CHAPTER VI. Romances of Chivalry relating to Classical and Mythological Heroes.-Livre de Jason.-La vie de Hercule.-Alexandre, &c. Ir has been suggested in a former part of this work, that many arbitrary fictions of romance are drawn from the classical and mythological authors; and in the summary given of the tales of chivalry, a few instances have been pointed out, in which the ancient stories of Greece have been introduced, modified merely by the manners of the age. Since so much of the machinery of romance has been derived from classical fiction, it would have been strange had not the heroes of antiquity been also enlisted under the banners of chivalry. Accordingly we find that Achilles, Jason, and Hercules, were early adopted into romance, and cele brated in common with the knights of the Round Table, the paladins of Charlemagne, and the imaginary lineage of Amadis and Palmerin. And though the purer streams of classical learning were probably withheld from the romancers of the middle ages, spurious materials were not wanting to make them in some degree "conscious of a former time." The "Tale of Troy Divine" had been kept alive in two Latin works, which passed under the names of Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. The former was a Trojan priest, mentioned by Homer,' and was believed to have written an account of the destruction of Troy. Ælian mentions that the history of Dares Phrygius was extant in his time, but he probably refers to some spurious author who had assumed that appellation. At length an obscure writer, posterior to the age of Constantine, availing himself of this tradition, wrote a book, which he entitled De Excidio Troja, and which 'The sons of Dares first the combat sought, Pore's Iliad, b. 5. professed to be translated from the work of Dares Prygius, by Cornelius Nepos. A pretended epistle is prefixed, as addressed by the translator to Sallust, in which he informs his friend that he had discovered a MS. in the hand-writing of Dares, while studying at Athens, where that historian had always been held in higher estimation than Homer, &c. The forgery, sheltered under these specious names, was a current and credited manuscript in the middle ages, and was first published at Milan in 1477. The work which bears the name of Dictys Cretensis is much longer and better written than the composition of Dares Phrygius. It is a prose Latin history, in six books, containing an account of the Trojan war, and the fate of the Grecian chiefs after their return. The author has principally drawn his materials from the Iliad, but has also pillaged other poems and histories, which contained information on the subject. In the preface to this work, it is said, that in the reign of Nero, the sepulchre of Dictys, who had been a follower of Idomeneus in the Trojan war, was thrown open by an earthquake, which shook the city of Gnossus in Crete. In the gap there was a chest found by some peasants, who carried it to their master Eupraxis. By him it was transmitted to Nero, and was then found to contain the history of the wars of Ilium, by Dictys Cretensis. After the preface follows the dedicatory epistle from Septimius to Quintus Arcadius, who lived in the reign of Constantine. Septimius professes himself to be the Latin translator of the work, and says he had rendered it into that language from the copy Eupraxis transmitted to Nero, and in which that Cretan had merely substituted Greek letters for the Phoenician characters, in which it was originally written. Now the commonly received opinion, and that maintained by the commentators Vossius, Mercerus, and Madame Dacier, is, that every thing here is a fiction that it is false that a Trojan history was written by Dictys; that it is equally untrue that any work of this nature was presented to Nero by Eupraxis; that even the letter of Septimius is a forgery; and that the work was written several ages posterior to the time of Constantine, by an unknown author, who feigned the story of the transmission to Nero, and the translation by Septimius. It is certain, however, that there did at one time exist a Greek work on the Trojan war, under the name of Dictys Cretensis. Of this several fragments are preserved by Cedrenus in his annals, and the book has been used by Malela in his history. These Greek fragments and quota tions, and also the title of the work, coincide pretty nearly with portions of the Latin Dictys. It is not therefore altogether improbable (as has been attempted to be shown by Perizonius, in a very ingenious dissertation,) that the work was originally a forgery of Eupraxis, and by him presented as an antique to Nero; that Septimius in reality translated it from the Greek of Eupraxis, and that the Greek fragments in Cedrenus and Malela are parts of the forgery of Eupraxis. In the histories of Dares and Dictys, every thing that related to mythology and the fights of the gods was expunged; and thus in the Tale of Troy, a vacancy was left for the introduction of romantic embellishment. The story was first versified in the metrical composition of Benoit de Saint More, an Anglo-Norman poet, who lived in the reign of Henry the Second of England. He took the ground-work of events from the writings of Dares and Dictys; comprehended in his plan the Theban and Argonautic expeditions, and grafted on these incidents many new romantic inventions, dictated by the taste of his age. This metrical work, as has been shown by Mr Douce, is the same in incident and decoration with the Latin prose chronicle of Guido de Colonna, who was formerly believed to have wrought solely |