Author Alciphron

best times in familiar but re­fined conversation at Athens. The city from which the letters are dated is, with a few exceptions, Athens and its vicinity; and the time, wherever it is discernible, is the period after the reign of Alexander the Great. The new Attic comedy was the principal source from which the author de­rived his information respecting the characters and manners which he describes, and for this reason these letters contain much valuable information about the private life of the Athenians of that time. It has been said that Alciphron was an imitator of Lucian; but besides the style, and, in a few in­stances, the subject matter, there is no resemblance between the two writers: the spirit in which the two treat their subjects is totally different. Both derived their materials from the same sources, and in style both aimed at the greatest perfection of the genuine Attic Greek. Classical scholar Stephan Bergler has remarked that Alciphron stands in the same relation to Menander as Lucian to Aristophanes.[1] Some earlier critics placed him, without any plausible reason, in the 5th century. The classical scholar Stephan Bergler, and others who followed him, placed Alciphron in the period between Lucian and Aristaenetus, that is, between 170 and 350, while others again assign to him a date even earlier than the time of Lucian. The only circumstance that suggests anything respecting his age is the fact that among the letters of Aristaenetus there are two between Lucian and Alciphron;[2] now as Aristaenetus is nowhere guilty of any great historical inaccuracy, we may safely infer that Alciphron was a contemporary of Lucian--an infe­rence which is not incompatible with the opinion, whether true or false, that Alciphron imitated Lucian.[1] The first edition of Alciphron's letters is that of Italian printer Aldus Manutius, in his collection of the Greek Epistolographers, Venice, 1499, 4to. This edition, however, contains only those letters which, in more modern editions, form the first two books. Seventy-two new letters were added from a Vienna and a Vatican manuscript by Stephan Bergler, in his edition (Leipzig, 1715, 8vo.) with notes and a Latin translation. These seventy-two epistles form the third book in Bergler's edition. J. A. Wagner, in his edition (Leipzig, 1798, 2 vols, 8vo.), with the notes of Bergler), added two new letters entire, and fragments of five others. One long letter, which as of the 19th century had not been published entire in English, exists in several Paris manuscripts.[1] This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1870). This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.