The twelfth-century Byzantine author Gregory Antiochus was, until recently, almost unknown. His works remained unpublished, or inaccurately attributed. Krumbacher, in his monumental history of Byzantine literature, mentioned the existence of manuscripts with Antiochus' speeches and letters, but recorded only one work which had appeared in print. Gradually, more information came to light. In 1917 W. Regel published a speech by Antiochus to Isaac II Angelus (Fontes, II, pp. 300–4). In 1940 Dölger and Bachmann produced an annotated edition of another speech, this time to Isaac's brother Constantine. Twenty years later P. Wirth established that two ‘anonymous’ speeches published by Regel were in fact written by Antiochus. And finally, J. Darrouzès published three more works by Antiochus, compiled a list of all his known compositions (thirty-five items), and attempted to sketch the outlines of his biography.

Yet long before the editions of Dölger, Bachmann, Wirth and Darrouzès, the works of Gregory Antiochus had been studied by the eminent Russian classicist N. I. Novosadsky. Novosadsky copied several speeches and letters from the invaluable Byzantine miscellany Escorial Y-II-10 (E), apparently with the intention of publishing them with Regel in some future volume of Regel's Fontes. But Regel died, circumstances changed, and Novosadsky's files lay untouched at his home until they were eventually passed by his widow to the Byzantine department of the Institute of History at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.