delayed and the dispute was still unsettled when St Anselm died in April 1109. Henry I. and his bishops then decided against Thomas, who was forced to make the necessary promise and was consecrated in London in June 1109. He died at Beverley on the 24th of February 1114.
THOMAS, surnamed Magister (i.e. officiorum),[1] also known as a monk by the name Theodulos Monachos, a native of Thessalonica, Byzantine scholar and grammarian and confidential adviser of Andronicus II. (1282–1328). His chief work, Ἐκλογὴ Ὀνομάτων καὶ Ῥημάτων Ἀττικῶν, is a collection of selected Attic words and phrases, partly arranged in alphabetical order, compiled as a help to Greek composition from the works of Phrynichus, Ammonius, Herodian and Moeris. He also wrote scholia on Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (with life), and three of the comedies of Aristophanes; the scholia on Pindar, attributed to him in two MSS., are now assigned to Demetrius Triclinius. His speeches and letters consist partly of declamations on the usual sophistical themes, partly deal with contemporary historical events: an argument between the fathers of Cynegirus and Callimachus (two Athenians who fell at Marathon) as to which had the better claim to have the funeral oration pronounced over him first; a discussion on the duties of, a king and of his subjects; a defence of the Byzantine general Chandrenos addressed to the emperor; a letter on the cruelties of the Catalans and Turks in Thessaly and Macedonia; a congratulatory letter to Theodorus Metochita; a panegyric on the king of Cyprus.
Editions of the Ἐκλογὴ by F. Ritschl (1832), C. Jacobitz (1833) and C. D. Beck (1836); other works in J. P. Migne, Patrologia graeca, cxlv.; see also C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).
THOMAS OF CELANO, Franciscan friar and disciple and biographer of St Francis of Assisi. Born at Celano in the Abruzzi, he joined St Francis probably about 1214, and he appears to have been one of the first band of friars who went into Germany. He was commissioned by Gregory IX. to write the Life of St Francis, and in 1229 he completed the First Legend; in 1247 at the command of the minister general he composed the Second Legend, and a few years later the Tract on the Miracles of St Francis. He also composed in 1255 the Legend of St Clare; and he is one of those to whom the sequence Dies irae is attributed.
Thomas of Celano’s writings on St Francis have been critically edited by E. d’Alençon in 1906; the value of this work is enhanced by the fact that critical opinion is veering round to the view that Thomas of Celano is the best authority for the life of the saint (see “Note on the Sources,” appended to article Francis of Assisi).
An English translation (The Lives of S. Francis of Assisi by Brother Thomas of Celano) by A. G. Ferrers Howell appeared in 1908. All that is known of Thomas of Celano is brought together in Edouard d’Alençon’s Prolegomena; see also introduction to Ferrers Howell’s translation. (E. C. B.)
THOMAS OF ERCELDOUNE, called also The Rhymer, and sometimes given the surname of Learmont (fl.? 1220–? 1297), poet and prophet in the legendary literature of Scotland. The historical person of that name figures in two charters of the 13th century, and from these it appears that he owned lands in Erceldoune (now Earlstoun), in Berwickshire, which were made over by his son and heir on the 2nd of November 1294 to the foundation of the Holy Trinity at Soltra (or Soutra) on the borders of the same county. This would seem to imply that Thomas the Rhymer was already dead, but J. A. H. Murray, who edited The Romance and Prophecies (E.E.T.S., 1875), thinks that he was living three years later in a Cluniac priory in Ayrshire. He figures in the works of Barbour and Harry the Minstrel as the sympathizing contemporary of their heroes, and Walter Bower, who continued the Scotichronicon of Fordun, tells how he prophesied the death of Alexander III. in 1285. Barbour makes the bishop of St Andrews in 1306 express a hope that a prophecy of Thomas referring to Bruce will come true; and Wyntoun says that he foretold the battle of Kilblane. In the folk-lore of Scotland his name is associated with numerous fragments of verse of a gnomic and prophetic character. The romance of Thomas and the elf-queen was attributed to Erceldoune by Robert Mannyng de Brunne, but the earliest text, in the Auchinleck MS. in the Advocates’ library, Edinburgh, is in a dialect showing southern forms, and dates from the beginning of the 14th century. It may be based on a genuine work of Thomas, a version by him of the widely diffused Tristan Saga. This text was published in 1804 by Sir Walter Scott, and was by him assigned to the Rhymer. The most widely accepted opinion is that it is a translation of a French original. The Rhymer’s lands at Earlstoun are still identified. In 1840 died the last of a family named Learmont, which claimed descent from the poet. It may be noted that the Russian poet Michael Lermontov claimed Thomas of Erceldoune as his ancestor.
