Phylarchus

This article deals with the Hellenistic historian Phylarchus. Phylarchos is also a name for the head of a phyle or a Greek or non-Greek tribe or tribal part.

Phylarchos (Greek Φύλαρχος Phýlarchos , German also Phylarchos of Athens ) was an ancient Greek historian . He lived in the second half of the 3rd century BC. Chr.

Phylarchus cannot be grasped as a historical personality. Essentially, all that is known about him is that he came from Athens or Naukratis , was a contemporary of Aratos of Sikyon and, apart from a few smaller writings (including a short saga), wrote the Histories , an extensive work in 28 books. This dealt with the history of the 53 years from the incursion of Pyrrhus into the Peloponnese and his associated death (272 BC) to the death of the Spartan king Cleomenes III. in Egypt (220/219 BC). With this, Phylarchos began his description of the history of the Greek world around the time where the previous works of Duris of Samos and Hieronymos of Kardia ended. Like these historical treatises, however, the histories of Phylarchos are largely lost; only 60 fragments derived therefrom remained.

The writing style of Phylarchus was judged extremely disparagingly by the atticists. But he is considered an important representative of the "tragic" or "mimetic" Hellenistic historiography. His histories were written vividly and vividly, often effectively focusing on the suffering of women and children. They also contained legends, wonderful events, anecdotes as well as erotic, geographical and folkloric passages. Many of these excursions, however, were historically questionable. Polybius , who continued the histories of Phylarchos, criticized this polemically. He accused him of falsifying history, as Phylarchus was too much for Cleomenes III. Take sides and take a hostile attitude towards his adversary Aratos of Sicyon ; In addition, he describes the events reported by him too sensationally and does not go into their deeper causes. This view, however, seems to be clouded in its objectivity by the fact that Polybius, for his part, had great sympathy for Aratos and the Achaeans and was therefore partially unilaterally partisan. It is true that Phylarchus' credibility under his dramatic representation of historical events and his enthusiasm for Cleomenes III. have suffered, but Polybius' extensive criticism does not show that he intentionally distorted or withheld facts.

For the period described by Phylarchus, he seems to have been an important source for later authors; in any case, no other historian is known who wrote a contemporary history of the entire Hellenistic empires for the epoch mentioned. Plutarch drew Phylarchus' histories as the most important source for his biographies of Agis IV and Cleomenes III. out. Furthermore, he sometimes used them for his biographies of Aratos and Pyrrhus. The group of users of the Phylarchus also included Pompeius Trogus , whose historical work is only preserved in the epitome of Marcus Junianus Iustinus . Finally, in his work Deipnosophistai , the Greek rhetorician Athenaios provides many, sometimes longer verbatim fragments from Phylarchus' histories.

expenditure

• Felix Jacoby : The Fragments of the Greek Historians (FGrHist), 1923ff., No. 81

literature

• Carlo Scardino: Phylarchus. In: Bernhard Zimmermann , Antonios Rengakos (Hrsg.): Handbook of the Greek literature of antiquity. Volume 2: The Literature of the Classical and Hellenistic Period. CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-61818-5 , p. 648 f.
• Jürgen Kroymann : Phylarchos. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Supplementary Volume VIII, Stuttgart 1956, Col. 471-489.

Remarks

1. ↑ Athenaios 2,58c; Suda under Phylarchus .
2. ^ Dionysius of Halicarnassus , De compositione verborum 4.
3. ↑ Polybios 2: 56-63.
4. ↑ Jürgen Kroymann : Phylarchos. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Supplementary Volume VIII, Stuttgart 1956, Sp. 481.