omances of Chivalry 
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T{omances of Chivalry 
 on (jreel^ Soil 
 
 BEING THE ROMANES LECTURE FOR 1911 
 
 BY 
 
 J. B. BURY 
 
 HON. D.LITT. OXON 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE 
 2S MA Y 1911 
 
 OXFORD 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 1911 
 
HENRY FROWDE, M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK 
 TORONTO AND MELBOURNE 
 
ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY ON 
 
 GREEK SOIL 
 
 The literary inheritance bequeathed by the ancient 
 Greeks was not neglected by their posterity. It was 
 held in such high honour that instead of being a source 
 of inspiration it was allowed to exercise an intellectual 
 tyranny. What the ancients had written on any subject 
 except religion was invested with authority ; they were 
 assumed to have exhausted the whole range of secular 
 knowledge and to have achieved all that was feasible 
 in the realm of profane literature. The mediaeval 
 Greeks lived and thought, not only under the yoke of 
 the Church and the Church's interpretation of the 
 universe, but also under the yoke of their classical 
 antiquity. Their own literary productions, those which 
 ^hey valued most, consisted of inferior imitations of 
 ificient models. The men and women of the better 
 classes enjoyed a classical education, but it was more 
 conventional than — shall I say? — classical education has 
 been among ourselves ; and while they did not succeed 
 in penetrating into the spirit of pagan antiquity, they 
 .W:ere unable to Tree themselves from the tyranny of 
 IvMeir brilliant ancestors. Later Greek literature is the 
 ' ffierature of men who were the slaves of tradition ; 
 1^ was a bondage to noble masters, but still it was 
 bondage ; yet the prospect is reheved by some 
 remarkable exceptions, to which I propose to invite 
 your attention. 
 
4 
 
 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 In a society tenacious of tradition and dominated 
 by these two authorities — the incompatibility of which 
 caused no embarrassment — we might expect that the 
 most hkely, if not the only, chance for the birth of 
 fresh and original works of imagination would be impact 
 and influence from another world, sufficiently strong 
 and persistent and exciting. There was obviously an 
 opportunity for influence of this kind in the last period 
 of the history of the Byzantine Greeks, when they were 
 overwhelmed, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, 
 by the invasion of the Western knights, and Greece and 
 the islands of the Aegean passed under the rule of 
 Frenchmen and Italians. Throughout the three fol- 
 lowing centuries the two civilizations, Greek and 
 Frank, were side by side. 
 
 The Frank invaders, who thus settled in the midst 
 of the Greeks, had the fully developed institutions of 
 Western chivalry, and it was a matter of course that 
 the new literature of the twelfth century which was 
 so intimately associated with chivalry, the Provencal 
 romances of adventure, and the tales of the Arthurian 
 cycle, should have circulated at the courts of the barons 
 who ruled in Hellenic lands. The poetry of the French 
 romance writers proved its cosmopolitan quality by its 
 reception in Germany, Italy, and England. Could 
 it fail in Greece, where the external conditions for 
 its reception seemed incomparably more favourable? 
 Western women were not very numerous in the Frank 
 colonies, and there was much intermarrying between 
 the foreigners and Greek ladies. In this mixed society 
 there followed, in the course of time, a demand for 
 romances of love and chivalrous adventure in the Greek 
 tongue, and the demand was partly met by adaptations 
 of French poems. For instance, the story of Floire ^ 
 and Blanceflor, the romance of Pierre of Provence and 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 5 
 
 the fair Maguelonne, the Arthurian tale of Gyron le 
 Courtois, were worked up in Greek. This fact entitles 
 us to speak of a literary reception. Such versions and 
 adaptations, however, do not constitute alone a reception 
 of much value. But original poems of chivalrous 
 adventure were also produced, and the character of 
 these must decide in what measure the imagination 
 of the Greeks was affected by the foreign literature 
 which had come their way. If we take as a sort of 
 standard the intellectual conquest of Rome by Greece, 
 the greatest perhaps of all literary receptions, did their 
 acquaintance with Western romances move the Greeks 
 to produce works impregnated with Western ideas in 
 the same way as the Odes of Horace or the Eclogues 
 and Aeneid of Virgil are charged with the influence of 
 their Hellenic masters? Or to take a lesser example, 
 did French romance inspire Greek poets as it inspired 
 Teutonic singers like Wolfram and Gottfried ? 
 
 Let me take a romance of adventure and love, com- 
 posed by a nameless Greek in the thirteenth or fourteenth 
 century, the story of Belthandros and Chrysantza. The 
 poem is short, about as long as two books of Homer, and 
 the plot is slight enough. The Emperor Rhodophilus has 
 two purple-born sons, Phiiarmos and Belthandros, who 
 devoted to each other. The younger, Belthandros, 
 is remarkable for his beauty and bravery, his prowess 
 in hunting, and his skill in archery. But his father has 
 tak^ a dislike to him, and treats him with intolerable 
 rigour. The slights which are put upon him furnish 
 '^e'femotive for his decision to leave his country and 
 seek adventures in foreign lands. In spite of his 
 I brother's tearful dissuasions he rides forth with three 
 i. attendants, and on the first night he pitches his tent 
 5 in a meadow lit by a full moon, and, taking his lute, 
 r utters in song his sadness, and a vague foreboding that 
 
6 
 
 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 some strange secret of destiny is awaiting him. Overtaken 
 here by men whom his father has sent to bring him 
 back, when they threaten to use force he slays ten of 
 them. Continuing his journey through the kingdom 
 of the Turks in Asia Minor, he has an adventure with 
 brigands, and reaches Tarsus. In this neighbourhood 
 he comes one day to .a small stream, and sees a star-like 
 flame dancing in the water. His curiosity excited at this 
 strange apparition, he determines to discover the source, 
 and rides upstream for ten days. Then he comes to 
 a magnificent castle, built of sardonyx, with a diamond 
 gate. Above the portal he reads this inscription : 
 
 Of him, who never felt Love's dart, 
 A million shafts shall pierce the heart 
 If in the fortalice of Love 
 He see the inner halls thereof. 
 
 Belthandros thus learns that he has come to the 
 Erotokastron, the Castle of Love. After long hesitation, 
 he resolves that he cannot depart without fulfilling the 
 quest and finding the source of the phlogopotamon^ 
 the flame-lit stream. Leaving the servants outside, he 
 enters the court, which is radiant with flowers and trees. 
 In the centre is an artificial fountain, and in the water 
 which spouted through the lips of a griffin the mysterious 
 flame again appears, as the griffin moves. The poet 
 lingers with evident enjoyment over the artistic decora- 
 tions of the castle, which resembles not the chateaux 
 of Western Europe but the palaces of Byzantium. 
 In the triklinos or great hall Belthandros solves the 
 problem of the flame. He sees the fiery source issuing 
 from the eyes of an image of sapphire. He notices an 
 inscription on the image, and is amazed to read his own 
 name. ' Belthandros,' said the writing, ' second son of 
 Rhodophilus, the crowned lord of the Roman Empire,; 
 is pining for love of Chrysantza, daughter of the great! 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 7 
 
 king of Antioch.' The young man was disturbed and 
 dismayed to find that the stream's secret imported 
 a secret of his own personal destiny, and he pitied 
 himself exceedingly. He was thrown into deeper 
 agitation when he discovered that another image, the 
 heart of which was cleft by an arrow, bore another 
 inscription, and its tenor was : ' Chrysantza, whose name 
 has been inscribed by Fate, and Belthandros, these two 
 Love has parted asunder/ Repenting the hour in 
 which he had come to the castle, he recognizes that 
 he has seen the writing of Fate, his /jLOLpoypd^Lcr/jLa, and 
 resigns himself to the exploration of all the bitter 
 and sweet beauties of Love's palace — 
 
 ray TrLKpoyXvKo^dpLra^ rod 'EpcoTOKacrTpov tovtov. 
 
 This noLpoypd(j)L<Tfia, the idea of a love predestined 
 between two persons who had never seen each other, 
 is the central idea of the poem. 
 
 Belthandros was still inspecting the courts of mystery 
 when night fell, dark and moonless. A winged love 
 suddenly hovered before him, and said, ' Come instantly, 
 Belthandros, the Emperor calls thee.* He found the 
 Emperor of the Loves seated on a throne, crowned and 
 sceptred, a golden arrow in his hand. When he had 
 told his story, the sovran said, 'I have forty noble 
 women here, all royal ladies, daughters of kings, chosen 
 for their beauty, and I desire thee, using thine own 
 judgement, to pick out the fairest.' He gave Belthandros 
 a wand of three substances, gold, iron, and ruby, to be 
 bestowed on her whom he selected as the queen of all. 
 
 The prince then found himself alone, until he suddenly 
 became aware of a company of forty beautiful women 
 sitting outside the terrace. They came one by one to be 
 inspected ; and he told each of them her defect with 
 jDrutal candour. The fortieth, of course, was perfect, 
 
 i 
 
 \ ■ 
 
 I 
 
 1 
 
8 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 and received the rod. Summoned again to the presence 
 of the master of the house to give an account of his 
 judgement, he describes with rapture the charms of the 
 lady to whom he awarded the prize. ' She fell/ he said, 
 ' from the arms of the moon, robbing her of her radiance.' 
 When he had finished, Love and his attendant train, and 
 the forty women, vanished, and Belthandros made his 
 way out of the castle and rode off with his servants. 
 
 This beauty-show was not borrowed, so far as we 
 know, from any literary predecessor, nor need we 
 suppose that the author was indebted to the ancient 
 judgement of Mount Ida. He has simply translated 
 into fiction the old Byzantine custom of the bride-show. 
 At one period the young emperors used to marry not 
 foreign princesses, who were regarded as barbarians, 
 . but Greek ladies ; and for this purpose discreet mes- 
 sengers were sent into the provinces to discover maidens 
 who were well educated and refined, and conformed to 
 a certain canon of beauty. These agents were provided 
 with measures — the measure, for instance, of the ideal 
 foot. All the girls who were chosen assembled on 
 a certain day in the palace at Constantinople, and the 
 bride was selected by the young man, generally under 
 the auspices of his mother. The judgement of beauty 
 in the Castle of Love is a Byzantine bride-show in 
 • a Byzantine palace. 
 
 The sequel of the future of Belthandros can be briefly 
 told. He reaches Antioch, and enters the service of 
 the king. Here we have come into a dominion where 
 the feudal system prevails. Belthandros has to become 
 the king's lizios — the Greek form of 'liegeman The king 
 is a pfjyay his wife is a p-qylva ; for the title Basileus was 
 strictly reserved for the emperor. It is clear that the 
 poet conceives Antioch as a Frank dominion, but he 
 does not say so ; he leaves this vague, and the king'* 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 9 
 
 daughter, Chrysantza, has a Greek name. Belthandros 
 recognizes her as the maiden to whom he had awarded 
 the wand, and she, too, recognizes him; for the poet 
 conceives that she was actually present on that night 
 in the Castle of Love. For more than four years they 
 woo each other by secret signs ; at last they meet in 
 a garden and declare their love. When he leaves her, 
 Belthandros, who had no right to enter the garden, is 
 arrested by the guards who were set to keep watch 
 over the princess. The danger which threatened the 
 prince at this discovery is diverted by a device of 
 Chrysantza. Her devoted maid, Phaidrokaza, pretends 
 that Belthandros had entered the forbidden precincts 
 for a tryst with herself ; and the king immediately 
 arranges a marriage between his liegeman and his 
 daughter's maid. For nearly a year Belthandros carried 
 on his amiour with the mistress under cover of his 
 marriage with her servant, and no one else knew of the 
 matter except his own squires. But he became uneasy ; 
 he feared that the business might leak out, and he 
 induced Chrysantza to fly with him. Accompanied by 
 their faithful attendants, they escaped from the palace 
 one dark and stormy night. In crossing a swollen river 
 the servants and horses were drowned, and the hero 
 and heroine were washed ashore on opposite banks. 
 Each thinks that the other is dead. Wandering along 
 the edge, Chrysantza comes on the body of one of the 
 men; the features are defaced, but as the clothes and 
 sword of Belthandros are near she believes that the 
 corpse is his, and is about to kill herself when she hears 
 his voice in the distance calling her by name. He 
 swims across, and they make their way down the river 
 to the sea-coast. A ship is approaching. It is a Greek 
 ship, bearing a search party sent by the Emperor 
 Rhodophilus to search the world for Belthandros. His 
 
 B 
 
lo Romances of Chivalry 
 
 elder son had recently died, and he had set his heart 
 on discovering the younger, who was now heir to the 
 throne. Thus Belthandros returned to his native 
 country and was duly married to the heroine. 
 
 In this romance the machinery is the most striking 
 part, and occupies the central place. The Castle of 
 Love, which Belthandros finds near such a familiar 
 place as Tarsus, is undisguised magic — like the forest 
 of Broceliande, or the castle in which Parzival saw the 
 Holy Grail. This magic is more satisfactory than if 
 the experience had been represented as a dream. An 
 improbable dream is less interesting than make-believe 
 reality, provided the illusion is well managed, and this 
 poet has managed it with skill. The idea of the phlogo- 
 potamon, the mystery of the flame glancing on the water, 
 which draws Belthandros to the abode of Love, gives 
 his romance a certain poetical distinction. But the 
 machinery is too large and impressive for the rest of 
 the story ; we feel that the plot, as it is worked out, is 
 too slight to justify the elaboration of the machinery. 
 In particular, the prediction which Belthandros read 
 in the Castle of Love, that he and Chrysantza would be 
 sundered apart, is fulfilled by their separation for a few 
 hours on the opposite sides of a river. There is here 
 an inartistic disproportion between the prophecy and 
 the event. There is, too, an almost insolent carelessness 
 in allowing the crude coincidence, by which Belthandros 
 and Chrysantza reach the seashore at the very moment 
 when his father's ship is approaching. 
 
 The poem is Greek from beginning to end, in its 
 setting, its descriptions, its ideas. There is nothing 
 in it which we can say must have been due to Western 
 influence. The poet is acquainted with the feudal 
 relations of liegeman and lord, as every Greek was 
 in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But the 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 Frankish element enters so little into the texture of 
 the story that even the heroine, who ought to have 
 a Latin name, is called Chrysantza, and described as 
 purple born. It has been ingeniously suggested that 
 Belthandros and Rhodophilus are transformations of 
 the names Bertrand and Rudolf, but the poet, as if to 
 show that he is not drawing upon Western literature, 
 intimates expressly that the names are Greek — and so 
 they are.^ At the same time, Greek though the poem 
 is, it has an unmistakable kinship with the French 
 romans d'aventure. 
 
 Another poem of chivalry, Lyhistros and Rhodamne^ 
 has a very similar motif. The general gist of the 
 argument may be stated in a sentence. It was revealed 
 to Lybistros in a dream that he is destined to wed 
 Rhodamne, whose fate is revealed in like manner to 
 her ; he discovers and wins her ; then they are separated 
 by magical means, and in the end he finds her again. 
 This is the groundwork ; but the construction is 
 intricate and the poem in every way more elaborate 
 than the tale of Belthandros. The first thing to be 
 noticed is that the poet is expressly sympathetic with 
 the world of Latin chivalry. The hero is conceived as 
 a Latin prince, and wears Latin costume. The heroine, 
 daughter of an Indian king, admires Frank customs. 
 The name of the hero's rival, a king of Egypt, is Berde- 
 richos, that is, Bertrich ; and the claim of the two suitors 
 for Rhodamne's hand is decided by a tournament. 
 
 The love-making of Lybistros and Rhodamne by cor- 
 respondence forms a substantial part of the story. The 
 lover has to attach his letters to arrows and shoot them 
 into the garden of the princess. Some of the letters are 
 
 ^ If the poem was written in Rhodes (a possible supposition) the 
 choice of the name Rhodophilus for the imaginary Basileus would 
 be explained. 
 
12 
 
 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 charming in their way, but they lack the subtlety which 
 would please the ' ladies who have intelligence in love ' 
 of France and Italy. I may take as a specimen the first 
 letter that Rhodamne wrote to her lover : — 
 
 * I shrieked it to heaven, I told it to the clouds, I made 
 earth my witness and the air, that never would I bow 
 my neck beneath the bond of love. And now — my un- 
 bending purpose has been bent, my pride subdued, the 
 
 will I have made thy bondslave. I forswear from this 
 hour the oath I made to heaven, the sacred oath I sware 
 to the clouds. I avow it, and I write thee this my letter, — 
 no small thing I deem it/ 
 
 The correspondence is somewhat too long, but the 
 author has introduced an element wanting vaBelthandros, 
 where the interest turns entirely on the adventures. 
 
 The fatality of Love is a central idea as in Belthandros, 
 and his destiny is revealed to Lybistros by the same 
 kind of machinery. There can indeed be hardly a doubt 
 that the poet knew Belthandros and borrowed the device. 
 But he has avoided the error of allowing it a dispro- 
 portionate place in his story, and he has so sophisticated 
 it that it has a different poetical value. Lybistros, too, 
 visits the fortress and gardens of Love ; but there is no 
 magic ; he visits them in dreams ; and the mansion, 
 which is called Erotokratia, is pervaded by an atmo- 
 sphere of allegory. Love himself assumes three forms — 
 of a child, a man in his prime, and an old man ; and he 
 is surrounded by allegorical figures. Agape ('Affection'), 
 Pothos (' Longing Kremasmos (' Suspense Thus, in- 
 stead of the illusion of reality, successfully achieved in 
 Belthandros^ we have here allegory and dream. More- 
 over, while in Belthandros love is accepted simply 
 as an irresistible power, here its claims are defended 
 on philosophical grounds. Its cult is vindicated. The 
 ideal hero must be trained in the school of love. 
 
 plan of my behaviour changed. 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 epa)TOTTaiS€Vfji€yo9, and he who denies its claims is 
 XOipLKos — rustic or provincial. 
 
 The Erotokratia of this poem cannot fail to remind 
 us of the close, surrounded by castled walls, in the 
 Romance of the Rose. It, too, is a dream-castle, 
 peopled with allegorical figures ; the dreamer, like 
 Lybistros, is a scorner of Love, and like him makes 
 complete submission to the god. This mansion, in 
 which Love dwelled, was not an invention of the 
 thirteenth-century poet William de Lorris. He owed 
 it, as M. Langlois has shown, to older poems in which 
 a garden and palace of Love were described, especially 
 the fableau of Dieu d'amours and the Altercation of 
 Phyllis and Flora ; and in the Dieu d'amours, as in 
 Lybistros and the Romance of the Rose, the divine 
 place is seen in a dream. These works establish that 
 the idea of a beautiful dwelling of Love appeared in 
 French Hterature in the twelfth century.^ But we may 
 safely say that this idea did not travel from the West 
 to the East. The courts to which Belthandros wan- 
 dered, and of whiqh Lybistros dreamed, have no 
 features which a Greek poet need have looked abroad 
 
 ^ M. Langlois thinks that the idea was suggested by lines of 
 Tibullus (i. 3, 58) :— 
 
 Ipsa Venus campos ducet in Elysios. 
 hie choreae cantusque uigent passimque uagantes 
 dulce sonant tenui gutture carmen aues, &c. 
 Compare, in the Altercatio Phyllidis et Florae^ 
 
 sonant omnes uolucrum linguae uoce plena, &c. 
 I may point out, as some support for the conjecture, that in the 
 Dieu d' amours Love's abode is called Champ fleuri. Now, in Floire 
 et Blanceflor, when Floire supposes that Blanceflor is dead, he 
 * says (1. 777): 
 
 M'ame la m'amie sivra, 
 En camp'flori la trovera 
 Ou el queut encontre moi flors* 
 This perhaps suppHes the link. 
 
14 
 
 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 to invent. And in other Greek poems of the same 
 period, where there is no question of Western influence, 
 we find castles of allegorical persons— the Castle of 
 Misfortune, the Castle of Sophrosyne.^ I may add 
 that the device of supernatural machinery for bringing 
 lovers together probably goes back to Callimachus. 
 It seems to have been through the deliberate inter- 
 vention of the god Eros that Acontius and Cydippe 
 met each other at the festival of Delos. 
 
 But what shall we say of the vision of Lybistros? 
 Has it any obligation to the visions of the French 
 dreamers? We need not think so. The revelation 
 of two lovers to one another by means of dreams is 
 an ancient Oriental motif, which was introduced into 
 Greek literature by Chares in the days of Alexander 
 the Great. And as to the other resemblance — the 
 defiant sentiment which Lybistros and Rodamne, and 
 the hero of the Romance of the Rose entertained 
 towards Love — this furnishes no case for the assumption 
 of borrowing. The subjugation of scorners of Love 
 is an ancient motif, which the French derived from 
 the old Latin poets, and which had never disappeared 
 from Greek fiction. In another curious Greek romance 
 of the same period, the love-story of Achilles^ we also 
 find the idea of defiance followed by submission. Like 
 Lybistros, Achilles is at first an Hippolytus who scorns 
 Love and is then subdued by him, but without the 
 help of machinery. In this poem, also, the interest of 
 the Greek poet in Western chivalry is undisguised. 
 The cheeks of the son of Aphrodite and Peleus are 
 shaven in the manner of the Franks; he unhorses 
 a Frank cavalier whom none of the Greeks could 
 
 ^ See Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur^ ed. 2, 
 p. 860. 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 15 
 
 master. The heroine Polyxena affected French 
 costumes. 
 
 The imagination of these poets has been struck by 
 some of the ways and fashions of the Franks, but 
 all these Western touches are adventitious and decora- 
 tive. That they are superimposed as ornament upon 
 Greek stories is hardly concealed. Gonsider that the 
 daughter of the Frank king of Antioch is named 
 Ghrysantza; consider that the Frank Lybistros has 
 a name that is not Frank : consider, again, that the 
 Indian king Ghrysos and his daughter are Greeks in 
 name and customs. A tournament, (r^oarpa, * joust') 
 indeed is held at their court, but when Lybistros is 
 promoted to be the colleague of his father-in-law the 
 whole ceremony is Byzantine. Take the furniture of 
 the tales. The descriptions of luxurious palaces and 
 gardens, which are a conventional feature of these 
 romances, presume the art and luxury of Byzantium. 
 In the Tale of Achilles there is a golden plane-tree in 
 the garden of Polyxena, with golden birds on the 
 branches, each of which sings its own song. Singing 
 birds of gold were also seen by Belthandros in the 
 Castle of Love. A mechanism of this kind was one of 
 the wonders in the palace of the emperors at Con- 
 stantinople. But the taste for descriptions of gardens, 
 marvellous fountains, and works of art has also a long 
 literary tradition among the Greeks. It can be traced 
 in the prose romances of the Alexandrine school — some- 
 times called the novels of the sophists — a species of 
 Hterature which reaches back into the Hellenistic period 
 and comes down to the twelfth century. These fantastic 
 love-tales, with their antique flavour, had a decisive 
 influence on the poems of which I am speaking. 
 
 So much for the staging and apparatus; they are 
 Greek. What about the plots? Here the affinity to 
 
i6 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 many of the romans (Taventure is manifest. But there 
 is not the least reason for supposing that the Greeks 
 were indebted to Provence. On the contrary. Pro- 
 vence did not produce original fiction. Her poets 
 only wrought up, in their inimitable manner, arguments 
 which they derived from foreign sources. And chief 
 among these sources were tales which circulated in 
 the Greek and Oriental worlds, and which reached 
 France not in books but by transmission from mouth 
 to mouth — some, it. has been conjectured, through 
 Greek channels.^ Such floating matter was shaped 
 independently by the Greeks. We have an example 
 in the adventurous romance of Callimachus and Chrysor- 
 rhocy written possibly by a member of the Palaeologus 
 family towards the end of the thirteenth century; it 
 can be shown that this poem was constructed out of 
 various legends of enchantment which were current 
 in Greece. 
 
 But there are other features in our romances which 
 have still to be accounted for. We are in a sensibly 
 different atmosphere from that of the Alexandrine 
 novels. The heroes, Lybistros and his fellows, are 
 not pseudo-antique figures, descendants of the young 
 men who frequented the Hellenistic gymnasia; they 
 are warriors, KaPaXXdpioL, peers of the Western knights. 
 Transfer them to Provence, and they would be at 
 home with the heroes of troubadour fiction. The 
 Greeks had no word for knight- errant, but they coined 
 a verb which expresses a similar notion, Koa-fioava- 
 yvpeveiy, to roam the world on a quest. Must we then 
 resort here to the hypothesis of Western influence and 
 suppose that the Greek poets borrowed from the 
 
 ^ See M. ^:delestand du Meril's introduction to his edition of 
 Floire et Blanceflor (1856). 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 17 
 
 Franks both the idea of a knight and the fantastic 
 ideal of chivalrous adventure? 
 
 I think not. The kavallarioi of these romances have 
 a different hneage. In prowess and manhness they 
 rival the knights of the West ; but they constitute no 
 order; there is no institution of knighthood, none of 
 the distinctive customs of Latin chivalry like the new 
 knight's vigil over his arms. The Latin institution was 
 not the model which produced the Greek ideal. For 
 the Greeks already had their own. While Latin 
 chivalry was developing into a social fact, under feudal 
 conditions, there was an analogous but perfectly inde- 
 pendent development of a chivalrous ideal in the Greek- 
 speaking worldy and to show this I must ask you to 
 accompany me into a different field of hterature. 
 
 Before the Crusades there was another experience, 
 both persistent and exciting, which made a deep im- 
 pression upon the Greeks — their experience of the 
 world of Islam. An intercourse of many centuries, 
 the commerce of war but also the commerce of peace, 
 did not fail to lead to mutual influence of the Greek 
 and Saracen civilizations. For generation after genera- 
 tion the tide of strife flowed backward and forward 
 over the mountain barriers, and was the great imminent 
 fact for the Christian population of Asia Minor. This 
 perennial war and all it meant entered into their very 
 soul. To hold the mountain passes — everything 
 depended on that; and the commanders of frontier 
 fortresses, Greek and Saracen, maintained continually 
 a wild irregular warfare, full of surprises and adven- 
 turous incidents. These circumstances developed a 
 new type of warrior, a kavallarioSy whose heart was 
 set on adventure and who was accustomed to act 
 independently of orders from the emperor or a military 
 superior. These watchers of the frontier were popularly 
 
 c 
 
i8 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 called akritai or hillsmen, and in the tenth century 
 many of them possessed large domains and resembled 
 feudal barons rather than Roman officers. 
 
 In this novel world, abounding in excitement, the 
 popular imagination was touched into a creative effort. 
 Hitherto men of Greek speech had only once been 
 stirred by the epic impulse; they had produced only 
 one popular epic cycle, the Homeric poems. The 
 holy war with the Saracens led to the birth of another. 
 The epic of Digenes Akrites is divided by an im- 
 measurable interval in art from the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey) but it stands out in the history of Greek 
 literature after Homer as the only national epic, and 
 it has Homeric qualities. In Western Europe its name 
 is hardly known ; yet it has had its fortunes elsewhere. 
 The Nibelungenlied exercised no influence on literature 
 beyond Germany; the poem of Digenes had a career 
 in the steppes of Russia. 
 
 This poem has no tragic interest in it, like the lliad^ 
 or like that other epic of which the background is war- 
 fare with unbelievers, the Song of Roland. There is no 
 catastrophe as in the Odyssey, It is a biography in 
 which the incidents lead up to no culmination ; the 
 hero, stricken by a malad}^, ends his adventurous life 
 peacefully in his bed. The cycle of stories from which 
 the epic was constructed have perhaps their nearest 
 parallel in the ballads in which the mythopoeic fancy 
 of the Spaniards celebrated the possibly historical 
 figure of the Cid. But though a central dramatic 
 motif is wanting, the Digenes has an epic quality, 
 which justifies us in naming it along with Homer and 
 the Nibelungenlied — its comprehensiveness. As Homer 
 reflects all sides of a certain stage of early Greek civili- 
 zation, as the Nibelungen song mirrors the civilization 
 of the Germans during the period of the migrations, 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 19 
 
