“At this time it would be wrong for me to say a word of love. You would deem me light indeed! Why, I hardly know you! and girls so often are deceived by men. What you have said cannot move a heart grieving, like mine, to lose my—friend, and others whom I may never see again. For one of my station to speak to you of love! I have no mind for that. Yet you seem of such rank and prowess that no girl under heaven ought to refuse you. It is only that I have no heart to give. If I had, surely I could hold none dearer than you. But I have neither the thought nor power, and may God never give it to me!”[337]
One need not tell the flash of joy that then was Diomede’s, nor the many troubles that were to be his before at last Briseida finds that her heart has indeed turned to this new lover, always at hand, courting danger for her sake, and at last wounded almost to death by Troilus’s spear. The end of the story is assured in her first discreetly halting words.
Enough has been said to show how far Benoit was from Omers qui fu clers merveillos, and what a story in some thirty thousand lines he has made of the dry data of “Dares” and “Dictys.” His Briseida, with her changing heart, was to rival steadier-minded but not more lovable women of mediaeval fiction—Iseult or Guinevere. And although the far-off echo of Briseid’s name comes from the ancient centuries, none the less she is as entirely a mediaeval creation as Lancelot’s or Tristram’s queen. Thus the Middle Ages took the antique narrative, and created for themselves within the altered lines of the old tale.[338]
The transformation of themes of epic story in vernacular mediaeval versions is paralleled by mediaeval refashionings of historical subjects which had been fictionized before the antique period closed. A chief example is the romance of Alexander the Great. The antique source was the conqueror’s Life and Deeds, written by one who took the name of Alexander’s physician, Callisthenes. The author was some Egyptian Greek of the first century after Christ. His work is preposterous from the beginning to the end, and presents a succession of impossible marvels performed by the somewhat indistinguishable heroes of the story. Its qualities were reflected in the Latin versions, which in turn were drawn upon by the Old French rhyming romancers. The latter mediaevalized and feudalized the tale. Nor were they halted by any absurdity, or conscious of the characterlessness of the puppets of the tale.[339]
Further to pursue the fortunes of antique themes in mediaeval literature would lead us beyond bounds. Yet mention should be made of the handling of minor narratives, as the Metamorphoses of Ovid. They were very popular, and from the twelfth century on, paraphrases or refashionings were made of many of them. These added to the old tale the interesting mediaeval element of the moral or didactic allegory. The most prodigious instance of this moralizing of Ovid was the work of Chrétien Légouais, a French Franciscan who wrote at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In some seventy thousand lines he presented the stories of the Metamorphoses, the allegories which he discovered in them, and the moral teaching of the same.[340]
Equally interesting was the application of allegory to Ovid’s Ars amatoria. The first translators treated this frivolous production as an authoritative treatise upon the art of winning love. So it was perhaps, only Ovid was amusing himself by making a parable of his youthful diversions. Mediaeval imitators changed the habits of the gilded youth of Rome to suit the society of their time. But they did more, being votaries of courtly love. Such love in the Middle Ages had its laws which were prone to deduce their lineage from Ovid’s verses. But its uplifted spirit revelled in symbolism; and tended to change to spiritual allegory whatever authority it imagined itself based upon, even though the authority were a book as dissolute, when seriously considered, as the Ars amatoria. It is strange to think of this poem as the very far off street-walking prototype of De Lorris’s Roman de la rose.
CHAPTER XXXIII
MEDIAEVAL APPROPRIATION OF THE ROMAN LAW