Dictys Cretensis

▪ author

      author of a pseudo-chronicle of the Trojan War. Dictys was supposed to have accompanied the Cretan leader Idomeneus from Knossos to the siege of Troy and to have written a pro-Greek account of the Trojan War. His manuscript was said to have been “discovered” during the 1st century AD and, by command of the Roman emperor Nero, to have been transliterated from Phoenician into Greek. Probably in the 4th century, one Septimius put out a translation of Dictys's supposed eyewitness account (which in fact probably dates from the 1st or 2nd century, since fragments of the Greek text have been discovered on papyri of the 2nd and 3rd centuries), and this fantastic work, the Ephemeris belli Trojani, together with a similar but pro-Trojan account by Dares Phrygius, was a major sourcebook for medieval handlings of the Trojan story.

Additional Reading

Two essays by Stefan Merkle serve as a useful introduction: “The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Dictys and Dares,” chapter 13B in Gareth Schmeling (ed.), The Novel in the Ancient World, rev. ed. (2003), pp. 563–580, and “News from the Past: Dictys and Dares on the Trojan War,” chapter 10 in Heinz Hofmann (ed.), Latin Fiction: The Latin Novel in Context (1999), pp. 155–166.

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