John Tzetzes

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John Tzetzes

John (Johannes) Tzetzes (??????? ???t???), (c. 1110 – 1180) was a Byzantine

Byzantine Empire

Byzantine Empire and Eastern Roman Empire are conventional names used to describe the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on its capital of Constantinople....
poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry....
and grammar

Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
ian, known to have lived at Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople was the empire capital of the Roman Empire , the Byzantine Empire , the Latin Empire , and the Ottoman Empire . Strategically located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara at the point where Europe meets Asia, Byzantine Constantinople had been the capital of a Christendom empire, successor to ancient ancient Greece...
during the 12th century.

Tzetzes was Georgian

Georgians

The Georgians are a nation and ethnic group originating in the Caucasus, the oldest group of the South Caucasian peoples people mainly centered in Georgia , but also living in Turkey, Russia, the United States, Iran, and other countries....
on his mother's side (and self-consciously Georgian). In his works, Tzetzes states that his grandmother was a relative of the Georgian Bagratid

Bagrationi Dynasty

The Bagrationi dynasty was the ruling family of Georgia . Their ascendency lasted from the early Middle Ages until the early 19th century. In modern usage, this royal line is frequently referred to as the Georgian Bagratids, a Greek language form of their dynastic name....
princess Maria "of Alania"

Maria Bagrationi

Empress Maria was a daughter of the Georgia king Bagrat IV of Georgia and spouse of the Byzantine Empire List of Byzantine emperors Michael VII Ducas and later also Nicephorus III Botaniates....
who came to Constantinople with her and later became the second wife of the sebastos
Byzantine aristocracy and bureaucracy

The Byzantine Empire had a complex system of aristocracy and bureaucracy, which was inherited from the Roman Empire. At the apex of the pyramid stood the Byzantine emperor, sole ruler and divinely ordained, but beneath him a multitude of officials and court functionaries operated the administrative machinery of the Byzantine state....
Constantine, grand droungarios and nephew of the patriarch Michael I Cerularius

Michael I Cerularius

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John (Johannes) Tzetzes (??????? ???t???), (c. 1110 – 1180) was a Byzantine

Byzantine Empire

Byzantine Empire and Eastern Roman Empire are conventional names used to describe the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on its capital of Constantinople....
poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry....
and grammar

Grammar

Constantinople

Georgians

Bagrationi Dynasty

Maria Bagrationi

Michael I Cerularius

Michael I Cerularius , also known as Michael Keroularios or Patriarch Michael I, was the Patriarch of Constantinople from 1043 to 1059....
.

Tzetzes was described as vain, seems to have resented any attempt at rivalry, and violently attacked his fellow grammarians. Owing to a lack of written material, he was obliged to trust to his memory; therefore caution has to be exercised in reading his work. However, he was learned, and made a great contribution to the furtherance of the study of ancient Greek literature

Greek literature

Greek literature refers to those writings autochthonic to the areas of Greeks influence, typically though not necessarily in one of the Greek dialects, throughout the whole period in which the Greek language people have existed....
.

The most important of his many works is considered to be the Book of Histories, usually called Chiliades
Chiliades

The Chiliades is a work of the 12th century by John Tzetzes, a Byzantine grammarian.The Chiliades is based upon a collection of Letters , which has been called an index to the larger work, itself described as a versified commentary on the letters....
("thousands") from the arbitrary division by its first editor (N. Gerbel, 1546) into books each containing 1000 lines (it actually consists of 12,674 lines of political verse

Political verse

Political verse , also known as Decapentasyllabic verse is a metric form in Modern Greek Greek poetry. It is an iambic verse of fifteen syllables and has been the main meter of traditional popular and folk poetry since the Medieval Greek period....
). It is a collection of literary, historical, theological, and antiquarian miscellanies, whose chief value consists in the fact that it to some extent makes up for the loss of works which were accessible to Tzetzes. The whole production suffers from an unnecessary display of learning, the total number of authors quoted being more than 400. The author subsequently brought out a revised edition with marginal notes in prose and verse (ed. T. Kiessling, 1826; on the sources see C. Harder, De J. T. historiarum fontibus quaestiones selectae, diss., Kiel, 1886).

