Author: PHOCILIDES
Biography:
PHOCILIDES (c. 170 BCE-70 CE)
There is little room for doubt that it was John Tapner (q.v.) who published a translation from Greek of The Preceptive Moral Poem of Phocilides, accompanied by some original moral poems of his own, at Chichester in 1785. (The space on the page at the end of the last line of text is occupied by an advertisement for the surveying business of Tapner and his son.) Tapner along with his contemporaries and predecessors believed the poem to be by Phocilides or Phocylides of Miletus, an ancient sage born about 560 BCE. More recent scholarship assigns it to a poet known as “Pseudo-Phocylides,” believed to have been an Alexandrian Christian of Jewish origin active four centuries later. It was a popular school text and had been translated into English at least once before, by J. Hart in 1744. (Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edn. [1911], 21:449) HJ
Other Names:
- Phocylides