Archimelus (Ancient Greek: Ἀρχίμηλος) was a writer of ancient Greece who was the author of an epigram on the great ship of Hiero II of Syracuse, which appears to have been built about 220 BCE. The writer Athenaeus recounts a story wherein Hiero supplied Archimelus with 1000 medimnoi (around 1500 bushels) of wheat as payment for this epigram.[1]
Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Roughly three centuries after the Late Bronze Age collapse of Mycenaean Greece, Greek urban poleis began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and colonization of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the period of Classical Greece, an era that began with the Greco-Persian Wars, lasting from the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Due to the conquests by Alexander the Great of Macedon, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the western end of the Mediterranean Sea. The Hellenistic period came to an end with the conquests and annexations of the eastern Mediterranean world by the Roman Republic, which established the Roman province of Macedonia in Roman Greece, and later the province of Achaea during the Roman Empire.
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek: ἐπίγραμμα epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two millennia.
Hiero II was the Greek Sicilian Tyrant of Syracuse from 270 to 215 BC, and the illegitimate son of a Syracusan noble, Hierocles, who claimed descent from Gelon. He was a former general of Pyrrhus of Epirus and an important figure of the First Punic War.
To this epigram the classical scholar Richard François Philippe Brunck added another, on an imitator of Euripides, the author of which, however, in the Vatican manuscript is "Archimedous" (Ἀρχιμήδους) not "Archimelus", which there is no good reason for altering, as we have no other mention of a poet named "Archimelus".[2]
Richard François Philippe Brunck was a French classical scholar.
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom a significant number of plays have survived. Some ancient scholars attributed 95 plays to him but, according to the Suda, it was 92 at most. Of these, 18 or 19 have survived more or less complete and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Other scholars propose that there never was any such person as "Archimelus", and the entire story is a fabrication, citing the fact that the only mention of him occurs in Athenaeus, as well as the general unlikeliness of the story in certain details such as the timing of the epigram and the size of the ship.[3]
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Sir William Smith was an English lexicographer. He also made advances in the teaching of Greek and Latin in schools.
The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology is an encyclopedia/biographical dictionary. Edited by William Smith, the dictionary spans three volumes and 3,700 pages. It is a classic work of 19th-century lexicography. The work is a companion to Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities and Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography.
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Alcaeus of Mytilene was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was an older contemporary and an alleged lover of Sappho, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where he was involved in political disputes and feuds.
Alexander Aetolus was a Greek poet and grammarian, the only known representative of Aetolian poetry.
In Greek mythology, Phemonoe was a Greek poet of the ante-Homeric period. She was said to have been the daughter of Apollo, his first priestess at Delphi, or of his possible son Delphus, and the inventor of the hexameter verses, a type of poetic metre. In some studies, attributed to the phrase "know thyself" found inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Some writers seem to have placed her at Delos instead of Delphi; and Servius identifies her with the Cumaean Sibyl. The tradition which ascribed to her the invention of the hexameter, was by no means uniform; Pausanias, for example, as quoted above, calls her the first who used it, but in another passage he quotes an hexameter distich, which was ascribed to the Pleiades, who lived before Phemonoe: the traditions respecting the invention of the hexameter are collected by Fabricius. There were poems which went under the name of Phemonoe, like the old religious poems which were ascribed to Orpheus, Musaeus, and the other mythological bards. Melampus, for example, quotes from her in his book Peri Palmon Mantike §17, §18; and Pliny quotes from her respecting eagles and hawks, evidently from some book of augury, and perhaps from a work which is still extant in MS., entitled Orneosophium. There is an epigram of Antipater of Thessalonica, alluding to a statue of Phemonoe, dressed in a pharos.
Athenaeus of Naucratis was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The Suda says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus, who died in 192, shows that he survived that emperor. He was a contemporary of Adrantus.
The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of the material of the Greek Anthology comes from two manuscripts, the Palatine Anthology of the 10th century and the Anthology of Planudes of the 14th century.
The Deipnosophistae is an early 3rd-century AD Greek work by the Greco-Egyptian author Athenaeus of Naucratis. It is a long work of literary, historical, and antiquarian references set in Rome at a series of banquets held by the protagonist Publius Livius Larensis for an assembly of grammarians, lexicographers, jurists, musicians, and hangers-on. It is sometimes called the oldest surviving cookbook.
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Alexander Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος) of Myndus in Caria was an ancient Greek writer who some believe lived during the 1st century AD but this date is uncertain. He wrote on diverse topics, including zoology and divination. His works, which are now lost, must have been considered very valuable by the ancients, since they refer to them very frequently; fragments of his work are preserved in various later authors.
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Parmenion was a Macedonian epigrammatic poet, whose verses were included in the collection of Philip of Thessalonica in Greek Anthology ; whence it is probable that he flourished in, or shortly before, the time of Augustus. Brunck gives fourteen of his epigrams in the Analecta, and one more in the Lectiones. Reiske refers to him one of the anonymous epigrams, on the ground of the superscription Parmenontos in the Vatican MS, but that is the name, not of the author of the epigram, but of the victor who dedicated the statue to which it forms the inscription, as is clear from the epigram itself. The epigrams of Parmenion are characterized by brevity, which he himself declares that he aimed at; unfortunately, they want the body, of which brevity is said to be the soul,—wit.
Theodoridas of Syracuse was a lyric and epigrammatic poet from Syracuse, who is supposed to have lived at the same time as Euphorion, that is, about 235 BC; for, on the one hand, Euphorion is mentioned in one of the epigrams of Theodoridas, and, on the other hand, Clement of Alexandria quotes a verse of Euphorion ἐν ταῖς πρὸς Θεωρίδαν ἀντιγραφαῖς, where Schneider suggests the emendation Θεοδωρίδαν.
Agias or Hagias was an ancient Greek poet, whose name was formerly written Augias through a mistake of the first editor of the Excerpta of Proclus. This misreading was corrected by Friedrich Thiersch, from the Codex Monacensis, which in one passage has "Agias", and in another "Hagias". The name itself does not occur in early Greek writers, unless it be supposed that the "Egias" or "Hegias" (Ἡγίας) in Clement of Alexandria and Pausanias, are only different forms of the same name.
Alcaeus of Messene was an ancient Greek poet, who flourished between 219 and 196 BC. Twenty-two of his short poems or epigrams survive in the Greek Anthology, from some of which his date may be fixed at around the late 3rd/early 2nd century BC. Some of his poems are on literary themes, but most are political.
Hagnon of Tarsus was an ancient Greek rhetorician, a philosopher, and a pupil of Carneades. Quintilian chides him for writing a book called Rhetorices accusatio in which he denied that rhetoric was an art.
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Hedylus, son of Melicertus and Hedyle, a native of Samos or Athens, was an epigrammatic poet. His epigrams were included in the Garland of Meleager Eleven of them are in the Greek Anthology, but the genuineness of two of these is very doubtful. Most of his epigrams are in praise of wine, and all of them are jocular. In some he describes the dedicatory offerings in the temple of Arsinoe, among which he mentions the hydraulic organ of Ctesibius. Besides this indication of his time, we know that he was the contemporary and rival of Callimachus and friend of Poseidippus of Pella. He lived therefore in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and is to be classed with the Alexandrian school of poets. According to Athenaeus, he killed himself for love of a certain Glaucus.
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