Duane W. Roller

in the third century b.c. His major treatise—Pyrrhoneian Arguments,
outlining the ideas of the founder of Scepticism, Pyrrhon—was dedicated
to L. Aelius Tubero, probably the friend and relative of Cicero,
demonstrative of the infl uence of Alexandrian philosophy in late
Republican Rome. 8
Th ere was also an emphasis on philology and its associated subjects
such as grammar and lexicography. Th e most important scholar in this
fi eld was Didymos of Alexandria, known as “Chalkenteros” (“Brazen
Innards”) because of the fortitude and industriousness that allowed him
to be such a prolifi c scholar. 9 He was said to have written nearly 4,000
books on many disciplines, including Homeric scholarship, lexicography,
medical language, oratory, and grammar. He compiled commentaries
on Archaic and Classical authors. In many ways he was more a
collector of past scholarship than an original thinker, and his work was
widely used in later times, with many fragments surviving. Th e extant
biographical summary of his career records that he lived “from the era
of Antonius and Cicero to that of Augustus,” not mentioning Cleopatra
specifi cally, but curiously his scholarship was compared to that of her
son-in-law Juba II.
Other philologists of the era were Tryphon, a follower or student of
Didymos, also a prolifi c grammarian and lexicographer, 10 and Th eon,
whose noteworthy contribution was to write the fi rst commentaries
on Hellenistic poets, such as Kallimachos and Th eokritos, the basis of
the extant later scholia on these authors. 11 Th eon’s father, Artemidoros,
was from Tarsos and a student of Aristophanes of Byzantion, himself
a student of the great polymath Eratosthenes, who was Librarian in
the third century b.c., thus providing an intriguing unbroken chain of
scholarship over 200 years from the greatest days of Alexandria to the
end of the Ptolemaic dynasty and (through Th eon’s students) well into
the Roman period. Antonius, when he had his headquarters in Tarsos in
41 b.c., may have given support to the family. Students of both Tryphon
and Th eon were active in Julio-Claudian Rome: Th eon was the teacher
of Apion, the nemesis of Josephus, immortalized in the latter’s polemic
Against Apion. 12
Research in the sciences seems to have been minimal. Th ere are only
hints of contemporary activities in these areas, since aft er the expulsions
by Ptolemy VIII, the scientifi c disciplines never recovered in Alexandria,
and Rhodes, which supported both Hipparchos and Poseidonios, became
the new center. Eudoros and Ariston, polymathic products of the school
Scholarship and Culture 125