THE HYPOTHESIS OF HOMER

ALLEGORIZED

BY JOHN THE GRAMMARIAN, TZETZES

Since you are radiant, full-mooned, light-bearing moon,
Not appearing washed from the streams of the ocean,

(*) I present the lemma of the Paris codex 2644, to be noted hereafter by the letter C. The scribe described it twice. In the former place, he used an unusual form, alemanon of the Alemanni. It is correctly written Alamanon in the codex of the Escorial Library, as witnessed by Miller, a very learned man who inserted the lemma and the first forty verses into his erudite and laborious catalog. In Paris codex 2705, which I shall hereafter designate with the letter B, the lemma ends with the name of Tzetzes. There is a different reading of the lemma in Paris codex 2707, which I shall indicate by the letter A for brevity, namely: "Allegories composed by Tzetzes on the Iliad of Homer." See Miller, who also notes these things. Regarding codex 2705, which is on parchment and written in a neat and very diligent hand, I shall not omit that it once belonged to Andronicus Cantacuzene, which I learned from that note, written perhaps by Cantacuzene himself, in the upper margin of folio 116 verso: "This book belongs to Andronicus Cantacuzene, the Great Domestic." I thought of the Andronicus Cantacuzene whom Emperor Isaac sent as an envoy to Frederick in the year 1189, according to Nicetas, History 2, ch. 3. Burgess inserted into his Homeric Beginnings long excerpts from the Prolegomena of the Tzetzean Allegories, diligently transcribed by himself from the Oxford codices and accurately, except that he neglected the accents; which was a habit of otherwise very learned men. The Empress Lady Irene was the wife of Manuel Comnenus, born Bertha, daughter of Count Berengar in the Bavarian town of Sultzbach, and by affinity the sister of Conrad III, King of the Germans. See Du Cange, Byzantine Families, p. 186. Nicetas, Manuel 1, 2, p. 37: "This emperor took as his wife a woman from the Alemanni." Regarding this work of his, Tzetzes, Chil. 9, 281: "Writing an explanation of Homer for the Augusta, having also a translation in carriage-driven i.e., common/prosaic verses..."
(1) Scholium in the margin of C: "The prologue is addressed to the person who commanded Tzetzes to take up this writing." These words are inserted into the lemma in the Escorial codex, and in codex A; in the latter without "Tzetzes." Cramer, Anecd. Oxon. vol. 3, p. 376, produced that scholium with various readings: e keleusen, kelasenen, and, from Paris 2644, ke-