person
Hegesias of Magnesia
Hegesias
also: Hegesias
Greek orator and historian (3rd century BC), founder of the Asiatic style of broken, choppy prose; he wished to imitate Charisius and thought himself the only true Attic, as Cicero scornfully notes in the Brutus.
Reading notes
- Tusculan Disputations §1.83 argued so copiously by Hegesias the Cyrenaic that he is said to have been forbidden by King Ptolemy
Hegesias, the Cyrenaic philosopher nicknamed Peisithanatos ('death-persuader'), whose lectures on life's miseries reputedly drove hearers to suicide, prompting King Ptolemy (II) to ban them. Cicero cites his book The Man Who Starves Himself to Death.