''Daretis Phrygii Ilias De bello Troiano'' ("The Iliad of Dares the Phrygian: On the Trojan War") is an
epic poem
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.
...
in
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
, written around 1183 by the English poet
Joseph of Exeter.
[Mortimer ''Angevin England'' p. 210] It tells the story of the ten year
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans ( Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and ...
as it was known in medieval western Europe. The ancient Greek epic on the subject, the ''
Iliad
The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Ody ...
'', was inaccessible; instead, the sources available included the fictional "diaries" of
Dictys of Crete
Dictys Cretensis, i.e. Dictys of Crete (, ; grc, Δίκτυς ὁ Κρής) of Knossos was a legendary companion of Idomeneus during the Trojan War, and the purported author of a diary of its events, that deployed some of the same materials worke ...
and
Dares of Phrygia. When Joseph's text was printed for the first time in 1541, it was actually erroneously attributed to Dares of Phrygia, announced as the long-lost verse version of his story (''quibus multis seculis caruimus'' – which we lacked for many centuries) supposedly put into Latin hexameters by
Nepos.
Notes
References
* Mortimer, Richard ''Angevin England 1154-1258'' Oxford: Blackwell 1994
External links
English translation by A. G. Rigg availableLatin edition from 1824(Internet Archive)
(Bavarian State Library)
12th-century Latin books
12th-century poems
Epic poems in Latin
Trojan War literature
1183 works
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