THE story of Troilus and his faithless mistress was
first told by Benoit of Sainte-Maure, a French
poet of the twelfth century. His Roman de Troie (ca.
1160), a long poem in octosyllabic couplets, was founded
very largely upon two works which mediaeval readers
believed to be accounts by eye-witnesses of the siege of
Troy. His principal source was the Daretis Phrygii De
Excidio Trojae Historia, which purported to be a trans-
lator, by Nepos, of a document discovered by the trans-
lator at Athens. No one would now think of attributing
its dull Latin prose to Nepos, nor does anyone believe
that the Historia originated with Dares the Phrygian,
described by Homer as a priest of Hephaestus, dwelling
in Troy. ( Iliad 5.9). Benoit, however, doubtless accepted
the work as a dependable history, and he based the first
three-fifths of his romance very largely upon the account
of "Dares," imitating his source in tracing the story of
Troy back to its most remote origins in the Argonautic
expedition. Out of the fifty-two pages of Latin text, he
spun the first 24,425 lines of his romance.

For the remaining portion of his poem, Benoit drew also

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