Apollodorus

“ Rufio and Caesar help Apollodorus to cast off the chain from the bale. RUFIO. Haul up.
The chain rises clear of their heads with a rattle. Britannus comes from the lighthouse and helps them to uncord the carpet. APOLLODORUS (when the cords are loose) . Stand off, my friends: let Caesar see. (He throws the carpet open.)
RUFIO. Nothing but a heap of shawls. Where are the pigeons' eggs?
APOLLODORUS. Approach, Caesar; and search for them among the shawls.
RUFIO (drawing his sword) . Ha, treachery! Keep back, Caesar: I saw the shawl move: there is something alive there. ”

“ So far as I am concerned, I am inclined to believe that god is in reality, not the one you have conceived, but indeed the matter he discovered on a certain day, and which the Greeks have styled chaos. You are mistaken in your belief that matter is inert. It is ever in motion, and its perpetual activity keeps life a-going throughout the universe."
Thus spake the philosopher Apollodorus. Gallio, who had listened to his speech with some degree of impatience, denied that he had fallen a victim to the mistakes and contradictions with which the Greek charged him. ”

“ XLIX. Kleopatra, [550] taking Apollodorus the Sicilian alone of all her friends with her, and getting into a small boat, [Pg 435] approached the palace as it was growing dark; and as it was impossible for her to escape notice in any other way, she got into a bed sack and laid herself out at full length, and Apollodorus, tying the sack together with a cord, carried her through the doors to Cæsar. ”

“ But perhaps the loves of the gods owe their origin to the mendacity of the poets."
Apollodorus persisted in his assertion that the reign of Jupiter would some day cease, supporting his opinion with subtile reasons. He prophesied that Prometheus would succeed the son of Saturn.
"Prometheus," replied Gallio, "was set free by Hercules with the consent of Jupiter, and he enjoys in Olympus the happiness he owes to his foresight and to his love of mankind. Nothing will ever happen to change his happy fate." ”

“ So they say that one time Apollodorus in a dream saw himself flayed by the Scythians, and then boiled, and that his heart out of the caldron spoke to him in a low voice and said, "I am the cause of this;" and at another time he dreamed that he saw his daughters running round him in a circle all on fire and in flames. And Hipparchus the son of Pisistratus, a little before his death, dreamt that Aphrodite threw some blood on his face out of a certain phial. ”

“ He was exposed as soon as born on mount Parthenius, but his life was preserved by a goat, and by some shepherds. According to Apollodorus, he was exposed, not on a mountain, but in the temple of Minerva, at Tegea, or, according to a tradition mentioned by Pausanias, he was left to the mercy of the waves with his mother, by the cruelty of Aleus, and carried by the winds to the mouth of the Caycus, where he was found by Teuthras the king of the country, who married, or rather adopted as his daughter, Auge, and educated her son. ”

“ The bodies of the gods, Apollodorus, are not any more exempt from injury than their dwellings. If it be true, as Homer teaches, that the gods, inhabitants of Olympus, impregnate the flanks of goddesses and mortal women, it is assuredly because they are not themselves immortal, in spite of their life’s span being greater than that of mankind, and hence it is patent that fate subjects them to the necessity of transmitting a life which they may not enjoy for ever. ”

“ Any one may well entertain such questions as these touching the localities mentioned by the poet [Homer] , and with regard to the Mysians and the illustrious Hippemolgi: but what Apollodorus has advanced in his preface to the Catalogue of Ships in the Second Book [of the Iliad] is by no means to be adopted. ”

“ He mentions the Aleian plain, and the Arimi mountains, but not the nation among which these are situated.
The argument drawn from this is false; the true argument would have been to show that the poet has asserted what is not true. Apollodorus has not succeeded in this attempt, and he has more particularly failed when he ventures to call by the name of fiction “the renowned Hippemolgi and Galactophagi.”1184 So much then in reply to Apollodorus. ”

“ All these very early productions, however, were in outline only, and it was not until Apollodorus, the Athenian, established a school for painting, about 400 years before our era, that the distribution of light and shade became a recognised principle of the art. Apollodorus was the first man who contributed to the glory of painting, and before he appeared there were no productions of the easel worthy to be call works of art. ”

