Library › Greek: Geography & Travel › Aethiopica (Fragments)
Aethiopica (Fragments) gathers the few surviving traces of a work on Ethiopia by Aristocreon, a geographer of the third century BC who may be the Aristocreon known as a nephew of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. The work is lost and survives only in Pliny the Elder and Aelian. The fragments give distances along the Nile, from Elephantine to the sea and beyond Meroe, mention a settlement of Egyptians who fled from Psammetichus, and report an Ethiopian people ruled by a dog.
Aristocreon was one of several Hellenistic writers who described the Nile valley and the lands beyond Egypt. His measurements were used by Pliny, and his story of a dog-king reached Aelian through the biographer Hermippus. The fragments show how geography and wonder-lore were mixed in Greek writing on Africa.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FHG IV p. 334). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).