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Alcidamas

Alcidamas

c. 435 BCE–c. 360 BCE · Athens

Alcidamas (c. 435 – c. 360 BCE) was a Greek rhetorician and sophist from Elaea in Aeolis (western Asia Minor). A pupil and successor of Gorgias, he taught at Athens, where he was a rival of Isocrates. His surviving declamation On the Sophists (Peri Sophiston), composed in the first half of the 4th century BCE, argues for the superiority of extemporaneous speaking over the composition of written speeches and criticizes reliance on prepared texts. He is also associated with the Mouseion, the source from which much of the contest narrative known as the Certamen of Homer and Hesiod is thought to derive; a papyrus subscription bearing "Alcidamas' narrative" supports the attribution.

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AthensAttica (Greece)

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About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini, Herodotus, Euripides, Antiphon

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

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In the same place & time

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

The world in their lifetime

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

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