The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, Vol. 1

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PREFACE

My debts to this work are too numerous to acknowledge in detail.
The text I used for translating the prose works of Synesius is that published in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca a comprehensive collection of the writings of the Church Fathers in Greek. This is partly a reprint from the folio edition by Petavius, and elsewhere it relies on the text established by Krabinger, a talented scholar whose valuable work was cut short by an untimely death. The best and most recent edition of the Hymns is that published by Professor Terzaghi,¹ who appended to a new text—based on a further comparison of manuscripts—a critical apparatus a collection of textual variants and academic notes on the manuscript tradition, along with references to Greek authors that clarify the nuances of Synesius's language. In the introduction, I have attempted to emphasize points in Greek history and culture that illuminate the character of this late-era Lacedaemonian, and to clarify the tangled threads of Neoplatonism a school of philosophy based on the teachings of Plato and Plotinus for those who have not had the time to unravel them. These essays and addresses have not been previously presented to English readers; there has been a tendency to regard them as interesting only to specialists in the decline of Greek literature under the late Roman Empire or to professional philologists. I hope this reading will convince many that, on the contrary, these are deeply human documents, as intelligible to our own age as to any other. The purpose of the notes, beyond providing historical explanation, is to trace the influence of previous writers on the mind of Synesius. I have also appended extracts from Neoplatonic philosophers such as Proclus, Olympiodorus, and Simplicius, to demonstrate the persistence of this trend of thought in later centuries. Writers like Nicephorus Gregoras and Michael Psellus under the later Byzantine Empire still share much in common with the culture of the fourth and fifth centuries as seen in these essays and hymns.

¹ Synesii Cyrenensis Hymni Metrici [The Metrical Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene], edited by Prof. Nicola Terzaghi, Naples, 1915.