THEBES, ROMANCE OF

This article appears in Volume V26, Page 742 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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THEBES, ROMANCE OF . The French Roman de Thebes is a poem of some To,000 lines which appears to be based, not on the Thebaid of

Statius

STATIUS, PUBLIUS PAPINIUS (c. A.D. 45-96)

, but on an abridgment of that

work

WORK

. This view is supported by the omission of incidents and details which, in spite of the altered conditions under which the poem was composed, would naturally have been preserved in any imitation of the Thebaid, while again certain modifications of the Statian version can hardly be due to the author's invention but point to an ancient origin. As in other poems of the same kind, the marvellous disappears; the Greeks adopt the French methods of warfare and the French code of chivalric love. The Roman

dates

DATES

from. the 12th century (c. 1150-55), and is written, not in the tirades of the chansons de geste, but in octosyllabic rhymed couplets. It was once attributed to

Benoit

BENOIT, PETER LEONARD LEOPOLD (1834—1901)

de Sainte-More; but all that can be said is that the Thebes is prior to the Roman de Troie, of which

Benoit

BENOIT, PETER LEONARD LEOPOLD (1834—1901)

was undoubtedly the author. The Thebes is preserved also in several French

prose

PROSE

redactions, the first of which, printed in the 16th century under the name of Edipus, belongs to the early years of the 13th century, and originally formed

part

PART

of a compilation of ancient history, Histoire ancienne jusqu'd Cesar. The first volume of Les histoires de Paul Crose traduites en francais contains a free and amplified version of the Thebes, The Romance of Thebes, written about 1420 by John Lydgate as a supplementary

Canterbury

CANTERBURY
CANTERBURY, CHARLES

Tale, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde about 1500. From the Roman de Thebes also were possibly derived the Ipomedon and its sequel Prothesilaus, two romans d'aventures written about the end of the 12th century by Hue de Rotelande, an Anglo-Norman trouvere who lived in Credenhill, near Here-ford. The author asserts that he translated from a Latin book lent him by Gilbert Fitz-Baderon, 4th lord of Monmouth, but in reality he has written romances of

chivalry

CHIVALRY (O. Fr. chevalerie, from
Late
- LATE
Lat. caballerius)

on the usual lines, the names of the characters alone being derived from antiquity.
See L. Constans, La Legende d'Oedipe etudiee daps l'antiquite au moyen age et clans les temps modernes (Paris, 1881), and in the section ' L'Epopee antique " in De Julleville's Hist. de la langue et de la lift. franeaise; Le Roman de Thebes, ed. L. Constans (Soc. des anciens textes francais (Paris, 189o) ; G. Ellis, Specimens of Early

English

ENGLISH

Metrical Romances, iii. (1805).

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