Elegiac poets (4): Callinus, Mimnermus, Philetas, Callimachus.
Lyric poets (9): Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides of Ceos.
Orators (10): Demosthenes, Lysias, Hypereides, Isocrates, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Isaeus, Antiphon, Ándocides, Deinarchus.
Historians (10): Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Philistius, Theopompus, Ephorus, Anaximenes, Callisthenes, Hellanicus, Polybius.
The latest name in the above list is that of Polybius, who died about 123 B.C. Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus and Theocritus were subsequently added to the “epic” poets. Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, were possibly classed in a separate “canon.”
While the scholars of Alexandria were mainly interested in the verbal criticism of the Greek poets, a wider variety of studies was the characteristic of the school of Pergamum, the literary rival of Alexandria. Pergamum was a home of learning for a large part of the 150 years of the Attalid dynasty, 283-133 B.C.
The grammar of the Stoics, gradually elaborated by Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, supplied a terminology which, in words such as “genitive,” “accusative” and “aorist,” has become a permanent part of the grammarian’s vocabulary; and the study of this grammar found its earliest home in Pergamum.
From about 168 B.C. the head of the Pergamene school was Crates of Mallus, who (like the Stoics) was an adherent of the principle of “anomaly” in grammar, and was thus opposed to Aristarchus of Alexandria, the champion of “analogy.” He also opposed Aristarchus, and supported the Stoics, by insisting on an allegorical interpretation of Homer. He is credited with having drawn up the classified lists of the best authors for the Pergamene library. His mission as an envoy to the Roman senate, “shortly after the death of Ennius” in 169 B.C., had a remarkable influence on literary studies in Rome. Meeting with an accident while he was wandering on the Palatine, and being detained in Rome, he passed part of his enforced leisure in giving lectures (possibly on Homer, his favourite author), and thus succeeded in arousing among the Romans a taste for the scholarly study of literature. The example set by Crates led to the production of a new edition of the epic poem of Naevius, and to the public recitation of the Annals of Ennius, and (two generations later) the Satires of Lucilius.
(ii.) The Roman Age.—(a) Latin Studies.—In the 1st century B.C. the foremost scholar in Rome was L. Aelius Stilo (c. 154-c. 74), who is described by Cicero as profoundly learned in Greek and Latin literature, and as an accomplished critic of Roman antiquities and of ancient authors. Of the plays then passing under the name of Plautus, he recognized twenty-five as genuine. His most famous pupil was Varro (116-27), the six surviving books of whose great work on the Latin language are mainly concerned with the great grammatical controversy on analogy and anomaly—a controversy which also engaged the attention of Cicero and Caesar, and of the elder Pliny and Quintilian. The twenty-one plays of Plautus accepted by Varro are doubtless the twenty now extant, together with the lost Vidularia. The influence of Varro’s last work on the nine disciplinae, or branches of study, long survived in the seven “liberal arts” recognized by St Augustine and Martianus Capella, and in the trivium and quadrivium of the middle ages.