Let's talk about poetry and politics of early Rome!

So, one of the classes I took this semester was the Poetry and Politics of Augustan Rome, or something like that (Ole Miss CLC 333). Basically, we read the Odes of Horace and The Aeneid by Vergil. Well, that's what we were SUPPOSED to do, but with the way my prof taught the class I more just skimmed the Aeneid rather than doing an in-depth reading. Bad, I know. At the end of the semester we had a paper due on the effectiveness of the two poets as propaganda artists for Augustus. The paper I wrote was entire crap and worth 25% of my grade. So, here I am, submitting for your pleasure and enlightnment, my paper. Keep in mind, I only had a few hours to put it together because I procrastinated until the last minute (but don't all seniors...or all students for that matter?). Professor Ajootian would freak if someone turned this in to her because she can't stand when people just B.S. their paper with quote after quote. It actually makes me kinda cringe that I did it, but come on, it was the LAST paper I had to do in college, I was not in the mood to actually kill it. I ended up with an A in the class so it's all good. Enjoy!

Love and Kisses,
KABO

Ancient P. R.̶  A Look at Octavian and His Poets

            In the early years of this millennium there was nothing but turmoil and war in the state of Rome.  Men pledged allegiance not to their empire but to their general; the generals in turn sent them out to their deaths in hopes of gaining power.  The assassination of Julius Caesar led to a series of wars that ultimately left his nephew as the last man standing and the self-appointed ruler of the Roman “democracy.”  Octavian, who later renamed himself Augustus, knew that in order to keep his dominion over the greatest empire the world had ever seen he had to convince the people that he was the best thing that had ever happened to them.  This turned out, in some ways, to not be as great a feat as many would have assumed because people were so happy to finally have a time of peace.  To keep this good will towards him, Augustus enlisted a group of the top poets of the time to act as his public relations, writing of how terrible things were before him and all the amazing things that he was doing to improve their lives even more. Two of these poets were Virgil and Horace, and although they did write of the glory of Rome and Augustus, they also made sure that their discontent with a one man rule was present.  This was achieved through ambiguities which lead to dual interpretations of their words.

            Vergil wrote his great epic poem, The Aeneid, in order to appease Augustus and put himself on the same literary page as the great Greek poet Homer.  Rather than write an epic of the glory of Augustus and his end to the civils wars, Vergil decided to write about the founding of Rome by Augustus’ ancestor Aeneas. This move allowed Vergil to speak more freely about how he felt while also giving Augustus something he could feel was positive about himself.  Augustus, through the Julian blood line, claimed to be descended from Aeneas and therefore Venus, something that he and his family was very proud of.  Vergil capitalized and expanded on this in his poem, “Virgil cements the connection between Aeneas and Augustus by creating a common ancestry for both. While stories of Aeneas as founding father or ancestor of Rome had been in circulation since at least the fifth century BCE, another Roman tradition, since before the fourth century, held that Rome's eponymous founder was Romulus, son of Mars and a Vestal virgin. According to the historian Livy, the Vestal virgin's name was Rhea Silvia, daughter of King Numitor, descendant of Aeneas. Virgil makes this familial connection explicit in the Aeneid” (Bell 17).  It is obvious, that as a tool for boosting Augustus’ reputation and popularity amoung the Roman people, Vergil knew what to say to make Augustus’ claim to power seem legitimate.  It also pleased Augustus to be related to the epic hero and therefore gave Vergil room to voice him opinions throughout the poem without Augustus having them censured.

