s of truce and war, and the shutting
up of the latter into so many days' hand-to-hand fighting,--with no
strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any
kind,--were exactly to mediaeval taste.

[Sidenote: _Troilus and Briseida._]

Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines, about whom not
very much was said, and whose _gestes_ the mediaeval writer could
accordingly fill up at his own will, with the presentation of others
in a light different from that of the classical accounts, was a
godsend. Achilles, as the principal author of the "Excidium Trojae"
(the title of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be
blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst
accusations of the mediaeval writers against the unshorn son of the
sea-goddess, it clears the way for them by taking away the excuse of
the unjust deprivation of Briseis. From this to making him not merely
a factious partisan, but an unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half
to death with Myrmidons before he engages them himself, is not far. On
the other hand, Troilus, a mere name in the older stories, offers
himself as a hero. And for a heroine, the casual mention of the charms
of Briseida in Dares started the required game. Helen was too
puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a faithful wife;
Cassandra a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim. Briseida had almost
a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered in
name afterwards) there was very little personality left in her, and
she could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.

In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same
difference of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears
in the Alexander legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Chatillon's
_Alexandreis_ is matched and its Latinity surpassed by the _Bellum
Trojanum_ of our countryman Joseph of Exeter, who was long and justly
praised as about the best mediaeval writer of classical Latin verse.
But this neighbourhood of the streams of history and fiction ceases
much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious reasons. The
temperament of mediaeval poets urged them to fill in and fill out: the
structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they very
shortly did it.

[Sidenote: _The_ Roman de Troie.]

After some controversy, the credit of first "romancing" the Tale of
Troy has been, it would seem justly and finally, a