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Telestes of Selinus in Sicily was a dithyrambic poet of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC, who won a victory at Athens in 402/401 BC. His works are lost and survive only in short quotations, chiefly in Athenaeus. The largest fragment, from his Argo, rejects the story that Athena threw away the aulos because it disfigured her face; others, including lines from his Asclepius, describe Phrygian and Lydian music and instruments.
Telestes belonged to the "New Music" of the late fifth century, a movement of elaborate, innovative lyric that was admired and attacked in equal measure. His defense of the aulos answers the dithyrambic poet Melanippides and gives a glimpse of contemporary debate about music. Plutarch reports that his dithyrambs were among the books sent to Alexander the Great in Asia.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: PMG 805–812). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).