Geoffrey Chaucer
translation: A. S. Kline

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Book IV: The Separation
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Notes to Book IV

BkIV:4 The Holy Ones: Megaera, Alecto, Tisiphone:

The Furies (Erinys, Erinnys, or Eumenides), The Three Sisters, were Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera, the daughters of Night and Uranus. They were the personified pangs of cruel conscience that pursued the guilty. (See Aeschylus – The Eumenides). Their abode is in Hades by the Styx.

BkIV:4 Quirinus: The name for the deified Romulus, the son of Mars and Ilia, hence Iliades, the father of the Roman people (genitor).

BkIV:5 Hercules’s Lion: The constellation Leo the Lion. The sun’s presence there indicates that it is late July/August. The constellation and zodiacal sign of the Lion contains the star Regulus ‘the heart of the lion’, one of the four guardians of the heavens in Babylonian astronomy, which lies nearly on the ecliptic. (The others are Aldebaran in Taurus, Antares in Scorpius, and Fomalhaut ‘the Fish’s Eye’ in Piscis Austrinus. All four are at roughly ninety degrees to one another). The constellation represents the lion killed by Hercules as the first of his twelve labours.

BkIV:18 Laomedon: The king of Troy, son of Ilus the younger, father of Priam, Hesione and Antigone. He reneged on his agreement to reward Apollo (Phoebus) and Neptune for building the walls of Troy. His daughter Hesione was chained to a rock to be taken by a sea-monster. Hercules rescued her and was also denied his reward. He seized Troy and married Hesione to Telamon.

BkIV:29 Juvenal: Chaucer refers to Juvenal’s satires X 2-4 ‘pauci dignoscere possunt/ vera bona atque illis multum diversa, remota/ erroris nebula....few can distinguish their own true good often, and separate it from the distant cloud of error...’

BkIV:60 Zeuxis:Chaucer calls him Zansis. Zeuxis was a Sicilian artist fl 468BC. His paintings were noted for their realism. The remark here attributed to him actually comes from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (462).

BkIV:113 Eurydice: The wife of Orpheus. The tale of her death and Orpheus’s visit to the underworld to attempt to redeem her is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X:1-85.

BkIV:139 (thru 154) great clerks: These stanzas are a rendering of Boethius’s Consolation Book V, prose 3, used here by Troilus to denote the power of Fate and Pre-destination and the lack of Free Will in human affairs.

BkIV:163 Myrrha: The daughter of Cinyras, mother of Adonis, incestuously, by her father. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X:298-502. She conceives an incestuous passion for her father, attempts suicide, and is rescued by her nurse who promises to help her.
She sleeps with her father, is impregnated by him, and when discovered flees to Sabaea, and is turned into the myrrh-tree, weeping resin. Adonis is born from the tree.

BkIV:170 Minos:The King of Crete, ruler of a hundred cities. Son of Jupiter and Europa. With his brother Rhadamanthus Jupiter (Zeus) made him a judge of the underworld. (See Dante’s Divine Comedy)

BkIV:173 Atropos: One of the (...)

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