Tzetzes published a collection of 107 of his
Letters addressed partly to fictitious/unidentified personages, and partly to influential men and women of the writer's time. They contain a considerable amount of social and biographical information, and are full of learned allusions to history, rhetoric, and mythology. These letters became the springboard for what became during the Renaissance perhaps the most influential of his many works, the
Book of Histories, usually called
Chiliades ("thousands") from the arbitrary division by its first editor (N. Gerbel, 1546) into books each containing 1,000 lines. The work consists of 12,674 lines of
political verse, divided into 660 topics, each of which is a gloss on a literary, historical, or other learned reference in one of his published letters. The first 141 histories serve as poetic footnotes to a verse letter Tzetzes addressed to John Lachanas, an official in Constantinople. This collection of literary, historical, theological, and antiquarian miscellanies provides an important snapshot of the intellectual world of Constantinople in the mid-12th century, and also preserves fragments of more than 200 ancient authors, including many whose works have been lost. The author subsequently brought out a revised edition with marginal notes in prose and verse (ed. T. Kiessling, 1826; on the sources see C. Harder,
De J. T. historiarum fontibus quaestiones selectae, diss., Kiel, 1886). Tzetzes supplemented
Homer's
Iliad by a work that begins with the birth of
Paris and continues the tale to the Achaeans' return home. The
Homeric Allegories, in "political" verse and dedicated initially to the German-born
empress Irene and then to Constantine Cotertzes, are two didactic poems, the first based on the
Iliad and the second based on the
Odyssey, in which Homer and the Homeric theology are set forth and then explained by means of three kinds of
allegory:
euhemeristic (),
anagogic () and
physic (). These works were translated into English in 2015 and 2019 by Adam J. Goldwyn and Dimitra Kokkini. In the
Antehomerica, Tzetzes recalls the events taking place before Homer's
Iliad. This work was followed by the
Homerica, covering the events of the
Iliad, and the
Posthomerica, reporting the events taking place between the
Iliad and the
Odyssey. All three are currently available in English translations. Tzetzes also wrote commentaries on a number of Greek authors, the most important of which is that elucidating the obscure
Cassandra or
Alexandra of the Hellenistic poet
Lycophron, usually called "On Lycophron" (edited by
K.O. Müller, 1811), in the production of which his brother Isaac is generally associated with him. Mention may also be made of a dramatic sketch in
iambic verse, in which the caprices of fortune and the wretched lot of the learned are described; and of an iambic poem on the death of the emperor
Manuel I Komnenos, noticeable for introducing at the beginning of each line the last word of the line preceding it (both in Pietro Matranga,
Anecdota Graeca 1850). For the other works of Tzetzes see
J. A. Fabricius,
Bibliotheca graeca (ed.
Harles), xi.228, and
Karl Krumbacher,
Geschichte der byz. Litt. (2nd edition, 1897); monograph by G. Hart, "De Tzetzarum nomine, vitis, scriptis," in
Jahn's
Jahrbucher für classische Philologie. Supplementband xii (Leipzig, 1881). == Notes ==