Suda

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Suda

The Suda or Souda (also , Suidas) is a massive 10th century Byzantine

Byzantine Empire

Byzantine Empire and Eastern Roman Empire are conventional names used to describe the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on its capital of Constantinople....
Greek

Medieval Greek

Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek , is a cover term for all forms of the Greek language that were spoken and written during the time of the Byzantine Empire....
historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is an encyclopedic

Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes....
with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The derivation is probably from the Byzantine Greek word souda
Souda

Souda or Suda is a town and municipality of the Greece island of Crete, in the prefecture of Chania Prefecture. It is an important ferry and naval port at the head of Souda Bay....
, meaning "fortress" or "stronghold," with the alternate name, Suidas, stemming from an error made by Eustathius

Eustathius of Thessalonica

Eustathius of Thessalonica was a native of Constantinople who became archbishop of Thessalonica. After being a monk in the monastery of St. Florus, he was appointed to the offices of superintendent of peti?tions , professor of rhetoric , and deacon of the church of Constantinople....
, who mistook the title for the proper name of the author.

The Suda is somewhere between a grammatical dictionary and an encyclopedia in the modern sense.

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Encyclopedia

The Suda or Souda (also , Suidas) is a massive 10th century Byzantine

Byzantine Empire

Byzantine Empire and Eastern Roman Empire are conventional names used to describe the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on its capital of Constantinople....
Greek

Medieval Greek

Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
lexicon

Lexicon

Eustathius of Thessalonica

Philology

Philology, derived from the Greek language considers both morphology and Meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies....
of its period, using such earlier authorities as Harpocration

Harpocration

Valerius Harpocration was a Greece grammarian of Alexandria, probably working in the 2nd century CE. He is possibly the Harpocration mentioned by Julius Capitolinus as the Greek tutor of Lucius Verus ; some authorities place him much later, on the ground that he borrowed from Athenaeus....
and Helladios. There is nothing especially important about this aspect of the work. It is the articles on literary history that are valuable. These entries supply details and quotations from authors whose works are otherwise lost. They use older scholia to the classics (Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, etc.), and for later writers, Polybius

Polybius

Polybius was a Greek historian of the Hellenistic Period noted for his book called The Histories covering in detail the period of 220–146 BC....
, Josephus

Josephus

Josephus , also known as Yosef Ben Matityahu and, after he became a Roman citizenship, as Titus Flavius Josephus, was a first-century Jewish historian and apologist of priestly and royal ancestry who survived and recorded the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70....
, the Chronicon Paschale
Chronicon Paschale

Chronicon Paschale is the conventional name of a 7th-century Byzantine Empire universal chronicle of the world. Its name comes from its system of Christian chronology based on the paschal cycle; its Greek author named it "Epitome of the ages from Adam the first man to the 20th year of the reign of the most August Heraclius..."...
, George Syncellus

George Syncellus

George Syncellus was a Byzantine Empire chronicler and ecclesiastic. He had lived many years in Palestine as a monk, before coming to Constantinople, where he was appointed syncellus to Patriarch Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople....
, George Hamartolus

George Hamartolus

George Hamartolus was a monk at Constantinople under Michael III and the author of a chronicle of some importance. Hamartolus is not his name but the epithet he gives to himself in the title of his work: "A compendious chronicle from various chroniclers and interpreters, gathered together and arranged by George, a sinner "....
, and so on.

This lexicon represents a convenient work of reference for persons who played a part in political, ecclesiastical, and literary history in the East down to the tenth century. The chief source for this is the encyclopedia of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (912-59), and for Roman history the excerpts of John of Antioch

John of Antioch

John of Antioch was List of Patriarchs of Antioch and led a group of moderate Eastern bishops during the Nestorianism controversy. He is sometimes confused with John Chrysostom, who is occasionally also referred to as John of Antioch....
(seventh century). Krumbacher (Byzantinische Literatur, 566) counts two main sources of the work: Constantine VII for ancient history, and Hamartolus (Georgios Monachos) for the Byzantine age.

