Henry Aristippus
Encyclopedia
Henry Aristippus of Calabria
, sometimes known as Enericus or Henricus Aristippus, was the archdeacon
of Catania
(from c.
1155) and later chief familiaris (or chancellor
) of the triumvirate
of familiares who replaced the Emir
Maio of Bari
as chief functionaries of the kingdom of Sicily
in 1161. According to the chronicler Hugo Falcandus
, he was:
While the historian of Norman Sicily, John Julius Norwich
, believes him to have probably been of Norman
extraction despite his Greek
surname, Donald Matthew considers it self-evident, based on both his name and occupations, that he was Greek. He was first and foremost a scholar and, even if Greek, he was an adherent of the Latin church.
Aristippus was an envoy to Constantinople
(1158-1160) when he received from the emperor Manuel I Comnenus a Greek copy of Ptolemy
's Almagest
. A student of the Schola Medica Salernitana
tracked down Aristippus and his copy on Mount Etna
(observing an eruption) and proceeded to give a Latin translation. Though this was the first translation of the Almagest into Latin, it was not as influential as a later translation into Latin made by Gerard of Cremona
from the Arabic. The original manuscript is probably in the Biblioteca Marciana
in Venice
.
Aristippus himself produced the first Latin translation of Plato
's Phaedo
(1160) and Meno
and the fourth book of Aristotle
's Meteorologica. He also translated Gregory of Nazianus at the request of William I of Sicily
.
In 1161, William appointed three familiares—Aristippus, Sylvester of Marsico
, and the Bishop Palmer—to replace the assassinated Maio. In 1162, Aristippus was suspected of disloyalty by the king and imprisoned. He died probably soon after in that very year. He may have helped himself to some of the royal concubines during the rebellion of 1161. He does not seem to have been a particularly effective administrator. Sylvester of Marsico died at the same time and Matthew of Ajello
and the caïd Peter replaced him and Aristippus in the "triumvirate."
Calabria
Calabria , in antiquity known as Bruttium, is a region in southern Italy, south of Naples, located at the "toe" of the Italian Peninsula. The capital city of Calabria is Catanzaro....
, sometimes known as Enericus or Henricus Aristippus, was the archdeacon
Archdeacon
An archdeacon is a senior clergy position in Anglicanism, Syrian Malabar Nasrani, Chaldean Catholic, and some other Christian denominations, above that of most clergy and below a bishop. In the High Middle Ages it was the most senior diocesan position below a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church...
of Catania
Catania
Catania is an Italian city on the east coast of Sicily facing the Ionian Sea, between Messina and Syracuse. It is the capital of the homonymous province, and with 298,957 inhabitants it is the second-largest city in Sicily and the tenth in Italy.Catania is known to have a seismic history and...
(from c.
Circa
Circa , usually abbreviated c. or ca. , means "approximately" in the English language, usually referring to a date...
1155) and later chief familiaris (or chancellor
Chancellor
Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...
) of the triumvirate
Triumvirate
A triumvirate is a political regime dominated by three powerful individuals, each a triumvir . The arrangement can be formal or informal, and though the three are usually equal on paper, in reality this is rarely the case...
of familiares who replaced the Emir
Emir
Emir , meaning "commander", "general", or "prince"; also transliterated as Amir, Aamir or Ameer) is a title of high office, used throughout the Muslim world...
Maio of Bari
Maio of Bari
Maio of Bari , a Lombard merchant's son from Bari, was the third of the great admirals of Sicily. An ammiratus ammiratorum, or "Emir of Emirs," he was the most important man in the kingdom save the king himself. After the deposition and execution of Philip of Mahdia , the admiralcy was vacant for...
as chief functionaries of the kingdom of Sicily
Kingdom of Sicily
The Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in the south of Italy from its founding by Roger II in 1130 until 1816. It was a successor state of the County of Sicily, which had been founded in 1071 during the Norman conquest of southern Italy...
in 1161. According to the chronicler Hugo Falcandus
Hugo Falcandus
Hugo Falcandus was an Italian historian who chronicled the reign of William I of Sicily and the minority of his son William II in a highly critical work entitled The History of the Tyrants of Sicily . There is some doubt as to whether "Hugo Falcandus" is a real name or a pseudonym. Evelyn Jamison...
, he was:
- mansuetissimi virum ingenii et tam latinis quam grecis litteris eruditum, familiarem sibi delegit ut vicem et officium interim gereret admirati, preessetque notariis, et cum co secretius de regni negotiis pertractaret.
While the historian of Norman Sicily, John Julius Norwich
John Julius Norwich
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich CVO — known as John Julius Norwich — is an English historian, travel writer and television personality.-Early life:...
