Sotades, a libellous poet, put to death

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 Ætolian, 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 flute-player, 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.

Athenaeus of Naucratis, TheDeipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 3 (Translator: Charles Duke Yonge), London, 1854. 

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