Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/21

16 many of the romans d'aventure is manifest. But there is not the least reason for supposing that the Greeks were indebted to Provence. On the contrary. Provence did not produce original fiction. Her poets only wrought up, in their inimitable manner, arguments which they derived from foreign sources. And chief among these sources were tales which circulated in the Greek and Oriental worlds, and which reached France not in books but by transmission from mouth to mouth—some, it has been conjectured, through Greek channels. Such floating matter was shaped independently by the Greeks. We have an example in the adventurous romance of Callimachus and Chrysorrhoe, written possibly by a member of the Palaeologus family towards the end of the thirteenth century; it can be shown that this poem was constructed out of various legends of enchantment which were current in Greece.

But there are other features in our romances which have still to be accounted for. We are in a sensibly different atmosphere from that of the Alexandrine novels. The heroes, Lybistros and his fellows, are not pseudo-antique figures, descendants of the young men who frequented the Hellenistic gymnasia; they are warriors,, peers of the Western knights. Transfer them to Provence, and they would be at home with the heroes of troubadour fiction. The Greeks had no word for knight-errant, but they coined a verb which expresses a similar notion,, to roam the world on a quest. Must we then resort here to the hypothesis of Western influence and suppose that the Greek poets borrowed from the