[1] He was the head librarian of the Library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.

[2] Aristarchus left the island of Samothrace at a young age and went to Alexandria, where he studied with the director of the library.

[3] He established the most historically important critical edition of the Homeric poems, and he is said to have applied his teacher's accent system to it, pointing the texts with a careful eye for metrical correctness.

[5] It is likely that he, or more probably, another predecessor at Alexandria, Zenodotus, was responsible for the division of the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books each.

According to the Suda, Aristarchus wrote 800 treatises (ὑπομνήματα hypomnemata) on various topics; these are all lost but for fragments preserved in the various scholia.