Apollonius (Ancient Greek: Απολλώνιος) of Athens—sometimes Apollonius of Naucratis—was a Greek sophist and rhetorician who lived in the time of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, that is, the end of the 2nd century.
Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years and its earliest human presence starting somewhere between the 11th and 7th millennium BC.
A sophist was a specific kind of teacher in ancient Greece, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Many sophists specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric, though other sophists taught subjects such as music, athletics, and mathematics. In general, they claimed to teach arete, predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
Rhetoric is, along with grammar and logic, one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the capacities of writers or speakers needed to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law or for passage of proposals in the assembly or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric or phases of developing a persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
Apollonius was a pupil of the sophists Adrianus and Chrestus. He distinguished himself by his forensic eloquence, and taught rhetoric at Athens at the same time with Heracleides. He was an opponent of Heracleides, and with the assistance of his associates he succeeded in expelling him from the chair of rhetoric in Athens. Apollonius was afterward appointed by the emperor to the chair of rhetoric, with a salary of one talent. He held several high offices in his native place, and distinguished himself no less as a statesman and diplomatist than as a rhetorician.
Adrianus of Tyre, also written as Hadrian and Hadrianos, was a sophist of ancient Athens who flourished under the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus.
Heracleides was a rhetorician from Lycia, who lived and taught in Athens and Smyrna in the second century.
Introduced in Mesopotamia at the end of the 4th Millennium, and normalized at the end of the 3rd Millennium during the Akkadian-Sumer phase, the load (talent) as a measure of weight was divided into 60 minas, each of which was subdivided into 60 shekels. The use of 60 illustrates the attachment of the early Mesopotamians to their useful sexagesimal arithmetic. These weights were used subsequently by the Babylonians, Sumerians, and Phoenicians, and later by the Hebrews. The Babylonian weights are approximately: shekel, mina, and talent. The Phoenicians took their trade to the Greeks with their weight measures during the Archaic period, and the latter adopted these wights and their ratio of 60 minas to one talent; a Greek mina in Euboea around 800 B.C. was hence 504 gm, [See J.H. Kroll, Early Iron Age balance weights at Lefkandi, Euboea: Oxford Journal of Archaeology 27, pp. 37–48 (2008)]; other minas in the Mediterranean basin, and even Greek minas in other parts of Greece, varied locally in some small measure from the Babylonian values, and from one to another.
Apollonius cultivated chiefly political oratory, and used to spend a great deal of time upon preparing his speeches in retirement. His declamations are said to have excelled those of many of his predecessors in dignity, beauty, and propriety; but he was often vehement and rhythmical.[1][2]
Apollonius' moral conduct was censured, as he had a son Rufinus by a concubine. He died at Athens in the seventieth year of his age.[3][4]
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Dr Leonhard Schmitz FRSE LLD was a Prussian-born classical scholar and educational author, mainly active in the United Kingdom. He is sometimes referred to in the Anglicised version of his name Leonard Schmitz.
Sir William Smith was an English lexicographer. He also made advances in the teaching of Greek and Latin in schools.
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