HOMER Iliad & Odyssey
Diagoras the Atheist of Melos was a Greek poet and sophist of the 5th century B.C. He became an atheist after an incident that happened against him went unpunished by the gods. As a result of his blasphemous speeches, especially his criticism of the Eleusinian Mysteries, he was condemned to death at Athens and a price was put on his head. He fled to Corinth, where he was said to have died.
Erinna, Greek poet, contemporary and friend of Sappho, a native of Rhodes or the adjacent island of Telos, flourished about 600 BC (according to Eusebius of Myndus, 350 BC). Of her best-known poem, the Distaff, written in a mixture of Aeolic and Doric, which contained 300 hexameter lines, only four lines are now extant. Three epigrams in the Palatine anthology, also ascribed to her, probably belong to a later date.
Hesiod , the early Greek poet and rhapsode, presumably lived around 700 BC. Historians have debated the priority of Hesiod or of Homer, and some authors even brought them together in an imagined poetic contest; most modern scholars agree that Homer lived before Hesiod.
Hesiod serves as a major source for knowledge of Greek mythology, of farming techniques, of archaic Greek astronomy and of ancient time-keeping.As with Homer, legendary traditions have accumulated round Hesiod. Unlike Homer, some biographical detail has survived: the few details of Hesiod's life come from three references in Works and Days; some further inferences derived from his Theogony.
Hesiod lived in Boeotia. His father came from Cumes in Aeolia, which lay between Ionia and the Troad in southwestern Anatolia, but crossed the sea to settle at Ascra, "a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant" (Works, 640). Hesiod's patrimony there, a small piece of ground at the foot of Mount Helicon, occasioned a lawsuit with his brother Perses, who won; some scholars have seen Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing of the Works and Days that Hesiod directed to him.
The Muses traditionally lived on Helicon, and they gave Hesiod the gift of poetic inspiration one day while he tended sheep. In another biographical detail, Hesiod mentions a poetry contest at Chalcis in Euboea where the sons of one Amiphidamas awarded him a tripod (ll.654-662).
Plutarch first identified this passage as an interpolation into Hesiod's original work, based on his identification of Amiphidamas with the hero of the Lelantine War between Chalcis and Eretria, which occurred around 705 BC. The account of this contest inspired the later tale of a competition between Hesiod and Homer.
Two different, yet early, traditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One, as early as Thucydides, reported in Plutarch, the Suda and John Tzetzes, states that the Delphic oracle had warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea, and so he fled to Locris, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried there. This tradition follows a familiar ironic convention: the oracle that turns out to be true, after all.
The other tradition, first mentioned in an epigram of Chersios of Orchomenus written in the 7th century BC (within a century or so of Hesiod's death) claims that Hesiod lies buried at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. According to Aristotle's Constitution of Orchomenus, when the Thespians ravaged Ascra, the villagers sought refuge at Orchomenus, where, following the advice of an oracle, they collected the ashes of Hesiod and placed them in a place of honour in their agora, beside the tomb of Minyas, their eponymous founder, and in the end came to regard Hesiod too as their "hearth-founder".
Later writers attempted to harmonize these two accounts.Legends that accumulated about Hesiod came from several sources: a treatise "The poetic contest of Homer and Hesiod"; a vita of Hesiod by the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes; the entry for Hesiod in the Suda; two passages and some scattered remarks in Pausanias (IX, 31.3 6 and 38.3-4); a passage in Plutarch Moralia (162b).
Works
Hesiod wrote only one poem universally considered authentic: the Works and Days, which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars have seen this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of documented colonizations in search of new land.
This work lays out the five Ages of Man, as well as containing advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest labour and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in favour of Perses).Tradition also attributes the Theogony to Hesiod, although the authorship remains uncertain. The Theogony resembles Works and Days very closely in style and substance considering the purposely different subject-matter.
The Theogony concerns the origins of the world (cosmogony) and of the gods (theogony), beginning with Gaia, Nyx and Eros, and shows a special interest in genealogy. Embedded in Greek myth there remain fragments of quite variant tales, hinting at the rich variety of myth that once existed, city by city; but Hesiod's retelling of the old stories became the accepted version that linked all Hellenes.
