Ailios Theon

Ailios Theon was a rhetorician from Alexandria and the author of a collection of preliminary exercises ( progymnasmata ) for training rhetoricians.

He lived and wrote probably in the mid to late first century AD and his treatise is the earliest treatment of these exercises. The work, which is incomplete and probably formed an appendix to a handbook of rhetoric , shows education and taste and contains valuable notes on the style and the speeches of the masters of the Attic oratory. Theon also wrote commentaries on Xenophon , Isocrates and Demosthenes and treatises on the style.

This Theon is to be distinguished from the Stoic Theon , who lived in the time of Augustus and also wrote about rhetoric.

expenditure

• Michel Patillon (Ed.): Aélius Théon: Progymnasmata. Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-251-00453-X (with detailed introduction, Armenian text and French translation).
• James R. Butts (Ed.): The "Progymnasmata" of Theon: A new Text with Translation and Commentary . 2 volumes, Claremont (Michigan) 1986 (with commentary and English translation).

literature

Overview representations

• Pierre Chiron: Théon (Aelius). In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques. Volume 6, CNRS Éditions, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-271-08989-2 , pp. 1000-1007
• Elżbieta Szabat: Ailios Theon. In: Paweł Janiszewski, Krystyna Stebnicka, Elżbieta Szabat: Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-871340-1 , pp. 362 f.

Investigations

• Michael Gronewald: A fragment from Theon's Progymnasmata . In: Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 24, 1977, 23 f.
• Gabriella Uluhogian: La versione armena dei 'Progymnasmata' di Teone . In: Eikasmós 9, 1998, pp. 219-224.