He was a follower of the school of
Aristarchus, and wrote a treatise on Aristarchus' edition of
Homer entitled
On Aristarchus' recension (), fragments of which are preserved in the
Venetus A manuscript of the
Iliad.
He also wrote commentaries on many other Greek
poets and prose authors. He is known to have written on Greek
lyric poets, notably
Bacchylides and
Pindar, and on drama; the better part of the Pindar and
Sophocles scholia originated with Didymus. The
Aristophanes scholia also cite him often, and he is known to have written treatises on
Euripides, Ion, Phrynichus, Cratinus, Menander, and many of the Greek
orators including
Demosthenes, Isaeus, Hypereides, Deinarchus, and others.
Besides these commentaries there are mentions of the following works, none of which survives:
*
On phraseology in tragedy (), which comprised at least 28 books
*
Comic phraseology (), of which
Hesychius made much use
* a third linguistic work on words of ambiguous or uncertain meaning, comprising at least seven books
* a fourth linguistic work on false or corrupt expressions
* a collection of Greek proverbs () comprising thirteen books, from which most of the proverbs in
Zenobius' collection are taken
*
On the laws of Solon (), a work mentioned by
Plutarch
* A response to Cicero's
De re publica, comprising six books, which later induced
Suetonius to write a counter-response
In addition there survive extracts on agriculture and botany, mention of a commentary on
Hippocrates, and a completely surviving treatise
On all types of marble and wood (). In view of the drastic difference in subject matter it is possible that these represent the work of a different Didymos.
rss feed