, believes him to have probably been of Norman
Normans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
extraction despite his Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
surname, Donald Matthew considers it self-evident, based on both his name and occupations, that he was Greek. He was first and foremost a scholar and, even if Greek, he was an adherent of the Latin church.
Aristippus was an envoy to Constantinople
Constantinople
Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...
(1158-1160) when he received from the emperor Manuel I Comnenus a Greek copy of Ptolemy
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the...
's Almagest
Almagest
The Almagest is a 2nd-century mathematical and astronomical treatise on the apparent motions of the stars and planetary paths. Written in Greek by Claudius Ptolemy, a Roman era scholar of Egypt,...
. A student of the Schola Medica Salernitana
Schola Medica Salernitana
The Schola Medica Salernitana was the first medieval medical school in the cosmopolitan coastal south Italian city of Salerno, which provided the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time...
tracked down Aristippus and his copy on Mount Etna
Mount Etna
Mount Etna is an active stratovolcano on the east coast of Sicily, close to Messina and Catania. It is the tallest active volcano in Europe, currently standing high, though this varies with summit eruptions; the mountain is 21 m higher than it was in 1981.. It is the highest mountain in...
(observing an eruption) and proceeded to give a Latin translation. Though this was the first translation of the Almagest into Latin, it was not as influential as a later translation into Latin made by Gerard of Cremona
Gerard of Cremona
Gerard of Cremona was an Italian translator of Arabic scientific works found in the abandoned Arab libraries of Toledo, Spain....
from the Arabic. The original manuscript is probably in the Biblioteca Marciana
Biblioteca Marciana
The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana is a library and Renaissance building in Venice, northern Italy; it is one of the earliest surviving public manuscript depositories in the country, holding one of the greatest classical texts collections in the world. The library is named after St. Mark, the...
in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
.
Aristippus himself produced the first Latin translation of Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Phaedo
Phaedo
Plato's Phaedo is one of the great dialogues of his middle period, along with the Republic and the Symposium. The Phaedo, which depicts the death of Socrates, is also Plato's seventh and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days .In the dialogue, Socrates...
(1160) and Meno
Meno
Meno is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato. It attempts to determine the definition of virtue, or arete, meaning virtue in general, rather than particular virtues, such as justice or temperance. The first part of the work is written in the Socratic dialectical style and Meno is reduced to...
and the fourth book of Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
's Meteorologica. He also translated Gregory of Nazianus at the request of William I of Sicily
William I of Sicily
William I , called the Bad or the Wicked, was the second king of Sicily, ruling from his father's death in 1154 to his own...
.
In 1161, William appointed three familiares—Aristippus, Sylvester of Marsico
Sylvester of Marsico
Sylvester , count of Marsico, was a Norman nobleman of the Kingdom of Sicily.Second son of Godfrey of Ragusa, second eldest son of Roger I of Sicily, he was not a young man when he first rose to importance in the realm. He immediately seized all the property of the Admiral Maio of Bari in Palermo...
, and the Bishop Palmer—to replace the assassinated Maio. In 1162, Aristippus was suspected of disloyalty by the king and imprisoned. He died probably soon after in that very year. He may have helped himself to some of the royal concubines during the rebellion of 1161. He does not seem to have been a particularly effective administrator. Sylvester of Marsico died at the same time and Matthew of Ajello
Matthew of Ajello
Matthew of Ajello was a high-ranking member of the Norman court of the Kingdom of Sicily in the 12th century.He first appears as the notary of the Admiral Maio of Bari who drew up the Treaty of Benevento of 1156...
and the caïd Peter replaced him and Aristippus in the "triumvirate."
Sources
- Hugo FalcandusHugo FalcandusHugo Falcandus was an Italian historian who chronicled the reign of William I of Sicily and the minority of his son William II in a highly critical work entitled The History of the Tyrants of Sicily . There is some doubt as to whether "Hugo Falcandus" is a real name or a pseudonym. Evelyn Jamison...
. History of the Tyrants of Sicily at the Latin LibraryThe Latin LibraryThe Latin Library is a website that collects public domain Latin texts. The texts have been drawn from different sources. Many were originally scanned and formatted from texts in the Public Domain. Others have been downloaded from various sites on the Internet . Most of the recent texts have been...
. - Norwich, John JuliusJohn Julius NorwichJohn Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich CVO — known as John Julius Norwich — is an English historian, travel writer and television personality.-Early life:...
. The Kingdom in the Sun 1130-1194. Longman: LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, 1970. - Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
: 1992. - Houben, Hubert. Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West. Trans. G. A. Loud and Diane Milbourne. Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
: 2002.