Faith & RitualGreek → English
Photius
/ˈfoʊʃiəs/proper noun
A Greek male name, borne by the ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople and scholar.
The Greek roots
φῶς, φωτός
phôs, phōtós
light
Literally: “of the light”
Follow a root:φῶς, φωτός5 words
The story of the word
Photius gave his name to a schism with Rome and, more usefully, to the Bibliotheca, a set of working notes on some 280 books he had read. Roughly half of those books survive nowhere else, so his summaries are all that is left of them. The name comes from φῶς, light, the same root Herschel used in 1839 when he proposed photography for writing with light.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
photographphotonphosphorusphotosynthesis
In a sentence
Everything we know about that lost novel comes from a paragraph in Photius.
The seminar spent a week on Photius and the Filioque.