The Suda or Souda (; ; )[Thomas Gaisford, ed., (1834), Suidae Lexicon, 3 vols.] is a large 10th-century Byzantine Empire encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Soudas (Σούδας) or Souidas (Σουίδας). It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Medieval Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers.
Title
The exact spelling of the title is disputed.
[It is worth noticing that Adler's edition maintains the spelling Suida/Σουΐδα (as Gaisford's and Bekker's editions did), in continuity with the manuscripts, but modern scholarship prefers Suda/Σούδα.] The transmitted title (
paradosis) is "Suida", which is also attested in Eustathius' commentary on
Homer's epic poems; several conjectures have been made, both defending it and trying to correct it in "Suda".
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Paul Maas advocated for the Σοῦδα spelling, connecting it to the Latin verb , the second-person singular imperative of , "to sweat".
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Franz Dölger also defended Σοῦδα, tracing its origins back to Byzantine military lexicon (, "ditch, trench", then "fortress").
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Henri Grégoire, starting from a critique to Dölger's interpretation, defended a proposal advanced by one of his pupils, and explained the word Σοῦδα as the acrostic of Συναγογὴ ὀνομάτων ὑπὸ διαφόρων ἀνδρῶν σοφῶν, "Collection of names (words) by different learned men", or alternatively Συναγογὴ ὀνομαστικῆς ὕλης δι’ ἀλφαβήτου, "Collection of lexicographical material in alphabetical order".
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Silvio Giuseppe Mercati wrote on the matter twice: firstly in an article appeared in the academic journal Byzantion,
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Bertrand Hemmerdinger interpreted Σουΐδας as a Doric Greek Genitive case.
Other suggestions include Jan Sajdak's theory that σοῦδα / σουίδα may derive from Sanskrit suvidyā (which he translated into Latin: perfecta cumulataque scientia, "collected and systemized knowledge");
Content and sources
The
Suda is somewhere between a grammatical dictionary and an encyclopedia in the modern sense. It explains the source, derivation, and meaning of words according to the
philology of its period, using such earlier authorities as
Harpocration and Helladios. It is a rich source of ancient and Byzantine history and life, although not every article is of equal quality, and it is an "uncritical" compilation.
Much of the work is probably interpolated, and passages that refer to Michael Psellos (c. 1017–1078) are deemed interpolations which were added in later copies.
Biographical notices
This
lexicon contains numerous biographical notices on political, ecclesiastical, and literary figures of the Byzantine Empire to the tenth century, those biographical entries being condensations from the works of Hesychius of Miletus, as the author himself avers. Other sources were the encyclopedia of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (reigned 912–959) for the figures in ancient history, excerpts of John of Antioch (seventh century) for Roman history, the chronicle of Hamartolus (Georgios Monachos, 9th century) for the Byzantine age, the biographies of Diogenes Laërtius, and the works of
Athenaeus and
Philostratus. Other principal sources include a lexicon by "Eudemus," perhaps derived from the work
On Rhetorical Language by Eudemus of Argos.
[Krumbacher, Karl, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, pp. 268f.]
Lost scholia
The lexicon copiously draws from
scholia to the classics (
Homer,
Aristophanes,
Thucydides,
Sophocles, etc.), and for later writers,
Polybius,
Josephus, the
Chronicon Paschale,
George Syncellus, George Hamartolus, and so on. The
Suda quotes or paraphrases these sources at length. Since many of the originals are lost, the
Suda serves as an invaluable repository of literary history, and this preservation of the "literary history" is more vital than the lexicographical compilation itself, by some estimation.
Organization
The lexicon is arranged alphabetically with some slight deviations from common vowel order and place in the Greek alphabet (including at each case the homophonous digraphs, e.g. αι, ει, οι, that had been previously, earlier in the history of Greek, distinct
or vowels) according to a system (formerly common in many languages) called
antistoichia (ἀντιστοιχία); namely the letters follow phonetically in order of sound according the pronunciation of the tenth century, which was similar to that of Modern Greek. The order is:
In addition, double letters are treated as single for the purposes of collation (as gemination had ceased to be distinctive). The system is not difficult to learn and remember, but some editors—for example, Immanuel Bekker—rearranged the Suda alphabetically.
Background
Little is known about the compiler of the
Suda. He probably lived in the second half of the 10th century, because the death of emperor John I Tzimiskes and his succession by
Basil II and
Constantine VIII are mentioned in the entry under "Adam" which is appended with a brief
chronology of the world. At any rate, the work must have appeared by the 12th century, since it is frequently quoted from and alluded to by Eustathius who lived from about 1115 to about 1195–1196. It has also been stated that the work was a collective work, thus not having had a single author, and that the name which it is known under does not refer to a specific person.
The work deals with Bible as well as paganism subjects, from which it is inferred that the writer was a Christianity. In any case, it lacks definite guidelines besides some minor interest in religious matters.
The standard printed edition was compiled by Danish classical scholar Ada Adler in the first half of the twentieth century. A modern collaborative English translation, the Suda On Line, was completed on 21 July 2014.[ Also ]
The Suda has a near-contemporaneous Islamic parallel, the Al-Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim. Compare also the Latin Speculum Maius, authored in the 13th century by Vincent of Beauvais.
Editions
See also
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Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder
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Etymologicum Magnum
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Etymologicum Genuinum
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Hesychius of Alexandria
Citations
Bibliography
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Eleanor Dickey. Ancient Greek Scholarship: a guide to finding, reading, and understanding scholia, commentaries, lexica, and grammatical treatises, from their beginnings to the Byzantine period. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. .
External links
