Dictys Cretensis

The story of his journal, an amusing fiction addressed to a knowledgeable Alexandrian audience[citation needed], came to be taken literally during Late Antiquity.

Its chief interest lies in the fact that, as knowledge of Greek waned and disappeared in Western Europe, this and the De excidio Trojae of Dares Phrygius were the sources from which the Homeric legends were transmitted to the Romance literature of the Middle Ages.

[1] An elaborate frame story presented in the prologue to the Latin text details how the manuscript of this work, written in Phoenician characters on tablets of limewood or tree bark, survived: it was said to have been enclosed in a leaden box and buried with its author, according to his wishes.

There are retranslations into Greek of Byzantine date, embodied in universal histories, of which Smith adds, "We may add to this account, that the writers of the Byzantine period, such as Joannes Malelas, Constantinus Porphyrogenitus, Georgius Cedrenus, Constantinus Manasses, Joannes and Isaacus Tzetzes, with others, quote largely from this Dictys as an author of the highest and most unquestionable authority, and he certainly was known as early as the age of Aelian."

The other surprise was the discovery, in the library of conte Aurelio Guglielmo Balleani at Jesi,[6] of a manuscript of Dictys, dating to the latter part of the ninth century, that was described and collated by C. Annibaldi in 1907.