His rule was eulogized by poets like Simonides of Ceos, Bacchylides and Pindar, who visited his court.

Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of nine lyric poets which included his uncle Simonides.

Simonides composed verses almost entirely for public performances and inscriptions, unlike previous lyric poets such as Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed more intimate verses to entertain friends —" With Simonides the age of individualism in lyric poetry has passed.

Like other lyric poets in late Archaic Greece, Simonides made notable use of compound adjectives and decorative epithets yet he is also remarkable for his restraint and balance.

" It contained poems by the compiler himself and forty-six other poets, including Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Simonides.

The form soon spread to other Greek city-states, and dithyrambs were composed by the poets Simonides and Bacchylides, as well as Pindar ( the only one whose works have survived in anything like their original form ).

Astute politicians in Athens often exploited popular feelings against medism as a means to their own advancement, which once led to a feud between the poets Timocreon of Rhodes and Simonides of Ceos for and against Themistocles.

In the classical period Kea ( Ceos ) was the home of Simonides and of his nephew Bacchylides, both ancient Greek lyric poets, and the Sophist Prodicus, and the physician Erasistratus.

The chief gnomic poets were Theognis, Solon, Phocylides, Simonides of Amorgos, Demodocus, Xenophanes and Euenus.

This approach to analyzing and classifying metres originates from ancient Greek tragedians and poets such as Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, and Sappho.

This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens.

Odes were first developed by poets writing in ancient Greek, such as Pindar, and Latin, such as Horace.

It appears likely that Sappho's poetry was largely lost through action of the same indiscriminate forces of cultural change that have left us such paltry remains of all nine canonical Greek lyric poets, of whom only Pindar ( whose works alone survive in a manuscript tradition ) and Bacchylides ( our knowledge of whom we owe to a single dramatic papyrus find ) have fared much better.

The two major lyrical poets were Sappho and Pindar.

They were arranged in nine ' books ', exemplifying the following genres ( Bacchylides in fact composed in a greater variety of genres than any of the other lyric poets who comprise the canonic nine, with the exception of Pindar, who composed in ten ):

Bacchylides had become, almost overnight, among the best represented poets of the canonic nine, with about half as many extant verses as Pindar, adding about a hundred new words to Greek lexicons.

This difference in moral posturing was typical of the two poets, with Bacchylides adopting a quieter, simpler and less forceful manner than Pindar.

In fact, in the same year that both poets celebrated Pherenicus's Olympic victory, Pindar also composed an ode for Theron of Acragas ( Olympian 2 ), in which he likens himself to an eagle confronted with chattering ravens – possibly a reference to Bacchylides and his uncle.

Significant variations on the legend of Oedipus are mentioned in fragments by several ancient Greek poets including Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus and Euripides.

The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria included him in the canonical list of nine lyric poets, along with Bacchylides ( his nephew ) and Pindar ( reputedly a bitter rival ).

He is known to have written on Greek lyric poets, notably Bacchylides and Pindar, and on drama ; the better part of the Pindar and Sophocles scholia originated with Didymus.

Quintilian wrote, " Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable.

Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical forms to a triad, including strophe, antistrophe ( metrically identical to the strophe ) and epode ( whose form does not match that of the strophe ).

Amongst the books he collected are early editions in Greek and Latin of the poets and playwrights Aeschylus, Aristotle, Homer, Livy, Ovid, Pindar, Sophocles and Virgil.

* The so-called ' Philosophers circle ', a monument to important Greek thinkers and poets, consisting of statues of Hesiod, Homer, Pindar, Plato, and others ( Ptolemaeic )

Early Greek lyric poetry, as represented by poets such as Sappho and Pindar, was responsible for defining the lyric genre as it is understood today in western literature.

Among the models favoured by the Pléiade were Pindar, Anacreon, Alcaeus and other poets of the Greek Anthology, as well as Virgil, Horace and Ovid.

He modeled his court after Athens and was a patron of the poets Pindar and Bacchylides, both of whom dedicated poems to Alexander.

Soon however, the impact of Petrarch ( the sonnet cycle addressed to an idealised lover, the use of amorous pardoxes ), Italian poets in the French court ( like Luigi Alamanni ), Italian Neo-platonism and humanism, and the rediscovery of certain Greek poets ( such as Pindar and Anacreon ) would profoundly modify the French tradition.

A tendency to imitate other poets is not peculiar to Bacchylides, however – it was common in ancient poetry, as for example in a poem by Alcaeus ( fragment 347 ), which virtually quotes a passage from Hesiod ( Works and Days 582 – 8 ).

Pindar's Olympian Ode 1 and Bacchylides's Ode 5 differ also in their description of the race – while Pindar's reference to Pherenicus is slight and general ("... speeding / by Alpheus ' bank, / His lovely limbs ungoaded on the course ...": Olympian I. 20 – 21 ), Bacchylides describes the running of the winner more vividly and in rather more detail – a difference that is characteristic of the two poets:

According to most ancient sources, Atreus was the father of Plisthenes, but in some lyric poets ( Ibycus, Bacchylides ) Plisthenides ( son of Plisthenes ) is used as an alternative name for Atreus himself.

The lines were much quoted in antiquity, as for example by Stobaeus and Sextus Empiricus, and it was imitated by later poets, such as Sophocles and Bacchylides.

The poets Alcaeus of Mytilene, Sappho, Anacreon, and Bacchylides wrote of love, war, and death in lyrics of great feeling and beauty.

" His career coincided with the ascendency of dramatic styles of poetry, as embodied in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, and he is in fact one of the last poets of major significance within the more ancient tradition of purely lyric poetry.

His vocabulary shows the influence of Aeschylus with several words being common to both poets and found nowhere else.

The epic Danais was written by one of the cyclic poets ; the name of the author and the narration of these events does not survive, but the Danaid tetralogy of Aeschylus undoubtedly draws upon its material.

Ancient dramatists and poets recounted the story including Sophocles in a lost tragedy called Tereus or in a set of plays by Philocles, the nephew of the great playwright Aeschylus.

He also wrote a work on the metres of the Greek dramatic poets, and compiled special lexicons to Aeschylus and Sophocles.

13-14 ), Aeschylus left Athens for Sicily because Athenians valued him less than some other poets ( Vit.

Milton continues, " Of the style and uniformity, and that commonly called the plot, whether intricate or explicit ... they only will best judge who are not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three tragic poets unequaled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavor to write tragedy ".