Isidorus
- Isidore, the name of several celebrated writers of antiquity, and particularly,
- A A geographer, Plin. 4, 4, 5, § 9.—
- B Isidorus Hispalensis, archbishop of Hispalis, in Spain, in the seventh century of our era, author of the XX. libri Originum. —
- C A cynic, who rebuked Nero, Suet. Ner. 39.—
- D A mime, father of Tertia, Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 34, § 78.
(Ἰσίδωρος). A Spaniard who, from the beginning of the seventh century, was bishop of Seville (in Latin Hispalis, whence he is called Hispalensis). He died about A.D. 636. He possessed a width of reading which was remarkable for his time, and an extraordinary faculty for collecting information. Next to Boëtius and Cassiodorus, he exercised the most important influence upon the general culture and literature of the Middle Ages. Besides works on grammar, theology, and history (including a chronicle of the world to his own day, and histories of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi), he composed in the last years of his life his greatest and most important work—an immense but imperfect encyclopaedic survey of all knowledge, in twenty books, entitled the Etymologiae or Origines, from its often very capricious and marvellous explanations of the various subjects of which it treats. Though it is only a vast congeries of collected excerpts, devoid of a single original idea, it is nevertheless important owing to the variety of its contents and its citations from writings now lost, such as those of Suetonius. Another work, which is similarly a compilation, but was greatly used in the Middle Ages, is his De Natura Rerum, a handbook of natural history.
The complete text of Isidorus is given in the Abbé Migne's Patrologia Latina, 4 vols., reprinted from Arevalo (1850). The De Natura Rerum is edited separately by G. Becker (Berlin, 1857), and the Origines in Lindemann's Corpus Grammaticorum Veterum (Leipzig, 1833), by Otto.