Peisander of Camirus in Rhodes

Rhodes

Rhodes is an island in Greece, located in the eastern Aegean Sea. It is the largest of the Dodecanese islands in terms of both land area and population, with a population of 117,007, and also the island group's historical capital. Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within...

, Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 epic poet, supposed to have flourished about 640 BC.

He was the author of a Heracleia - Ἡράκλεια, in which he introduced a new conception of the hero Heracles

Heracles

Heracles ,born Alcaeus or Alcides , was a divine hero in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, foster son of Amphitryon and great-grandson of Perseus...

 costume, the lions skin and club taking the place of the older armor of the heroic era. He is also said to have fixed the number of the labors of Heracles at twelve. The work, which according to Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria

Titus Flavius Clemens , known as Clement of Alexandria , was a Christian theologian and the head of the noted Catechetical School of Alexandria. Clement is best remembered as the teacher of Origen...

 (Stromata, yr. ch. 2) was simply a plagiarism from an unknown Pisinus of Lindus, enjoyed so high a reputation that the Alexandrian critics admitted the author to the epic canon. From an epigram (20) of Theocritus

Theocritus

Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...

 we learn that a statue was erected in honor of Peisander by his countrymen. He is to be distinguished from Peisander of Laranda in Lycia

Lycia

Lycia Lycian: Trm̃mis; ) was a region in Anatolia in what are now the provinces of Antalya and Muğla on the southern coast of Turkey. It was a federation of ancient cities in the region and later a province of the Roman Empire...

, who lived during the reign of Alexander Severus

Alexander Severus

Severus Alexander was Roman Emperor from 222 to 235. Alexander was the last emperor of the Severan dynasty. He succeeded his cousin Elagabalus upon the latter's assassination in 222, and was ultimately assassinated himself, marking the epoch event for the Crisis of the Third Century — nearly fifty...

 (AD 208 to 201), and wrote a poem on the mixed marriages of gods and mortals, after the manner of the Eoiai of Hesiod

Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

.

See fragments in G. Kinkel, Epicorum graecorum fragmenta (1878); also F. G. Welcher, Kuleana Schriften, vol. i. (1844), on the twelve labors of Heracles in Peisander.

External links

• "Peisander" in William George Smith (ed), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. London : J. Walton, 1849