Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 1.djvu/589

Rh CALLl′GENES, the name of the physician of Philip, Wmg of Macedonia, who attended him in his last illness at Amphipolis, B. C. 179, and concealed his death from the people till the arrival of Perseus, to whom he had sent intelligence of the great danger of the king. (Liv. xl. 56.)  CALLI′MACHUS. 1. Of the tribe of Aiantis and the of Aphidna, held the office of Polemarch, B. C. 490, and in that capacity commanded the right wing of the Athenian array at Marathon, where he was slain, after behaving with much gallantry. In the battle he is said to have vowed to Artemis a heifer for every enemy he should slay. By the persuasion of Miltiades he had given his casting vote for fighting, when the voices of the ten generals were equally divided on the question. This is the last recorded instance of the Polemarch performing the military duties which his name implies. Callimachus was conspicuously figured in the fresco painting of the battle of Marathon, by Polygnotus, in the. (Herod, vi. 109—114; Plut. Aristid. et Cat. Maj. 2, Sympos. i. 8. § 3; Schol. ad Aristoph. Eq. 658; Paus. i. 15.)

2. One of the generals of Mithridates, who, by his skill in engineering, defended the town of Amisus, in Pontus, for a considerable time against the Romans, in B. C. 71; and when Lucullus had succeeded in taking a portion of the wall, Callimachus set fire to the place and made his escape by sea. He afterwards fell into the hands of Lucullus at the capture of Nisibis (called by the Greeks Antioch) in Mygdonia, B. C. 68, and was put to death in revenge for the burning of Amisus. (Plut. Lucull. 19, 32; comp. Appian, Bell Mithr. 78, 83; Dion Cass. xxxv. 7.)

 CALLI′MACHUS, one of the most celebrated Alexandrine grammarians and poets, was, according to Suidas, a son of Battus and Mesatme, and belonged to the celebrated family of the Battiadae at Cyrene, whence Ovid (Ib. 53) and others call him simply Battiades. (Comp. Strab. xvii. p. 837.) He was a disciple of the grammarian Hermocrates, and afterwards taught at Eleusis, a suburb of Alexandria. He was highly esteemed by Ptolemy Philadelphus, who invited him to a place in the Museum. (Suid.; Strab. xvii. p. 838.) Callimachus was still alive in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes, the successor of Philadelphus. (Schol. ad Callim. Hymn. ii. 26.) It was formerly believed, but is now established as an historical fact, that Callimachus was chief librarian of the famous library of Alexandria. This fact leads us to the conclusion, that he was the successor of Zenodotus, and that he held this office from about B. C. 260 until his death about B. C. 240. (Ritschl, Die Alexandrin. Biblioth. &c pp. 19, 84, &c.) This calculation agrees with the statement of A. Gellius (xvii. 21), that Callimachus lived shortly before the first Punic war. He was married to a daughter of Euphrates of Syracuse, and had a sister Megatime, who was married to Stasenorus, and a son Callimachus, who is distinguished from his uncle by being called the younger, and is called by Suidas the author of an epic poem ,

Callimachus was one of the most distinguished grammarians, critics, and poets of the Alexandrine period, and his celebrity surpassed that of nearly all the other Alexandrine scholars and poets. Several of the most distinguished men of that period, such as his successor Eratosthenes, Philostephanus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius Rhodius, Ister, and Hermippus. were among his pupils. Callimachus was one of the most fertile writers of antiquity, and if the number in Suidas be correct, he wrote 800 works, though we may take it for granted that most of them were not of great extent, if he followed his own maxim, that a great book was equal to a great evil. (Athen. iii. p. 72.) The number of his works of which the titles or fragments are known to us, amounts to upwards of forty. But what we possess is very little, and consists principally of poetical productions, apparently the least valuable of all his works, since Callimachus, notwithstanding the reputation he enjoyed for his poems, was not a man of real poetical talent: labour and learning are with him the substitutes for poetical genius and talent. His prose works, on the other hand, which would have furnished us with some highly important information concerning ancient mythology, history, literature, &c., are completely lost.

The poetical productions of Callimachus still extant are: 1. Hymns, six in number, of which five are written in hexameter verse and in the Ionic dialect, and one, on the bath of Pallas, in distichs and in the Doric dialect. These hymns, which bear greater resemblance to epic than to lyric poetry, are the productions of labour and learning, like most of the poems of that period. Almost every line furnishes some curious mythical information, and it is perhaps not saying too much to assert, that these hymns are more overloaded with learning than any other poetical production of that time. Their style has nothing of the easy flow of genuine poetry, and is evidently studied and laboured. There are some ancient Greek scholia on these hymns, which however have no great merit. 2. Seventy-three epigrams, which belong to the best specimens of this kind of poetry. The high estimation they enjoyed in antiquity is attested by the fact, that Archibius, the grammarian, who lived, at the latest, one generation after Callimachus, wrote a commentary upon them, and that Marianus, in the reign of the emperor Anastasius, wrote a paraphrase of them in iambics. They were incorporated in the Greek Anthology at an early time, and have thus been preserved. 3. Elegies. These are lost with the exception of some fragments, but there are imitations of them by the Roman poets, the most celebrated of which is the "De Coma Berenices" of Catullus. If we may believe the Roman critics, Callimachus was the greatest among the elegiac poets (Quintil. x. 1. § 58), and Ovid, Propertius, and Catullus took Callimachus for their model in this species of poetry. We have mention of several more poetical productions, but all of them have perished except a few fragments, and however much we may lament their loss on account of the information we might have derived from them, we have very little reason to regret their loss as specimens of poetry. Among them we may mention, 1. The, an epic poem in four books on the causes of the various mythical stories, religious ceremonies, and other customs. The work is often referred to, and was paraphrased by Marianus; but the paraphrase is lost, and of the original we have only a few fragments. 2. An epic poem entitled, which was the name of an old woman who had received 