Lucius Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor was a
GreekAncient Greece is the civilisation belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the...
scholar who was enslaved by the
RomansAncient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
during the Mithridatic War and taken to
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
as a tutor. After his release, he continued to live in
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
as a Roman citizen. He was so productive a writer that he earned the surname
polyhistorA polyhistor is a person of great erudition whose knowledge spans many fields. The definition includes having both an expert level of knowledge in diverse specific fields and broad general knowledge. Arguably a polyhistor is one possible type of polymath...
. The majority of his writings are now lost, but the fragments that remain shed valuable light on antiquarian and eastern Mediterranean subjects.
Alexander flourished in the first half of the 1st century B.C.
Lucius Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor was a
GreekAncient Greece is the civilisation belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the...
scholar who was enslaved by the
RomansAncient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
during the Mithridatic War and taken to
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
as a tutor. After his release, he continued to live in
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
as a Roman citizen. He was so productive a writer that he earned the surname
polyhistorA polyhistor is a person of great erudition whose knowledge spans many fields. The definition includes having both an expert level of knowledge in diverse specific fields and broad general knowledge. Arguably a polyhistor is one possible type of polymath...
. The majority of his writings are now lost, but the fragments that remain shed valuable light on antiquarian and eastern Mediterranean subjects.
Life
Alexander flourished in the first half of the 1st century B.C. According to the
SudaThe Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly wrongfully attributed to an author called Suidas. The text belongs to the Byzantine Empire and was written in Greek...
he was a pupil of
CratesCrates can mean:-* Plural of "crate", pronounced as one syllable* A Greek name , pronounced as two syllables:-** Crates , the poet of Old Comedy, and actor** Crates of Thebes, the Hellenistic philosopher...
and a Milesian, whereas
Stephanus of ByzantiumStephen of Byzantium, also known as Stephanus Byzantinus was the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled Ethnica...
claims he was a native of Cotiaeum in
Lesser PhrygiaIn antiquity, Phrygia was a kingdom in the west central part of Anatolia, in what is now modern-day Turkey. The Phrygians initially lived in the southern Balkans; according to Herodotus, under the name of Bryges , changing it to Phruges after their final migration to Anatolia, via the...
and a son of Asklepiades, while the
Etymologicum MagnumEtymologicum Magnum is the traditional title of a Greek lexical encyclopedia compiled at Constantinople by an unknown lexicographer around 1150 AD. It is the largest Byzantine lexicon and draws on many earlier grammatical, lexical and rhetorical works...
agrees in calling him
Kotiaeus. It is possible that two different Alexandroi have been merged or confused.
He became a Roman prisoner of war, was sold into slavery to a Cornelius Lentulus as his teacher (
paedagogusPaedagogus, second in the great trilogy of Clement of Alexandria.Having laid a foundation in the knowledge of divine truth in the first book, he goes on in the Paedagogus to develop a Christian ethic...
) and was later freed. As a Roman freedman his name was Cornelius Alexander. The
nomen may come from the Corneli Lentuli or from Sulla Felix, as he received the citizenship from Sulla..
He died at
LaurentumLaurentum was an ancient Roman city of Latium situated between Ostia and Lavinium. Roman writers regarded it as the original capital of the Latins, before Lavinium assumed that role after the death of King Latinus...
in a fire which consumed his house, and his wife Helene is said by the
SudaThe Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly wrongfully attributed to an author called Suidas. The text belongs to the Byzantine Empire and was written in Greek...
to have responded to the news of his loss by hanging herself.
Works
Extremely erudite and prolific, the
SudaThe Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly wrongfully attributed to an author called Suidas. The text belongs to the Byzantine Empire and was written in Greek...
makes no attempt to list his works, asserting that he composed books "beyond number", and naming only his 5 books
On Rome.
Further attested ethno-geographic texts include:
Aigyptiaka, at least 3 books,
On Bithynia,
On the Euxine Sea,
On Illyria, an
Indika.
Alexander's most important treatise consisted of forty-two books of historical and geographical accounts of nearly all the countries of the ancient world. His other notable work is about the Jews (Müller,
Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, iii); it reproduces in paraphrase relevant excerpts from Jewish writers, of whom nothing otherwise would be known. One of Alexander’s students was
Gaius Julius HyginusGaius Julius Hyginus was a Latin author, a pupil of the famous Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus. He was by Augustus elected superintendent of the Palatine library according to Suetonius' De Grammaticis, 20...
, Latin author, scholar and friend of
OvidPublius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who wrote about love, seduction, and mythological transformation....
, who was appointed by
AugustusGaius Julius Caesar Augustus was the first emperor of the Roman Empire, which he ruled alone from 27 BC until his death in AD 14.
[These are the contemporary dates; Augustus lived under two calendars, the Roman Republican until 45 BC, and the Julian after 45 BC...]
to be superintendent of the Palatine library. As a philosopher, Alexander Polyhistor wrote
Successions of PhilosophersSuccessions of Philosophers or Philosophers' Successions was the name of several lost works from the Hellenistic era. Their purpose was to depict the philosophers of different schools in terms of a line of succession of which they were a part...
, mentioned several times by
Diogenes LaërtiusDiogenes Laërtius , was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is one of the principal surviving sources for the history of Greek philosophy.-Life:Nothing is known about his life. He must have lived after...
in his
Lives and Opinions of Eminent PhilosophersLives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a biography of the Greek philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, written in Greek, perhaps in the first half of the third century AD.-Overview:...
. From what Laërtius describes or paraphrases in his work, Alexander recorded various thoughts on contradictions, fate, life, soul and its parts, perfect figures, and different curiosities, such as advice not to eat beans.
His
Chaldæan History was based on
Sibylline oracles* This article is about the Sibylline Oracles. For the books, see Sibylline Books.The Sibylline Oracles are a collection of oracular utterances written in Greek hexameters ascribed to the Sibyls, prophetesses who uttered divine revelations in a frenzied state. Twelve books of Sibylline Oracles...
, Book III, especially for the account of the
Tower of BabelThe Tower of Babel , according to the Book of Genesis, was an enormous tower built at the city of Babylon , a cosmopolitan city typified by a confusion of languages, also called the "beginning" of Nimrod's kingdom...
.
External links