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Linda Yuretich (trans.), The Chronicle of Constantine Manasses. Translated Texts for Byzantinists 6. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii + 320.
This latest addition to Liverpool's series of translations presents a work originally written sometime between 1145 and 1148 for the Sevastokratorissa Eirene, the widowed sister-in-law of Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180). The author, Constantine Manasses, was a typical man of letters of the period, who also wrote a description of a journey to Jerusalem made in 1160 and an erotic novel entitled Aristandros and Kallithea. The latter was recently translated by Elizabeth Jeffreys in another volume of the same series, Four Byzantine Novels (2012). The work translated here is a chronicle which begins with creation and ends in 1081 with the accession of Manuel I's grandfather, Alexios Komnenos. It was clearly designed to entertain rather than to be a dry record of events as it was written in verse and combines classicizing vocabulary and Homeric imagery with occasional rather indelicate passages. The coverage is also very selective. A good deal of space is devoted...