A collection of 107 Letters addressed partly to fictitious personages, and partly to the great men and women of the writer's time, contain a considerable amount of biographical details.

Tzetzes supplemented Homer

Homer

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek language epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns....
's Iliad
ILiad

The iLiad is an electronic handheld device, or e-book device, which can be used for document reading and editing. Like the Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle, the iLiad makes use of an electronic paper display....
by a work that begins with the birth of Paris

Paris (mythology)

Paris , the son of Priam, king of Troy, appears in a number of Greek mythology. Probably the best-known was his elopement with Helen, queen of Sparta, this being one of the immediate causes of the Trojan War....
and continues the tale to the Achaeans' return home.

The Homeric Allegories, in "political" verse and dedicated initially to the German-born empress Irene

Bertha of Sulzbach

Bertha von Sulzbach was the first wife and Empress of Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus....
and then to Constantine Cotertzes, are two didactic poems in which Homer and the Homeric theology are set forth and then explained by means of three kinds of allegory

Allegory

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of Mimesis, or representative art....
: historical (p?a?t???), anagogic

Anagoge

Anagoge is a Greek word suggesting a "climb" or "ascent" upwards. The anagogical is a method of spiritual interpretation of literal statements or events, especially the Scriptures....
or physical

Cosmogony

Cosmogony, or cosmogeny, is any theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be. The word comes from the Greek ??s??????a , from ??s??? "cosmos, the world", and the root of ?????a? / ?????a "to be born, come about"....
(st???e?a??).

Tzetzes also wrote commentaries on a number of Greek authors, the most important of which is that on the Cassandra or Alexandra of Lycophron

Lycophron

Lycophron was a Greece poet and grammarian .He was born at Chalcis in Euboea, and flourished at Alexandria in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus ....
(ed. K.O. Müller

Karl Otfried Müller

Karl Otfried M?ller , was a Germany scholar and Philodorian, or admirer of ancient Sparta, who introduced the modern study of Greek mythology but whose life was cut tragically short....
, 1811), in the production of which his brother Isaac is generally associated with him. Mention may also be made of a dramatic sketch in iambic verse, in which the caprices of fortune and the wretched lot of the learned are described; and of an iambic poem on the death of the emperor Manuel

Manuel I Komnenos

Manuel I Komnenos, or Comnenus was a List of Byzantine Emperors of the 12th century who reigned over a crucial turning point in the history of Byzantine Empire and the History of the Mediterranean region....
, noticeable for introducing at the beginning of each line the last word of the line preceding it (both in Pietro Matranga, Anecdota Graeca 1850).

For the other works of Tzetzes see JA Fabricius

Johann Albert Fabricius

Johann Albert Fabricius , was a Germany classical scholar and bibliographer.He was born at Leipzig. His father, Werner Fabricius, director of music in the church of St....
, Bibliotheca graeca (ed. Harles

Gottlieb Christoph Harless

Gottlieb Christoph Harless , was a Germany classical scholar and bibliographer.He was born at Culmbach in Bavaria. He studied at the universities of university of Halle, university of Erlangen and university of Jena....
), xi.228, and Karl Krumbacher

Karl Krumbacher

Karl Krumbacher , Germany scholar, an expert on Byzantine Empire culture.He was born at Kurnach in Bavaria, and was educated at the universities of university of Munich and university of Leipzig, and held the professorship of the middle age and modern Greek language and literature in the former from 1897 to his death....
, Geschichte der byz. Litt. (2nd ed., 1897); monograph by G. Hart, "De Tzetzarum nomine, vitis, scriptis," in Jahn

Otto Jahn

Otto Jahn , was a Germany archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art and music.He was born at Kiel. After the completion of his university studies at Christian-Albrechts-Universit?t in Kiel, the University of Leipzig and Humboldt University, Berlin, he travelled for three years in France and Italy; in 1839 he became Privatdozent at...
's Jahrbucher für classische Philologie. Supplementband xii (Leipzig, 1881).

Sources

Gautier, Paul (1970), 'La curieuse ascendance de Jean Tzetzes'. Revue des Études Byzantines, 28: 207-20.

John Tzetzes

Sources

External links