{"id":17200,"date":"2015-04-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2025"},"modified":"2015-04-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T00:00:00","slug":"chaucer-and-the-greeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/04\/chaucer-and-the-greeks\/","title":{"rendered":"Chaucer and the Greeks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, set some of his poems in ancient Greece. The \u201cKnight\u2019s Tale\u201d takes place in Athens, ruled by the same \u201cDuke\u201d Theseus who rules Athens in Midsummer Nights Dream<\/em>. Troilus and Cresyde<\/em> is a Trojan love tragedy. Neither of these works, however, shows much deep knowledge of ancient Greek.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That supports Gilbert Highet\u2019s judgment about Chaucer in his\u00a0The Classical Tradition<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cChaucer was not a very deep or intelligent student of the classics. What he takes from them is always simplified to the point of bareness. His learning, too, is limited in scope: it is more confined than Dante\u2019s small bookshelf, and its books are not so well thumbed as those the great exile carried with him. On the other hand, there are a few books in it which Dante did not know, and a few glimpses of others which had been unknown throughout the Middle Ages.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chaucer\u2019s Greek works include either joking or ignorant allusions: \u201cAgain and again in Troilus and Criseyde<\/em> he says he is retelling the story told by \u2018myn auctor Lollius,\u2019 who wrote an old book about Troy in Latin; and in The House of Fame<\/em> he introduces Lollius as a real historian. There is no such historian, ancient or modern, known to the world under that name. A very clever explanation is that it is a latinization of Boccaccio (= \u2018big-mouth\u2019), LOLL meaning \u2018thick-tongued.\u2019 But since Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio, although he often copies him, and since he does not show so much verbal dexterity in translation as this explanation would assume, something much simpler should be suggested.\u201d Highet suggests that this came from a misreading of a passage in Horace, written to a boy named Lollius Maximus, which actually refers to Homer as the author of the history of Troy. Chaucer, Highet thinks, concluded that Lollius was the author of the epic.<\/p>\n

More generally:\u00a0\u201cChaucer had not read all the authors whom he quotes, and it would be quite mistaken to list their names as \u2018classical influences\u2019 on his work. He knew a few Latin writers fairly well, translating and adapting their books with some understanding and with genuine love. He had a surface acquaintance with a number of others. But any knowledge he had of their work was either at second hand (because their writings were used by someone else whom he knew), or through excerpts or short summaries in one of the numerous medieval books of encyclopedic learning. For him the world of Greece and Rome was not peopled with many massive figures, clearly distinct even in the distance, as it was for Dante. It held four or five great \u2018clerks\u2019 who were his masters; behind them a multitude of ghosts faintly seen and heard through the midst of the past\u201d (97).<\/p>\n

Little Latin and less Greek: Seems to be a trend.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, set some of his poems in ancient Greece. The \u201cKnight\u2019s Tale\u201d takes place in Athens, ruled by the same \u201cDuke\u201d Theseus who rules Athens in Midsummer Nights Dream. Troilus and Cresyde is a Trojan love tragedy. Neither of these works, however, shows much deep knowledge of ancient Greek.\u00a0 That supports […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1255,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chaucer","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nChaucer and the Greeks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, set some of his poems in ancient Greece. 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