Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/786

Rh 772 LESBONAX. against which the celebrated oration of Demosthenes is directed, usually known as the oration against Leptines. This speech was delivered in B. c. 355 : and the law must have been passed above a year before, as we are told that the lapse of more than that period had already exempted Leptines from all personal responsibility. Hence the efforts of Demosthenes were directed solely to the repeal of the law, not to the punishment of its proposer. It appears that his arguments were successful, and the law was in fact repealed. (See Wolf. Prolegom. ad Demosth. Orat. adv. Leptiuem ; Liban. Argum. p. 452 ; Dion. Hal. Ep. ad Amm. i. 4.) 6. A Syrian Greek, who assassinated with his own hand at Laodiceia, Cn. Octavius, the chief of the Roman deputies, who had been sent to examine into the state of affairs in Syria. This murder took place during the short reign of Antiochus Eupator (b. c. 162;, and not without the con- nivance, as was supposed, of Lysias, the minister and governor of the young king. As soon as Demetrius had established himself on the throne, wishing to conciliate the favour of the Romans, he caused Leptines, who, far from denying the deed, had the audacity to boast of it publicly, to be seized, and sent as a prisoner to Rome : but the senate refused to receive him, being desirous, as we are told, to reserve this cause of complaint as a public grievance, instead of visiting it on the head of an individual. (Polyb. xxxi. 19, xxxii. 4, 6, 7; Ap- pian, Syr. 46, 47 ; Diod. Exc. Legal, xxxi. p. 526 ; Cic. PUlipp. ix. 2.) [E. H. B.] LE'SBOCLES, a Greek rhetorician, who lived at Rome in the time of the emperor Tiberius. (Senec. Simsor. ii. p. 18.) He was a rival of La- tron ; and a short fragment of one of his speeches is preserved in Seneca. {Controv. i. 8, p. 130, &c.) ^ [L. S.] LE'SBOCLES, a celebrated statuary, none of whose works, however, were known to Pliny {H. N. xxxiv. 8. s. 19. <$ 25, where the name is differ- ently spelt in the MSS. It is important also to observe, that instead of " Lesbocles, Prodorus, Py- thodicus, Polygnotus : iidem pictores nobilissimi.,' the Bamberg MS. has " idem pictor e nobilisdmis,' which is evidently right. [P. S.] LESBO'NAX (Aeo-gwi/ttI). 1 . A son of Pota- mon of Mytilene, a philosopher and sophist, who lived in- the time of Augustus. He was a pupil of Timocrates, and the father of Polemon, who is knov/n as the teacher and friend of the emperor Tiberius. (Suidas, 8. v. ^ Eudoc. p. 283.) Suidas says that Lesbonax wrote several philosophical works, but does not mention that he was an orator or rhetorician, although there can be no doubt that he is the same person as the Lesbonax who wrote (leKeTal ^TjTopt/cal and ipwriKoi eTriaTohal (Schol. ad Luc. de Saltat. Q9)., and the one of whom, in the time of Photius {DM. Cod. 74, p. 52), there were extant sixteen political orations. Of these orations only two have come down to us, one en- titled 7r«pi rov iroKefiov Kopivdiwu^ and the other irporpeiTTiKos A070S, both of which are not unsuc- cessful imitations of the Attic orators of the best times. They are printed in the collections of the Greek orators published by Aldus, H. Stephens, Reiske, Bekker, and Dobson : a separate edition w;is published by J. C. Orelli, Lipsiae, 1820, 8vo. 2. A Greek grammarian, whose age is unknown, but who must at any rate be aasigned to a much LETO. later period than the rhetorician LeRbonax. He is the author of a little Avork on grammatical figures {irepl (TxrjiuaTwi'), which was first published by Valckenaer in his edition of Ammonius (p. 177, or in the Leipz. edit. p. 165, &c. ; comp. p. xviii. &c.) This little treatise is not without some im- portance, since it contains things which are not mentioned anywhere else. [L. S.] LESBO'THEMIS (Aeo-gofle/zty), was a statuary of an ancient date, and probably a native of Lesbos. He is the only artist who is mentioned in connection with that island. His statue of one of the Muses holding a lyre of the ancient fonn (o-OiuguKTj) at Mytilene, was mentioned by Euphorion in his Trepl'IaOfxiouv (Athen. iv. p. 182, e., xiv. p. 635, a. b. ; Meineke, Euphor. Fr. 31, Anal. Alex. p. 67, Fr. 32). [P.S.] LESCHES or LESCHEUS (A^trx^y, AeVxevs), one of the so-called cyclic poets, the son of Aeschy- linus, a native of Pyrrha, in the neighbourhood of Mytilene (Paus. x. 25, § 5), and thence also called a Mytilenean or a Lesbian. He flourished about the 18th Olympiad ; and therefore the tale, which is related about a contest between him and Arcti- nus, who lived about the beginning of the Olym- piads, is an anachronism. This tradition is explained by the fact that Lesches treated, at least to some extent, the same events in his Little Iliad ('I Aids TJ eXdaawu or 'Wicis jxiKpd), which were the sub- ject of Arctinus's Aethiopis. The little Ilias, like all the other cyclic poems, was ascribed to various poets — to Homer himself, to Thestorides of Pho- caea (Herod. Vit. Horn. 16), to the Lacedaemonian Cinaethon, and Diodorus of Erythrae. The poem consisted of four books, according to Proclus, who has preserved an extract from it. It was evidently intended as a supplement to the Homeric Iliad ; consequently it related the events after the death of Hector, the fate of Ajax, the exploits of Philoc- tetes, Neoptolemus, and Ulysses, and the final cap- ture and destruction of Troy (Arist. Poet. 23, Bekk.), which part of the poem was called The Destruction of Troy {'Iklov irepais). There was no unity in the poem, except that of historical and chronological succession. Hence Aristotle remarks that the little Iliad furnished materials for eight tragedies, whilst only one could be based upon the Iliad or Odyssey of Homer. The extracts which Proclus gives of the poem of Lesches are inter- woven with those from the Aethiopis of Arctinus. It is not to be presumed, as Miiller shows {Hist, of Greek Lit. vi. § 3), that either poet should have broken off in the middle of an event, in order that the other might fill up the gap. The different times at which they lived is sufficient proof to the contrary, and there are fragments extant which show that Lesches had treated of those events also which in Proclus's extract are not taken from him, but from Arctinus. (Comp. Welcker, der Epische C^c/ms, pp. 272, 358, 368.) _ C^-.^-l. LETHE (AtJ^tj), the personification of oblivion, is called by Hesiod {Theog. 227) a daughter of Eris. A river in the lower world likewise bore the name of Lethe. [Hades.] [L. S.] LETO (ATjraJ), in Latin Latona, according to Hesiod {Theog. 406, 921), a daughter of the Titan Coeus and Phoebe, a sister of Asteria, and the mother of Apollo and Artemis by Zeus, to whom she was married before Hera. Homer, who like- wise calls her the mother of Apollo and Artemis by Zeus (//. i. 9, xiv. 327, xxi. 499, Od. xi. 318, 580),