3—
Past Politics and the Politics of the Past
Ancient History I

The Historiography of Secular Culture

In the introduction to Cligès , written about 1176, Chrétien de Troyes offered to a prospective audience of French-speaking laity an estoire that he claimed to have discovered in an ancient book at the library of Monseigneur Saint Pierre de Beauvais, the truth of which was guaranteed by its venerable age and the high seriousness of its content.^[1] For, he claimed,

Par les livres que nos avons
Les fez des anciiens savons
Et del siecle qui fu jadis.
        (lines 27-29)

By means of the books that we have, we know the deeds of the an-dents, and of the times that came before.

The necessity for such an undertaking, Chrétien lamented, stemmed from the fact that

. . . des Grezois ne des Romains
Ne dit an mes ne plus ne mains;
D'aus est la parole remese
Et estainte la vive brese.
        (lines 41-44)

No one any longer discusses the Greeks and Romans; talk of them has receded, and its glowing embers extinguished.

No longer discussed, the history of ancient Greece and Rome was wrapped in silence, and the glowing embers (vive brese ) of glorious deeds and famous exploits that it enshrined extinguished. From

Chrétien's perspective, the cultural situation confronting romance authors and audiences in the last third of the twelfth century was the potential loss of the cultural legacy bequeathed to the medieval world by its classical predecessors, a rupture with the past that his verses at once mark and seek to repair. Chrétien's recuperation of ancient history was to be achieved not merely by breathing new life into the dying embers of medieval society's knowledge of Greek and Roman deeds, but, more important, by translating that knowledge into a language and literary form accessible to those untutored in Latin letters. For as is well known, it is precisely the notion of translatio that stands at the heart of Chrétien's cultural project. Embedded in the musty book of Saint Pierre de Beauvais was an estoire that Chrétien deemed to be of great pertinence to the social life and cultural horizons of the medieval French nobility:

Ce nos ont nostre livre apris,
Que Grece ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie.
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui ore est an France venue.
        (lines 30-35)

This is what our book taught us: that Greece has the first renown of chivalry and of learning [clergie ]. Then chivalry came to Rome, and with it the sum of learning, which now has arrived in France.

His "translation" of les fez des anciiens , thus, assumes as an enabling condition the existence of a historical process through which cheva-lerie and clergie —chivalry and learning—were themselves translated from Greece to Rome and came finally to rest in France, whence, he prays, the honor that has alighted there shall nevermore depart.^[2]

One may be justifiably skeptical about the relative neglect of ancient matière against which Chrétien inveighs in the prologue to Cligès . He writes, after all, considerably later than the initial flourishing of the romans d'antiquite —begun as early as the 1130s with the first redaction of the Roman d'Alexandre by Alberic de Pisanon and continued in the 1150s and 1160s with the appearance of the Roman d'Enéas and the Roman de Thèbes —and he outlines a program whose didactic goals are not very different from those announced by Benoit de Sainte-Maure in the prologue to his nearly contemporary Roman de Troie (1172).^[3] ç Indeed, by the end of the twelfth century, Marie de France complained that too many romance authors had de-

voted themselves to adaptations of Latin works and that, as a consequence, she had lost her appetite for the task:

Pur ceo comenai a penser
D'aukune bone estoire faire
E de Latin en romaunze traire
Mais ne me fust guaires de pris
Itant s'en sunt altre entremis!^[4] ç

I had begun to think that I might make a good story of them, and translate from the Latin into French. But such a project would scarcely have benefited me, since it had already been done so much by others.

And it hardly needs saying that Chrétien's Cligès is not, in any case, an adaptation into French of a classical book discovered at Beauvais, but a wholly original work, which employs this fiction of authority as warrant for its own creative act of authorship.

Yet the terms of Chrétien's complaint are noteworthy. His "translation" into French of the translatio of chevalerie and clergie from Greece to Rome to France suggests that ancient history itself served as a translatio in the medieval rhetorician's sense of the word—that is, as a metaphor by which contemporary French society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries sought to explore and to articulate historical dimensions and cultural components of its existence with which it had scarcely been concerned before. The literary passage from the Old French chanson de geste , involving the oral recitation of the Carolin-gian "matter of France," to courtly romance, inaugurated, significantly, with the roman d'antiquité , enormously enlarged the temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries within which the imagination of French writers and audiences operated, supplying a much broader range of subjects, images, and traditions against which to interpret their own cultural performance.

Yet somewhat paradoxically, this newly enlarged domain of the past, receding back into classical antiquity, was relentlessly rewritten in the image of medieval chivalry. Simultaneously recovered and transfigured, ancient history provided a capacious field of metaphors through which medieval French society could project onto the screen of the past an image of itself in historical perspective, an image that functioned less, perhaps, as a measure of its accomplishments than as the bearer of its political and ethical anxieties and aspirations. When romance authors transferred to the distant shores of Troy, Greece, and Rome the feudal-chivalric world of the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries, they effaced the temporal distance that separated their world from the classical past. At work in this rewriting of ancient history in shapes and hues borrowed from contemporary society was neither ignorance of classical antiquity nor bad faith toward the past, but an intellectual attitude that refused to acknowledge the past as either irretrievably lost or ethically irrelevant. By transforming ancient history into a metaphoric equivalent of French chivalric society, romance authors established an implicit, metaphorically effected connection to ancient civilization that enabled them to convert that past from a cultural legacy into a social patrimony. Ancient history was figured as a genuine forebear of the medieval world of chevalerie and clergie , which could now be seen as the last link in a cultural chain of transmission that stretched in unbroken succession, as Chrétien proclaimed, from Greece to Rome to France.^[5]

The same forces within vernacular literature that helped to promote the generic shift from epic to romance, and with it the extension of the temporal boundaries and matière informing vernacular culture, also were at work in historiography. The generic evolution of vernacular historiography recapitulated in prose the generic development of romance verse forms. Just as the roman d'antiquité succeeded the chanson de geste , substituting for epic's treatment of the Carolingian "matter of France" a focus on the "matter of Rome" (to use Jean Bodel's famous formula), so also the translations of the "Carolingian" Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle were followed in the domain of Old French historiography by translations of ancient histories. Not surprisingly, these histories were subject to many of the same impulses as the romans d'antiquité , to which the histories owed an unacknowledged but primary debt of influence. The recasting into prose of the literary themes and historical concerns of the romans d'antiquité was accomplished within the framework of new translations of classical historians, into which the amorous and chivalric exploits originally created in courtly romance were inserted.

This raise en prose was impelled by the same distrust of verse and desire for "truth" that had inspired the first translations of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle . Yet the task facing the translators of ancient history was inherently different from that confronting translators of the Carolingian myth. If the Carolingian past of thirteenth-century France could, almost without question, be considered the "true" and legitimate prehistory of thirteenth-century French society—a past to which members of the French nobility were bound by ties of blood, geography, and a "national" tradition continually reaffirmed within

oral performance—the same could not be said of classical history. The ancient past lay buried in Latin texts whose pagan authors described a world divided from the Middle Ages not only by time and space, but also by religion, political practice, social custom, moral outlook, and intellectual heritage. Ancient history lacked exactly that self-evident continuity with the present that endowed the deeds of Roland and Oliver, Charlemagne and Archbishop Turpin, with their power to move, and that gave to their commemoration in song and history an elegiac tone of collective mourning for a social world that had been, though was no longer, present, but which remained accessible through the collective memory that medieval Europe had preserved about its distant past. In contrast, the creation of a sense of continuity between the classical past and medieval present was an act of intellectual will, conscious, even contrived, and inevitably artificial. It required, as a basis for its success, the conversion of the "other" represented by the ancient world into a fictive "sameness," and the thoroughness with which the ancient "other" was converted into a medieval "identity" furnishes one index of the goals that motivated the patrons and authors of these translations.

It is within this context that the question of anachronism, which has so long plagued the study of the romans d'antiquité and the histories alike, must be judged. Although most scholars who lament the medieval penchant for anachronism acknowledge that it was accompanied by an awareness of the classical past as a distinct historical era,^[6] they do not necessarily focus on that awareness of distance as itself a force in reshaping the past. For some literary historians, like Monfrin, the intrusion of anachronism is an inevitable by-product of the translation procedures employed by medieval authors, who accepted as the basis of their practice a widespread belief that all works destined to instruct were inherently perfectible: "du moment qu'on le transcrit et qu'on le traduit, on ne voit aucune raison pour ne pas le modifier au goût du jour ou l'améliorer en le complétant à l'aide de renseignements puisés à d'autres sources."^[7] Since the translation of pagan authors, in particular, justified itself on didactic grounds as making available to lay audiences those kernels of clergie and wisdom preserved in the Latin past, the very didacticism of such works laid them open to the "perfectionist" impulses of the translators.

Other scholars believe that the anachronisms that abound in translations and adaptations of classical texts serve a simpler purpose of familiarizing an alien world, enhancing an author's ability to communicate with and be understood by a public ignorant of the realities of

antiquity, and thus contributing to the work's overall intelligibility.^[8] In this view, as Cormier points out, medieval anachronisms can be considered necessary mediators between past and present, translating foreign institutions and beliefs into terms readily grasped by contemporary readers. From a technical point of view, he insists, the necessity of communication within adaptation explains the widespread existence of anachronisms.^[9]

The prevalence of "mimetic anachronisms"—of decor, costumes, customs, usages, institutions, even psychology—Frappier also suggests, helped to typify the ancient hero and to create an idealized world with exemplary value for the moral instruction of the laity.^[10] The exaggerated character of these sorts of anachronism contributed to the rhetorical intensity of the romance author's depiction of antiquity and hence to its persuasive force as exemplarist history. Mimetic anachronisms superimposed upon the body of classical works, from this perspective, were the result not of historical "naïveté" but rather of a general, hyperbolic style that affected all didactic and exemplarist literature in the Middle Ages. For Frappier, what shocks the modern reader of medieval romans d'antiquité and ancient histories is not the presence of anachronism, but its global character, which engulfs moral and religious beliefs as easily as details of dress and fashions of fighting.^[11] Behind it lies a moral and aesthetic conception of antiquity that seeks to garner from the past an aestheticized view of human conduct in which ancient, medieval, and Oriental practices meld together like figures at a masked ball, at once enriching the poetics of the romances and histories and endowing the past with a sense of dramatic renewal.^[12]

As Frappier and others have demonstrated, this tendency to "typify" classical heroes within an idealized, almost dreamlike world of exotic adventure, extraordinary luxury, riches, beauty, and exemplary behavior both "actualized" the past and suppressed the historical distance between antiquity and the Middle Ages.^[13] Although far more pronounced in the romans d'antiquité than in the thirteenth-century translations of ancient history, where temporal markers underlining the historical remove of antiquity are much more in evidence, in both genres the use of anachronism addressed the same underlying problem of how to effect a temporal connection with an absent and discontinuous past whose relationship to medieval society could not easily be assumed to exist. The re-creation of classical civilizations in the image of medieval society worked to relocate the past in the zone, as Gilson once called it, of the "eternal present," while at the same

time historicizing the present by furnishing it with ancient antecedents.^[14] In this bi-directional renovation, both past and present were elevated, as it were, into a kind of atemporal equivalence, which was the temporal corollary of the translators' use of ancient history as a metaphoric field.

It is worth noting briefly the implications of this use of ancient history as a metaphoric field on which the self-projections of the medieval world were displayed, for it helps to explain many of the peculiarities both of the romans d'antiquité and of the prose histories that were their literary heirs in the thirteenth century. To begin with, it meant that there was relatively little interest in remaining faithful to either the letter or the spirit of the Latin texts being translated. To have transmitted classical authors without adaptation, revision, or the addition of invented episodes (a literary phenomenon that begins only in the fifteenth century) paradoxically would have generated the very sense of alienation from the past that the translators sought to overcome through its recovery. Even allowing for the varying linguistic properties of Latin and Old French, it can be assumed that a medieval author capable of translating a classical text was also capable of doing so tout court . No deficiencies of Old French required the level of adaptation and invention characteristic of the medieval approach to ancient history.^[15] At issue here is not a question of simple additions made to a text in order to familiarize medieval audiences with alien classical practices, or even of the clothing of ancient actors in medieval garb to encourage identification with the past, but the wholesale recreation of the past in the image of the medieval world. The refigulation of classical antiquity in the forms of contemporary chivalry can only be understood as a deliberate strategy, deliberately executed.

