Satyrus: Peripatetic or Alexandrian? West, Stephanie Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1974; 15, 3; ProQuest pg. 279

Satyrus: Peripatetic or Alexandrian? 
Stephanie West 

THE SIGNIFICANCE of Satyrus the Peripatetic for the development 
of ancient biography was a point on which all students of the 
subject were agreed even before the publication in 1911 of 

P.Oxy. 1176, which preserves a substantial part of his Life of Euripides. 1 

The outlines of Satyrus' portrait had been memorably sketched by 
Wilamowitz in 1899;2 some further colouring was added by Leo in 
his fundamental book on ancient biography.3 Wilamowitz, working 
with the scanty and second-hand materials then available-a score of 
citations of Satyrus in Diogenes Laertius, Athenaeus and a few other 
authors--clothed the dry bones with flesh. Under his hands Satyrus 
took on the aspect of a scholar, a learned Alexandrian strongly in­
fluenced by Callimachus:4 clearly an authority deserving serious at­
tention. 

The publication of the remains of the Life of Euripides did no good 
to Satyrus' reputation. Gilbert Murray, not usually a captious or 

1 The Oxyrhynchus Papyri IX, ed. A. S. Hunt (London 1912) no.1176; Packs 1456. The most 
important item to be added to the bibliography in Pack is the commentary by G. Arri­
ghetti, Satire: Vita di Euripide (Pisa 1964). For a complete collection of the fragments of 
Satyrus, together with a commentary, see C. F. Kumaniecki, De Satyre Peripatetico (Cracow 
1929). 

2 Hermes 34 (1899) 633ft' = Kleine Schriften IV (Berlin 1962) 103ft'. 
3 F. Leo, Die griechisch-romische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form (Leipzig 1901) 118ft'. 

For an interesting critique of Leo's work, see A. Momigliano, The Development of Greek 
Biography (Cambridge [Mass.] 1971) 18ft'. 

& "Aber wenn die Tendenz der Lebensbeschreibung auch die echt peripatetische ist, 
nicht die Taten und Erlebnisse zu erzahlen, sondern die charakteristischen Ziige der 
Lebensfiihrung zur Darstellung zu bringen ... , so ist in der Behandlung doch die gelehrte 
Art der kallimacheischen Schule unverkennbar: es werden altere Bticher aller Art nicht 
nur benutzt, sondern auch zitiert. (Z.B. Antisthenes, Lysias, Gorgias, Hieronymos von 
Rhodos ... ) Es ist ein gelehrtes Werk nicht minder als ein philosophisches im aristoteli­
schen Sinne." Wilamowitz's catalogue of Satyrus' sources should be treated with caution. 
For Antisthenes, see Athen. 534c (Satyrus fr.20 K.), for Gorgias, Diog.Laert. 8.58 (Satyrus 
fr.6 K.), but it is by no means certain that Gorgias' own works were Satyrus' source here: 
see H. Diels, SBBerlin 1884, 343ft'; B.A. van Groningen, CLMed 17 (1956) 47ft'. For Hieronymus 
of Rhodes, see Diog.Laert. 2.26 (Satyrus fr.1O K., Hieronymus frA5 Wehrli); however, it is 
not clear that Satyrus got this story about Socrates the bigamist from Hieronymus. Lysias 
is not mentioned in the extant fragments of Satyrus, as far as I know, and his inclusion in 
this list is mysterious. 

279 



280 SATYRUS : PERIPATETIC OR ALEXANDRIAN? 

unsympathetic critic, wrote: "Evidently anecdotes amused Satyrus 
and facts, as such, did not. He cared about literary style, but he neither 
knew nor cared about history."s Satyrus has not lacked defenders, 
who have reminded us that the papyrus is mutilated and may not 
fairly represent the work as a whole. But his most earnest advocates 
are clearly aware that the Life of EUripides does not, at first glance, look 
like a work of scholarship. 

