THE MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA PUBLICATION No. 44 EXCIDIUM TROIAE Ri 59r, p. 16, i. ii-p. 17, !, .11 EXCIDIUM TROIAE EDITED BY E. BAGBY ATWOOD University of Texas and VIRGIL K. WHITAKER Stanford University THE MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 1944 KRAUS REPRINT CO. New York 1971 The publication of this book was made possible by grants of funds to the Academy from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the American Council of Learned Societies. COPYRIGHT BY THE MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA 1944 Reprinted with the permission of the original publisher KRAUS REPRINT CO. A U.S. Division of Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited Printed in U.S.A. PREFACE WE ARE HERE presenting for the first time the complete text of the Excidium Troiae, a post-classical compendium of ancient history dealing with the downfall of Troy, the wanderings of Aeneas, and the early his- tory of Rome. This edition is based on three manuscripts (described in Section VIII of the Introduction), one of which is preserved in the Bod- leian Library, the other two in the Laurentian and Riccardian Libraries in Florence. The Bodleian manuscript {Rawlinson D 893) first came to the atten- tion of Mr Atwood in 1932, while he was a student at the University of Virginia. Through correspondence with Mr O. T. Holloway of the Bodleian Library he was able to determine that this manuscript contained a hitherto unpublished Latin version of the Trojan War, and to obtain an excellent photostatic copy of the entire text. He included a brief discussion of this text in his doctoral dissertation, which was presented during the same year. The first quarter of the Rawlinson manuscript was published in Speculum in October, 1934, together with a discussion of the mediaeval interrelationships of this version of the Troy story. Work on the remaining, and larger, portion of the Excidium Troiae was begun late in 1934. At that time both editors were instructors at Stan- ford University, and their friendship soon led to Mr Whitaker's active collaboration in the preparation of the Latin text. The subsequent dis- covery of two additional manuscripts both delayed the work and in- creased its scope; at the advice of Professor W. A. Oldfather it was decided to prepare an edition, complete with introduction, variants, and notes, of the entire text, and not merely of the unpublished portion. It is not easy to indicate precisely which portions of this book are the work of each collaborator, since there has been a high degree of co- operation between us in all aspects of our work; much of the earlier spade- work, in fact, was done by the two of us working together. Mr Atwood has concentrated chiefly on the first fourth of the text—that relating the downfall of Troy; he constructed a tentative text of this portion and investigated its possible sources, as well as its classical and mediaeval analogues. His studies of the later portions of the composition have been confined almost entirely to the question of sources and derivatives. Mr Whitaker constructed the text of the last three-fourths of the Exci- dium; he also revised Mr Atwood's text so as to render it consistent with his own textual policies. Thus the final choice of the entire text, the vi Preface listing of variants, and the study of manuscript relationships have been the work of Mr Whitaker. He also contributed much of the linguistic material contained in Section I of the Introduction. Sections I-VII of the Introduction, and most of the notes on sources and analogues were written by Mr Atwood; Section VIII and most of the notes on textual problems were written by Mr Whitaker. We wish to express our gratitude to a number of scholars whose advice and assistance have been indispensable to us in the preparation of this volume. Professors A. A. Hill and W. A. Montgomery of the Univer- sity of Virginia devoted much time to aiding Mr Atwood in the unfamiliar task of transcribing, reading, and construing the Rawlinson manuscript. Professor Hill, moreover, has on many occasions proved a wise and trust- worthy guide in problems of mediaeval research. In the matters of text construction and textual criticism, we have for- tunately been able to profit by the expert aid and advice of Professor W. A. Oldfather. Together with Dr J. A. Catterall (at that time his re- search assistant), Professor Oldfather read through the entire Rawlinson manuscript and our rough transcription with minute care, making count- less corrections and suggestions. His corrections it is, unfortunately, impossible to acknowledge in the notes, since they amounted to lessons in paleography; and his numerous conjectures and emendations were so good that many of them appeared as the reading of one of the Florentine manuscripts after they were discovered and collated. Our