Philo the Paradoxographer is the conventional name for the author of a short rhetorical description of the Seven Wonders of the World. Nothing is known of him beyond this work. The single manuscript heads it with the name of Philo of Byzantium, and it was long ascribed to the Hellenistic engineer of that name, the author of the Mechanical Collection. That ascription is now generally rejected: the ornate, antithetical prose belongs to the tradition of the later sophists, and the work is generally held to be late antique, although no firm date has been established.
His one surviving work, On the Seven Wonders of the World, opens with a proem arguing that a description can show the wonders to a reader who never makes the journey. It then describes in turn the Hanging Garden, the Pyramids at Memphis, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Walls of Babylon, and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The text breaks off during the account of the temple, and the seventh wonder is lost.
The work is one of the fullest ancient accounts of the Seven Wonders. Its descriptions of how the Hanging Garden was watered and how the Colossus was cast are often cited in modern discussion of these structures, and it is a characteristic example of rhetorical description applied to famous sights.
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