Satyrus' stock has certainly not fallen as much as might have been 
expected, but it is not my primary purpose to explode his pretensions 
to scholarship. A writer may be influential and important without 
being learned or even particularly reliable; Satyrus was clearly influ­
ential, and though the details of his personal history do not matter 
much, it is clearly desirable to set him in the right historical and 
literary context, or, at any rate, to avoid dogmatically assigning him 
to the wrong one. I shall argue that there is no particular reason to 
associate the biographer with Alexandria, and that his date cannot be 
as precisely established as Wilamowitz thought. 

Athenaeus, who cites Satyrus' Blot in several places, three times 
calls him 0 IIEpmaT"f}TLK6c (248D, 541c, 556A). This might be expected 
to mean that he had some connection with the Peripatos, but there is 
a strange consensus among modern writers that it does not, or, at 
least, not in any ordinary sense. This doctrine derives from Leo:6 

«Von den drei Mannern, die in Alexandria selbst den Uebergang von 
der peripatetischen zur alexandrinischen Biographie vermitteln, heis­
sen zwei Peripatetiker, dem dritten hat man den Namen geben 
wollen. Yom Peripatos zeigen sie nichts, als den Typus der litterar­
historischen Studien: diese verbunden mit kunstmassig popularer 
Darstellung geben in dieser Zeit das Recht auf den Namen. Hatten 
Philochoros Idomeneus Neanthes in Alexandria gesessen, so triigen 
sie ihn vielleicht so gut wie Satyros Hermippos und auch Sotion."7 

6 Euripides and his Agel (Oxford 1946) 13. 

e op.cit. (supra n.3) 118. 
7 Cj. K. O. Brink, "Cailimachus and Aristotle: an inquiry into Callimachus' llPOJ: 

llPABlIbANHN," CQ 40 (1946) 11f: "The name ll"pL1TaT7]TLKoC, which by the middle of the 
third century B.C. denoted a member of the Peripatetic School in Athens, changed its 
significance about that time. With the wider influence of Peripatetic studies, it is not only 
used for the Athenian School but can also denote any writer of biography or literary history 
connected with Alexandria. The two non-Peripatetics to whom the name appears to have 
been applied first are two pupils of Callimachus, Hermippus and Satyrus. I think F. Leo 
(Gr.Rom.Biogr. 118) was right in saying that two conditions constitute this new usage of an 
older name, viZ' connexion with Alexandria on the one hand, and the refined form which 



STEPHANIE WEST 281 

It is interesting that Leo's theory (for it is no more) of this rather 
subtle change in connotation has won such widespread acceptance; on 
the assumption that any actual connection with the Peripatos was ex­
cluded it would have been simpler to argue that Athenaeus and 
St Jerome, to whom we owe these designations of Satyrus and Her­
mippus respectively, used peripateticus rather imprecisely, as a more 
interesting synonym for grammaticus, or even that they were simply 
wrong. 

Yet there is obviously something strange about this alleged change 
of meaning. Athenaeus gives no hint that he is using the term 'Peripa­
tetic' in anything less than the literal sense: what did he understand 
by it? As one leafs through the fragments collected by Wehrli it be­
comes increasingly difficult to define the interests and methods of a 
typical Peripatetic. Undoubtedly, certain members of the school of 
Aristotle had some interests in common. But the Peripatos does not 
seem, at least in any area of learning relevant to Satyrus, to have been 
marked by intellectual trends so peculiarly characteristic that an out­
sider who shared them might be regarded by the rest of the world as, 
in some sense, an honorary member. 

On the other hand, there is no reason why Satyrus should not have 
lived for a time in Athens and claimed a connection with the Peripa­
tos; though not what it had once been, it continued to function for 
many generations after the foundation of the Alexandrian Museum. 
Satyrus undoubtedly had much in common with writers whose claim 
to membership of the Peripatos is unimpeachable. The Life of Euripides 
itself has obvious affinities with the literary problemata popular with 
Aristotle and his pupils,8 and the surviving fragment of his work 

Alexandria had bestowed on the literary and biographical studies of the Peripatos"; cf id. 
RE s.v. PERlPATOS (Supp!. 7 [1940] 904); R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford 
1968) 150f; J. P. Lynch, Aristotle's School (Berkeley 1972) 136f. F. R. Wehrli's decision to ex­
clude Satyrus and Hermippus from Die Schule des Aristoteles2 (Basel 1967-69) reflects the 
same view. 

