Summary

Over the course of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, descriptions of wonders and marvels developed into a discrete branch of literature known as paradoxography. Fragments of paradoxographical collections in both Greek and Latin reveal an abiding interest in natural wonders, but marvellous phenomena related to physiology, botany, zoology, and culture also frequently appear. Paradoxography shares thematic concerns with several historiographical, philosophical, and scientific genres, leading classicists of previous generations to spurn these texts as derivative of more serious, especially Aristotelian, scholarship. More recently, however, scholars have begun to appreciate the stylistic and expository features of paradoxography according to its own logic and principles. Nevertheless, how paradoxographical compendia were read and used in antiquity and in what scholarly or popular contexts they circulated remain difficult issues.