Demetrius of Magnesia (; 1st century BC) was a Greek

grammarian Grammarian may refer to: * Alexandrine grammarians, philologists and textual scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE * Biblical grammarians, scholars who study the Bible and the Hebrew language * Grammarian (Greco-Roman ...

and

biographer Biographers are authors who write an account of another person's life, while autobiographers are authors who write their own biography. Biographers Countries of working life: Ab=Arabia, AG=Ancient Greece, Al=Australia, Am=Armenian, AR=Ancient Rome ...

, and a contemporary of

Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises tha ...

and Atticus. He had, in Cicero's recollection, sent Atticus a work of his on concord, (), which Cicero also was anxious to read. A second work of his, which is often referred to, was of an historical and

philological Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

nature, and treated of poets and other authors who bore the same name (). This important work, to judge from what is quoted from it, contained the lives of the persons, and a critical examination of their merits. For example, Demetrius is cited by

Diogenes Laertius Diogenes Laërtius ( ; , ; ) was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Little is definitively known about his life, but his surviving book ''Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers'' is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek phi ...

as a key source in his biography of the historian

Xenophon Xenophon of Athens (; ; 355/354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian. At the age of 30, he was elected as one of the leaders of the retreating Ancient Greek mercenaries, Greek mercenaries, the Ten Thousand, who had been ...

, providing information about Xenophon that would otherwise be unknown.D. H. Kelly, ''Xenophon’s Hellenika: a Commentary'' (ed. J. McDonald), Amsterdam, 2019, pp. 45-7.

Notes

{{authority control 1st-century BC Greek writers Ancient Greek grammarians Ancient Greek biographers Ancient Magnesia 1st-century BC historians Ancient Greek historians known only from secondary sources