One of the methods that Vergil employs to appease Augustus is, “the transferal topos. Virgil uses this rhetorical trope of transferal, translatio studii et imperii or the transferal of culture and empire, to weave strands of contemporary Roman history into his literary tapestry of ancient wars, legendary heroes, and mythical gods; translatio functions through his hero Aeneas, who serves as the vehicle for transmitting the culture of Troy to Rome. In using the translatio topos, Virgil draws certain parallels between his fictional hero and the princeps Augustus, transforming his Greek sources to achieve one of his many political aims-constructing a national identity for Rome as glorious and ancient as that of Greece” (Bell 11).  In other words, by writing of an epic past, Vergil is able to transfer and link that glory to his present Rome.  This technique was both common and honored in his time, “In his De Oratore, Cicero discusses how translatio (or metaphor) is used for linguistic adornment ["ornatum"] and dignity ["dignitatem"]: "The ex planation is that when something that can scarcely be conveyed by the proper term is expressed metaphorically, the meaning we desire to convey is made clear by the resemblance of the thing that we have expressed by the word that does not belong" . . .  He then maintains that "if a thing has not got a proper name and designation of its own ...necessity compels one to borrow what one has not got from somewhere else" (Bell 13).  So, Vergil, who did not necessarily agree with everything was using the technique to make Augustus appear better than he really felt he was. Augustus though, could read the Aeneid, link it to himself, and feel that it glorified him through the translatio.  For example,

“[The] Aeneas as both the founder of the new and improved Troy and the living icon of Troy itself reflects Virgil's political agenda in drawing similarities between Aeneas and Augustus in their roles as founders of great civilizations. R.G.M. Nisbet refers to Aeneas as the "proto-type of Augustus, carrying the destiny of his nation on his shoulders" (378), just as Augustus, in his role as princeps, would lift up Rome from the ashes of the republic and into the glory of the Empire. As Aeneas constructs a new city based on the elements of two older civilizations, Augustus sought to create a new state politically, socially, and physically, based on a solid foundation of Roman tradition laid since the early days of the republic (Bell 16).”

Once again, Vergil shows his genius in writing.  He finds ways to stroke Augustus’ ego which allows him to have room to add the ambiguity that lets readers see that he probably wasn’t the biggest fan of Augustus.

            The main theme of his epic is that of the price of death in the journey for peace.  Vergil seems disgusted by the lives that are ruined and lost because of wars and politics and he comments on this many times in his poem.  A great inspiration for this was the reign of Augustus and the lives he stole; “No one who has studied the Aeneid in its historical aspect will, I think, deny that most of the conspicuous events of Vergil's lifetime have left some impress on the poem, and Octavian's cold-blooded slaughter of three hundred senators and knights at Perusia in 41 must have been known to Vergil. (Conway 200)

            One of the main things that Vergil does in opposition of Augustus is portray Aeneas as not that great of a guy.  He isn’t a hero that people can all love because he does so many things that seem horrible to readers.  So, despite the fact that he was the father to the first of the Roman blood line, and the fact that he saved a good number of his kinsmen when they escaped from Troy, it doesn’t seem like he is someone that Augustus should have been proud to be related to on a personal, moral level.  The first thing that makes people wonder about Aeneas is his uncontrollable passions that lead him to act in very stupid ways.  During the fall of Troy these passions lead him to want to basically be suicidal.  When he is transfixed by Cupid in Carthage, his uncontrolled love for Dido makes him want to give up his quest and just let the Trojans live with the Carthinians (which is very bad as they become Rome’s most hated enemy in its history). Vergil even concludes the poem with Aeneas in an uncontrolled rage that leads him to murder Turnus.  Self-control in Roman times was of the utmost importance, so modeling the “great ancestor” of Augustus as a man with no self-control was an offhanded way of saying that Augustus wasn’t from a good line, and that maybe it was even a genetic trait he had be passed on.

