1. Biography

Theodore Hexapterygos was born in Constantinople c. 1180 and studied in the Patriarchal School of the city. In this school, which was then housed in the Church of the Forty Martyrs, he was taught grammar, schedography, poetry and rhetoric, possibly by George Tornikes and Constantine Stilbes. It appears that he did not continue his studies into other subjects of the liberal arts.

Following the capture of Constantinople by the Latins (1204), Hexapterygos settled in Nicaea, where he embarked on his teaching career. The emperor John III Vatatzes, in the context of his efforts to cultivate the letters and improve education in the Empire of Nicaea, placed Hexapterygos’s school under his auspices, making it the Empire’s official school. The sons of eminent families were sent to study there, persons destined to receive posts in the administration of the state. Among them was George Akropolites, whom the emperor had sent to Hexapterygos in 1234.

2. Teaching - writings

Hexapterygos' courses focused on the teaching of grammar and rhetoric; his contemporaries also considered him an accomplished orator, as testified by Akropolites. From his oeuvre, six diegemata and one funeral oration to Stephanos, one of his relatives, survive in a 13^th-century manuscript. The diegemata, in dodecasyllable, are based on the progymnasmata of Aphthonius and on Hermogenes' Rhetorical Art and they were probably used in his school, but by later generations as well, as a handbook for teaching grammar and rhetoric. Their content reveals Hexapterygos' deep mastery of his field of teaching, as well as his familiarity with Ancient Greek mythology, for in many of these mythological figures feature as protagonists.