Page:Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (Seyffert, 1901).pdf/45

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ANDRONITIS——ANNA PERENNA.
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whom she had been betrothed before, and Perseus, who turns his rival into stone with the Gorgon's head. Andromeda follows Perseus to Argos, and becomes ancestress of the famous line of Perseïdæ. Athēna set her among the stars.


Andrōnītis. The men's apartments in a Greek house. See House.


Androtion. A Greek historian, an Athenian, and a pupil of Isocrates, who was accused of making an illegal proposal and went into banishment at Megara. (We have the speech composed by Demosthenes for one of the accusers.) At Megara he wrote a history of Attica (see Atthis) in at least 12 books, one of the best of that class of writings; but only fragments of it have survived.


Angdistis. See Rhea.


Anĭus. Son of Apollo by Rhœo or Creüsa, whose father, Stăphy̌lus of Naxos, a son of Dionȳsus and Ariadnē, committed her to the sea in a box. She was carried to Delos, and there gave birth to her son Anius. Apollo taught him divination, and made him his priest and king of Delos. His son Thasus, like Linus and Actæōn, was torn to pieces by dogs, after which no dogs were allowed in the island. His daughters by the nymph Dorippē, being descendants of Dionysus, had the gift of turning anything they pleased into wine, corn, or oil; but when Agamemnōn on his way to Troy wished to take them from their father by force, Dionysus changed them into doves.


Annalists. A series of writers on Roman history, older than those usually called the historians, beginning about 200 b.c., and covering about a century and a half. They related their country's story from its first beginnings down to their own times, treating the former briefly, the latter in full detail, and at first always in Greek, like Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus. With Porcius Cato (q.v.) commenced composition in Latin and a livelier interest in native history, which constantly stimulated new efforts to celebrate the deeds of their forefathers. Two main characteristics of these annalists are the free use they made of their predecessors, and an inclination to suppress unfavourable facts, which gradually grew into a habit of flattering the national vanity by exaggerations.

Works dealing in this manner with the whole of Roman history, or large sections of it, continued to be written in Cicero's time. The leading annalists of this class are: Cassius Hemina, soon after Cato; Calpurnius Piso Frugi, consul in b.c. 133; Fannius, consul in b.c. 122; Gellius, who wrote about the same time (ninety-seven books of Annālēs); Claudius Quadrigarius, a contemporary of Sulla, author of at least twenty-three books, from the Gallic conflagration to his own time; his younger contemporary Valerius Antias (who treated all Roman history in seventy-five books); Licinius Macer, who died b.c. 66, author of the earlier history, in twenty-one books. Some few writers, on the other hand, confined themselves to the description of shorter periods: first, Cælius Antipater, about b.c. 120 (whose history of the Second Punic War in seven books, was noted for its accuracy); then Sempronius Asellio, about b.c. 100, who, in his account of events he had taken part in (Rerum Gestarum Libri, fourteen at least), was the first who, not content with barely relating facts, tried to explain the reasons of them; and Cornelius Sisenna, who lived 120–67 b.c. and wrote at least twenty-three books on the brief period between the Social War and Sulla's dictatorship. To these works, in which history has begun to assume the character of memoirs, we may add the autobiography of Cornelius Sulla the dictator (Rērum Suārum Commentārii in twenty-two books), which he wrote in self-justification at the end of his career. He died b.c. 78. All these works are lost, except scanty fragments; but the later Greek and Roman writers had made full use of them.


Annals (Annālēs). Year-books. From early times a record of all important events at Rome had been kept in chronological order by the high priest (pontĭfex maxĭmus) for the time, who every year exhibited in his official residence a whited board (album), on which, after the names of the magistrates for the year, occurrences of all kinds—war, dearth, pestilence, prodigies—were set down briefly according to their dates. These annales pontifĭcum or annales maxĭmi (supposed to be so called after the pontifex maximus), though destroyed at the burning of Rome by the Gauls, b.c. 389, were restored as far as possible, and continued till b.c. 130. Collected afterwards in eighty books, they were at once utilized and superseded by the so-called Annalists (q.v.).


Anna Perenna. An ancient Italian goddess, about whose exact attributes the ancients themselves were not clear. She is probably the moon-goddess of the revolving year, who every month renews her youth,