Ibycus

[2] 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.

[3] As is the case with many other major poets of ancient Greece, Ibycus became famous not just for his poetry but also for events in his life, largely the stuff of legend: the testimonia are difficult to interpret and very few biographical facts are actually known.

[4]Suda's chronology has been dismissed as "muddled" since it makes Ibycus about a generation older than Anacreon, another poet known to have flourished at the court of Polycrates, and it is inconsistent with what we know of the Samian tyrant from Herodotus.

X/Zalmoxis apparently achieved some form of apprenticeship with that most famous practitioner of Pythagoreanism, and evidently goes on to earn his freedom as well as a reputation as a great healer of 'body and soul (psyche),' via Plato[11] (see Zalmoxis#"Religion of the Getae") ...Plato attributes an holistic approach to healing body and soul (psyche)... in the latter case, not unlike Orpheus..who ended up with a cave-based oracle in nearby Lesbos island, in the region of Ionia's northern neighbors, the Aeolians.

Notably, Using music to relieve lustful urges was a Pythagorean remedy[12] stemming from an anecdote from the life of Pythagoras claiming that, when he encountered some drunken youths trying to break into the home of a virtuous woman, he sang a solemn tune with long spondees and the boys' "raging willfulness" was quelled.

[19] There is no other information about Ibycus' activities in the West, apart from an account by Himerius, that he fell from his chariot while travelling between Catana and Himera and injured his hand badly enough to give up playing the lyre "for some considerable time.

[22] It is possible that he left Samos at the same time as Anacreon, on the death of Polycrates, and there is an anonymous poem in the Palatine Anthology celebrating Rhegium as his final resting place, describing a tomb located under an elm, covered in ivy and white reeds.

[32] Authorship of the poem is attributed to Ibycus on textual and historical grounds but its quality as verse is open to debate: "insipid", "inept and slovenly"[33] or, more gently, "not an unqualified success"[24] and optimally "the work of a poet realizing a new vision, with a great command of epic material which he could manipulate for encomiastic effect.

This "puzzling" poem has been considered historically significant by some scholars as a signal from Ibycus that he is now turning his back on epic themes to concentrate on love poetry instead: a new vision or recusatio.

[37] In addition to this "superficial element of Doric dialect", the style of Ibycus features mainly dactylic rhythms (reflecting the Epic traditions he shared with Stesichorus), a love theme and accumulated epithets.

[41] The following lines, dedicated to a lover, Euryalus, were recorded by Athenaeus as a famous example of amorous praise: The rich language of these lines, in particular the accumulation of epithets, typical of Ibycus, is shown in the following translation: This mythological account of his lover recalls Hesiod's account of Pandora,[43] who was decked out by the same goddesses (the Graces, the Seasons and Persuasion) so as to be a bane to mankind—an allusion consistent with Ibycus's view of love as unavoidable turmoil.