Dictionary.net

A Greek poet and prose-writer; born in Chios about 484 B. C.; died at Athens about 422. Few losses to literature are so serious as the destruction of his works, fragments only of which have descended to us. Richly endowed, intellectually and physically, and accomplished even for the age of Pericles, he established himself in the intimacy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the other men who ornament that unexampled era. He distinguished himself by his versatility: tragedies, hymns, elegies, epigrams, and essays issued in a splendid if not very deep stream from the perennial springs of his fancy. Brilliant passages in his memoirs, saved to us by a happy accident, tell of the banquet he gave to Sophocles and the things said and done on that typically Hellenic occasion.