Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/834

 798 P H L P H O with the dance, in short, it was a sort of comic opera. The music, which Philoxeniis himself composed, appears to have been of a debased, Offenbachian character. His masterpiece was the Cyclops or Galatea, a pastoral bur lesque on the love of the Cyclops for the fair Galatea. Its general style may probably be gathered from the sixth idyl of Theocritus. The work must have been well known before 3S8, for it was parodied by Aristophanes in his play the Plutus, performed in that year. Another work of Philoxenus, sometimes attributed to a notorious parasite and glutton of the same name, is the ACITTVOV (Dinner), of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Athenieus. This poem, of which the text is very obscure and corrupt, is little more than an elaborate bill of fare put into verse, and, as such, possesses more interest for cooks than scholars. In the time of Aristotle it was the one book read by the Athenian quidnuncs. The great popularity enjoyed by Philoxenus is attested not only by the allusions to him in the comic poets of his day but also by a complimentary resolution passed by the Athenian senate in 393 on the motion of the dithyrambic poet Cinesias. The intention of the decree was doubtless mainly political to propitiate Dionysius but the poet was included in it. Nor was his popularity transient : the poet Antiphanes of the Middle Comedy spoke of Philoxenus as a god among men ; Alexander the Great had his poems sent to him in Asia along with the tragedies of yEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides ; the Alexandrian grammarians received him into the canon ; and down to the time of Polybius his works were regularly learned and annually acted by the Arcadian youth. The scanty frag ments of his works are to be found in Bergk s Poetx Lyrici Gr&ci, vol. iii. PHLEGON, of Tralles in Asia Minor, a Greek writer of the 2d century, was a freedman of the emperor Hadrian. His chief work was the Olympiads (clr^nicles, or col lection of Olympic victories and chronicles), a universal history in sixteen books, from the 1st down to the 229th Olympiad (776 B.C. to 137 A.D.). If we may judge from the sample preserved by Photius, the work contained lists of the victors in the Olympic games together with a bare and disjointed summary of the chief historical events ; it is probable, however, that Photius quoted from an epitome in eight books which we know to have existed, and which, together with another epitome in two books, is ascribed by Suidas to Phlegon himself. Portions of another work of Phlegon, On Marvels, along with parts of another On Long-lived Persons, and the opening part of his Olympiads, are extant in a Heidelberg MS. of the 10th century. The b.jok On Marvels contains some ridiculous stories about ghosts, prophecies, and monstrous births. The work On Long-lived Persons includes a list, extracted by Phlegon from the Roman censuses, of persons who had lived a hundred years and upwards. He mentions two men aged 136 years each, one of whom he professes to have seen. Oilier works ascribed to Phlegon by Suidas arc a description of Sicily, a work on the Roman festivals in three books, and a topography of Rome. ./Elius Spartianus tells us that a life of Hadrian was published in Phlegon s name, but that it was written by the emperor himself. A work on Women Wine and Iti-ave in War has sometimes been wrongly attributed to Phlegon. From his remains Phlegon is seen to have been credulous and superstitious to absurdity, but his literary style deserves the re mark of Photius that, without being pure Attic, it is not very bad. The complaint of Photius, that Phlegon wearied his readers by the numerous oracles which he dragged in, is fully borne out by the remains of his works. These remains are collected by Westermann in his Scriptores rerum mirabilium Greed (1839) and by Miiller in his Fragment/I Historicorum Grsecorum, vol. iii. PHLOX, a considerable genus of Polemoniacese, chiefly consisting of North-American perennial plants, with entire, usually opposite, leaves and showy flowers generally in terminal clusters. Each flower has a tubular calyx with five lobes, and a salver-shaped corolla with a long slender tube and a flat limb. The five stamens are given off from the tube of the corolla at different heights and do not pro trude beyond it. The ovary is three-celled with one to two ovules in each cell ; it ripens into a three- valved capsule. .Many of the species are cultivated for the beauty of their flowers; and the forms obtained by cross-breeding and selection are innumerable. The garden varieties fall under three groups, the annuals, including the lovely P. Drum- jnoiufi. from Texas and its many forms ; the perennials, including a dwarf section of alpine plants (forms of P. subulata), suitable, by reason of their prostrate habit arid neat mode of growth, for the rockery ; and the taller- growing decussate phloxes which contribute so much to the beauty of gardens in late summer, and which have probably originated from J jmniculata. The range of colour in all the groups is from white to rose and lilac. PHOC^EA, in ancient geography, was one of the cities of Ionia, on the western coast of Asia Minor. It was the most northern of the Ionian cities, and was situated on the coast of the peninsula that separates the Gulf of Cyme, which was occupied by ^Eolian settlers, from the Henmean Gulf, on which stood Smyrna and Clazomena?. 1 Its advantageous position between two good harbours, called Naustathmus and Lampter, is pointed out by Livy (xxxvii. 31), and was probably the cause which led the inhabitants to devote themselves from an early period to maritime pursuits. We are expressly told by Herodotus that the Phocaeans were the first of all the Greeks who undertook distant voyages and made known to their countrymen the coasts of the Adriatic, as well as those of Tyrrhenia and Spain. In the latter country they estab lished friendly relations with Arganthonius, king of Tartessus, who even invited them to emigrate in a body to settle in his dominions, and, on their declining this offer, presented them with a large sum of money. This they employed in constructing a strong wall of fortifi cation around their city, a defence which stood them in good stead when the Ionian cities were attacked by Cyrus in 546. On that occasion they refused to submit when besieged by Harpagus, the general of Cyrus ; but, mis trusting their power of ultimate resistance, they determined to abandon their city, and, embarking their wives and children and most valuable effects, to seek a new home in the western regions, where they had already founded several flourishing colonies, among others those of Alalia in Corsica and the important city of Massilia in the south of Gaul. A large part of the emigrants, however, relented, and, after having proceeded only as far as Chios, returned to Phocsea, where they submitted to the Persian yoke. The rest, however, having bound themselves by a solemn oath never to return, proceeded to Corsica, where they settled for a time ; but, being afterwards expelled from the island, they founded the colony of Velia or Elea in southern Italy. Phocaea continued to exist under the Persian government, but greatly reduced in population and commerce, so that, although it joined in the revolt of the lonians against Persia in 500, it was only able to send three ships to the combined fleet that fought at Lade. Nor did it ever again assume a prominent part among the Ionian cities, and it is rarely mentioned in Greek history. IJiit at a later period it was sufficiently powerful to oppose a vigorous resistance to the Roman pni tor yEmilius during the war against Antiochus in 191. On that occasion the town was taken and plundered, but it continued to survive, and we learn from its coins that it was a place of some importance throughout the Roman empire. The ruins still visible on the site bear the name of Palea Foggia, but they are of little interest. A small town in the im mediate neighbourhood, known as Nova Foggia, appears to date only from Byzantine times. 1 It was said to have been founded by a band of emigrants from Phocis, under the guidance of two Athenian leaders, named Philogenes and Damon, but it joined the Ionian confederacy by accepting the government of Athenian rulers of the house of Codrus.