Odysseus [attributed]
Athens
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Alcidamas
Alcidamas
c. 435 BCE–c. 360 BCE · Athens
Alcidamas (c. 435 – c. 360 BCE) was a Greek rhetorician and sophist from Elaea in Aeolis (western Asia Minor). A pupil and successor of Gorgias, he taught at Athens, where he was a rival of Isocrates. His surviving declamation On the Sophists (Peri Sophiston), composed in the first half of the 4th century BCE, argues for the superiority of extemporaneous speaking over the composition of written speeches and criticizes reliance on prepared texts. He is also associated with the Mouseion, the source from which much of the contest narrative known as the Certamen of Homer and Hesiod is thought to derive; a papyrus subscription bearing "Alcidamas' narrative" supports the attribution.
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AthensAttica (Greece)
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About Athens
The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.
In Athens at the same time
Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Alcidamas’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias, Antisthenes, Aristophanes, Lysias, Andocides, Isocrates, Xenophon, Plato
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Alcidamas’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Jewish world
Buddhist world
Works(2)
Peri Sophiston
Athens