Library › Greek: Philosophy › Testimonia
Boidas was a philosopher of whom almost nothing is known, and none of his writings survive. This page presents the single ancient testimony about him, a scholion on Aristophanes' Clouds. It reports that a poet named Diphilus wrote an entire poem against Boidas the philosopher, and uses this to argue that comic attacks on philosophers did not necessarily reflect personal hostility.
The testimony is interesting chiefly for what it shows about the relation between comic poets and philosophers. The scholiast cites it in discussing Aristophanes' treatment of Socrates in the Clouds, contrasting a whole poem aimed at Boidas with Eupolis' brief mentions of Socrates. It also preserves the name of a thinker otherwise forgotten.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: DK 34). 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).