1 Sophron and Xenarchus, said to he father and son, lived in Syracuse, the elder a contemporary of Euripides. They wrote "mimes," i.e., simple and usually farcical sketches of familiar incidents, similar to the mimes of Herondas and the fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, but in prose. There was a tradition that their mimes suggested to Plato the use of dialogue.
2 Empedocles (floruit 445 B.C.) expressed his philosophical and religious teaching in hexameter verse, to which Aristotle elsewhere attributes genuine value as poetry, but it is here excluded from the ranks of poetry because the object is definitely.
3 Chaeremon was a tragedian and rhapsodist. The Centaur was apparently an experiment which might be classed as either drama or epic. Cf. Aristot. Poet. 24.11.
4 The traditional definition is that the Dithyramb was sung to a flute accompaniment by a chorus in honor of Dionysus; and that the Nome was a solo sung to a harp accompaniment in honor of Apollo, but it is not clear that Aristotle regarded the Dithyramb as restricted to the worship of Dionysus. Timotheus's dithyramb mentioned in Aristot. Poet. 15.8 cannot have been Dionysiac. But there is good evidence to show that the dithyramb was primarily associated with Dionysus.
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