Zenodotus
Encyclopedia
Zenodotus was a Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 grammarian, literary critic, and Homeric scholar
Homeric scholarship
Homeric scholarship is the study of Homeric epic, especially the two large surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies, but the subject is one of the very oldest topics in all scholarship or science, and goes back to antiquity...

. A native of Ephesus
Ephesus
Ephesus was an ancient Greek city, and later a major Roman city, on the west coast of Asia Minor, near present-day Selçuk, Izmir Province, Turkey. It was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League during the Classical Greek era...

 and a pupil of Philitas of Cos
Philitas of Cos
Philitas of Cos , sometimes spelled Philetas , was a scholar and poet during the early Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. A Greek associated with Alexandria, he flourished in the second half of the 4th century BC and was appointed tutor to the heir to the throne of Ptolemaic Egypt...

, he was the first librarian
Librarian
A librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs...

 of the Library of Alexandria
Library of Alexandria
The Royal Library of Alexandria, or Ancient Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the...

. He lived during the reigns of the first two Ptolemies
Ptolemaic dynasty
The Ptolemaic dynasty, was a Macedonian Greek royal family which ruled the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. Their rule lasted for 275 years, from 305 BC to 30 BC...

, and was at the height of his reputation about 280 BC.

Zenodotus was the first superintendent of the Library of Alexandria
Library of Alexandria
The Royal Library of Alexandria, or Ancient Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the...

 and the first critical editor ( diorthōtes) of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

. His colleagues in the librarianship were Alexander of Aetolia
Alexander Aetolus
For other uses, see Alexander and Alexander Alexander Aetolus was a Greek poet and grammarian, the only known representative of Aetolian poetry...

 and Lycophron of Chalcis, to whom were allotted the tragic and comic writers respectively, Homer and other epic poets being assigned to Zenodotus.

Although he has been reproached with arbitrariness and an insufficient knowledge of Greek, his recension undoubtedly laid a sound foundation for future criticism. Having collated the different manuscripts in the library, he expunged or obelized doubtful verses, transposed or altered lines, and introduced new readings. It is probable that he was responsible for the division of the Homeric poems into twenty-four books each (using capital Greek letters for the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

, and lower-case for the Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...

), and possibly was the author of the calculation of the days of the Iliad in the Tabula Iliaca
Tabula Iliaca
A Tabula Iliaca is a generic label for a calculation of the days of the Iliad, probably by Zenodotus, of which numerous fragmentary examples are now known...

.

He does not appear to have written any regular commentary on Homer, but his Homeric (glōssai
Glossa
Glossa may refer to several things:*glossa , a Greek word meaning "tongue" or "language" and is used in several English words including gloss, glossary, glossitis, and others...

, "lists of unusual words, gloss
Gloss
A gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....

es") probably formed the source of the explanations of Homer attributed by the grammarians to Zenodotus. He also lectured upon Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

, Anacreon and Pindar
Pindar
Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...

, if he did not publish editions of them. He is further called an epic poet by the Suda
Suda
The Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often...

,
and three epigrams in the Greek Anthology
Greek Anthology
The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature...

are assigned to him.

In addition to his other scholarly work, Zenodotus introduced an organization system on the materials in the Library of Alexandria
Library of Alexandria
The Royal Library of Alexandria, or Ancient Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the...

 whereby texts were assigned to different rooms based on their subject matter. Within their subjects, Zenodotus organized the works alphabetically by the first letter of the name of their author. The principle of alphabetic organization, so unremarkable in modern days, was introduced by Zenodotus. In addition, library staff attached a small tag to the end of each scroll which contained information on each work’s author, title, and subject so that materials could be easily returned to the area in which they had been classified, but also so that library users did not have to unroll each scroll in order to see what it contained. Obvious and unimpressive though it may seem to those accustomed to modern libraries, this was the first recorded use of metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

, a landmark in library history.

There appear to have been at least two other grammarians of the same name:
  1. Zenodotus of Alexandria, surnamed (ho en astei, "the one from the city", i.e. Alexandria)
  2. Zenodotus of Mallus, the disciple of Crates
    Crates of Mallus
    Crates, of Mallus in Cilicia , was a Greek language grammarian and Stoic philosopher of the 2nd century BC, leader of the literary school and head of the library of Pergamum. His chief work was a critical and exegetical commentary on Homer...

    , who like his master attacked Aristarchus of Samothrace
    Aristarchus of Samothrace
    Aristarchus of Samothrace was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.He established the most historically important critical...


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