Surprisingly little is known about Apollonius Rhodius, the author of Argonautica, the third greatest epic poem from ancient Greece. We have no firm dates for his birth or death. What little information we have about his life comes almost exclusively from four sources: a second-century CE papyrus fragment (Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1241) containing a list of librarians at the Ptolemaic library; two brief “lives” preserved in manuscripts of the Argonautica; and a brief entry in the Suda, a tenth-century CE Byzantine lexicon. From these meager and often contradictory accounts, we can establish with some probability that Apollonius was originally from Alexandria, that he spent some time in Rhodes, that he was a

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First published 23 March 2009

Citation: Race, William. "Apollonius of Rhodes". The Literary Encyclopedia. 23 March 2009.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=130, accessed 21 November 2009.]