Active in the early 3rd Century BCE, Herodas (or ‘Herondas’, as his name is sometimes given) is known foremost as the author of the
Mimiambs, a corpus of poems so titled because of their juxtaposition of subject-matter drawn from mime with the choliambic metre employed by the sixth-century BCE poet Hipponax. Herodas appears to have been the first author to compose such mimic-iambic (or ‘mimiambic’) poems: his work is particularly notable for this fusion of dramatic and non-dramatic genres.
Little of biographical certainty is known about the poet. Internal references attest that several of the Mimiambs must have been composed in the period 280-265 BCE, suggesting that Herodas was contemporaneous with the most famous Hellenistic poets, Callimachus and Theocritus, but we possess no
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Citation: Chesterton, Barnaby. "Herodas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 July 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13934, accessed 25 April 2024.]
