Further to pursue the fortunes of antique themes in mediaeval literature would lead us beyond bounds. Yet mention should be made of the handling of minor narratives, as the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid. They were very popular, and from the twelfth century on, paraphrases or refashionings were made of many of them. These added to the old tale the interesting mediaeval element of the moral or didactic allegory. The most prodigious instance of this moralizing of Ovid was the work of Chrétien Légouais, a French Franciscan who wrote at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In some seventy thousand lines he presented the stories of the _Metamorphoses_, the allegories which he discovered in them, and the moral teaching of the same.[340] Equally interesting was the application of allegory to Ovid’s _Ars amatoria_. The first translators treated this frivolous production as an authoritative treatise upon the art of winning love. So it was perhaps, only Ovid was amusing himself by making a parable of his youthful diversions. Mediaeval imitators changed the habits of the gilded youth of Rome to suit the society of their time. But they did more, being votaries of courtly love. Such love in the Middle Ages had its laws which were prone to deduce their lineage from Ovid’s verses. But its uplifted spirit revelled in symbolism; and tended to change to spiritual allegory whatever authority it imagined itself based upon, even though the authority were a book as dissolute, when seriously considered, as the _Ars amatoria_. It is strange to think of this poem as the very far off street-walking prototype of De Lorris’s _Roman de la rose_. CHAPTER XXXIII MEDIAEVAL APPROPRIATION OF THE ROMAN LAW I. THE FONTES JURIS CIVILIS. II. ROMAN AND BARBARIAN CODIFICATION. III. THE MEDIAEVAL APPROPRIATION. IV. CHURCH LAW. V. POLITICAL THEORIZING. Classical studies, and the gradual development of mediaeval prose and verse, discussed in the preceding chapters, illustrate modes of mediaeval progress. But of all examples of mediaeval intellectual growth through the appropriation of the antique, none is more completely illuminating than the mediaeval use of Roman law. As with patristic theology and antique philosophy, the Roman law was crudely taken and then painfully learned, till in the end, vitally and broadly mastered, it became even a means and mode of mediaeval thinking. Its mediaeval appropriation illustrates the legal capacity of the Middle Ages and their concern with law both as a practical business and an intellectual interest. I