Anti-Virgilianism in Late Medieval English Troy Narratives

Late medieval English traditions of Troy material are each anti-Virgilian, and therefore anti-imperialist. The three principal Troy traditions in late medieval British writing are as follows: (i) the elegiac tradition of Ovid's Heroides (pre-2 BCE); (ii) the tragic tradition, derived from Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae (1287); and (iii) the Galfridian tradition, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (1136). The anti-Virgilian, anti-imperialist thesis applies to each tradition. In the elegiac tradition anti-Virgilianism and indifference to the imperialist enterprise are all but explicit. In the second, tragic tradition, Trojan narratives are not anti-militarist, but they are fundamentally anti-imperialist: imperialist claims derived from Virgil, and an aggressive chivalric ethos, are, for authors in this tradition, extremely dangerous. The third late medieval British Troy tradition, the pseudo-historical tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth, seems, on the face of it, both imperialist and para-Virgilian. Even here, however, Virgilian imperialism turns to catastrophe; the energies that might lead to imperial ambition in fact provoke lethal internal fractures within the imperial polity. This tradition is initially drawn to the Virgilian project, but finally repelled by it.