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1. One of the great lyric poets of Greece, was a native of Iulis in the island of Ceos, and
the nephew as well as fellow-townsman of Simonides. (s. v.
s. v.
Böckh, Schol. Pind. p. 8), or Meidylus (Etym. M. p. 582. 20): his
paternal grandfather was the athlete Bacchylides. We know nothing of his life, except that he
lived at the court of Hiero in Syracuse, ad Ol. 2.154, 155, ad Pyth.
2.131, 161, 166, 167, 171) that Bacchylides and Pindar were jealous of and opposed to one
another; but whether this was the fact, or the story is to be attributed to the love of
scandal which distinguishes the later Greek grammarians, it is impossible to determine.
The poems of Bacchylides were numerous and of various kinds. They consisted of Epinici (songs, like Pindar's, in honour of the victors in the public games), Hymns, Paeans, Dithyrambs, Prosodia, Hyporchemata, Erotica, and Paroenia or Drinking-songs : but all of these have perished with the exception of a few fragments.
It is, therefore, difficult to form an independent opinion of their poetical value; but as far as we can judge from what has come down to us, Bacchylides was distinguished, like Simonides, for the elegance and finish of his compositions. He was inferior to Pindar in strength and energy, as Longinus remarks (100.33); and in his lamentations over the inexorable character of fate, and the necessity of submitting to death, he reminds one of the Ionic elegy. Like his predecessors in Lyric poetry, he wrote in the Doric dialect, but frequently introduces Attic forms, so that the dialect of his poems very much resembles that of the choruses in the Attic tragedies.
Besides his lyrical poems there are two epigrams in the Greek Anthology attributed to Bacchylides, one in the Doric and the other in the Ionic dialect, and there seems no reason to doubt their genuineness.
The fragments of Bacchylides have been published by