In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood Read Free Book Online

in the courtly societies of twelfth-century Europe; indeed it was at this time that a most influential vernacular poetic version was made by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, an Anglo-Norman trouvère at the court of Henry II ( Roman de Troie , c .1160). The tale translated well to the world of chivalry, of vaillants chevaliers and bons vassaus . It was, incidentally, Benoît’s fickle Briseida ( trop est mes cuers muable et fel ) who provided Shakespeare with his model for ‘false Cressid’ through that landmark in English translation, Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye ( c .1475), a prose version from Benoît via the French of Raoul le Fèvre. In framing his account Benoît in his turn had used the late Roman stories of Dares and Dictys, the former allegedly a translation of the Iliad story older than Homer, the latter supposed to have been unearthed at Knossos in Nero’s time. It is one of the curiosities of historiography that during this period these two worthless pieces of fiction had pride of place as authorities for the Trojan War, which they were thought to have actually witnessed. This was especially pertinent as several western nations followed the Virgilian idea of tracing their ancestry back to Aeneas and those Trojans who were thought to have escaped the sack and emigrated to Italy and further west. Strangely enough, it was in Britain that the Trojan theme was particularly tenacious.
    Back in the declining days of the late Roman Empire we first find evidence of the Troy tale being appropriated by the invading barbarians as a way of getting themselves more closely identified with the ancient and superior Roman culture they were to inherit. Not long before the fall of Rome the historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that fugitive Trojans had settled in Gaul (now France), and soon enough the story was made to serve political ends. In about AD 550 Cassiodorus’ History of the Goths claimed Trojan descent for Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy. The Franks next appropriated the tale, inventing their mythical eponymous ancestor, Francus the Trojan. It was a good story, and from France it soon came to Britain. In Dark-Age Wales, as related by Nennius, it was told that the founder of Britain was one Brutus, who was descended from ‘Ilius’ who ‘first founded Ilium, that is Troy’. This story was popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his famous story of Brutus’ founding of London as Troynovant, or New Troy. Though dismissed by the historian Polydore Vergil, this story was accepted by most Elizabethan poets as part of the Tudor myth, and it became a commonplace of Elizabethan thought. The Tudors, it was argued, were of Welsh or ancient British descent, and therefore, when they ascended the throne of England after the battle of Bosworthin 1485, so ran the myth, the ancient Trojan–British race of monarchs once more assumed imperial power and would usher in the Golden Age. Hence in Armada year Elizabeth could be greeted at Gray’s Inn as ‘that sweet remain of Priam’s state: that hope of springing Troy’, and in the famous painting of 1569 in Hampton Court she, not Athena, Aphrodite or Hera, receives the golden apple in the judgement of Paris! So when in Henry V Shakespeare’s Pistol says to the Welshman Fluellen, ‘Base Trojan, thou shalt die’, he was assuming in his audience familiarity with an old story: one more curious reverberation of the tale of Troy!
    The place of the tale of Troy in the Tudor myth perhaps helps account for the number of translations of the Iliad in sixteenth-century England, as the original text was increasingly studied in early manuscripts. Hall’s version of ten books appeared in 1581, Chapman’s famous rendering in 1598. But it is interesting that Caxton’s Recuyell was still popular, running through five editions before 1600: it was used by Shakespeare as a source for Troilus and Cressida and was still in demand until Pope’s time. Chapman’s and Pope’s works