Expert: Maria - 11/19/2009

Question
researching history of censorship,encountered repeated references
to "Sodatic" writers, attitudes, et cetera, all apparently stemming from an inferred relation to "Sodates".

who's "Sodates", what and where are his/her works, what qualifies a writer as "Sodatic"?

am guessing that current trouble finding this fellow on the Net
may be due to transliteration variables
between Greek and English letters.  

Answer
Hello,

First of all the correct English adjective  is “Sotadic”, not “Sodatic” where there is  a metathesis, i.e. a transposition of two phonemes  in a word, since in "Sodatic" we have a -d- instead of a –t- and a –d- instead of a –t-.

The term "Sotadic"  derives from “Sotades” (Greek: Σωτάδης), the name of an ancient  scurrilous Greek poet of the 3rd century B.C. born in Maroneia, Thrace, or, according to other sources, in Crete.

Sotades of Maroneia lived in Alexandria, Egypt, about 280 BC  during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and wrote lascivious satirical poems called “Kínaidoi” (meaning “oscene verse/lines”), composed in the "sotadic" metre so named just after him.
The sotadic metre or sotadic verse, called also palindromic(from Greek "palindromos" meaning  "running back again"), can be read the same backwards or forwards.

According to Plutarch (Moralia, 11) one of his poems attacked Ptolemy's marriage to Arsinoe and therefore the king threw Sotades  into prison where he rotted for a long time, whereas, according to Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae, 14) he was imprisoned, but  escaped to an island , where he was afterwards captured by Patroclus, Ptolemy's admiral, shut up in a leaden chest, and thrown into the sea.
Only a few fragments of Sotades have been preserved.


As to what qualifies a writer as "Sotadic", a writer is qualified as “Sotadic” if his poetry is quite obscene, homoerotic or sometimes palindromic, just like Sotades verse.

Finally I have to tell you that the British explorer Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) named "Sotadic zone", after Sotades, a supposed geographical belt where he hypothesized male homosexuality was unusually prevalent.

Best regards,
Maria
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-PLUTARCH, Greek historian, biographer, essayist, flourished AD 46 – 120.He wrote the Parallel Lives and the Moralia (Matters relating to customs and mores).

-ATHENAEUS, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century A.D. He wrote the Deipnosophistae ('The Banquet of the Learned' or 'Philosophers at Dinner').