Castor of Rhodes

Kastor of Rhodes was an ancient Greek rhetorician and historian in the 1st century BC

Kastor wrote several works, but get nothing from most. His only fragmentary handed down masterpiece were the Chronicles. They performed six books the time of Belus and Ninus to the year 61/60 BC The presentation took place possibly in tabular form, but this is controversial. That Kastor, let start with the Oriental story of the legendary King Ninos his work, in which he also took into account mythological narratives, underscoring its commitment to represent oriental as Greco- Roman history as a unit. In this sense, he also extended Greek king lists to make Greek history appear to be as old as the ancient Near East. The work offered royal and official lists. For the period from 776 BC he used in his account of the system of counting Olympics.

The Chronicles were used in the subsequent period, among others, Varro, Flavius ​​Josephus, Plutarch, Eusebius of Caesarea ( which explicitly refers to Kastor ) and Georgios Synkellos; whether this also applies to Diodorus, is doubtful today. The fragments are collected in Felix Jacoby's The fragments of Greek historians (No. 250).