EUSTATHIUS or EUMATHIUS, surnamed Macrembo lites ("living near the long bazaar"), the last of the Greek ro mance 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 chief keeper of the ecclesiastical archives, he must have been a Christian. He was the author of The Story of Hysmine and ,h'ysminias, in II 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. The digressions on works of art, apparently the result of personal observation, are the best part of the work. A collection of II 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 (1888, new ed. in Bohn's Standard Library) ; K. Krurnbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur E. Rohde, Der griechische Roman (1900) . There are many transla tions in modern languages, of which that by P. le Bas (1825) may be recommended; there is an English version from the French by L. H. le Moine (London and Paris, 1788) .