A final poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod, The Shield of Heracles, apparently forms a late expansion of one of these genealogical poems, taking its cue from Homer's description of the Shield of Achilles.
Hipponax of Ephesus was an Ancient Greek iambic poet. Expelled from Ephesus in 540 BC by the tyrant Athenagoras, he took refuge in Clazomenae, where he spent the rest of his life in poverty. His deformed flgure and malicious disposition exposed him to the caricature of the Chian sculptors Bupalus and Athenis, upon whom he revenged himself by issuing against them a series of satires. They are said to have hanged themselves like Lycambes and his daughters when assailed by Archilochus, the model and predecessor of Hipponax. His coarseness of thought and feeling, his rude vocabulary, his want of grace and taste, and his numerous allusions to matters of merely local interest prevented his becoming a favourite in Attica. He was considered the inventor of parody and of a peculiar metre, the scazon or choliamb, which substitutes a spondee for the final iambus of an iambic senarius, and is an appropriate form for the burlesque character of his poems .Among his aphormisms is "There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one marries her and the day one buries her."
Ibycus, of Rhegium in Italy, Greek lyric poet, contemporary of Anacreon, flourished in the 6th century BC. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria.
Notwithstanding his good position at home, he lived a wandering life, and spent a considerable time at the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos. The story of his death is thus related: While in the neighbourhood of Corinth, the poet was mortally wounded by robbers. As he lay dying he saw a flock of cranes flying overhead, and called upon them to avenge his death. The murderers betook themselves to Corinth, and soon after, while sitting in the theatre, saw the cranes hovering above. One of them, either in alarm or jest, exclaimed, "Behold the avengers of Ibycus," and thus gave the clue to the detection of the crime (Plutarch, De Garrulitate, xiv.).
The phrase, "the cranes of Ibycus," passed into a proverb among the Greeks for the discovery of crime through divine intervention.
According to the Suda, Ibycus wrote seven books of lyrics, to some extent mythical and heroic, but mainly erotic (Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iv. 33), celebrating the charms of beautiful youths and girls. F.G. Welcker suggests that they were sung by choruses of boys at the "beauty competitions" held at Lesbos. Although the metre and dialect are Dorian, the poems breathe the spirit of Aeolian melic poetry.
Ion of Chios was a versatile writer, dramatist, lyric poet and philosopher in Ancient Greece. Of his forty or fifty plays only a few titles and fragments have come down to us, while of his elegies and dithyrambs nothing has been preserved. He also wrote a work which has been counted as 'philosophical', its title, Triagmos (or Triagmoi), and the few surviving fragments (no. 36 Diels-Kranz) suggesting it had pythagorean leanings. He was a friend of Socrates and contemporary with all the three great dramatists, winning the third prize in the contest where Euripides was first with his Hyppolytus. In commemoration of this not very glorious victory he presented each Athenian citizen with a flask of Chian wine.
Isyllus was a Greek poet, whose name was rediscovered in the course of excavations on the site of the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus. An inscription was found engraved on stone, consisting of 72 lines of verse (trochaic tetrameters, hexameters, ionics), mainly in the Doric dialect. It is preceded by two lines of prose stating that the author was Isvllus, an Epidaurian, and that it was dedicated to Asclepius and Apollo of Malea. It contains a few political remarks, showing general sympathy with an aristocratic form of government; a self-congratulatory notice of the resolution, passed at the poets instigation, to arrange a solemn procession in honor of the two gods; a paean (no doubt for use in the procession), chiefly occupied with the genealogical relations of Apollo and Asclepius; a poem of thanks for the assistance rendered to Sparta by Asclepius against "Philip", when he led an army against Sparta to put down the monarchy.
The offer of assistance was made by the god himself to the youthful poet, who had entered the Asclepieum to pray for recovery from illness, and communicated the good news to the Spartans. The Philip referred to is identified with (a) Philip II of Macedon, who invaded Peloponnesus after the battle of Chaeronea in 338, or (b) with Philip III, who undertook a similar campaign in 218.Wilamowitz, who characterizes Isyllus as a poetaster without talent and a farcical politician, has written an elaborate treatise on him (Kiessling and Mollendorff, Philologische Untersuchungen, Heft 9, 1886), containing the text with notes, and essays on the political condition of Peloponnesus and the cult of Asclepius. The inscription was first edited by P. Kavvadias (1885), and by J. F. Baunack in Studien onf dem Gebiete der griechischen und der arischen Spraclien (1886).
