Constantine VII’s significance in commissioning digests of useful knowledge
from ancient texts is generally acknowledged, but he was tapping
into and trying to direct an intellectual trend under way long before his
time, which Paul Lemerle has termed ‘encyclopedism’.55 A collection of late
antique texts on the care and medical treatment of horses that Constantine
had revised has been expounded in detail, although not yet translated into
English.56 A major compilation made shortly after Constantine’s time was a
lexicon, the Suidae lexicon, containing entries on a variety of words, names
and subjects, mostly classical and scriptural, in alphabetical order. This is
being translated online.
World History
