Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi

Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi was an Italian priest, antiquary and philologist.

Biography

Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi was born in 1684 at Santa Maria, near Capua. He attended the Seminaries of Capua and Naples. He was ordained a priest in 1709, and became professor of Greek and Hebrew at the archiepiscopal seminary at Naples. In 1711 he was made a canon of the Cathedral of Capua and in 1735 he was appointed professor of theology and Sacred Scripture at the University of Naples. He died in Naples on 12 September 1771. His funerary monument was sculpted by Giuseppe Sanmartino. Mazzocchi was a friend of Francesco Scipione Maffei, Jacopo Facciolati and Ludovico Antonio Muratori. He was a member of several learned societies, including the Accademia Ercolanese and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Mazzocchi made significant contributions to the field of biblical criticism.

Works

In mutilum Campani Amphitheatri titulum, aliasque nonnullas Campanas Inscriptiones Commentarius, published in Naples in 1727 and reissued in the fifth volume of Giovanni Poleni's Utriusque Thesauri Antiquitatum Nova Supplementa;
Mazzocchi published several other philological and archeological dissertations, among whom one in Italian, on the origin of the Tyrrhenians, published in the third volume of the Acts of the Etruscan Academy of Cortona. He published also an improved edition of Vossius' Etymologicon linguae Latinae and dissertations on Hebrew poetry and on the Antiquities of the Roman Campagna. He left besides, in manuscript, a book on the origin of the city of Capua.