Thirteenth-century French adaptations of classical texts privilege an ideological reading of ancient history in which the past is seen less as a prefiguration of the present than as a material replica of the medieval world.^[16] And as with all ideological readings, the goal was to naturalize, by historicizing, those aspects of the contemporary world sensed as problematic. In that sense, thirteenth-century ancient historiography in France operated very much in the fashion of "high" epic genres, in which, as Bakhtin has explained, "the important point is not that the past constitutes the content of the epic. The formally constitutive feature of the epic as a genre is rather the transferral of a represented world into the past, and the degree to which this world participates in the past." For Bakhtin, this process of representing the present in the past derives from mythological and artistic modes of

thinking that consider the past to be the repository of society's valorized categories: "in the high genres, all authority and privilege, all lofty significance and grandeur abandoned the zone of familiar contact for the distanced plane. . .. It is in this orientation to history that the classicism of all high genres is expressed."^[17] By locating present ideals in the past, the valorized categories of contemporary society are endowed with the authority and prestige of the past and at the same time protected from the ravages of contemporary reality because separated from the present. They are, in a sense, cut off from history and "saved," their value intact and immutable, no longer subject to historical forces that might reveal them as dysfunctional or problematic. Contemporary reality enters into the high genres in an already valorized state, suggesting that the ideological function of such historical inversion is to preserve and protect the present , to cut it off from the criticisms and challenges of the familiar, hence vulnerable, world of contemporary experience and, thus, to hedge it with an aura of the unquestionable.

Since this temporal manipulation had as its ideological goal the elimination of distinctions between socially significant aspects of ancient times and medieval society, it did not, needless to say, operate evenly across the whole spectrum of the ancient past, but was directed at facets that paralleled contemporary concerns and anxieties. This explains the extremely uneven application of anachronism to the body of Latin works translated into Old French, a procedure that allowed large segments of past time and behavior to be reproduced authentically according to the letter of the texts under scrutiny even as other parts were systematically deformed. It is, perhaps, this inconsistent play of anachronism in the medieval view of antiquity that has proven so confusing to scholars, since it accommodated the growth of a critical spirit in the translation of ancient works of history, which some scholars have pointed to,^[18] yet at the same time recast the form and meaning of certain kinds of events within its own evaluative framework.

It is the deformed aspects of the past, then, that hold the greatest interest for us, since they point most clearly to the issues that medieval authors and audiences sensed as problematic. Far from representing annoying embellishments to otherwise "authentic" texts, the anachronisms that so profoundly mold the character and tone of thirteenth-century translations of classical histories provide our surest points of access to the motives and aims inspiring the translations.

What were, in the broadest sense, those goals? In what ways was ancient history relevant to the nobility's consciousness of itself in his-

torical perspective, and to what extent did ancient historiography expand and redefine the French laity's awareness of its ideal attributes and sociopolitical roles? And why, in the first instance, did Frenchmen seek to extend their sense of historical filiation with the past back beyond their own legendary traditions connected with the "matter of France" and the "matter of Britain" to the pagan past of Troy, Thebes, Greece, and Rome? The answers to these questions are in part already present in the romans d'antiquité and in part discoverable only through close readings of the texts, such as will be offered later in this chapter. But a few preliminary points can be made by way of introduction.

The two principal concerns identified by Chrétien de Troyes in the prologue to Cligès continued to preoccupy producers and consumers of ancient history in the thirteenth century. The revival of clergie and chevalerie were, if anything, objectives addressed more directly in these works than in the earlier romans , which tended to refract a belief in the historical mission and intellectual attainments of ancient heroes through the lens of amatory exploits.^[19] Indeed, the translators self-consciously stigmatize the courtly themes of the romances as "fables," which their own "true" histories eschew, a claim to authenticity of content enormously aided by the fact that the histories are said to be translations of genuine classical texts, free of the "fictions" against which prose historiography in general demarcates its generic identity and makes its bid for credibility.

A striking instance of the concern to liberate the vernacular prose chronicle from its evident dependence on prior romances, which at the same time seeks to promote a movement from authorial presence to textual objectification, can be traced in the manuscript tradition of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César .^[20] This text, the earliest universal chronicle in Old French prose, was written at the behest of Roger IV, castellan of Lille, sometime between 1211 and 1230.^[21] According to the verse prologue, the author planned to cover the history of the world from the creation down to the Norman Conquest and the peopling of Flanders. In fact, for reasons that remain unknown, the chronicle abruptly terminates with an account of Caesar's conquest of Gaul, after the defeat of the Belgae in 57 B.C. The work as a whole is divided into seven sections beginning with Genesis (I) and progressing through the history of Assyria and Greece (II), of Thebes (III) via a somewhat confused section that treats the history of the Minotaur, the Amazons, and Hercules (IV), and continues with an account of Troy (V) and Aeneas (VI), closing with the history of Rome (VII), which contains an oddly placed and extremely lengthy interpolation devoted

primarily to the career of Alexander the Great.^[22] Although the author shares the general aversion to romance characteristic of early vernacular chroniclers, it is striking that the best-realized portions of his history are those that cover the terrain of earlier romances—that is, the accounts of Thebes, Troy, Aeneas, and Alexander—works which he clearly knew and used, all the while fiercely maintaining his textual independence of such "fables" and his strict reliance on Latin sources whose truth was to be believed ("que de verité iert creüe").^[23]

Forty-seven manuscripts exist today of the first recension of the Histoire ancienne , of which eight date from the thirteenth century.^[24] Of these, two (and only two) preserve a series of twenty-one moralizations in which the anonymous clerical author engages in a personal appeal to his listeners to hearken to the moral lessons that his history proffers, lessons ranging from the necessity to do good, fear death, and avoid envy and greed, to the benefits of loyal servitors, humility, virtue, and the political advantages of largece as exemplified by Romulus.^[25] The verse moralizations are scattered throughout the text in fairly regular intervals, but are notably absent from the sections that deal with Theban and Trojan history and that recount the deeds of Aeneas and Alexander—that is, from precisely those parts of the work most indebted to romance verse narrative. The absence of verse moralizations in these sections suggests a conscious strategy on the author's part to avoid contamination of his own verses by a too close association with the matire of the romans d'antiquité , whose mendacious treatment of history is routinely criticized.^[26] ç

On four occasions, the moralizations are clearly marked in the text as establishing the author's personal voice, being introduced with well-rubricated titles announcing that "ci parole cil qui le livre fait," or "ci parole le maistres qui traite l'estorie."^[27] Elsewhere, the author initiates his moral commentary with a direct address to his audience of seignors et dames , a live voice calling to a live and listening public, whose participation in the recitation of the great deeds of the past he hopes will bring them moral profit.

Later manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne progressively suppress both the verse moralizations and the interpellations to the audience. First to disappear is the extensive prologue in which the author had located his enterprise in a personal context of patron and purpose, doubtless deemed overly specific by later copyists operating in other milieux and for new patrons. Manuscripts such as the thirteenth-century B.N. fr. 9682 not only suppress the prologue, but also transcribe the verse moralizations in a prose format—without, however,

bothering to rewrite the verse, so that they remain embedded in what appears, visually, to be a uniform prose text. The effect of this method of transcription is textually to efface authorial presence without actually silencing the author's voice, for when the passages are read aloud, that voice instantly reemerges in the octosyllabic couplets that still make up the moralizations. This masking of authorial presence is the first step in a steady process by which the verse portions of the Histoire ancienne are little by little abridged, prosed, or dropped altogether (as is the direct address to the audience)^[28] in favor of a textually coherent prose narration that has lost all traces of the author's original moral preoccupations (see table, pp. 110-111). The burden of the moral lessons that ancient history conveys is, in the end, carried by an "objective" historical narration, unassisted by authorial commentary, which refuses engagement in a direct dialogue with its public.

By offering their public "faithful" translations of authoritative Latin histories free of the fictions and forms of versification that had characterized romances, French histories of antiquity vastly expanded the scope of the laity's knowledge of the past, satisfying a desire for learning that seems to have become increasingly important to the nobility's sense of self-worth in the High Middle Ages. One thinks, for example, of the extraordinary collection of books that, according to Lambert of Ardres, Baldwin II, count of Guines, had translated and read aloud to him (ante se legere fecit ), works ranging from the scriptural and theological to the musical and scientific and even works in fabellis ignobilium ioculatores .^[29] Jacques Le Goff, in fact, hypothesizes that one of the primary motives for the creation of the historical roman was the intellectual insecurity of the French nobility in the twelfth century, a sentiment of inferiority that recourse to an ancient history furnishing brilliant examples of chivalric heroes pursuing amorous adventure and military glory did much to assuage.^[30]

Thirteenth-century vernacular histories of antiquity opened up a vast cultural legacy from which the laity had been barred by ignorance and linguistic incompetence. The translation of classical works hitherto available only in Latin liberated the nobility from its dependence on clerical preceptors while linking it to a pre-Christian past of extraordinary authority and prestige. The appropriation of clergie independently of the clergy created a novel potential for cultural competition with the clerical classes who had for so long monopolized learning in medieval society. In a more general sense, thirteenth-century histories of antiquity provided French audiences with a model of secular culture and source of moral wisdom, providing thereby the

Verse Moralizations Omitted, Retained, or Rendered in Prose in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne ,-Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, using B.N. fr. 20125 as the base MS.
[ ] = nonverse moralization
= MS. incomplete, hence portion of text not included.

basis for a collective history of chivalry on which to construct a specifically historical identity. The conflation of classical past and contemporary chivalry argued for the historical antiquity of the aristocracy's political roles and codes of behavior and helped to valorize its claim to an autonomy that was at once political and cultural.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of time itself to this cultural agenda, for it was precisely the antiquity of ancient history that made it such a powerful symbol of authority in a society accustomed to look to the past for legitimation.^[31] The recuperation of the classical past and its transfiguration into an image of medieval

chivalry invested chivalric ideals with universality,^[32] transforming them into patterns of behavior continually expressed and re-expressed down through the ages. Ancient history became in the process not merely a source of moral wisdom and exemplary deeds, but a repository of precedents newly available to a class threatened in the exercise of its traditional functions and thus attacked at the very source of its prestige in medieval society. In turning to ancient history, the French aristocracy conformed to what John Pocock has taught us about the processes that stand at the origins of the study of the past in pre-modern societies. According to Pocock, the study of the past within a

society, or within a particular segment of society, originates when a traditional relationship to the immediate past has broken down. The elements of society affected by the disturbance to traditional continuities respond by reshaping myth, historicizing or constructing a novel image of the past in terms of some new continuity.^[33]

On this model, the thirteenth-century translations of ancient history, in converting antiquity into an image of feudal-chivalric society, represented an effort on the part of the French lay aristocracy to mask social change through the articulation of a newly created continuity between it and the lay society of classical antiquity. The result was a universalization of chivalric ideals and codes of behavior, now endowed, as Maurice Keen has remarked, with a "faultlessly antique and highly evocative pedigree."^[34] And it is surely significant that this universalizing impulse increasingly made itself felt at a time when the Capetian monarchy was rapidly establishing itself in a space that could, eventually, be understood as "national."

The growth of royal power in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, most striking during the reign of Philip Augustus, necessarily entailed the gradual restriction of the territorial and jurisdictional scope of the nobility's spheres of activity. Would we be wrong to see in the nobility's attempt to connect itself to a universal past of unquestionable power and authority, effected through its attachment to the great deeds of antiquity, a response to the diminution of its political authority, martial roles, and territorial possessions enforced from above by the actions of a newly aggressive king? The temporal extension into the past of the aristocracy's codes of conduct compensated, so to speak, for its present-day constrictions in territory and power. By refiguring a classical "other" into a medieval "identity," vernacular historiography relegated a troubled present to a deproblematized past, a present/past protected from the incursions and vagaries of the contemporary world by its (re)location in a temporal zone of absolute value. To that extent, Le Goff's judgment concerning the roman historique of the twelfth century remains true for thirteenth-century ancient historiography in the vernacular as well: "The historical romance is nothing other than a psychodrama played out, under the trappings of history, by a social class struggling against its destiny."^[35]

What perhaps differentiates these thirteenth-century works from their romance predecessors is their greater focus on the specifically martial and "chivalric" aspects of the classical past, in place of the highly eroticized adventures of the twelfth-century romans d'antiquité . Although the Old French histories include and even interpolate

amorous tales, they deliberately downplay such romance elements—the love affairs between Achilles and Polixena and between Caesar and Cleopatra being notable exceptions—and relegate the erotic economy of the roman to a secondary place. This shift is in keeping with the worsening military and political environment for the thirteenth-century French aristocracy and its correspondingly greater need for social and political legitimation. To an aristocracy challenged in the exercise of its defining roles and powers, ancient history offered a realm of fantasy and escape, the continuation in daydreams of a glorious past and an expression of historical crisis.

The repetitive patterning of ancient history according to chivalric models takes on new meaning in the light of these social and political preoccupations. If an essential aim of the Old French histories of antiquity was to universalize the dominant features of contemporary aristocratic society that were threatened by the expansion of royal power, the rewriting of the past by the addition of epically styled battles and the attribution of chivalric codes of behavior and values to ancient actors can be seen as a powerful instrument for the realization of this aim.

The significance of these interpolated sequences stems from their function as synecdoches of the implicit intertextual corpus from which they derive and which, as part, they represent as a whole. As interpolated units they represent only a fragment of the world of the absolute past for which they stand. The absolute past, Bakhtin notes, "is closed and completed in the whole as well as in any of its parts. It is, therefore, possible to take any part and offer it as a whole."^[36] Since one cannot embrace in a single epic the national past in its entirety, the part must stand for the whole, whose structure and meaning are repeated in each of its parts.

The interpolation of epic segments into the histories of antiquity thus summoned up the entire structure of epic discourse, which in turn implicitly served to reinterpret the whole of the narrative in reference to the inserted part. At the same time, it conjured up in the minds of the audience that vast repertoire of motifs and values embedded in romance literature, enabling translators to rewrite the ancient auctores so as to make the past conform to the lineaments of medieval chivalric culture. The widespread presence of this literary procedure in the Old French histories of antiquity, despite their differing concerns and styles, suggests that its prevalence was overdetermined, responding to more than one need. It therefore seems reasonable to inquire what other sorts of purposes the repeated epic patterning of the text

might have served and to what extent its utility lay in the very fact of repetition itself.

Literary critics such as Northrop Frye have argued that the appearance of symmetry in any narrative means that historical content is being subordinated to mythical demands, and anthropologists have long noted the centrality of repetition to myth in all its contexts.^[37] In archaic societies, human life is given over to the conscious repetition of received paradigmatic gestures—paradigmatic in that such gestures reflect not merely social order, but the supernatural order upon which men should seek to pattern their lives.^[38] It is instructive to look at the ways in which narrative repetitions function within the histories as laicized, textualized versions of ritual, endowing secular culture with the same timeless quality usually associated with the divine. Although pretending to be narrative accounts of enacted deeds, the interpolated epic sequences are not so much mimetic as paradigmatic, despite their surface appearance of historicity. Indeed, it is precisely the repetitive nature of the deeds recounted that belies their veracity, betraying the mythic demands at work in the construction of the narrative. The return to the past, together with the seemingly obsessive character of the recurring epic motifs, reveals the insecurity of contemporaries and betokens the wish to recapture a historical experience that has been lost. Repetition on this level, as E. Jane Burns has tellingly argued in her analysis of the Vulgate cycle, can be equated with a desire for the missing term, for a past that can only be recuperated through textual reenactment.^[39] And one function of textual reenactment is to stimulate desire for the missing term, to enlarge the demand for a mythic past that is, like all history, by definition absent.

What is inscribed by means of discursive recurrence, therefore, is not plenitude but lack: the loss of legitimate domains of aristocratic experience that discursive repetition attempts in vain to revive in words. The endlessly repeating cycle of chivalric deeds and amatory exploits assigned to historical characters manifestly incapable of having performed them discloses an underlying anxiety about the brokenness of contemporary experience brought about by adverse historical change, which the search for historical continuity and identity endeavors to repair. Ironically, the discontinuous character of aristocratic experience is textually embodied in the narrative ruptures to which the Latin sources are subjected by the interpolation of epic sequences and romance themes. The very procedure employed by the thirteenth-century translator in his desire to impart pattern and continuity to the representation of the past, thus, wreaks upon the Latin

source a narrative analogue of the historical process for which the texts were intended to serve as antidotes.

The centrality of the cultural component of this agenda should not be missed. Nor should it be seen in isolation, as somehow unrelated to the political program for which the newly reinterpreted history of antiquity was a vehicle. In a sense, the issue of political autonomy was merely displaced to culture. The acquisition of cultural autonomy at a moment of political loss indicates the extent to which political and cultural aspirations operated, Janus-like, as interrelated phenomena. The translation of ancient texts into vernacular prose for consumption by the lay aristocracy of France served to redefine that class's status with respect to the whole cultural patrimony of antiquity and signaled a revived relationship between history and writing that, as Vance has pointed out, had been essentially Roman and classical.^[40] In appropriating the cultural legacy of antiquity as its own, the French aristocracy laid claim to the prestige and durability of a written, historical culture into which a historical mythology of chivalry had been introduced and which, thus, by association, assumed a commensurate degree of authority and permanence.

The fact that, in its now mythologized origins, chivalry could be located in a pre-Christian past raised the prestige of a secular world that had long labored under a sense of cultural inferiority with respect both to the clergy, who acted as the guardians of culture in medieval society, and to kings, who had succeeded in elevating themselves into the representatives of God on earth. Whether cultural in the narrow sense or political, the autonomy that ancient history could confer on the medieval French aristocracy helped to heighten its aura of legitimacy and to strengthen its resolve to compete in cultural arenas formerly closed off. In both aspects, the connection to a distinct and distant past reinforced aristocratic ideology: politically, by liberating chivalric forms and functions from their strict dependence on royal grants, since chivalry could be said to antedate the rise of kingship in France; culturally, by legitimating through the assertion of its antiquity a lay vernacular culture increasingly besieged by clerical critics for its moral transgressions and literary mendacity.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the tie sought with the Greek and Roman past in these adaptations of ancient history went well beyond the imitation and assimilation of the legacy of classical learning. In effect, Old French translations attempted to create a genealogical attachment to Troy, Thebes, Greece, and Rome as proof of the historical basis for its claims to autonomy. Thus Roger IV, castellan of Lille, in

commissioning the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César , conceived of the classical past as a vast prologue to the history of Flanders. The work was to offer a historical account running from the creation of the world to the peopling of Flanders ("des quels gens Flandres fu puplée / vos iert l'estoire bien contee")^[41] and expressly indicates that the histories of Thebes, Troy, and Rome are to be understood as the prehistory of Flanders. The author is, in general, scrupulously attentive to royal genealogies within the text and to the chronological concordances that, in his eyes, they authorize.^[42] Throughout the text, elaborate genealogical interpolations trace the patterns of descent binding the peoples and cities of Flanders to classical founders.

The author of the Faits des Romains is similarly concerned to demonstrate the ties that link the various inhabitants and cities of France to ancient forebears, whose Roman names are consistently replaced by thirteenth-century French designations. All the translations, in fact, routinely practice this substitution of medieval French names for Roman equivalents (or nonequivalents, in many cases), the effect of which is nominally to fuse medieval and classical identities. The impression created by this fusion of ancient and medieval nomina is to suggest the active presence of French peoples and places in the distant classical past, an impression strengthened by the invention of erroneous etymologies for medieval place-names that purposely create false genealogical ties between medieval and ancient sites and populations.

In this way, ancient history comes to function not merely as a prologue to the history of French chivalry, but as the very ground of a genealogically inherited system of status, prerogatives, values, and functions, the right to which, as a historically transmitted legacy, could not be denied. In contrast to the romans d'antiquité that circulated in the Angevin realm,^[43] in these texts it is not so much empire as lineage that forms the keystone of a system of values, rights, and codes of behavior. The aristocracy's assertion of historical affiliation with ancient civilization, thus, is corroborated by the creation of a genealogical filiation between past and present, the aim of which was to proclaim the imprescriptible nature of aristocratic claims. Antiquity as the ancestral ground of the medieval French nobility is integrated into a historical vision in which the most important persons and events of the ancient world acquire paradigmatic force for contemporary life. The recuperation of the ancient past becomes, thereby, a process of self-definition. The great gestes of the ancient world become the thematic nodes around which a discussion of the most troubling aspects of medieval noble life are organized. As we shall see, these themes—of

chivalry, love, desire, liberty, morality, counsel, and money—are present with varying emphases in all the texts that make up the corpus of ancient historiography in the thirteenth century. Both singly and as a group, these texts disclose the political and cultural forces at work in the literary strategies adopted on behalf of an aristocracy in search of a historical mission and the moral wisdom with which to carry it out.

That ancient history was addressed principally to the concerns of the aristocracy is made clear not only by the social status of the patrons who commissioned the translations, but also by the class-specific character of its intended audience, one clearly marked in the texts. The prologues open with exhortations to their audience to attend to the moral lessons that the past proffers, assuming that audience to be made up, as Jean de Thuin specified in the initial lines of his Hystore de Jules César , of those "ki tiere ont a garder et a gouvrener" (who have lands to protect and to govern).^[44] All the texts stress that they will deal with material useful to the conduct of noble life and will trace the actions and affiliations of the great lineages of the past. Bonté (virtue), loiauté (loyalty), droiture (righteousness), noblece (nobility), hautesce (loftiness), and parages (lineage) are all topics present in the ancient past that, the translator of the Histoire ancienne declares, had never before been treated in Old French ("C'onques fust an nos lengue traite"). In his work, they will be set forth for the benefit of those who care to learn—a timely lesson, the anonymous author believes, for "li siecles chascun ior enpire" (the times daily worsen).^[45] Like the translators of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle , these writers begin their works with an evocation of secular decline, which their histories both address and seek to redress by furnishing accounts of past glory.

According to the prologue of the Faits des Romains , the special utility of ancient (in this case, Roman) history for men of haut lignage derives from the extraordinary power amassed by the Romans, who "par lor sens et par 10r force et par lor proesce conquistrent meinte terre" (by their wisdom and by their strength and prowess conquered many lands). The Roman achievement of world domination endows Roman history with its exemplary status, for "en lor fez puet on trover assez connoissance de bien fere et de mal eschiver" (in their deeds one can find much to learn about doing good and avoiding evil).^[46] This suggests that the cultivation of classical history among the French aristocracy of the thirteenth century is intimately tied to issues of political power and authority. Whether as a guide to gestes or as a compensation for the loss of martial and political potency, "wisdom"

cannot be divorced from "chivalry," from the attempt to use cultural competition as a displaced arena for political competition.

The intertwined nature of culture and politics, morality and authority, virtue and power, is powerfully articulated by Jean de Thuin, who fears the effect of evil speakers, calumners and low-born (vilain ) counselors, whose tongues poison the atmosphere of reason that should guide the exercise of power. Against them, Jean proclaims, present rulers must learn from the classical past "biel parler sans fol gas et sans mesdire d'autrui" (fine speech without foolish prattle and without speaking iii of others).^[47] Correct speech becomes the ethical counterpart of a corrected social order.

The medieval belief in the ethical dimensions of language, understood as a discursive order both expressing and fostering social order, helps to explain the attraction that ancient history held for thirteenth-century vernacular chroniclers. Insofar as ancient history presented a model of lay society founded on correct linguistic usage, it held up a corrective mirror to the threat of social decline and hierarchical confusion so insistently invoked in the prologues to vernacular histories. And because, in medieval thought, speech and behavior, virtue and power, culture and politics, are never far removed from one another, the presentation of an appropriate linguistic model of lay society is equally a program of social renovation, a vehicle of political legitimation, and a template of cultural attainment. Vernacular translations of ancient history constantly move among the strands of a broad range of goals that are at once political, moral, and sociocultural. Literary language preempts more violent modes of social reform,^[48] a strategy well adapted to the needs of a class that was slowly losing its ability to impose its authority in less mediated forms. Although the prologues to the texts stress the mimetic and hortatory functions of classical historiography in recounting the great deeds of the past, the logic of the procedures employed in the literary reconfiguration of the past in the image of medieval society suggests that the primary aims of Old French histories of antiquity are not mimetic. Rather, they displace to linguistic mediation the conflict between king and nobility that constitutes the underlying problematic of vernacular historiography in this period. Nowhere is this process so clearly at work as in the Faits des Romains , which is also the first work produced by vernacular translators of ancient history in the thirteenth century.

The Faits des Romains

The Faits des Romains is not merely the earliest but arguably the most influential work of ancient historiography to appear during the

first phase of vernacular translations of classical texts. One characteristic to be noted at the outset is the novelty of its treatment of Roman history and of Caesar, which departed sharply from the topics hitherto addressed in the romans d'antiquité . In France, the first romans d'antiquité take their themes from Greek or Trojan history. The Roman d'Alexandre , the Roman de Thèbes , the Roman de Troie , and even less well known works like the Roman d'Apollonius de Tyr and the Roman d'Hector et Hercule are all set in the Greek or Trojan world. Even the Roman d'Enéas , the one exception to this rule, might be considered a continuation of the Trojan legend, as Aeneas and his Trojan remnant make their way through the world after the destruction of Troy.

Moreover, Caesar's appearance as a subject of Old French narrative clearly coincides in France with the emergence of prose historical narratives, in contrast to developments in Italy, where the use of Caesar as a literary subject preceded the legends of Alexander, Troy, and Thebes in verse compositions.^[49] The vernacular chronicle's novel focus on Caesar suggests that early-thirteenth-century writers turned to this period of ancient history with a specific political purpose, motivated by the historical developments outlined in chapter 1. Complementing a generalized desire to resuscitate clergie and chevalerie in the light of a new Roman historiography that stood for the idea of a resurgent and educated French aristocracy was a more specific political desire to recover precisely those phases of Roman history that could serve as analytical models for the confrontation between a centralized and a decentralized view of political authority. At issue in a Roman past centered on Caesar was the confrontation between late Republicanism and Caesarism, a confrontation that Philip Augustus was seen to have modeled by his very name: Augustus. In medieval France, the opposition between senatorial rule and imperial authority could be understood only in terms of a confrontation between the feudal aristocracy and centralized kingship. But precisely for this reason, the situation of France in the thirteenth century, if not an exact match, nonetheless resonated powerfully with this critical juncture of Roman history.

