Career
He was a secretary and interpreter of signs, and a man of considerable influence. When Antigonus Gonatas, the son of the latter, besieged and captured Athens (261 British Columbia), Philochorus was put to death for having supported Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, who had encouraged the Athenians in their resistance to Macedonia. His investigations into the usages and customs of his native Attica were embodied in an Atthis, in seventeen books, a history of Athens from the earliest times to 262 British Columbia. Considerable fragments are preserved in the lexicographers, scholiasts, Athenaeus, and elsewhere.
The work was epitomized by the author himself, and later by Asinius Pollio of Tralles (perhaps a freedman of the famous Gaius Asinius Pollio).
Philochorus also wrote on oracles, divination and sacrifices. The mythology and religious observances of the tetrapolis of Attica.
The myths of Sophocles. The lives of Euripides and Pythagoras.
The foundation of Salamis, Cyprus.
He compiled chronological lists of the archons and Olympiads, and made a collection of Attic inscriptions, the first of its kind in Greece.