            The next way that Vergil really seems to frown upon the ‘hero’ Aeneas is with his lack of concern for death or hurting people.  In his escape from Troy he makes sure to help his father and son out of the city, but tells his wife to take up the rear of the party, which leads to her death.  He gets really upset when she dies, but then agrees with her shade to just move on with his life.  He then meets Dido and after a little persuasion also leaves her behind, which leads to her death.  He may have been struck by Cupid’s love potion, but it still comes off very callous that he could just walk away without the woman he had claimed to be in love with and may have possibly married.  Finally, he basically steals his final wife (second if he didn’t marry Dido, third if he did) from Turnus, who he goes ahead and kills at the very end of the poem after leading Turnus to believe that he would be spared. The rash actions and disregard for human emotions makes Aeneas someone who isn’t the best, or even traditional, hero.  Although this should have gone over poorly with Augustus, it seems he was just happy to have his lineage displayed to the entire world through Vergils poem.  Then again, Vergil did say certain things in order to stroke at Augustus, like when he, “[Lists the] heroes in chronological order, from the time of Romulus to Augustus (and thereby retain the linearity of the historical narrative) Anchises conflates time, telling Aeneas to gaze upon "the Romans that are yours," specifically Augustus Caesar, "son of a god, who will again establish a golden age in Latium amid fields once ruled by Saturn" Such a rhetorical strategy creates the literary illusion of a direct connection between Romulus, eponymous hero of the distant past, and Augustus, hero and leader of the present. It was no coincidence that Octavian had seriously considered taking on the name Romulus early in his career.' (Bell 19)

            The other poet, Horace, was even less of a fan of Octavian. In his younger years he fought against Octavian’s cause, though he claims he ran away from this battle. There has been debate about why Augustus would hire him as help to promote himself, but it turns out that it was Vergil who first introduced Horace to his mentor- “His poetry nonetheless brought him the friendship of the young Virgil, who introduced him to Maecenas, the minister of internal affairs for Octavian. At this time, the first years of the 30's, Octavian was struggling to maintain an insecure position in Italy against the threats of Sextus Pompey, master of the Western seas, and was rapidly changing his program along the lines already suggested. Whether Maecenas could see practical utility in gaining the support of a promising but bitter poet we do not know; but in the end, after a delay of nine months, he accepted Horace” (Starr 59). 

Horace, unlike his friend Vergil, did not write an epic for Augustus, but rather a series of odes.  In his compilation of poems, there is two tones that come out to which one can easily see his lack of enthusiasm for Augustus, “Perhaps the most complicated personality of the Augustan age, Horace could fluctuate between the frankest hedonism and the blackest pessimism; and scholars have long noted that even his praise of Augustus was marked by an under- tone of detachment. A recent work thus distinguishes in Horace's Roman odes between his sincerita, a quality genuinely present, and an autenticita, i. e., a deep spiritual commitment, which is lacking” (Starr 60).  Most of Horace’s poetry is so ambiguous that it is hard to understand at first what he is even trying to say, other than that everyone should live like a poet and make love and drink wine often.  He believed that people needed poetry to make bad things better and that’s why he says in 1.6 that he had decided to write love poetry.  It comes off like he was telling Romans that even though he was an Augustan poet he was really their poet, concerned with making them feel better as opposed to making Augustus look better. This poem is meant to be his response to others suggesting he write about the glories of Augustan Rome, he suggests right back that Darius should worry about writing the epic for Augustus because that’s what he likes to do and not what Horace himself enjoys.          

Though Horace never seemed to be Octavian’s biggest supporter, he also was able to backhandedly support Augustan’s opposition.  In ode 2.1, he warns his peer Asinius Pollio to be careful about questioning Imperial Rule vs. the Republic because it was dangerous for him.  He also points out that bringing up all the hurt from the civil wars did not help the people but rather just made them feel really bad by stirring up the feelings of loss they were all trying to put behind them. He then goes ahead and starts bringing up all of the horrors of war himself, emphasizing how horrible it all was for the people of Rome.  This move allows him to say how he feels in the guise of him warning others to not speak that way.

