Bassus
2. A dramatic poet, contemporary with Martial, and the subject of a witty epigram, in which he is recommended to abandon such themes as Medea, Thyestes, Niobe, and the fate of Troy, and to devote his compositions to Phaethon or Deucalion, i. e. to fire or water. (Martial. 5.53.) The name occurs frequently in other epigrams by the same author, but the persons spoken of are utterly unknown.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.