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 ANTIMACHUS OF COLOPHON 71 verses^the same anecdote is told of others — may have been this man's grandson. If he was really the author of the epitaph on Sardanapallus he was not a bad writer, though the original prose was finer: ^^ Sardanapallus, son of Anakyndaraxes, built Anchiale and Tarsus in one day. Eat, drink, make merry ; all things else are not worth — that!" A rival of the earlier Choirilus was Antimachus of Colophon, author of the Thebais,* a learned poet affecting to despise popularity, and in several respects an Alexan- drian born before his time. Naturally, Alexandria admired him, counted him with Empedocles as master of 'the austere style,' and ranked him in general next to Homer, though Quintilian, in quoting the criticism, remarks that ' next ' does not always mean ' near,' A vague anecdotic tradition connects Antimachus and Plato, Plato sent his disciple Heraclides to collect Antimachus's works, or else stayed in a room which Antimachus's recitation had emptied of other listeners ; and Antimachus said, " Plato to me is worth a thousand." There were literary wars over Antimachus in later times ; and this anecdote is used by the friends of the learned epos, like Apollonius, to glorify Antimachus, while Callimachus and Duris took it as merely proving what they otherwise held, that Plato was no judge of poetry. The fragments are mostly too short to be of any literary interest ; the longer pieces are either merely grammatical or are quoted by Athenzeus for some trivial point about wine-cups. The style strikes a modern ear as poor and harsh, but the harshness is studied, as the strange words are. He owed his real fame more to his elegiac romance LydS* than to his epic. Lastly, Pausanias tells us : "A person called Phalysios