Works
Pherecydes's great treatises (a history of his native isle, Leros; an essay, On Iphigeneia; and On the Festivals of Dionysus) are all lost. However, numerous fragments of his ten-book genealogies of the gods and heroes, which was written in the Ionian dialect to glorify the ancestors in the heroic age of his 5th-century patrons, have been preserved. Pherecydes modified the legends, not in order to rationalize them, but rather to adjust them to popular beliefs. Therefore, Pherecydes cannot be classed with the earlier mythographer Hecataeus of Miletus, whose Genealogiai ("Genealogies") were more skeptical and critical.
Pherecydes was the main source for the mythological encyclopedia, the Bibliotheke mistakenly connected with the name of Apollodorus.
Read more about this topic: Pherecydes Of Leros
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.”
—Hannah More (17451833)
“Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the drisk, with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“And when discipline is concerned, the parent who has to make it to the end of an eighteen-hour daywho works at a job and then takes on a second shift with the kids every nightis much more likely to adopt the survivors motto: If it works, Ill use it. From this perspective, dads who are even slightly less involved and emphasize firm limits or character- building might as well be talking a foreign language. They just dont get it.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)