c. 63 BCE–10 CE · grammarian · compiler
Didymus Chalcenterus
Δίδυμος Χαλκέντερος
In Alexandria: c. 63 BCE–10 CE
"Brazen-guts", who wrote 3,500 books by Athenaeus's count and 4,000 by Seneca's. Demetrius of Troezen called him the book-forgetter, and Quintilian tells that when he dismissed a story as idle, a book of his own containing it was produced. His compilations preserved the Alexandrian critics for the scholia; such work, it is usually argued, needed a great library still in being after Caesar's fire.
Their life and work
The Suda places him in the time of Antonius and Cicero, 'and until Augustus' (δ 872). He worked in Alexandria under the last Ptolemies and into the reign of Augustus, and what he did was gather: commentaries on Homer, the lyric poets, the dramatists and the orators, built from the work of Aristarchus and the critics before him. A papyrus of his commentary on Demosthenes, published in 1904 and now in Berlin, shows the method at first hand: long quotations from historians lost to us, set beside the speeches.
That he needed a great library is a common modern inference, and a strong one: such compilation is impossible without the critics' own books to hand, and it puts a working collection in the city after 48 BCE. Known: probable
Our device: Their emblem is a heap of rolls. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Didymus 'Chalcenterus' (Bronze-guts), Commentaries · c. 50 BCE - 10 CE · Survives in fragments
Moments
- c. 25–20 BCE · Strabo describes the Mouseion and names no library Known: attested
In the show
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Sources (7)
- Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.139c
- Seneca, Letters 88.37
- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.8.20
- M. Hatzimichali, "Ashes to Ashes? The Library of Alexandria after 48 BC", in J. König, K. Oikonomopoulou and G. Woolf (eds.), Ancient Libraries (Cambridge, 2013) 167–182
- Suda δ 872
- Didymus, On Demosthenes P.Berol. 9780
- R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)