From our slight acquaintance with Bion's life, we are left in doubt whether he accompanied his friend Moschus to the court of Alexandria; but it is probable that he did. In his beautiful lamentation for the death of Adonis, we have an imitation of the melancholy chant of the Egyptians, named _maneros_, which they sang through the streets in the procession on the feast of Isis, when the crowd joined in the chorus, "Ah, hapless Isis, Osiris is no more." The tale has been a good deal changed by the Sicilian muse of Bion, but in the boar which killed Adonis, we have the wicked Typhon as carved on the monuments; we have also the wound in the thigh, and the consolations of the priests, who every year ended their mournful song with advising the goddess to reserve her sorrow for another year, when on the return of the festival the same lament would be again celebrated. The whole poem has a depth and earnestness of feeling which is truly Egyptian, but which was very little known in Alexandria. To the Alexandrian grammarians, and more particularly to Aristophanes, Aristarchus, and their pupil, Ammonius, we are indebted for our present copies of Homer. These critics acted like modern editors, each publishing an edition, or rather writing out a copy, which was then re-copied in the museum as often as called for by the demands of the purchasers of books. Aristophanes left perhaps only one such copy or edition, while Aristarchus, in his efforts to correct the text of the great epic poet, made several such copies. These were in the hands of the later scholiasts, who appealed to them as their authority, and ventured to make no further alterations; we therefore now read the Iliad and Odyssey nearly as left by these Alexandrian critics. They no doubt took some liberties in altering the spelling and smoothing the lines; and, though we should value most highly a copy in the rougher form in which it came into their hands, yet, on the whole, we must be great gainers by their labours. They divided the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books each, and corrected the faulty metres; but one of their chief tasks was to set aside, or put a mark against, those more modern lines which had crept into the ancient poems. It had been usual to call every old verse Homer's or Homeric, and these it was the business of the critic to mark as not genuine. Aristarchus was jocosely said to have called every line spurious which he did not like; but everything that we can learn of him leads us to believe that he executed his task with judgment. From these men sprang the school of Alexandrian grammarians, who for several centuries continued their minute and often unprofitable studies in verbal criticism. [Illustration: 234.jpg THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER]