PHILOXENUS  , of

Cythera (435–380 B.C.), Greek dithyrambic poet . On the conquest of the island by the Athenians he was taken as a prisoner of war to Athens, where he came into the possession of the dithyrambic poet Melanippides, who educated him and set him free . Philoxenus afterwards resided in Sicily, at the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, whose bad verses he declined to praise, and was in consequence sent to work in the quarries . After leaving Sicily he travelled in Greece, Italy and Asia, reciting his poems, and died at Ephesus . According to Suidas, Philoxenus composed twenty-four dithyrambs and a lyric poem on the genealogy of the Aeacidae . In his hands the dithyramb seems to have been a sort of comic opera, and the music, composed by himself, of a debased character . His masterpiece was the Cyclops, a pastoral burlesque on the love of the Cyclops for the fair Galatea, written to avenge himself upon Dionysius, who was wholly or partially blind of. one eye . It was parodied by Aristophanes in the Plutus (29o) . Another work of Philoxenus (sometimes • attributed to Philoxenus of Leucas, a notorious parasite and glutton) is the zeuirvov (Dinner), of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Athenaeus . This is an elaborate bill of fare in verse, probably intended as a satire on the luxury of the Sicilian court . The great popularity of Philoxenus is attested by a complimentary resolution passed by the Athenian senate in 393 . The comic poet Antiphanes spoke of him as a god among men; Alexander the Great had his poems sent to him in Asia; 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 .

Fragments, with

life, by G . Bippart (1843); T . Bergk, Poetae lyrici graeci .