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These are the ancient testimonies about Rhianus, the Hellenistic epic poet, as collected by Felix Jacoby. The Suda records that he came from Bene in Crete, though others made him a native of Ceraea or of Ithome in Messenia; that he was once a slave and the guard of a wrestling school before being educated and becoming a grammarian; that he was a contemporary of Eratosthenes; and that he wrote a Heracleia. Other notices come from Stephanus of Byzantium, Athenaeus, Meleager and Suetonius.
Brief as they are, these notices outline a remarkable career, from slavery to literary distinction. They also show his lasting reputation: Meleager placed him in his Garland of epigrammatists, and Suetonius reports that the emperor Tiberius imitated his poetry and set up his works and portrait in the public libraries among the classic authors.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 265 T 1–3). 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).