Antimachus
Ancient Greek poet
title: "Antimachus" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["ancient-greek-grammarians", "ancient-greek-epic-poets", "ancient-greek-elegiac-poets", "4th-century-bc-greek-poets", "ancient-colophonians", "year-of-birth-unknown", "year-of-death-unknown"] description: "Ancient Greek poet" topic_path: "general/ancient-greek-grammarians" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimachus" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Ancient Greek poet ::
::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Antimaco_di_Colofone.jpg" caption="Herm of Antimachus from Colophon"] ::
Antimachus of Colophon (), or of Claros, was a Greek poet and grammarian, who flourished about 400 BC.
Life
Scarcely anything is known of his life. The Suda claims that he was a pupil of the poets Panyassis and Stesimbrotus.
Work
His poetical efforts were not generally appreciated, although he received encouragement from his younger contemporary Plato (Plutarch, Lysander, 18). The emperor Hadrian, however, would later consider him superior to Homer.
His chief works were: an epic Thebaid, an account of the expedition of the Seven against Thebes and the war of the Epigoni; and an elegiac poem Lyde, so called from the poet's mistress, for whose death he endeavoured to find consolation telling stories from mythology of heroic disasters (Plutarch, Consul, ad Apoll. 9; Athenaeus xiii. 597).
Antimachus was the founder of "learned" epic poetry, and the forerunner of the Alexandrian school, whose critics allotted him the next place to Homer. He also prepared a critical recension of the Homeric poems.
He is to be distinguished from Antimachus of Teos, a much earlier poet to whom the lost Cyclic epic Epigoni was apparently ascribed (though the attribution may result from confusion).
Bibliography
- Fragments, ed. Stoll (1845); Bergk
- Poetae Lyrici Graeci (1882); Kinkel
- Fragmenta epicorum Graecorum (1877). 20th century ed: V.J. Matthews
- Antimachus of Colophon, text and commentary (Leiden : Brill, 1996)
References
Attribution:
References
- Suda α 2681
- Cassius Dio, 69.4.6.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::