Listed 9 sub titles with search on: Biographies for wider area of: "NAFKRATIS Ancient city EGYPT" .
NAFKRATIS (Ancient city) EGYPT
Charon, of Naucratis, was the author of a history of the Alexandrian and Egyptian priests, and of the events which occurred under each; likewise of a treatise on Naucratis, and other works. (Suid. s. v.) The Charon who was a friend of Apollonius Rhodius, and wrote a historical commentary on his Argonaulica, has been identified by some with the historian of Naucratis, by others with the Carthaginian.
Apollonius of Naucratis, a pupil of Adrianus and Chrestus, taught rhetoric at Athens. He was an opponent of Heracleides, and with the assistance of his associates he succeeded in expelling him from his chair. He cultivated chiefly political oratory, and used to spend a great deal of time upon preparing his speeches in retirement. His moral conduct is censured, as he had a son Rufinus by a concubine. He died at Athens in the seventieth year of his age. (Philostr. Vit. Saph. ii. 19, 26.2; Eudoc.)
Editor's Information: Native of Naucratis, he was born in Alexandria; information, though, concerning the poet are found in ancient Rhodes , where he spent many years of his life; this is why he was surnamed Rhodius.
Athenaeus. The Greek scholar, a native of Naucratis in Egypt. He was educated at Alexandria, where he lived from A.D. 170-230. After this he lived at Rome, and there wrote his Deipnosophistai (or “Banquet of the Learned”), in fifteen books. Of these the first, second, and part of the third are only preserved in a selection made in the eleventh century; the rest survive in a tolerably complete state. The work shows astonishing learning, and contains a number of notices of ancient life which would otherwise have been lost. The author gives us collections and extracts from more than 1500 works (now mostly lost), and by more than 700 writers. His book is thrown into the form of a conversation held in the year A.D. 228 at a dinner given by Larensius, a rich and accomplished Roman, and a descendant of the great antiquarian Varro. Among the guests are the most learned men of the time, including Galen the physician and Ulpian the jurist. The conversation ranges over numberless subjects connected with domestic and social life, manners and customs, trade, art, and science. Among the most valuable things in the book are the numerous passages from prosewriters and poets, especially from the masters of the Middle Comedy. Good editions are those of Dindorf (1827); and Meineke, 4 vols. (1859-67). There is a literal English translation in the Bohn Classical Library, 3 vols. (1854).
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited July 2004 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Athenaeus (Athenaios), a native of Naucratis, a town on the left side of the Canopic
mouth of the Nile, is called by Suidas a grammatikos, a term which may be best
rendered into English, a literary man. Suidas places him in the "times of Marcus",
but whether by this is meant Marcus Aurelius is uncertain, as Caracalla was also
Marcus Antoninus. We know, however, that Oppian, who wrote a work called Halieutica
inscribed to Caracalla, was a little anterior to him (Athen. i.), and that Commodus
was dead when he wrote (xii.), so that he may have been born in the reign of Aurelius,
but flourished under his successors. Part of his work must have been written after
A. D. 228, the date given by Dion Cassius for the death of Ulpian the lawyer,
which event he mentions (xv.).
His extant work is entitled the Deipnosophistae, i.e. the Banquet
of the Learned, or else, perhaps, as has lately been suggested, The Contrivers
of Feasts. It may be considered one of the earliest collections of what are called
Ana, being an immense mass of anecdotes, extracts from the writings of poets,
historians, dramatists, philosophers, orators, and physicians, of facts in natural
history, criticisms, and discussions on almost every conceivable subject, especially
on Gastronomy, upon which noble science he mentions a work (now lost) of Archestratus,
whose place his own 15 books have probably supplied. It is in short a collection
of stories from the memory and common-place book of a Greek gentleman of the third
century of the Christian era, of enormous reading, extreme love of good eating,
and respectable ability. Some notion of the materials which he had amassed for
the work, may be formed from the fact, which he tells us himself, that he had
read and made extracts from 800 plays of the middle comedy only.
Athenaeus represents himself as describing to his friend Timocrates,
a banquet given at the house of Laurentius (Larensios), a nolle Roman, to several
guests, of whom the best known are Galen, a physician, and Ulpian, the lawyer.
The work is in the form of a dialogue, in which these guests are the interlocutors,
related to Timocrates: a double machinery, which would have been inconvenient
to an author who had a real talent for dramatic writing, but which in the hands
of Athenaeus, who had none, is wholly unmanageable. As a work of art the failure
is complete. Unity of time and dramatic probability are utterly violated by the
supposition that so immense a work is the record of the conversation at a single
banquet, and [p. 401] by the absurdity of collecting at it the produce of every
season of the year. Long quotations and intricate discussions introduced apropos
of some trifling incident, entirely destroy the form of the dialogue, so that
before we have finished a speech we forget who was the speaker. And when in addition
to this confusion we are suddenly brought back to the tiresome Timocrates, we
are quite provoked at the clumsy way in which the book is put together. But as
a work illustrative of ancient manners, as a collection of curious facts, names
of authors and fragments, which, but for Athenaeus, would utterly have perished;
in short, as a body of amusing antiquarian research, it would be difficult to
praise the Deipnosophistae too highly.
