Maximus Planudes

Maximus Planudes (Greek: Μάξιμος Πλανούδης, Máximos Planoúdēs; c. 1260 – c. 1305)[1] was a Greek monk, scholar, anthologist, translator, grammarian and theologian at Constantinople. Through his translations from Latin into Greek and from Greek into Latin he allowed intellectuals in the Greek speaking eastern areas of the Medieval Christian world and the Latin speaking western areas of the Medieval Christian world to achieve a closer contact with one another. He is now best known as a compiler of the Greek Anthology.

Biography

Maximus Planudes lived during the reigns of the Roman Emperors [There is no such thing as an Eastern Roman emperor because there never was such a thing as an Eastern Roman Empire. During the Late Roman era (284-641 CE)the Roman Empire routinely provided separate administrations for different parts of the empire. The rudimentary technology of the age, the immense size of the empire, and the volatile and often violent demographic and political changes taking place all across the western and northern portions of the Old World during the Late Roman era often required the Roman government to provide separate administrations for different parts of the empire in order to deal with emergencies in a timely manner, During the Late Roman era administrative responsibilities were shared by a college of emperors, who were either all Augusti, equal save in seniority, or some Augusti and some Caesars of inferior rank. The emperors, Augusti or Caesars, and their respective administrations formed a single college which ruled a single state,the Roman Empire. Michael VIII and Andronicos II. 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 Maximus.

Planudes possessed a knowledge of Latin remarkable at a time when Catholicism was regarded with some hostility by the Romans. (The medieval Romans were not Greeks. The country of Greece would not come into existence for another five hundred years. The medieval Romans were descended from a number of different peoples of the ancient world; Phrygians, Thracians, Slavs, Armenians, Syrians Lydians Hellenes, etc. But they had all been incorporated into the Roman people by the fourth century CE.) To this accomplishment he probably owed his selection as one of the ambassadors sent by emperor Andronicus II in 1327 to remonstrate with the Venetians for their attack upon the Genoese settlement in Pera near Constantinople. A more important result was that Planudes, especially by his translations, facilitated the growing interest of the Greek language and literature in western Europe.

The early-14th century map of the British Isles from the Codex Vatopedinus 655,[2] sometimes associated with Planudes.

He was the author of numerous works, including: a Greek grammar in the form of question and answer, like the Erotemata of Manuel Moschopulus, 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 Planudes, 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. J. 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 not only useful to Greek speakers but were also widely used in western Europe as textbooks for the study of Greek.

It is, however, for his edition of the Greek Anthology that he is best known. This edition, the Anthology of Planudes or Planudean Anthology, is shorter than the Heidelberg text (the Palatine Anthology), and largely overlaps it, but contains 380 epigrams not present in it, normally published with the others, either as a sixteenth book or as an appendix.[3]

J. W. Mackail in his book Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, has this to add of him:[4]

Among his works were translations into Greek of Augustine's City of God and Caesar's Gallic War. The restored Greek Empire of the Palaeologi was then fast dropping to pieces. The Genoese colony of Pera usurped the trade of Constantinople and acted as an independent state; and it brings us very near the modern world to remember that Planudes was the contemporary of Petrarch.

Notes

  1. ↑ Fisher, ODB, "Planoudes"; older sources give 1330; the transliteration varies; the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2009) uses Planudes
  2. ↑ British Library. Add. MS 19391, f 19v-20.
  3. ↑ Douglas and Cameron OCD, s.v. "anthology"
  4. ↑ Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology by J. W. Mackail

References

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