About Sotades in Plutarch's Morals

If anyone thinks it a small and unimportant matter to govern the tongue, another point I promised to touch on, he is very far from the reality.For silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech. And that is, I think, the reason why the ancients instituted the mysteries that we, learning therein to be silent, might transfer our secrecy to the gods to human affairs. And no one ever yet...

Read More »

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,...

Read More »

Sotădes, an athlete

A Greek poet of Thrace. He wrote verses against Philadelphus Ptolemy, for which he was thrown into the sea in a cage of lead. He was called Cinædus, not only because he was addicted to the abominable crime which the surname indicates, but because he wrote a poem in commendation of it. Some suppose, that instead of the word Socraticos in the 2nd satire, verse the 10th, of Juvenal, the word Sotadicos...

Read More »