POLYAENUS

flourished 2nd century AD Macedonian rhetorician and pleader who lived in Rome and was the author of a work entitled Strategica (or Strategemata), which he dedicated to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus on the outbreak of the Parthian War (162-165). The Strategica, still extant, is a historical collection of stratagems and maxims of military strategy written in Greek and strung together in the form of anecdotes; it also includes examples of wisdom, courage, and cunning from civil and political life. Comprising eight books (parts of the sixth and seventh are lost), it originally contained 900 anecdotes, of which 833 are extant. Despite its many errors of judgment and fact, its contents have some historical value. Evidently highly esteemed by the Roman emperors, it was handed down by them as a sort of heirloom and passed to Constantinople, where it was diligently studied by the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, who himself wrote a work on tactics.