favour of her son Michael and retire to a convent, where she died. The dictionary of mythology entitled Ἰωνιά (“Collection of Violets”), which formerly used to be ascribed to her, was not composed till 1543 (Constantine Palaeokappa).
See J. Flach, Die Kaiserin Eudokia Makrembolitissa (Tübingen, 1876); P. Pulch, De Eudociae quod fertur Violario (Strassburg, 1880); and in Hermes, xvii. (1882), p. 177 ff.
EUDOXIA LOPUKHINA (1669–1731), tsaritsa, first consort
of Peter the Great, was the daughter of the boyarin Theodore
Lopukhin. Peter, then a youth of seventeen, married her on the
27th of January 1689 at the command of his mother, who hoped
to wean him from the wicked ways of the German suburb of
Moscow by wedding him betimes to a lady who was as pious
as she was beautiful. The marriage was in every way unfortunate.
Accustomed from her infancy to the monastic
seclusion of the terem, or women’s quarter, Eudoxia’s mental
horizon did not extend much beyond her embroidery-frame or
her illuminated service-book. From the first her society bored
Peter unspeakably, and after the birth of their second, short-lived
son Alexander, he practically deserted her. In 1698 she
was unceremoniously sent off to the Pokrovsky monastery at
Suzdal for refusing to consent to a divorce, though it was not
till June 1699 that she disappeared from the world beneath the
hood of sister Elena. In the monastery, however, she was held
in high honour by the archimandrite; the nuns persisted in
regarding her as the lawful empress; and she was permitted an
extraordinary degree of latitude, unknown to Peter, who dragged
her from her enforced retreat in 1718 on a charge of adultery.
As the evidence was collected by Peter’s creatures, it is very
doubtful whether Eudoxia was guilty, though she was compelled
to make a public confession. She was then divorced and consigned
to the remote monastery of Ladoga. Here she remained
for ten years till the accession of her grandson, Peter II.,
when the reactionaries proposed to appoint her regent. She was
escorted with great ceremony to Moscow in 1728 and exhibited
to the people attired in the splendid, old-fashioned robes
of a tsaritsa; but years of rigid seclusion had dulled her wits,
and her best friends soon convinced themselves that a convent
was a much more suitable place for her than a throne. An
allowance of 60,000 roubles a year was accordingly assigned to
her, and she disappeared again in a monastery at Moscow, where
she died in 1731.
See Robert Nisbet Bain, Pupils of Peter the Great (London, 1895), chaps. ii. and iv.; and The First Romanovs (London, 1905), chaps. viii. and xii. (R. N. B.)
EUDOXUS, of Cnidus, Greek savant, flourished about the
middle of the 4th century B.C. It is chiefly as an astronomer
that his name has come down to us (see Astronomy and Zodiac).
From a life by Diogenes Laërtius, we learn that he studied at
Athens under Plato, but, being dismissed, passed over into Egypt,
where he remained for sixteen months with the priests of Heliopolis.
He then taught physics in Cyzicus and the Propontis,
and subsequently, accompanied by a number of pupils, went to
Athens. Towards the end of his life he returned to his native
place, where he died. Strabo states that he discovered that the
solar year is longer than 365 days by 6 hours; Vitruvius that he
invented a sun-dial. The Phaenomena of Aratus is a poetical
account of the astronomical observations of Eudoxus. Several
works have been attributed to him, but they are all lost; some
fragments are preserved in the extant Τῶν Ἀράτου καὶ Εὐδόξου φαινομένων ἐξηγήσεωμ βιβλία τρία of the astronomer Hipparchus
(ed. C. Manitius, 1894). According to Aristotle (Ethics x. 2),
Eudoxus held that pleasure was the chief good, because (1) all
beings sought it and endeavoured to escape its contrary, pain;
(2) it is an end in itself, not a relative good. Aristotle, who speaks
highly of the sincerity of Eudoxus’s convictions, while giving a
qualified approval to his arguments, considers him wrong in not
distinguishing the different kinds of pleasure and in making
pleasure the summum bonum.
