Antimachus, of Colophon or Claros

Claros

Claros is a prophecy center of Colophon, one of the twelve Ionic cities. Claros is built between two cities; it is 13 kilometers south of Colophon and two kilometers north of Notion. The Temple of Apollo here was a very important center of prophecy as in Delphi and Didyma. The oldest information...

, Greek

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and grammar

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

ian, flourished about 400 BC.

Scarcely anything is known of his life. His poetical efforts were not generally appreciated, although he received encouragement from his younger contemporary Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 (Plutarch

Plutarch

Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...

, Lysander, 18).

His chief works were: an epic Thebais, an account of the expedition of the Seven against Thebes

Seven Against Thebes

The Seven against Thebes is the third play in an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BC. The trilogy is sometimes referred to as the Oedipodea. It concerns the battle between an Argive army led by Polynices and the army of Thebes led by Eteocles and his supporters. The trilogy won...

 and the war of the Epigoni

Epigoni

In Greek mythology, Epigoni are the sons of the Argive heroes who had fought and been killed in the first Theban war, the subject of the Greek Thebaid, in which Polynices and six allies attacked Thebes because Polynices' brother, Eteocles, refused to give up the throne as promised...

; and an elegiac poem Lyde, so called from the poet's mistress, for whose death he endeavoured to find consolation telling stories from mythology

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 of heroic disasters (Plutarch, Consul, ad Apoll. 9; Athenaeus

Athenaeus

Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...

 xiii. 597).

Antimachus was the founder of "learned" epic poetry

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

, and the forerunner of the Alexandrian school, whose critics allotted him the next place to Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

. He also prepared a critical recension of the Homeric poems.

He is to be distinguished from Antimachus of Teos

Antimachus of Teos

Antimachus of Teos was an early Greek epic poet. According to Plutarch, he observed an eclipse of the sun in 753 BC, the same year in which Rome was founded. The epic Epigoni, a sequel to the legend of Thebes, was apparently sometimes ascribed to Antimachus of Teos. However, confusion is possible...

, a much earlier poet to whom the lost Cyclic epic Epigoni

Epigoni

In Greek mythology, Epigoni are the sons of the Argive heroes who had fought and been killed in the first Theban war, the subject of the Greek Thebaid, in which Polynices and six allies attacked Thebes because Polynices' brother, Eteocles, refused to give up the throne as promised...

was apparently ascribed (though the attribution may result from confusion).

Fragments, ed. Stoll (1845); Bergk

Theodor Bergk

Theodor Bergk was a German philologist, an authority on classical Greek poetry.-Biography:He was born in Leipzig. After studying at the University of Leipzig, where he profited by the instruction of G. Hermann, he was appointed in 1835 to the lectureship in Latin at the orphan school at Halle...

, Poetae Lyrici Graeci (1882); Kinkel, Fragmenta epicorum Graecorum (1877).

20th century ed: V.J. Matthews, Antimachus of Colophon, text and commentary (Leiden : Brill, 1996) ISBN 90-04-10468-2