The poem was commissioned by the Despot of Epirus, who asked Hermoniakos to write a new version of this epic in the Greek vernacular language.
Little is known about him, except that he lived in the courtly circles of Arta, the capital of the Despotate of Epirus, a successor state of the Byzantine Empire.
After being commissioned by the Despot John II Orsini (1323–1335) and his wife Anna Palaiologina, ca.
[2] His intention was to make Homer easy to comprehend for his contemporaries, so while some sections are copied verbatim, others are considerably altered to remove "pagan" references to the Olympian gods and to reflect the more familiar circumstances of the late medieval Greek world.
[3] However he falsifies the events of the Iliad and introduces characters that were alien to the Trojan Cycle, thus giving for example Achilles a regiment of Hungarian and Bulgarian troops.