And the men called Hilarodists (whom some people at the present day call Simodists, as Aristocles tells us in his first book on Choruses, because Simus the Magnesian was the most celebrated of all the poets of joyous songs,) frequently come under our notice. And Aristocles also gives a regular list of them in his treatise on Music, here he speaks in the following manner:—“The Magodist—but he is the same as the Lysiodist.” But Aristoxenus says that Magodus is the name given to an actor who acts both male and female characters;1 but that he who acts a woman's part in [p. 990] combination with a man's is called a Lysiodist. And they both sing the same songs, and in other respects they are similar. The Ionic dialect also supplies us with poems of Sotades, and with what before his time were called Ionic poems, such as those of Alexander the Aetolian, and Pyres the Milesian, and Alexas, and other poets of the same kind; and Sotades is called κιναιδόλογος. And Sotades the Maronite was very notorious for this kind of poetry, as Carystius of Pergamus says in his essay on Sotades; and so was the son of Sotades, Apollonius: and this latter also wrote an essay on his father's poetry, from which one may easily see the unbridled licence of language which Sotades allowed himself,—abusing Lysimachus the king in Alexandria,—and, when at the court of Lysimachus, abusing Ptolemy Philadelphus,-and in different cities speaking ill of different sovereigns; on which account, at last, he met with the punishment that he deserved: for when he had sailed from Alexandria (as Hegesander, in his Reminiscences, relates), and thought that he had escaped all danger, (for he had said many bitter things against Ptolemy the king, and especially this, after he had heard that he had married his sister Arsinoe,—
He pierced forbidden fruit with deadly sting,)Patrocles, the general of Ptolemy, caught him in the island of Caunus, and shut him up in a leaden vessel, and carried him into the open sea and drowned him. And his poetry is of this kind: Philenus was the father of Theodorus the fluteplayer, on whom he wrote these lines:—
And he, opening the door which leads from the back-street,
Sent forth vain thunder from a leafy cave,
Such as a mighty ploughing ox might utter.
