Henry Aristippus

Who was Henry Aristippus?

Henry Aristippus of Calabria, sometimes known as Enericus or Henricus Aristippus, was a religious scholar and the archdeacon of Catania and later chief familiaris of the triumvirate of familiares who replaced the admiral Maio of Bari as chief functionaries of the kingdom of Sicily in 1161.

While the historian of Norman Sicily, John Julius Norwich, believes him to have probably been of Norman extraction despite his Greek surname, Donald Matthew considers it self-evident, based on both his name and occupations, that he was Greek. He was first and foremost a scholar and, even if Greek, he was an adherent of the Latin church.

Aristippus was an envoy to Constantinople when he received from the emperor Manuel I Comnenus a Greek copy of Ptolemy's Almagest. A student of the Schola Medica Salernitana tracked down Aristippus and his copy on Mount Etna and proceeded to give a Latin translation. Though this was the first translation of the Almagest into Latin, it was not as influential as a later translation into Latin made by Gerard of Cremona from the Arabic. The original manuscript is probably in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.