he imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the first
group (about 1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF THEBES, the work of an
unknown author, founded upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius,
preceded by the story of OEdipus. It opened the way for the vast
ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten years later, by Benoit de
Sainte-More. The chief sources of Benoit were versions, probably more
or less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan war, ascribed
to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary defender of the city, and the
Cretan Dictys, one of the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which,
on a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive faculty to work,
and among these by far the most interesting and admirable is the story
of Troilus and Briseida, known better to us by her later name of
Cressida. Through Boccaccio's _Il Filostrato_ this tale reached our
English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it gave rise to the strange,
half-heroic, half-satirical play of Shakespeare.

Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting Virgil to the
taste of his contemporaries in his _Eneas_, where the courtship of
the Trojan hero and Lavinia is related in the chivalric manner. All
these poems are composed in the swift octosyllabic verse; the _Troy_
extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of the personages
are classical, the spirit and life of the romances are wholly
mediaeval: Troilus, and Hector, and AEneas are conceived as if knights
of the Middle Ages; their wars and loves are those of gallant
chevaliers. The _Romance of Julius Caesar_ (in alexandrine verse),
the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing in the second half
of the thirteenth century, versifies, with some additions from the
Commentaries of Caesar, an earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin
(about 1240) of Lucan's Pharsalia--the oldest translation in prose
of any secular work of antiquity. Caesar's passion for Cleopatra in
the Romance is the love prescribed to good knights by the amorous
code of the writer's day, and Cleopatra herself has borrowed something
of the charm of Tristram's Iseult.

If _Julius Caesar_ may be styled historical, the ROMAN D'ALEXANDRE,
a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the form of which this romance
gave its name--"alexandrine" verse), the work of Lambert le Tort and
Alexandre de Bernay, can only be described as legendary. All--or
nearly all--that was written during the Middle Ages in French on the
subject of Alexander may be tr