Dionusios of Ephesos (290 – 250 BCE?)
Physician, wrote a Record of Physicians wherein he reports that N M was
E’ fellow student.
FGrHist 1104.
GLIM
Dionusios (of Halikarnassos?) (200 BCE – ca 300 CE)
One or perhaps two authors of this name are cited by P in his commentary on
P’s Harmonics.
Dionusios “the musicologist” (ho mousikos) is introduced early in Porphurios’ work as the
author of a Peri homoiote ̄to ̄n (On likenesses, 37.16). Porphurios preserves a brief quotation from
the first book of this treatise, in which Dionusios relates four basic doctrines of the “canonic
theorists” (kanonikoi): (1) the nature of rhythm and melody is nearly one and the same; (2)
what is high-pitched is fast and what is low-pitched is slow; (3) attunement is the com-
mensurability (summetria) of certain speeds; and (4) well-tuned intervals (diaste ̄mata) are in
ratios (logoi) of numbers.
Much later in Porphurios’ commentary a Dionusios “of Halikarnassos” is mentioned in a
different context (92.28); he is named in a list of authorities including P, D,
A and E, all of whom used the term “interval” (diaste ̄ma) in place of “ratio”
(logos) – i.e., they referred to (e.g.) the “epitritic interval” rather than the “epitritic ratio.”
This Dionusios agreed with A and E “and many others” in
admitting eight concords, as opposed to A and Ptolemy, who only admitted six
(96.11). His authority is invoked to corroborate the statement that the octave interval does
not differ in function (kata dunamin) from a single note, and therefore that any interval
combined with an octave will have the same melodic function as the uncompounded inter-
val, like the numbers under ten when added to ten (104.14).
The second Dionusios (“of Halikarnassos”) may be the same man as the first Dionusios
(ho mousikos), notwithstanding his use of both terms logos and diaste ̄ma in the same sentence
(37.19–20). (The context here requires the use of both terms, and the discussion at 92.28 is
of a somewhat different point.)
Porphurios’ Dionusios ho mousikos has therefore been identified by some as Dionusios of
Halikarnassos – not the author of the De compositione verborum, who lived in the time of
A, but a Hadrianic musicologist for whom the Souda (Delta-1171, which gives him
both epithets) lists three further titles: Rhythmics (in 24 books), Musical History (in 36 books)
and Science of Music (in 22 books). He may be identical with Aelius Dionusios, the Atticist
lexicographer of Hadrian’s time (so Düring, following Scherer).
Karl Scherer, De Aelio Dionysio musico qui vocatur (Diss. Bonn 1886); RE 5.1 (1903) 986–991 (#142), L.
Cohn; Düring (1932); BNP 4 (2004) 484 (#20), F. Montanari.
David Creese
Dionusios of Kure ̄ne ̄ (160 – 110 CE)
A student of A T and of D S, Dionusios was an
acclaimed Stoic geometer (according to a Herculaneum papyrus, Index Stoicorum, col. 52)
who wrote against P, and was attacked by D L (P. Herc.
DIONUSIOS OF KURE ̄NE ̄