In his fourth book of his Odes though there are specific references to Augustus, though they aren’t what the ruler was probably looking for.  The reason for this being, “The praise of Augustus in the later Odes, thus, is of a conventional nature which reminds one of Ovid's mode of flattery;15 and the epistle to Augustus seems to have a flat air as if Horace were irritated at the command to compose it” (Starr 62). Aparently though, he did not write these because Augustus asked for them but rather out of respect for his patron.  It is thought that, “his reconciliation with Augustus and his eventual celebration of Roman themes were probably due, at least in part, to his affectionate loyalty to Maecenas and to the gentle pressure from the man who gave him literary independence” (Reckford 202).  In other words, the poems were just a purely political move by him to keep a man whom he care about happy with him.

            The Augustan poets had to tip-toe around a man who had the power to destroy their lives if they upset him.  This didn’t mean just physically, but emotionally and politically as well.  Though the two men didn’t seem to see eye to eye with Augustus, they knew that they had to do what they could to stay in his good graces. One of the main reasons for this is that, “A poet in Augustan Rome, as in republican Rome, required either independent means or a patron; there was no third way. He could not live off his sales; there were no royalties; there was no copyright; there were no chairs of literature and no Guggenheim Fellowships” (Reckford 200).  Basically, Augustus hired Maecenas who was their patron, if they upset Augustus, they risked losing their friend and means of survival. The men didn’t lose their sense of free thinking though, and found unique ways to say how they felt without getting under the skin of Augustus. Despite the obvious ambiguity and implied dissatisfaction with the loss of the democracy, the men also seem to have a genuine respect for the good things that Augustus did for Rome, such as end the civil wars, rebuild temples and public houses, and, of course, foster the expansion of the arts. There is a saying today that ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity,” so even if the two poets weren’t saying the best things about Augustus they were at least saying something that made people talk about the war general turned emperor.  A key part to keeping power is keeping people believing that you deserve the power, and Augustus did that by keeping his name on their tongues and their brains full of his “culture.”

Word Count- 2679

Works Cited

Bell, Kimberly. "Translatio" and the Constructs of a Roman Nation in Virgil's "Aeneid,"

Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 11-24

Conway, R. Vergil and Octavian, The Classical Review, Vol. 46, No. 5 (Nov., 1932), pp.

199-202

Reckford, Kenneth. Horace and Maecenas, Transactions and Proceedings of the

American Philological Association, Vol. 90 (1959), pp. 195-208

Starr, Chester. Horace and Augustus, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 90, No. 1

(Jan., 1969), pp. 58-64

Final Chaucer paper- The Canterbury Tales

Hey my awesome readers! So, here is the final paper I submitted for my Chaucer class at Ole Miss. I recieved a 92 on it which, I'm not going to lie, I think is way better than I deserve. My prof says that I'm an excellent writer, great at making arguments, and basically kick ass minus some grammar issues. I threw this together in about three hours haha. At the end of the day though, I walked away from the class with an A and having read all of Chaucer's main works, which is pretty awesome I think. So, enjoy the paper if you feel like reading it, and just remember, once again, I have not gone back and fixed what he suggested because I'm lazy like that :)

Love and kisses,
KABO

Chaucer and Married Life

            Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories that serves as a frozen moment in time, an observation of the characters and practices that Chaucer saw about him when he was writing.  The brilliance of the work is the ambiguity that allows for people from all walks of life to be revealed to the audience without putting Chaucer himself at risk of offending any particular group.  From Chaucer’s early poems all the way to his Canterbury Tales, there is one topic that always seems to be on his mind- love.  A more interesting facet though is that love is not always present in his marriage stories, in fact, many times it seems absent and the root cause of the problems between characters in stories.  Love and marriage being separate spheres for life in Chaucer’s tales changes the idea of marriage from a fairy tale to an economic and political contract, one that does not always make people happy. 

            The crux of the matter for marriage and love seems to come from the Wife of Bath’s story.  In the prologue the Wife of Bath tells her audience about her love life before she gets to that of her tale.  For Alisoun, she started marrying men at the age of 12 and was never happy with her husbands.  She tells that they weren’t necessarily bad men, but rather that they just didn’t spark in her a love and passion which lead her to a life of sorrow as their wife.  Finally, at the age of forty she meets a man half her age and decides to marry for love, already having enough money from her dead husbands to support herself.  The start of the marriage turns out to be sad, as her husband constantly tells her that wives and women are evil and she gets fed up with his verbal and physical abuse. Her story with him ends in love once he realized that striking her was wrong and that he needed to love her back in order to have a happy marriage.

