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These fragments survive from the writings of Callinicus of Petra, a Greek sophist who taught at Athens in the third century AD, under the emperor Gallienus. The first is an excerpt from his work On the Ancestral Traditions of Rome, a speech in praise of Rome and its empire. The second is a Latin passage from Jerome's Commentary on Daniel on the war between Antiochus IV and the Ptolemies, which Porphyry took from Callinicus.
The praise of Rome is a rare surviving sample of third-century Greek oratory and its views of Roman rule. Jerome's notice shows that Porphyry drew on Callinicus's historical writing in his critique of the Book of Daniel, which brought it into one of the major debates between pagan and Christian scholars.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 281 F 1–2). 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).