Career
He came from the island of Leros. Pherecydes spent the greater part of his working life in Athens, and so he was also called Pherecydes of Athens: the encyclopedic Byzantine Suda consider Pherecydes of Athens and of Leros separately.
He came from the island of Leros. Pherecydes spent the greater part of his working life in Athens, and so he was also called Pherecydes of Athens: the encyclopedic Byzantine Suda consider Pherecydes of Athens and of Leros separately.
Pherecydes's great treatises—a history of his native isle, Leros (Περὶ Λέρου). An essay, On Iphigeneia (Περὶ Ἰφιγενείας). And On the Festivals of Dionysus (Περὶ τῶν Διονύσου ἐορτῶν)—are all lost.
However, numerous fragments of his ten-book genealogies of the gods and heroes, which was written in the Ionian dialect to glorify the ancestors in the heroic age of his 5th-century patrons, have been preserved. Pherecydes modified the legends, not in order to rationalize them, but rather to adjust them to popular beliefs. Therefore, Pherecydes cannot be classed with the earlier mythographer Hecataeus of Miletus, whose Genealogiai ("Genealogies") were more skeptical and critical.Pherecydes was the main source for the mythological encyclopedia, the Bibliotheke mistakenly connected with the name of Apollodorus.