Cercidas was a poet, philosopher, and legislator for his native city Megalopolis. He was a disciple of Diogenes, whose death he recorded in some Meliambic lines. He is mentioned and cited by Athenaeus and Stobaeus. At his death he ordered the first and second books of the Iliad to be buried with him. Aelian relates that Cercidas died expressing his hope of being with Pythagorus of the Philosophers, Hecataeus of the historians, Olympus of the musicians, and Homer of the poets, which clearly implies that he himself cultivated these four sciences. He appears to be the same person as Cercidas the Arcadian, who is mentioned by Demosthenes among those Greeks, who, by their cowardice and corruption, enslaved their states to Philip II of Macedon.
Corinna (or Korinna) was an Ancient Greek poet, probably of the 6th century BC. She came from Tanagra in Boeotia, and according to later legend was the teacher of the much better-known Theban poet Pindar. Most of her work survives only in fragments, but two poems survive in epitome.
Corinna's birthdate is unknown, but if Pindar was indeed her pupil, it may be assumed that she was born some years earlier than his birthdate of 522 BC. Some writers, however, place her in the 5th or 4th century BC. Pausanias says she won a poetry competition against Pindar in honour of which she had a monument erected to her. He says that her success was chiefly due to her beauty and her use of the local Boeotian dialect. Aelian says said she defeated Pindar five times, and in response to these defeats, Pindar called her a sow. Antipater of Thessaloniki lists her in his catalogue of nine mortal muses.
Corinna wrote choral poetry for celebrations in the Boeotian dialect of Greek. It is said that she criticised Pindar for introducing Atticisms into his poems. Unlike Pindar, she focused on local myths, and drew parallels between the world of mythology and ordinary human behaviour. The outlines of two of her poems survive. Minouaie (The Daughters of Minyas), tells of the three adult daughters of King Minyas of Orchomenos: Leukippe, Arsippe, and Alkathoe. Koronaie (The Shuttle Maidens), tells of Orion's two daughters Menippe and Metioche, who cut their throats with their shuttle, "accepting death for their neighbours' sake".
Lasus of Hermione was a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century BC. He is known to have been active at Athens under the reign of the Peisistratids. Pseudo-Plutarch's De Musica credits Lasus with innovations in the dithyramb. According to Herodotus, Lasus also exposed Onomacritus's forgeries of the oracles of Musaeus.
Lesches (Lescheos in Pausanias x. 25. 5), the reputed author of the Little Iliad, one of the "cyclic poems." According to the usually accepted tradition, he was a native of Pyrrha in Lesbos, and flourished about 660 BC (others place him about 50 years earlier). The Little Iliad took up the story of the Homeric Iliad, and, beginning with the contest between Ajax and Odysseus for the arms of Achilles, carried it down to the fall of Troy (Aristotle, Poetics, 23). According to the epitome in the Chrestomathy of Proclus, it ended with the admission of the wooden horse within the walls of the city. Some ancient authorities ascribe the work to a Lacedaemonian named Cinaethon, and even to Homer.
Machon (fl. 3rd century BC) was a playwright of the New Comedy.He was born in Corinth or Sicyon, and lived in Alexandria. Two fragments of his work survive, along with 462 verses of a book of anecdotes of the words and deeds of notorious Athenians, preserved in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. Dioscorides wrote an epitaph for Machon that has also survived.
Meleager of Gadara was a collector of epigrams active in the 1st century BCE. His work was the basis for the Greek Anthology. The city of Gadara is now Umm Qais in Jordan.
Menedemus, (c. 350 - 278 to 275 BC), a Greek philosopher and founder of the Eretrian School of Philosophy, was born at Eretria. Though of noble birth, he worked as builder and tentmaker until he was sent with a military expedition to Megara, where, according to Diogenes Laertius, he heard Plato and resolved to devote himself to philosophy. It is more likely that he heard one of Plato's followers, inasmuch as Plato died when he was only four years old, if the above dates are correct. At Megara he formed a life-long friendship with Asclepiades, with whom he toiled in the night that he might study philosophy by day. He was subsequently a pupil first of Stilpo and then of Phaedo of Elis, whose school he transferred to Eretria, by which name it was afterwards known.
