RATIONES RERUM 23: Articolo Eugenio Lanzillotta

Descrizione

Rationes Rerum 23

EUGENIO LANZILLOTTA
Su un frammento della Foronide in Clemente Alessandrino

In the Stromata (1, 102, 1-103, 1), Clement of Alexandria lists the oldest royal dynasties of the Greek world: occupying the premier rank is Argos, whose first king is said to have lived twenty generations after the beginning of the Assyrian kingdom. During the reign of the second king of Argos, Phoroneus, the dynasties of the kings of Sicyon and Crete would have begun; while the first king of Attica, Cecrops, would have come to power three generations after Phoroneus. Clement explicitly argues that the Greeks cannot claim any chronological primacy over other peoples, since the Assyrians would have provided for themselves monarchical institutions long before them, and of course even more ancient, according to universal agreement, was the Egyptian kingdom. Clement, in the same passage, also quotes Dionysius of Halicarnassus. For both, Phoroneus is the progenitor of the Greek lineages, but they evaluate his figure differently: Dionysius, who probably follows an Arcadian tradition, merely reports that Phoroneus had been the first king of a Peloponnesian polis; Clement, in addition to emphasizing his personal antiquity and kingship, points out that for the poet of the Phoronis (c. 7^th – 6^th century BC) and for Acusilaus (that is, for the Argive tradition) Phoroneus would have been “the father of mortal men”, i.e., the first man. The article discusses the complex problems of Greek genealogical traditions, with an excursus on the Áτλαντικò λόγο that Plato (Tim. 21c) fictionally attributes to the great Athenian lawgiver Solon.