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Ioannis Tzetzes, Histories or Chiliades

§ i  Tzetzes wrote this personalized, idiosyncratic, bitter/playful manual of cultural references partly on Imbros, with limited access to books, in the mid-12th century CE. He offers here, often from memory, tantalizing snippets of authors and works now lost to us, along with scatological assaults on rival intellectuals in Constantinople. He is writing, however, about a very dim past indeed, and that encyclopedic memory betrays him often enough to make him horrendously unreliable as a guide to history.
The manuscript version in print is a collection of 668 numberedtopoi orhistoriai from history, philology, rhetoric, and mythology, punctuated with autobiographical rants, condensed into 12759 lines of (mostly) 15-syllablepolitical verse, a modernish meter that uses stress accents rather than syllable length.
Their purpose is to illuminate the literary and other allusions in a series of letters Tzetzes published. The first 141 “histories” gloss a relentless flow of learned references in the “epistolion” (little letter), 308 lines in verse cautioning rival grammarian Lachanas against ingratitude and triumphalism. Tzetzes included theepistolion atBook 4, lines 472-786. The remaining stories provide explanatory footnotes to a volume of 107 letters in prose addressed to various personalities of the day and not included in this text (seeLeone 1972 for the Greek edition). Tzetzes was responding to numbered lists (pinakes) quoting brief phrases from the letters, in the order they appeared. These lists have many overlaps and duplications due to Tzetzes' reuse of favorite historical allusions (e.g. Croesus). To save paper and time, Tzetzes summarized and cross-referenced overlapping allusions, citing the list numbers (hyperlinked below). Finding himself with a blank page at the end of his last list, he threw in some dubious biographic details on Homer.
The misleading modern name “Chiliades” or “Thousands” is inspired by an early editor's arbitrary division of the text into thirteen 1000-line “books” that ignore the work's internal logic.

CHILIADES OR BOOK OF HISTORIES BY JOHN TZETZES


[The first lines are the ToposText editor's attempt to illustrate “political” meter in English.]

§ 1.1  Book of History of Ioannis Tzetzes inPolitical Verses (called Alpha) [or] Historiai of Ioannes the Grammarian Tzetzes from the things referred to in one of his letters.
My dearest friend, you ask to learn both scholarship unerring
And all that history can teach from this one single letter;
Attention give, accordingly, first to the tale ofCroesus.

§ 1.4  (T1) CONCERNING CROESUS
Croesus wasAlyattes' son, the ruler of theLydians,
Whose capital and palace were establishéd atSardis;
By which the flowingPactolus, the rain-fed golden river,
FromTmolus mountain washéd down a waterfall of gold dust.
[end metrical translation]
Croesus became richest in gold of all kings.
Living delicately in wealth and countless treasures.
Friendly to everybody, he was also generous.
AsPindar the son ofDaiphantus reports,
WhenAlcmaeon came to seeCroesus once

§ 1.10  He bid him take gold, as much as he could carry.
Alcmaeon dressed himself in a very wide-breasted robe
And the wide-soled boots of tragic actors.
He entered the treasury and filled them with gold,
Up to his hair, holding it with his teeth.
Alcmaeon couldn't walk - the gold weighed so much.
The sight movedCroesus to laughter.
He told him to take two times more in addition.
While this is whatPindar the lyric poet wrote somewhere,
The writerHerodotus, the son of Oxylus,

§ 1.20  AndPlutarch as well, describeCroesus
Sending toDelphi a thousand bricks of solid gold
To build a golden altar forApollo.
Once he invitedSolon, the lawmaker,
ToSardis, to spend time at his palace.
He showed him his treasures, and boasting over them he urged
That he account him blessed, renowned among the fortunate.
ButSolon the philosopher, the law-giver,
Did not hold him blessed, andCroesus asked him:
“Where,Solon, do you know someone happier than I?”

§ 1.30  He replied, indeed I do, the generalTellus
AndCleobis andBiton, the sons ofCydippe.
The first one,Tellus the general, after defeating his enemies
Was glorified by many for his brilliant victory;
He was fortunate to die the very evening of his victory.
The children ofCydippe, the priestess ofHera,
Because their mother was sick, yoked themselves likeoxen
And brought their mother to theHeraion precinct.
Their mother prayed for the best for them.
Both of them died that night, meeting a most beautiful end.
[For the remainder of the translation seetheoi.com]

§ 1.40  “These ones I call happy,Croesus, and people like them
Who end their lives at a worthy end-point.
Your end is yet unknown; so I do not deem you fortunate.
No one should consider blessed a man whose end is not yet known”.
This is whatSolon told theLydian, prophetically.
For soon afterCroesus was defeated in war
ByCyrus thePersian, the son ofCambyses andMandane.
Fourteen whole days he was besieged,
And taken by storm, as a prisoner being dragged to the pyre.
“OSolon!Solon!Solon!” he shouted three times.

§ 13.620  [LIFE OF HOMER]
The Homeric lineage I will post up here,
But very briefly, and only for this reason,
That you know whoHomer's wife and children were.
Because the rest of it I have already written in the Empress' book
The key points of which I will set down here.
The all-wiseHomer, the sea oflogoi
Except being full of nectar rather than salt water,
Is said to have seven disputed homelands,
To be the scion of seven fathers, likewise disputed.

§ 13.630  Know you thatHomer was aSmyrnaean
Son ofMeles andCritheis
And leave aside the mythology about his birth.
Know Pornapides asHomer's teacher
His bedmate was calledEurydice,
The daughter of Pastor or Gnostor theCymaean.
Seriphon and Theolaos wereHomer's sons
His daughter was Arsiphone, who marriedStasinus,
Stasinus who composed theCypria,
Which some say wasHomer's own work,

§ 13.640  Given toStasinus as a dowry along with money.
Arctinus fromMiletus wasHomer's student,
And the poet also had a slave called Byccon,
WhomTzetzes punning calls bikon and phlaskon (jar and flask)
Homer's books number thirteen.
His era coincides with two military campaigns
TheTheban andTrojan, according to many others.
ButApollodorus the chronicler writes
That his time was eighty years after theTrojan War.
Hesiod was at his prime, as I have found in other authors,
During theeleventh Olympiad.

§ 13.650  Homer's end occurred in this way:
It was prophesied that he would die on being asked
A riddle he was unable to solve.
The man was poor, and blind due to old age,
(What sensible person would write that fictional nonsense)
He travelled the whole country of Greece
Reciting his poems, to an honorable welcome.
While being hosted inArcadia under Creophilus
He went for a walk on the shore.

§ 13.660  He said, “OArcadian fishermen, what have we here?”
And they answered him, talking about lice,
What they caught they did not have, while what they had they had not caught.
He turned away distraught, not having gotten the joke.
He slipped on some clay and hit on a rock,
Breaking his right-hand ribs, and died on the third day.
Here you have, narrowly: the sea of nectar;
WiseHelicon, indeed theMuses themselves;
Apollo himself, moreover, the leader of theMuses;
The one above all else, greatHomer,

§ 13.670  Whence he sprouted, and who he was, whom he brought forth,
His slave, his teacher, his student
His date and his books and where and how he died.
So let us now put a stop with this, make him the seal,
The seal and conclusion of this book of ours.
End ofIoannes Tzetzes' book of history, inpolitical meter, called Alpha, the number of lines being 12759.