Diogenes of Athens (tragedian)

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Diogenes of Athens (Greek : Διογένης ὁ Ἀθηναῖος) was a writer of Greek tragedy in the late 5th or early 4th century BC. His works are listed by the Suda [1] as Semele , [2] Achilles, Helen, Herakles, Thyestes, Medea, Oedipus, and Chrysippus . He was either born or flourished at the time of the Thirty Tyrants and the suppression of Athenian democracy, around 404–403 BC. [3]

Greek language language spoken in Greece, Cyprus and Southern Albania

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language, spanning more than 3000 years of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Asia Minor. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy. Greek tragedy is widely believed to be an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus, and it heavily influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance. Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the oral traditions of archaic epics. In tragic theatre, however, these narratives were presented by actors. The most acclaimed Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

<i>Suda</i> literary work

The Suda or Souda is a large 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Soudas (Σούδας) or Souidas (Σουίδας). It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The derivation is probably from the Byzantine Greek word souda, meaning "fortress" or "stronghold", with the alternate name, Suidas, stemming from an error made by Eustathius, who mistook the title for the author's name.

This Diogenes is sometimes confused with Diogenes of Sinope, to whom a similar list of tragedies is attributed [4] by Diogenes Laërtius. [5]

Diogenes Laërtius late antique biographer of classical Greek philosophers

Diogenes Laërtius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy. His reputation is controversial among scholars because he often repeats information from his sources without critically evaluating it. He also frequently focuses on trivial or insignificant details of his subjects' lives while ignoring important details of their philosophical teachings and he sometimes fails to distinguish between earlier and later teachings of specific philosophical schools. However, unlike many other ancient secondary sources, Diogenes Laërtius generally reports philosophical teachings without attempting to reinterpret or expand on them, which means his accounts are often closer to the primary sources. Due to the loss of so many of the primary sources on which Diogenes relied, his work has become the foremost surviving source on the history of Greek philosophy.

Athenaeus preserves a geographically confused fragment [6] from Diogenes, having to do with a laurel grove along the Halys river where Lydian and Bactrian girls perform sacred music for Artemis as the goddess of Mount Tmolus. [7]

Athenaeus of Naucratis was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The Suda says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus, who died in 192, shows that he survived that emperor. He was a contemporary of Adrantus.

Lydia Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor

Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern western Turkish provinces of Uşak, Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian. Its capital was Sardis.

Bactria Historical region in Central Asia

Bactria ; or Bactriana was a historical region in Central Asia. Bactria proper was north of the Hindu Kush mountain range and south of the Amu Darya river, covering the flat region that straddles modern-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and parts of Northern Pakistan. More broadly Bactria was the area north of the Hindu Kush, west of the Pamirs and south of the Tian Shan with the Amu Darya flowing west through the center.

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References

  1. ↑ J. Radicke and Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente Der Griechischen Historiker, edited by G. Schepens (Brill, 1999), pt. 4, fasc. 7, p. 195.
  2. ↑ For which see also David D. Leitao, The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 66.
  3. ↑ Suda δ 1142, Diogenes.
  4. ↑ Radicke, p. 195.
  5. ↑ Diogenes Laërtius 6.80.
  6. ↑ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.38.636.
  7. ↑ Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Brill, 1997), p. 284.



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