20. Acontius Cydippae; 21. Cydippe Acontio.
Chaucer's method, I fear, was to plan more than he cared to finish. He did so with his Canterbury Tales, and again with his Treatise on the Astrolabe; and he left the Squire's Tale half-told. According to his own account (Prologue to Legend of Good Women, l. 481) he never intended to write his Legend all at once, but only 'yeer by yere.' Such proposals are dangerous, and commonly end in incompleteness. To Tyrwhitt's question—'are we to suppose that they [i. e. the legends of Penelope and others] have been lost?' the obvious answer is, that they were never written.
Chaucer alludes to Ovid's Epistles again in his House of Fame, bk. i., where he mentions the stories of Phyllis, Briseis, Oenone (not mentioned here), Hypsipyle, Medea, Deianira, Ariadne, and Dido; the last being told at some length. Again, in the Book of the Duchesse, he alludes to Medea, Phyllis, and Dido (ll. 726-734); to Penelope and Lucretia (l. 1081); and to Helen (l. 331). As for the stories in the Legend which are not in Ovid's Heroides, we find that of Thisbe in Ovid's Metamorphoses, bk. iv; that of Philomela in the same, bk. vi; whilst those of Cleopatra and Lucretia are in Boccaccio's book De Claris Mulieribus, from which he imitated the title 'Legend of Good Women,' and derived also the story of Zenobia, as told in the Monkes Tale. However, Chaucer also consulted other sources, such as Ovid's Fasti (ii. 721) and Livy for Lucretia, &c. See my Introduction to the Legend in vol. iii. pp. xxv., xxxvii.
With regard to the title 'seintes legend of Cupide,' which in modern English would be 'Cupid's Saints' Legend,' or 'the Legend of Cupid's Saints,' Mr. Jephson remarks—'This name is one example of the way in which Chaucer entered into the spirit of the heathen pantheism, as a real form of religion. He considers these persons, who suffered for love, to have been saints and martyrs for Cupid, just as Peter and Paul and Cyprian were martyrs for Christ.'
63. Gower also tells the story of Tarquin and Lucrece, which he took, says Professor Morley (English Writers, iv. 230), from the Gesta Romanorum, which again had it from Augustine's De Civitate Dei.
Babilan, Babylonian; elsewhere Chaucer has Babiloine = Babylon, riming with Macedoine; Book of the Duchesse, l. 1061.
64. swerd, sword; put here for death by the sword. See Virgil's Aeneid, iv. 646; and Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, 1351.
65. tree, put here, most likely, for death by hanging; cf. last line. In Chaucer's Legend, 2485, we find—
'She was her owne deeth right with a corde.'
The word may also be taken literally, since Phyllis was metamorphosed after her death into a tree; Gower says she became a nut-tree, and