Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/386

78 At the time of the Renaissance and after, a school of national Serbo-Croatian literature flourished in Ragusa. All who have studied this literature know that it was greatly influenced by the literature of Italy. The works of the Italian writers were constantly read by the literary men of Ragusa. May we not therefore assume that the Pecorone was likewise known to our Ragusan ancestors, and that it was thence that the tale of the Jewish usurer found its way by oral tradition to our people of the littoral? In this connection it surely counts for something that one of the above tales was collected in the neighbourhood of Ragusa. As to the Gesta Romanorum, a seventeenth-century Serbian scholar from Bosnia, Matija Divkovic, a Franciscan monk, included many translations from this celebrated collection in his popular writings. Is it not possible that the tale of De milite conventionem faciente cum mercatore spread orally in Bosnia, thanks to Divkovic and his surroundings? Attention may be called to the circumstance that the best Serbian tale of this cycle—the one we related first—happens to be a Bosnian tale. The Dolopathos may also have been known to the Serbians. It is known that both the French novel and the Latin version of the Historia septem sapientium is merely an adaptation of the Oriental cycle of Sindibad or Syntipas, as he is called in Byzantine literature. The Slavonic versions of this Byzantine work are well known. There was even a Serbian translation published in 1809. We may even assume that this same work was translated into Serbian during the golden age of Serbian mediaeval literature, when so many Byzantine works were translated into Serbian, and possibly our tales are only surviving traces of an otherwise lost tradition. Moreover, the Dolopathos version has a distinctive feature which is apparently lacking in the other version, and which is present in the two best Serbian examples of the tale. In the Dolopathos, the hero borrows the money from the usurer specially in order to obtain