ANDROTION (c. 350 B.C.), Greek orator, and one of the leading politicians of his time, was a pupil of Isocrates and a contemporary of Demosthenes. He is known to us chiefly from the speech of Demosthenes, in which he was accused of illegality in proposing the usual honour of a crown to the Council of Five Hundred at the expiration of its term of office. Androtion filled several important posts, and during the Social War was appointed extraordinary commissioner to recover certain arrears of taxes. Both Demosthenes and Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 4) speak favourably of his powers as an orator. He is said to have gone into exile at Megara, and to have composed an Atthis, or annalistic account of Attica from the earliest times to his own days (Pausanias vi. 7; x. 8). It is disputed whether the annalist and orator are identical, but an Androtion who wrote on agriculture is certainly a different person. Professor Gaetano de Sanctis (in L’Attide di Androzione e un papiro di Oxyrhynchos, Turin, 1908) attributes to Androtion, the atthidographer, a 4th-century historical fragment, discovered by B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. v.). Strong arguments against this view are set forth by E.M. Walker in the Classical Review, May 1908.
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ANDUJAR (the anc. Slilurgi), a town of southern Spain, in the province of Jaen; on the right bank of the river Guadalquivir and the Madrid-Cordova railway. Pop. (1900) 16,302. Andujar is widely known for its porous earthenware jars, called alcarrazas, which keep water cool in the hottest weather, and are manufactured from a whitish clay found in the neighbourhood.
ANECDOTE (from [Greek: an]-, privative, and [Greek: ekdidomi], to give out or publish), a word originally meaning something not published. It has now two distinct significations. The primary one is something not published, in which sense it has been used to denote either secret histories—Procopius, e.g., gives this as one of the titles of his secret history of Justinian’s court—or portions of ancient writers which have remained long in manuscript and are edited for the first time. Of such anecdota there are many collections; the earliest was probably L.A. Muratori’s, in 1709. In the more general and popular acceptation of the word, however, anecdotes are short accounts of detached interesting particulars. Of such anecdotes the collections are almost infinite; the best in many respects is that compiled by T. Byerley (d. 1826) and J. Clinton Robertson (d. 1852), known as the Percy Anecdotes (1820-1823).