The actual story that the Wife of Bath tells is about women wanting power and control over their husbands, making power a commodity that both parties strive for.  The idea of power being equal, mimicking the last marriage of the Wife of Bath, is repeated by the Franklin’s tale,

“The Franklyn takes as donnees the notions of Christian marriage and courtly love: the husband is to take no "maistrye" against the wife's will, and is to have "soverayntee" only in name; the wife on her part will be his "humble trewe wyf." In moments of duress both partners agree to exercise patience. Thus the husband is to be servant in love and lord in marriage, and the result is to be "joy, ease, and prosperity" (V, 804). The compromise preserves nominal "maistrye" for the husband, satisfies the Wife of Bath's demand that sovereignty go to the woman” (Howard 226).

Chaucer, with most of his tales not involving love in marriage, seems to say that power is the commodity that all strive for in marriage. When love is present though, as it was for Alisoun and Jenkin, power no longer becomes an issues and the couple can be happy.

            In Chaucer’s tales one of the main thing he points out that men want is a young wife.  For the men, young wives seem to bring back the youth they lost in making names for themselves and ensures the chances that they will have multiple heirs, as well as providing that someone is capable of the energy running a household full of children calls for.  The first time a young wife is introduced to the audience is in the Miller’s Tale, with young Alison.  Having been married off to someone she didn’t love, the eighteen year old decides to play around with multiple men’s hearts and tricks her husband into looking like a fool while she had an affair on him with a young student. The carpenter though that he had power over the young Alison, but in his ignorance she was able to steal that power from him and get what she wanted.  The tale is hilarious, but when looked at from an economic point of view it is very sad how their marriage is nothing but a game of seizing control from one another rather than doing as the Wife of Bath did with Jenkin and working things out to respect and love one another.

            The next tale in which a young woman is married to a man for her looks rather than for love is the case of January and May.  January at sixty years old decides that he should get married because he’s tired of being a bachelor and is finally ready to settle down with someone so that he can have an heir to his estate.  He thinks long and hard about whom he wants, even telling his friends that his potential wife had better be no older than twenty, as an old wife would be nothing but trouble for him.  One day he decides that the young girl May is the most beautiful maiden around and picks her to be his wife.  He constantly tells her that he loves her, but any reader can see there is no real connection between the two of them and they live a life of a contractual relationship rather than one of the heart. Like Alison, May eventually deceives her husband in order to have an affair with his employee Damian.  The God Pluto returns sight to January so that he can see his wife’s deception, but Pluto’s wife Proserpina allows May to have an answer to what January saw and is able to get out of his ill will. The interesting thing about this scene from the Merchant’s tale is that in one swell move Chaucer showed the economics of two relationships swaying back and forth.  On one hand, January, who was so jealous and protective of May is still deceived and she is able to find love with another right in front of his eyes, then convinces him he didn’t see what he thought he saw. On the other, the goddess Proserpina is able to regain some of the power she lost when, as mythology tells, Pluto tricked her into eating the pomegranates and therefore forced her into becoming his wife and spending half the year with him. Chaucer seems to say with these tales that no matter what your station in life, from workman to knight to god, if there is not a pure love between a husband and a wife then the marriage will never be anything more than trying to one-over the other in a search for control. Or, “Control is theft, as he sees it, whether in the state, the market place, or the bedroom. An authoritarian relationship begets distortions in both parties to it” (Murtaugh 477).

