The "Narrative of Livistros and Rodamni" is the most extensive, narratively complex, and poetically perfected of the eight surviving romantic-heroic novels of the late Byzantine era. Written in the mid-13th century at the court of the Laskaris emperors of Nicaea, it reflects a new trend in Byzantine literature, where traditional and modern elements are experimentally fused.

The now-anonymous poet employs all the tricks of Hellenistic and Byzantine storytelling, simultaneously utilizing motifs and techniques from both French medieval chivalric novels and Persian romantic tales. All these are combined with impressive narrative consistency, based on the artful—clearly descriptive and sensually lyrical—language of the popular tradition, thus creating a modern narrative for its time.

Latin aristocrats, Arab and Armenian kings, dreamlike appearances of the god of Love as a Byzantine emperor, beautiful and clever princesses, jousting tournaments, disguised merchants, wicked witches, flying horses, deadly rings, unexpected twists, and a strangely happy ending compose the "exotic" canvas of the extensive plot.

With this publication, Panagiotis Agapitos, a regular professor of Byzantine philology at the University of Cyprus, presents the first critical edition of the oldest of the three surviving adaptations of the novel. The "Narrative of Livistros and Rodamni" is transmitted in a large number of manuscripts (for the standards of the popular Byzantine texts) and even more fragments, establishing it as the undisputed "bestseller" of Byzantine romantic fiction.

The goal of the critical edition is, on one hand, to present a new method of editorial approach to these texts, allowing for a more historically and linguistically accurate treatment of the manuscript material, and, on the other hand, to make this previously overlooked narrative poem more widely known.

The extensive introduction discusses in detail all the methodological issues concerning the edition. Additionally, the introduction includes a chapter dedicated to the literary themes of the novel, while the text is accompanied by an extensive glossary that contributes to a better understanding of the medieval vernacular language and its Byzantine characteristics.