Greek romance itself—beginning as early as the second century, but mostly produced at uncertain dates from the fourth century onwards—at once betrays an Oriental atmosphere. Its genesis is not so much in the Greek mind as in the eastern mind, with which the empire of Alexander had brought the Greeks into contact. The writers commonly hail from Asia Minor or Alexandria, and the scenes and adventures are apt to be Babylonian, Syrian, or Egyptian. Their chief features are much the same. A number of unlikely and inconsequent adventures, comprising separations and stratagems of lovers, travels, voyages, dangers, pirates, magic, murders, descriptions, and dreams, are tediously repeated with unessential variations. One of the first examples, it is true, deals with wanderings in the north and west, among Celts and Cimmerians. This is the Marvels beyond Thule of Antonius Diogenes. But the Babylonica of Iamblichus and the Aethiopica (or Theagenes and Chariclea) of Heliodorus have their mise-en-scène in the east, with events and wonders in the Oriental style. The latter work enjoyed a special vogue, and portions of its contents were not scorned even in comparatively late times by Italians like Tasso and Guarini, and Frenchmen like Hardy and Racine. This, together with the Leucippe and Cleitophon of Achilles Tatius, and the pastoral romance of Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, played no small part in the conception of the French sentimental romances of the seventeenth century, beginning with D’Urfé and carried on by Scudéry and La Calprenède. The work of Longus is on the whole the most important, since it contains the new element of pastoral setting and description and some novelty of simple sentiment. In the Dark Ages themselves we cannot tell how far these productions were known in any direct form in the west, but at least we know that nothing travels more quickly than stories. Another romance, with the usual elements of love and adventure, and with the addition of “recognition of the long-lost,” was the famous story of Apollonius of Tyre, of which we possess only the Latin version, through which the tale was passed westward. This work was favourite reading in the age with which we are here concerned. It was translated even into Anglo-Saxon, and later came in again as an English version of a French rendering.
Of a different character was the Barlaam and Josaphat of John of Damascus, an ecclesiastical writer of the eighth century. The story is derived from Buddhist sources in India. Though magic plays its part, the whole is naturally of a moral and theological turn. The mediaeval world found it vastly interesting, for after its conversion into Latin by Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth century, it passed into nearly every European language which could pretend to a literature.
Meanwhile, through Greek versions, there came in tales of purely non-Greek construction. Chief among these was the work known to more modern times as the Seven Wise Masters, originally an Indian production, styled the Parables of Sandabar. This was turned into Persian or Arabic, then into Greek under the name of Syntipas, thence, in the thirteenth century, into Latin as Dolopathos, and thence again versified into French.
All this material appears and reappears in the fabliaux of France, in the earliest novelle of the Italians, and naturally in Boccaccio.
Other productions popular in the Dark Ages, of special note as the storehouse upon which the French trouvères in particular drew for their classical cycles of romances (to be dealt with in the chapter on French literature), were those attributed to “Dares Phrygius,” “Dictys Cretensis,” and “Callisthenes.” If we place the two former under the head of Greek work, it is because of their ascription to Greek writers and their possible derivation, at least in part, from lost Greek sources. They deal with the story of Troy, ostensibly from complementary points of view—a Trojan and a Greek. That there actually was some sort of history by Dares of Phrygia appears from a passage in Aelian; but the book On the Destruction of Troy, in which mediaeval readers put their simple trust, is a Latin production of a date probably not earlier than the sixth century A.D., although it pretends to be a translation of Dares by the classical writer Nepos. Similarly an actual Greek Dictys of Crete apparently did write an account of the Trojan war and the Greek heroes, but the book in actual use was but a fourth-century production in Latin, asserting itself to be a translation. Portions of these two compilations were versified, transfused, and invested with an atmosphere of mediaeval chivalry, by Trouvères, including the Norman-English Benoît de Sainte-More, whom again Guido Colonna, in the thirteenth century, exploited for his Latin History of the Trojan War, a work which became the standard reference for “matter of Troy” as it appears in Chaucer, Lydgate (Troy Book), and Gower. It is not from Homer, but from these pseudo-classical accounts, that we derive such episodes as those of Troilus and Cressida.
For the cycle of Alexander the same generation of Trouvères and their English followers were indebted to a late Byzantine writer, who pretended to be the Greek Callisthenes, contemporary of the great Macedonian. In point of fact his History of Alexander is an imaginative mixture of passages culled from history with eastern stories and marvels. It is, of course, in a Latin version that this farrago became known to the authors of the romans.
We must not forget the vogue during these ages, devoted as they were to tale and apologue, of the fables of “Aesop.” Of these there were in mediaeval times various versions and collections, some derived directly from the Latin Phaedrus, who had versified from the Greek; others from the later Greek remodelling by Babrius; others again from an Arabic collection, which combined a compilation of the Greek with a compilation from the Indian Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay). One early version, of uncertain provenance, was that of King Alfred; and it was apparently a general massing of all this material which, after passing through German and French hands, became the famous Esope of Caxton.
To all that literary matter which pretended to classical antiquity the Middle Ages, entirely lacking historical perspective, gave the comprehensive name of “Roman.” How freely that term was used, and how miscellaneous had been the sources of legend, is manifested in the strange medley of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, known as the Gesta Romanorum, in which fragments of classical history, legends of saints, and Oriental stories, are combined without the least notion of their relations or contradictions. To the Gesta every writer, whether in England, beginning with Chaucer, or in Italy, beginning with Boccaccio, had free recourse for the matter of his poems or his plots.