In this respect the Tale of Troy presents a remarkable contrast to its great companion--a contrast pervading, and almost too remarkable to be accidental. Inasmuch as this part of mediæval dealings with antiquity connects itself with the literary history of two of the very greatest writers of our own country, Chaucer and Shakespeare; with that of one of the greatest writers of Italy, Boccaccio; and with some of the most noteworthy work in Old French, it has been thoroughly and repeatedly investigated.[82] But it is so important, and so characteristic of the time with which we are dealing, that it cannot be passed over here, though the later developments must only be referred to in so far as they help us to understand the real originality, which was so long, and still is sometimes, denied to mediæval writers. In this case, as in the other, the first striking point is the fact that the Middle Ages, having before them what may be called, _mutatis mutandis_, canonical and apocryphal, authentic and unauthentic, ancient and not ancient, accounts of a great literary matter, chose, by an instinct which was not probably so wrong as it has sometimes seemed, the apocryphal in preference to the canonical, the unauthentic in preference to the authentic, the modern in preference to the ancient.
[Footnote 82: It would be unfair not to mention, as having preceded that of M. Joly by some years, and having practically founded study on the right lines, the handling of MM. Moland and d'Héricault, _Nouvelles Françaises du Quatorzième Siècle_ (Bibliothèque Elzévirienne. Paris, 1856).]
As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the _Iter ad Paradisum_, so in the Tale of Troy they were the works of two persons whose literary offspring has obtained for them an amount of attention transcending to a quite ludicrous extent their literary merit--Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were by no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer very well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of course represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and they knew Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of which more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephæstus, the Trojan.