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CRATO Who that is a man at all, a life-long friend of letters, moreover, and moderately conversant with philosophy, abandons his interest, Lycinus, in all that is better and his association with the ancients to sit enthralled by the flute, watching a girlish fellow play the wanton with dainty clothing and bawdy songs and imitate love-sick minxes, the most erotic of all antiquity, such as Phaedra and Parthenope and Rhodope,Parthenope, the beloved of Metiochus the Phrygian, was the heroine of a lost romance; on the extant fragment, see New Chapters in the Hist. of Greek Lit., III, 238-240. Rhodope is probably the Thracian mentioned below in § 51, who married Haemus, her brother; they insolently likened themselves to Zeus and Hera, and were turned into the mountains known by their names. every bit of this, moreover, accompanied by strumming and tootling and tapping of feet??See p. 285, n. 2, below. —a ridiculous business in all truth, which does not in the least become a freeborn gentleman of your sort. So for my part, when I learned that you give your time to such spectacles, I was not only ashamed on your account but sorely distressed that you should sit there oblivious of Plato and Chrysippus and Aristotle, getting treated like people who have themselves tickled in the ear with a feather, and that too when there are countless other things to hear and see that are worth while, if one wants them—flute-players who accompany cyclic choruses, singers of conventional compositions for the lyre,The reference is to the citharoedi, soloists who played their own accompaniment on the lyre; of their songs, called nomes, the Persians of Timotheus is the only surviving specimen, and in especial, grand tragedy and comedy, the gayest of the gay; all these have even been held worthy to figure in competitions.
