Among the best known of the men of letters who came to Alexandria to enjoy the patronage of Philadelphus was Theocritus. Many of his poems are lost; but his pastoral poems, though too rough for the polished taste of Quintilian, and perhaps more like nature than we wish any works of imitative art to be, have always been looked upon as the model of that kind of poetry. If his shepherds do not speak the language of courtiers, they have at least a rustic propriety which makes us admire the manners and thoughts of the peasant. He repaid the bounty of the king in the way most agreeable to him; he speaks of him as one
to freemen kind,
Wise, fond of books and love, of generous mind;
Knows well his friend, but better knows his foe;
Scatters his wealth; when asked he ne’er says No,
But gives as kings should give.
Idyll, xiv. 60.
Theocritus boasted that he would in an undying poem place him in the rank of the demigods; and, writing with the pyramids and the Memnonium before his eyes, assured him that generosity towards the poets would do more to make his name live for ever than any building that he could raise.
In a back street of Alexandria, in the part of the city named Eleusinis, near the temple of Ceres and Proserpine, lived the poet Callimachus, earning his livelihood by teaching. But the writer of the Hymns could not long dwell so near the court of Philadelphus unknown and unhonoured. He was made professor of poetry in the museum, and even now repays the king and patron for what he then received. He was a man of great industry, and wrote in prose and in all kinds of verse; but of these only a few hymns and epigrams have come down to our time. Egypt seems to have been the birthplace of the mournful elegy, and Callimachus was the chief of the elegiac poets. He was born at Cyrene; and though, from the language in which he wrote, his thoughts are mostly Greek, yet he did not forget the place of his birth. He calls upon Apollo by the name of Carneus, because, after Sparta and Thera, Cyrene was his chosen seat. He paints Latona, weary and in pain in the island of Delos, as leaning against a palm-tree, by the side of the river Inopus, which, sinking into the ground, was to rise again in Egypt, near the cataracts of Syênê; and, prettily pointing to Philadelphus, he makes Apollo, yet unborn, ask his mother not to give birth to him in the island of Cos, because that island was already chosen as the birthplace of another god, the child of the gods Soteres, who would be the copy of his father, and under whose diadem both Egypt and the islands would be proud to be governed by a Macedonian.
The poet Philastas, who had been the first tutor of Philadelphus, was in elegy second only to Callimachus; but Quintilian (while advising us about books, to read much but not many) does not rank him among the few first-rate poets by whom the student should form his taste; and his works are now lost. He was small and thin in person, and it was jokingly said of him that he wore leaden soles to his shoes lest he should be blown away by the wind. But in losing his poetry, we have perhaps lost the point of the joke. While these three, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Philastas, were writing in Alexandria, the museum was certainly the chief seat of the muses. Athens itself could boast of no such poet but Menander, with whom Attic literature ended; and him Philadelphus earnestly invited to his court. He sent a ship to Greece on purpose to fetch him; but neither this honour nor the promised salary could make him quit his mother country and the schools of Athens; and, in the time of Pausanias, his tomb was still visited by the scholar on the road to the Pmeus, and his statue was still seen in the theatre.
Strato, the pupil of Theophrastus, though chiefly known for his writings on physics, was also a writer on many branches of knowledge. He was one of the men of learning who had taken part in the education of Phil-adelphus; and the king showed his gratitude to his teacher by making him a present of eighty talents, or sixty thousand dollars. He was for eighteen years at the head of one of the Alexandrian schools.
Timocharis, the astronomer, made some of his observations at Alexandria in the last reign, and continued them through half of this reign. He began a catalogue of the fixed stars, with their latitudes and their longitudes measured from the equinoctial point; by the help of which Hipparchus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, made the great discovery that the equinoctial point had moved. He has left an observation of the place of Venus, on the seventeenth day of the month of Mesore, in the thirteenth year of this reign, which by the modern tables of the planets is known to have been on the eighth day of October, B.C. 272; from which we learn that the first year of Philadelphus ended in October, B.C. 284, and the first year of Ptolemy Soter ended in October, B.C. 322; thus fixing the chronology of these reigns with a certainty which leaves nothing to be wished for. Aris-tillus also made some observations of the same kind at Alexandria. Few of them have been handed down to us, but they were made use of by Hipparchus.