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Aelius Theon

Aelius Theon

c. 15 CE–c. 55 CE · Alexandria

Aelius Theon was a Greek rhetorician of Alexandria, generally dated to the 1st century CE. He is best known as the author of a 'Progymnasmata,' a handbook of graded preliminary exercises for training students in composition and rhetoric, which is among the earliest and most detailed such manuals to survive. His work was influential in the teaching of rhetoric in later antiquity.

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AlexandriaEgypt

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About Alexandria

Alexandria is the main Mediterranean port of northern Egypt and the country's second city. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, it became the capital of the Ptolemies, whose Museum and Great Library made it the leading centre of Hellenistic learning. It also held one of the largest Jewish communities of antiquity, where the Greek Bible translation known as the Septuagint was produced and Philo wrote. Church tradition traces its patriarchate to Mark the Evangelist, and its catechetical school was led by Clement and Origen. Arab forces under Amr ibn al-As took the city in 641, and it remained a commercial and scholarly hub of the Islamic world; the Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari was born there.

In Alexandria at the same time

Aristonicus of Alexandria, Plutarch

Across the traditions, in Alexandria at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aelius Theon’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Aristonicus of Alexandria, Plutarch

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aelius Theon’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(1)