P. M. Fraser
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780197264287
- eISBN:
- 9780191753978
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264287.003.0016
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The epitomised Stephanus is the only text of an Ethnika surviving from antiquity. Consequently we cannot speak of his successors in the same way that he himself may be regarded as successor of Oros, ...
More
The epitomised Stephanus is the only text of an Ethnika surviving from antiquity. Consequently we cannot speak of his successors in the same way that he himself may be regarded as successor of Oros, or at a further remove, of Alexander Polyhistor or Herennius Philon. There survive a number of unnamed quotations regarding ethnic forms in various Etymologica and elsewhere, which sometimes provide more information than the corresponding entries in Stephanus, but it is a manifest oversimplification to suppose that all these entries derive from the full text of Stephanus. Stephanus and the Epitome were subsequently used by a few Byzantine writers, notably by Constantine Porphyrogennetus and the Continuators of Theophanes, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and above all, though last in time, by Eustathius in the twelfth.Less
The epitomised Stephanus is the only text of an Ethnika surviving from antiquity. Consequently we cannot speak of his successors in the same way that he himself may be regarded as successor of Oros, or at a further remove, of Alexander Polyhistor or Herennius Philon. There survive a number of unnamed quotations regarding ethnic forms in various Etymologica and elsewhere, which sometimes provide more information than the corresponding entries in Stephanus, but it is a manifest oversimplification to suppose that all these entries derive from the full text of Stephanus. Stephanus and the Epitome were subsequently used by a few Byzantine writers, notably by Constantine Porphyrogennetus and the Continuators of Theophanes, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and above all, though last in time, by Eustathius in the twelfth.
