The New International Encyclopædia/Alexander Ætolus

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1653924The New International Encyclopædia — Alexander Ætolus

ALEXANDER ÆTO′LUS (Gk. Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Αἰτωλός, Alexandros ho Aitōlos) A Greek poet of the third century B.C. He was born in Ætolia, but lived mainly at Alexandria, where he was considered one of the seven poets of the Alexandrian tragic pleiad. He also wrote short epics, elegies, and epigrams, of which fragments have been preserved. These fragments, published in Bergk's Poetæ Lyrici, attest the cultivated taste of the writer, and prove him one of the immediate predecessors of Callimachus. See Couat's La poésie alexandrine (1882).