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Alexis was a Greek comic poet of the Middle Comedy period. He was born in Thurii in Magna Graecia and taken early to Athens, where he became a citizen, being enrolled in the deme Oion (Οἶον) and the tribe Leontides. It is thought he lived to the age of 106 and died on the stage while being crowned. According to the Suda, a 10th-century encyclopedia, Alexis was the paternal uncle of the dramatist Menander and wrote 245 comedies, of which only fragments now survive, including some 130 preserved titles.
Ibycus was an Ancient Greek lyric poet, a citizen of Rhegium in Magna Graecia, probably active at Samos during the reign of the tyrant Polycrates and numbered by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria in the canonical list of nine lyric poets. He was mainly remembered in antiquity for pederastic verses, but he also composed lyrical narratives on mythological themes in the manner of Stesichorus. His work survives today only as quotations by ancient scholars or recorded on fragments of papyrus recovered from archaeological sites in Egypt, yet his extant verses include what are considered some of the finest examples of Greek poetry.
Heraclea Pontica, known in Byzantine and later times as Pontoheraclea, was an ancient city on the coast of Bithynia in Asia Minor, at the mouth of the river Lycus. It was founded by the Greek city-state of Megara in approximately 560–558 BC and was named after Heracles who the Greeks believed entered the underworld at a cave on the adjoining Archerusian cape. The site is now the location of the modern city Karadeniz Ereğli, in the Zonguldak Province of Turkey.
Diphilus, of Sinope, was a poet of the new Attic comedy and a contemporary of Menander. He is frequently listed together with Menander and Philemon, considered the three greatest poets of New Comedy. He was victorious at least three times at the Lenaia, placing him third before Philemon and Menander. Although most of his plays were written and acted at Athens he died at Smyrna. His body was returned and buried in Athens.
Athenaeus of Naucratis was an ancient Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The Suda says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus, who died in 192, implies that he survived that emperor. He was a contemporary of Adrantus.
The Deipnosophistae is a work written c. 200 AD in Ancient Greek by Athenaeus of Naucratis. It is a long work of literary, historical, and antiquarian references set in Rome at a series of banquets held by the protagonist Publius Livius Larensis for an assembly of grammarians, lexicographers, jurists, musicians, and hangers-on.
Phryne was an ancient Greek hetaira (courtesan). Born Mnesarete, she was from Thespiae in Boeotia, but seems to have lived most of her life in Athens. Though she apparently grew up poor, she became one of the wealthiest women in Greece.
Machon was a playwright of the New Comedy.
Hermippus was the one-eyed Athenian writer of the Old Comedy, who flourished during the Peloponnesian War.
Archestratus was an ancient Greek poet of Gela or Syracuse, Magna Graecia, in Sicily, who wrote some time in the mid 4th century BCE, and was known as "the Daedalus of tasty dishes". His humorous didactic poem Hedypatheia, written in hexameters but known only from quotations, advises a gastronomic reader on where to find the best food in the Mediterranean world. The writer, who was styled in antiquity the Hesiod or Theognis of gluttons, parodies the pithy style of older gnomic poets; most of his attention is given to fish, although some fragments refer to appetizers, and there was also a section on wine. His poem had a certain notoriety among readers in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE: it was referred to by the comic poet Antiphanes, by Lynceus of Samos and by the philosophers Aristotle, Chrysippus and Clearchus of Soli. In nearly every case these references are disparaging, implying that Archestratus's poem—like the sex manual by Philaenis—was likely to corrupt its readers. This attitude is exemplified in the Deipnosophistae with citations of Chrysippus:
This utterly admirable Chrysippus, in On Goodness and Pleasure book V, talks of: Books like Philaenis's, and the Gastronomy of Archestratus, and stimulants to love and sexual intercourse, and then again slave girls practised in such movements and postures and specialising in the subject; and further on he says: studying all this and getting the books about it by Philaenis and Archestratus and the other writers of such stuff; and in book VII he says: one is therefore not to study Philaenis, or the Gastronomy of Archestratus, with the expectation of improving one's life! Clearly, in quoting this Archestratus so often, you people have filled our banquet with indecency. Is there anything calculated to corrupt that this fine poet has failed to say?
Idomeneus of Lampsacus was a friend and disciple of Epicurus.
Dionysius was a tyrant of Heraclea Pontica on the Euxine. He was a son of Clearchus, who had assumed the tyranny in his place of birth.
Duris of Samos was a Greek historian and was at some period tyrant of Samos. Duris was the author of a narrative history of events in Greece and especially Macedonia from 371 BC to 281 BC, which has been lost. Other works included a life of Agathocles of Syracuse and a number of treatises on literary and artistic subjects.
Plato was an Athenian comic poet and contemporary of Aristophanes. None of his plays survive intact, but the titles of thirty of them are known, including a Hyperbolus, Victories, Cleophon, and Phaon. The titles suggest that his themes were often political. In 410 BC, one of his plays took first prize at the City Dionysia.
Lynceus of Samos, brother of the historian Duris of Samos, was a classical Greek author of comedies, letters and humorous anecdotes. He lived in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC and was a pupil of Theophrastus. His works, especially his letters and the essay Shopping for Food, show a special interest in gastronomy. He was also the addressee of an important letter by Hippolochus on dining in Macedon. He would be practically unknown if it were not for numerous quotations from his works in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus.
Sannyrion was an Athenian comic poet of the late 5th century BC, and a contemporary of Diocles and Philyllius, according to the Suda. He belonged to the later years of Old Comedy and the start of Middle Comedy.
In Greek mythology, Eros is the Greek god of love and sex. His Roman counterpart is Cupid ('desire'). In the earliest account, he is a primordial god, while in later accounts he is described as one of the children of Aphrodite and Ares and, with some of his siblings, was one of the Erotes, a group of winged love gods.
Theognetus was an Ancient Greek comic poet of the 3rd century BC.
Xenarchus was a Greek comic poet of the Middle Comedy. None of his plays have survived, but Athenaeus preserves several quotations from his plays in the Deipnosophistae.
Sappho 2 is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. In antiquity it was part of Book I of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. Sixteen lines of the poem survive, preserved on a potsherd discovered in Egypt and first published in 1937 by Medea Norsa. It is in the form of a hymn to the goddess Aphrodite, summoning her to appear in a temple in an apple grove. The majority of the poem is made up of an extended description of the sacred grove to which Aphrodite is being summoned.