S The question whether Satyrus' work was closer to problemata-literature than to biog­
raphy proper was raised by K. Latte (ap. A. Dihle, Studien zur griech. Biographie [Abh 
Gottingen 1956] 105 Anm.I). Even if we had much more material, it might be hard to decide. 
Librarians are constantly faced with problems in classifying books with titles like Shakes­
peare: the Man and his Work (biography or English literature ?), and the boundary between 
the two is often vague. The title preserved on the papyrus (Btwv avaypac/>fjc ~' 'AlcXu>.ou 
l:oc/>oKMovc EVpt7Tl'Bov) cannot be taken as reflecting the author's own conception of his 
work, since there is no guarantee that it goes back to Satyrus himself (pace Momigliano, 
op.dt. [supra n.3] 80). But though the affinities with problemata-literature are obvious in the 



282 SATYRUS: PERIPATETIC OR ALEXANDRIAN? 

n€p" xapaKnlPwv, quoted by Athenaeus (16Sc) is well in line with 
Peripatetic interests, as can be seen from the material assembled by 
Wehrli in his commentary on Clearchus, ll€p" {3twv (frs.37-62). 

The main reason why it is generally supposed that Satyrus was not 
a Peripatetic in the strict sense is the assumption that he was an 
Alexandrian and a pupil of Callimachus. This is not wholly logical, 
and indeed is seldom stated so bluntly. Even if his Alexandrian con­
nections were well established, they would not automatically exclude 
an association with the Peripatos at some stage in his life: travel 
between Athens and Alexandria was not particularly difficult. This 
may be the explanation to be invoked in the case of Hermippus <the 
Callimachean' (Athen. 5SF, 213F, 696F), if St Jerome's reference to him 
as Peripateticus (De script. eccles. 1) may be trusted. 

But no ancient authority connects Satyrus the biographer with 
Alexandria, and it cannot be seriously maintained that his researches 
were so recondite that he would have been unable to prosecute them 
without the vast resources of the Museum library. Wilamowitz's 
picture of Satyrus emphasises the biographer's scholarly use of his 
sources, supposedly a reflection of the pinacographical methods of 
Callimachus. It is therefore worth scrutinizing briefly what the Life of 
Euripides reveals on this point. We look in vain for any reference to 
Philochorus' fundamental work on the poet's life (FGrHist 32S F2l7-2I); 
still, it may be unfair to press this point, given the lacunose condition 
of the papyrus. Satyrus' method of exploiting the evidence of comedy 
fails to inspire confidence, as does his habit of imposing an autobio­
graphical interpretation on the text of Euripides. In his account of 
Euripides' death he reproduces, he tells us, what ol AOYLot 'T€ Kai 
y€pat'Ta'TOL ,.LV8oAoyova MaK€OOVWV (fr.39 col.xx). The technique of this 
rather portentous reference to local tradition is reminiscent of a some­
what suspect Herodotean mannerism,9 and is evidently meant to 
suggest fieldwork on the spot: it is surely bogus. (If it were genuine, it 
would of course be highly creditable to Satyrus, but scarcely what we 
should expect of a pupil of Callimachus.) Admittedly, some scholars 
have interpreted the references in terms of serious reading in histories 

Life of Euripides, the strictly biographical element was presumably more prominent in his 
treatment of those whose claims on the attention of posterity were not based primarily on 
their writings-Alcibiades, for instance, or Philip of Macedon. 

'Cf. D. Fehling, Die Quellenangaben /xi Herodot (Berlin 1971), especially 67fI. For a parti­
cularly suspect example of this technique in Herodotus. see 2.75. 



STEPHANIE WEST 283 

of Macedon, but this is obviously not the impression which Satyrus 
intended to convey; if he in fact derived his information from such 
works, it would be more scholarly to name them. It is hard to see 
signs of Callimachean influence here. The fact that Satyrus shared 
with Hermippus the dubious honour of epitomisation at the hands of 
Herac1eides Lembus is no argument for regarding Satyrus himself as 
a Callimachean, as some have thought. On the contrary: Heracleides 
evidently had a taste for epitomising Peripatetic works, most notably 
Aristotle's Constitutions.10 

More significant is Wilamowitz's argument that the biographer is 
to be identified with the Satyrus whose work On the Demes of Alexan­
driall is cited by the apologist Theophilus of Antioch (Autol. 2.94) in 
the course of a polemic against the absurdity of Greek mythology; the 
passage which he quotes consists of a genealogy tracing the descent of 
the Ptolemies from Dionysus, and a list, with brief explanations, of the 
Dionysiac deme-names introduced by Ptolemy IV Philopator (221-
203 B.C.). This revision of the deme-names ad maiorem Dionysi gloriam 
was, in Wilamowitz's view, a short-lived gimmick, and the scholar 
who recorded them must, he inferred, have been a contemporary: 
"Die dionysischen Demen sind in den agyptischen Dokumenten nicht 
nachweisbar. Es ist eine toUe Spielerei, die freilich dem liiderlichen 
Philopator zu Gesicht steht. Man kann der Institution nur den Werth 
einer ephemeren Laune beilegen, den Gelehrten nur am Hofe des 
Philopator suchen." For Wilamowitz this was exactly the right date 
and place for the biographer, and he regarded the identification as 
established. 

This argument now looks very shaky; it never commanded uni­
versal assent. The name itself is common, as Wilamowitz himself ad-

10 See H. Bloch TAPA 71 (1940) 27-39, cf. M. Dilts, GRBM 5 (1971) 8. 
11 FGrHist 631: on the text of this passage, see appendix. It does not much matter whether 

this was a monograph on the demes, or whether Theophilus' phrase {"TOpWV 'Tove 8~f'ove 
'TWV 'AA£gav8plwv merely indicates the context within a work of wider scope; I suspect that 
Theophilus intended the former, though he may not have known the book at first hand. 
He takes over from Josephus, without acknowledgement, a list of the kings of Tyre as 
recorded by Menander of Ephesus (3.22) and a list of Pharaohs derived from Manetho 
(3.20); he has a remarkable penchant for genealogical lists, but, as Bardy observes in his 
introduction (Theophile d'Antioche: Trois livres Ii Autolyeus [Paris 1948] 53), "on ne peut pas 
s'empecher de remarquer que, dans tous ces caleuIs, Ie Sauveur ne tient aucune place," 
and the Old Testament balance of his work is striking. I suspect that he exploited the labours 
of Jewish apologists wherever possible; the Alexandrian Jews, at least, had good reason to 
remember Philopator's Dionysiac enthusiasm. 



284 SATYRUS: PERIPATETIC OR ALEXANDRIAN? 

mitted, and many scholars have therefore remained sceptical; from 
Egypt alone we now have more than fifty instances of the name, many 
of them Ptolemaic.12 We have seen that there is no objective evidence 
to associate Satyrus the biographer with Alexandria, so that even if 
the two namesakes could be shewn to have been writing at the same 
date, there is no reason to think they were working in the same place, 
and, even if they were, the name is so common that the coincidence 
does not provide an adequate basis for further argument. 

It is not easy to establish the date of either writer securely. There is 
no useful terminus post quem for the biographer if we cannot argue 
from Callimachean influence. A terminus ante quem is provided by the 
date of his epitomator, Heracleides Lembus, who flourished under 
Ptolemy VI philometor (181/0-145),13 but it is hard to say what 
would be a reasonable interval between composition and epitomisa­
tion. Satyrus' error about the name of Empedocles' father (Diog. 
Laert. 8.53) suggested to Wilamowitz that he must have written be­
fore Eratosthenes drew up his list of Olympic victors, since Satyrus 
would have had no difficulty on this point if he had consulted Eratos­
thenes' work. Eratosthenes' own dates are somewhat problematic, 
but it seems most likely that he died early in the reign of Ptolemy V, 
in the closing years of the third century.14 However, this slight clue 
was more useful to Wilamowitz than it is to me, because, while it goes 
without saying that his scholarly Alexandrian Satyrus would have 
consulted Eratosthenes' list had it existed, I can scarcely claim as 
much for the Athenian-based dilettante whom I have been describing. 
As for the historian's date, we now know that some at least of the 
Dionysiac demotics outlasted Philopator's reign and are attested in 
documents of the second century B.C. or later;15 a serious researcher 
could no doubt have extracted this information some time after the 
event, and there is no real reason to suppose that the historian was 
himself contemporary with their introduction. 

