Sophonias (commentator)

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Sophonias (Greek : Σοφονίας; fl. 13th–14th century) was a Byzantine monk who wrote commentaries or paraphrases of the works of Aristotle including De Anima , Sophistici Elenchi , Prior Analytics , and the Parva Naturalia , [1] which are still extant. Little is known about Sophonias, except that he was probably the monk sent by Michael IX Palaiologos on an abortive mission to arrange a marriage between Michael and a western princess around 1295. [2] [3]

Greek language language spoken in Greece, Cyprus and Southern Albania

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language, spanning more than 3000 years of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

Byzantine Empire Roman Empire during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople. It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe. Both the terms "Byzantine Empire" and "Eastern Roman Empire" are historiographical exonyms; its citizens continued to refer to their empire simply as the Roman Empire, or Romania (Ῥωμανία), and to themselves as "Romans".

Monk religious occupation

A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism by monastic living, either alone or with any number of other monks. A monk may be a person who decides to dedicate his life to serving all other living beings, or to be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live his or her life in prayer and contemplation. The concept is ancient and can be seen in many religions and in philosophy.

Contents

Work

In his works Sophonias has interwoven the statements of Aristotle with the scholia of Michael of Ephesus. Some later manuscripts of the Parva Naturalia commentary ascribe the work to Themistius, but Sophonias' authorship, first proposed by Valentin Rose, may be regarded as certain, and the method of composition does not resemble Themistius' at all. [4] Sophonias wrote paraphrases of Aristotle's Categories , Prior Analytics, Sophistici Elenchi, De Anima, De Memoria and De Somno . [5] He considered innovative his practice of writing a running explanatory account of every passage in Aristotle, incorporating amplifications of Aristotle's paraphrasers or those critical remarks of the commentators that he thought necessary to understand the text. [6] The value of the works of Sophonias is that they contain excerpts from the best of the earlier commentators. [5]

Michael of Ephesus or Michael Ephesius wrote important commentaries on Aristotle, including the first full commentary on the Sophistical Refutations, which established the regular study of that text.

Themistius, named εὐφραδής (eloquent), was a statesman, rhetorician, and philosopher. He flourished in the reigns of Constantius II, Julian, Jovian, Valens, Gratian, and Theodosius I; and he enjoyed the favour of all those emperors, notwithstanding their many differences, and the fact that he himself was not a Christian. He was admitted to the senate by Constantius in 355, and he was prefect of Constantinople in 384 on the nomination of Theodosius. Of his many works, thirty-three orations of his have come down to us, as well as various commentaries and epitomes of the works of Aristotle.

Valentin Rose (classicist) German classicist and textual critic

Valentin Rose was a German classicist and textual critic.

Notes

  1. ↑ Ierodiakonou, Katerina. "Byzantine Philosophy". In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
  2. ↑ Sten Ebbesen, 1981, Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle's Sophistici Elenchi, page 333. BRILL
  3. ↑ Edmund Fryde, 2000, The Early Palaeologan Renaissance (1261–c. 1360), pages 198–9. BRILL
  4. ↑ Paul Wendland, "Praefatio," Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, vol. VI, part VI (Berlin 1903), pp. v–x.
  5. 1 2 John Edwin Sandys, 1903, A history of classical scholarship from the sixth century B.C. to the end of the Middle Ages, page 421. Cambridge University Press
  6. ↑ Nicholas J. Moutafakis, 2003, Byzantine Philosophy, page 203
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