Bacchylides

(c. 510 BC - c. 452 BC)

A nephew of the poet Simonides and a contemporary of Pindar, Baccylides was a Greek lyric poet best known for composing epincian poems honoring the victors of Hellenic games. Third century bc scholars at the library at Alexandria listed him among the canonical nine lyric poets, and they produced an edition of his poems. The poems remained popular until at least the fourth century, when the emperor Julian was said by the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus to have enjoyed them. His works were lost—except in quotation—until the discovery of papyrus texts that reached the British Museum in 1896 and were published in 1897.