Chion (in Greek Χιων; lived 4th century BC), the son of Matris, a noble citizen of Heraclea, on the Pontus, was a disciple of Plato. With the aid of Leon, Euxenon, and other noble youths, he put to death Clearchus, the tyrant of Heraclea (353 BC). Most of the conspirators were cut down by the tyrant's body-guards upon the spot, others were afterwards taken and put to death with cruel tortures, and the city fell again beneath the worse tyranny of Satyrus, the brother of Clearchus.¹

There are extant thirteen letters which are ascribed to Chion, and which are of considerable merit; but they are undoubtedly spurious. Probably they are the composition of one of the later Platonists, intentioned to write a sort of epistolary novel based on Chion's life. It is very difficult to date the work; it is generally presumed to have been written in the 1st or 2nd century of our era, but some scholars are more cautious and prefer the 4th century. They were first printed in Greek in the Aldine collection of Greek Letters, Venice, 1499; again, in Greek and Latin, in the reprint of that collection in 1606. The first edition in a separate form was by Johannes Caselius in 1583 at Rostock; there was also a Latin translation published in the same volume with a Latin version of the fourth book of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, by the same editor and printer the following year. A more com­ plete edition of the Greek text, founded on a new recension of some Medicean Manuscripts, with notes and indices, was published by J. T. Coberus, Leipzig & Dresden, 1765. The best edition till then, containing all that is valuable in the preceding ones, was that of Johann Conrad Orelli, in the same volume with his edition of Memnon, Leipzig, 1816. It contains the Greek text, the Latin version of Caselius, the Prolegomena of Andreas Gottlieb Hoffmann, the Preface of Coberus, and the Notes of Coberus, Hoffmann, and Orelli. It was first translated in English by I. During, Goteborg, 1951.

References

Smith, William (editor); Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, "Chion", Boston, (1867)

Anonymous; Chion of Heraclea. A Novel in Letters, I. During (translator), Göteborg, 1951

Owen Rodkinson's review of "Pierre-Louis Malosse, Lettres de Chion d'Héraclée. 2004" in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Note

• 1 Memnon, History of Heracleia, 1; Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, xvi. 5