Zenodŏtus
(
Ζηνόδοτος). A celebrated grammarian of Ephesus,
superintendent of the great library at Alexandria, who flourished under Ptolemy Philadelphus,
about B.C. 308. Zenodotus was employed by Philadelphus, together with his two contemporaries,
Alexander the Aetolian and Lycophron the Chalcidian, to collect and revise all the Greek
poets. Alexander, we are told, undertook the task of collecting the tragedies, Lycophron the
comedies, and Zenodotus the poems of Homer and of the other illustrious poets. Zenodotus,
however, devoted his chief attention to the
Iliad and
Odyssey.
Hence he is called the first reviser (
διορθωτής) of Homer,
and his recension (
διόρθωσις) of the
Iliad and
Odyssey obtained the greatest celebrity. The corrections which Zenodotus
applied to the text of Homer were of three kinds:
1.
He expunged verses;
2.
he marked some as spurious, but left them in his copy;
3.
he introduced new readings and transposed or altered verses. The great attention which
Zenodotus paid to the language of Homer caused a new epoch in the grammatical study of the
Greek language. The results of his investigations respecting the meaning and the use of words
were contained in two works which he published under the title of a glossary (
Γλῶσσαι), and a dictionary of barbarous or foreign phrases. See
Düntzer,
De Zenodoti Studiis Homericis (Göttingen,
1848); Römer,
Ueber die Homerrecension des Zenod.
(Munich, 1885); and the article
Textual
Criticism.