Herodorus of Herakleia

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Herodorus of Herakleia was an ancient Greek sophist and mythographer from Herakleia on the Pontus . He lived in the first half of the 4th century BC. Chr.

Herodorus is the first known Herakleote to achieve literary fame. His writings, which deal with the individual characters or themes of Greek mythology in a wide range, but only survived in very fragmentary form, were often used as a source by later commentators alongside Pherecytes and Hellanikos . It was also a forerunner of a fictional mythography . His detailed work on Heracles , which comprised at least 17 books and was written in Ionic , is particularly well recognizable . Herodoros used an allegorizing and rationalizing interpretation of myths . With regard to the hero's wanderings, he gave long explanations from areas such as geography, ethnography and cosmology. In other writings he presented the Argonauts saga and the myths about the Pelopids .

Aristotle took some zoological paradoxes from Herodorus, whose Argonaut legend served later Scholiasts as a source for explanations on the corresponding work of Apollonios of Rhodes . What is uncertain, however, is the extent to which Herodorus' writings were used by other authors such as Pseudo-Apollodor , Diodor in the fourth volume of his Universal History and local writers on Herakleia on the Pontus such as Nymphis .

A son of Herodorus was the sophist Bryson .

Edition of the fragments

literature

  • Pedro Pablo Fuentes González, Javier Campos Daroca: Hérodore d'Héraclée. In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques . Volume 3, CNRS Éditions, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-271-05748-5 , pp. 671-675