Apsines


Apsines of Gadara was a Greek rhetorician. He was a native of the Hellenised city of Gadara, whose ruins stand today at the border of Jordan with Syria and Israel. Apsines went on to study at Smyrna and taught at Athens, gaining such a reputation that he was raised to the consulship by the emperor Maximinus. He was a rival of Fronto of Emesa, and a friend of Philostratus, the author of the Lives of the Sophists, who praises his wonderful memory and accuracy.
Two rhetorical treatises by him are extant:
  1. His Τέχνη ῥητορική is a greatly interpolated handbook of rhetoric, a considerable portion being taken from the Rhetoric of Longinus and other material from Hermogenes;
an English translation was first published in 1997. Malcolm Heath has argued that the work's attribution to Apsines is incorrect.
  1. A smaller work, Περὶ ἐσχηματισμένων προβλημάτων.

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