Location information

Agias, epic poet, 8th cent. B.C.

Agias. A Greek poet, whose name was formerly written Augias, through a mistake of the first editor of the Excerpta of Proclus. It has been corrected by Thiersch in the Acta Philol. Monac. ii. p. 584, from the Codex Monacensis, which in one passage has Agias, and in another Hagias. The name itself does not occur in early Greek writers, unless it be supposed that Egias or Hegias in Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom. vi. p. 622), and Pausanias ( i. 2.1), are only different forms of the same name. He was a native of Troezen, and the time at which he wrote appears to have been about the year B. C. 740. His poem was celebrated in antiquity, under the name of Nostoi, i. e. the history of the return of the Achaean heroes from Troy, and consisted of five books. The poem began with the cause of the misfortunes which befel the Achaeans on their way home and after their arrival, that is, with the outrage committed upon Cassandra and the Palladium; and the whole poem filled up the space which was left between the work of the poet Arctinus and the Odyssey. The ancients themselves appear to have been uncertain about the author of this poem, for they refer to it simply by the name of Nostoi, and when they mention the author, they only call him ho tous Nostous grapsas (Athen. vii. p. 281; Paus. x. 28.4, 29.2, 30.2; Apollod. ii. 1.5; Schol. ad Odyss. iv. 12 ; Schol. ad Aristoph. Equit. 1332; Lucian, De Saltat. 46). Hence some writers attributed the Nostoi to Homer Suid. s. v. nostoi; Anthol. Planud. iv. 30), while others call its author a Colophonian (Eustath. ad Odyss. xvi. 118). Similar poems, and with the same title, were written by other poets also, such as Eumclus of Corinth (Schol. ad Pind. Ol. xiii. 3]), Anticleides of Athens (Athen. iv. p. 157, ix. p. 466), Cleidemus (Athen. xiii. p. 609), and Lysimachus (Athen. iv. p. 158; Schol. ad Apollon. Rhod. i. 558). Where the Nostoi is mentioned without a name, we have generally to understand the work of Agias.

This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited June 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks

A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology (ed. William Smith)
• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Per...