See J. A. H. Murray’s edition of The Romance and Prophecies (E.E.T.S., 1875); Brandl’s Thomas of Erceldoune (Berlin, 1880), and Kölbing’s Die nordische und die englische Version der Tristransage (Heilbronn, 1882); also McNeill’s Sir Tristrem (S.T.S., 1886); Lumby’s Early Scottish Prophecies (E.E.T.S., 1870), and the reprint of the Whole Prophesie of Scotland (1603) by the Bannatyne Club (1833).
THOMAS OF MARGĀ, a Nestorian bishop and author of an important monastic history in Syriac, who flourished in the 9th century A.D. He was born early in the century, probably of Persian parents, in the region of Salakh to the north-east of Mosul. As a young man he became in 832 a monk of the famous Nestorian monastery of Beth ʽĀbhē, which was situated at the confluence of the Great Zab with one of its tributaries, about 25 m. due east of Mosul. A few years later he was acting as secretary to Abraham, who had been abbot of Beth ʽĀbhē, and was catholicus (patriarch) of the Nestorians from 837 to 850. At some date during these 13 years Thomas was promoted by Abraham to be bishop of Margā, a diocese in the same district as Beth ʽĀbhē, and afterwards he was further advanced to be a metropolitan of Beth Garmai, a district farther to the south-east in the mountains which border the Tigris basin. It was during the period of his life at Beth ʽĀbhē and his bishopric that he composed The Book of Governors, which is in the main a history of his own monastery, but includes lives of holy men in other parts of Mesopotamia and the regions east of the Tigris. The work was probably planned in imitation of the famous Paradise of Palladius, the history of Egyptian monasticism which had become well known to Syriac-speaking Christians in the version of ʽĂnān-Īshōʽ (6th century).
The Book of Governors has been edited with an English translation and a copious introduction by E. W. Budge (2 vols., London, 1893), who claims that “it occupies a unique position in Syriac literature, and it fully deserves the veneration with which it has been and is still regarded by all classes of Nestorians to whom it is known.” It gives a detailed history of the great monastery of Beth ʽĀbhē during its three centuries of existence down to the author’s time. It is full of interesting narratives of saintly men told in a naïve and candid spirit, and it throws much light on the history of Christianity in the Persian dominions. There is a later edition by P. Bedjan (Paris, 1901). (N. M.)
THOMAS, ARTHUR GORING (1850–1892), English musical composer, was the youngest son of Freeman Thomas and Amelia, daughter of Colonel Thomas Frederick. He was born at Ratton Park, Sussex, on the 20th of November 1850, and educated at Haileybury College. He was intended for the Civil Service, but delicate health interfered with his studies, and in 1873 he went to Paris to cultivate the musical talent he had displayed from an early age. Here he studied for two years with Émile Durand. In 1875 he returned to England, and in 1877 entered the Royal Academy of Music, where for three years he studied under Ebenezer Prout and Arthur Sullivan, winning twice the Lucas medal for composition. At a later period he received some instruction in orchestration from Max Bruch. His first published composition was a song, “Le Roi Henri,” which appeared in 1871. An early comic opera, Don Braggadocio (libretto by his brother, C. I. Thomas), was apparently unfinished; some of the music in it was afterwards used for The Golden Web. A selection from his second opera, The Light of the Harem (libretto by Clifford Harrison), was performed at the Royal Academy of Music on the 7th of November 1879, with such success that Carl Rosa commissioned him to write
- ↑ For the duties of this important office, see J. B. Bury, Later Roman Empire (1859), i. 45.
