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 to the Trojan war, in a version of events that differs from that of the Iliad and Odyssey, to the foundation of Rome and to Julius Caesar and Augustus while Alexander the Great is passed over quite quickly. That choice may well say something about how twelfth-century Byzantines saw their past.

Linda Yuretich's translation is based on the Greek text published by Odysseus Lampsidis in 1996 but she also takes into account the later life of the text. It was translated into Middle Bulgarian at some point after 1331, probably in connection with the propaganda emanating from the court of Tsar John Alexander (1331-1371) which sought to spread the message that Bulgaria was the heir of the Roman political tradition. This Bulgarian version was edited and published by Ivan Dujčev and others in 1988 and Yuretich's footnotes alert the reader to the differences between the Greek and Bulgarian texts, providing English equivalents for the variants found in the latter. These footnotes help the reader to trace how the text was slightly altered for a Bulgarian readership. The anonymous translator clearly faced a challenge in expressing the flowery vocabulary of an archaizing literary text in a vernacular language. For example, the word Αὐσονάνακτος, literally lord of Ausonia or of Italy, appears frequently in the Greek text. It was apparently in vogue among panegyrists at the Komnenian court as a way of referring to the Byzantine ruler, possibly as a riposte to the ideological and territorial claims of the western emperor. Manasses describes emperors as widely spaced as Justin II (565-578) and John II Komnenos (118-1143) in this way. The Bulgarian version simply replaces Αὐσονάνακτος with ‘emperor’ or ‘ruler’. Similarly δίκορος or ‘two-pupiled’, used to describe Emperor Anastasius I (491-518) who had one eye darker than the other, becomes ‘different eyes’ (line 2963). There were also misunderstandings. The Vandal ruler Gaiseric is described by Manasses as ‘the Libyan’ (Λίβυς) but the Bulgarian translator rendered him as ‘leprous’ (line 2883). More significantly, the translator apparently disapproved of Manasses’ use of the classical convention of attributing events to τύχη or fortune and of the Byzantine author's allusions to ancient pagan gods. Such references were removed or reworded. He also introduced some additional passages which, not surprisingly, cover episodes from Bulgarian history. Yuretich reveals these additions in a list of glosses at the end and provides translations of them in the footnotes. For example, to the passage describing Basil II's subjugation of Bulgaria, the translation adds a sentence looking forward to its revival under John I Asen in the 1190s. By taking the Bulgarian version into account in this way, Yuretich has greatly increased the value of her English translation for historians.

The gold standard for translations of Byzantine texts has to be the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library published by Harvard University Press, mainly because this series provides the Greek text parallel to the English. Its volumes also have rather fuller commentaries and explanations of the text. In the Manasses translation, apart from the references to the Bulgarian text, footnotes are restricted to providing the dates of rulers and significant individuals. Nevertheless, by providing a translation and by collating it with the Bulgarian version, Yuretich has done a considerable service to researchers, teachers and students.