Looked at from this perspective, the choice of Caesar's rise to power and his threat to the Republican ideals of senatorial authority as a primary subject for the vernacular historiography of antiquity was hardly accidental. As would occur in later European historiography for similar reasons, the story of Caesar's destruction of the Roman Republic and the advent of imperial rule functioned as an analogue for contemporary history. Thus, it is perfectly clear that Caesar functions

in the Faits des Romains as an analogue for Philip Augustus—but not, as Jeanette M. A. Beer proposes, in order to legitimize Capetian territorial ambitions by presenting Julius Caesar's program of territorial expansion as a historical precedent for a French monarchy claiming to be heir to the Roman imperium .^[50] Rather, Caesar is a pejorative analogue of the French king, who, like his Roman predecessor, weakened advisement and made the monarchy less a consultative and more an absolutist form of rulership, thereby moving it closer to the imperial model furnished by Caesar.

To be sure, Caesar himself never attained imperial status, having been cut down by Brutus before he could bring to a successful conclusion his seizure of the Roman polity. But by the Middle Ages, Julius as Roman general and military leader and Caesar as emperor are collapsed into a single imperial image. In the thirteenth century, "Caesar" means emperor, a fact that renders intelligible the author's use of Suetonius as an overall frame for the Faits des Romains . In Suetonius's Vitae , medieval readers found a negative representation of Caesarism, seen as an overall phenomenon (despite Suetonius's relatively benign treatment of Julius) leading inexorably to Nero and Tiberius. The translation of Lucan in the second half of the Faits des Romains merely strengthens this interpretive tendency, since in Lucan there appears an absolute fusion between Caesar and Nero. This collapsing of Caesar and the pejorative imperial tradition that was his long-term legacy to the Roman world thus adds another level of anachronism to the Faits des Romains , one already embedded in the historical sources selected for presentation.

The Faits des Romains survives in some fifty-nine manuscripts, of which eleven date from the thirteenth century, eighteen from the fourteenth, and thirty from the fifteenth—compelling testimony to the popularity that it achieved and sustained throughout the High Middle Ages, for which it served as a basic manual of lay culture. Although the author announced at the beginning of the book that he intended to trace a vast tableau of Roman history from the time of Julius Caesar to the reign of Domitian, with Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars as his obvious model, he did not realize this design. Instead of the planned history of the twelve emperors, he offers only that of Julius Caesar, terminating the work with the death of the Republican conspirators against Caesar—that is, in the last chapter of Suetonius's Vita . The work was originally called Li fet des Romains, compilé ensemble de Salluste, et de Suetoine et de Lucan ,^[51] but later copyists,

finding this title both unduly long and inadequately descriptive of the material treated, changed it in subsequent manuscripts to Le livre de Julius César, Comment Julius César regna et conquist plusieurs terres, Le granz afaires dou livre de Juille César, La vraie histoire de Julius César , and the like, tituli that better reflected the scope of the work.^[52]

The identity of the author of the Faits des Romains remains unknown, for none of the extant manuscripts bears his name, nor does internal evidence allow for speculation. As Flutre indicates, he was assuredly a cleric, who knew the rules of rhetoric and who reveals throughout his history the influence of the schools, not least in his utilization of scholastic glosses (scholies ) on Lucan.^[53] But whether this means, as Guenée has suggested, that he was aiming primarily at a clerical audience is, perhaps, a different question. Focusing on the learned character of the sources consulted by the anonymous author, Guenée concluded that the Faits des Romains was "l'oeuvre savante d'un clerc nourri de la culture historique qu'offraient les écoles en général et celle d'Orléans en particulier, dont ni le sujet ni la conception n'étaient particulirement propres à séduire, en 1214, des laïques."^[54] ç The basis for Guenée's opinion is the immediate use made of the Faits des Romains by subsequent authors, such as Jean de Thuin in his Hystore de Jules César , a work Guenée also characterizes as learned in inspiration and execution, dependent on Jean's access to rare texts and glosses such as those from the school of Orleans, to which he refers several times and which would have been available to him in Paris. The same argument applies to Brunetto Latini, who was living and teaching in Paris after his exile from Florence at the time that he composed his Trésor , in which several passages borrowed from the Faits des Romains are present. On these grounds, Guenée asserts that for the first fifty years of its existence, the Faits des Romains "restent essentiellement ce qu'ils étaient d'abord, une oeuvre universitaire."^[55] Only in the second half of the thirteenth century, he claims, did the Faits des Romains achieve a wider audience, primarily (although not exclusively) among the nobility of northern France and, in particular, Flanders, where its employment by Baudouin d'Avesnes for the composition of his Chronique created a secondary center of diffusion.

The pattern of manuscript diffusion on which Guenée's thesis rests is beyond question. Even so, it is reasonable to ask why a cleric, writing for a university audience, should have laboriously rewritten this material not only in French (which clerics could have enjoyed as easily as the laity), but in the epic and courtly styles to which, in principle,

a clerical, university audience would have been hostile. Why systematically deform learned texts for a learned audience in ways inimical to their tastes and interests ? Moreover, if copies of the Faits des Romains did not proliferate in the north of France until the middle of the century, perhaps the reason lies in the virtually simultaneous appearance of the Histoire ancienne (ca. 1220), a work identifying itself as the product of aristocratic patronage, which may in part have satisfied the aristocracy's demand for ancient history. Judging from the literary styles employed by the anonymous author, his obvious familiarity with chansons de geste and Old French romans , his persistent refiguration of the classical past in the image of medieval chivalric society, and his avowed desire to instruct the laity in the exercise of authority, there seems little reason to reject the notion that at least one important audience that he envisaged was the nobility of northern France, among whom, in fact, the Faits des Romains had a substantial success.

If the authorship of the Faits des Romains remains elusive, the date of its composition is relatively easy to determine from a scattering of interpolated remarks. The work must have been written after 1211, since it mentions as still standing a Roman amphitheater, les arènes , whose construction the author mistakenly attributes to Chilperic. The amphitheater was situated on the Left Bank of Paris between the abbeys of Sainte-Geneviève and Saint-Victor and lay in the path of the city walls with which Philip Augustus was encircling Paris in the early years of the thirteenth century: "de ce theaitre duroit encore une partie en estant au jor que li rois Phelipes conmena Paris a ceindre de mur par devers Petit Pont" (of this amphitheater there still remained a part standing in the days when King Philip began to encircle Paris with walls [in the section] around the Petit Pont).^[56] ç According to Guillaume le Breton, this part of the construction of the left-bank enceinte was begun in 1211.^[57]

It also seems likely that the Faits was completed before July 1214, the date of the battle of Bouvines, at which a coalition of Anglo-Norman, Flemish, and German forces was defeated by Philip Augustus. This conclusion emerges from an allusion that the author makes, in the midst of describing the horrors visited upon Rome by the wars between Marius and Sulla, to a planned invasion of France by English and Norman forces, aided by the excommunicated emperor, Otto IV—a plan he derides as misguided:

Totes eures que il me membre de ceste chose, je tieng por fox et Anglois et Normanz, qui ont fole esperance et quident que Octes li escomeniez, que Diex et seinte Eglise ont degité, doie France envaïr par itel gent.^[58]

Whenever I am reminded of this matter, I hold as foolish both the English and the Normans, who have vain hopes and believe that Otto, the excommunicated, whom God and Holy Church have set aside, could invade France with such people.

Otto was excommunicated by Innocent III in June of 1210 and joined the coalition in mid-1213. Since the reference to the invasion occurs toward the middle of the work, it seems reasonable to fix the composition of the Faits des Romains in the years 1213 and 1214,^[59] which makes the Faits des Romains the oldest extant vernacular translation of ancient authors.

The author not only is well informed about the rumors of war preceding the battle of Bouvines, but also claims to have seen King Philip Augustus. Reporting from Suetonius that Sulla had once warned the Senate to beware of the young Caesar, "that boy with the loose clothes" (literally, "badly belted": le valet mau ceint ), he draws a comparison to Philip Augustus as mau pingnié when he was young, and demonstrates his awareness that the king was illiterate as well as disheveled:

Quant ge lis de Juilles Cesar que Luces Silla l'apeloit le valet mau ceint, si me membre de monseignor Phelipe le roi de France, que l'en pooit bien apeler le valet mau pingnié quant il estoit joenes, car il estoit torjors hericiez. Ne il n'a pas mains de sens en lui que il ot en Juilles Cesar, fors seulement de letres, ne n'a pas meins eü affere que Juilles ot; et encontre ce que Juilles fu letfez, est li rois sanz malice, car la letreüre aguisa Juilles a meint malice.^[60]

When I read that Lucius Sulla called Julius Caesar "the boy badly belted," I am reminded of my lord Philip the king of France, whom one might well have called "the boy ill combed" when he was young, because he was always disheveled. Nor did he possess less sense in him than there was in Julius Caesar, with the exception of [learning in] letters, nor did he accomplish less than Julius; and in contrast to Julius, who was literate, the king was without malice, for literacy goaded Julius to a great deal of malice.

Although Beer argues from the presence of this comparison in the Faits that the anonymous author must have been a royal partisan, the passage itself indicates only that at one time in his life he had seen the ill-combed king and that he excused royal illiteracy on the (somewhat strained) grounds that literary attainments had made Caesar vicious. He equally reveals a knowledge of Parisian topography, especially the Left Bank, and displays a rather precise understanding of the ecclesiastical divisions of France, as well as of the countryside of the

Île-de-France.^[61] All these indications firmly locate the author in Paris and its environs, although they tell us little else.

In compiling his history, the anonymous translator employed the main Latin sources of ancient history popular in the West, to which he added a series of medieval works on which he drew for amplifications, explanations, and incidental material. The Faits des Romains is made up of successive translations of Suetonius's Life of Caesar ; Sallust's Catiline Conspiracy ; Caesar's Commentaries on the War of the Gauls , with the continuation by Hirtius; and Lucan's Bellum civile , or, as it was more familiarly known, Pharsalia .

Rather than simply following Suetonius's Life , however, the compiler uses Suetonius as a frame for the insertion of the principal texts to be translated. The prologue is loosely based on the first chapter of Sallust, to which the author adds his own reflections on the nature of Roman history and the lessons to be learned from it. It is followed by a chapter on Roman magistracies taken from Book 9 of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies . Clearly, the anonymous author feared that his audience would not be sufficiently acquainted with the Roman political system to follow the maneuverings of Caesar's political career. Only then does he begin a "life" of Caesar, using Suetonius to recount Caesar's birth and early youth, and the beginning of his military and official career through the Roman cursus honorum of questor, aedile, pontifex, and praetor.

Since Caesar was praetor during the Catiline conspiracy, the author inserts a complete translation of Sallust's Catilina before returning to Suetonius's account of Caesar's election as consul and his subsequent alliance with Pompey. After a series of digressive episodes that treat Pompey's military exploits against the Jews and the formation of the Triumvirate by Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, he returns to his main theme and takes up the story of Caesar's conquest of Gaul, based on Caesar's Gallic Wars —although he fails to recognize the work as Caesar's own and attributes it instead to "Celsus."

In this first section, once the anonymous compiler begins his translation of the Gallic Wars , he remains for the most part faithful to the original text in its narrative development. Although there are numerous additions, moral comments, fictive elaborations of battles, glosses on place-names, and changes in the names of the Gallic peoples against whom Caesar wages war, only one major interpolation interrupts Caesar's account. A long and curious episode is intercalated between chapters 29 and 30 of Book 8, in which the author narrates a presumed combat between Caesar and the Gallic leader Drappés

Brenno, during which Caesar was captured but subsequently escaped with the aid of another Gallic chieftain. The singularity of this episode in light of the relative rarity of changes to the Latin account in this part of the Faits des Romains gives it an importance out of proportion to its relatively short length.

Once Gaul is subdued, Caesar returns to Rome to claim a triumph, but this is denied him because of Pompey's jealous machinations. For the author of the Faits des Romains , the Senate's refusal to grant Caesar the right to celebrate a triumph for his conquest of Gaul provides the casus belli —the "achoisons de la bataille"—between Caesar and Pompey. The political struggle over Caesar's triumph, the account of which derives variously from Suetonius, Lucan, and some remarks of the author's own, concludes part one of the Faits des Romains and serves as a bridge to the next major section, which is the account of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.

Part two, which the majority of manuscripts entitle "Le livre de Lucan," inaugurates the author's use of the Pharsalia , although the initial chapters describing Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon come from Suetonius, mixed with passages from Lucan. The account of the civil war begins with Lucan's Book 3, where Lucan enumerates the peoples who sided with Pompey. At this point the translator introduces an account of the voyage to Paradise made by two lieutenants of Alexander, the Alexandri Magni iter ad Paradisium . The Iter was a narrative of Hebrew origin, known in the West by a Latin work that seems to have been redacted in the first half of the twelfth century and that appears in certain versions of the Roman d'Alexandre .^[62] This anonymous translator's treatment of the material, however, differs from any of the standard sources.

