[citation needed] However, he was learned, and made a great contribution to the furtherance of the study of ancient Greek literature.

The work consists of 12,674 lines of political verse, divided into 660 topics, each of which is a gloss on a literary, historical, or other learned reference in one of his published letters.

The first 141 histories serve as poetic footnotes to a verse letter Tzetzes addressed to John Lachanas, an official in Constantinople.

[4] This collection of literary, historical, theological, and antiquarian miscellanies provides an important snapshot of the intellectual world of Constantinople in the mid-12th century, and also preserves fragments of more than 200 ancient authors, including many whose works have been lost.

[6] Tzetzes supplemented Homer's Iliad by a work that begins with the birth of Paris and continues the tale to the Achaeans' return home.

Mention may also be made of a dramatic sketch in iambic verse, in which the caprices of fortune and the wretched lot of the learned are described; and of an iambic poem on the death of the emperor Manuel I Komnenos, noticeable for introducing at the beginning of each line the last word of the line preceding it (both in Pietro Matranga, Anecdota Graeca 1850).

(2nd edition, 1897); monograph by G. Hart, "De Tzetzarum nomine, vitis, scriptis," in Jahn's Jahrbucher für classische Philologie.