The author of a Greek dictionary to the works of the ten Attic orators.
All we know about his personal history is contained in a line or two in Suidas, who calls him a rhetorician of Alexandria, and, besides the above-mentioned dictionary, attributes to him an ἀνθηρῶν συναλωλή, which is lost. We are thus left in the dark as to the time in which our rhetorician lived. Some believe that he is the same person as the Harpocration who, according to Julius Capitolinus ( Verus, 2), instructed the emperor L. Verus in Greek; so that he would have lived in the latter half of the second century after Christ. Maussac (Dissert. Crit. p. 378, in Blancard's edition of Harpocration) points out passages from which it would appear that Harpocration must have been acquainted with the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, and that consequently he must have lived after the time of Athenaeus. Others, again, look upon him as identical with the Harpocration whom Libanius (Epist. 367) calls a good poet and a still better teacher; whence it would follow that he lived about A. D. 354. Others, lastly, identify him with the physician Harpocration: but all is mere conjecture, and it is impossible to arrive at any positive conviction.[*](GRC: 6/11/2008: Moved this paragraph to the start the of article to bring it into conformance with most other articles.)
[L.S]