He also posed as an author and patron of literature; his poems, severely criticized by Philoxenus, were hissed at the Olympic games; but having gained a prize for a tragedy on the Ransom of Hector at the Lenaea at Athens, he was so elated that he engaged in a debauch which proved fatal.
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Like Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, Dionysius was fond of having literary men about him, such as the historian Philistus, the poet Philoxenus, and the philosopher Plato, but treated them in a most arbitrary manner.
The first is the image of a king on prancing horse, a common type which was most frequently used by the earlier kings Antimachus II and Philoxenus.
Philoxenus of Mabbug (d. 523), Syriac writer and proponent of Miaphysitism