The Byzantine Sinbad

by Michael Andreopoulos, Jeffrey Beneker (Translator), Craig A. Gibson (Translator)

The Byzantine Sinbad collects The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher and The Fables of Syntipas , both translated from Syriac in the late eleventh century by the scholar Michael Andreopoulos.

Originally written in Persian and part of a multilingual and multicultural medieval storytelling tradition, The Book of Syntipas recounts how the Persian king Cyrus’s unnamed son―a student of the fictional philosopher Sinbad, who is known in Greek as Syntipas―is falsely accused of rape by a royal concubine. While the young man awaits execution, seven philosophers and the concubine attempt to influence Cyrus’s judgment. After seven days of storytelling, the son is exonerated and demonstrates the wisdom he learned from Syntipas.

The sixty-two moral tales in The Fables of Syntipas are inspired mainly by the tradition of Aesop but include fifteen that are uniquely attributed to the philosopher.

This volume is the first English translation to bring together Andreopoulos’s Byzantine Greek texts.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 11, 2021

Reviews

[Rjyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of the book is an interesting Arabian Nights-y story-that-contains-many-smaller-stories. It's neither boring nor all that crucial imho. The second part is a few dozen goofy fables, all of which are like 1 paragraph of 2 animals having a kind of generic, undeveloped encounter, and then a second paragraph explaining the moral of the story, and it all kind of reads like it was written by some intern for a medieval Byzantine Buzzfeed who forgot they had a listicle about fables due in an hour.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book - a Byzantine Greek retelling of allegedly Persian stories of the sage and philosopher Sinbad (here rendered in Greek as "Syntipas"). King Cyrus sends his son to be educated by Syntipas. When he returns, he is under a vow of silence for 7 days. But a concubine accuses him of attempted rape, and he won't speak in his own defense, so Cyrus sentences the prince to death. For 7 days, wise philosophers argue for the prince, and the death sentence is lifted each day, but each day the concubine hears the sentence has been lifted, and presents her grievances to the king anew, and gets the sentence restored. At the end of the 7 days, the prince is able to reveal the truth and prove his innocence, demonstrating the wisdom learned from Syntipas/Sinbad. There are also a set of Aesop-like fables attributed to Syntipas/Sinbad. The whole collection is interesting and entertaining, but extremely misogynistic and rather too fawning of royalty and nobility.

[Lulu]

second half of the eleventh century c. 1090s?

First Indian and pahlavi persian

The eastern branch is the oldest and includes eight adaptations:

• Arabic (The Seven Viziers, mid-eighth century)*****
• Syriac (Sindbad, tenth century circa)
• Greek (Syntipas, second half of the eleventh century)*
• Persian (the Sindibad-Nameh prose version of 1160 was the source of eighth night of the fourteenth century Tuti-Nameh by Nashebi*, as well as a 1375 poetic version),
• Hebrew (Mishle Sendebar, twelfth-thirteenth century)*
• Castilian (Sendebar, 1253)*

All these versions vary in numerous aspects: they gather a different number of interpolated stories, they show overall distinct details and motifs, and their framing tales have dissimilar endings. However, they all have in common the title of the text, the main plot of the framing story, and the figure of the wise man who educates the prince.

The most ancient [surviving] one is the Syriac [fragments] version, from which the Greek and Castilian ones derive. According to Morris Epstein, the Syriac, Greek, and Castilian adaptations all developed from an unidentified Arabic version.
Andreopoulos’s version represented a faithful translation of its Syriac exemplar, although it is not word-for-word.


The Castilian version of the Sendebar, also called The Book of the Wiles of Women, is the only version in a European language that developed from the eastern branch.


western version of the Sendebar reached wide popularity in Europe. Although the western branch derives from the eastern one, it introduces an important change into the main framing story: the character of the lone wise man is substituted by the sole presence of seven sages. the western branch further split into two different groups, the first one entitled Dolopathos* (12th) and the second one named Historia Septem Sapientium Romae*. This second one is the largest group. [read the one in Auchinleck Manuscript c. 1330-1340 https://auchinleck.nls.uk/contents.html https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... + Wynkyn De Worde, 1520 (made into prose version from The Early Modern English versions of The Seven Sages which have no connection with the Middle English versions , but represent a quite distinct line of tradition https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3.... from This group also Scottish poem by John Rolland (fl. 1560))]
For a collection of English versions check “The Seven Sages of Rome; by Killis 1872-1937 Ed Campbell” https://resources.warburg.sas.ac.uk/p...


***** 101 nights preserves one of the oldest versions
Also check? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
Arabe 3639 - 16th https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv...