Asclepiades of Tragilus

Asclepiades of Tragilus (Greek: Ἀσκληπιάδης) was an ancient Greek literary critic and mythographer of the 4th century BC, and a student of the Athenian orator Isocrates.[1] His works do not survive, but he is known to have written the Tragodoumena (Τραγῳδούμενα, "The Subjects of Tragedy"),[2] in which he discussed the treatment of myths in Greek tragedy. The Tragodoumena is sometimes considered the first systematic mythography.[3] Asclepiades summarized the plots of myths as dramatized in tragedy, and provided details and variants.[4] He is one of the authors (= FGrHist 12) whose fragments were collected in Felix Jacoby's Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. He is cited twice in the work traditionally known as the Library of Apollodorus.[5]

A gloss on Vergil's phrase Idaeis cyparissis ("cypresses of Ida") mentions that Asclepiades preserved a Celtic version of the myth of Cyparissus, in which a female Cyparissa is the daughter of a Celtic king named Boreas.[6]

  1. ^ Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, translated by Cornelis de Heer and James Willis (Methuen, 1966, originally published 1957 in German), p. 667.
  2. ^ Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 12.
  3. ^ Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction, translated by Thomas Marier (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, originally published 1987 in German), p. 193.
  4. ^ Graf (1993), Greek Mythology, p. 193.
  5. ^ R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology (Hackett, 2007), p. xxii.
  6. ^ Timothy P. Bridgman, Hyperboreans: Myth and History in Celtic-Hellenic Contacts (Routledge, 2005), p. 51.