Zenobius (Sophist)

Zenobios ( Greek  Ζηνόβιος Zēnóbios , also called Zenobios Grammatikos ) was a Greek sophist , paremiographer and philologist . He lived in the first half of the 2nd century.

According to the Suda, Zenobius was teaching rhetoric in Rome at the time of Emperor Hadrian . He wrote an epitome of the collections of proverbs of the Greek grammarians Didymos and Lukillos von Tarrha in three books, which have not survived in their original version, but only in a diluted form in later revisions. It is possible that Zenobius was personally acquainted with Hadrian, as he wrote a birthday speech in the Princeps . He also translated the historical writings of the Roman historian Sallust into Greek, but these last two works have been lost.

Zenobius's collection of proverbs has been handed down in two traditional lines, of which the so-called Vulgate goes back to Codex Parisinus 3070 and is an alphabetical arrangement, while the so-called recensio Athoa is based on a manuscript found on Mount Athos , the Codex Parisinus suppl. 1164 , and should be closer to the original version. Zenobius wrote this work in the spirit of the Second Sophistic. In it, the quotation of a proverb is followed by an explanation of its meaning or its origin.

Source edition

• Jan Radicke (ed.): Felix Jacoby: The fragments of the Greek historians continued , Part IV A: Biography , Fasc. 7: Imperial and Undated Authors. Brill, Leiden 1999, ISBN 90-04-11304-5 , pp. 302–305 (No. 1088; critical edition with English translation and commentary)

literature

• William D. Furley : Zenobios Grammatikos. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 12/2, Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-01487-8 , column 735.
• Krystyna Stebnicka: Zenobios. In: Paweł Janiszewski, Krystyna Stebnicka, Elżbieta Szabat: Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-871340-1 , p. 382