Meanwhile, through Greek versions, there came in tales of purely non-Greek construction. Chief among these was the work known to more modern times as the _Seven Wise Masters_, originally an Indian production, styled the _Parables of Sandabar_. This was turned into Persian or Arabic, then into Greek under the name of _Syntipas_, thence, in the thirteenth century, into Latin as _Dolopathos_, and thence again versified into French. All this material appears and reappears in the _fabliaux_ of France, in the earliest _novelle_ of the Italians, and naturally in Boccaccio. Other productions popular in the Dark Ages, of special note as the storehouse upon which the French _trouvères_ in particular drew for their classical cycles of romances (to be dealt with in the chapter on French literature), were those attributed to “Dares Phrygius,” “Dictys Cretensis,” and “Callisthenes.” If we place the two former under the head of Greek work, it is because of their ascription to Greek writers and their possible derivation, at least in part, from lost Greek sources. They deal with the story of Troy, ostensibly from complementary points of view—a Trojan and a Greek. That there actually was some sort of history by Dares of Phrygia appears from a passage in Aelian; but the book _On the Destruction of Troy_, in which mediaeval readers put their simple trust, is a Latin production of a date probably not earlier than the sixth century A.D., although it pretends to be a translation of Dares by the classical writer Nepos. Similarly an actual Greek Dictys of Crete apparently did write an account of the Trojan war and the Greek heroes, but the book in actual use was but a fourth-century production in Latin, asserting itself to be a translation. Portions of these two compilations were versified, transfused, and invested with an atmosphere of mediaeval chivalry, by Trouvères, including the Norman-English Benoît de Sainte-More, whom again Guido Colonna, in the thirteenth century, exploited for his Latin _History of the Trojan War_, a work which became the standard reference for “matter of Troy” as it appears in Chaucer, Lydgate (_Troy Book_), and Gower. It is not from Homer, but from these pseudo-classical accounts, that we derive such episodes as those of Troilus and Cressida. For the cycle of Alexander the same generation of Trouvères and their English followers were indebted to a late Byzantine writer, who pretended to be the Greek Callisthenes, contemporary of the great Macedonian. In point of fact his _History of Alexander_ is an imaginative mixture of passages culled from history with eastern stories and marvels. It is, of course, in a Latin version that this farrago became known to the authors of the _romans_.