Hecateus Abderitas

:''See Hecataeus of Miletus for the earlier historian.''

Hecataeus of Abdera or of Teos ( el, Ἑκαταῖος ὁ Ἀβδηρίτης), was a Greek historian and Pyrrhonist philosopher who flourished in the 4th century BC.

Life

Diogenes Laërtius (ix.61) relates that he was a student of Pyrrho, along with Timon of Phlius and Nausiphanes of Teos, and includes him among the Pyrrhoneans. Diodorus Siculus (i.46.8) tells us that Hecataeus visited Thebes in the times of Ptolemy I Soter, and composed a history of Egypt. Diodorus supplies the comment that many additional Greeks went to and wrote about Egypt in the same period. The '' Suda'' gives him the nickname, 'critic grammarian' and says that he lived in the time of the successors to Alexander.

Works

No complete works of Hecataeus have survived, and our knowledge of his writing exists only in fragments located in various ancient Greek and Latin authors' works. Fourteen fragments survive, most of which concern religion. Eight fragments are from his book about the Hyperboreans, the fabulous people of the far north who reflect the Indian traditions about Uttarakuru. Six fragments survive from his ''Aegyptiaca'' and regard Egyptian philosophy, priests, gods, sanctuaries, Moses, wine, and which makes mention of Clearchus and the gymnosophists.

Diodorus Siculus, whose ethnography of Egypt ('' Bibliotheca historica,'' Book I) represents by far the largest number of fragments. Diodorus mostly paraphrases Hecataeus, thus it is difficult to extract Hecataeus' actual writings. (as in Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Müller's ''Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum'').

Hecataeus wrote the work ''Aegyptiaca'' or ''On the Egyptians'' (the same title of Manetho's later work), both suggestions are based on known titles of other ethnographic works, an account of Egypt's customs, beliefs and geography, and the single largest fragment from this lost work is held to be Diodorus' account of the Ramesseum, tomb of Osymandyas (i.47-50).

Diodorus (ii.47.1-2) and Apollonius of Rhodes tell of another work by Hecataeus, ''On the Hyperboreans''.

Clement of Alexandria ('' Stromata'' 5.113) cites a work titled "On Abraham and the Egyptians". According to Clement, Hecataeus was the source for verses of Sophocles that praise monotheism and condemn idolatry.R. Doran, ''Pseudo-Hecataeus (Second Century B.C.-First Century A.D.). A New Translation and Introduction'', in James H. Charlesworth (1985), ''The Old Testament Pseudoepigrapha'', Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company Inc., Volume 2, (Vol. 1), (Vol. 2), p. 906 The major fragment explicitly attributed to Hecataeus in Jewish and Christian literature is found in Josephus (''Apion'' 1.183-205) in which Josephus argues that learned Greeks (''Apion'' 1.175) and Aristotle (''Apion'' 1.176-82) admired the Jews.

According to the '' Suda'', the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia, he wrote a treatise on the poetry of Hesiod and Homer, but nothing of them has survived.

His digression on the Jews in ''Aegyptiaca'' was the first mention of them in Greek literature. It was subsequently paraphrased in Diodorus Siculus 40.3.8. A work attributed to him by Josephus ''On the Jews'' has been considered spurious by some. However Pucci Ben Zeev, in surveying scholarship on this matter, finds reasons to grant core elements of authenticity in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary.Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev "The Reliability of Josephus Flavius: The Case of Hecateus' and Manentho's Accounts of Jews and Judaism: Fifteen years of contemporary research (1974-1990) Journal for the Studies of Judaism 24 no2. December 1993

References

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External links

Fragments of Hecataeus
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Hecataeus, Abdera
Hellenistic-era historians
Hellenistic-era philosophers
Abderites
4th-century BC philosophers
4th-century BC historians
Ancient Greeks in Egypt
Ancient Skeptic philosophers
Year of birth unknown
Year of death unknown
Pyrrhonism
Ancient Greek epistemologists