Talk:Menippus

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Very poor sourcing

We have following "sources":

Stephanus Byz. - not defined (Who is he? What work?), not linked
Diogenes Laërtius - the only one linked under "Bibliography"
Cicero - not linked
Chisholm, Hugh - the only one linked here
Athenaeus - not defined (Who is he? What work?), not linked

Half of them practically useless. Copy-and-paste job. Arminden (talk) 11:44, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Born in ANOTHER Gadara: Gezer

Josephus uses the Hellenised name "Gadara" for Gezer in Judaea. That is quite certainly also the city we're dealing with here: Strabo writes in Geographica

"But in the interval one comes to Gadaris, which the Judaeans appropriated to themselves; and then to Azotus and Ascalon. The distance from Iamneia to Azotus and Ascalon is about two hundred stadia. The country of the Ascalonitae is a good onion-market, though the town is small. Antiochus the philosopher, who was born a little before my time, was a native of this place. Philodemus, the Epicurean, and Meleager and Menippus, the satirist, and Theodorus, the rhetorician of my own time, were natives of Gadaris." (Strabo, Geography 16:2:29)

It appears from the wording, as it appears in this translation, that Antiochus is from Ascalon, while the others (Philodemus, Meleager, Menippus, and Theodorus) are from "Gadaris".
Which "Gadaris"? The geographical context is Strabo's itinerary down the Mediterranean coast between: Acê, Mt. Carmel, Sycaminopolis, Bucolopolis, Crocodeilopolis, the Tower of Strato, Iopê (with nearby Jerusalem and Iamneia), Gadaris, Azotus, Ascalon, and far to the west Mt. Casius and Pelusium. One can easily presume from the context that Strabo's "Gadaris" is the Hellenised Gezer, near the coast, and by no means Gadara (later part of the Decapolis) or Gadara of the Peraea, both beyond the Judaean Mountains, the Jordan Valley, and up the hill country of Transjordan.
Also, note that Strabo writes of Gadaris "which the Judaeans appropriated to themselves"; in Strabo's time, Gadara/Gezer was firmly in Herod's hands, while Gadara/Umm Qais was part of the autonomous Decapolis.
Therefore, I changed the link to Gezer. Arminden (talk) 12:38, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

...which shows why "original research" based on primary sources from antiquity can lead you astray. They just had different norms, those Greeks & Romans :)

A good source (Blank, David, "Philodemus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)) sorted it all out. Whether Strabo took a long detour east or just mentioned fellow thinkers from Gadaris farther inland (east) from his coastal itinerary, I'll never know, but academics have decided where they're from, basta. Good to know. Closed chapter. Arminden (talk) 16:36, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]