III THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY Later to develop than the national epopee was that which formed the cycle of antiquity. Their romantic matter made the works of the Greco-Roman decadence even more attractive than the writings of the great classical authors to poets who would enter into rivalry with the singers of the _chansons de geste_. These poems, which mediaevalise ancient literature--poems often of portentous length--have been classified in three groups--epic romances, historical or pseudo-historical romances, and mythological tales, including the imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the first group (about 1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF THEBES, the work of an unknown author, founded upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius, preceded by the story of OEdipus. It opened the way for the vast ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten years later, by Benoit de Sainte-More. The chief sources of Benoit were versions, probably more or less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan war, ascribed to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary defender of the city, and the Cretan Dictys, one of the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which, on a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive faculty to work, and among these by far the most interesting and admirable is the story of Troilus and Briseida, known better to us by her later name of Cressida. Through Boccaccio's _Il Filostrato_ this tale reached our English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it gave rise to the strange, half-heroic, half-satirical play of Shakespeare. Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting Virgil to the taste of his contemporaries in his _Eneas_, where the courtship of the Trojan hero and Lavinia is related in the chivalric manner. All these poems are composed in the swift octosyllabic verse; the _Troy_ extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of the personages are classical, the spirit and life of the romances are wholly mediaeval: Troilus, and Hector, and AEneas are conceived as if knights of the Middle Ages; their wars and loves are those of gallant chevaliers. The _Romance of Julius Caesar_ (in alexandrine verse), the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing in the second half of the thirteenth century, versifies, with some additions from the Commentaries of Caesar, an earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin (about 1240) of Lucan's Pharsalia--the oldest translation in prose of any secular work of antiquity. Caesar's passion for Cleopatra in the Romance is the love prescribed to good knights by the amorous code of the writer's day, and Cleopatra herself has borrowed something of the charm of Tristram's Iseult.