c. 257–180 BCE · head of the Library · editor · lexicographer
Aristophanes of Byzantium
Ἀριστοφάνης ὁ Βυζάντιος
In Alexandria: c. 220–180 BCE
Took charge of the Library at sixty-two. He edited Homer, Hesiod, the lyric poets and the dramatists, arranged Pindar and Plato, wrote supplements to Callimachus's Pinakes and a great Lexeis, and is credited with the Greek accent marks. The Suda says he was imprisoned on suspicion of planning to flee to the rival court at Pergamon.
Their life and work
The Suda says he heard Callimachus as a young man and Zenodotus as a boy, which would have brought him to Alexandria young; on the usual dates, though, he can hardly have heard Zenodotus. As an editor he went beyond the obelos with new critical signs, divided the lyric poets' lines into their metrical units, and wrote the short introductions to plays (hypotheses) whose descendants still head the dramas in manuscripts. His Lexeis collected words by kind and by period, and parts survive in later lexica.
The story that he was imprisoned on a charge of planning to flee to Eumenes II of Pergamon rests on one late notice. The Suda gives it under the comic poet Aristonymus (α 3936), where Aristophanes' own name has dropped out of the text. It says as much about the rivalry of the two courts as about him. Known: probable
Our device: Their emblem is the accent marks. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Aristophanes of Byzantium, Lexeis (Words), and editions of Homer, Hesiod, the lyric poets and drama · c. 220–180 BCE · Survives in fragments
- Aristophanes of Byzantium, On the Pinakes of Callimachus · c. 200–180 BCE · Survives in fragments
Moments
- c. 200–180 BCE · Aristophanes of Byzantium; the rivalry with Pergamon Known: attested
In the show
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Sources (6)
- Suda Aristophanes, α 3933 (opens in a new tab)
- Suda Aristonymos, α 3936 (on Aristophanes of Byzantium) (opens in a new tab)
- P.Oxy. X 1241 (ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri X, London 1914) col. ii (opens in a new tab)
- Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 9.408f
- R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)
- E. Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)