After this, Lucan's account is followed through to its end with the deaths of Pompey and Cato and the war of Alexandria. Since Lucan's poem remained unfinished, however, the concluding sections of the translator's account of the civil war are based, though loosely, on the continuations of Caesar's Commentaries , the Bellurn Alexandrinum, Bellum Africae , and Bellurn Hispaniense . Into the account of Caesar's expedition to Alexandria the author interpolates a veritable romance between Caesar and Cleopatra and rewrites the history of Cleopatra, who is besieged by Achilles in the tower of the Phare. The eunuch Ganymede is metamorphosed into an Egyptian knight, who rescues from prison Arsinoé, the sister of Cleopatra and Ptolemy, and then seizes the throne by marrying her. Finally, the battles of Thapsus and Munda, against Juba and the sons of Pompey, respectively, are pure

inventions in the style of chansons de geste , in which the author's poetic and fantastical elaborations overwhelm the little that derives from Latin authors. The end of the Faits des Romains returns to Suetonius, chapters 37-89, and offers an assessment of Caesar's achievements and character, moral and personal, terminating with an account of Caesar's death.^[63]

To these principal texts the author added episodes, etymologies, and descriptions taken from Isidore of Seville's Etymologies , Josephus's War of the Jews , Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History and Epistolae , and Peter Comester's History of the Maccabees , as well as a brief segment concerning Cato from St. Augustine's City of God , which he mentions by name. Perhaps the most important of the secondary texts that he employed were learned scholies (glosses and commentary) on Lucan's Pharsalia , which Berthe Marti has identified as written by Master Arnulfus of Orleans.^[64] He also cites briefly from the Bible, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid and interpolates the episode from the Alexandri Magni iter ad Paradisium mentioned above. He occasionally takes the opportunity to christianize the sites to which his story carries him, commenting on biblical events and personages whose histories overlie the classical past.^[65] His borrowing from medieval sources includes Geoffrey of Monmouth, either directly or through the vernacular adaptations of Geoffrey by Wace; the Roman de Thbes ; and the Roman d'Alexandre , the latter in particular for the description of Caesar's horse, which is modeled on Bucephalus. Although their origins are impossible to identify, there are also long explanatory digressions^[66] ç and extensive interpolated scenes of battle executed in an epic style, all of which combine to make the translator the third most important "author" represented in the compilation.^[67]

The author/translator's approach to his sources varies widely throughout the course of the Faits . The additions to and subtractions from the Latin sources do not operate evenly across the body of works presented. Although the translation of Caesar's Gallic Wars , with the noted exceptions, is a relatively straightforward affair, where the most consistent distortion of the original text takes the form of epic toning and the substitution of medieval for Roman names, the translation of Lucan is handled differently. In part, this difference is due to the quite distinct character of the two works. Caesar's account of the conquest of Gaul fit easily into the framework of medieval narratives of exemplary battles and heroic encounters between enemies. But Lucan's long and difficult verse epic, laden with mythological allusions, poetic figures, philosophical reflections, and obscure references to Roman political factions, posed quite a different problem, both in terms of the

linguistic resources required for translation and in the Latin author's narrative procedures, which included frequent astrological and mythological digressions, moral apostrophes, and political laments. Although Lucan enjoyed considerable popularity in the Middle Ages as a historian and a source of aphorisms,^[68] a direct rendering of Lucan lay just barely within the realm of a thirteenth-century vernacular writer's literary competence to translate and a medieval audience's capacity to comprehend. Not surprisingly, then, this part of the Faits des Romains exhibits much greater independence from its source than do, for example, the translations of Caesar and Suetonius, possessing the highest degree of both deletion and interpolation of episodes.

The author justifies his rewriting of his received material and the use of additional material, whether from other sources or from his own imagination, on the grounds of the inadequacy of his Latin models. When translating Lucan, for example, he is tempted to elaborate, since "Lucans s'em passe d elecques si briement, que nus ne puet savoir certain ordre de l'estoire par chose que il en die" (Lucan passes over this so briefly, that one is unable to know for certain the order of events by the things he says of it). Unfortunately, Sallust provided little help at this point in the narrative, which dealt with the war of Alexandria, for he "meïsmes n'en redist qui a conter face" (similarly fails to say anything that might furnish subject matter to recount). Although the author seeks to augment the deficiencies of Lucan and Sallust here by referring to the works of "Herodotus et Berosus, dui hystoriographe qui touchierent en lor estoires cest passage, en dient plus et auques s'acordent" (two historiographers who in their histories touch upon this passage, say more, and agree somewhat), it is impossible to identify any part of Herodotus or Berosius (a contemporary of Alexander the Great, fragments of whose Chaldaica had passed into Josephus) relevant to his discussion.^[69] It seems likely, then, that the citation of "authors" is a false invocation of "authority" to conceal the author's own inventions.

The translator's departure from the sources for the sake of epic interpolation is similarly justified, for example in his account of the battle of Pharsalia, with the remark that "il i ot meinte bele joste et meint beau cop feru, dont Lucans ne parole pas; mes nos les escriverons einsi con nos les avons trovez es autres tretiez, en un livre meïsmes que Cesar fist de ses fez, et en Suetoine et aillors" (there were many fine jousts and many a fine blow delivered, of which Lucan does not speak; but we shall write about them as we have found them in other treatises, in a book that Caesar himself wrote of his deeds, and in Suetonius and elsewhere).^[70] Despite the careful enumeration of alternative

authorities, the ensuing narrative is a fictive elaboration in epic style based solely on the author's knowledge and deployment of the epic modes of Old French chansons de geste . For the most part, however, such epic additions are inserted without comment and so thoroughly woven into the fabric of the text as to fuse seamlessly with the Latin account. This is an ancient world in which antagonists in battle routinely engage in single combat with one another; where famous Roman fighters, such as Scipio at the battle of Thapsus, appear as a "biaus chevaliers, adroiz et boens" (handsome knight, agile and good);^[71] in which Gneus, the son of Pompey, does battle with Caesar to avenge the death of his father, who was, he proclaims, "pleins de totes bontez, loiax chevaliers adurez et vassaux feelz vers sa cité et vers son païs" (full of all goodness, a loyal, experienced knight and a vassal faithful to his city and to his country);^[72] where, at the naval battle before Marseille, the father of Argus is extolled in feudal terms as a man "qui avoit esté si preuz en sa jovente que il ne trovoit son paraill en vaselage n'a pié n'a cheval. Il estoit roes afebloiez de viellece, mes essamples de chevalerie estoit a cels qui le veoient et connoissoient" (who had been so preu in his youth that he did not find his equal in vassalage, neither on foot nor mounted. He was then enfeebled by old age, but he offered an example of chivalry to those who saw and knew him);^[73] and where Caesar and Cleopatra fall into each other's arms with all the conventional passion of medieval romance lovers. To the uninitiated reader or hearer, ignorant of the original Latin source, ancient history as construed by the Faits des Romains must have seemed of a piece with the whole corpus of medieval literature traditionally sung and recounted in aristocratic circles, but now graced with the superior authority of prestigious ancient auctores and a classical literary pedigree. It therefore lent to chivalric culture the inherent legitimacy of antiquity without disturbing its essential ideological contours or ethical apparatus.

Viewed as a whole, the Faits des Romains reads less as a "life" of Caesar than as an inquiry into the roots and consequences of military and political ambition. Although he uses the frame provided by Suetonius, the author concentrates his attention on the military exploits generated by the Roman conquest of Gaul and the ensuing civil war. In his treatment, these events are causally related, since he believes that the Senate's denial of a triumph to Caesar for his successes in Gaul propelled the Roman general into open conflict with the state. Despite the employment of a wide variety of sources, both ancient and medieval, the two main sections formed by the translation of Caesar's

Bellum Gallicum and Lucan's Bellum civile take up fully 84 percent of the translated work. In both sections, the principal issue over which war is waged is liberty: the liberty of the Gauls in the face of Roman subjugation; the liberty of Romans in the face of Caesar's overweening political ambitions. As we shall see, the "wisdom" that the Faits des Romains seeks to promote turns, at its core, on the question of the untrammeled exercise of military and political power on the part of greedy and ruthless rulers. Insofar as Caesar emerges triumphant from both series of engagements, his success spells the death of liberty, a death mirrored in Caesar's own moral decline, which in turn, as handled by the anonymous translator, signifies the disruption of the values of the Roman world.

The Translation of Caesar

Caesar's Gallic Wars was a work of self-promotion in which the Roman general advertised the greatness and utility of his war against the Gauls both as a personal triumph due to his exceptional military talents and as a potential benefit for the Roman world. To this end, Caesar sought to present the populations he subjected as worthy adversaries whose integration into the Roman world could be effected without undue strain. A notable feature of the Gallic Wars , indeed, is the fact that for Caesar, the "French" (that is, the Gauls) are barbarian allies, whereas the Britons and Germans (Saxons) are the "real" barbarians, whose absorption by Roman civilization appears scarcely possible.^[74] Unlike the other "barbarian" peoples confronted by the Roman legions, the Gauls were civilizable.^[75] In Caesar's Gallic Wars , they are depicted, if not on a par with the Romans, at least as worthy of forcible inclusion within the Roman political and military orbit. Since the anonymous translator worked on his text in the years 1213-1214, the distinction that Caesar had drawn in the Gallic Wars between the "French" and the "Saxons" and "Britons"—whose thirteenth-century descendants were at that moment in deadly alliance against Philip Augustus—conformed to the structure of political alignments in western Europe and may explain why Caesar's tale of conquest over the Gauls was less unpalatable to a prospective French audience than might otherwise be thought.

However, Caesar also was compelled to account for the difficulties that he encountered in subduing various Gallic peoples and for the persistence of revolts against Roman domination, even after the defeat and return of Vercingetorix. To do so, he resorted to an unflattering picture of the inherent instability, inconstancy, and impulsiveness of

the Gauls, as well as their ferocity and credulity, apparent in their tendency to credit unfounded rumors, which continually led them into perfidious and faithless acts ranging from the breaking of treaties to outright rebellion. In translating the Gallic Wars , the thirteenth-century author systematically reworked the Caesarian image of the Gauls in ways favorable to the "French," who were their nominal equivalents. But this reinterpretation of Franco-Gallic "national" character did not extend to all the peoples that Caesar had termed "Gauls," nor was it applicable to the other barbarian tribes that had fallen victim to his sword and to his pen. The exclusionary tactics of rewriting that guided the author of the Faits des Romains is compelling testimony to the cultural and political agendas that he harbored and cannot be attributed simply to the desire to "modernize" his source in order to elucidate the text and enhance its didactic efficacy.

The "Gaul" that the thirteenth-century translator constructs is neither Roman Gaul as presented by Caesar nor precisely contemporary France under Philip Augustus. It is a Gaul seen from the perspective of Paris, not Rome; "beyond the Alps," in the Faits des Romains , designates Italy, not France.^[76] The primary characteristic of this "new" Gaul is its size, for the author prefaces Caesar's famous statement concerning the tripartite division of Gaul by stressing that France in the days of Julius Caesar "estoit molt granz" (was very large).^[77] It is a Gaul that includes Savoy—"toz cil dou païs de la estoient apeléz François et toz li païs estoit apelez France a cel tens" (all those from that country were called French and all the country was called France at that time)^[78] —and Trier, which "a ce jor estoit la plus poissanz de France entre les autres citez en chevalerie, et gent de pié i avoit a foison" (in that day was the most powerful among the cities of France in chivalry, and it [also] had foot soldiers in abundance).^[79] Yet it is also a Gaul thoroughly familiar to a thirteenth-century audience, in which the ancient cities and inhabitants of the north are metamorphosed into classical avatars of medieval French society. Caesar's Aquitani thus are identified as the Poitevins, the Morini as the Flemish, the Cantabri as the Gascons, and the Allobroges as the Burgundians. But they are all, as the translator notes at the beginning of his work, one people: "li messagier borguenon ou françois, tot est un" (Burgundian or French messengers, they are all one).^[80]

More prevalent still is the identification of the French according to the cities they inhabit, a process that has the dual effect of reinscribing the ancient geography of Gaul as France and of reconstituting the adversaries against whom Caesar struggled as members of urban regions

rather than tribal entities. No longer the tribal barbari of the Gallic Wars , the "Franois" are, like the Romans, a people who live in the city; hence they are "civilized" in the root sense of the word, all traces of "barbarism" effaced by the culturally neutral urban designations. Caesar's legions set forth to do battle against "cil de Rains," "cil de Biauves," and "cil de Soissons," all of whom are "François." Vercingetorix "de Clermont," seeking to raise an army to contend with the Romans, dispatches his messengers "partout as citez de France et manda que se tenissent en foi et en loiauté" (throughout the cities of France and commanded that they bind themselves in faith and loyalty). Responding to his call were "cil de Sens, de Paris, de Poitiers, de Caors, de Tors, d'Angiers, de Limoges et des autres citez."^[81] ç Normans and Nivernais, Burgundians and Bretons, pass through these pages as emblematic representatives of the antiquity of France's geographic and social identity and the continuity of her political community.