Since 1962 interest in the question has revived with the publication 
of P.Oxy. 2465,16 which preserves the genealogy quoted by Theophilus, 

11 See F. Preisigke, Namenbuch (Heidelberg 1922), and D. Foraboschi, Onomasticon alterum 
papyrologicum (Milan 1967) s.v. EaTVpoc. 

18 See RE 8 (1912) 488ff. 
14 See pfeiffer, op.cit. (supra n.7) 153f. 
15 See P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford 1972) I 44, II 121. 
16 The Oxyrhynchus Papyri xxvn, ed. Turner, Rea, Koenen and Pomar (London 1962) 

pp.118ff; Pack' 1457. So far as I know, no one has questioned the identification of P.Oxy. 



STEPHANIE WEST 285 

some information about demotics, and interesting extracts from regu­
lations for the cult of Arsinoe Philadelphus,17 However, nothing in 
the new fragments argues for identifying historian and biographer; 
they are austerely factual, and no concessions, either in style or in 
content, are made to the casual reader. There is a great gulf between 
this text and the chatty dialogue of the Life of Euripides with its 
manifest indifference to historical fact. 

It is surprising that, though many scholars have expressed some 
scepticism about Wilamowitz's identification of the Alexandrian his­
torian with the biographer, no one has raised the question whether 
there is anything to connect the latter with Alexandria; Wilamowitz's 
conclusions were accepted even though half the supporting argument 
was not, pardy, I suspect, because the common habit of using <Alexan­
drian' as a synonym for <Hellenistic' has confused the issue. At all 
events, alleged Callimachean influence seems a precarious basis for 
further deduction. 

There is, then, no objective evidence to associate the biographer 
with Alexandria, or indeed with any part of Egypt.1S Satyrus, as we 
learn from the unknown author of P.Herc. 558,19 came from Calla tis 

2465 with the work cited by Theophilus, and so long as we distinguish the historian from 
the biographer, the point is unimportant; the difference between a further fragment of an 
author who is only a name to us and a fragment by an unknown author with similar 
interests is negligible. But the coincidence with Theophilus' citation proves less than has 
generally been supposed. There is no reason to think Satyrus enjoyed a monopoly of this 
information; he did not invent the genealogy which made Dionysus the ancestor of the 
Ptolemies, nor its connection with the deme-names; this was, for a time, the official line 
and a fact in the history of Alexandria relevant not only to the study of constitutional 
antiquities but to the wider topic of Philopator's peculiar devotion to Dionysus. A geneal­
ogy offers little scope for stylistic variation; if the facts are agreed its course is predictable, 
except that some writers may be more generous than others in giving details of marriages. 
The papyrus is certainly fuller in this respect than the extract in Theophilus. 

17 See the discussion by L. Robert, "Un decret d'Ilion et un papyrus concernant des cuItes 
nouveaux," Essays in Honor ofC. Bradford Welles (AmStudPap I, New Haven 1966) 175ff. 

18 I relegate to a footnote the very odd argument of A. Gudeman (RE sv. SATYROS 16) 
that he may have lived in Oxyrhynchus, "wo das grosse Bruchstiick seines Hauptwerkes 
gefunden wurde und wo auch dessen Epitomator Herakleides Lembos lebte (Suidas 
s.v. nennt ihn 'O~vPP"i'X{TTJc), ein seltsames Zusammentreffen, auf das schon Hunt auf­
merksam machte und das noch merkwiirdiger sich gestaltet, wenn Herakleides (nach 
Diog.Laert. v 94 KaAAanavoc ~ 'AA€gavop€tk) obendrein ein Landsman des S. war." None. 
of this creates any probability that Satyrus himself had anything to do with Oxyrhynchus. 

