Didymos Chalkenteros

Didymos Chalkenteros ( Greek  Δίδυμος Χαλκέντερος ; * around 65 BC; † around 10 AD) was an important Greek grammarian and lexicographer at the time of Cicero and Augustus . He taught in Alexandria and is considered one of the most prolific writers.

life and work

Didymos was the son of a father of the same name. He belonged to the school of Aristarchus and is said to have written a total of 3,500 to 4,000 (now lost) books, although the corresponding number of his writings (often comprising several books) was significantly lower. That is why he was given the nickname Bibliolathas (ie "book- forgetful "), because due to his prolific writing he occasionally forgot comments made in his earlier works and therefore contradicted them in later writings, as well as Chalkenteros (ie "man with iron entrails") to expressing his tireless work. Among his students were Apion and Herakleides Pontikos the Younger .

Didymos wrote extensive commentaries on many well-known classical Greek poets, including Homer , Hesiod , Bakchylides , Pindar , the three tragedians Aeschylus , Euripides and Sophocles , and also on Ion , Aristophanes , Phrynichus and Menander . He reproduced Aristarchus' text-critical explanations of Homer's works in his own writing, which found its way into the four-man commentary on the Iliad and is still recognizable in the surviving A-Scholia. He also published comments on the Attic speakers Demosthenes , Hypereides , Deinarchos and others. Extensive fragments of his commentary on Demosthenes (9-11 and 13) were found in the Berol papyrus . 9780 accessible. From them it can be seen that Didymos primarily recorded historical events with the help of the atthidographers and Greek universal historians of the 4th century BC. Declared.

Didymos dealt with the linguistic peculiarities of tragedians and comic poets in two probably very detailed lexicons ( Λέξις τραγική in at least 28 books and Λέξις κομική ). He also wrote books on problems of language and its changes. He was also the author of literary history and antiquarian writings and treated mythographic material in an extremely rationalistic manner. The form of his book Συμποσιακά , in which he designed scholarly table conversations, was later used by Plutarch and Athenaios in their own works. Didymos also put on a collection of proverbs in 13 books. It drew from older collections of this kind and in turn entered into that of Zenobius , in which traces of it can be found.

Didymos was above all a compiler who endeavored to collect and organize the most important knowledge from the special works of the Hellenistic philologists and thus to protect them from complete loss. His fame and its after-effects were very great in the period that followed, his oeuvre was exploited by writers of all kinds, but it was lost in its original form in the later Roman Empire because it was replaced by even shorter compilations. Apart from the aforementioned papyrus find, only small remains have survived, among others, from Athenaios as well as ancient scholia and encyclopedias.

Editions and translations

• Bruce Karl Braswell : Didymos of Alexandria. Commentary on Pindar (= Swiss contributions to classical studies. Volume 41). 2nd, revised edition. Schwabe, Basel 2017.
• Lionel Pearson, Susan Stephens (Eds.): Didymi in Demosthenem commenta. Teubner, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-519-01269-3 (critical edition)
• Phillip Harding (Ed.): Didymos on Demosthenes. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-928359-0 (Greek text with English translation and commentary)
• Collotype of Didymospapyros: four panels. Edited by the General Administration of the Royal Museums. Weidmann, Berlin 1904

literature

• Jean-Marie Flamand: Didymos Chalcenteros. In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques. Volume 2, CNRS Éditions, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-271-05195-9 , pp. 768-770

Web links

• Literature by and about Didymos Chalkenteros in the catalog of the German National Library

Remarks

1. ^ Athenaios 4, 139c.
2. ↑ Seneca , Epistulae ad Lucilium 88, 37.
3. ↑ This is how Didymos was named by Demetrios of Troizen (Athenaios 4, 139c).
4. ↑ Suda , p. Didymos ; Athenaios 4, 139c.