Schevill — Studies in Cervantes. 479 



rial to writers of poetry and fiction as early as the fourteenth and 

 fifteenth centuries. Thus a typically Renascent conception of Vir- 

 gil came into existence, which made of him not the author of a pure 

 classic of unintelligible past ages, but the writer of a deeply human 

 roman d'aventure, whose ancient character, wherever copied or 

 interpreted, was remoulded in the spirit of the new era.^ 



The assimilation of the story of Dido into literature was, however, 

 assisted by various factors. The romance itself has always found 

 favor with Christian and pagan alike; great Churchmen from St. 

 Augustine to Luis' de Leon or Bossuet- had been among Virgil's 

 most fervent admirers. Again, the incorporation of all kinds of 

 material from Virgil into letters of the Renaissance merely coin- 

 cided with the absorption of the most important classic works ; their 

 influence on popular literature, especially in Spain and Italy, cannot 

 be overestimated. This was due not only to the general spread of 

 the legends,^ the mythology and poetry of the ancients through the 

 great centers of learning; it was furthered by the large number of 

 translations which, printed in many cases with bulky annotations, 

 served to popularize the foremost Latin and some of the Greek 

 authors.^ Einally, the more specific reason why Virgil's poetry 



(i. e., Virgil's account) poetiselie Fiktion war, hat sicli nicht verloren," 

 p. 114. 



^ Cf. Landau's Boccaccio, seln Lehen, op. cit., p. 87, where he speaks of 

 tlie attitude of the Middle Ages toward the classics. 



^ Cf. Sainte-Beuve, Etude sur Viryile (Paris, 1891), p. 101; Causeries 

 du Lundi, X, troisieme edition, p. 18.5, on Bossuet. 



' Cf . Schack, Gcschichte der dramatischen Litteratur und Kunst in 

 Spanien (Frankfurt, 1854), Vol. II, p. 29, for an illuminating discussion 

 of the absorption of classical literature by that of Spain. 



* Some of the translations from the classics and the dates of editions 

 (not always the first) are: 1. Homer, La Vlyxea (13 books) 1550, (24 

 books) 1556; on Spanish versions of the Iliad cf. La Iliada, "Biblioteca 

 clasica," Vol. Ill (Madrid, 1905) ; there is, however, an Iliad in Italian, 1564. 

 2. Thucydides, Historia, 1564. 3. Euripides, Hecuba, 1585?, Medea, 1599. 4. 

 Sophocles, an imitation of the Electra in Perez de Oliva's La Venganza de 

 Agamemnon, 1531. 5. Plato, Tutte V Opere (Italian) 1601. 6. Aristotle, La 

 Philosofia moral, etc., 1509; Compendia de toda Philosofia Natural, 1547; 

 Los ocho lihros de republica, 1584, etc., besides many in Italian. 7. Lucian, 

 Dialogos, 1550. 8. Heliodorus, 1554. From the Latin: 1. Plautus, 

 Menechmos, 1555; Amphitrion, undated edition in Gothic type in the 

 ]\Iunieh library, about 1530? Graesse, Tresor, etc., gives an edition of 

 1574. 2. Terence, Las seys Comedias, 1577. 3. Virgil, Eneida, treated else- 

 where; Georgicas, 1586. 4. Horace, cf. Menendez y Pelayo, Horacio en Espaiia, 



J 



