Atticist Orus of Alexandria (5th Century A.D.) and His Works
This research by N.N. Bolgov was carried out under the State Assignment of the Institute of History and Archaeology of Byzantium and the Black Sea Region, Sevastopol State University: “Comprehensive Historical and Archaeological Study of Byzantium and the Black Sea Region in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages” (FEFM-2025-0002). The author's contribution is 50 %
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52575/2687-0967-2026-53-2-275-284Keywords:
Early Byzantium, intellectuals, grammarians, Orus, Alexandria, Constantinople, cultureAbstract
In this article, the authors attempt to reconstruct the key events in the biography of the early Byzantine intellectual and grammarian, Оrus of Alexandria (c. 400–460), and analyze his works. Based on available sources, primarily the Suda, as well as manuscripts of Horus's own works, a number of conclusions are drawn. First, Оrus was one of the few major intellectuals acting in the capital in the mid-5th century. Оrus was close to the Christian Hellenistic culture that developed at the court of Theodosius the Younger and apparently taught at the proto-university of Constantinople. His grammatical works devoted to Attic lexicography reflect the medievalization of the Greek language: his recommendations were useful to authors, but they no longer reflected actual norms of the language. His other works, either lost or preserved in small fragments, are also of interest. Overall, this study is among the first in Russian historical science dedicated to grammarians – representatives of the vast world of teachers of the late antique (early Byzantine) period, thanks to whose tireless work the empire maintained its previous level of almost complete literacy.
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Список литературы
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Hunger H. 1961. Katalog der griechischen Handschriften der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Museion: Veröffentlichungen der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, n.s., 4. Reihe, Veröffentlichungen der Handschriftensammlung. T. 1: Codices historici. Codices philosophici et philogici. Vienna, George Plachner Verlag, xxi+503.
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Kaster R.A. 1988. Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity. Berkeley; Los Angeles, University of California Press, 525.
Kröhnert O. 1897. Canonesne poetarum scriptorem artificum per antiquitatem fuerunt. Diss. Regimonti, ex officina Leupoldiana, 86.
Rabe H. 1892. Lexicon Messanense de iota ascripto. In: Rheinisches Museum. 47: 405–413.
Reitzenstein R. 1897. Geschichte der griechischen Etymologika: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie in Alexandria und Byzanz. Leipzig, Teubner, 424.
Ritschl F. 1834. De Oro et Orione Commentatio. Vratislaviae, Schulze, 84.
Robins R.H. 1998. The Byzantine Grammarians. In: Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 51: 29–38.
Robins R.H. 1993. The Byzantine Grammarians: Their Place in History. Berlin; New York, W. de Gruyter, ix+278.
Wahlgren S. 2002. Towards a Grammar of Byzantine Greek. In: Symbolae Osloenses, 77: 201–204.
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