            Finally, in the Clerk’s Tale, the character Griselda is constantly toyed with by her husband to make sure that she was loyal to him.  He gets her pregnant and takes away both of her children, then waits for her to say a bad word about him to prove that she is a horrible wife.  After many years he even tells her that he is going to remarry and brings her long-lost daughter home as his “bride-to-be.”  When Griselda stays completely faithful to him even up unto that point he finally decides to believe that she is true to him and gives up trying to trick her so that they could live happily ever after. This tale is especially scary for people to read, as it is about a man who psychologically tortures his wife in order to assert his power over her, and in no way can it be viewed as a story about true love. Chaucer seems to be trying to relate ideas about marriage that were common in his time,  

            “The Middle Ages delighted (as children still delight) in stories that exemplify a

single human quality, like valor, or tyranny, or fortitude. In such cases, the settled rule (for which neither Chaucer nor the Clerk was responsible) was to show to what lengths this quality may conceivably go. Hence, in tales of this kind, there can be no question of conflict of duties, no problem as to the point at which excess of goodness becomes evil. It is, then, absurd to censure a fourteenth-century Clerk for telling (or Chaucer for making him tell) a story which exemplifies in this hyperbolical way the virtue of fortitude under affliction. Whether Griselda could have put an end to her woes, or ought to have put an end to them, by refusing to obey her husband's commands is parum ad rem. We are to look at her trials as inevitable, and to pity her accordingly, and wonder at her endurance” (Kittredge 2-3).

It seems that Chaucer was trying to say that women were really powerless to their husband’s will and many times had to deal with injustices quietly for fear of their lives.  In this instance, the power game is a game of life or death, it is a woman having to give up everything that makes her her in order to please a man who sees her as nothing more than a possession. In the end she may get her children back and her husband’s respect, but it is hard to say that it is just because of everything she went through.

            In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales he approaches the idea of marriage in place of his earlier poems of love.  It seems that all the women in his stories long for the freedom that the Tercel Eagle from the Parliament of the Fowls had in taking a step back and asking to be given a choice of whom to marry based on love rather than station or money or beauty or any other such trivial matters.  His early poems were all dream visions, searching for what every person longs for- their soul mate and a life of happiness. The Canterbury Tales on the other hand is a compilation of stories by everyday people, it is about the reality of the world, the sad truth that love does not always conquer and many people end up in unhappy relationships because marriage was really about economics rather than feelings.

Manipulation, the Covert Game of Criseyde

So, the next instillation of my essays is the one I did for my Chaucer class on Troilus and Criseyde which is Chaucer's great epic poem. I received a 95 on this paper because my prof said it was so well written, BUT he said the argument is a silent argument (means that the paper is about what is not said rather than what is said) and that's not good. There are some mistakes, but once again, I'm too lazy to go back and fix them. Hope you like it! 

Manipulation, the Covert Game of Criseyde

            Chaucer wrote his poem, Troilus and Criseyde, in an attempt to join the ranks of other great epic poets, toiling endlessly on it so that it would be his only true “masterpiece” (Pearsall 170). Homer was, and still is, one of the greatest poets to have ever lived. It took 700 years for another writer to finally find himself on a level playing field with the ancient great- Virgil, with his poem The Aeneid.  Homer wrote of the siege of Troy in the Trojan War, as well as the journey home of the warrior Odysseus; Virgil looked at the other side and wrote of the few Trojans who escaped the collapse of their city and set about to found a new race (the Romans).  When Chaucer sat down to compose his great epic he borrowed from a poem by Benoit de Sainte-Maure, as well as Boccaccio’s Filostrato.  These poems helped outline for him his own great epic poem, and following in his idol’s footsteps, his story was set during the Trojan War (Pearsall 169). Upon first reading this epic, many people see the character of Pandarus as being a very obvious manipulator, playing with people for fun.  A thorough examination of the poem though brings to light a somewhat subtle manipulator- Criseyde.  Criseyde, usually portrayed as a victim, seems to have the upper hand throughout the entire poem, and therefore, Chaucer was not just writing a story about Troy but of the power of a sneaky woman.   

