This book comprises the first English translation of John Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Odyssey, a long allegorical commentary on Homer’s Odyssey in 15-syllable verse. It is the authors’ second work on Tzetzes to be published in recent years, following their translation of the Allegories of the Iliad (Cambridge 2015). The book includes an introduction (vii–xxiv), an English translation of the Allegories of the Odyssey along with the edition of the Greek text by Herbert Hunger (2–281), notes on the Greek text followed by a list of the translators’ emendations of Hunger’s edition (285–88), a commentary that identifies Tzetzes’ quotations from the Odyssey and offers brief explanatory notes on the mythological and historical figures of the Allegories (289–336), a bibliography (337–39) and an index of the names and places mentioned in the Greek text (341–47).

The introduction provides useful information on a variety of topics, such as the content of the work, its audience, commission, date of composition, the life of Tzetzes, his allegorical method and the Homeric criticism of Eustathios of Thessaloniki. This section ends with some notes on the challenges that the translators encountered due to the complexity and obscurity of Tzetzes’ allegorical interpretations. Although the introduction is carefully written, it could have included more information about Tzetzes’ writing style, his allegorical method and his sources. Adetailed analysis of these topics could have helped familiarize readers with the nature of this uncommon composition, especially those unacquainted with ancient allegorical exegesis of Homer.

Tzetzes divides his commentary into 24 sections corresponding to the Homeric books. After a short summary of each book, he interprets allegorically the Homeric verses that refer to the pagan gods. His Allegories are full of repetitions (for example, his interpretation of Zeus as ‘destiny’ and Athena as ‘wisdom’), and as a result, the reader may wonder why Tzetzes had this ‘obsession’ with demonstrating that all pagan gods were physical elements, psychological powers and planets. It would be interesting to explore Tzetzes’ intention to present the Odyssey as a fully appropriate text for a Christian audience and whether this is related to the tensions between the official church and some intellectual circles during the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see the case of John Italos). Other characteristics of the Tzetzean style, which are not discussed in the book but an analysis of which could assist the reader to understand better the didactic character of the Allegories, include the mixture of different linguistic styles (for instance, the epic and the everyday) with the 15-syllable verse, the use of digressions (usually genealogical, geographical or philological), as well as the occasional use of different speaking voices (for example, of Tzetzes, Zeus, Odysseus). With regard to the sources of the Allegories of the Odyssey, Tzetzes himself mentions them in the Prolegomena A, vv. 35–36 (Demo, Heraclitus, Palaiphatos, Michael Psellos). He also specifies three different methods of allegorizing in 11.95–96: ‘psychologically’ (ψυχικῶς), ‘physically’ (στοιχειακῶς) and ‘pragmatically’ (πραγματικῶς). Iwould thus favour these terms for describing his allegorical methods (cf. P. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia: APoetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Cambridge MA 2005), 125), rather than the characterizations ‘rhetorical, natural and mathematical allegory’ proposed by the authors (xvi). Another question that arises when one reads the book is how faithfully Tzetzes reproduces the Homeric text and whether his Homeric quotations could be of any value for a future edition of the Odyssey?

As far as the translation is concerned, the authors have done an admirable job of rendering such a difficult composition into clear and understandable English while remaining faithful to the Greek text. Recently, two other reviewers (Johannes Haubold in BMCR (2020) and Valeria Lovato in The Byzantine Review (2020)) have proposed many, often useful, corrections on the translation and on the Greek text. Afull evaluation of these emendations would require a thorough examination of the poem’s manuscript tradition, which is impossible to do here. Ishall only propose a few suggestions for improvement that have not been mentioned before: ‘extensively’ instead of ‘in broad strokes’ (1.18); ‘dislike’ instead of ‘counteract’ (4.65); ‘narrate’ instead of ‘relate’ (7.5); αἱματομαντεία instead of αἱμαντομαντεία (11.135); ‘comes … will kill’ instead of ‘came … would kill’ (17.4); ‘kindle’ instead of ‘shine’ (18.13); and ‘tender hearts’ instead of ‘simple minds’ (24.280).

This English translation of Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Odyssey is welcome in the fields of Byzantine and classical studies, as it makes available to a broader audience an atypical medieval text that can redirect our ways of approaching Homer, while offering us insight into the interesting methods of an idiosyncratic philologist.