Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/344

Rh 332 PHILOXENUS. in 01. 86. 2, b. c. 435. The time when he most flourished was, according to Diodorus (xiv. 46), in 01. 95. 2, B. c. 3.98. The brief account of his life in Suidas involves some difficulties ; he states that, when the Cythe- reans were reduced to slavery bj' the Lacedaemo- nians, Philoxenus was bought by a certain Age- sylas, by whom he was brought up, and was called Mvp/xT]^ : and that, after the death of Agesylas, he was bought by the lyric poet Melanippides, by whom he was also educated. Now there is no record of the Lacedaemonians having reduced the Cythe- reans to slavery ; but we know that the island was seized by an Athenian expedition under Nicias, in B.C. 424 (Thuc. iv. 53, 54 ; Diod. Sic. xii. 65 ; Plut. Nic. 6) ; and therefore some critics propose to read ^Ad-qvalcvv for Aa.KedaiiJ.ovLwv (Meineke, Frag. Corn. Graec. vol. iv. p. 635). This solution is not quite satisfactory, and another, of much in- genuity, is proposed by Schmidt (Dithyramb, pp. 5, 6) ; but it is not worth while here to discuss the question further, since the only important part of the statement, namely, that Philoxenus was really a slave in his youth, is quite sustained by other testimonies, especially by the allusions to him in the comic poets (see Hesych. s. v. AovXccva ; Meineke, I.e.). Schmidt (pp. 7, 8) very inge- niously conjectures that there is an allusion to Phi- loxenus in the Fmgs of Aristophanes (v. 1506), in the name M.vpfj.T}Ki, which we have seen that Suidas says to have been given to him by his first master, and which belongs to a class of words which seem to have been often used for the names of slaves. Others, however, suppose the name to have been a nickname given to him by the comic poets, to express the intricacy of his musical strains, the iKTpaTr4ovs fxvpixrjKids, as Pherecrates calls them (see below). He was educated, says Suidas, by Melanippides, of course in that poet's own profession, that of dithyrambic poetry, in which, if the above inter- pretation of the allusion in the Frogs be correct, he had already attained to considerable eminence before b. c. 408 ; which agrees very well with the statement of Diodorus {I. c), according to which he was at the height of his fame seven years later. Pherecrates also attacked him in his Chetron, as one of the corruptors of music ; at least Plutarch applies to hira a part of the passage ; and if this application be correct, we have another allusion to his name Mtipixri^, in the mention of eKTpaneKovs ixvpp.rKias ( Plut. de Mus. 30, p. 1146, as explained and corrected by Meineke, Frag. Com. iiraec. vol. ii. pp. 326 — 335). In the Gerytades of Aristophanes, which was also on the prevalent cor- ruptions of poetry and music, and which seems to have been acted some little time after the Frogs, though Philoxenus is not mentioned by name, there are passages which are, to all appearance, parodies upon his poem entitled AeTirj/ov {Fr. xii. xiii. ed. Bergk, ap. Meineke, Frag. Com. Graec. vol. ii. pp. 1009, 1010). In the Fcclesiaztisae also, b. c. 392, there is a passage which is almost certainly a similar parody (vv. 1167 — 1178; Bergk, Comment, de Reliq. Comoed. Att. Antiq. p. 212). There is also a long passage in the Pliaon of the comic poet Plato, which seems to have been acted in the year after the Ecclesiazusae, B. c. 391, professing to be read from a book, which the person who has it calls 4>io|6Vou Kaiv^ ris ol/apTv(Tia, which is almost certainly a parody on the same PHILOXENUS. poem, although Athenaeus and some modern critics suppose the allusion to be to a poem by Philoxenus, the Leucadian, on the art of cookery. It is true that the latter was known for his fondness of lux- urious living ; but the coincidence would be too remarkable, and the confusion between the two Philoxeni utterly hopeless, if we were to suppose, with Schmidt and others, that they both wrote poems of so similar a character about the same time. (Meineke, Frag Com. Graec. vol. ii. pp. 672 — 674; Bergk, Comment, pp. 211, 212; Schmidt, Dithyramb, p. 11, &c.) These testimonies all point to the very end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth centuries B. c, as the time when Philoxenus flourished. There is, indeed, a passage in the Clouds (332), which the scholiast explains as referring to him, but which must allude to Philoxenus the Leuca- dian, if to either, as Philoxenus of Cythera was •only in his 11th year at the time of the first exhi- bition of the Clouds., and in his 1 5th at the time of the second. Possibly, however, the comment results from a mere confusion in the mind of the scholiast, who, seeing in the text of Aristophanes a joke on the voracity of the dithyrambic poets of his day, and having read of the gluttony of Philo- xenus of Leucadia, identified the latter with Phi- loxenus the dithyrambic poet, and therefore sup- posed him to be referred to by Aristophanes. At what time Philoxenus left Athens and went to Sicily, cannot be determined. Schmidt (p. 15) supposes that he went as a colonist, after the first victories of Dionysius over the Carthaginians, B. c. 396 ; that he speedily obtained the favour of Dio- nysius, and took up his abode at his court at Syra- cuse, the luxury of which furnished him with, the theme of his poem entitled A^lTrvov. However this may be, we know that he soon offended Diony- sius, and was cast into prison ; an act of oppression which most writers ascribe to the wounded vanity of the tyrant, whose poems Philoxenus not only refused to praise, but, on being asked to revise one of them, said that the best way of correcting it would be to draw a black line through the whole paper. Another account ascribes his disgrace to too close an intimacy with the tyrant's mistress Galateia ; but this looks like a fiction, arising out of a misunderstanding of the object of his poem en- titled Cyclops or Galateia. It appears that, after some time, he was released from prison, and re- stored outwardly to the favour of Dionysius ; but either in consequence of some new quarrel, or because he had a distrust of the tyrant's feelings towards him, he finally left his court: other accounts say nothing of his reconciliation, but simply that he escaped from prison, and went to the country of the Cythereans, where he composed his poem Galateia (Schul. ad Aristoph. Plut. 290). Accord- ing to Suidas he went to Tarentum {s.v. ^iho^evoL ypafxixdriov). There is a curious story related by Plutarch, that he gave up his estate in Sicily, and left the island, in order that he might not be seduced, by the wealth he derived from it, into the luxury which prevailed around him (Plut. de Vit. Aer. alien, p. 831). Schmidt endeavours to reconcile this statement with the former, by supposing that, after he left the court of Dionysius, he resided for some time on his Sicilian estate, and afterwards gave it up, in the way mentioned by Plutarch, and then departed finally from the island. It is doubt- ful where the last yefurs of his life were spent,