Background

Little is known of the compilation of this work, except that it must have been before Eustathius (12th century), who frequently quotes it. Under the heading "Adam" the author of the lexicon (which a prefatory note states to be "by Suidas") gives a brief chronology

Chronology

Chronology is a chronicle or arrangement of events in their occurrence order. General chronology is the science of locating and resolution of temporal sequence of past events in time...
of the world, ending with the death of the emperor John Zimisces (975), and under Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople was the empire capital of the Roman Empire , the Byzantine Empire , the Latin Empire , and the Ottoman Empire . Strategically located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara at the point where Europe meets Asia, Byzantine Constantinople had been the capital of a Christendom empire, successor to ancient ancient Greece...
his successors Basil II

Basil II

Basil II, surnamed the Bulgar-slayer , also known as Basil the Porphyrogenitus and Basil the Young to distinguish him from Basil I the Macedonian, was a Byzantine emperor from the Macedonian dynasty who reigned from January 10 976 to December 15, 1025....
and Constantine VIII (accession 1025) are mentioned. It would thus appear that the Suda was compiled in the latter part of the 10th century. Passages referring to Michael Psellus (end of the 11th century) are considered later interpolations.

It includes numerous quotations from ancient writers; the scholiast

Scholium

Scholia , are grammar, critical, or explanatory comments, either original or extracted from pre-existing commentaries, which are inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author, as gloss....
s on Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comedy playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays have come down to us virtually complete....
, Homer

Homer

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek language epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns....
, Sophocles

Sophocles

Sophocles was the second of the three classical Greece tragedy whose work has survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus and earlier than those of Euripides....
and Thucydides

Thucydides

Thucydides was a Greeks history and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century B.C. war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 B.C....
are also much used. The biographical notices, the author tells us, are condensed from the Onomatologion or Pinax of Hesychius of Miletus

Hesychius of Miletus

Hesychius of Miletus, Greece chronicler and biographer, surnamed Illustrius, son of an advocate, flourished at Constantinople in the 6th century AD during the reign of Justinian I....
; other sources were the excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus

Constantine VII

Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos or Porphyrogenitus, "the Purple-born" , was the son of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI the Wise and his fourth wife Zoe Karbonopsina....
, the chronicle of Georgius Monachus, the biographies of Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes La?rtius , the biographer of the Greece philosophers, is supposed by some to have received his surname from the town of Laerte in Cilicia, Asia Minor, and by others from the Roman Empire family of the La?rtii....
and the works of Athenaeus

Athenaeus

Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greeks rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century A.D. The Suda only tells us that he lived in the times of Marcus ; but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus shows that he survived that emperor....
and Philostratus

Philostratus

Philostratus, was the name of four Greek sophists of the Roman Empire:# "Philostratus I": Very minor author, known only for a dialogue Nero, possibly written by Philostratus II....
.

The work deals with biblical

Bible

The Bible is the central religious text of Judaism and Christianity. The exact Books of the Bible is dependent on the religious traditions of specific denominations....
as well as pagan

Paganism

Paganism is the blanket term given to describe religions and spiritual practices of pre-Christian Europe, and by extension a term for polytheistic?traditions or folk religion?worldwide seen from a Western or Christian viewpoint....
subjects, from which it is inferred that the writer was a Christian

Christianity

Christianity is a Monotheistic religion #Christian view religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as New Testament view on Jesus' life....
. A prefatory note gives a list of dictionaries from which the lexical portion was compiled, together with the names of their authors. Although the work is uncritical and probably much interpolated, and the value of the articles is very unequal, it contains much information on ancient history and life.

The Fehrest was published in 938 and as the practice of that era were later on taken to Byzantine Empire. (see under Ibn-Nadim and Al-beyrouni)

Organization

The lexicon is arranged alphabetically with some slight deviations. According to a system (formerly common in many languages) called antistoichia; namely the letters follow phonetically, in order of sound (of course in the pronunciation of the tenth century, which is similar to that of Modern Greek). So for instance alpha-iota comes after epsilon; epsilon-iota, eta-iota come together after zeta, omega after omicron, and so on. The system is not difficult to learn and remember, but in some modern editions (Immanuel Bekker) the work is rearranged alphabetically.

External links

. An on-line edition of the Adler edition with ongoing translations and commentary by registered editors. "The purpose of the Suda On Line is to open up this stronghold of information by means of a freely accessible, keyword-searchable, XML-encoded database with translations, annotations, bibliography, and automatically generated links to a number of other important electronic resources."
, containing the complete Suda, Hesychius and Liddell & Scott

Suda

Background

Organization

External links

Sources