In addition to his philosophical work, he took a leading part iii the political affairs of his city from the time of the Diadochi until his death, and obtained a remission of the tribute to Demetrius. His friendship with Antigonus Gonatas seems to have roused suspicion as to his loyalty, and he sought safety first in the temple of Amphiaraus at Oropus, and later with Antigonus, at whose court he is said to have died of grief. Other accounts say that he starved himself to death on failing to induce Antigonus to free his native city.
His philosophical views are known only in part. Athenaeus quotes Epicrates as stating that he was a Platonist, but other accounts credit him with having preferred Stilpo to Plato. Diogenes Laërtius (ii. 134 and 135) says that he declined to identify the Good with the Useful, and that he denied the value of the negative proposition on the ground that affirmation alone can express truth. He probably meant to imply that qualities have no existence apart from the subject to which they belong. In ethics we learn from Plutarch (De virt. mor. 2) and from Cicero (Acad. ii. 42) that he regarded Virtue as one, by whatever name it be called, and maintained that it is intellectual. Cicero's evidence is the less valuable in that he always assumed that Menedemus was a follower of the Megarians. Diogenes says that he left no writings, and the Eretrian school disappeared after a short and unobtrusive existence.
Mimnermus of Colophon, Greek elegiac poet, flourished about 630-600 BC. His life fell in the troubled time when the Ionic cities of Asia Minor were struggling to maintain themselves against the rising power of the Lydian kings. One of the extant fragments of his poems refers to this struggle, and contrasts the present effeminacy of his countrymen with the bravery of those who had once defeated the Lydian king Gyges. But his most important poems were a set of elegies addressed to a flute player named Nanno, collected in two books called after her name. Mimnermus was the first to make the elegiac verse the vehicle for love-poetry. He set his own poems to the music of the flute, and the poet Hipponax says that he used the melancholy "the fig-branch strain," said to be a peculiar melody, to the accompaniment of which two human purificatory victims were led out of Athens to be sacrificed during the festival of Thargelia (Hesychius, s.v.).
Moschus, Ancient Greek bucolic poet and friend of the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus, was born at Syracuse and flourished about 150 BC. He was the author of a short epic poem, Europa, and a pretty little epigram, Love, the Runaway, imitated by Torquato Tasso and Ben Jonson. The epitaph on Bion of Smyrna, wrongly supposed to have been his tutor, was in all probability written about the time of Sulla (see F Bücheler in Rheinisches Museum, xxx., 1875). The poem on Megara (the wife of Heracles) is probably not his, but a few other pieces, undoubtedly genuine, have been preserved. His poems are nearly all in hexameters. They are usually printed in editions of Bion and Theocritus, and have been translated into many European languages.
Musaeus or Musaios was the name of three Greek poets.
The first Musaeus was a mythical seer and priest, the pupil or son of Orpheus, and is said to have been the founder of priestly poetry in Attica. According to Pausanias, he was buried on the Museum hill, south-west of the Acropolis. He composed dedicatory and purificatory hymns and prose treatises, and oracular responses. These were collected and arranged in the time of Peisistratus by Onomacritus, who added interpolations. The mystic and oracular verses and customs of Attica, especially of Eleusis, are connected with his name (Herodotus vii. 6; viii. 96; ix. 43). A Titanomachia and Theogonia are also attributed to him by Gottfried Kinkel (Epicorum graecorum fragmenta, 1878).
Herodotus reports that, during the reign of Pisistratus at Athens, the scholar Onomacritus was charged with compiling the oracles of Musaeus, but that he inserted forgeries of his own devising, which were detected by Lasus of Hermione.
The second Musaeus was an Ephesian attached to the court of the kings of Pergamon, who wrote a Perseis, and poems on Eumenes and Attalus I (Suidas s.v.).
The third Musaeus (called Grammaticus in all the manuscripts) is of uncertain date, but probably belongs to the beginning of the 6th century, as his style and metre are evidently modelled on those of Nonnus. He must have lived before Agathias (530-582) and has been identified with the friend of Procopius whose poem (340 hexameter lines) on the story of Hero and Leander is by far the most beautiful of the age (editions by Franz Passow, 1810; GH Schafer, 1825; C Dilthey, 1874). The little love-poem Alpheus and Arethusa (Anthol. pal. ix. 362) is also ascribed to Musaeus.
