He is sometimes called "the last of the Alexandrians".
Erotica Pathemata
His only surviving work, the Erotica Pathemata (Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα, Of the Sorrows of Love), was set out, the poet says in his preface, "in the shortest possible form" and dedicated to the poet
Cornelius Gallus, as "a storehouse from which to draw material". Erotica Pathemata is a collection of thirty-six
epitomes of love-stories, all of which have tragic or sentimental endings, taken from histories and historicised fictions as well as poetry.
As Parthenius generally quotes his authorities, these stories are valuable as affording information on the Alexandrian poets and grammarians.
Contents
The mythical or legendary characters whose stories are presented in Erotica Pathemata are as follows.
In Parthenius' own time, he was not famous for his prose but his poems. These are listed below:
Arete
Dirge on Archelais
Aphrodite
Bias
Delos
Krinagoras
Leucadiai
Anthippe
Dirge on Auxithemis
Idolophanes
Herakles
Iphiklos
Metamorphoses
Propemptikon
A Greek original of Moretum
The surviving manuscript
Parthenius is one of the few ancient writers whose work survives in only one manuscript. The only surviving manuscript of Parthenius was called Palatinus Heidelbergensis graecus 398 (P), probably written in the mid-9th century AD. It contains a diverse mixture of geography, excerpts from
Hesychius of Alexandria,
paradoxography,
epistolography and mythology.[5]
Editions of Parthenius
1531: Editio princeps, edited by Janus Cornarius. Basle, Froben.
1675: Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui, edited by
Thomas Gale, Paris.
1798: Legrand and Heyne, Göttingen.
1824: Corpus scriptorum eroticorum Graecorum, Passow, Leipzig.
1843: Analecta alexandrina, Augustus Meineke (ed.), Berolini sumptibus Th. chr. Fr. Enslini.
1843: Mythographoi. Scriptores poetiace historiae graeci, Antonius Westermann (ed.), Brunsvigae sumptum fecit Georgius Westermann,
pagg. 152-81.
2008: Michèle Biraud, Dominique Voisin, and Arnaud Zucker (trans. and comm.), Parthénios de Nicée. Passions d'amour. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon. Reviewed by Simone Viarre at
The Bryn Mawr Classical Review
^Suda, Parthenius. Cf. J. L. Lightfoot, (1999), Parthenius of Nicaea: the poetical fragments and the Erotika pathemata, page 9. Oxford University Press
^Courtney, E. (2003). Who's Who in the Classical World. Oxford, entry: Helvius Cinna, Gaius.