A polygraph (from

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

: πολύς, poly = "many" and γράφειν, graphein = "to write") is an author who writes in a variety of fields. In literature, the term polygraph is often applied to certain writers of antiquity such as

Aristotle Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...

Plutarch Plutarch (; , ''Ploútarchos'', ; – 120s) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo (Delphi), Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his ''Parallel Lives'', ...

Varro Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" (after Virgil and Cicero). He is sometimes call ...

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

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/24 79), known in English as Pliny the Elder ( ), was a Roman Empire, Roman author, Natural history, naturalist, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the Roman emperor, emperor Vesp ...

. Polygraphs still existed in the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

and

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

, but, other than writers of books for children, they have become rarer in modern times due to the specialisation of knowledge.

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778), known by his ''Pen name, nom de plume'' Voltaire (, ; ), was a French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment writer, philosopher (''philosophe''), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit ...

and

Diderot Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during t ...

are examples of modern polygraphs.

Polygraph writers

Classical Antiquity

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 ...

* Philostratus of Lemnos *

Duris of Samos Duris of Samos (or Douris) (; BCafter 281BC) was a Greek historian and was at some period tyrant of Samos. Duris was the author of a narrative history of events in Greece and especially Macedonia from 371BC to 281BC, which has been lost. Othe ...

Suetonius Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (), commonly referred to as Suetonius ( ; – after AD 122), was a Roman historian who wrote during the early Imperial era of the Roman Empire. His most important surviving work is ''De vita Caesarum'', common ...

Apuleius Apuleius ( ), also called Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (c. 124 – after 170), was a Numidians, Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He was born in the Roman Empire, Roman Numidia (Roman province), province ...

* Apion

Middle Ages

Abu Nuwas Abu Nuwas () (756-8) was a classical Arabic poet, and the foremost representative of the modern (''muhdath'') poetry that developed during the first years of the Abbasid Caliphate. He also entered the folkloric tradition, appearing several ...

Isidore of Seville Isidore of Seville (; 4 April 636) was a Spania, Hispano-Roman scholar, theologian and Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seville, archbishop of Seville. He is widely regarded, in the words of the 19th-century historian Charles Forbes René de Montal ...

Jacob of Edessa Jacob of Edessa (or James of Edessa) () (c. 640 – 5 June 708) was Bishop of Edessa and prominent Syriac Christian writer in Classical Syriac language, also known as one of earliest Syriac grammarians. In various works, he treated theologica ...

Al-Jahiz Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Basri (; ), commonly known as al-Jahiz (), was an Arab polymath and author of works of literature (including theory and criticism), theology, zoology, philosophy, grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, philology, lin ...

Michael Psellos Michael Psellos or Psellus (, ) was a Byzantine Greeks, Byzantine Greek monk, savant, writer, philosopher, imperial courtier, historian and music theorist. He was born in 1017 or 1018, and is believed to have died in 1078, although it has also b ...

* Bar-HebraeusRichard Barrie Dobson. ''Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, Volume 2'' (Routledge, 2000) p. 49 * Piero Valeriano Bolzani

Early modern period The early modern period is a Periodization, historical period that is defined either as part of or as immediately preceding the modern period, with divisions based primarily on the history of Europe and the broader concept of modernity. There i ...
(1500-1800)

* Carlo Amoretti * Jean-François de Bastide * Giuseppe Betussi *

Jacques Pierre Brissot Jacques Pierre Brissot (, 15 January 1754 – 31 October 1793), also known as Brissot de Warville, was a French journalist, abolitionist, and revolutionary leading the political faction, faction of Girondins (initially called Brissotins) at the ...

Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644, Montargis – 8 May 1712, Paris) was a French novelist, journalist, pamphleteer and memorialist. His abundant output includes short stories, gallant letters, tales of historical love affairs (''Les Intrigu ...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on Western literature, literary, Polit ...

* Ferdinand Hoefer *

Athanasius Kircher Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680) was a German Society of Jesus, Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jes ...

* *

Pierre Louis Manuel Louis Pierre Manuel (; July 1751 – 14 November 1793) was a republican French writer, municipal administrator of the police, and public prosecutor during the French Revolution who was arrested, trialled and guillotined. Life Revolutionary H ...

* Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert * Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne * César Vichard de Saint-Réal * Francesco Sansovino * Charles Sorel

Modern era (1800 onwards)

August Strindberg Johan August Strindberg (; ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter.Lane (1998), 1040. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than 60 pla ...

* Jean-Marie-Vincent Audin *

Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Hol ...

* Pierre Gévart * Henry de Graffigny * T. Proctor Hall * Léon Halévy * Vincent Labaume * Paul Lacroix * Gustave Le Rouge * Simin Palay * Christian Plume * Claude Roy *

Ludwig Tieck Johann Ludwig Tieck (; ; 31 May 177328 April 1853) was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romanticism, Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Early life Tieck w ...

Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov ( ; – April 6, 1992) was an Russian-born American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. H ...

Stephen Jay Gould Stephen Jay Gould ( ; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American Paleontology, paleontologist, Evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, and History of science, historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely re ...

Other usage

The term can be used in a pejorative sense to mean a

journalist A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the public. This is called journalism. Roles Journalists can work in broadcast, print, advertis ...

who writes on many subjects but without expertise in any particular one. The composer Georg Telemann was considered, somewhat pejoratively, a polygraph by critics due to the vast number and variety of his musical compositions.

Notes

*This article incorporates text from French Wikipedia, Polygraphe (auteur). Writing occupations Writing {{Lit-stub