ὑμετέρης γενεῆς τε καὶ αἵματος εὔχομαι εἶναι
(Eudocia's Laudes Antiochiae; cf. Il. 6.211, 20.241).1
The article argues that in Eudocia's fifth-century Martyrdom of St Cyprian – the only surviving Greek verse paraphrase of a hagiography – certain Odyssean lexical items and intertexts may be thematically grouped. A new category, the ‘diatext’, is introduced to describe this function of the Odyssey as an intermediate thematic model used to transpose the Cyprianic hagiographies (the ‘hypotext’) into Eudocia's verse paraphrase (the ‘hypertext’). A particularly important and complex example is the way in which Eudocia's metapoetic/narratorial and biographical alter ego, the ex-pagan Christian convert Cyprian, is modelled after Odysseus (especially in book 2).