indebtedness to him is therefore far greater than the occasional mention of his name in the notes might suggest. With Professor Oldfather's permission we are reprinting many of his published comments on the Rawlinson text, contained in his article 'Notes on the Excidium Troie,' Speculum, XI (1936), 272-277. Unless this work is specifically cited, the occurrence of Professor Oldfather's name indicates indebtedness to his unpublished oral or written suggestions. To the late Professor A. G. Solalinde we are indebted for a great deal of information regarding the Spanish versions of the Troy story and their evident relationship to the Excidium Troiae. Professor Solalinde also called our attention to a reference which led us to the oldest of our three manuscripts; and he kindly lent us a photostatic copy of one of his manu- scripts of Alfonso el Sabio's General Estoria. In the matter of paleography we have been aided most generously by Professor Bernard M. Peebles and by Professor S. Harrison Thomson. We are relying strongly on Professor Thomson's opinion of our two later manuscripts, whose classification is dependent entirely on paleographical Preface vii criteria. With his permission we have quoted some passages from his correspondence pertaining to this problem. We are indebted to a number of libraries for their courteous co-opera- tion: to the Laurentian and Riccardian libraries in Florence and the Bodleian Library at Oxford for permitting the photostating of manu- scripts; to the libraries of the University of Virginia, Stanford University, the University of Texas, and Harvard University for innumerable cour- tesies and services. Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the publishers of Modern Philology, Speculum, PMLA, Studies in Philology, and the University of Texas Studies in English, for permission to reprint (in revised form) material which has previously appeared in articles in those journals. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to the American Council of Learned Societies for the generous financial grant which made the pub- lication of this volume possible; and to Messrs S. H. Cross, G. W. Cot- trell, Jr., Paul E. Ward, and Robert J. Clements of the Mediaeval Acad- emy of America for their patient assistance in the preparation of our manuscript for the press. E. B. A. V. K. W. CONTENTS Page PREFACE v INTRODUCTION xi I. Nature and Probable Origin of the Excidium Troiae. xi II. The Troy Story in the Excidium Troiae and the Problem of an 'Enlarged Roman de Troie' xxi III. The Troy Story: Further Literary Relationships . xxxi IV. The Troy Story: Analysis of Episodes xlii V. The Redaction of Virgil lix VI. The History of Rome lxxii VII. Literary Characteristics of the Excidium Troiae . lxxv VIII. Manuscripts and Text lxxvii BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ANALOGOUS TEXTS lxxxvii EXCIDIUM TROIAE 3 CRITICAL NOTES AND COMMENTARY 58 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 77 PLATES {with page to line references to the text) I Florence, RICCARDIANA 881, fol. 59' (pp. 16, 11-17, 11) [frontispiece] II Florence, RICCARDIANA 881, fol. 6iv (pp. 23, 2-24, 16) III Florence, LAURENTIAN LXVI, 40, fols. 3Sv-36r (pp. 26,25-28,4) IV Oxford, RAWLINSON D 893, fol. 83* (pp. 19, 26-23, 1) INTRODUCTION I. NATURE AND PROBABLE ORIGIN HE ANONYMOUS Excidium Troiae (ET), contained in three Tknown manuscripts,1 may conveniently be divided, with regard to its content, into three parts.2 The first part, which makes up a little less than one fourth of the text, contains a classical version of the Trojan War beginning with the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and culminating in the death of Achilles. The second part relates the fall of Troy as narrated by Virgil, and gives a detailed summary of the wanderings of Aeneas, taken from the same source. In the final portion, which is ex- tremely brief, there is presented an account of the founding of Rome and something of its early history. Thus the complete text consists of a continuous narrative of Troy and Rome from the casting of the golden apple to the reign of Augustus Caesar. The account is written in a fairly simple variety of vulgar Latin of the early mediaeval period; the organic unity of the piece and the recurrence of certain stylistic peculi- arities mark the whole narrative as a single composition. The earliest extant manuscript known to us dates from the end of the ninth century;3 but even this text seems a considerable distance from the original—at many points further than the later manuscripts. In numerous instances the three manuscripts show the same corruptions in phraseology, as well as the same accumulation of glosses and even titles of illustrations, which must have been inherited from earlier exemplars. But even the many scribal accretions seem hardly sufficient to account for the present state of the text.