EUSTATHIUS, or EUMATHIUS  , surnamed Macrembolites (" living near the long bazaar "), the last of the Greek romance writers, flourished in the second half of the 12th century A.D . His title Protonobilissimus shows him to have been a person of distinction, and if he is also correctly described in the MSS. as p yas xapTotiXaE (chief keeper of the ecclesiastical archives), he must have been a Christian . He was the author of The Story of Hysmine and Hysminias, in eleven books, a tedious and inferior imitation of the Cleitophon and Leucippe of Achilles Tatius . There is nothing original in the plot, and the work is tasteless and often coarse . Although the author borrowed from Homer and other Attic poets, the chief source of his phraseology was the rhetorician Choricius of Gaza . The style is remarkable for the absence of hiatus and an extremely laboured use of antithesis . The digressions on works of art, apparently the result of personal observation, are the best part of the work . A collection of eleven Riddles, of which solutions were written by the grammarian Manuel Holobolos, is also attributed to Eustathius . The best edition of both romance and riddles is by I . Hilberg (1876, who fixes the date of Eustathius between 85o and 988), with critical apparatus and prolegomena, including the solutions; of the Riddles alone by M . Treu (1893) . On Eustathius generally, see J .

C .

Dunlop, History of Fiction (1388, new ed. in Bohn's Standard Library) ; E . Rohde, Der griechische Roman (1900) ; K . Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897) . There are many translations in modern languages, of which that by r. le Bas (1825) may be recommended; there is an English version from the French by L . H. le Moine (London and Paris, 1788) .