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Dionysius Periegetes

Dionysius Periegetes

c. 90 CE–c. 140 CE · Alexandria

Dionysius Periegetes ('the traveler/guide') was a Greek poet, generally dated to the early 2nd century CE under the emperor Hadrian, often connected with Alexandria. He wrote a 'Description of the Known World,' a verse geography of the inhabited world that became a widely used school text and was translated into Latin. His personal life is essentially unknown.

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AlexandriaEgypt

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Alexandria

Alexandria (al-Iskandariyya) is the great Mediterranean port-city of northern Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE and a leading centre of learning in antiquity. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt (642) it remained a major commercial and scholarly hub; the Shadhili Sufi Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari (d. 1309) took his nisba from the city, and the modernist reformer Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) was active in Egypt's intellectual life there and in Cairo.

In Alexandria at the same time

Aretaeus of Cappadocia, Appian of Alexandria, Claudius Ptolemaeus, Harpocration, Achilles Tatius, Apollonius Dyscolus

Across the traditions, in Alexandria at the same time

See other sages who lived in Alexandria→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Dionysius Periegetes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Dionysius Periegetes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(1)