Callisthenes of Olynthus (in Greek Καλλισθένης; ca.
360-328 BC) was a Greek
historian. He was the son of Hero and Proxenus of Atarneus, which made him the great nephew of Aristotle by his sister Arimneste. They first met when Aristotle tutored
Alexander the Great. Through his uncle's influence, he was later appointed to attend
Alexander the Great in his Asiatic expedition as a professional historian.
He censured Alexander's adoption of oriental customs, inveighing especially against the servile ceremony of proskynesis. Having thereby greatly offended the king, he was accused of being privy to a treasonable
conspiracy and thrown into prison, where he died from torture or disease. His melancholic end was commemorated in a special
treatise (Callisthenes or a Treatise on Grief) by his friend Theophrastus, whose
acquaintance he made during a visit to Athens.
Callisthenes wrote an account of Alexander's expedition, a history of Greece from the Peace of Antalcidas (387) to the Phocian war (357), a history of the Phocian war and other works,
all of which have perished.
A quantity of the more legendary material coalesced into a text known as the Alexander
Romance, the basis of all the Alexander legends of the Middle Ages, originated during the time of the Ptolemies, but in its present form belongs to the 3rd century AD.
Its author is usually known as pseudo-Callisthenes, although in the Latin translation by Julius
Valerius Alexander Polemius (beginning of the 4th century) it is ascribed to a
certain Aesopus; Aristotle, Antisthenes, Onesicritus and Arrian have also been credited with the
authorship.
There are also Syrian, Armenian and Slavonic versions, in addition to four Greek
versions (two in prose and two in verse) in the Middle Ages (see Krumbacher,
Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, 1897, p. 849). Valerius's translation was
completely superseded by that of Leo, arch-priest of Naples in the 10th century, the
so-called Historia de Preliis.
References
See Scriptores rerum Alexandri Magni (by C. W. Müller, in the Didot edition of Arrian, 1846), containing the genuine fragments and the text of the
pseudo-Callisthenes, with notes and introduction; A. Westermann, De Callisthene
Olynthio et Pseudo-Callisthene Commentatio (1838-1842); J. Zacher, Pseudo-Callisthenes
(1867); W. Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur (1898), pp. 363, 819; article by
Edward Meyer in Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyklopädie; A. Ausfeld, Zur
Kritik des griechischen Alexanderromans (Bruchsal, 1894); Plutarch, Alexander,
52-55; Arrian, Anab. iv. 10-14; Diog. Laertius v. 1; Quintus Curtius viii. 5-8; Suda s.v.
External links
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