ABSTRACT
Some time in the fifteenth century, someone called Eustathios sat down to write, as he puts it:
Neither in the preface, which declares his role as compiler, nor in the heading to the manuscript which names the notional addressee for whom this version was composed, is any hint given as to the work's genre. The term KaTop9ci|iaTa . . . TTpaxOevTd sounds uncannily like the Latin res gestae and later medieval cognates, which by this time were perhaps becoming known in the Greek world. But if we are to judge from the version produced by Eustathios, with its many nods in the direction of the Hellenistic and more particularly the Byzantine romance, we would be hard put to it to define his text in terms of genre at all.
