November 12, 2023
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PAGE SPONSOR		 Aristophanes (Greek: Ἀριστοφάνης) of Byzantium (c. 257 BC - c. 185-180 BC) was a Greek scholar, critic and grammarian, particularly renowned for his work in Homeric scholarship, but also for work on other classical authors such as Pindar and Hesiod. Born in Byzantium about 257 BC, he soon moved to Alexandria and studied under Zenodotus, Callimachus and Dionysius Iambus. He succeeded Eratosthenes as head librarian of the Library of Alexandria at the age of sixty.

Aristophanes was the first to deny that the Precepts of Chiron was the work of Hesiod.

Aristophanes is credited with the invention of the accent system used in Greek to designate pronunciation, as the tonal, pitched system of archaic and classical Greek was giving way (or had given way) to the stress based system of koine. This was also a period when Greek, in the wake of Alexander's conquests, was beginning to act as a lingua franca for the Eastern Mediterranean (replacing various Semitic languages). The accents were designed to assist in the pronunciation of Greek in older literary works.

He also invented one of the first forms of punctuation in the 3rd century BC; single dots (distinctiones) that separated verses (colometry), and indicated the amount of breath needed to complete each fragment of text when reading aloud (not to comply with rules of grammar, which were not applied to punctuation marks until thousands of years later). For a short passage (a komma), a media distinctio dot was placed mid level (·). This is the origin of the modern comma punctuation mark, and its name. For a longer passage (a colon), a subdistinctio dot was placed level with the bottom of the text (.), similar to a modern colon or semicolon, and for very long pauses (periodos), a distinctio point near the top of the line of text (·).

As a lexicographer he compiled collections of archaic and unusual words. He died in Alexandria around 185 - 180 BC. His students included Callistratus, Aristarchus of Samothrace and, perhaps, Agallis.

Aristarchus of Samothrace (Ἀρίσταρχος, 220? - 143 BC?) was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.

He established the most historically important critical edition of the Homeric poems, and he is said to have applied his teacher's accent system to it, pointing the texts with a careful eye for metrical correctness. His rejection of doubtful lines made his severity proverbial. It is likely that he, or more probably, another predecessor at Alexandria, Zenodotus, was responsible for the division of the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty - four books each. According to the Suda, Aristarchus wrote 800 treatises (ὑπομνήματα) on various topics; these are all lost but for fragments preserved in the various scholia.

Accounts of his death vary, though they agree that it was during the persecutions of Ptolemy VIII of Egypt. One account has him, having contracted an incurable dropsy, starving himself to death while in exile on Cyprus.

The historical connection of his name to literary criticism has created the term aristarch for someone who is a judgmental critic.