Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonist and satirist

Abstract

The twentieth century has been so begrudging to Timon of Phlius that he could be forgiven for identifying himself with his misanthropic namesake. About a hundred and fifty of his ‘glänzenden Sillen’ (the phrase is Wilamowitz's) survive, but in Albin Lesky's Geschichte der griechischen Literatur Timon gets only a third of the space devoted to Anaximander from whom we possess one possible sentence. Serious work on Timon largely came to a stop with Hermann Diels who edited the fragments and testimonia in Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta (Berlin, 1901), a book which is as difficult to come by as the older and much fuller study of Timon by C. Wachsmuth in Sillographorum Graecorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1885). In spite of his skilful parody of Homer and his Aristophanic versatility in language (some sixty neologisms, many of them comic formations, occur in the fragments), Timon has been ignored by those who give such generous attention to Hellenistic poetry. Many fragments raise at least one major textual difficulty. A new edition and literary study of the material is badly needed.