 so the Digenes cycle presents a comprehensive picture 
 of the Byzantine world in Asia Minor and of the 
 frontier life. It is a cycle of popular tales which 
 gathered round the figure of an ideal akrites or 
 warden of the marches, and have come down to us 
 as they were put together by some nameless poet in 
 the shape of an epic. The hero is called Digenes, 
 the man of two races, because his mother was a Greek, 
 connected with historic families, and his father a 
 Saracen emir who captured her in a raid and became 
 for her love a Christian. Thus his name is synrbolic 
 of the mutual influence of the two hostile empires. 
 His deeds of prowess begin at the age of twelve, when 
 he slays a bear and a Hon. His ambition is fired by 
 the fame of the lawless bands of free-lances who lived 
 in the frontier hills and were a terror not only to 
 Moslems but to Christians, on both of whom they 
 preyed. They were known as apelatai or drivers ; we 
 might translate the word by 'cattle-lifters'. Digenes 
 destroyed or reduced these predatory hillsmen, and 
 the Christians enjoyed peace. In love he was also 
 triumphant. The rumour came to his ear of the won- 
 derful beauty of Eudoxia, daughter of a governor 
 of one of the provinces of Asia Minor. Her father 
 kept her under lock and key, and the numerous suitors 
 who attempted to carry her away paid the penalty with 
 their lives. Digenes serenades her, wins her affection, 
 and bears her off. Pursued by her father and brothers 
 he overcomes their men, and forces the governor to 
 consent to the marriage. His passionate devotion for 
 this lady endures till death. He has other amorous 
 adventures, like Odysseus, but the devotion of his 
 heart to Eudoxia is not more seriously endangered 
 by these episodes than the affection of the lover of 
 Circe and Calypso for Penelope. 
 
20 
 
 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 The emperor, who had heard of his wonderful ex- 
 ploits, paid him a visit in his palace on the Euphrates, 
 and the description of this abode reflects the fashions 
 of Byzantine luxury. The tone of their intercourse is 
 significant. While Digenes formally professes himself 
 a devoted servant, they meet far more as equals than 
 as subject and servant. The warrior has a position 
 of virtual independence, like that of a powerful Western 
 baron. 
 
 Idyllic scenes— repose in pleasant shady meadows 
 near waters — were a stereotyped feature in the Greek 
 romances, and descriptions of such scenes were a 
 conventional topic with Hellenistic rhetors. But they 
 occur also in the epic. Digenes retired with his wife 
 to a lovely meadow in which he pitched his tent. 
 * The ground,* he says, ' was embroidered with radiant 
 flowers. There were trees and tall reeds. A fresh 
 spring wefled in the midst of the meadow, and near 
 it were deep pools in which the flowers and trees were 
 reflected. The wood was full of birds which sang 
 more sweetly than sirens ; there were parrots on the 
 boughs, swans on the water; peacocks displayed their 
 plumage in rivalry of the flowers ; but the brilliant 
 beauty of the lady outshone the flowers and the birds.' ^ 
 We may suspect that the epic poet was influenced 
 here by sophistic fiction, but he has succeeded in 
 investing with freshness a conventional scene. 
 
 While the violence and brutalities of the frontier 
 warfare are not veiled, Digenes is portrayed as an 
 accomphshed cavalier, not only invincible in combat 
 and insatiably eager for adventure, but courteous to 
 ladies, modest about his own exploits, and, as M. Diehl 
 has observed, capable of delicate emotions. He is the 
 
 ^ The epic has come down in different recensions, and the 
 descriptions of this scene differ in elaboration. 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 prototype of the cavaliers of the romances. And not 
 only in the ideal of the cavalier, but also in the treat- 
 ment of love, the atmosphere of the romances has, we 
 might say, been constituted by the atmosphere of the 
 epic, though new ingredients have been added. In 
 the epic, love is only one note, though a leading note ; 
 in the romances it is the main motif, and it is idealized, 
 and dissociated from real life, and invested with mystery. 
 The romancers have worked, as we saw, under the 
 influence of the sophistic novelists ; they have adopted 
 some of the tricks of their masters ; they have introduced 
 the Hellenistic personification of Love — the irresistible 
 king with deadly arrows, and the conception of heroes 
 or heroines who at first defy the god. Now Hellenistic 
 antiquity also influenced the French romances. The 
 authors of the most typical French poems went back to 
 ancient erotic literature, taking Ovid as their doctor 
 egregius and his Ars amatoria as their scripture — 
 quasi evangelium. But the Greek poets, who simply 
 continued an unbroken tradition, did not, like the French, 
 propound a new science of love. They did not subtilize 
 the passion after the manner of the troubadours, or sophis- 
 ticate it by any such refined doctrines as were woven 
 around it by writers like Alan the Chaplain or expert 
 ladies like the Countess Marie of Champagne, who acted 
 as umpires in affaires de coeur and solved questions 
 of amorous casuistry. Though the Greek romantic 
 poets resorted to various devices, suggested by the 
 Alexandrine novelists, to enhance the interest of their 
 theme by mystery, though they made love more arti- 
 ficial, less nalVe, yet, in the sentiment and the psychology, 
 the epic exerted a supreme influence. 
 
