OR maomao / Marmar OU porporate / purpurate OZ toetoe /
tzetze OS ochavo / schavs OY topo / typy
(= 42 Marcovich) occurs in a scholion on
Tzetzes' commentary on the Iliad.
The poem was associated with Orpheus by
Tzetzes in the twelfth century (West 1984, 36).
Joannes
Tzetzes born; wrote a commentary on Ptolomy's astronomy.
Byzantine scholiast John
Tzetzes (in Parsons, 1952) estimated that it contained over 532,800 rolls (including the 42,800 rolls in its nearby sister library, the Sarapeum), and by the mid-first century BCE it is said to have contained over 700,000 rolls (Aulus Gellius, 7.17.3, trans.
The other source for medieval Ossetic consists of two lines in the Byzantine court official Ioannes
Tzetzes's Theogony (twelfth c.), in what he denotes as "Alanic." This intriguing text has been the subject of several studies; the two most recent, Bielmeier 1993 and Testen 1994: 312-15, take into account the new reading of Hunger 1953, based on the Codex Vindobonensis of the Theogony discovered by Hunger in the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek.
The principal source of this anecdote is the Byzantine author
Tzetzes. But, in the usual quotations,
Tzetzes's text -- taken from Joannes Philopon's commentaries to Aristotle's book On The Soul -- is rendered in a fragmented, even mutilated manner.