Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Suda is a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia written in Greek, containing thirty thousand entries on the ancient Mediterranean world. It preserves quotations and paraphrases from many ancient texts that no longer survive in any other form. Some scholars consider its role as a literary archive more valuable than its function as a lexicon.
The compiler of the Suda is unknown. The name Soudas or Souidas, once attributed to an author, is now understood to refer to the title rather than to a person. Some scholars have proposed the work was a collective project produced by multiple hands.
The Suda was compiled in the second half of the tenth century. The entry for Adam mentions the death of emperor John I Tzimiskes and the succession of Basil II and Constantine VIII, placing the compilation after those events. The work was in circulation before the twelfth century at the latest, since Eustathius, who lived from around 1115 to around 1195 or 1196, quoted it frequently.
The meaning of the name Suda is disputed and has been debated by scholars for over a century. Proposed origins include a Byzantine military term meaning fortress, an acrostic for a phrase meaning 'Collection of names by different learned men', a link to the Sanskrit suvidya meaning 'collected and systematized knowledge', and a connection to the Russian word sjuda meaning 'here'. The most recent scholarly argument, as of 2024, was made by Claudia Nuovo on palaeographical, philological, and historical grounds.
The Suda quotes and paraphrases extensively from scholia on Homer, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Sophocles. It also drew on Polybius, Josephus, the Chronicon Paschale, George Syncellus, and George Hamartolus, as well as earlier grammatical authorities including Harpocration and Helladios. Many of these originals no longer survive independently, leaving the Suda as the only source for their contents.
A collaborative English translation called the Suda On Line was completed on the 21st of July 2014. The standard printed edition in Greek was compiled by the Danish classical scholar Ada Adler in the first half of the twentieth century.