[6] Astydamas was the pupil of the rhetorician Isocrates, and wrote 240 tragedies and took the top prize a virtually unprecedented fifteen times in the Dionysia and Lenaia and other theatre festivals, earning his first victory in 372 BCE.
[7][8][9] The tenth-century encyclopedia known as the Suda attributes this achievement to the elder Astydamas, but other sources indicate that the 15-time winner was a contemporary of, and competitor to, the tragic poet Theodectes, so it must have been the younger.
[12][4] Astydamas then wrote some boastful verse on the base of the statue—namely that he "had no rivals worthy of his powers", and that he "ought to have been born in the time of the great poets of old"—that rankled the Athenians, who erased his writing, though these lines were later immortalized as an epigram in the Greek Anthology.
[13] This episode was mocked by later comedians, and gave rise to the ancient Greek proverb "You praise yourself, just like Astydamas" (Σαυτὴν ἐπαινεῖς ὥσπερ Ἀστυδάμας ποτέ).
[17][18][3] An inscribed statue base from the Theatre of Dionysus exists bearing the inscription Ἀστυ[δάμας], and is generally associated with this historical episode.