His title Protonobilissimus shows him to have been a person of distinction, and if he is also correctly described in the manuscripts, as chief keeper of the ecclesiastical archives, he must have been a Christian. He was the author of The Story of Hysmine and Hysminias, in eleven books, a tedious and inferior imitation of the Cleitophon and Leucippe of Achilles Tatius. There is nothing original in the plot, and the work is tasteless and often coarse. Although the author borrowed from Homer and other Attic poets, the chief source of his phraseology was the rhetorician Choricius of Gaza. The style is remarkable for the absence of hiatus and an extremely laboured use of antithesis. The digressions on works of art, apparently the result of personal observation, are the best part of the work. A collection of eleven Riddles, of which solutions were written by the grammarian Manuel Holobolos, is also attributed to Eustathius.
The best edition of both romance and riddles is by I Hilberg (1876) who fixes the date of Eustathius between 850 and 988, with critical apparatus and prolegomena, including the solutions; of the Riddles alone by M Treu (1893). On Eustathius generally, see JC Dunlop, History of Fiction (1888, new ed. in Bohn's Standard Library); E Rohde, Der griechische Roman (1900); K Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
He was a native of Side in Pamphylia. About 320 he was bishop of Beroea, and he was patriarch of Antioch before the council of Nicaea in 325. In that assembly he distinguished himself zealously against the Arians, though the Allocutio ad Imperatorem with which he has been credited is hardly genuine.
His anti-Arian polemic against Eusebius of Caesarea made him unpopular among his fellow bishops in the East, and a synod convened at Antioch in 330 passed a sentence of deposition, which was confirmed by the emperor. He was banished to Trajanopolis in Thrace, where he died, probably about 337, though possibly not until 360.
The only complete work by Eustathius is the De Engastrimytho contra Origenem (ed. by A. Jahn in Texte und Untersuchungen, ii. 4). Other fragments are enumerated by G. F. Loofs in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopädie.
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.