ld form his taste; and his
works are now lost. He was small and thin in person, and it was jokingly
said of him that he wore leaden soles to his shoes lest he should be
blown away by the wind. But in losing his poetry, we have perhaps lost
the point of the joke. While these three, Theocritus, Callimachus, and
Philastas, were writing in Alexandria, the museum was certainly the
chief seat of the muses. Athens itself could boast of no such poet
but Menander, with whom Attic literature ended; and him Philadelphus
earnestly invited to his court. He sent a ship to Greece on purpose to
fetch him; but neither this honour nor the promised salary could make
him quit his mother country and the schools of Athens; and, in the time
of Pausanias, his tomb was still visited by the scholar on the road to
the Pmeus, and his statue was still seen in the theatre.

Strato, the pupil of Theophrastus, though chiefly known for his writings
on physics, was also a writer on many branches of knowledge. He was
one of the men of learning who had taken part in the education of
Phil-adelphus; and the king showed his gratitude to his teacher by
making him a present of eighty talents, or sixty thousand dollars. He
was for eighteen years at the head of one of the Alexandrian schools.

Timocharis, the astronomer, made some of his observations at Alexandria
in the last reign, and continued them through half of this reign. He
began a catalogue of the fixed stars, with their latitudes and their
longitudes measured from the equinoctial point; by the help of which
Hipparchus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, made the great
discovery that the equinoctial point had moved. He has left an
observation of the place of Venus, on the seventeenth day of the month
of Mesore, in the thirteenth year of this reign, which by the modern
tables of the planets is known to have been on the eighth day
of October, B.C. 272; from which we learn that the first year of
Philadelphus ended in October, B.C. 284, and the first year of Ptolemy
Soter ended in October, B.C. 322; thus fixing the chronology of
these reigns with a certainty which leaves nothing to be wished for.
Aris-tillus also made some observations of the same kind at Alexandria.
Few of them have been handed down to us, but they were made use of by
Hipparchus.

Aristarchus, the astronomer of Samos, most likely came to Alexandria
in the last reign, as some of his observations were made in the very
beginning of th