PHILETAS of Cos, a contemporary of Alexander, and tutor to the children of Ptolemy I. He was chiefly distinguished as an elegiac poet. Theocritus (vii. 39) names him along with Asclepiades as his master in style, and Propertius repeatedly couples him in the same way with Callimachus. If one may judge from the few fragments extant, chiefly in Stobaeus, his poetry was simpler and more dignified than that of the Alexandrian school, of which he may be called the founder. He was also one of the earliest commentators on Homer, the celebrated Zenodotus being his pupil. SIMMIAS of Rhodes, who fl. rather before 300 B.C., and was the author of four books of miscellaneous poems including an epic history of Apollo. "The tall wild-pear of Simmias" is in the /Garland/ of Meleager, l. 30. Two of the seven epigrams under his name in the Palatine Anthology are headed "Simmias of Thebes." This would be the disciple of Socrates, best known as one of the interlocutors in the /Phaedo/. But these epigrams are undoubtedly of the Alexandrian type, and quite in the same style as the rest; and the title is probably a mistake. Simmias is also the reputed author of several of the {griphoi} or pattern-poems at the end of the Palatine MS. ASCLEPIADES, son of Sicelides of Samos, who flourished B.C. 290, one of the most brilliant authors of the period. Theocritus (l.c. supra) couples him with Philetas as a model of excellence in poetry. This passage fixes his date towards the end of the reign of Ptolemy I., to whose wife Berenice and daughter Cleopatra there are references in his epigrams. There are forty-three epigrams of his in the Anthology; nearly all of them amatory, with much wider range and finer feeling that most of the erotic epigrams, and all with the firm clear touch of the best period. There are also one or two fine epitaphs. The reference in the /Garland/ of Meleager, l. 46, to "the wind-flower of the son of Sicelides" is another of Meleager's exquisite criticisms.