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Euphorion of Chalcis, in Euboea, was an eminent grammarian and poet, and was born about 274/275 BC. He became the librarian of Antiochus the Great, 221 BC, and died in Syria, either at Apamea or Antioch. Euphorion wrote numerous works, both in poetry and prose, relating chiefly to mythological history. The following were poems in heroic verse:

1. Isiodos, probably an agricultural poem.

2. Mopsopia, so called from an old name of Attica, the legends of which country seem to have been the chief subject of the poem. From the variety of its contents, which Suidas calls symmigeis istoriai it was also termed Atakta a title frequently given to the writings of that period.

3. Chiliades, a poem written against certain persons who had defrauded Euphorion of money which he had intrusted to their care. It probably derived its title from each of its books consisting of a thousand verses.

Euphorion was an epigrammatist as well as an epic poet. He had a place in the Garland of Meleager, and the Greek Anthology contains two epigrams by him. His epigrams appear to have been mostly erotic, and were imitated by Propertius, Tibullus, and Gallus, as also by the Emperor Tiberius, with whom he was a favorite writer. He composed, also, many historical and grammatical works. Euphorion seems to have carried to excess some of the worst faults of the Alexandrean school. He was particularly distinguished by an obscurity, arising, according to Meineke, from his choice of the most out-of-the-way subjects, from the cumbrous learning with which he overloaded his poems, from the arbitrary changes which he made in the common legends, from his choice of obsolete words, and from his employment of ordinary words with a new meaning of his own. Only some fragments remain of his numerous works, collected by Meineke in his Analecta Alexandrina, Berlin, 1843.

For a another discovered fragment of about 30 lines see Berliner Klassikertexte, v. I (1907).

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