Antiphilus of

Byzantium Byzantium () or Byzantion ( grc, Βυζάντιον) was an ancient Greek city in classical antiquity that became known as Constantinople in late antiquity and Istanbul today. The Greek name ''Byzantion'' and its Latinization ''Byzantium'' cont ...

( grc, Ἀντίφιλος ὁ Βυζάντιος) was a writer of epigrams who lived about the time of the Roman emperor

Nero Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ( ; born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus; 15 December AD 37 – 9 June AD 68), was the fifth Roman emperor and final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, reigning from AD 54 un ...

, as appears from one of his epigrams in which he mentions the favor conferred by that emperor upon the island of

Rhodes Rhodes (; el, Ρόδος , translit=Ródos ) is the largest and the historical capital of the Dodecanese islands of Greece. Administratively, the island forms a separate municipality within the Rhodes regional unit, which is part of the So ...

.comp. Tacit. Annal. 12.58

Epigrams

The number of Antiphilus' epigrams still extant is upwards of forty, and most of them are superior in conception and style to the majority of these compositions. Byzantine scholar

Johann Jakob Reiske Johann Jakob Reiske (Neo-Latin: Johannes Jacobus Reiskius; December 25, 1716 – August 14, 1774) was a German scholar and physician. He was a pioneer in the fields of Arabic and Byzantine philology as well as Islamic numismatics. Biography Reisk ...

, in his notes on the ''

Greek Anthology The ''Greek Anthology'' ( la, Anthologia Graeca) is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of the material of the ''Greek Anthology'' comes from two manuscripts, the ''Pa ...

'' of

Constantine Cephalas Constantine most often refers to: * Constantine the Great, Roman emperor from 306 to 337, also known as Constantine I * Constantine, Algeria, a city in Algeria Constantine may also refer to: People * Constantine (name), a masculine given na ...

, was led, by the difference of style in some of the poems bearing the name of Antiphilus, to suppose that there were two or three poets of this name, and that their productions were all by mistake ascribed to the one poet of Byzantium. Other scholars think there is not sufficient ground for such an hypothesis.

Notes

External links

Antiphilus: translation of all surviving epigrams
at ''attalus.org''; adapted from W.R.Paton (1916–18) Ancient Greek writers 1st-century Greek people {{AncientGreece-writer-stub