Allegories of the Odyssey

Description

"Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were central to the educational system of Byzantium, yet the religion and culture of the Homeric epics--even the ancient Greek language itself--had become almost unrecognizable to Byzantine Greek readers coming to the texts nearly two millennia later. The scholar, poet, and teacher John Tzetzes (ca. 1110-1180) joined the extensive tradition of interpreting Homer by producing his Allegories of the Iliad, dedicated to the foreign-born empress Eirene. Tzetzes later composed the Allegories of the Odyssey, a more advanced verse commentary, to explain Odysseus's journey and the pagan gods and marvels he encountered. Through historical allegory, the gods become ancient kings deified by the pagan poet; through astrological interpretation, they become planets whose positions and movements affect human life; through moral allegory Athena represents wisdom, Aphrodite desire. This edition presents the first translation of the Allegories of the Odyssey into any language."-- The Allegories of the Odyssey by John Tzetzes is a twelfth-century commentary on Homer's Odyssey in fifteen-syllable verse. Though the Allegories of the Odyssey can be read as a stand-alone work in its own right, it is preferable to regard it as the successor work to his Allegories of the Iliad. The Allegories of the Iliad can be divided stylistically into two sections. The first section, consisting of Books 1-15, is dedicated to the foreign-born empress Eirene (born Bertha von Sulzbach in Bavaria) and was meant to help familiarize her with one of the foundational works of the new Byzantine environment in which she found herself after her marriage to Emperor Manuel I Komnenos in 1146. This section consists of a book-by-book plot summary of Homer's Iliad interspersed with Tzetzes's own allegorical interpretation. At Book 16, however, the style changes dramatically: gone are the basic plot-level summaries, replaced instead with direct quotations from the Iliad that are then explained in allegorical terms.--

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