Despite the overall tendency to homogenize past and present, pagan and Christian, Galli and Franci , the anonymous author nonetheless draws some fine distinctions in his treatment of the various populations he has assimilated to the "Franois." As a rule, "li François" seen as an ensemble are excused from the opprobrium that Caesar had heaped on them for their "légèreté." Although the translator acknowledges that Caesar placed little trust in the French—"por ce que il sot que François estoient appareillié a guerroier et a prendre noviax conselz tote jor, il se fioit petit en els" (because he knew that the French were always prepared to make war and to take new counsel, he had little faith in them)—their readiness to do battle and follow counsel hardly replicates Caesar's charge of pusillanimity, and Caesar's allegation of the notorious infirmitatem Gallorum veritus in the Latin text is simply suppressed. At worst, the French can be accused of overfrequent councils and of responding indiscriminately to interested rumor from passing merchants and travelers: "Lors prenoient conseill selonc ce que il ooient, a tel chief de foiz qui tornoit a lor nuisement, car li trespassant ne lor responnoient pas toz jors verité, mes selonc ce que il cuidoient que fust a lor plesir" (They took counsel according to what they heard, such that it often turned out to their harm, since passersby did not always answer [their inquiries] with the truth, but rather with what they thought would please them).^[82] ç

Similarly, where Caesar claims that his Gallic auxiliaries inform upon their countrymen, the translator says in passing only that "espies i estoient" (there were spies), thus removing suspicions of treachery. Rather than fickle or treacherous, the inhabitants of France are

portrayed as fierce warriors, committed to preserving their liberty. "Cil de Biauvés" are "de grant pooir et de tres grant fierté" (of great power and very fierce).^[83] Those from Nevers are "home dur, cruel et de grant vertu, qui mout blasmoient toz cels de France qui rendu s'estoient en la main des Romains et avoient gitee arriere l'ancienne vertu de lor païs" (hard men, cruel and of great strength, who greatly blamed all those of France who had surrendered themselves to the hands of the Romans and had thrown away the ancient virtue of their country); the "Belges" are characterized as "soverain conbateor estoient en tote France" (sovereign fighters in all France), as are the Poitevins "qui bon conbateor furent et orent beles armes" (who were good fighters and bore excellent arms); the Champenois "sevent assez de fonde et de trere et de lancier" (were well acquainted with the use of a fronde and with the sword and lance).^[84] Indeed, for the author of the Faits des Romains , "tote France estoient preste a bataille autresi con par nature" (all France was prepared to do battle, as if by nature),^[85] exhibiting exceptional courage, the ability to withstand hardship, and a love of competition. Pride of place among them goes to the inhabitants of the Île-de-France and the "Parisis," "cil de la riviere de Sainne, ou li boen chevalier sont par nature et li hardi torneieor et meillor des autres" (those from the Seine river, where good knights are by nature, and bold tourneyers, better than the others).^[86] It is in "cels de France," the author remarks in an addition to the Latin text, that Caesar places his greatest trust: "por for hardement, car plus les avoit esprovez aspres et estables en totes batailles" (for their bravery, for he had found them courageous and steadfast in all battles).^[87]

Yet, as Mireille Schmidt-Chazan has demonstrated, the translator's excision or mitigation of Caesar's criticisms is not total. He often lets stand isolated adverse judgments in the Latin text. But rather than apply them to the French as a whole, he reserves them for particular peoples from well-defined regions.^[88] Thus, amid the general praise of the French for their warlike virtue, the Auvergnats are decried as "menteor . . . par nature et faignent que il sont frere as Romains et as Latins por ce que il vindrent de Troie" (liars . . . by nature, and they pretend that they are brothers to the Romans and Latins because they came from Troy).^[89] In the same way, the scope of Caesar's remark on the return of the Aedui to Vercingetorix's rebellion—an act of betrayal that Caesar attributed to their having "treated frivolous hearsay as assured fact: some were influenced by avarice, others by anger and the recklessness which is specially characteristic of their race"^[90] —is restricted by the translator to apply to "cil d'Ostum" who

en furent si esmeü, c'onques n'i ot espace d'enquerre en nule verité, ainz alerent li un par avarice, li autres par ire, li autre[s] par folie, de croi[e]re tot quanque il ooient, car de nature avoient que il creïssent ce et coi de legier.^[91]

were so [easily] moved, that they never had time [lit. space] to inquire into the truth; thus some proceeded from avarice, others from anger, others from folly, to believe everything they heard, for it was their nature to easily believe this and that.

And this despite the fact that Caesar had always held "cil d'Ostum" in the highest honor "por la foi qu'il avoient enciennement gardee vers Romains" (for the fealty that they had in ancient times maintained toward the Romans).^[92]

Among the French, some come in for especially pointed criticism. For example, the Normans, alone among the "Franois," are said to lack courage in battle. The author transforms a rather bland comment of Caesar's on the Unelles—as being, like the Gauls, prompt in taking up arms, but lacking strength and resolve in sustaining reverses—into a direct attack on the Normans:

Si con dit Juliens, autresi come Normenz estoient prest a movoir barate et noise por petit, ensement il perdoient les cuers et les vertuz lues que il avoient une aversité d'aucun meschief.^[93]

As Julius says, just as the Normans were ready to engage in treachery and tumults for very little cause, in the same way they lost heart and virtue as soon as they experienced a calamity of any misfortune.

The inability to persevere in enterprises rashly begun, a characteristic that Caesar attributes to the Gauls as a whole, is here shifted to the Normans, once again replicating in the ancient past the configurations and sentiments of thirteenth-century France at a moment of "national" struggle between the French and Normans, only recently conquered by Philip Augustus (in 1204-1205) and still suspect as potential allies for the Anglo-German coalition of 1213-1214.

Without doubt, however, the main target of the author's selective revisions of Caesar's account is the Germans, generally designated by the names of "Tyois" or "Sesnes." They alone merit the appellation of barbari , and they invariably appear in the text as a people "bar-bares et sauvages"—even when the Latin source refers only to "Germans."^[94] The Germans who inhabit the territories beyond the Rhine appear in the Faits des Romains as cruel and ferocious beyond sense, a "gens forsené,"^[95] habituated to thievery in their pursuit of plunder ("come genz qui estoient usé de larrecins et de roberies"),^[96]

who (rather surprisingly, given the general tenor of the Latin text on the warlike character of the Germans) are of less military value even than the "Hermines" ("mout meins a redoter que Hermines ne autres genz" [much less to be feared than the Hermines or other peoples])^[97] —a disparaging phrase added to Caesar's account and referring to the Armenians defeated by Sulla. The Saxons are presented as "genz qui n'avoient loisir de conseill prendre ne de lor armes saisir" (a people who do not have the leisure to take counsel nor to bear arms). In place of the military valor that distinguishes the "François," Saxons resort to ruse (barate ) and trickery (tricherie ).^[98] The Germans are a race of cowards ("ne sont pas de grant hardement"), and the Normans and English are unwise to ally themselves against the French with "such people," as the author interjects in an appreciation of the current political situation in France: "je tieng por fox et Anglois et Normanz, qui ont fole esperance et quident que Octes li escomeniez . . . doie France envaïr par itel genz" (I hold as foolish both the English and the Normans, who have vain hopes and think that Otto the excommunicated . . . could invade France with such people).^[99] France, on the other hand, is a society where

li chevalier . . . estoient toz jors en guerre et en bataille. Acostumé l'avoient avant la venue Cesar, car chascun an assilloient autrui, ou il se deffendoient de cels qui venoient sur els.

the knights . . . were always engaged in war and in battle. They were accustomed to it before Caesar's advent, for each assailed the other, or defended themselves against those who attacked them.

In France, the exercise of war is not conducted merely for plunder, as among the Germans. Rather,

qui plus estoit riches, plus avoit mesniee et serjanz environ soi. Qui plus pooit avoir grant conpaignie et de sa table et de sa meson, plus avoit, ce li sembloit, honor et cortoisie et grace.^[100]

he who was richer had more of an entourage and sergeants around him. He who was able to maintain a great company, both of his table and his household, had, so it seemed, greater honor and courtesy and grace.

As in the present, so in the past; as in the past, so in the present. The essential character of French society is chivalric, a world in which riches, honor, courtoisie , and favor are and always have been the determinants of social position and personal virtue. The transferral of the represented world of medieval chivalry to the ancient origins of

the French people comes full circle and authorizes its continuance in the present. Because the French have always been a people distinguished by military prowess and valor, they will overcome the threatened coalition, just as surely as the Germans, the roots of whose cowardice burrow deep into the distant past, will suffer defeat. In the end, it is the maintenance of their ancienne vertu of military strength and moral honor that guarantees the liberty of "li Franois."

The crucial role of chivalric prowess in sustaining "French" liberty emerges most distinctively in the Faits in its treatment of the conflicts between Caesar and a series of Gallic leaders, whose meaning in the vernacular text takes on political and ethical dimensions absent from Caesar's narrative. The anonymous thirteenth-century translator consistently rewrites his Latin source to eliminate any suspicion of Gallic subordination toward Rome, both during the successive military confrontations and even, finally, in defeat.^[101] Whether allies or enemies, the "François" are always treated as free peoples, routinely called for consultation to Caesar's numerous colloquies, and accorded the respect and fear due worthy adversaries. As handled in the Faits des Romains , the war between the Romans and the Gauls is a struggle between equal opponents, one fighting for domination and territorial expansion, the other striving to preserve its ancient liberty. Against Caesar's efforts to subjugate the Gauls, the "French" oppose a deep and perduring desire for autonomy that fuels their ferocity in the face of aggression. At times, the desire for liberty may even lead them to ally with the Romans. Thus the "François" applaud Caesar's conquest of the Helvetians, which they attribute not to Caesar's desire to avenge the shame that the Helvetians had visited upon the Romans in defeating Lucius Cassius, but to Caesar's recognition of the "conmun profit de tote France":

car li Helveois n'avoient guerpiz lor leus, qui plein estoit de tot bien, fors que por metre desoz lor piez tote France si grant come ele estoit en .iij. parties, et por estre seignor de tot et fere dou païs a lor volenté^[102] ç

because the Helvetians left their spot, which was full of good things, only to subjugate [lit. place beneath their feet] all France, as great as she was in three parts, and in order to be lord of everything and to do what they wanted with the country.

Similarly, the French request Caesar's aid against the "Sesnes," who, under King Ariovistus, threaten to cross the Rhine in order that "il porront les Franois chacier de tote France" (they could chase the

French out of France), knowing full well that Ariovistus "veust avoir sor els cruel seignorie" (wished to exercise cruel lordship over them).^[103]

But the most persistent threat to Gallic liberty comes from Caesar himself. When confronted with the specter of subjection to Rome, "Franois" of every sort and from every region relentlessly resist. Whereas Caesar found the continuous rebellion of the Gauls to be proof of their instability and inconstancy, the author of the Faits presents it as proof of their absolute commitment to preserving their autonomy. Thus the cities of Brittany, although subdued and in principle pacified, nonetheless rise up against the Roman victors, because "mielz se voloient abandoner a tote fortune que remanoir ou servage as Romains" (they preferred to abandon themselves to the whims of fortune rather than to remain in bondage to the Romans).^[104] ç Indeed, Caesar was forced to conclude that "tote France pres s'apareilloit a movoir guerre, por ce meesmement que chascuns huem aime franchise par nature et het lien de servage" (almost all France was prepared to go to war, because each man loves liberty by nature and hates any tie of dependency).^[105]Franchise , which in the romans d'antiquité tended to signify "nobility of character," "goodness," or "speech that bears witness to a noble heart"—all important qualities of the perfect courtly knight^[106] —here takes on a decided inflection in the direction of "freedom." In the Faits des Romains , it is at one and the same time a condition strenuously defended by the French, a rallying cry for rebellion, and a structure of argumentation.

Thus Convictolitavis, on whom Caesar had conferred the leadership of "cil d'Ostum," determined to join the revolt against the Romans because, although "voirs est que je doi assez a Cesar por le bien que il m'a fet; mes je doi plus a comune franchise" (it is true that I owe Caesar much for the good that he has done me; but I owe more to the common liberty). And it is on this basis that he persuades the Aeduan messengers to join the ranks of the rebelling peoples of France in behalf of their "common liberty."^[107] The guardians of the "common liberty" of the "François" are the Gallic tribal chieftains, here transformed into regional princes, against whom Caesar wages pitiless war but who emerge in their opposition to Roman aggression as national heroes fighting for the ancient liberties and customs of their followers. From first to last, they are treated as disinterested partisans of French freedom, who struggle against overwhelming odds to sustain traditional forms of Gallic self-government, waging war for causes both just and deeply embedded in the French past. To so present France's

ancient rulers required the anonymous author of the Faits des Romains to revise considerably the picture that Caesar had painted of them. The underlying political preoccupations that guided his work emerge clearly in the ways that he redraws Caesar's image of Gallic tribal leaders as greedy, ambitious, and untrustworthy and refigures them as legitimate champions of "French" national honor and liberty.

