Hedylus son of Melicertus, a native of Samos or Athens, was an epigrammatic poet. His epigrams were included in the Garland of Meleager

Meleager of Gadara

Meleager of Gadara was a poet and collector of epigrams. He wrote some satirical prose, now lost, and he wrote some sensual poetry, of which, 134 epigrams survive...

 (Prooem. 45.) Eleven of them are in the Greek Anthology

Greek Anthology

The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature...

, but the genuineness of two of these (ix. and x.) is very doubtful. Most of his epigrams are in praise of wine, and all of them are jocular. In some he describes the dedicatory offerings in the temple of Arsinoe

Arsinoe II of Egypt

For other uses see, ArsinoeArsinoë II was a Ptolemaic Greek Princess of Ancient Egypt and through marriage was of Queen Thrace, Asia Minor and Macedonia as wife of King Lysimachus and later co-ruler of Egypt with her brother-husband Ptolemy II Philadelphus For other uses see, ArsinoeArsinoë II...

, among which he mentions the hydraulic organ

Water organ

The water organ or hydraulic organ is a type of pipe organ blown by air, where the power source pushing the air is derived by water from a natural source or by a manual pump...

 of Ctesibius

Ctesibius

Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius was a Greek inventor and mathematician in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps...

. Besides this indication of his time, we know that he was the contemporary and rival of Callimachus

Callimachus

Callimachus was a native of the Greek colony of Cyrene, Libya. He was a noted poet, critic and scholar at the Library of Alexandria and enjoyed the patronage of the Egyptian–Greek Pharaohs Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes...

 and friend of Poseidippus of Pella. He lived therefore in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus

Ptolemy II Philadelphus

Ptolemy II Philadelphus was the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE. He was the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom Ptolemy I Soter and Berenice, and was educated by Philitas of Cos...

, and is to be classed with the Alexandrian school

Alexandrian school

The Alexandrian school is a collective designation for certain tendencies in literature, philosophy, medicine, and the sciences that developed in the Hellenistic cultural center of Alexandria, Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman periods....

 of poets. According to Athenaeus, he killed himself for love of a certain Glaucus.

Hedyle was an Iambic

Iambus (genre)

Iambus was a genre of ancient Greek poetry that included but was not restricted to the iambic meter and whose origins modern scholars have traced to the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. The genre featured insulting and obscene language...

 poetess, daughter of Moschine the Athenian, and mother of Hedylus. She wrote a poem entitled Scylla

Scylla

In Greek mythology, Scylla was a monster that lived on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite its counterpart Charybdis. The two sides of the strait were within an arrow's range of each other—so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis would pass too close to Scylla and vice...

;, from which a passage is cited by 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...

(vii. p. 2979 b.)