See J. A. Letronne, Sur les écrites et les travaux d’Eudoxe de Cnide, d’après L. Ideler (1841); G. V. Schiaparelli, Le Sfere omocentriche di Eudosso (Milan, 1876); T. H. Martin in Académie des inscriptions, 3rd of October, 1879; article in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie.
EUDOXUS, of Cyzicus, Greek navigator, flourished about 130 B.C. He was employed by Ptolemy Euergetes, who sent out a fleet under him to explore the Arabian Sea. After two successful
voyages, Eudoxus left the Egyptian service, and proceeded
to Cadiz with the object of fitting out an expedition for the
purpose of African discovery; and we learn from Strabo, who
utilized the results of his observations, that the veteran explorer
made at least two voyages southward along the coast of Africa.
There is a good account of Eudoxus in E. H. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, ii. (1879); see also P. Gaffarel, Eudoxe de Cyzique (1873).
EUGENE OF SAVOY [François Eugène], Prince (1663–1736), fifth son of Prince Eugene Maurice of Savoy-Carignano, count of Soissons, and of Olympia Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, was born at Paris on the 18th of October 1663. Originally destined for the church, Eugene was known at court as the petit abbé, but his own predilection was strongly for the army. His mother, however, had fallen into disgrace at court, and his application for a commission, repeated more than once, was refused by Louis XIV. This, and the influence of his mother, produced in him a lifelong resentment against the king. Having quitted France in disgust, he proceeded to Vienna, where his relative the emperor Leopold I. received him kindly, and he served with the Austrian army during the campaign of 1683 against the Turks. He displayed his bravery in a cavalry fight at Petronell (7th July) and in the great battle for the relief of Vienna. The emperor now gave him the command of a regiment of dragoons. At the capture of Buda in 1686 he received a wound (3rd August), but he continued to serve up to the siege of Belgrade in 1688, in which he was dangerously wounded. At the instigation of Louvois, a decree of banishment from France was now issued against all Frenchmen who should continue to serve in foreign armies. “The king will see me again,” was Eugene’s reply when the news was communicated to him; he continued his career in foreign service.
Prince Eugene’s next employment was in a service that required diplomatic as well as military skill (1689). He was sent by the emperor Leopold to Italy with the view of binding the duke of Savoy to the coalition against France and of co-operating with the Italian and Spanish troops. Later in 1689 he served on the Rhine and was again wounded. He returned to Italy in time to take part in the battle of Staffarda, which resulted in the defeat of the coalition at the hands of the French marshal Catinat; but in the spring of 1691 Prince Eugene, having secured reinforcements, caused the siege of Coni to be raised, took possession of Carmagnola, and in the end completely defeated Catinat. He followed up his success by entering Dauphiné, where he took possession of Embrun and Gap. After another campaign, which was uneventful, the further prosecution of the war was abandoned owing to the defection of the duke of Savoy from the coalition, and Prince Eugene returned to Vienna, where he soon afterwards received the command of the army in Hungary, on the recommendation of the veteran count Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the defender of Vienna in 1683. It was about this time that Louis XIV. secretly offered him the bâton of a marshal of France, with the government of Champagne which his father had held, and also a pension. But Eugene rejected these offers with indignation, and proceeded to operate against the Turks commanded by Kara Mustapha. After some skilful manœuvres, he surprised the enemy (September 11th, 1697) at Zenta, on the Theiss. His attack was vigorous and daring, and the victory was one of the most complete and important ever won by the Austrian arms. Formerly it was often stated that the battle of Zenta was fought against express orders from the court, that Eugene was placed under arrest for violating these orders, and that a proposal to bring him before a council of war was frustrated only by the threatening attitude of the citizens of Vienna. This story, minute in details as it is, is entirely without foundation. After a further period of manœuvres, peace was at length concluded at Karlowitz on the 26th of January 1699.
Two years later he was again in active service in the War of
