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, pronounced by Cicero to be by far the greatest of all the Peripatetic philosophers he ever heard, was of Mitylene, and taught philosophy there. He went afterwards to Athens, where he followed the sa'riie profession; and amongst his disciples had Cicero’s son. Cicero had an high esteem for him, and prevailed upon Ca;sar to grant him the freedom of Rome; and afterwards engaged the Areopagus to make a decree, by which Cratippns was desired to continue at Athens, as an ornament to the city, and to read lectures to the youth there. These lectures were probably interesting, as Brutus went to hear them when he was preparing for the war against Marc Antony. Cratippus had the art of making himself agreeable to his disciples, and of pleasing them by his conversation, which was free from austerity. This appears from a letter of young Cicero, where there is the following passage: “Know then that Cratippus loves me not as a disciple, but as a son; and as I am very well pleased to hear his lectures, so I am extremely delighted with the sweetness of his temper. I prevail with him whenever I can to sup with me; and this being now customary, he comes often to us unawares, when we are at supper; and, laying aside his philosophic gravity, he is so kind as to laugh and joke with us.” There are other proofs beside this, that Cratippus was a man who understood life as well as philosophy. After the battle of Pharsalia, Pompey went to Mitylene, where the inhabitants paid their respects to him, and Cratippus among them. Pompey complained, as Plutarch tells us, and disputed a little upon divine providence; but Cratippus gently yielded to him, giving him hopes of better times, lest he should have tired and vexed him with answering and refuting his objections. Cratippus wrote some pieces about divination; and is supposed to he the same with him whom Tertullian, in his book “De Anima,” has ranked among the writers upon dreams.

, of Mitylene, was an ancient Greek historian, born in the year A. C. 496, twelve years before the birth of Herodotus. He wrote a history of “the earliest Kings of various Nations, and the Founders of Cities;” which is mentioned by several ancient authors, but is not extant. He lived to the age of eighty-five. There was another Hellanicus of much later times, who was a Milesian, but very little is known of either.

, a native of Mitylene, who flourished in the first century of the Christian aera, was a disciple of Timocrates, afterwards became a teacher of philosophy in his native city, and obtained a great number of scholars. He was author of many books of philosophy, and Photius says he had read sixteen orations written by him. Two of these were first published by Aldus, in his edition of the ancient orators, in 1513; afterwards by Henry Stephens, with the orations of JEschines, Lysias, and others; and in 1619, by Gruter. Lesbonax is said. to have been the author of a treatise “De Figuris Grammaticis,” printed with Ammonius, Leyden, 1739, 4to. He left a son named Potamon, an eminent rhetorician at Rome, in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. So sensible were the magistrates of Mitylene of his merits, and of the utility of his labours, that they caused a medal to be struck in his honour: one of which was discovered in the south of France about 1740, and an engraving of it, with a learned dissertation, published in the year 174-4, by M. Gary, of the Academy of Marseilles, but there seems some reason to think that Lesbonax the philosopher, and Lesbonax the grammarian, were different persons.

, an eminent Greek poetess, was a native of Mitylene in the island of Lesbos. Who was her father is uncertain, there being no less than eight persons who have contended for that honour; but it is universally acknowledged that Cleis was her mother. She flourished, according to Suidas, in the 42d olympiad according to Eusebius, in the 44th olympiad, about 600 years B. C. Her love-affairs form the chief materials of her biography. Barnes has endeavoured to prove, from the testimonies of Chameleon and Hermesianax, that Anacreon was one of her lovers; but from the chronology of both, this has been generally considered as a poetical fiction. She married one Cercolas, a man of great wealth and power in the island of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis. He leaving her a widow very young, she renounced all thoughts of marriage, but not of love*; nor was she very scrupulous in her intrigues. Her chief favourite appears to have been the accomplished Phaon, a young man of Lesbos; who is said to have been a kind of ferry-man, and thence fabled to have carried Venus over the stream in his boat, and to have received from her, as a reward, the favour of becoming the most beautiful man in the world. Sappho fell desperately in love with him, and went into Sicily in pursuit of him, he having withdrawn himself thither on purpose to avoid her. It was in that island, and on this occasion, that she composed her hymn to Venus. This, however, was ineffectual. Phaon was still obdurate, and Sappho was so transported with the violence of her passion, that she had recourse to a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the top of which was a temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for de­* “Sappho formed an academy of culpate her And might she not have females who excelled*!!) music; and it written the celebrated verses” Blest was doubtless this academy which drew as the immortal gods is he,“&c. for on her the hatred of the women of Mi- another Many of our poetical ladies tylene, who accused her of being too whom we could name, have written fond of her own sex; but will not her excellent impassioned songs of cornlove for Phaon, and the fatal termioa- plaint in a male character.” Dr. Bur* tioa of her existence, sufficiently ex- ney in Hist, of Music. spairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea, it being an established opinion, that all those who were taken up alive, would immediately be cured of their former passion. Sappho perished in the experiment. The original of this unaccountable humour is not known. Her genius, however, made her be lamented. The Romans erected a noble statue of porphyry to her memory; and the Mitylenians, to express their sense of her worth, paid her sovereign honours after her death, and coined money with her head for the impress. She was likewise honoured with the title of the tenth Muse.

, a Grecian poet, wit, and somewhat of a philosopher, uas born in the 35th olympiad, or 558 B.C. and is said to have died in his ninetieth year. He was a native of Ceos, one of the Cyclades, in the neighbourhood of Attica, and became the preceptor of Pindar. Both Plato and Cicero speak of him, not only as a good poet ana musician, but also as a man of wisdom and virtue. His lengthened life gave him an opportunity of knowing a great number of the first characters in antiquity, with whom he was in some measure connected. Fabncius informs us that he was contemporary, and in friendship with Pittacus of Mitylene, Hipparchus, tyrant of Athens, Pausanias, king of Sparta; Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse also with Themistocles, and with Alcuudes, king of Thessaly. X uophon, in his dialogue upon tyranny, makes him one of the interlocutors. His famous answer to Hiero. as recorded by Cicero, has been often quoted as a proof, not only of his wisdom, hut his piety. When Hiero asked of him a definition of God, he requested a day to consider of it; when this was expired, he doubled the time, and thus he did repeatedly, till the monarch desired to know his reason for this proceeding “It is,” said he,“because the longer I reflect on the question, the more difficult it appears to be.”