Book 8
45
And when Polyidas was giving himself airs, because his pupil Philotas had beaten Timotheus, he said, That he wondered at his being so ignorant as not to know that he makes decrees, and Timotheus laws. And he said to Areus the harp-player, who was annoying him, Play to the crows. ψάλλ’ ἐς κόρακας, parodying the common execration, βάλλ’ ἐς κόρακας. And once he was at Sicyon, when a leather-dresser was abusing him, and he said to the leather-dresser (νακοδέψης), O you κακόδαιμον νακόδαιμον. And Stratonicus himself, beholding the Rhodians dissolved in luxury, and drinking only warm drinks, said, that there were white Cyrenæans. And he called Rhodes itself the City of the Suitors,Alluding to the intemperance of the suitors of Pen lope, as de- scribed in the Odyssey. thinking that they were in no respect different from the Cyrenæans in debauchery, but only in complexion; and also because of the devotion to pleasure of the inhabitants, he compared Rhodes itself to the city of the Suitors.
46
And Stratonicus was, in all these elaborate witticisms, an imitator of Simonides the poet, as Ephorus tells us in the second book of his treatise on Inventions; who says that Philoxenus of Cythera was also a great studier of the same pursuit. And Phænias the Peripatetic, in the second book of his treatise on Poets, says—Stratonicus the Athenian appears to have been the first person who introduced the system of playing chords into the simple harp-playing; and he was the first man who ever took pupils in music, and who ever composed tables of music. And he was also a man of no small brilliancy as a wit. He says also that he was eventually put to death by Nicocles, the King of the Cyprians, on account of the freedom of his witticisms, being compelled to drink poison, because he had turned the sons of the king into ridicule.
