He repaid the bounty of the
king in the way most agreeable to him; he speaks of him as one

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 shou