Zachary The Rhetorician (ZACCARIA IL RETORE) - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XII, p. 1085

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

ZACCARIA THE RHETORICIAN. — Born ca. 465 at Majuma in Palestine and died shortly after 536.

He studied in Alexandria and Berytus. After converting his friend Severus, later bishop of Antioch, to asceticism, he went ca. 492 to Constantinople, where he practised law, hence his title. Z., a highly prominent figure in the capital, fully adhered to the imperial policy that had proclaimed the «Henotikon» (482); he was subsequently elected bishop of Mytilene and, in that capacity, attended the Council of Constantinople in 536, which condemned his former friend Severus. Z. died in orthodoxy after having followed the Court’s Monophysite policy.

He composed an important historical work whose Greek text has been lost but which was preserved in a Syriac version in the historical compilation (only Books III–IV) of an anonymous sixth-century author. Z.’s narrative covers the years 450–91 and is valuable particularly for its information concerning Palestine and Egypt. Z. also wrote a rather apologetic Vita of Severus of Antioch, as well as the biography of the Egyptian monk Isaiah, both preserved in Syriac, and that of Peter the Iberian, of which only fragments remain. Also belonging to Z. are the De mundi opificio contra philosophios disputatio, preserved in Greek, and the Disputatio contra manichaeos, of which several fragments have come down in a Latin version.

BIBL.: edition of the Storia ecl. edited by E. W. Brooks, in Corpus Script. Christ. Orient., Script. Syri, V–VI, Paris 1919–24; the Vita di Severo, edited by F. Nau, in PO, 2, and the Vita di Isaia, edited by E. W. Brooks, ibid., 25; the De mundi opificio, in PG 85, 1011–1114, and more recently edited by J. F. Boissonade, Paris 1836; the fragments of the disputation against the Manichaeans in PG 85, 1143–44. On the biography of Peter the Iberian V. L. Sikorski, Die Lebensbeschreibung Peters das Iberers, in 97. Jahresber. der Schles. Ges. J. Vaterland Kultur, I, 4, Breslau 1945, p. 7 ff.; Th. Nissen, Eine christl. Polemik gegen Julius Rech und den König Helios, in Byz. Zeitschr., 40 (1940), pp. 15–22; G. Bardy s. V. in DTNC, XV, pp. 3676–80; E. Honigmann, Patristic Studies (Studi e testi, 173), Vatican City 1953, pp. 194–204.