Polyainos

This article is about the author of the stratagems. For other bearers of the name Polyainos see Polyainos (disambiguation) .

Polyainos (Latin Polyaenus , German also Polyän ; * around 100) was a Macedonian rhetor , lawyer and writer in Rome .

Life

Polyainos was around 100 in the in Asia Minor lying Roman province of Bithynia may, in the city of Nicaea born. His family was of Macedonian descent. Around 161 he worked in Rome as a rhetorician (speaker) and lawyer. This means that he must have lived there for a long time, so that he had Roman citizenship and spoke Latin as well as Greek. It is not known since when he lived in Rome and how he received Roman citizenship.

Information about his life can be found in the Suda , a Byzantine lexicon from around 1000 , a few scattered fragments and in the forewords to his work Strategemata .

Works

Polyainos' only surviving work is his stratagems , a collection of military stratagems , which he dedicated to the emperors Mark Aurel and Lucius Verus .

161 published Polyainos on the occasion of the beginning of the Parthian War (161-166) the first book of the strategemata . The next five of a total of eight books each appeared individually up to the summer of 162. This haste can be seen in the work. Polyainos dedicated his work to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus and wanted to give them a guide to military knowledge. It contains around 900 examples of stratagems from a period from mythological times to Augustus . The work is structured according to peoples. Book I-IV deals with Greek mythology, the Greeks, Macedonians and Diadochi , Book V Sicily, Book VI various peoples, Book VII mainly peoples living in Persia and Book VIII Romans and women.

Polyainos used historians, older stratagem collections and, according to his own statement, his own research as sources. The different value of his sources means that some of his examples are fictional or unbelievable. Polyainos' goal was not historical accuracy either, but wanted to convey principles of successful military leadership.

In the sources there are references to other works that are lost today:

• a speech for the Macedonian Assembly , with which he won a case for the Macedonian Provincial Assembly as a lawyer,
• a treatise on Thebes , in which he described the famous sound-producing statue of Memnon in Thebes, Egypt , and
• a work called Taktika in three books.

expenditure

• Polyaenus: Stratagems of war . Edited and translated by Peter Krentz and Everett L. Wheeler. 2 volumes. Chicago 1994.
• Polyaenus: Polyaeni Strategematon libri VIII. Ex rec. Eduardi Woelfflin iterum rec. Ioannes Melber. Addenda adiecit Klaus Reinhard. Teubner, Lipsiae 1887, reprint Stuttgart 1970.
• Polyainos: Strategika . Bilingual edition by Kai Brodersen . Tusculum Collection . De Gruyter, Berlin 2017. ISBN 978-3-11-053664-5

literature

Overview representations

• Friedrich Lammert : Polyainos 8). In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XXI, 2, Stuttgart 1952, Col. 1432-1436.
• Klaus Meister : Polyainos. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 10, Metzler, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-476-01480-0 , column 40 f.
• Krystyna Stebnicka: Polyainos. 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 , p. 305

Investigations

• Kai Brodersen (Ed.): Polyainos. New studies. Polyenus. New studies. Verlag Antike, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-938032-39-8

Web links

• Literature by and about Polyainos in the catalog of the German National Library
• English translation