(Ἑλλάνικος).
1. Of Mytilene in the island of Lesbos, the most eminent among the Greek logographers. He was the son, according to some, of Andromenes or Aristomenes, and, according to others, of Scamon (Scammon), though this latter may be merely a mistake of
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Suidas (s. v. Ἑλλάνικος). According to the confused account of Suidas, Hellanicus and Herodotus lived together at the court of Amyntas (B. C. 553-504), and Hellanicus was still alive in the reign of Perdiccas, who succeeded to the throne in B. C. 461. This account, however, is irreconcilable with the further statement of Suidas, that Hellanicus was a contemporary of Sophocles and Euripides. Lucian (Macrob. 22) states that Hellanicus died at the age of eighty-five, and the learned authoress Pamphila (apud Gellium, 15.23), who likewise makes him a contemporary of Herodotus, says that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war (B. C. 431), Hellanicus was about sixty-five years old, so that he would have been born about B. C. 496, and died in B. C. 411. This account, which in itself is very probable, seems to be contradicted by a statement of a scholiast (ad Aristoph. Ran. 706), from which it would appear that after the battle of Arginusae, in B. C. 406, Hellanicus was still engaged in writing; but the vague and indefinite expression of that scholiast does not warrant such an inference, and it is moreover clear from Thucydides (1.97), that in B. C. 404 or 403 Hellanicus was no longer alive. Another authority, an anonymous biographer of Euripides (p. 134 in Westermann's Vitarum Scriptores Graeci minores, Brunswick, 1845), states that Hellanicus was born on the day of the battle of Salamis, that is, on the 20th of Boedromion B. C. 481, and that he received his name from the victory of Ἑλλάς over the barbarians; but this account is too much like an invention of some grammarian to account for the name Hellanicus, and deserves no credit; and among the various contradictory statements we are inclined to adopt that of Pamphila. Respecting the life of Hellanicus we are altogether in the dark, and we only learn from Suidas that he died at Perperene, a town on the coast of Asia Minor opposite to Lesbos ; we may, however, presume that he visited at least some of the countries of whose history he treated.