Thus, in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the tale of Troy is a very different one from that of the Homeric Iliad. The plight of the Trojans and the adventures of Aeneas after the war is over, as well as Aeneas’ romance with the Carthaginian queen Dido, take center stage, as in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1593). (For more examples, see Chapter 42, by Kallendorf.) Just as influential as Virgil, however, would be the accounts of Dares and Dictys, which were the ultimate inspiration for the Trojan War romances of the Middle Ages. Around 1160 a Frenchman, Benoit de Ste Maure, composed his Roman de Troie, which tells the story of Troy in verse, basing it primarily on Dares and Dictys. Benoit’s account transforms the Trojan warriors into chivalrous Christian knights and introduces for the first time the romance of Troilus and Briseida (later known as Cressida). In the Iliad, Troilus is mentioned as one of the sons of Priam and Hecuba; in another well-known myth, narrated in the Epic Cycle and depicted frequently in vase paintings, the Greek hero Achilles kills Troilus in an ambush. Briseis in the Iliad is the prize and concubine of Achilles. When Agamemnon takes Briseis for himself after being forced to give up his own prize Chryseis in Book 1 of the Iliad, Achilles’ anger leads him to withdraw from battle and sets in motion the plot of the epic. In Benoit’s account, however, Briseis is in no way connected with Achilles. Rather, she is the daughter of a Trojan priest living in the Greek camp. Although she is the lover of Troilus, she soon deserts him for the Greek warrior Diomedes. Her treachery becomes the nucleus of many subsequent adaptations in countless other medieval versions of the tale, including Bocca-cio’s Il Filostrato (where her name is changed to Criseida), Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare’s only play on a Trojan theme).
Equally influential was the prose translation of Benoit into Latin, the Historia Destruc-tionis Troiae, made by the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne (ca.1287). Other popular translations and adaptations of Benoit’s romance and Colonne’s prose translation of it include John Lydgate’s English Troy Book (ca.1420) and Raoul Lefevre’s French Recueil des Histoires de Troie (1464). (For a more comprehensive list, see Appendix A in Scherer 1964.) William Caxton’s translation of Lefevre’s work became the first book printed in English in 1474. It was reprinted many times and was an important source for Shakespeare. Finally, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (left unfinished in 1494) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (a continuation of Boiardo) blended several cycles of romance, including those of Charlemagne, Arthur, and Troy. Such romances, together with Virgil’s Aeneid, in turn inspired much of Troy-themed music, opera, and art in the coming centuries. (See Chapter 42, by Kallendorf, and further below.)
These works all depart dramatically from the plot of the Iliad, and reveal a fundamental disconnect between the Latin and Greek worlds at this time. But although the Iliad and Odyssey were no longer known in Europe, the name of Homer lived on, indelibly associated with poetry and the genre of epic (see Chapter 1, by Martin). It was known that Homer was Virgil’s teacher, so to speak, with the result that, as in antiquity, Homer was imagined as the primordial poet, the first in a long chain of inspired artists. Even more than that, Homer became, as we have seen, a sage and prophetic visionary, capable of concealing fundamental truths beneath the surface of his poetry. Because the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey were lost to western Europe, the Homer of the Middle Ages was that which could be gleaned through Plato, as transmitted by the writings of Neoplatonic philosophers and scholars. The scholars of the Middle Ages of course could not read Plato in the original Greek either. Instead they read the commentaries of previous scholars and the meager amount of Plato that was translated into Latin. The understanding of poetry, especially Homeric epic, that was transmitted through the Middle Ages was that poetry had many levels of meaning and required explication. The poet was a philosopher and a sage who cloaked wisdom and truth beneath a superficial veneer.
This is the Homer of Dante, who, as Robert Lamberton has pointed out, composed his Divine Comedy only a generation before the recovery of Greek in Europe and the first translations of Homer into Latin (Lamberton 1986: 283). Virgil is Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory in the Inferno and Purgatorio, leaving him only as Dante ascends to heaven in the Paradiso, where, as a pagan, Virgil cannot go. For Dante, Homer is the ‘‘poeta sovrano’’ (‘‘the sovereign poet,’’ in canto 4 of the Inferno), even though Dante cannot have known the Iliad or Odyssey (and in fact he often departs from them when narrating the myths of the various Greek heroes). Dante sets himself up as the inheritor of the poetic craft from Virgil, who in turn inherited it from Homer. (See especially the narrator’s words to Virgil in canto 2 of the Inferno, ‘‘you are my teacher, my master, and my guide,’’ in the translation of Pinsky (1994).) In keeping with the Neoplatonic and Christian allegorical readings of Homer and Virgil that were standard in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Dante’s work is full of complex allegory and layers of meaning that go far beyond the surface narrative. The Divine Comedy is set up as the journey of a man who has strayed from the correct path into woods populated by savage beasts. Virgil saves this man (who is generally equated with Dante himself) by showing him the way out. The way is difficult and requires a descent, like those of Odysseus and Aeneas, through the Underworld before enlightenment can be achieved.
World History