19 W. Cronert, "Herculanensische Bruchstiicke einer Geschichte des Sokrates u. seiner 
Schule," RhM 57 (1902) 295: fr.ll K.; Satyrus 0 Ka,\,\a[nw6c is cited for a detail concerning 
Socrates' death and his disciple Apollodorus. The writer from Callatis is not explicitly 
identified with the Peripatetic, but we know that the latter wrote a life of Socrates (Diog. 



286 SATYRUS: PERIPATETIC OR ALEXANDRIAN? 

on the Black Sea. No doubt this was no place for a man with literary 
ambitions. But there is no reason to suppose that the attraction of 
Alexandria was irresistible, and Satyrus shared many interests with 
writers whose association with the Peripatos is beyond suspicion: the 
burden of proof surely lies with those who would remove him from 
their company. 

ApPENDIX: ON THE TEXT OF FGrHist 631 
Jacoby's text leaves room for improvement. The genealogy begins LhovVcov 

Ka~ • A>'8alac rijc 8EC'Tlov YEYEvfjc8at A7]t&VEtpav· rijc OE Ka~ • HpaKMovc 'TOV Auk 
olp.at "Y>.>.OV. olp.at has no business here; it is absent from V, the primary 
MS., and editors of Theophilus (Otto [1861], Bardy [1948], Grant [1970]) omit 
(or bracket) the word; it is obviously a sarcastic Christian comment, and it is 
reassuring to find that Theophilus was not responsible for its insertion. 

The second part of the extract calls for more thoroughgoing revision. The 
oddity of the feminine forms of the deme-names (' AA87]lc. A7]taVEtplc. 'Aptao­
VTJlc etc.) was noted by Dittenberger in connection with the demotic MapwvEvc 
(OGIS I p.I67f); he proposed a simple solution: "Quod et hic et reliqui omnes 
demi a Satyro enumerati nomina feminini generis in -{c cadentia habere 
videntur, sine dubio ad vocalium confusionem Byzantinam redit; restitue 
igitur MapwvELc itemque 'A>'8atELC A7]tavnpELc 'AptaOVELC 8ECTLELC BOavTELC 
l:'Tac/Jv>'ELc Evav8ELc." Several of these forms in -lc are in fact the product of 
emendation where the MSS. give endings in -EtC or -7]C. The clause '7TaLOOC 
'7TaTpoc/JtAac rijc P.LX8ElC7JC A LOvVCcp Ev p.om '7TPVP.V{OL is an old crux, to which 
P.Oxy. 2465 has provided a solution. Muller realised that this clause must 
refer to another deme, and that there was a lacuna in the text of Theophilus; 
the attempts of more conservative scholars to take the words as a description 
of Ariadne are more ingenious than convincing. The papyrus mentions 
(fr.3 col.ii 13) Bacchis, the founder of the Bacchiad house of Corinth, as son of 
Prymnis, and the context suggests that this is part of an explanation of the 
(otherwise unattested) demotic BaKXLEvc. H. Lloyd-Jones (Gnomon 35 [1963] 
454) accordingly proposed reading here <BaKX7J{c (better BaKXLELc) &'7T0 
BaKXtooc 'TOV> '7TatOOC naTpoc/JtAac rijc P.tX8Elc7]c AtovVccp Ev p.opc/Jfi npvp.v{ooc 
(pape gives two instances of the name Patrophila, Anth.Pal. 7.221, IG XIV 1350; 
the persistence of the Doric form is interesting). Between Staphylus and 

Laert. 2.26, Athen. 5550-556A: fr.9 K.), and the identification is surely beyond reasonable 
doubt; very likely this information came from the opening of Satyrus' work. I am indebted 
to Professor F. Sbordone for an excellent photograph of the papyrus. 



STEPHANIE WEST 287 

'Maron stood the name of another son of Dionysus, badly corrupted in the 
MSS (Evcnvl.c a1To Evvo6c, Evawtcl.c a1To Evv6wc); Muller was surely right to see 
here a reference to Euanthes, who, like Thoas and Staphylus, was a son of 
Ariadne and Dionysus (schol. ad Ap.Rhod. 3.997). 

HERTFORD COLLEGE, OXFORD 

January, 1974