The Gallic Opposition

The first of the Gallic chieftains subjected to the author's legitimizing revisions is Dumnorix, of the "païs d'Ostum." In Caesar's account, Dumnorix was a notorious farmer of taxes who used the revenues from that enterprise to bribe his way to influence and a position of dominance among the Aedui, whom he was inciting to revolt against the Romans. According to Caesar:

For several years, it was said, he had contracted at a low price for the customs and all the rest of the Aeduan taxes, for the simple reason that when he made a bid none durst bid against him. By this means he had at once increased his own prosperity and acquired ample resources for bribery; he maintained a considerable body of horses permanently at his own charges, and kept them about his own person; not only in his own but even in neighboring states his power was extensive.^[108]

In place of this unflattering portrait, the author of the Faits des Romains depicts Dumnorix as a brave and powerful leader, who had won his followers' favor and cemented their loyalty by his capacity for "biau parler":

Ce estoit Domnorix qui estoit si hardiz et de si grant pooir el pueple que nus n'osoit rien contre lui, car il avoit si la grace de toz par sa liberalité et par sa largece et par sa franchise et par son biau parler, que tuit le suivoient et voloient ce que il voloit.

This was Dumnorix, who was extremely bold and possessed such great power over the people that no one dared to do anything against him, because he had so won the favor of all by his liberality and by his largesse and by his nobility of character [franchise ] and fine speech, that everyone followed him and wished what he wished.

Although this Dumnorix also farms taxes, he does so not to bribe his way to influence, but to have

de quoi il pooit granz largeces fere por la gent atrere a s'amor et por baer a noveles honors par assentement del pueple; et grant nombre de chevalerie avoit toz jors entor soi, que il meintenoit en totes choses de son avoir.^[109]

the wherewithal to distribute great largesse in order to attract the love of the people and to aspire to new honors by the assent of the people; and he always had a great number of knights around him, whom he maintained in all things at his own expense.

He is an ideal medieval ruler, liberal with largece , eager for honors that are conferred upon him by the "assent of the people," whose favor and love he wins through that "fine speech" (biau parler ) so essential, as Jean de Thuin noted, to the preservation of correct order in the chivalric world. He exhorts his followers to support the resistance, only to be cut down, dying with the cry upon his lips: "Je sui frans, et de franche cité" (I am free and from a free city).^[110]

In this thirteenth-century vision of the ancient world of Gaul, the leader acts on the promptings of his followers, among whom he figures as a primus inter pares and whose wishes and counsels he is required to implement. Hence Ambiorix excuses himself from leading the Eburones in an attack against Caesar's troops sent to winter among his people on the grounds that he was bound by "French" custom to execute their demands, even against his better judgment, for in France ruler and subjects are contractually implicated in each other's "seignorie" and required to abide by the counsel of the majority:

"et ce que je ai fet d'assaillir les tentes romaines n'a pas esté par ma volonté ne par mon jugement, ainz le m'a fet fere li pueples, qui a autretant de seignorie sor moi come je ai sor lui, car itex est nostre costume."

"and what I did in attacking the tents of the Romans was not according to my own wishes nor my judgment, but I was made to do it by the people, who have as much lordship over me as I have over them, for such is our custom."

The fact that all the French together had decided to attack Caesar's legions wherever they were wintering only provided further incentive to join the rebellion, since

ce estoit le comuns conselz de France d'assaillir totes les legions Cesar. . .. Ne li uns Franois ne puet escondire s'aide a l'autre a cest besoign, car cist conselz est de conmune franchise·^[111] ç

it was the common counsel of France to attack all Caesar's legions. . .. No Frenchman could refuse his aid to another in this need, for this counsel concerned the common liberty·

Counsel and consent are the twin pillars on which the franchise of the French stands or falls. They constitute the main vectors along which

the lines of force in Gallic society run, its governing principles of cohesion and strength, and hence the essential elements that define its historical character. Consent to the common causes of liberty arrived at through deliberation in council cannot be refused, for the historical destiny of "li Franois" depends on adherence to the collective will of the princes.

The princes' title to leadership derives ultimately from their personal fortitude and valor, for it is, in this sense, their "chivalric" prowess that validates their ability to rule. The author of the Faits des Romains embellishes his history with innumerable micro-narratives of heroic valor among lesser figures, whose feats of bravery, recounted in heavily accented epic tones, contribute to the overall patterning of the narrative in epic style. Thus, in a small episode that recalls the actions of Roland at the battle of Roncevaux, Corbeus, the leader of the Beauvaisins (Bellovaci), although already defeated in battle, refuses to give up:

Mes en nule maniere dou monde Corbeus ne vost le chanp guerpir, ne foïr n'ou bois n'aillors, ne partir soi de la bataille, n'estre menez ace qu'il se vossist rendre par nul enortement de Romains; ainz le veïst l'en plus tier que lion plaier, abatre et ocirre plusors a tas devant soi. Tant que Romain nel porent plus sosfrir de mautalent, anois li lancerent tant darz qu'il le ferirent parmi le corset fu abatuz sanz relever. Mes bien si fu avant contenuz come vertueus dux.^[112] ç

In no way in the world did Corbeus wish to quit the field, or to flee into the woods or elsewhere, nor to remove himself from the battle, nor to be led to surrender by any urging of the Romans; rather one could see him, prouder than a lion, attack, strike, and kill several in a pile before him. To such an extent that the Romans in their anger could no longer endure it; therefore they threw so many javelins at him that they pierced him throughout his body and he was struck down without being able to get up again. But how well he had conducted himself before this as a virtuous leader.

Similarly, Vertiscus, "li princes de Rains," insisted on leading his host into battle despite his great age, which made it difficult for him to mount his horse:

Il ne vost pas sosfrir que si chevalier alassent bataillier sanz lui, ne par viellece ne s'estoit escussez qu'il n'eüst receüe la provosté des chevaliers guier. [ . . . He was considered] le prince prevost de tote la chevalerie de Renciens.^[113]

He could not stand to have his knights go into battle without him, nor did he excuse himself by reason of old age from receiving the

charge of commanding the knights. [ . . . He was considered] the principal leader of all the chivalry of Reims.

The stories of even such minor princes as Corbeus and Vertiscus, taken from Caesar's account but consistently rewritten in language borrowed from the lexicon of medieval chivalry, build upon one another to heighten the sense of cyclical return and discursive recurrence that is an essential part of the narrative and historiographical strategies of the Faits des Romains . Narrative repetition creates a vast epic tableau out of alien classical matiére that reinscribes its meaning for a medieval audience as a past that it makes its own. Ancient history becomes the ground of an ideology of chivalric identity whose distant origins tacitly argue the authentic status of the aristocracy's claim to a historical mission as warriors and leaders of France. The princes whose blood has been spilt since the beginning of time for the liberty of France are the true representatives of the ancient peoples of France. Their actions, guided by the common accord of leaders and followers in council, provide the paradigm of a French society governed according to ancient customs, offering a heritage of valor, honor, prowess, and virtue in the service of franchise that is the historical meaning and mandate of a specifically "French" antiquity.

Even more do the histories of ancient Gaul's emblematic chieftains such as Vercingetorix and—for the author of the Faits des Romains —Drappés Brenno disclose the contours of a French past potentially capable of reviving a lost world of aristocratic potency and chivalric virtue. In his account of the exploits of Vercingetorix and Drappés Brenno, the author of the Faits des Romains offers his thirteenth-century audience of readers and listeners a rectified history of ancient Gaul aimed at redeeming contemporary chivalric society.

Vercingetorix was not yet in the thirteenth century the national hero that nineteenth-century Frenchmen were to make of him, but he figured in the Gallic Wars as the principal Gallic chieftain fomenting revolt against Caesar. Caesar's depiction of Vercingetorix was a complicated admixture of admiration for his military skills, frustration with the continual rebellions that he excited and led, and scorn for the motley character of the followers that he admitted into his host, which Caesar disdains as "a levy of beggars and outcasts."^[114] Curiously, the author of the Faits des Romains lets stand Caesar's adverse judgment on Vercingetorix's army and, if anything, darkens the picture, describing the warriors as a ragbag "de povres, d'eschis, d'endetez, de gent desperee, qui plus amoit guerre que pes" (of the poor, deprived, indebted, of desperate people, who loved war more than peace).^[115]

Vercingetorix is moved to wage war, according to Caesar and our vernacular author, by a combination of personal ambition and "entencion de comune franchise recovrer" (intention to recover the common liberty). The narrative of his uprisings repeatedly raises questions about the nature of the Gallic leader's personal motives and goals, questions initiated by Caesar and allowed to linger in the vernacular text.^[116] To the extent that the author of the Faits corrects the history of Gallic revolt against Caesar under Vercingetorix, his emendations of the past do not so much revise the image of the Gallic leader as reinterpret the global character of French rebellion and its meaning within the history of resistance to Roman domination.

In Caesar's view, Gallic princes had seized the opportunity created by his departure for Italy to sow discord among the people, already "chafing at their subjection to the sovereignty of Rome." In particular, he pointed to their alarm at the execution of Acco, chief of the Senones, and their concern that a similar fate might befall them.^[117] In Caesar's eyes, then, Gallic motivation for the renewal of war derived from a combination of resentment over their defeat and subjugation to Roman rule and self-interested fear for their personal safety. The French author, in contrast, mitigates Caesar's judgment by adding that, although the French were afraid that Acco's cruel death at Caesar's hands "porroit avenir a chascun de nos" (could happen to each of us), more important was their belief that "tote France est en aventure . . . or si parra qui metra sa teste en aventure por conmune franchise recovrer" (the fate of France is in the balance . . . now it will be clear who is willing to place his head at risk in order to recover the common liberty). Indeed, so little did the French fear for their lives that they collectively determined that

il voloient mielz estre tuit ocis em bataille, eta greignor honor lor torneroit, que il ne recovrassent la gloire de bataille que lor ancessor avoient eüe jadis.^[118]

they would prefer all to be killed in battle, and it would redound more greatly to their honor, rather than not recover the glory of battle that their ancestors formerly had.

Ancestral honor and glory require the prosecution of war in the name of liberty, not for the sake of personal security, but for "le conmun salu de France."^[119] In answering Vercingetorix's call to arms, the "Franéois" are responding to the imperatives of ancestry and the traditions of national honor by which liberty and glory have been sustained in the past. Vercingetorix is merely an instrument selected to

lead the French to their historical destiny, an imperfect bearer of their aspirations for autonomy, perhaps, but in his military cunning a worthy opponent to Caesar's legions and, as the princes acclaim him, a "sovrains dux."^[120]

Strikingly, Vercingetorix never acts alone. He is a chosen leader, "esleüz a prince eta comandeor par le conmun otroi des citez" (elected as prince and commander by the common consent of the cities) and bound by the common counsel of the other princes. His lordship (seignorie ) and authority to command are established by election. The author of the Faits des Romains insists on the collective nature of decisions made in council in the conduct of war:

Chascun marin fesoit [Vercingetorix] venir a soi princes et connoistables de tote s'ost por prendre conseill de tel atirement come au jor covenoit.^[121]

Each morning [Vercingetorix] had the princes and constables of all his host come to him in order to take counsel concerning the disposition of affairs that was necessary that day.

So compelling is the cause of national franchise that even those who allied with Caesar in the past join their compatriots against the Romans. Thus Commius, who loyally assisted Caesar in his wars in Britain and as a reward received Flanders and Thérouanne, nonetheless enters the fray on the side of French liberty:

Neporquant tote France fu si a un acort de lor franchise venchier et ravoir et de recovrer 10r premeraine gloire de bataille, qu'il ne men-bra onques a nului d'amor ne de bienfet que Cesar lor eüst let, ainz avoient tuit boene volenté de metre lor corset lor avoirs en ceste guerre fornir.^[122]

Nevertheless, all France was of such an accord to avenge and repossess their freedom and recover their original glory of battle that no one remembered the love or benefits that Caesar had brought them; rather, they all wished to offer their bodies and goods for the prosecution of this war.

The war is fought in epic style, knight against knight, matching the proece, vertu , and hatdement of each.^[123] The French appetite for war is excited by "la memoire de l'encienne vertu des François" (the memory of the ancient virtue of the French). And it is precisely this memory that drives the Romans to conquer the French and deprive them of their laws, customs, and franchise . In the eyes of the French, the Romans seek nothing less than

par envie de nostre boene renomee que nos avons toz jors eüe par noz victoires, demorer en noz heritages et acuivertir nos et tolir nostre franchise.^[124]

out of envy of our good repute that we have always had by virtue of our victories, to dwell in our heritages and to enslave us and take away our liberty.

Although finally defeated in battle by Caesar, the French remain faithful to their ancestral traditions of liberty. Caesar recognizes only too well that if he left France to winter after subduing Vercingetorix, the French would rise up again, for

ne cuidoient Franois que ja i eüst cité qui volontiers ne s'entremeïst et preïst fes sor soi de sa franchise vanchier.^[125] ç

the French did not believe that there was any city that would not willingly join in and take it upon itself to avenge its liberty.

Whatever the cost, freedom in France is to be defended, for in freedom lies the sole guarantee for the preservation of ancestral honor.

