Maximus Planudes

Maximus Planudes (c. 1260 - 1330), Byzantine grammarian[?] and theologian, flourished during the reigns of Michael VIII and Andronicus II. He was born at Nicomedia in Bithynia, but the greater part of his life was spent in Constantinople, where as a monk he devoted himself to study and teaching. On entering the monastery he changed his original name Manuel to Maximus.

Planudes possessed a knowledge of Latin remarkable at a time when Rome and Italy were regarded with hatred and contempt by the Byzantines. To this accomplishment he probably owed his selection as one of the ambassadors sent by Andronicus II in 1327 to remonstrate with the Venetians for their attack upon the Genoese settlement in Pera. A more important result was that Planudes, especially by his translations, paved the way for the introduction of the Greek language and literature into the West.

He was the author of numerous works, including: a Greek grammar in the form of question and answer, like the Epurlluara of Moschopulus[?], with an appendix on the so-called "political" verse; a treatise on syntax; a biography of Aesop and a prose version of the fables; scholia on certain Greek authors; two hexameter poems, one a eulogy of Claudius Ptolemaeus, the other an account of the sudden change of an ox into a mouse; a treatise on the method of calculating in use amongst the Indians (ed. CJ Gerhardt, Halle, 1865); and scholia to the first two books of the Arithmetic of Diophantus.

His numerous translations from the Latin included Cicero's Somnium Scipionis with the commentary of Macrobius: Caesar's Gallic War; Ovid's Heroides and Metamorphoses; Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae; Augustine, De trinitate. These translations were very popular during the middle ages as textbooks for the study of Greek. It is, however, as the editor and compiler of the collection of the Greek Anthology that he is best known.

See Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca, ed. Harles, xi. 682; theological writings in Migne, Patrologia graeca, cxlvii; correspondence, ed.

M Treu (1890), with a valuable commentary; K Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897); JE Sandys[?], Hist. of Class. Schol. (1906), vol. i.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.