Sositheus

• a Greek proper name.
• • • 1 A slave whose death grieved Cicero, Cic. Att. 1, 12, 4.—
    • 2 Sositheus Entellinus, Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 87, § 200.

(Σωσίθεος), of Syracuse or Athens, or rather, according to Suidas, of Alexandreia in the Troad, was a distinguished tragic poet, one of the Tragic Pleiad, and the antagonist of the tragic poet Homer : he flourished about Ol. 124 (B. C. 284); and wrote both in poetry and in prose. (Suid. s. v. He is also mentioned among the poets of the Pleiad in all the lists except that of Tzetzes.

The remains of his works consist of two lines from his Ἄθλιος (Stob. Serm. 51.23), and a considerable fragment of twenty-four lines from his Δάφνις or Λιτυέρσας, which appears to have been a drama pastoral in its scene, and in its form and character very similar to the old satyric dramas of the Attic tragedians. (Schol. apud Casaub. ad Theocr. 100.12; comp. Ath. x. p. 415b; Tzetz. Chil. 2.595; Schol. ad Theocr. 10.41.) By some of the above authorities the name Sosibius is wrongly given instead of Sositheus. Another error, into which some writers have been led by the character of the Δάφνις of Sositheus, is that of making him a comic poet. (Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. ii. pp. 322, 323, comp. p. 495; Clinton, F. H. vol. iii. s. aa. 278, 259, pp. 501, 502; Welcker, Griech. Trag. p. 1052; Wagner, Frag. Trag. Graec. in Didot's Bibliotheca, pp. 149-152.) [P.S]

(Σωσίθεος). A native of Alexandria in the Troad; a Greek tragedian, one of the Alexandrian Pleiad. He lived in the first half of the third century B.C. in Athens and in Alexandria in Egypt. In an epigram of the Greek Anthology (vii. 707) he is celebrated as the restorer of the satyric drama. We still possess an interesting fragment of his satyric plays, the Daphnis (twenty-one lines in Nauck's Tragicorum Gr. Fragm. 822, ed. 1889).