In Greek mythology, Myrtilus was a divine hero, a son of Hermes on Theobula, and charioteer of King Oenomaus of Pisa in Elis, on the northwest coast of the Peloponnesus.
On the eve of the fateful horse race that would decide the marriage between Pelops and Hippodameia, Myrtilus was approached by Pelops (or alternatively, by Hippodameia) who wanted him to hinder the efforts of his master, Oenamaus, to win the race. Myrtilus was offered as bribe the privilege of the first night with Hippodameia.
Myrtilus, who loved Hippodamia himself but was too afraid to ask her hand of her father, agreed and sabotaged the king's chariot by replacing the bronze lynchpins with fake ones made of bees' wax. In the ensuing accident Oenomaus lost his life, cursing Myrtilus as he died. Shortly thereafter Myrtilus made a pass at Hippodameia who ran crying to Pelops. Enraged, Pelops murdered Myrtilus by casting him into the sea off the east coast of the Peloponnesus, which was later named the Myrtoan Sea in honor of the hero. His body was later recovered and brought in the temple of Hermes where it was honored with annual sacrifices.
As Myrtilus died, he cursed Pelops. This was the source of the curse that haunted future generation of Pelops' children, including Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Menelaus, Orestes and Chrysippus.
Nicarchus was a Greek writer of the first century AD, best known for his epigrams, of which 42 survive, and his satirical poetry. He was a contemporary of, and influence on, the better-known Latin writer Martial. A large proportion of his epigrams are directed against doctors. Some of his writings have been found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
Palladas (flourished 4th century AD) was a Greek poet, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. All that is known about this poet has been deduced from his 151 epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthology. (Another twenty-three appear in that collection under his name, but his authorship is suspect). His poems describe the persona of a pagan schoolteacher resigned to life in a Christian city, and bitter about his wife to the point of misogyny.
One of the epigrams attributed to him on the authority of Maximus Planudes is a eulogy on the celebrated Hypatia, daughter of Theon of Alexandria, whose tragic death took place in 415. Another was, according to a scholium in the Palatine Manuscript (an edition of the Greek Anthology), written in the reign of the joint emperors Valentinian and Valens (364-375). A third epigram on the destruction of Beirut (9.27), offers no certain date.
An anonymous epigram (Gk. Anth. 9.380) speaks of him as of high poetical reputation. However, Isaac Casaubon dismisses him in two contemptuous words as versificator insulsissimus ("a most coarse poet"); this is true of a great part of his work, and would perhaps be true of it all but for the savage indignation which kindles his verse, not into the flame of poetry, but to a dull red heat.
There is little direct allusion in his epigrams to the struggle against the onslaught of Christianity. One epigram speaks obscurely of the destruction of the idols of Alexandria popular in the archiepiscopate of Theophilus in 389; another in even more enigmatic language (Gk. Anth. 10.90) seems to be a bitter attack on the doctrine of the Resurrection; and a scornful couplet against the swarms of Egyptian monks might have been written by a Reformer of the 16th century.
For the most part his sympathy with the losing side is only betrayed in his despondency over all things. But it is in his criticism of life that the power of Palladas lies; with a remorselessness like that of Jonathan Swift he tears the coverings from human frailty and holds it up in its meanness and misery. The lines on the Descent of Man (Gk. Anth. 10.45), fall as heavily on the Neo-Platonic martyr as on the Christian persecutor, and remain even now among the most mordant and crushing sarcasms ever passed upon mankind.
To the same period in thought -- beyond this there is no clue to their date -- belong Aesopus and Glycon, each the author of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. They belong to the age of the Byzantine metaphrasts, when infinite pains were taken to rewrite well-known poems or passages in different metres, by turning Homer into elegiacs or iambics, and recasting pieces of Euripides or Menander as epigrams.
