Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/294

264 The Greek towns in Sicily had had an intellectual life by no means unimportant in the general sum of Greek culture. Stesichorus of Himera flourished about B.C. 600 and was one of the earliest writers of lyrical as well as other poetry. Comedy seems to have been brought to Hyblaean Megara from Megara in Greece, and Epicharmus of Cos, one of its earliest authors, spent the greater part of his life there (fl. about B.C. 475). The court of Hiero I. (B.C. 478–467) was frequented by the greatest writers—Aeschylus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and the poet-philosopher Xenophanes. Leontini was the home of the famous Sophist Gorgias; Agrigentum of Empedocles (fl. B.C. 445). Philistus, the historian of Sicily and other countries, was a native of Syracuse (fl. B.C. 395), Xenarchus, the mimograph, resided at the court of Dionysius, Apollodorus, a comic poet, was a native of Gela (fl. B.C. 340). Dionysius the elder was himself a writer in various styles and encouraged the presence of philosophers and men of letters; and the most famous of ancient mathematicians, Archimedes, was born at Syracuse about B.C. 287. But the poet of Sicily, whose fame has been most abiding, is Theocritus of Syracuse (fl. about B.C. 284–270). There must still have been peaceful and quiet scenes of country life to be found in Sicily, in spite of wars and revolutions, to inspire his sweet pastoral muse. Like other poets of his day, he spent some of his time in Alexandria under the patronage of the second Ptolemy (Philadelphus), but his idyll on the Adonis feast—a dialogue between two Syracusan women—has nothing of town life