Maximos Planoudes

Maximos Planoudes, latinized as Maximus Planudes (Greek: Μάξιμος Πλανούδης, c. 1260–1330), was a Byzantine Greek grammarian and theologian who lived and worked during the reigns of Michael VIII Palaiologos and Andronikos II Palaiologos.

Life & Work

He was born at Nicomedia in Bithynia, but the greater part of his life was spent in Constantinople, where, as a monk, he devoted himself to study and teaching. On entering the monastery he changed his original name Manuel to Maximos.

Planoudes possessed a knowledge of Latin remarkable at a time when Rome and Italy were regarded with hatred and contempt by the Byzantines. To this accomplishment he probably owed his selection as one of the ambassadors sent by Andronikos II in 1327 to remonstrate with the Venetians for their attack upon the Genoese settlement in Pera. A more important result was that Planoudes, especially by his translations, paved the way for the introduction of the Greek language and literature into the West.

He was the author of numerous works, including: a Greek grammar in the form of question and answer, like the Erotemata of Manuel Moschopoulos, with an appendix on the so-called "political" verse; a treatise on syntax; a biography of Aesop and a prose version of the fables; scholia on certain Greek authors; two hexameter poems, one a eulogy of Claudius Ptolemaeus—whose Geography was rediscovered by Planoudes, who translated it into Latin—, the other an account of the sudden change of an ox into a mouse; a treatise on the method of calculating in use amongst the Indians (ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Halle, 1865); and scholia to the first two books of the Arithmetic of Diophantus.

His numerous translations from the Latin included Cicero's Somnium Scipionis with the commentary of Macrobius: Julius Caesar's Gallic War; Ovid's Heroides and Metamorphoses; Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae; and Augustine's De trinitate. These translations were very popular during the Middle Ages as textbooks for the study of Greek. It is, however, for his edition of the Greek Anthology that he is best known.

See also

• Palaeologan Renaissance
• Byzantine scholars in Renaissance

Further reading

• Editions include: Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca, ed. G. C. Harles, xi. 682; theological writings in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, cxlvii; correspondence, ed. M Treu (1890), with a valuable commentary
• K. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897)
• J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. (1906), vol. i

External links

• Planudes from Charles Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867), v. 3, pp. 384–390
• Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology by J. W. Mackail (Project Gutenberg)
• The Greek Anthology, Books 1-6, Translated by W. R. Patton, with Facing Greek Text
• Maximus Planudes' The Great Calculation According to the Indians at Convergence

(Loeb Classical Library, 1916)

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.