Polyeidos (poet)

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For the military engineer, see Polyidus of Thessaly.

Polyeidos (ca. 400 BCE) was an ancient Greek dithyrambic poet who was also skillful as a painter; he seems to have been esteemed almost as highly as Timo­theus, whom one of his pupils, Philotas, once conquered in competition. It seems from a passage of Plutarch (De Mm. 21, p. 1138, b.), that Polyeidus outdid Timotheus in those in­tricate variations, for the introduction of which the musicians of this period are so frequently attacked by contemporaries. Aristotle, in Poetics 17, notes the example of "Polyeidos the Sophist" in bringing the action vividly before the hearer in an example drawn from the myth of Orestes, his recognition: "On his coming he was arrested, and about to be sacrificed, when he revealed who he was—either as Euripides puts it, or (as suggested by Polyeidos) by the not improbable exclamation, ’So I too am doomed to be sacrificed, as my sister was’".

[edit] References

• William Smith. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, p. 466