DICAEARCHUS  , of

Messene in Sicily, Peripatetic philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, historian, and geographer, flourished about 320 B.C . He was a friend of Theophrastus, to whom he dedicated the majority of his works . Of his writings, which comprised treatises on a great variety of subjects, only the titles and a few fragments survive . The most important of them was his (3ios -rilr `EXAabos (Life in Greece), in which the moral, political and social condition of the people was very fully discussed . In his Tripoliticos he described the best form of government as a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, and illustrated it by the example of Sparta . Among the philosophical works of Dicaearchus may be mentioned the Lesbiaci, a dialogue in three books, in which the author endeavours to prove that the soul is mortal, to which he added a supplement called Corinthiaci . He also wrote a Description of the World illustrated by maps, in which was probably included his Measurements of Mountains . A description of Greece (150 iambics, in C . Muller, Frag. list . Greec. i . 238-243) was formerly attributed to him, but, as the initial letters of the first twenty-three lines show, was really the work of Dionysius, son of Calliphon . Three considerable fragments of a prose description of Greece (Muller, i .

97-110) are now assigned to an unknown author named Heracleides . The De re publica of

Cicero is supposed to be founded on one of Dicaearchus's works . The best edition of the fragments is by M . Fuhr (1841), a work of great learning; see also a dissertation by F . G . Osann, Beitrage zur rom. and griech . Litteratur, ii. pp . 1-117 (1839) ; Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopadie der klass . Altertumswiss. v. pt . 1 (1905) .