Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/20

Rh master. The heroine Polyxena affected French costumes.

The imagination of these poets has been struck by some of the ways and fashions of the Franks, but all these Western touches are adventitious and decorative. That they are superimposed as ornament upon Greek stories is hardly concealed. Consider that the daughter of the Frank king of Antioch is named Chrysantza; consider that the Frank Lybistros has a name that is not Frank: consider, again, that the Indian king Chrysos and his daughter are Greeks in name and customs. A tournament (, 'joust') indeed is held at their court, but when Lybistros is prompted to be the colleague of his father-in-law the whole ceremony is Byzantine. Take the furniture of the tales. The descriptions of luxurious palaces and gardens, which are a conventional feature of these romances, presume the art and luxury of Byzantium. In the Tale of Achilles there is a golden plane-tree in the garden of Polyxena, with golden birds on the branches, each of which sings its own song. Singing birds of gold were also seen by Belthandros in the Castle of Love, A mechanism of this kind was one of the wonders in the palace of the emperors at Constantinople. But the taste for descriptions of gardens, marvellous fountains, and works of art has also a long literary tradition among the Greeks. It can be traced in the prose romances of the Alexandrine school—sometimes called the novels of the sophists—a species of literature which reaches back into the Hellenistic period and comes down to the twelfth century. These fantastic love-tales, with their antique flavour, had a decisive influence on the poems of which I am speaking.

So much for the staging and apparatus; they are Greek. What about the plots? Here the affinity to