Theodorus was a Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 sophist and orator of the late 5th century BC, born of Byzantium

Byzantium

Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas . The name Byzantium is a Latinization of the original name Byzantion...

.

Theodorus is noted by Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 in his ironic survey of oratory in the Phaedrus

Phaedrus (Plato)

The Phaedrus , written by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's main protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues. The Phaedrus was presumably composed around 370 BC, around the same time as Plato's Republic and Symposium...

for mentioning "confirmation and further confirmation", and calls Theodorus "that most excellent artist in words." Phaedrus responds in turn by calling Theodorus "worthy." Quintillian references Plato's usage in his history of Oratory in the third book of the Instiutio Oratoria. The Loeb

Loeb Classical Library

The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each...

 translation of the passage gives us the perhaps more appropriate reading of "word-artificer" for Plato's witticism. Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is one of the principal surviving sources for the history of Greek philosophy.-Life:Nothing is definitively known about his life...

 refers to him in a similarly cursorial manner.

Aristotle places him beside Tisias and Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a sophist of Ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic.-Life, date, and career:...

 as the key movers in the history of rhetoric. Quoting the W. A. Pickard-Cambridge text: "For it may be that in everything, as the saying is 'the first start is the main part'... This is in fact what has happened in regard to rhetorical speeches and to practically all the other arts: for those who discovered the beginnings of them advanced them in all only a little way, whereas the celebrities of to-day are the heirs (so to speak) of a long succession of men who have advanced them bit by bit, and so have developed them to their present form, Tisias coming next after the first founders, then Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a sophist of Ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic.-Life, date, and career:...

 after Tisias, and Theodorus next to him, while several people have made their several contributions to it: and therefore it is not to be wondered at that the art has attained considerable dimensions." The later Peripatetic school seems not to have been so kind. Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, who flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus. His literary style was Attistic — imitating Classical Attic Greek in its prime.-Life:...

, writing of the school in his era, 30 BC, states that "It is important that they should not assume that all the principles of rhetoric are covered in Peripatetic philosophy, and that nothing significant has been discovered by Theodorus, Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a sophist of Ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic.-Life, date, and career:...

, Antiphon

Antiphon (person)

Antiphon the Sophist lived in Athens probably in the last two decades of the 5th century BC. There is an ongoing controversy over whether he is one and the same with Antiphon of the Athenian deme Rhamnus in Attica , the earliest of the ten Attic orators...

 and their associates..." Some commentators conclude from the passage that Theodorus is linked significantly with Antiphon

Antiphon (person)

Antiphon the Sophist lived in Athens probably in the last two decades of the 5th century BC. There is an ongoing controversy over whether he is one and the same with Antiphon of the Athenian deme Rhamnus in Attica , the earliest of the ten Attic orators...

 and Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a sophist of Ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic.-Life, date, and career:...

. Elsewhere, Dionysius speaks of him as antiquated, careless and superficial. Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

 describes him as excelling rather in the theory than the practice of his art.

The Byzantine Suda

Suda

The Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often...

quotes the Phaedrus again in referencing Theodorus, with the translation giving the curious variation of "Daedalus of words." The Suda provides a brief listing of his works, declaring him the author of Against Thrasybulus

Thrasybulus

Thrasybulus was an Athenian general and democratic leader. In 411 BC, in the wake of an oligarchic coup at Athens, the pro-democracy sailors at Samos elected him as a general, making him a primary leader of the successful democratic resistance to that coup...

, and Against Andocides

Andocides

Andocides or Andokides was a logographer in Ancient Greece. He was one of the ten Attic orators included in the "Alexandrian Canon" compiled by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace in the third century BCE.He was implicated during the Peloponnesian War in the mutilation of the...

, and other unspecified works.

Secondary sources and translations

• William Smith
  William Smith (lexicographer)
  Sir William Smith Kt. was a noted English lexicographer.-Early life:Born at Enfield in 1813 of Nonconformist parents, he was originally destined for a theological career, but instead was articled to a solicitor. In his spare time he taught himself classics, and when he entered University College...
  
  , (1873). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
  The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology is an encyclopedia/biographical dictionary.- Characteristic :...
  
  . London: John Murray.