            The most important aspect of Criseyde’s personality and manipulation comes from her genealogy.  Her father was the seer who ran from Troy when he learned that it was to be destroyed by the Greeks (Book 1, lines 64-70).  Chaucer leads the reader to believe during the entire story that Criseyde was an innocent victim left behind to pay for the sins of her father, not even knowing why he left, but that isn’t the case. Criseyde admits in book IV, lines 1407-1414, that she knew her father was leaving because of a vision the gods gave him of the fall of the city (Roberts 96). This comes from a very important passage in which Criseyde and Troilus are planning a way for her to return to the city after she is surrendered to the Greeks. On one hand, it shows her outright plan to manipulate her father, proving without a doubt that she is a manipulative person when she wants to be. On the other hand, it also suggests that she may have always known her fate because, “To what episode is Criseyde referring in the last three lines? It is quite clear that the "text" referred to must be the oracle which lead Calchas to believe that Troy was doomed. But when did Calchas visit Delphi? No mention has previously been made of the visit- except such a hint as may possibly be inherent in the phrase "Apollo Delphicus” (Roberts 94).  In other words, the reader only knows a small fraction of the information concerning the gods warning to her father to flee Troy.  The importance of what is not said is that he very well could have informed his daughter of her fate, which would mean her entire relationship with Troilus was false because she knew it would end as it did. What is a better way of receiving a warm welcome from the Greeks than leaving behind a broken-hearted Trojan prince, the brother of the sworn enemy of King Agamemnon?

The God of Love and Fortune are the only gods who seem to be highly remarked on in the poem, but anyone familiar with classical mythology and Greek history know that the cause of the Trojan war was the Apple of Discourse, in which Paris chose Venus as the “fairest” of the goddesses, leaving Hera and Athena to have strong feelings of hatred for the Trojans because it was their prince, Paris, who was bribed into picking Venus, over either of them. It is interesting that Eros/Cupid would chose to play games with a Trojan prince during wartime when both his parents (Aphrodite and Ares) were on the side of the Trojans. That being said though, it could be argued, that if Criseyde’s father had told her that she was fated to manipulate Troilus she may have specifically been at the temple so that she was the one he saw when the God of Love struck him in the eyes with his arrow (Book 1, lines 208-209). The fact that she looked as if to say, “What, may I nat stonden here?” makes it seem that she was really there to be seen, waiting for his eyes to find her and drink her figure in (Book 1, line 292).  For any other woman there would be no way to connect her actions to the plans of the gods and fate, but the daughter of a seer means that she was privy to knowledge others did not have. Chaucer tells us that she knew her father’s reasoning for leaving the city, she may have talked him down to Troilus, but since she ended up never returning to Troy it is easy to believe that there was a larger scheme behind her actions throughout the entire poem.

As the scene progresses, Criseyde also seems to make comments that counteract each other, hinting that she has known her fate and knows that she is about to hurt a man who loves her.  This idea comes from when she is promising and reassuring Troilus that she will return to him after a period of ten days with the Greeks. The first thing that should have jumped out to him that she was manipulating him was the fact that she was using Juno (Hera) as her witness. There is a problem in this for two reasons. The first reason is that Juno hated the Trojans with a fiery passion and would never have punished someone who hurt a Trojan, especially Paris’ brother.  The second reason that swearing on Juno was a stupid thing is that Juno was the goddess of marriage and family, she hated adulterers, and since Criseyde and Troilus had an affair she would not have been one to support their “love.” Apparently, the arrows from Cupid’s bow made Troilus’ brain hazy and he didn’t realize that her reassurance was nothing but empty promises, based off of swearing to a goddess who wanted to see the Trojans destroyed. The other reason that these passages show her manipulation, and enforce my idea that she knew all along what she was doing, is that she says, “Whoso wol han life, he life moot lete” (Book IV, line 1585). In other words, “She has already devoted two stanzas (11. 1534-1547) to swearing that she will return, and now she, so notoriously and fatally " slydynge of corage," exhorts Troilus to be master of his fate,” but, “the audience already knows that Troilus is doomed to "losse of lyf" (IV, 2t7), and any persuasion, no matter from whom, that he can master Fortune is tinged with tragic irony” ( Evans 586).  Another great representation of the idea that Criseyde is a manipulator is explained by Cook-

