Marilynn Desmond, “The Roman de Troie in Francophone Greece”
The Roman de Troie was translated into Greek verse in the late thirteenth century, and the
sizable number of surviving manuscripts and manuscript fragments testifies to its popularity in
Frankish Greece (this Greek version shows no awareness of the Homeric epics, but is rather
entirely derived from Benoît’s text). In addition, one of the five prose epitomes of the Roman de
Troie, the one classified as “Prose 5” by Marc René Jung, was also produced in Greece and
includes extensive geographical commentary on the topography of Greece. “Prose 5” became
incorporated into the second redaction of the Histoire anciennce jusqu’à César, a compilation
that originates in Angevin Naples in the 1330’s but was copied repeatedly in Northern Europe by
the end of the fourteenth century. The Greek context of “Prose 5” thus has a significant afterlife
in late medieval Europe.
This paper will compare the Greek translation of the Roman de Troie to “Prose 5” in
order to compare 1) the ethics of translation from French verse to Greek verse and from French
verse to French prose, and 2) the politics of the matter of Troy in the Francophone outposts of
Greece.