“ And Apollodorus, in his treatise on Beasts, says—"There is the chamæpitys, or ground pine, which some call olocyrum, but the Athenians call it Ionia, and the Eubœans sideritis." And Nicander, in the second book of his Georgics, (the words themselves I will quote hereafter, when I thoroughly discuss all the flowers fit for making into garlands,) says—"The violet (ἴον) was originally given by some Ionian nymphs to Ion." ”

“ Art under Polygnotus was, however, in a state of formal "parallelism;" certainly it could boast no variety of composition. Apollodorus "applied the essential principles of Polygnotus to the delineation of the species, by investigating the leading forms that discriminate the various classes of human qualities and passions." He saw that all men were connected together by one general form, yet were separated by some predominant power into classes ”

“ There are writers who trace the origin and progress of Greek painting from the very earliest times; but I shall begin with Apollodorus, who is spoken of as the first Greek [Pg 14] painter worthy of fame, because he was the first one who knew how to make his pictures appear to be real, and to follow the rules of perspective so as to have a background from which his figures stood out, and to shade his colors and soften his outlines. He was very famous, and was called skiagraphos, which means shadow painter. ”

“ Apollodorus says:—"Cresphontes had not reigned long in Messenia when he was murdered, together with two of his sons. And Polyphontes reigned in his stead, he, too, being of the family of Hercules; and he had for his wife, against her will, Merope, the widow of the murdered king. ”

“ There was no real, but only apparent, motion. Moreover he said that we ought not to make any statements about the gods, for it was impossible to have knowledge of them.
According to Apollodorus, he flourished in the 84th Olympiad. ”

“ Pears upon pear-trees grow; on fig-trees, figs.
Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says that he was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth olympiad, and that he attached himself to Plato, and remained with him for twenty years, having been seventeen years of age when he originally joined him. And he went to Mitylene in the archonship of Eubulus, in the fourth year of the hundred and eighth olympiad. But as Plato had died in the first year of this same olympiad, in the archonship of Theophilus, he departed for the court of Hermias, and remained there three years. ”

“ The sculptor Apollodorus, who is thus beholden to me, has been living here for the last six months with his wife and daughters, for he has been executing for Philometor the busts of the philosophers, and the animal groups to decorate the open space in front of the tomb of Apis. His sons are managers of his large factory in Alexandria, and when he next goes there, down the Nile in his boat, as often happens, he can take Irene with him, and put her on board a ship. ”

“ She was beloved of Apollo, who promised to bestow on her the spirit of prophecy if she would comply with his desires. Cassandra accepted the proposal; but no sooner had she obtained the gift than she laughed at the tempter, and refused to fulfil her promise. Apollo revenged himself by ordaining that her predictions should be discredited (Apollodorus iii. 12. 5) ”

“ That they were men, the most learned of the Egyptians also testify, who, while saying that ether, earth, sun, moon, are gods, regard the rest as mortal men, and the temples as their sepulchres. Apollodorus, too, asserts the same thing in his treatise concerning the gods. But Herodotus calls even their sufferings mysteries. “The ceremonies at the feast of Isis in the city of Busiris have been already spoken of. ”

“ APOLLODORUS, an Athenian grammarian, pupil of Aristarchus and Panaetius the Stoic, who lived about 140 B.C. He was a prolific and versatile writer. There is extant under his name a treatise on the gods and the heroic age, entitled Βιβλιοθἠκη, a valuable authority on ancient mythology. Modern critics are of opinion that, if genuine, it is an abridgment of a larger work by him (Περὶ θεῶν) .
Edition, with commentary, by Heyne (1803) ”

“ Apollodorus.――A daughter of Oceanus, sister to Caanthus. She became mother of Ismarus and Tenerus by Apollo. Tenerus was endowed with the gift of prophecy, and the river Ladon in Bœtia assumed the name of Ismarus. Pausanias, bk. 9, ch. 10.――One of the Nereides.――A daughter of Agenor.
Mĕlĭbœa, a daughter of Oceanus, who married Pelasgus.――A daughter of Amphion and Niobe. Apollodorus.――A maritime town of Magnesia in Thessaly, at the foot of mount Ossa, famous for dyeing wool. The epithet of Melibœus is applied to Philoctetes, because he reigned there. Virgil, Æneid, bk. 3, li. 401; bk. ”

