HELLANICUS, of Mitylene, the best of the old Greek logographers, lived and wrote in the fifth century B.C. His exact era is not known; but the best authorities place the date of his birth in B.C. 496, and of his death in B.C. 411. Nothing is known of his personal history except that he died at Perperene, a town of Mysia, opposite the island of Lesbos. His works, which were very numerous, and are frequently alluded to in the classics, are only known to us from the fragments that still survive. They seem to have comprised treatises on mythology, history, and chronology. Of these the most important were his Atthis, or History of Attica from the remotest times; his Æolica, Persica, and Junonis Sacerdotes. This last-mentioned work is a History of Argos arranged chronologically according to the succession of the priestesses of Juno in the great temple in that city. It contains, however, besides mere dates, a number of traditions and historical events which were afterwards turned to account by Thucydides. Hellanicus was the first Greek who can be said to have even tried to rise above the method of the old logographers, and his success is very partial. His histories are not so much separate works as detached and isolated fragments of the same work, which he had not the skill to work up into an harmonious whole. Thucydides censures his chronology as incorrect. The fragments of Hellanicus have been published by Sturz, Leipzig, 1787; and again in 1826 in the Museum Criticum; and in Müller's Fragmenta Historicorum Græc.