Khoaspes and thence to Susa; and he placed the Hyperboreans north of the Arimaspians,
beyond the Rhipaean mountains.
Ed.: FGrHist 5.
RE 4.2 (1901) 2050–2051, E. Schwartz; OCD3 427, K. Meister.
Philip KaplanDamianos of Larissa (400 – 600 CE?)
Damianos (probably the son of H L) is known only as the author
of the Optica (the conventional name for the title in the Greek MSS, Summaries of Optical
Principles), an elementary treatise in which 14 propositions on optics and the theory of vision
are stated and then discussed. The date of the treatise is uncertain, but passages identical
with sections of T A’s recension of E’s Optics made in the
second half of the 4th c. CE render it likely that Damianos wrote in the 5th or even 6th c.
CE. He broadened his discussion into philosophical topics, and in particular the Platonic
extromission theory of vision, in connection with which he referred to “the great P” as
having shown that sight was the most “sunlike” of the senses (cf. Plato Republic 6 [508b3–4]).
This suggests that the treatise belongs to milieux such as we find at Alexandria and Athens
of the 5th and 6th cc. CE in which Platonic exegesis was central to philosophical education.
Otherwise, the Optica merits Knorr’s assessment of it as “unsystematic and non-technical”;
but while it might not be consulted by serious students of optics, it deserves note as part of
the corpus of elementary pedagogical texts that are integral to the transmission of the
ancient scientific tradition.
Ed.: R. Schöne, Damianos Schrift über Optik (1897).
W.R. Knorr, “Archimedes and the Pseudo-Euclidean Catoptrics,” AIHS 35 (1985) 28–105 at 32– 33
and 89–96; DPA 2 (1994) 594–597, Robert B. Todd, CTC 8 (2003) 1–6, Idem; NDSB 2.233–234,
F. Acerbi.
Alan C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd
Damigero ̄n (325 BCE – 160 CE)
Listed with other eastern magi (A Apol. 90.6, Tertullian De anim. 57.1, and Arnobius
Adu. nat. 1.52). It is not clear if he is the same figure attributed – in some medieval MSS,
although in a corrupt form (Amigero ̄n) – with the Latin lapidary also ascribed to E.
The current opinion is that Damigero ̄n is the Greek name of the author of an Alexandrian
Greek lapidary used as a model for the surviving Latin version. Damigero ̄n is also cited in
the G as a source of information regarding the preservation of cereals (2.30–31),
viticulture and wine (5.21–22, 37; 7.13, 24), olive oil production (9.18, 26), etc., without any
reference to magic and mineralogy.
Ed.: Halleux and Schamp (1985) 193–290.
RE 4.2 (1901) 2055–2056, M. Wellmann.
Eugenio Amato
D ⇒ D
DAMIGERO ̄N