Demaratus
3. A Spartan, who is said to have retorted upon the epigram on the subjugation of Greece usually ascribed to Hadrian (Anthol. ii. p. 285) by writing under it a line from a speech of Achilles to Patroclus. (Il. 16.70.) When inquiry was made as to who had "capped" the imperial epigram, he replied by a parody on Archilochus (Fragm. ii.): Εἰμὶ μὲν εὐώρηκος Ἐνυαλίου πολεμιδτής
, κ. τ. λ.
The story seems to rest on the authority of a note in the Vatican MS. This does not, however, give the name of Demaratus, which occurs in the version of the anecdote in the Anthology of Planudes. (See Jacobs, ad Anthol. l.c.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.