Joly calls attention to the fact that, on the point of leaving Troy, she had all her precious possessions packed, "and," says the poet, "all her gowns put up; she clothed and decked her person with the richest garments she had", and these the poet then proceeds to describe, in terms which might well set any feminine heart a-flutter. This, be it remembered, is the morning after the night spent in tears and moans with Troilus. Could anything more clearly paint the character of the woman? However, says the poet, "the damsel thinks she will die when obliged to part from him whom she so loves and holds dear;" but he has already assured us that she will be calmed in time, and will soon forget. "If now she has sorrow, then she will have joy. Her love will soon turn to one whom she has never seen." To which, in the extremity of his indignation, the poet adds: "Grief does not last long with a woman; she weeps with one eye, and laughs with the other. They soon change their fancy; and the wisest of them is enough of a fool (Cook 535)

Why would Criseyde have packed her and half of her father’s belongings if she meant to return to Troy? The “scheme” to use her father’s greed for his own possessions is really a scheme to give him back half of his goods in the guise of a plan to trick him. Rather than her father being a poor traitor to his people, he is now a somewhat wealthy immigrant in the Greek camp.  The Trojans all hated her father for abandoning them, but the manipulation by Criseyde allows her father to regain some of what he left behind without anyone stopping the goods from leaving the city, a plan she could have only come up with if he had given her foreknowledge of the situation. All of her actions regarding her departure from Troy hint at the fact that she has been manipulating everyone from the start.

Criseyde may have been the innocent victim and Pandarus the real manipulator of the poem, but that is hard to believe when, as the poem draws towards the end, she slips up and seems to give away her true intentions in many different ways. It can not be forgotten that she was a widow, and much like the character of the Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales, was probably raised to know how to manipulate men and be married.  This idea can be seen when Troilus tells her that he will die without her and fears she will marry a Greek from the insistence of her father (Book IV, lines 1464-1498).  Whether it was foreshadowed knowledge that she meet Troilus and manipulate him or really just a matter of fate, she still played her cards right and had a prince of Troy willing to abandon his family and country to be with her, or die if he lose her.  Criseyde even seems to try and manipulate the readers into thinking that she was a victim, her long inner monologues really just devices to sway people into feeling that she had no control of her own life and was just a pawn to be played by men and gods, when in reality she was really the one playing the game. There is a saying that nice girls finish last (just like the nice guys), and Criseyde did not finish last in the least, she had a prince fall in love with her which would have kept her safe if Troy had been the victor, and she found a Greek warrior to love and protect her when she was sure Troy would lose, “Her wit and governance never deserted her, apparently. She can pretend to her agonizing lover that she has no idea what he seeks of her, and afterwards is ready to deal with Diomede in the same way; she does not scruple to speak to Troilus of her own dissimulation, and she is quite capable of telling Diomede, that, save for her dead husband, other love, so helpe me now Pallas, Ther in myn herte nis, ne ever was” (Cook 544). In the end, the only victim seems to be Troilus, first as a victim of punishment for making fun of the God of Love and falling in love, and then for falling in love with a woman who would leave him alone and destroyed in the end, even giving a present from him to her new husband.

Works Cited

Benson, Larry. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. 471-586.

Cook, Albert. "The Character of Criseyde." PMLA. 22.3 (1907): 531-547.

Evans, Lawrence. "A Biblical Allusion in Troilus and Criseyde." Modern Language Notes. 74.7

(1959): 584-587.

Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 168-177

Roberts, P. "Notes on Troilus and Criseyde, IV, 1397-1414." Modern Language Notes. 57.2

(1942): 92-97.