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:
“We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately, we had no business in this country.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute..”
—Edmund Burke (1729–97)