Philetas of Cos, Alexandrian poet and critic, flourished in the second half of the 4th century BC. He was tutor to the son of Ptolemy I of Egypt, and also taught Theocritus and the grammarian Zenodotus. His thinness made him an object of ridicule; according to the comic poets, he carried lead in his shoes to keep himself from being blown away. Over-study of Megarian dialectic subtleties is said to have shortened his life. His elegies, chiefly of an amatory nature and singing the praises of his mistress Battis (or Bittis), were much admired by the Romans. He is frequently mentioned by Ovid and Propertius, the latter of whom imitated him and preferred him to his rival Callimachus, whose superior mythological lore was more to the taste of the Alexandrian critics. Philetas was also the author of a vocabulary called "Aro/cra, explaining the meanings of rare and obscure words, including words peculiar to certain dialects; and of notes on Homer, severely criticized by Aristarchus.
Philoxenus of Cythera (435 BC-380 BC) was a Greek dithyrambic poet.On the conquest of the island by the Athenians he was taken as a prisoner of war to Athens, where he came into the possession of the dithyrambic poet Melanippides, who educated him and set him free. Philoxenus afterwards resided in Sicily, at the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, whose bad verses he declined to praise, and was in consequence sent to work in the quarries. After leaving Sicily he travelled in Greece, Italy and Asia, reciting his poems, and died at Ephesus.
According to the Suidas, Philoxenus composed twenty-four dithyrambs and a lyric poem on the genealogy of the Aeacidae. In his hands the dithyramb seems to have been a sort of comic opera, and the music, composed by himself, of a debased character. His masterpiece was the Cyclops, a pastoral burlesque on the love of the Cyclops for the fair Galatea, written to avenge himself upon Dionysius, who was wholly or partially blind of one eye. It was parodied by Aristophanes in the Plutus (290 BC).
Another work of Philoxenus (sometimes attributed to Philoxenus of Leucas, a notorious parasite and glutton) is the Aeiirnon ("Dinner"), of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Athenaeus. This is an elaborate bill of fare in verse, probably intended as a satire on the luxury of the Sicilian court.
The great popularity of Philoxenus is attested by a complimentary resolution passed by the Athenian Senate in 393 BC. The comic poet Antiphanes spoke of him as a god among men; Alexander the Great had his poems sent to him in Asia; the Alexandrian grammarians received him into the canon; and down to the time of Polybius his works were regularly learned and annually acted by the Arcadian youth.
Phocylides, Greek gnomic poet of Miletus, contemporary of Theognis of Megara, was born about 560 BC.A few fragments of his "maxims" have survived (chiefly in the Florilegium of Stobaeus), in which he expresses his contempt for the pomps and vanities of rank and wealth, and sets forth in simple language his ideas of honour, justice and wisdom.
A complete didactic poem (230 hexameters) called llotnua vovO~rtK6v or 7v&~/2cu, bearing the name of Phocylides, is now considered to be the work of an Alexandrian Christian of Jewish origin who lived between 170 BC and AD 50. The Jewish element is shown in verbal agreement with passages of the Old Testament (especially the Book of Sirach); the Christian by the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. Some Jewish authorities, however, maintain that there are in reality no traces of Christian doctrine to be found in the poem, and that the author was a Jew. The poem was first printed at Venice in 1495, and was a favourite school textbook during the Reformation period.
Pigres, a native of Halicarnassus, either the brother or the son of the celebrated Artemisia, satrap of Caria. He is spoken of by the Suda (s.v. where, however, he makes the mistake of conflating Artemisia the wife of Mausolus with Artemisia the advisor of Xerxes in the Histories Herodotus) as the author of the Margites, and the Batrachomyomachia. The latter poem is also attributed to him by Plutarch (de Herod. malign. 43. p. 873), and was probably his work.
Pindar (522 BC - 443 BC), considered the greatest of the nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, was born at Cynoscephalae, a village in Thebes. He was the son of Daiphantus and Cleodice. The traditions of his family have left their impression on his poetry, and are not without importance for a correct estimate of his relation to his contemporaries.
While his father belonged to the 'aristocracy', his mother is said to have been a member of the 'rightless' class or maybe even a slave. Together with the fact that his relation with a woman from the aristocracy ended abruptly, this would remain a source of inspiration for Pindar. He felt looked down upon. He got his 'revenge' through his poetry. It is even said that the same girl and his father committed suicide after reading his work.
But nevertheless, through his father, he truly belonged to the aristocracy, and from a very early age on, he became familiar with all the intimacies of the aristocratic ranks and titles. This is something to keep in mind when studying Pindar's work.