“ Half doubtful as to the meaning of the oracle, they throw behind them stones, which are immediately changed into men and women, and the earth spontaneously produces the rest of the animal creation. [15]
Apollodorus relates the matter thus:—"When Zeus determined to destroy the brazen race, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, made a great ark, λάρναξ, and put into it all necessary things, and entered it with Pyrrha. Zeus then, pouring down heavy rains from heaven, overwhelmed the greater part of Greece, so that all men perished except a few who fled to the highest mountains. ”

“ Apollodorus of Athens, son of Asclepiades, who wrote in stiff, quaint Greek about 120 B.C., gives in his 'Bibliotheca' (book ii. chapter 5, section 2) the following account of the many-headed monster. "This Hydra," he says, "nourished in the marshes of Lerne, went forth into the open country and destroyed the herds of the land. It had a huge body and nine heads, eight mortal, but the ninth immortal. Having mounted his chariot, which was driven by Iolaus, Hercules got to Lerne and stopped his horses. ”

“ Apollodorus is said to have bound his associates in some movement for his own aggrandizement by bringing them together at a festival, and at its close giving them evidence that they had been feeding on human victims.
[33:1] Glaucus, a Lacedaemonian, had a high reputation for integrity, and on the ground of it received from a foreigner a deposit of a large sum of money. When the owner’s sons claimed the deposit, he disclaimed all knowledge of it. But a threat of the Delphian oracle led him to make restitution afterward. Nevertheless the threat took effect, and he and his whole family perished. ”

“ Apollodorus, the architect, who was employed by the emperor Trajan in constructing the celebrated bridge over the Danube, and erecting some large works at Rome, and who was put to death by his successor Adrian, out of revenge for a jeering answer which he received from him, as we are told by Dio Cassius, describes in the fragment of his book on warlike machines, how assistance may be given when the upper part of a building is on fire, and the machine called sipho is not at hand. ”

“ Now from the Trojan war to the birth of Homer, according to Philochorus, a hundred and eighty years elapsed; and he was posterior to the Ionic migration. But Aristarchus, in the Archilochian Memoirs, says that he lived during the Ionic migration, which took place a hundred and twenty years after the siege of Troy. But Apollodorus alleges it was an hundred and twenty years after the Ionic migration, while Agesilaus son of Doryssæus was king of the Lacedæmonians: so that he brings Lycurgus the legislator, while still a young man, near him. ”

“ He assumed the habit of Diana to corrupt Callisto, and became Amphitryon to gain the affections of Alcmena. His children were also numerous as well as his mistresses. According to Apollodorus, bk. 1, ch. 3, he was father of the Seasons, Irene, Eunomia, the Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos by Themis; of Venus by Dione; of the Graces, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, by Eurynome the daughter of Oceanus; of Proserpine by Styx; of the nine muses by Mnemosyne, &c. See: Niobe, Laodamia, Pyrrha, Protogenia, Electra, Maia, Semele, &c. The worship of Jupiter was universal ”

“ He offered his daughter to him who shot a bow better than himself. Hercules conquered him, and put him to death because he refused him his daughter as the prize of his victory. Apollodorus, bk. 2, chs. 4 & 7.――A son of Actor, concerned in the wars between Augias and Hercules, and killed by the hero.――A son of Augias, killed by Hercules as he was going to Corinth to celebrate the Isthmian games. Apollodorus.――A person killed in hunting the Calydonian boar.――A son of Hippocoon. Apollodorus, bk. 3, ch. 10.――A giant killed by Hercules or Bacchus for making war against the gods. ”

“ We see in the Iliad how, when angry with the Greeks, the "god of the silver bow" strode down from Olympus, with his quiver full of death-bringing darts, and sent a raging pestilence into their camp. For nine days he let fly his fatal arrows, first on animals and then on men, till the air became darkened with the smoke from the funeral pyres.
In his character as god of light, Phœbus-Apollo is the protecting deity of shepherds, because it is he who warms [71] the fields and meadows, and gives rich pastures to the flocks, thereby gladdening the heart of the herdsman. ”