Library › Greek: History › Historical Parallels (Fragments)
Myronianus of Amastris is known only as the author of a compilation called Historical Parallels, or Similar Historical Chapters, which is lost. Little is known of his life, though he wrote before Diogenes Laertius, whose Lives of the Philosophers preserves all six surviving extracts. They report anecdotes about Epimenides, Plato, Xenocrates, Theophrastus and Epicurus, such as Xenocrates refusing a gift from Antipater, and his rescue by Demetrius of Phalerum when the Athenians sold him for failing to pay the resident-alien tax.
The fragments show the kind of anecdotal collection on which later biographers of the philosophers relied. They give a glimpse of the ancient taste for grouping parallel stories and of the sources behind Diogenes Laertius, one of our main guides to the lives of Greek thinkers.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FHG IV pp. 454–455). 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).