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Founders of the Alexandrian School
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Epigrammatists from The Greek Anthology from Alexander the Great to the beginning of the Roman period: Philetas, Simmias, and Asclepiades.
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Source: Select Epigrams from The Greek Anthology
Edited with a Revised Text, Translation, and Notes, by J. W. Mackail
London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890
(2) Under this head is a group of three distinguished poets and
critics:
PHILETAS of Cos, a contemporary of Alexander, and tutor to the
children of Ptolemy I. He was chiefly distinguished as an elegiac
poet. Theocritus (vii. 39) names him along with Asclepiades as his
master in style, and Propertius repeatedly couples him in the same way
with Callimachus. If one may judge from the few fragments extant,
chiefly in Stobaeus, his poetry was simpler and more dignified than
that of the Alexandrian school, of which he may be called the founder.
He was also one of the earliest commentators on Homer, the celebrated
Zenodotus being his pupil.
SIMMIAS of Rhodes, who fl. rather before 300 B.C., and was the author
of four books of miscellaneous poems including an epic history of
Apollo. "The tall wild-pear of Simmias" is in the "Garland" of
Meleager, l. 30. Two of the seven epigrams under his name in the
Palatine Anthology are headed "Simmias of Thebes." This would be the
disciple of Socrates, best known as one of the interlocutors in the
"Phaedo". But these epigrams are undoubtedly of the Alexandrian type,
and quite in the same style as the rest; and the title is probably a
mistake. Simmias is also the reputed author of several of the
{griphoi} or pattern-poems at the end of the Palatine MS.
ASCLEPIADES, son of Sicelides of Samos, who flourished B.C. 290, one
of the most brilliant authors of the period. Theocritus (l.c. supra)
couples him with Philetas as a model of excellence in poetry. This
passage fixes his date towards the end of the reign of Ptolemy I., to
whose wife Berenice and daughter Cleopatra there are references in his
epigrams. There are forty-three epigrams of his in the Anthology;
nearly all of them amatory, with much wider range and finer feeling
that most of the erotic epigrams, and all with the firm clear touch of
the best period. There are also one or two fine epitaphs. The
reference in the "Garland" of Meleager, l. 46, to "the wind-flower of
the son of Sicelides" is another of Meleager's exquisite criticisms.
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