Geoffrey Chaucer
translation: A. S. Kline

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Book II: Love Returned
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Notes to Book II

BkII:2 Clio:The Muse of History. The nine Muses were the virgin daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne (Memory). They were the patronesses of the arts. Clio (History), Melpomene (Tragedy), Thalia (Comedy), Enterpe (Lyric Poetry), Terpsichore (Dance), Calliope (Epic Poetry), Erato (Love Poetry),Urania (Astronomy), and Polyhymnia (Sacred Song).

BkII:8 The White Bull: The constellation and zodiacal sun sign of the Bull. The sun is in Taurus in May. It represents the white ‘Bull from the Sea’, a disguise of Jupiter when he carried off Europa. Its glinting red eye is the star Aldebaran one of the four Babylonian guardians of the heavens, lying near the ecliptic. (The others are Regulus in Leo, Antares in Scorpius, and Fomalhaut ‘the Fish’s Eye’ in Piscis Austrinus. All four are at roughly ninety degrees to one another.)

BkII:10 Procne:See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book VI:401 onwards. Procne was the daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, married to Tereus, king of Thrace. She persuaded Tereus to bring her sister Philomela to stay with her. Tereus raped and mutilated her sister, and told  Procne that Philomela was dead. Philomela communicated with her by means of a woven message, and she rescued her during the Bacchic rites. She then murdered her son Itys and served the flesh to Tereus. Pursued by Tereus she turned into a nightingale. The bird’s call, mourning Itys, is said to be ‘Itu! Itu!’ which is something like the occasional ‘chooc, chooc’ among its wide range of notes.

BkII:11 Janus:The Roman two-headed god of doorways and beginnings, equivalent to the Hindu elephant god Ganesh. The Janus mask is often depicted with one melancholy and one smiling face.

BkII:12 Thebes:They were listening to a reading from the Thebaid of Statius. The poet Publius Papinius Statius, born at Naples c 50AD, died there c 96AD. He lived at Rome in Vespasian’s and Domitian’s reigns, and dedicated his Thebaid to the latter, an epic about the War of the Seven against Thebes. His Achilleid, dealing with the Trojan War, was left unfinished.

BkII:15 Amphiaraus: A Greek seer, one of the heroes, the Oeclides, at the Calydonian Boar Hunt. He was the son of Oecleus, the father of Alcmaeon, and the husband of Eriphyle. He was present at the Calydonian Boar Hunt. Fighting in the war of the Seven against Thebes he was swallowed up alive by the earth, as he had foreseen, trying to hide from this fate he was betrayed by his wife Eriphyle and forced to join the war.

BkII:34 Minerva, Jupiter, Venus: Also Bk II:61 Pallas: Minerva was the Roman name for Pallas Athene the goddess of the mind and women’s arts (also a goddess of war and the goddess of boundaries – see the Stele of Athena, bas-relief, Athens, Acropolis Museum). Jupiter was the sky-god, son of Saturn and Rhea, born on Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia and nurtured on Mount Ida in Crete. The oak is his sacred tree. His emblems of power are the sceptre and lightning-bolt. His wife (...)

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