Amphicrates
(Ἀμφικράτης), king of Samos in ancient times, in whose reign the Samians invaded Aegina. (Hdt. 3.59.)
(Ἀμφικράτης), a Greek sophist and rhetorician of Athens. He was a contemporary of Tigranes (B. C. 70), and being exiled (we know not for what reason) from Athens, he went to Seleuceia on the Tigris. The inhabitants of this place requested him to teach rhetoric in their city, but he haughtily refused, saying, that the vessel was too small to contain a dolphin. He then went to Cleopatra, the daughter of Mithridates, who was married to Tigranes, and who seems to have become attached to him. Amphicrates soon drew suspicions upon himself, and was forbidden to have any intercourse with the Greeks, whereupon he starved himself to death. (Plut. Luc. 22.) Longinus (de Sublim. p. 54, ed. Toup) mentions him along with Hegesias and Matris, and censures him for his affectation of sublimity. Whether he is the same person as the Amphicrates who wrote a work on celebrated men (περὶ ἐνδόξων ανδρῶν, Athen. 13.576; D. L. 2.101), is uncertain. [L.S]
a Greek sculptor, probably of Athens, since he was the maker of a statue which the Athenians erected in honour of a courtezan, who having learnt from Harmodius and Aristogeiton their conspiracy against Hippias and Hipparchus, was tortured to death by the tyrants, without disclosing the secret. Her name was Leana (a lioness) : and the Athenians, unwilling openly to honour a courtezan, had the statue made in the form of a lioness ; and, to point out the act which it was meant to commemorate, the animal's tongue was omitted. We know nothing of the sculptor's age, unless we may infer from the narrative that the statue was made soon after the expulsion of the Peisistratidae. (B. C. 510.) In the passage of Pliny, which is our sole authority (34.19.12), there is a manifest corruption of the text, and the reading Amphicratis is only a conjecture, though a most probable one, by Sillig. (Catalogus Artificum, s. v.) [P.S]
(Ἀμφικράτης). (1) A biographer, who, according to Diogenes Laertius (Vit. Aristip.), was condemned to die by poison. See Athenaeus, xiii. 5.
(2) An Athenian orator, who, being banished from his country, retired to Seleucia on the Tigris, and took up his residence there under the protection of Cleopatra , daughter of Mithridates. He starved himself to death, because suspected by this princess of treason.
- Hdt. 3.59