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This Philetas was a critic, a commentator on Homer, and an elegiac poet whose love-songs were greatly admired by the Romans of the Augustan age. He is said to have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was himself born, as Theocritus records, in the isle of Cos.
It was well for poor Philetas of Cos that he ended his days before Chrysippus was born, though as it was he grew thin and died of the Liar, and his epitaph served as a solemn reminder to poets not to meddle with logic Philetas of Cos am I 'Twas the Liar who made me die And the bad nights caused thereby. Perhaps we owe him an apology for the translation.
Philetas, the remaining member of the Alexandrian Triad, seems to have been a more simple, genial, and graceful spirit than the other two, to whom he was accordingly esteemed inferior.
No well nurtured youth, on seeing the statue of Jupiter Olympius at Pisa, wishes that he were a Pheidias, or that he were a Polykleitus on seeing the statue of Juno at Argos, nor yet while he takes pleasure in poetry, does he wish that he were an Anakreon, a Philetas, or an Archilochus; for it does not necessarily follow that we esteem the workman because we are pleased with the work.
Oratory, Rhetoric, and History; Pericles; the Sophists; Lysias; Isocrates; Demosthenes; Thucydides; Xenophon. 7. Socrates and the Socratic Schools; Plato; Aristotle. Origin of the Alexandrian Literature. 2. The Alexandrian Poets; Philetas; Callimachus; Theocritus; Bion; Moschus. 3. The Prose Writers of Alexandria; Zenodotus; Aristophanes; Aristarchus; Eratosthenes; Euclid; Archimedes. 4.
Ptolemy Soter was an historian of no mean talent, and his son Philadelphus, as a pupil of the poet Philetas and the philosopher Strabo, was a man of great learning. Ptolemy III. was a mathematician, and Ptolemy Philopator, who had erected and dedicated a temple to Homer, was the writer of a tragedy.
Elegiac poetry had been cultivated by several Greek writers, particularly Callimachus, Mimnermus, and Philetas; but, so far as we can find, had, until the present age, been unknown to the Romans in their own tongue.
Mechanically speaking, he is a disciple in the same school as Ovid, but his success in the Ovidian distich is insignificant; for he has nothing of the epigrammatist in him, and his finest lines all seem to have come by accident, or at any rate without effort. His excessive reverence for the Alexandrines Callimachus and Philetas, has cramped his muse.
Nor did any generous and ingenuous young man, at the sight of the statue of Jupiter at Pisa, ever desire to be a Phidias, or, on seeing that of Juno at Argos, long to be a Polycletus, or feel induced by his pleasure in their poems to wish to be an Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus.
The ideas of that artificial age make it not improbable that Philetas professed to teach the art of poetry. A French critic and poet of our own time, M. Baudelaire, was willing to do as much 'in thirty lessons. Possibly Philetas may have imparted technical rules then in vogue, and the fashionable knack of introducing obscure mythological allusions.
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