Heracleides (Ancient Greek: Ἡρακλείδης) was a rhetorician from Lycia, who lived and taught in Athens and Smyrna in the second century AD.
[2] At the same time, we know him to have been somewhat embattled in his position: at one point before the year 203 he lost in a contest of oratory against Apollonius of Athens so profoundly that he displeased the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, and the emperor revoked Heracleides's immunity from civic duty.
He died at the age of eighty, leaving a country-house in the neighborhood of Smyrna, which he had built with the money he had earned, and which he called Rhetorica.
He owed his success not so much to his talent as to his indefatigable industry; and once, when he had composed an ἐγκώμιον πόνου ("Praise of work"), and showed it to his rival Ptolemaeus, the latter struck out the π in πόνου, and, returning it to Heracleides, said, "There, you may read your own encomium" (ἐγκώμιον ὄνου meaning "Praise of the donkey")).
He also published a purified edition of the orations of Nicetes, forgetting, as his biographer says, that he was putting the armor of a pigmy on a colossus.