Matter of Rome

• 1. Introduction

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  The Matter of Rome is the name medieval poets gave to an entire world of stories: the myths, wars, and heroes of classical Greece and Rome, refracted through medieval eyes. The term comes from the French poet Jean Bodel, who sorted the literary cycles of his day into three great categories. Alongside the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain, Bodel placed the stories of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and the warriors of Troy into what he called the matière de Rome. What makes this grouping strange and fascinating is not what it preserved from the ancient world, but what it did to it. Knights rode into battles that Homer had imagined. Courtly love bloomed between figures who knew nothing of medieval courts. And the line between Roman epic and chivalric romance blurred until it almost disappeared.

• 2. Working Without Homer

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  Medieval Western poets who wanted to write about the Trojan War faced a serious problem: they could not read the Iliad or the Odyssey. Those texts were simply unknown in the medieval West. In their place, poets relied on two short prose summaries of the Trojan story, attributed to writers named Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius. These were thin foundations for a grand tradition. Yet the 12th-century Norman poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure built from them a poem of forty thousand lines, Le Roman de Troie, written in the 1150s. The gap between the slim sources and the sprawling result tells you something essential about how medieval poets understood their task: they were not translators. They were inventors working under a classical license.

• 3. Knights in Ancient Armor

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  Poets of the romans d'antiquité, the romances of antiquity, treated their classical heroes as if they had grown up at a medieval court. In both the Roman d'Alixandre and the Roman de Troie, Alexander the Great and Achilles appear not as figures from a distant civilization but as knights of chivalry, indistinguishable in spirit from the heroes of the chansons de geste. The poets also folded in elements of courtly love. The Roman de Thèbes introduces a romantic relationship between Parthenopæus and Antigone that has no equivalent in any Greek source. Military episodes were expanded to make room for tournaments and scenes of knight-errantry. The anachronism was not accidental or careless. It was the method.

• 4. Ovid and the Pastiche

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  Virgil's Aeneid became, in French hands, a text called the Eneas, written in French in 1156, and the result reads less like a reverent translation than a burlesque. Sentimental and fantasy elements already present in Virgil were amplified further. Into this retelling, the poets also wove episodes taken from Ovid, who was the most widely read Latin poet of the entire Middle Ages. The Philomela, attributed to Chrétien de Troyes, draws directly from Ovid's Metamorphoses to retell the story of Philomela and Procne. These borrowings from Ovid were not citations or homage in any modern sense; they were raw material, blended freely with Virgilian and other classical threads to produce something new.

• 5. English and the Fairy King

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  Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde brought the Matter of Rome into English, and Chaucer deliberately deepened its ties to the tradition of courtly love as he did so. The anachronistic handling of Greek myth also appears in the Middle English narrative poem Sir Orfeo, where the Greek hero Orpheus becomes Sir Orfeo, a knight who rides out to rescue his wife Heurodis, a name that preserves Eurydice, from a fairy king. The supernatural world of Greek myth is replaced by the English fairy realm, and the outcome is transformed too: Sir Orfeo succeeds where Orpheus famously did not. The classical source provides the frame; the medieval imagination fills it with different furniture entirely.

• 6. The Texts That Survived

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  The Matter of Rome crystallized around a recognizable set of texts. The Alexander Romance, probably first written in Greek during the fourth century, was adapted into European vernaculars in the twelfth century. The Romance of Thebes, written in French in 1155, retells the ancient myth of Eteocles and Polynices, drawing on the first-century Latin poem Thebaid by the Roman poet Statius. Gautier d'Arras wrote the Roman d'Éracle in 1177. The Seven Wise Masters, also part of the tradition, is a collection of tales with roots in Middle Eastern and Indian storytelling rather than in classical Greece or Rome at all, a reminder that the boundaries of the cycle were always looser than the name implied. Jean Bodel's tidy categories described something far more tangled and fertile than any single label could contain.