ABSTRACT
Much ink has been spilt over the character of Phaenias’ works of which some fragments of historical and biographical content have been preserved. What has puzzled scholars most is the role these works may have played in the early history of Greek biography. But given the small number of fragments preserved and the ambivalent character of their book titles, without a papyrus find or a similar wonder, we will probably never find out whether these works were biographies in a strict sense, philosophical or historical works in which biographical aspects also played a certain role, collections of anecdotes or some other kind of collections of information around certain topics. The works of Phaenias that fall into this category are: On Poets, On the Socratics, On the Tyrants of Sicily, Killings of Tyrants for Revenge (here one could at the most think of partial bio-graphies) and Against the Sophists. 1 No less problematic are several fragments on Solon and Themistocles that have to a large extent been preserved by the relevant Lives of Plutarch without indication of the 202book title. Already Leo noted that “at least Themistocles, the strongest personality of the older Attic history and already privileged by Thucydides, was dealt with in a wholly biographical manner (scil. by Phaenias).” 2 However, Leo avoids expressing himself about the provenance of these texts. Momigliano speaks of “fine specimens of biographical style,” but then closes his discussion of Phaenias’ position in the history of early biography with the words: “In the present state of our knowledge it would be absurd to deny altogether that Phaenias wrote biographies; but it is a waste of time to try to guess what sort of biography Phaenias may have written, since we cannot be certain that there even was biography by Phaenias.” 3 That is undoubtedly correct. But what we can do is study Phaenias’ book titles and biographical and historical fragments in the context of biographical and historical literature. That is what I intend to do with a focus on the biographical aspects. The questions I want to ask are: Who wrote works with identical or similar titles and what can we learn about the Peripatetic by comparing their contents with the remains of Phaenias’ works? How does the information in Phaenias relate to other traditions on the same events and persons, and what can we infer from these relationships about the distinctive characteristics and tendencies of our author’s works? One problem is, however, that many of the relevant works are preserved in fragments as well, so their interpretation relies in part equally on hypotheses. In addition, I want to examine the reliability of Phaenias and, in connection with that, the role philosophy may have played in his biographical and historical presentations. To Leo Phaenias was a “scholar to whom authentic material and detecting the truth did matter,” 4 whereas to Laqueur Phaenias’ Life of Themistocles (whose existence he takes for granted) was “a treatise on φιλοτιμία, exemplified by one person” and full of inventions. 5 And until recently it was generally assumed that in Killings of Tyrants for Revenge Phaenias wanted to illustrate a theory contained 203in Aristotle’s Politics by historical examples. 6 So one may ask whether philosophical aims had an impact on what he narrated and if they led to distortions or even pure inventions.
