Sotto il segno di Mercurio: Autolico, Euripide, Tzetze e la circolazione delle histoires de truands antiche e contemporanee a Bisanzio

The well-known passage from John Tzetzes’ Chiliads in which unique details are provided about Euripides’ Autolycus (8.202, l. 435-453) is examined in depth, with a particular focus on the figures of thieves to whom Autolycus is compared. For the first time, the mysterious Hydrargyros, to whom Tzetzes also alludes at other times in his writings, is identified. He is the famous villain Ali az- Zaibaq (“Mercury Ali”), mentioned in Seljuk chronicles, in the Thousand and One Nights and in a very successful Arab novel of the Mamluk era. Tzetzes is evidently referring to an undergrowth of “submerged” entertainment stories that circulated in the East, between Byzantium and the Arab world, and which generally tended to be ignored by literati in both of these cultural areas. Other references to these “tales of rascals”, widely circulated but ignored by literati, can be identified in Eustathius of Thessalonica and above all in the enigmatic Idyll by Maximus Planudes. The latter is framed in the light of similar stories of fraudsters in circulation, more or less at the same time, in the Western and Arab worlds. The fact that Tzetzes is the only Byzantine author to quote the story of Ali az-Zaibaq and, at the same time, to provide thorough details on the Euripidean treatment of Autolycus’ misdeeds may lead to think that even the latter, despite its antiquity, could constitute an unwelcome material for scholars and grammarians, who tended to prefer gnomic and sententious contents in classical works. Rather than by a fortunate discovery of material otherwise inaccessible to all the others, this isolated mention by Tzetzes could perhaps be explained by his ostentatiously provocative and irreverent authorial persona, which often leads him to lash out at his colleagues and at the “sacred monsters” of antiquity, drawing also on levels usually ostentatiously ignored by scholars, such as that of the “tales of rascals” and of the not-quite-edifying Euripidean plots. As for the latter, he may have known them through lexicographic and erudite works no longer (or no longer fully) available to us, such as Suetonius’s Peri blasphemion which had a special section on thieves and rascals. Finally, the comparison with the stories of thieves attested in the Islamic world allows us to advance a series of typological considerations on the possible developments of the plot of the Euripidean Autolycus alluded to by Tzetzes.