Sotades
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Sotades (Greek: Σωτάδης) was an Ancient Greek poet who flourished in the third century BC.
Sotades was born in Maroneia, either the one in Thrace, or in Crete. He was the chief representative of the writers of obscene satirical poems, called Kinaidoi, composed in the Ionic dialect and in the "sotadic" metre named after him. He lived in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285 BC-246 BC). One of his poems attacked Ptolemy's marriage to his own sister Arsinoe, from which came the infamous line: "You're sticking your prick in an unholy hole."[1] For this, Sotades was imprisoned, but he escaped to the island of Caunus, where he was afterwards captured by Patroclus, Ptolemy's admiral, shut up in a leaden chest, and thrown into the sea.
Only a few genuine fragments of Sotades have been preserved; those in Stobaeus are generally considered spurious. Ennius translated some poems of this kind, included in his book of satires under the name of Sola.
Sotades was also the author of some of the first recorded palindromes, and many credit him with the invention of that particular genre of composition.
Richard Francis Burton named the Sotadic zone, a supposed geographical belt where he hypothesized homosexuality was unusually prevalent, after Sotades.
Adapted from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Plutarch, On the Education of Children, 11a; Athenaeus, xiv. 621a. Translation from Graham Shipley, The Greek World After Alexander, 323-30 B.C., page 185. Routledge.
[edit] External links
- Sotades from the Wiki Classical Dictionary
- Sotades (2) from Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867)