The work begins, somewhat absurdly, considering the difference between
a discussion on the Immortality of the Soul, and one on the Pleasures of the Stomach,
with an exact imitation of the opening of Plato's Phaedo, -Athenaeus and Timocrates
being substituted for Phaedo and Echecrates. The praises of Laurentius are then
introduced, and the conversation of the savans begins. It would be impossible
to give an account of the contents of the book; a few specimens therefore must
suffice. We have anecdotes of gourmands, as of Apicius (the second of the three
illustrious gluttons of that name), who is said to have spent many thousands on
his stomach, and to have lived at Minturnae in the reign of Tiberius, whence he
sailed to Africa, in search of good lobsters; but finding, as he approached the
shore, that they were no larger than those which he ate in Italy, he turned back
without landing. Sometimes we have anecdotes to prove assertions in natural history,
e. g. it is shewn that water is nutritious (1), by the statement that it nourishes
the tettix, and (2) because fluids generally are so, as milk and honey, by the
latter of which Democritus of Abdera allowed himself to be kept alive over the
Thesmophoria (though he had determined to starve himself), in order that the mournin
g for his death might not prevent his maidservants from celebrating the festival.
The story of the Pinna and Pinnoteer (pinnophulax or pinnoteres) is told in the
course of the disquisitions on shell-fish. The pinna is a bivalve shell-fish (ostreon),
the pinnoteer a small crab, who inhabits the pinna's shell. As soon as the small
fish on which the pinna subsists have swum in, the pinnoteer bites the pinna as
a signal to him to close his shell and secure them. Grammatical discussions are
mixed up with gastronomic; e. g. the account of the amugdale begins with the laws
of its accentuation; of eggs, by an inquiry into the spelling of the word, whether
oon, oion, oeon, or oarion. Quotations are nade in support of each, and we are
told that oa was fonnerly the same as huperoia, from which fact he deduces an
explanation of the story of Helen's birth from an egg. This suggests to him a
quotation from Eriphus, who says that Leda produced goose's eggs; and so he wanders
on through every variety of subject connected with eggs. This will give some notion
of the discursive manner in which he extracts all kinds of facts from the vast
stores of his erudition. Sometimes he connects different pieces of knowledge by
a mere similarity of sounds. Cynulcus, one of the guests, calls for bread (artos),"not
however for Artus king of the Messapians"; and then we are led back from Artus
the king to Artus the eatable, and from that to salted meats, which brings in
a grammatical discussion on the word tarichos, whether it is masculine in Attic
or not. Sometimes antiquarian points are discussed, especially Homeric. Thus,
he examines the times of day at which the Homeric meals took place, and the genuineness
of some of the lines in the Iliad and Odyssey, as
eidee gar kata Dumon adelpheon, hos eponeito,
which he pronounces spurious, and only introduced to explain
automatos de hoi elthe boen agathos Menelaos.
His etymological conjectures are in the usual style of ancient philology. In proving
the religious duty of drunkenness, as he considers it, he derives thoine from
theon heneka oinousthai and mxthuein from meta to thuein. We often obtain from
him curious pieces of information on subjects connected with ancient art, as that
the kind of drinking-cup called rhuton was first devised by Ptolemy Philadelphus
as an ornament for the statues of his queen, Arsinoe. At the end of the work is
a collection of scolia and other songs, which the savans recite. One of these
is a real curiosity: a song by Aristotle in praise of arete.
Among the authors, whose works are now lost, from whom Athenaeus gives extracts, are Alcaeus, Agathon the tragic poet, Antisthenes the philosopher, Archilochus the inventor of iambics, Menander and his contemporary Diphilus, Epiimenides of Crete, Empedocles of Agrigentum, Cratinus, Eupolis (Hor. Sat. i. 4.1), Alcman, Epicurus (whom he represents as a wasteful glutton), and many others whose names are well known. In all, he cites nearly 800 authors and more than 1200 separate works. Athenaeus was also the author of a lost book peri ton en Suriai basilensanton, which probably, from the specimen of it in the Deipnosophists, and the obvious unfitness of Athenaeus to be a historian, was rather a collection of anecdotes than a connected history.
Of the Deipnosophists the first two books, and parts of the third,
eleventh, and fifteenth, exist only in an Epitome, whose date and author are unknown.
The original work, however, was rare in the time of Eustathius (latter part of
12th cent.); for Bentley has shewn, by examining nearly a hundred of his references
to Athenaeus, that his only knowledge of him was through the Epitome, Perizonius
has proved that Aelian transferred large portions of the work to his Various Histories
(middle of 3rd cent.), a robbery which must have been committed almost in the
life-time of the pillaged author. The Deipnosophists also furnished to Macrobius
the idea and much of the matter of his Saturnalia (end of 4th cent.); but no one
has availed himself so largely of Athenaeus's erudition as Eustathius.
Only one original MS. of Athenaeus now exists, called by Schweighauser
the Codex Veneto-Parisiensis. From this all the others which we now possess are
copies; so that the text of the work, especially in the poetical parts, is in
a very unsettled state. The MS. was brought from Greece by cardinal Bessarion,
and after his death was placed in the library of St. Mark at Venice, whence it
was taken to Paris by order of Napoleon, and there for the first time collated
by Schweighauser's son. It is probably of the date of the 10th century. The subscript
is always placed after, instead of under, the vowel with which it is connected,
and the whole is written without contractions.
The first edition of Athenaeus was that of Aldus, Venice, 1514; a
second published at Basle, 1535; a third by Casaubon at Geneva, 1597, with the
Latin version of Dalecampius (Jacques Dalechamp of Caen), and a commentary published
in 1600; a fourth by Schweighauser, Strasburg 1801-1807, founded on a collation
of the abovementioned MS. and also of a valuable copy of the Epitome; a fifth
by W. Dindorf, 1827. The last is the best, Schweighauser not having availed himself
sufficiently of the sagacity of previous critics in amending the text, and being
himself apparently very ignorant of metrical laws. There is a translation of Athenaeus
into French by M. Lefevre de Villebrune, under the title "Banquet des Savans,
par Athenae" 1789-1791.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Lyceas (Lukeas), of Naucratis, the author of a work on Egypt, which is mentioned by Athenaeus (xiii.; xiv.) and by Pliny, in his list of authorities for his 36th book.
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