Aresas (or Aesara) of Lucania is the name attached to a Doric Pythagorean treatise On Human Nature preserved by Stobaeus. A historical Lucanian Pythagorean may stand behind the name in Iamblichus's lists, but the surviving Greek is pseudepigraphic: a Hellenistic forgery that restates Platonic psychē-tripartition and the city–psychē analogy under an early Pythagorean authority.
Recent scholarship places most such treatises in the 1st century BCE (Centrone); Pellò and De Cesaris (2025) call On Human Nature a first-century pseudepigraphon. The Classical date once attached to the name (−450) is the legendary label, not the date of the text.
The fragment analyses psychē as threefold—the reasoning part, the spirited part, and the desiring part—and treats its orderly arrangement as the standard of law and justice for both household and city. Aresas is best classed as Hellenistic, 1st century BCE, matching the composition of the Doric treatise rather than the early Classical persona.
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