PHILOXENUS, one of the last of the dithyrambic poets of Greece, was born in 435 b.c., in the island of Cythera. When the island was conquered by the Athenians in 424 Philoxenus was sold as a slave to Agesylas, who gave him the name of Myrmex (“ant”). On the death of Agesylas he was bought by the dithyrambic poet Melanippides, who educated him, no doubt in his own profession. 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. Being fetched back again and asked by the tyrant how he liked his verses now, the poet made no reply but “Take me away to the quarries.” He is said to have quitted Sicily in disgust at the luxury and vulgarity of the people, abandoning an estate which he owned in the island. From Sicily he seems to have gone to Tarentum, and thence perhaps to Corinth. He visited Colophon in Asia Minor and died at Ephesus in 380. 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 burlesque drama in verse, which was acted and sung to the accompaniment of elaborate instrumental music and enlivened with the dance,—in short, it was a sort of comic opera. The music, which Philoxenus himself composed, appears to have been of a debased, Offenbachian character. His masterpiece was the Cyclops or Galatea, a pastoral burlesque on the love of the Cyclops for the fair Galatea. Its general style may probably be gathered from the sixth idyl of Theocritus. The work must have been well known before 388, for it was parodied by Aristophanes in his play the Plutus, performed in that year. Another work of Philoxenus, sometimes attributed ...