Aristarchus of Samothrace (Aristarchos)

Aristarchus of Samothrace, Aristarchos, 216-144 gg. BC, Greek scholar. Lived and worked in Alexandria, where he was student of Aristophanes of Byzantium, later the same (but not immediately after the death of Aristophanes) became the head of the Alexandria Library. Banished from Alexandria in 145 g. Ptolemy VIII Bithynia, died in Cyprus. - A. gained enormous prestige thanks to the work, we investigate and restore the original appearance of poetic texts, especially Homer. To restore the text, conducted an exhaustive analysis of the manuscripts available to him: he improved inherited from predecessors (Zenodota and Aristophanes) system of criteria by adding new.

A. believed that Homer should be explained on the basis of himself. Probably, . it prepares its own edition of Homer, . and - perhaps - as other poets, . but unlike his predecessors, he took up in the first place the creation of extensive comments and monographs on individual authors, . Lyrics (Archilochus, . Alkee, . Anacreon, . Pindar) and dramatist (Aeschylus, . Sophocles, . Euripides, . Aristophanes),
. He is also the first dedicated study of Herodotus, and then the other Greek prose writers. For the interpretation of texts widely used by Aristophanes of Byzantium inherited the principle of analogy, that led him to a heated debate with supporters of the anomalies (Crates). A. formulate some general rules of dramaturgy and identified 8 parts of speech, this work continued by his disciple Dionysius Truck. Student B. was and Apollodorus of Athens. Slava A. existed for many centuries, and his name became synonymous with the literary critic. None of the works of A. not survived, although how in the oldest manuscripts of the Iliad (the so-called Venetus A. X century) contains extracts from the commentary A. to Homer.