Perhaps Claudian is a little overparted with the “mind of Virgil and the Muse of Homer.” But all decadences are given to exaggeration of this kind; and the reviews of the closing years of the nineteenth century in England will furnish much more extravagant instances of comparison. Footnote 87: I use the ed. of Jacobs, Leipsic, 1794, 10 vols. (nominally 3 vols. of Commentary, in 7 parts, 4 vols. of text, and 1 of Indices). Footnote 88: Ep. Adesp., 454, ed. cit., Text, iv. 214. Footnote 89: Ibid., Ep. 468, p. 218. Footnote 90: Ibid., p. 221 _sq._ Footnote 91: _V._ Bergk, _Poet. Lyr._, iii. 143. The work of known, or at least named, individuals is less noteworthy in bulk, and not much more so in kind and degree. The right happy industry of Meleager appears to have helped in preserving for us no small proportion of the minor work of the great men of old. But his own quintessenced and not seldom charming pen is devoted to subjects always less solemn, and sometimes very much less worthy, than literature. These elders themselves (as indeed we should expect) meddle with literature but rarely; while their successors, the early Alexandrians, are less copious than we might have expected. Simmias of Thebes (perhaps not the same who outraged[92] the feelings of neo-classic critics, from Addison downwards, two thousand years later, by composing verse-eggs and -hatchets) has left us a couple of elegant and regular, though rather vague and slight, epigrams on Sophocles;[93] Philiscus of Miletus, who was at least old enough to be a pupil of Isocrates, a pompous eulogium of Lysias;[94] while no less a person than Thucydides has the credit of one[95] on the Third Tragedian, which if extravagant in tone is neat in expression. Of the compliments[96] to Aristophanes and Sappho, which are similarly attributed to Plato, the former, with its consecration of the soul of the great comic poet as the _temenos_ of the Graces, is far the better. But the nearest approach to literature among the verses attributed to Plato’s mightiest rival is a quaint bundle (no small one)[97] of epitaphs on the Homeric heroes. Of course these attributions are in all cases very doubtful, and possibly not in a single one correct; but the fact of them for literary history remains the same. Footnote 92: He is generally called Simmias the _Rhodian_. But some speak of the two as identical. Footnote 93: Ibid., i. 100. Footnote 94: Ibid., i. 101. Footnote 95: Ibid., i. 102. Footnote 96: Ibid., i. 102, 103. Footnote 97: Ibid., i. 111-117. There are 48 of them. Aristotle had versatility enough to do them, but they do not _read_ like him.