17. Great part of this “tragedy” of Nero is really borrowed, however, from the “Romance of the Rose.”
18. Trice: thrust; from Anglo-Saxon, “thriccan.”
19. So, in the Man of Law’s Tale, the Sultaness promises her son that she will “reny her lay.”
20. As the “tragedy” of Holofernes is founded on the book of Judith, so is that of Antiochus on the Second Book of the Maccabees, chap. ix.
21. By the insurgents under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus; 2 Macc. chap. viii.
22. Six: the highest cast on a dicing-cube; here representing the highest favour of fortune.
23. Pompey had married his daughter Julia to Caesar; but she died six years before Pompey’s final overthrow.
24. At the battle of Pharsalia, B.C. 48.
25. Word and end: apparently a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon phrase, “ord and end,” meaning the whole, the beginning and the end.
26. At the opening of the story of Croesus, Chaucer has copied from his own translation of Boethius; but the story is mainly taken from the “Romance of the Rose”