 From all this it follows that there was a parallel 
 development in French and Greek lands. As the French 
 romances of the twelfth century had a mass of epic 
 
22 
 
 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 poetry behind them, so the Greek romances of the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had an epic back- 
 ground too. In both cases the treatment of romantic 
 motives was affected by influences derived directly or 
 indirectly from the Hellenistic world; in France, through 
 deliberate recourse to Latin literature and especially 
 Ovid ; in Greece, through a literary tradition which had 
 never died. If this parallelism is taken along with the 
 fact that stories and motives travelled, by whatever 
 devious ways, from the East to the West, it is not sur- 
 prising that the Greek and some of the French romances 
 should have a family likeness. For direct literary in- 
 debtedness we must wait till the sixteenth century, and 
 visit the Island of Crete, where we shall find a certain 
 Cornaro, a Hellenized Venetian, composing a long and 
 tedious romance {the Erotokn'tos), which is saturated with 
 Italian influence. 
 
 A few words may be said about the language and 
 metre of the poems. Both the epic and the romances 
 are composed in the colloquial language — I do not mean 
 the rustic language, but the speech of educated people 
 in contradistinction to the literary Greek which was 
 employed in serious works. The metre is also the 
 same. It is that form of verse which was most used 
 in the popular poetry of the Middle Ages — alternate 
 verses of eight and seven syllables modulated by accent 
 and not by quantity. It is the metre of — 
 
 In Scarlet towne where I was born 
 There was a fair maid dwellin'. 
 
 In the period which we have been considering there 
 was no rhyme. Rhyme afterwards came in, and its 
 effect is unfortunate in longer poems ; the jingle becomes 
 insupportable. It is possible that this metre, which 
 corresponds in beat to the iambic tetrameters of Greek 
 
on Greek Soil 
 
 comedy, may have been the most suitable to the aptitudes 
 of the language when the principle of quantity was 
 abandoned for that of accent. 
 
 In the vocabulary and diction the influence of the epic 
 is patent. But the romantic poets elaborated the style 
 by devices. They cultivated the use of long epithets of 
 seven or eight syllables which filled a whole verse, and 
 they could appeal to classical literature for the propriety 
 of this device. Such compounds occur occasionally in 
 Digenes ; they are a feature in the romances. Some of 
 them become conventional, like //i/pioxaptrco/Ae^/oy/ endued 
 with a milHon graces,' or riXioyevvrjiievri, ' daughter of the 
 sun.' They are often accumulated in descriptions of art 
 and beauty, such epithets, for instance, as Kpya-TaXXox^ouo- 
 TpdxrjXo?, 'with neck Hke crystal snow,' o-TpoyyvXefi- 
 pLopcpoTTovyovvT), ' wlth round shapely chin.' The poet of 
 Rhodamne converts her name into 'EpcoTLKo-poSdfjLurj — 
 reminding us of Liebrdschen or Love-lily. 
 
 If I may now briefly resume my argument, the Greeks 
 already possessed, along with their own technique, all 
 the ideas, material, and apparatus for romances of chi- 
 valry when the Western knights came and established 
 themselves within their borders. And just on this 
 account it is not surprising that, although the com- 
 minghng of the two cultures, Western and Greek, 
 afiforded to the French literature of chivalry an un- 
 rivalled opportunity for exercising here the potency of 
 charm which it wrought elsewhere, there was no result 
 that can be compared, for instance, to the reception of 
 French romances in Germany. The romantic literature 
 of the West did not come as a new revelation to a people 
 who possessed in their own Hterature motives, ideals, 
 and a tradition of fantastic fiction which were in many 
 respects homogeneous. Yet the close contact with the 
 French and Italian settlers did exert an influence. I do 
 
24 Romances of Chivalry 
 
 not mean merely that the ways and customs of the 
 foreigners offered material to the Greek poets for 
 decoration and accessory effects. I mean a provocative 
 influence. There was a demand for fiction of the same 
 class as the French romances, and Greek writers 
 responded to it not only by versions, but also by original 
 creations. These creations, however, are of Greek, not 
 foreign parentage; they have a native, not a foreign 
 tradition behind them — the mediaeval epic and the 
 amorous fiction which originated in the Hellenistic age. 
 They are inferior to the best compositions of the French 
 poets; nothing was produced that could be compared 
 remotely, for instance, with Aucassin et Nicolette. They 
 have not the stamp of cosmopohtan literature. You 
 may care for them or not, but they are not exotics nor 
 second-hand imitations. Western Europe played a deci- 
 sive part in creating the social conditions under which 
 they appeared ; but they are in all essential features, in 
 spirit and matter, as well as in form, an outcome of 
 indigenous development, the legitimate progeny of a 
 literature which was always accustomed to take little 
 and give much. 
 
 Oxford : Printed at the Clarendon Press by Horace Hart, M.A.