Employing himself by writing choral works in praise of notable personages, events and princes, his house in Thebes was spared by Alexander the Great in recognition of the complimentary works composed for king Alexander I of Macedon.
Pindar composed choral songs of several types. According to a Late Antique biographer, these works were grouped into seventeen books by scholars at the Library of Alexandria. They were, by genre:
Of this vast and varied corpus, only the victory odes survive in complete form. The rest are known to us only by quotations in other ancient authors or papyrus scraps unearthed in Egypt.
Pindar's victory odes were composed for aristocratic victors in the four most prominent athletic festivals in early Classical Greece: the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean Games. Rich and allusive in style, they are packed with dense parallels between the athletic victor, his illustrious ancestors, and the myths of gods and heroes underlying the athletic festival.
Pindar is to be conceived, then, as standing within the circle of those families for whom the heroic myths were domestic records. He had a personal link with the memories which everywhere were most cherished by Dorians, no less than with those which appealed to men of "Cadmean" or of Achaean stock. And the wide ramifications of the Aegidae throughout Hellas rendered it peculiarly fitting that a member of that illustrious clan should celebrate the glories of many cities in verse which was truly Panhellenic.
Pindar is said to have received lessons in aulos-playing from one Scopelinus at Thebes, and afterwards to have studied at Athens under the musicians Apollodorus (or Agathocles) and Lasus of Hermione. Several passages in Pindar's extant odes glance at the long technical development of Greek lyric poetry before his time, and at the various elements of art which the lyricist was required to temper into a harmonious whole. The facts that stand out from these meagre traditions are that Pindar was precocious and laborious. Preparatory labour of a somewhat severe and complex kind was, indeed, indispensable for the Greek lyric poet of that age.
Pindar's wife's name was Megacleia, and he had a son named Daiphantus and two daughters, Eumetis and Protomache. He is said to have died at Argos, at the age of seventy-nine, in 443 BC.
Posidippus (also transliterated Poseidippos) was a Hellenistic Greek epigrammatic poet (c.280 - 240 BC). Born in the Macedonian city of Pella, he lived for some time in Samos before moving permanently to Egypt. An inscription from Thermon in Aetolia records that he was granted the liberties of that city in 264/3 BC. He was friends with the poets Asclepiades and Hedylus. Twenty of his poems were included in the Greek Anthology, and several more were quoted in either part or whole by Athenaeus of Naucratis in his Deipnosophistairum.
Until 2001, it was assumed that Posidippus wrote only about drinking and love. In that year the Milan Papyrus was recovered from the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy, which contained 112 poems, two of which were previously known to have been written by Posidippus, which address subjects that include events of the court of the Ptolemaic dynasty, gemstones, and bird divination. Because of Posidippus' authorship of these two poems, scholars have concluded that the other poems of the Milan Papyrus were also written by him.
Praxilla, of Sicyon, was a Greek lyric poet of the 5th century BC. She was one of the nine lyric Muses.According to Athenaeus (xv. 694), she was famous as a composer of scolia (short lyrical poems sung after dinner), which were considered equal to those of Alcaeus and Anacreon. She also wrote dithyrambs and hymns, chiefly on mystic and mythological subjects, genealogies, and the love-stories of the gods and heroes. A dactylic metre was also called by her name.
Rhianus was a Greek poet and grammarian, a native of Crete, friend and contemporary of Eratosthenes (275 BC-195 BC). Suidas says he was at first a slave and overseer of a palaestra, but obtained a good education later in life and devoted himself to grammatical studies, probably in Alexandria. He prepared a new recension of the Iliad and Odyssey, characterized by sound judgment and poetical taste. His bold atheteses are frequently mentioned in the scholia. He also wrote epigrams, eleven of which, preserved in the Greek anthology and Athenaeus, show elegance and vivacity. But he was chiefly known as a writer of epics (mythological and ethnographical), the most celebrated of which was the Messeniaca in six books, dealing with the second Messenian war and the exploits of its central figure Aristomenes, and used by Pausanias in his fourth book as a trustworthy authority. Other similar poems were the Achaica, Eliaca, and Thessalica. The Heracleia was a long mythological epic, probably an imitation of the poem of the same name by Panyasis, and containing the same number of books (fourteen).
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