Palaephatus the Antiquarian: The Genre, Aims and Intellectual Context of the Peri Apiston

Abstract This article argues that Palaephatus’ Peri Apiston should be read as an intervention in ancient debates about the status of ‘incredible reports’ ( apista legomena ) as sources of information regarding the past and contemporary worlds. After carefully reviewing the arguments previous scholars have adduced to deny the author’s serious historical and epistemological interests, the discussion proposes that Palaephatus sought to steer a middle course between those who tended to accept these narratives unquestioningly, like the readers of paradoxographical collections, and the mainstream historiographical and geographical writers who denied that apista legomena had any value as historical records. Palaephatus emerges from the article as the author of an antiquarian text whose approach to handling mythic evidence was relevant for a variety of ancient genres – historiography, paradoxography, geography, mythography – which relied on information drawn from more or less incredible reports.