eul_aid: otm
Χίωνος Ἐπιστολαί
Chion Heraclea Letters
1 work

Chion of Heraclea is a pseudonym attached to a collection of fictional letters composed in the 1st or 2nd century CE. The letters are presented as the work of Chion of Heraclea, a student of Plato who assassinated the tyrant Clearchus in 353/2 BCE, but they are a later Roman-era literary creation. No historical author named Chion is attested.

The sole work is the Letters, a collection of seventeen fictional epistles surviving in full. They are pseudepigraphically attributed to the historical tyrannicide Chion.

The Letters of Chion constitute the only complete Greek epistolary novel preserved from antiquity. As a key example of the "tyrannicide" genre, the work reflects the Roman-era reception of Platonic philosophy and the idealized philosopher, while exemplifying contemporary literary tastes for rhetorical and pseudepigraphical fiction.

Available Works

Ἐπιστολαὶ πρὸς Μάτριν
Letters to Matris
46 passages