[4][5] Rudolf Pfeiffer dates his shift to the isle of Rhodes to c. 144/143 BC, when political upheavals associated with the policies of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II are thought to have led to his exile.
According to a report in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae (11,489a, b), his Rhodian pupils, grateful for his learning,[6] gathered enough silver to enable him to fashion a cup whose shape aspired to recreate that of Nestor mentioned in the Iliad (Book 11, lines 632–637).
[10] His teaching may have exercised a formative impact on the rise of Roman grammatical studies if as an entry in the Suda suggests, the elder Tyrannion was one of his pupils.
[12] He states that grammatikē, what we might nowadays call "literary criticism",[d] comprises six parts: Grammatikḗ Paragraph 6 outlines the στοιχεῖα (stoikheia) or letters of the alphabet, together with the divisions into vowels, diphthongs and consonants.
Paragraph 11 treats the eight-word classes, though strong doubts exist as to whether or not this division goes back to Dionysius Thrax, since ancient testimonies assert that he conflated proper nouns and appellatives, and classified the article together with pronouns.
[29] He argued that before the 3rd to 4th centuries AD, no papyri on Greek grammar reveal material structured in a way similar to the exposition we have in Dionysius's treatise, that the surviving witnesses for the period before that late date, namely authors such as Sextus Empiricus, Aelius Herodianus, Apollonius Dyscolus and Quintilian, fail to cite him, and that Dionysius's work only begins to receive explicit mention in the works written from the 5th century onwards by such scholars as Timotheus of Gaza, Ammonius Hermiae and Priscian.
[19] Though initially rebuffed by scholars of the calibre of Pfeiffer and Hartmut Erbse, Di Benedetto's argument has found general acceptance today among specialists.