EOTADES

A poet from Maroneia, Crete, who flourished during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus. According to the testimonies of ancient writers and especially Strabo, Eotades was the leader of the school of satirical poetry of the Kinaidology or Kinaidography . His son Apollonius and the critic Karystius from Pergamos wrote about his life and work. Athenaeus criticized Eotades, because as he writes in the Deipnosophists, when the latter was in Alexandria near King Ptolemy, among other things, for his marriage with Arsinoe.

Eotades's verses were so openly directed against the king that he was persecuted by him and forced to leave Alexandria. But he was captured by Ptolemy's general Patroklos, who locked him in a lead box and threw him into the sea. From Eotades's works, only titles and very few excerpts have survived. The poems of Eotades were known in ancient grammar as phlyakas or kinaides or Ionian discourses, because they were written in the Ionian dialect. As far as the poetic metre is concerned, Eotades introduced some innovations. The eotadian metre consists of two equal dimeters of cola Ionic of major feet, of which the first is acatalectic, while the second is catalectic, and they are separated from each other by a division.