The twelfth-century author and grammarian John Tzetzes, a fixture in the scholarly circles of imperial Byzantium, did not want to write another book “like some of those guys, who are deceptive big-talkers, or produce only shadows.” He and his literary rivals faced a serious problem: the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, are some of the most important jewels of Greek literature and were widely read in the Byzantine empire (as they are today). Yet Homer’s stories of battles, sea voyages, strange monsters, heroic adventures, and the dramatic rivalries between pagan gods and goddesses would have been a challenge to readers firmly ensconced in a Christian worldview. How can these important poems be read and understood if the stories they tell are antithetical to unembellished history or Christian orthodoxy? Allegories of the Odyssey is Tzetzes’s answer to that challenge, and a new book in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series by Adam J. Goldwyn of North Dakota State University and Dimitra Kokkini of Birkbeck, University of London, is the first translation of this poem ever published.
