October of that year held the (first) Lateran synod, by which not only the Monothelite doctrine but also the moderating ecthesis of Heraclius and typus of Constans II. were anathematized. About 653 Maximus, for the part he had taken against the latter document especially, was apprehended (together with the pope) by order of Constans and carried a prisoner to Constantinople. In 655, after repeated examinations, in which he maintained his theological opinions with memorable constancy, he was banished to Byzia in Thrace, and afterwards to Perberis. In 662 he was again brought to Constantinople and was condemned by a synod to be scourged, to have his tongue cut out by the root, and to have his right hand chopped off. After this sentence had been carried out he was again banished to Lazica, where he died on the 13th of August 662. He is venerated as a saint both in the Greek and in the Latin Churches. Maximus was not only a leader in the Monothelite struggle but a mystic who zealously followed and advocated the system of Pseudo-Dionysius, while adding to it an ethical element in the conception of the freedom of the will. His works had considerable influence in shaping the system of John Scotus Erigena.
The most important of the works of Maximus will be found in Migne, Patrologia graeca, xc. xci., together with an anonymous life; an exhaustive list in Wagenmann’s article in vol. xii. (1903) of Hauck-Herzog’s Realencyklopädie where the following classification is adopted: (a) exegetical, (b) scholia on the Fathers, (c) dogmatic and controversial, (d) ethical and ascetic, (e) miscellaneous. The details of the disputation with Pyrrhus and of the martyrdom are given very fully and clearly in Hefele’s Conciliengeschichte, iii. For further literature see H. Gelzer in C. Krumbacher’s Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).
MAXIMUS OF SMYRNA, a Greek philosopher of the Neo-platonist school, who lived towards the end of the 4th century A.D. He was perhaps the most important of the followers of Iamblichus. He is said to have been of a rich and noble family, and exercised great influence over the emperor Julian, who was commended to him by Aedesius. He pandered to the emperor’s love of magic and theurgy, and by judicious administration of the omens won a high position at court. His overbearing manner made him numerous enemies, and, after being imprisoned on the death of Julian, he was put to death by Valens. He is a representative of the least attractive side of Neoplatonism. Attaching no value to logical proof and argument, he enlarged on the wonders and mysteries of nature, and maintained his position by the working of miracles. In logic he is reported to have agreed with Eusebius, Iamblichus and Porphyry in asserting the validity of the second and third figures of the syllogism.
MAXIMUS OF TYRE (Cassius Maximus Tyrius), a Greek rhetorician and philosopher who flourished in the time of the Antonines and Commodus (2nd century A.D.). After the manner of the sophists of his age, he travelled extensively, delivering lectures on the way. His writings contain many allusions to the history of Greece, while there is little reference to Rome; hence it is inferred that he lived longer in Greece, perhaps as a professor at Athens. Although nominally a Platonist, he is really an Eclectic and one of the precursors of Neoplatonism. There are still extant by him forty-one essays or discourses (διαλέξεις) on theological, ethical, and other philosophical commonplaces. With him God is the supreme being, one and indivisible though called by many names, accessible to reason alone; but as animals form the intermediate stage between plants and human beings, so there exist intermediaries between God and man, viz. daemons, who dwell on the confines of heaven and earth. The soul in many ways bears a great resemblance to the divinity; it is partly mortal, partly immortal, and, when freed from the fetters of the body, becomes a daemon. Life is the sleep of the soul, from which it awakes at death. The style of Maximus is superior to that of the ordinary sophistical rhetorician, but scholars differ widely as to the merits of the essays themselves.
Maximus of Tyre must be distinguished from the Stoic Maximus, tutor of Marcus Aurelius.
Editions by J. Davies, revised with valuable notes by J. Markland (1740); J. J. Reiske (1774); F. Dübner (1840, with Theophrastus, &c., in the Didot series). Monographs by R. Rohdich (Beuthen, 1879); H. Hobein, De Maximo Tyrio quaestiones philol. (Jena, 1895). There is an English translation (1804) by Thomas Taylor, the Platonist.
MAX MÜLLER, FRIEDRICH (1823–1900), Anglo-German orientalist and comparative philologist, was born at Dessau on the 6th of December 1823, being the son of Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), the German poet, celebrated for his phil-Hellenic lyrics, who was ducal librarian at Dessau. The elder Müller had endeared himself to the most intellectual circles in Germany by his amiable character and his genuine poetic gift; his songs had been utilized by musical composers, notably Schubert; and it was his son’s good fortune to meet in his youth with a succession of eminent friends, who, already interested in him for his father’s sake, and charmed by the qualities which they discovered in the young man himself, powerfully aided him by advice and patronage. Mendelssohn, who was his godfather, dissuaded him from indulging his natural bent to the study of music; Professor Brockhaus of the University of Leipzig, where Max Müller matriculated in 1841, induced him to take up Sanskrit; Bopp, at the University of Berlin (1844), made the Sanskrit student a scientific comparative philologist; Schelling at the same university, inspired him with a love for metaphysical speculation, though failing to attract him to his own philosophy; Burnouf, at Paris in the following year, by teaching him Zend, started him on the track of inquiry into the science of comparative religion, and impelled him to edit the Rig Veda; and when, in 1846, Max Müller came to England upon this errand, Bunsen, in conjunction with Professor H. H. Wilson, prevailed upon the East India Company to undertake the expense of publication. Up to this time Max Müller had lived the life of a poor student, supporting himself partly by copying manuscripts, but Bunsen’s introductions to Queen Victoria and the prince consort, and to Oxford University, laid the foundation for him of fame and fortune. In 1848 the printing of his Rig Veda at the University Press obliged him to settle in Oxford, a step which decided his future career. He arrived at a favourable conjuncture: the Tractarian strife, which had so long thrust learning into the background, was just over, and Oxford was becoming accessible to modern ideas. The young German excited curiosity and interest, and it was soon discovered that, although a genuine scholar, he was no mere bookworm. Part of his social success was due to his readiness to exert his musical talents at private parties. Max Müller was speedily subjugated by the genius loci. He was appointed deputy Taylorian professor of modern languages in 1850, and the German government failed to tempt him back to Strassburg. In the following year he was made M.A. and honorary fellow of Christ Church, and in 1858 he was elected a fellow of All Souls. In 1854 the Crimean War gave him the opportunity of utilizing his oriental learning in vocabularies and schemes of transliteration. In 1857 he successfully essayed another kind of literature in his beautiful story Deutsche Liebe, written both in German and English. He had by this time become an extensive contributor to English periodical literature, and had written several of the essays subsequently collected as Chips from a German Workshop. The most important of them was the fascinating essay on “Comparative Mythology” in the Oxford Essays for 1856. His valuable History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the primitive religion of the Brahmans (and hence the Vedic period only), was published in 1859.
Though Max Müller’s reputation was that of a comparative philologist and orientalist, his professional duties at Oxford were long confined to lecturing on modern languages, or at least their medieval forms. In 1860 the death of Horace Hayman Wilson, professor of Sanskrit, seemed to open a more congenial sphere to him. His claims to the succession seemed incontestable, for his opponent, Monier Williams, though well qualified as a Sanskritist, lacked Max Müller’s brilliant versatility, and although educated at Oxford, had held no University
