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 Syene; 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.

[Illustration:  123.jpg THE CARARACT ON THE ASWAN]

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.