APION. – Alexandrian grammarian of the first half of the 1st century A.D., surnamed *Pleistoniḗs* ‘rich in victory’, on account of his oratorical successes.
He was famous in his own time for his commentaries on Homer and Aristophanes. An Egyptian from the Oasis, he studied and then taught with great success in Alexandria, which granted him citizenship. He held a school in Rome under Tiberius, and again under Claudius. Pliny the Elder, who attended his lectures, says that Tiberius called him ‘symbolum mundi’, while his vanity made him seem rather ‘proprie fame tympanum’ (Hist. Nat., praef., 25).
Of his many works, of which only fragments remain, special interest attaches to his *History of Egypt* (Αἰγύπτιάκα), in which Book II asserts the spurious origin and expulsion from Egypt of the Jews, and vents his antisemitism, as was shown in fact when (39 A.D.) he was sent to Rome as head of the Alexandrian embassy demanding the persecution of the Jews (v. PHILO). He does not seem to have written also a work ‘Against the Jews’, since Flavius Josephus, in his *Contra Apionem* (c. 95 A.D.), does not mention II. He spread in the Roman world the slanderous fables (refuted by Flavius Josephus in Bk. II of the aforesaid apology) about the origin of the Jews, their ritual cannibalism, and the worship of an ass’s head—tales in which Tacitus also believed (Hist., 5, 4).