His poetical efforts were not generally appreciated, although he received encouragement from his younger contemporary
Plato (
Plutarch,
Lysander, 18). The emperor
Hadrian, however, would later consider him superior to
Homer. His chief works were: an epic
Thebaid, an account of the expedition of the
Seven against Thebes and the war of the
Epigoni; and an elegiac poem
Lyde, so called from the poet's mistress, for whose death he endeavoured to find consolation telling stories from
mythology of heroic disasters (Plutarch,
Consul, ad Apoll. 9;
Athenaeus xiii. 597). Antimachus was the founder of "learned"
epic poetry, and the forerunner of the
Alexandrian school, whose critics allotted him the next place to
Homer. He also prepared a critical recension of the Homeric poems. He is to be distinguished from
Antimachus of Teos, a much earlier poet to whom the lost
Cyclic epic Epigoni was apparently ascribed (though the attribution may result from confusion). == Bibliography ==