Suidas

, author of a celebrated Greek Lexicon, is a personage of whom we are unable to give many particulars. Who he was, or when he lived, are points of great uncertainty; no circumstances of his life having been recorded, either by himself or any other writer. Politian and some oihers have been of opinion that no such person ever existed; but thai Suidas was a real person, appears, not only from his name being found in all the manuscripts of his Lexicon, but from his being often mentioned by Eustathius in his Commentary upon Homer. The learned have differed in the same manner concerning the age of Suidas; some, as Grotins, supposing him to have lived under Conjstantinus, the son of Leo, emperor of the East, who began to reign in the year 912; while others have brought him even lower than Eustathins, who is known to have lived in 1180. The learned Bentley thinks that as he has referred a point of chronology to the death of the emperor Zimisces, that is, to the year of Christ 975: we may infer that he wrote his Lexicon between that time and the death of the succeeding emperor, which was in 1075. This Lexicon is a compilation of matters from various authors, sometimes made with judgment and diligence, but often from bad copies; and he therefore sometimes gives his reader corrupt and spurious words, instead of those that are pure and genuine. He also mixes things of a different kind, and belonging to different authors, promiscuously; and some of his examples to illustrate the signification of words are very little to the purpose. His Lexicon, however, is a very useful book, and a storehouse of all sorts of erudition. Scholars by profession have all prized it highly; as exhibiting many excellent passages of ancient authors whose works are lost. It is to be ranked with the Bbliotheca of Photuis ard works of that kind. The “Etymologicon Magnum” has been ascribed to Suidas, but without sufficient authority, though it may have been composed in the same period with the Lexicon. | Suidas’s Lexicon was first published at Milan, 1499, in Greek only: it has since been printed with a Latin version: but the best edition, indeed the only good one, is that of Kuster, Gr. & Lat. Cambridge, 1705, 3 vols. folio. To this should be added Toup’s valuable “Emendationes in Suidam,” Oxon. 1790, 4 vols. 8vo. Mr. Taylor had begun an appendix to Suidas, four sheets only of which were printed off at the time of his death, April 4, 1766. It had the following title, “Appendix notarum in Suidae Lexicon, ad paginas edit. Cantab. 1705, adcommodatarum; colligente, qui et suas etiani aliquammultas adjecit, Joanne Taylor.” This, we believe, was never finished. 1

1

Moreri. —Saxii Onomast. Berrington’s Middle Ages. Clarke’s Bibliographical Dictionary.