| Summary: | The BSP survives as an eleventh-century translation from Syriac into Greek, whose plot revolves around the theme of the role of philosophers in princely education, and as advisors to rulers. The text features an array of colourful characters – a great king, a young prince, a wily wife, an erudite teacher, and seven wise men – and a series of twenty-four tales told by the protagonists in the main story. An epigram and a prologue disclose the identities of the author, and of the translator of the book into Greek, as well as of his patron, and help contextualize the early transmission of the BSP. Later Greek versions show some morphological, syntactical, lexical and stylistic modifications. Their linguistic range spans from the middle-register Byzantine koinē to several more liberal renditions into modern Greek. The printed editions of the BSP had a long run and wide circulation in Greek, as did their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations into Romanian, Bulgarian and Serbian.
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