John Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Iliad: introduction and partial edition
This thesis is a literary and philological study of the Allegories of the Iliad, a poem written by John Tzetzes in twelfth-century Constantinople. The first part of the thesis is an introduction to the text. The first chapter of the introduction explores composition of the poem, its manuscript tradi...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English Greek, Ancient (to 1453) |
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2023
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| Summary: | This thesis is a literary and philological study of the Allegories of the Iliad, a poem written by John Tzetzes in twelfth-century Constantinople. The first part of the thesis is an introduction to the text. The first chapter of the introduction explores composition of the poem, its manuscript tradition (i.e., both the manuscripts and their relationship) and the reception of the work. The second chapter of the introduction offers an overview of the reception of the Homeric works in twelfth-century Byzantium and then focuses on allegory. After a summary of classical allegorical readings, it describes the Byzantine allegorical tradition. A long section of this second chapter is dedicated to Tzetzes’ allegorical method and how it fits in with the contemporary debate on allegory and Homeric exegesis. The third chapter of the introduction is dedicated to the text: aim, structure, audience, Tzetzes’ style and an overview of metre and the sources. This last chapter closes with a close reading of Tzetzes’ literary self-portrait from the Prolegomena of the Allegories of the Iliad. The thesis offers a critical edition of books 1-6 and 10-12 of the Allegories of the Iliad and all the scholia to those books.
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