Suda

• 1. Introduction

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  The Suda contains thirty thousand entries and was compiled in the tenth century in the Byzantine Empire. Written entirely in Greek, it covers the ancient Mediterranean world. Its entries range from the derivations of words to the life histories of emperors, philosophers, and poets. The work sits somewhere between a grammatical dictionary and what we would now call an encyclopedia. Many of the ancient texts it drew from have since vanished, leaving the Suda as the sole surviving record of their contents. The compiler remains unknown. The meaning of the work's very name has been disputed for more than a century. A medieval assessment described the Suda as cattle, but cattle with a golden fleece.

• 2. The Name Debate

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  The transmitted title of the work is spelled 'Suida', a form attested in Eustathius' commentary on Homer's epic poems. Paul Maas defended an alternative spelling, Σοῦδα. He read it as drawn from a Latin verb meaning 'to sweat', in its second-person singular imperative form. Franz Dölger also supported Σοῦδα, tracing it to Byzantine military vocabulary, where the word first meant 'ditch' or 'trench'. That usage later came to signify a fortress. Henri Grégoire, building on a proposal from one of his pupils, read Σοῦδα as an acrostic. The letters, on his reading, stood for a Greek phrase meaning 'Collection of names by different learned men.' A second acrostic reading, also advanced by Grégoire, gave the phrase as 'Collection of lexicographical material in alphabetical order.' French Hellenist Alphonse Dain supported the acrostic interpretation. Silvio Giuseppe Mercati linked the title to a Neo-Latin word meaning 'guide', transliterated into Greek as γουίδα and later miscopied as σουίδα. Dölger rejected that argument and refused to publish Mercati's first article in the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift. Giuseppe Schirò sided with Mercati. Bertrand Hemmerdinger proposed that Σουΐδας was a Doric genitive. Jan Sajdak linked the word to the Sanskrit suvidyā, which he translated into Latin as perfecta cumulataque scientia, meaning 'collected and systematized knowledge.' Hans Gerstinger looked to Russian, connecting the title to sjudá, meaning 'here', as an answer to the question 'what and where is it?' The most recent argument, as of 2024, was made by Claudia Nuovo, who defended Σοῦδα on palaeographical, philological, and historical grounds.

• 3. Lexicon and Archive

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  The Suda drew from scholia on Homer, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Sophocles, quoting and paraphrasing at length. For later writers, it quoted from Polybius, Josephus, the Chronicon Paschale, George Syncellus, and George Hamartolus. Their fragments survive only because the Suda copied them. Some scholars have judged this act of preservation as more valuable than the Suda's lexicographical work itself. The work explained the derivation and meaning of words according to the philology of its period. Among the earlier authorities it relied on were Harpocration and Helladios.

  Hesychius of Miletus supplied the biographical notices on political, ecclesiastical, and literary figures of the Byzantine Empire. The compiler acknowledged this source explicitly. For ancient history, the material came from the encyclopedia of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who reigned from 912 to 959. John of Antioch, writing in the seventh century, supplied the entries on Roman history. Georgios Monachos, known also as Hamartolus, contributed a chronicle of the Byzantine age from the ninth century. The works of Diogenes Laërtius, Athenaeus, and Philostratus also fed the biographical sections. A lexicon attributed to 'Eudemus' may derive from a work on rhetorical language by Eudemus of Argos.

  Michael Psellos, who lived roughly from 1017 to 1078, is mentioned in certain entries. Those references are considered later interpolations added to copies of the text. The work has been described as an 'uncritical' compilation, and much of it is probably interpolated. It deals with both biblical and pagan subjects. Apart from a minor interest in religious matters, it has no definite organizing guidelines.

• 4. The Unknown Compiler

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  The entry for 'Adam' in the Suda contains a brief world chronology. Within it, the compiler mentions the death of emperor John I Tzimiskes and the succession by Basil II and Constantine VIII. That reference places the compilation in the second half of the tenth century.

  Some scholars have proposed the Suda was a collective work, produced by multiple hands rather than a single author. The name once attached to the compiler, Soudas or Souidas, is now understood to refer to the title, not to a person.

  Eustathius, who lived from around 1115 to around 1195 or 1196, quoted from and alluded to the Suda frequently in his own writings. His references establish that the work was already in circulation before the twelfth century. The Suda follows a phonetic alphabetical system rooted in the pronunciation of the tenth century. That feature would puzzle editors for centuries after.

• 5. The Order of Sounds

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  Immanuel Bekker, an early editor of the Suda, found the work's alphabetical order inconvenient enough to rearrange the entire text. The system he departed from is called antistoichia. It arranged letters according to the phonetic pronunciation of the tenth century, which closely resembled that of Modern Greek. Vowels and digraphs that had once been phonetically distinct, such as αι, ει, and οι, had merged in pronunciation by that period. The Suda's system sorted them together. Double letters were treated as single for collation, since gemination had ceased to carry a distinct phonetic value. The ordering is not difficult to learn, but it requires familiarity with how Greek was pronounced in the Byzantine period.

• 6. Adler and the Online Suda

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  Ada Adler, a Danish classical scholar, compiled the standard printed edition of the Suda in the first half of the twentieth century. A collaborative English translation, the Suda On Line, was completed on the 21st of July 2014. The Suda is not without parallel. The Kitab al-Fihrist, compiled by Ibn al-Nadim, is a near-contemporary Islamic encyclopedic parallel. Vincent of Beauvais produced a Latin counterpart, the Speculum Maius, in the thirteenth century.