Herodorus

Herodorus of Heraclea was an ancient Greek sophist and Mythograph of Heraclea on the Pontus, who lived around 400 BC.

Life

Herodorus is the first known Herakleote who earned literary fame. His single figures and themes of Greek mythology in a large width treated, but very fragmentary writings were often used by later commentators next Pherekydes and Hellanicus as the source. He was also a forerunner of a novelistic mythography. Particularly marked is his detailed work on Hercules, which included at least 17 ​​books and was written in Ionic. Herodorus operation in an allegorical interpretation of myth and rationalizing. With regard to the migrations of the heroes he brought long versions, among others from the fields of geography, ethnography and cosmology. In other writings, he presented the Argonauts and the myths dar. the Pelopidse

Aristotle took some zoological paradoxes of Herodorus whose Argonauts served as a source for later scholiast remarks on the corresponding work of Apollonius of Rhodes. Uncertain, however, is the extent of use of Herodorus ' writings by other authors as pseudo - Apollodorus, Diodorus in the fourth volume of his Universal History and local writers over at Heraclea Pontus as Nymphis.

A son of Herodorus was the sophist Bryson.

Edition of the fragments

• Felix Jacoby: The fragments of Greek historians ( FGrH ), No. 31