(Καλλῖνος).
1. Of Ephesus, the carliest Greek elegiac poct, whence either he or Archilochus is usually regarded by the ancients as the inventor of elegiae poetry. As regards the time at which he lived, we have no definite statement, and the ancients themselves endeavoured to determine it from the historical allusions which they found in his elegies. It has been fixed by some at about B. C. 634, and by others at about B. C. 680, whereas some are inclined to place Callinus as far back as the ninth century before the Christian aera, and to make him more ancient even than Hesiod. The main authorities for determining his age are Strabo (xiv. p.647), Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom. i. p. 333), and Athenaecus (xii. P. 525). But the interpretation of these passages is involved in considerable difficulty, since the Cimmerian invasion of Asia Minor, to which they allude, is itself very uncertain; for history records three different inroads of the Cimmerians into Asia Minor. We cannot enter here into a refutation of the opinions of others, but confine ourseíves to our own views of the case. From Strabo it is evident that Callinus, in one of his poems, mentioned Magnesia on the Maeander as still existing, and at war with the Ephesians. Now, we know that Magnesia was destroyed by the Treres, a Cimmerian tribe, in B. C. 727, and consequently the poem referred to by Strabo must have been written previous to that year, perhaps about B. C. 730, or shortly before Archilochus, who in one of his earliest poems mentioned the destruction of Magnesia. Callinus himself, however, appears to have long survived that event; for there is a line of his (Fragm. 2, comp. Fragm. 8, ed. Bergk) which is usually referred to the destruction of Sardis by the Cimmerians, about B. C. 678. If this calculation is correct, Callinus, must have been in the bloom of life at the time of the war between Magnesia and Ephesus, in which he himself perhaps took a part.