In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same difference of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears in the Alexander legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Chatillon's _Alexandreis_ is matched and its Latinity surpassed by the _Bellum Trojanum_ of our countryman Joseph of Exeter, who was long and justly praised as about the best mediaeval writer of classical Latin verse. But this neighbourhood of the streams of history and fiction ceases much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious reasons. The temperament of mediaeval poets urged them to fill in and fill out: the structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they very shortly did it. [Sidenote: _The_ Roman de Troie.] After some controversy, the credit of first "romancing" the Tale of Troy has been, it would seem justly and finally, assigned to Benoit de Sainte-More. Benoit, whose flourishing time was about 1160, who was a contemporary and rival of Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy even longer than his Troy-book, composed the latter in more than thirty thousand octosyllabic lines, an expansion of the fifty pages of Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone even among the numerous similar feats of mediaeval bards. He has helped himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion, however, so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a stumbling-block to the _trouvere_. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity of sinning. Not that Benoit is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken of. In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many hundred years completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in the second, he is the literary ancestor of far greater men than himself; and in the third, his verse, though not free from the besetting sin of its kind, and especially of the octosyllabic variety--the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency--is always pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoit de Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the original of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require little more than a bare mention here. [Sidenote: _The phases of Cressid._]