Новая история Птолемея Хенна (Phot. Bibl.190)
Ptolemy Chennus’ Novel History (Phot. Bibl. 190)

Summary/Abstract: Ptolemy Chennus is a poorly known Roman author who wrote in Greek and lived in the late 1st — beginning of 2nd century AD. His works are enumerated in the corresponding article from the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda: a collection of Paradoxical stories, a historical drama Sphinx, and an epic entitled Anthomerus; his only extant work is the Novel History, probably another title of Ptolemy’s aforementioned paradoxographical collection, which has been preserved as an epitome in the Bibliotheca of Patriarch Photius (c. 810/820–893). By his professional pursuits, apparently initiated in his native Alexandria, Ptolemy is defined as grammaticus, i.e. classical scholar, and the classics in his time were centered primarily on Homer; the tendency to thwart this great authority is evident throughout the Novel History which is teeming with a mass of blatantly unorthodox versions of various mythological stories going back to Homer. It is this unorthodoxy that the compiler of the epitome finds attractive, though unfortunately a mere summary forestalls the possibility to savour the presumed stylistic complexity of the work, as well as to form a well-grounded judgement on how serious was its author’s attitude to the fibs he tells, or on how close these fanciful rehashes came to a deliberate parody; still, it almost seems certain that the original text was truly rich in playfulness, irony, and burgeoning imagination. The publication presents the first full Russian translation of the work, accompanied with sufficiently detailed commentary, paying special attention to Eustathius’ of Thessalonica (c. 1115–1195/6) Commentaria to Homeric poems, the only literary source where some few parallels to the wildly unconventional data provided by Ptolemy may be found.

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