john tzetzes () (c. 1110, constantinople â 1180, constantinople) was a byzantine poet and grammarian, known to have lived at constantinople during the 12th century. tzetzes was georgian on his mother's side. in his works, tzetzes states that his grandmother was a relative of the georgian bagratid princess maria of alania who came to constantinople with her and later became the second wife of the sebastos constantine keroularios, megas droungarios and nephew of the patriarch michael keroularios.garland, lynda (2006), byzantine women: varieties of experience, 800-1200, pp. 95-6. ashgate publishing, ltd. isbn 0-7546-5737-x. tzetzes was described as vain, seems to have resented any attempt at rivalry, and violently attacked his fellow grammarians. owing to a lack of written material, he was obliged to trust to his memory; therefore caution has to be exercised in reading his work. however, he was learned, and made a great contribution to the furtherance of the study of ancient greek literature.  the most important of his many works is considered to be the book of histories, usually called chiliades ("thousands") from the arbitrary division by its first editor (n. gerbel, 1546) into books each containing 1000 lines (it actually consists of 12,674 lines of political verse). it is a collection of literary, historical, theological, and antiquarian miscellanies, whose chief value consists in the fact that it to some extent makes up for the loss of works which were accessible to tzetzes. the whole production suffers from an unnecessary display of learning, the total number of authors quoted being more than 400. 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). his collection of 107 letters addressed partly to fictitious personages, and partly to the great men and women of the writer's time, contain a considerable amount of biographical details. 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 in which homer and the homeric theology are set forth and then explained by means of three kinds of allegory: historical (), anagogic ({{lang|grc|
1110_births 1180_deaths 12th-century_Byzantine_people 12th-century_people_from_Georgia_(country) 12th-century_writers Byzantine_Georgians Byzantine_grammarians Byzantine_poets