Hieronymos of Kardia (original) (raw)

We lack positive evidence that Didymus composed scholarly works specifically devoted to Greek historians. Even more, the very origins and characteristics of the Alexandrian interest in the historiographic genre, not to say in literary prose, represent open issues for the historian of Hellenistic scholarship. In this chapter, the rare and sparse pieces of information are gathered, in order to obtain a possibly systematic and organic overview on the very defective puzzle of the Didymean approach in this field. In the first part, clues from testimonies and fragments directly concerning historians (Herodotus, Thucydides) and antiquarian subjects (Solon’s axones) are taken into special consideration. The second part deals with the use and abuse of history and historical sources detectable in fragments from Didymean works which were devoted to fields and genres other than historiography. As a result, the testimony of the Pindar scholia and of the writing On Demosthenes attested to by P.Berol. inv. 9780 recto (second century AD) proves to be especially decisive for a reassessment of Didymus’ approach to historiography and history.

This article presents a new reading in Phld., Acad. Hist., PHerc. 1021 col. 2, 7 (from the biography of Plato), where the multispectral photographs show that the correct verb is παρέγραψ̣εν «he added», not παρέ{ι}παιϲεν «he joked». The verb παραγράφω is also found in col. Y, 1, where it should be read with Gaiser as παρέγρα[ψε], i.e. with the name of Philodemus’ source as its subject. This source in question is probably the Peripatetic Dicaearchus of Messana, who is also the source of col. 1 and the beginning of col. 2.

Tyranny as summum bonum n Xenophon's Hiero 1 the discussion between a wise poet (Simonides) and an ex private person, an ex ordinary citizen, who managed to become a tyrant 2 , takes place. The poet embodies the empirical wisdom of things, insofar as its knowledge and its grounds charm and please both the ignorant and the wise people, the rulers and the subjects, the free and the slaves, the men and the women gaining the universal recognition and appreciation both in his homeland and in any other city, to use a phrase of Democritus homeland of 1