It is in the author's treatment of Vercingetorix's surrender to Caesar that his greatest changes to this section of the Latin source occur, changes consistent with the image of French history as the history of liberty that shapes his corrected vision of France's ancient past. Caesar's account emphasizes the final submission of the French in a ritual laying down of arms tantamount to an act of obeisance before a sovereign ruler. Caesar ordered the arms to be delivered up and the chiefs to be brought to him. Upon their arrival he was seated at the front of the camp, and the leaders approached him there: "Vercingetorix was surrendered, arms were thrown down."^[126] The persistent use of the passive voice in the Caesarian text underscores the impotence of the "pacified" rebels, who no longer control their own deeds but are compelled to respond to the commands of others. The loss of franchise is a loss of agency, of the capacity to govern oneself.

In contrast, the author of the Faits des Romains converts Vercingetorix's final act of submission into a ritual of volition in which Vercingetorix se rendit (rendered himself) to Caesar, sovereign to sovereign, the agent of his self-surrender. It is, as Mireille Schmidt-Chazan remarks, a small detail, "mais combien révélateur de son souci de ne pas voir ternie si peu que ce soit l'image des Franais."^[127] ç In surrendering himself, Vercingetorix recovers the agency that Caesar had sought to take from him. The laying down of arms does not entail the loss of autonomy, only a momentary abandonment of the contest.

Caesar may set limits to French freedom of action, but he cannot destroy for all time their franchise .

To the degree that the story of Vercingetorix's resistance to Roman domination encodes the history of France as the history of French franchise , its meaning within the Faits des Romains lies within a semantic field of extraordinary breadth and complexity. Franchise is at once a status; a collection of personal attributes designating the inner qualities of nobility of character, virtue, and speech indicative of a noble heart; and an eponym for the French, who as Franci are francs (free, noble, etc.).^[128] The social semantics of franchise move between these significations, drawing together into a single etymological and semantic lineage nobility of birth and status, nobility of moral being associated with high birth (i.e., courage, pride, prowess, liberality, etc.), propriety of speech, free status, and ethnic identity. To be French is to claim a legacy of personal characteristics and of ethical and linguistic propriety that replicates the semantic lineage of franchise . Given that the medieval inflections of franchise are socially coded to the highest degree, the history of France's ancient struggle for franchise (liberty) becomes, in the Faits des Romains , the history of the nobility, embodying in the ancient past a range of authoritative meanings associated with franchise as the social attribute and social prerogative of a class destined by ancestry, moral attainment, and exemplary gestes to be the guardians of the nation's honor. In light of the semantic fluidity within franchise between the senses of status, freedom, and autonomy, the effect of the author's insistent representation of the Gallic struggle against Caesar as the struggle for liberty is to recode the ancient past of the Gauls as the story of aristocratic autonomy. Resistance to Roman domination constitutes a legacy authorizing resistance to any attempt, past or present, to deprive the nobility of their rightful spheres of autonomous action, whether political, territorial, or sociomoral. The history of French liberty validates the aristocracy's struggle to preserve its autonomy in the face of any and all threats from above, including those of present-day rulers, that seek to deprive it of the franchise that is the defining mark of its status and character as a social class.

If Vercingetorix himself is a problematic figure, inappropriate in the eyes of the thirteenth-century translator as a representative of the full conspectus of chivalric values, the significance of his deeds nonetheless adequately articulates the necessary relations, semantically embedded in the term franchise , among status, rights, property, propriety, and autonomy that the genetic logic of lineage in the Middle Ages associ-

ated with a "free" (franc ) nobility. In Drappés Brenno the author of the Faits des Romains was to find an opportunity to complete his vision of a "corrected past," and it is in this figure that the moral failings inherent in Vercingetorix are rectified.

The author interpolates the episode concerning Drappés Brenno between chapters 29 and 30 of Book 8, at the conclusion of the Gallic Wars , where it figures as the closing act of French resistance before the definitive submission of Gaul to Caesar. Placed after the defeat of Vercingetorix, as the climax of the Gallic struggle against the threat of subjugation to Rome, the interpolation revises and reverses the history of French defeat at the hands of the Romans, for it demonstrates the temporary character of that defeat and the undying fidelity to the pursuit of liberty that motivates French action.

The source of the episode is a passage in Hirtius's continuation of Caesar, in which he identifies Drappés as a Senonian who, at the first outbreak of the revolt in Gaul, "had collected desperadoes from anywhere and everywhere, calling slaves to liberty, summoning exiles from every state, and harboring brigands."^[129] From the perspective of the Latin text, then, Drappés is no more appropriate a bearer of the traditions of French chivalry than Vercingetorix. If anything, his host transgresses more profoundly the principal boundaries of class and "national" identity in medieval society, for whom few social distinctions were greater than the barriers separating those who were slave and free, or those who possessed membership in a legal community and those who did not. The fact that the translator selects Drappés rather than Vercingetorix as the "national" hero of the ancient "François" would seem to be due to Drappés's position at the conclusion of the narrative, where he serves as both the finale and the final word on the character and meaning of France's ancestral past. Thus, whereas the pejorative implications of Vercingetorix's assembled host of "poor, dispossessed, and indebted" followers are allowed to stand, the author completely rewrites the account of Drappés from the inside out, effacing any trace of social or martial disabilities in him or in the French warriors who joined his army.

In Hirtius's version, Drappés sought to invade Provence but was routed and imprisoned under the walls of Uxellodunum, where he died of starvation. Using Drappés's campaign as a narrative frame, the author of the Faits des Romains reverses the sequence of events and their meaning. The "defection" of the Gauls is converted to a war:^[130] the French campaign in Provence is answered by Caesar's in Sens, making French resistance to the Romans an act of defense. No longer

composed of liberated slaves, exiles, and brigands, Drappés's army is a proper host of soudoiers , which he amasses "de partout . . . de privez et d'estranges."^[131]

The battle between Drappés and Caesar is joined with all the traditional flourishes of epic encounters and, following the conventions of chansons de geste , takes the form of single combat. Caesar initiates the attack, hotly demanding engagement, while Drappés, equally avid for action, holds back in order to protect his host "come boens pastres qui se met entre les leus et ses oailles quant il les voit chacier" (like a good shepherd who places himself between the wolves and his sheep when he sees them being hunted). The pastoral metaphor places the leader of the Senonians within the traditions of Christian knighthood, whereas Caesar exhibits a rash and intemperate appetite for war, thereby, in Drappés's view, undermining the legitimacy of his lordship:

Huem qui vehe le cors a un seul chevalier ne doit terre tenir n'avoir droit en ost mener n'en chevalerie governer.^[132]

A man who charges against a single knight should not hold land nor have the right to lead the host or to govern chivalry.

A long and vividly recounted series of thrusts and counter-thrusts ensues. At one point, when Drappés removes with a single blow a part of Caesar's scalp, he mocks the Roman's baldness, enraging Caesar, "qui mout estoit irez quant il ooit ramentevoir sa chauveté, si fu molt eschaufez quant il oï l'eschar Drappés" (who was very angry when he saw his baldness revealed; and he became very heated when he heard Drappés's jeer). From that moment, Caesar determines to kill Drappés, "qui tant de mal li avoit fet" (who had done him so much harm).^[133] Whereas Drappés fights to protect his people and further the cause of French franchise , Caesar is driven by hatred of the enemy and a desire for revenge.

For once in this wholly fictitious account, the French remain undefeated. Instead, Caesar is captured and imprisoned in Sens. He is helped to escape by Cadorix, a knight of Melun who owed his life to Caesar, for Caesar had once protected him in the past when he led an embassy to Rome. In saving Caesar, Cadorix repays a debt of honor; his actions do not constitute a betrayal of the French, however unfortunate their consequences. And unfortunate they are, as Drappés recognizes:

"Eschapez m'est," dist Drappés, "par mescheance. Se il fust pris, tote France eüst sa franchise recovree."^[134]

"He escaped me," said Drappés, "by ill luck. If he had been taken, all France would have recovered her freedom."

Although Drappés endeavors to trick Caesar once more into capture, the effort fails. He and his companion Lucterius retreat from Sens, which is taken by Caesar and granted to Cadorix, whom Caesar designates as prince et seignor . Drappés is subsequently defeated at the siege of Alise (Uxellodunum) by Gaius Canines and taken prisoner. But even in defeat, he denies Caesar the final satisfaction of killing him. Rather than submit to Roman domination and vengeance, Drappés starves himself and, in a final act of self-mastery, "se lessa en ceste maniere de faim morir" (in this way let himself die of hunger).^[135]

Throughout the account, the author of the Faits des Romains emphasizes the chivalric qualities that make Drappés a worthy leader of the French and a fearless antagonist to Caesar. His prowess, heroism, and concern for his followers contrast sharply with the cruelty and démesure with which Caesar pursues him. The preservation of Gallic liberty is opposed to Roman ruthlessness, the national hero to the "bald" conqueror. The narrative leaves little room for doubt concerning the inherent justice of the French cause, and Drappés's final act of suicide, which replicates and exaggerates Vercingetorix's assumption of agency in surrender, leaves unresolved the question of whether the French, under suitable leadership, might have escaped subjection to Rome. It thus interrogates the whole structure of Caesar's text, with its implicit assumption of the legitimacy of Roman conquest over Gaul as a civilizing mission.

Drappés himself is endowed with an entirely new status and lineage, one that connects him to a long tradition of ancient and medieval resistance to Rome. He is the "sire of Sens," bons chevaliers et hardiz , a descendant of "Brenne le premerain" (a name retrieved either from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain or from Wace's Roman de Brut ),^[136]

dont tot li prince de Sens retenoient les nons, que chascuns avoit non Brenno, ci com cist Drappés Brenno, et li autre qui furent jusqu'au tens Artur; car veritablement cil Brenno qui fu au tens Artu ne fu pas li premerains dont la citez de Sens fu renomee, mes uns autres qui assist Rome et la prist jusqu'au Capitoile au tens Camillus qui fut conciles de Rome anois que Marius et Silla fussent.^[137] ç

of which all the princes of Sens kept the name, since each one had the name Brenno, like this Drappés Brenno, and the others who lived

up to the time of Arthur; for truly this Brenno who lived in Arthur's time was not the first, on account of whom the city of Sens was renowned, but the one who attacked Rome and took the city up to the Capitol in the time of Camillus who was consul of Rome before Marius and Sulla.

In Drappés is revived the spirit of the first "Brenne." Like the "Brenne" who preceded him and the "Brenne" who will come after him in the time of Arthur, he opposes Roman domination. The sword he wields is inherited from the first Brenne, founder of the line and conqueror of Rome, and with it he, like Arthur, is empowered to perform feats of bravery and prowess that fulfill the imperatives of his lineage. Even Caesar, engaged in mortal combat with the leader of the Senonians, recognizes the revival of ancestral fortitude in him, proclaiming:

En non Dieu, il samble que Brenno li premiers soit resucitez. Se cist vivoit longues, je cuit que il vodroit le Capitoile ancore asseoir une foiz.^[138]

In God's name, it seems as if Brenne the first were revived. If this one were to live a long life, I think that he would once again besiege the Capitol.

The associative logic of lineage here gathers into a single thread a tightly braided structure of argument. Drappés, as the lineal descendant of "Brenne le premerain," not only bears within him the moral and chivalric traditions of his own lineage, whose actions he replicates, but looks forward to "li autre Brenne," historically associated with Arthur, who similarly conducts a nearly successful campaign against the Roman emperor Lucius. The allusion to Brenne and Arthur in Drappés's fictionalized genealogy reinterprets Drappés's deeds in terms of the later working out of the historical precedents they embody, and associates with him the legitimacy and ideal value ascribed by medieval romance to Arthur's legendary realm. With the mention of the Arthurian world, the legitimizing process comes full circle; ancient and medieval pasts fuse through the workings of descent as two faces of a single history that constantly throw back their reflections to one another, multiplying, as in facing mirrors, the repeated images of the other. Because of this reciprocity of vision, the narrative of events is submitted to a process of reinterpretation in which meaning incessantly circulates within the enclosed reflexivity of past and present.

The authorial act of interpolation in the Faits des Romains represents an intervention in history. The anonymous writer's revision of

Caesar's text is also a re-visioning of the past in light of the present and generates the same circularity of inscribed meaning. As authorial heir to the Latin source he translates, he repositions himself with respect to the textual legacy that he is endeavoring to pass down to contemporary society; he textually enacts the process of mastery over the past achieved in the refiguration of ancient history in the image of chivalric society. The story of Drappés's resistance to Caesar, thus, functions simultaneously on a variety of literary, interpretive, and historiographical levels. It rectifies the legacy of the past as handed down in the Caesarian text; it reinscribes the past within the legitimizing ideology of genealogy; it refigures the past in the image of the present.

The revision of the past that the translator effects in his reworking of Caesar's text does not only affect the interpretation of the interpolated episode concerning Drappés Brenno; it carries over as well to the meaning of the Gallic wars in their entirety. The definitive submission of the Gauls following Drappés's suicide is revised to emphasize the continued independence of the French and their social and political parity with the Romans. Hirtius had stressed the ease with which Caesar secured his conquest of Gaul: "by addressing the states in terms of honor, by bestowing ample presents upon the chiefs, by imposing no new burdens, he easily kept Gaul at peace after the exhaustion of so many defeats, under improved conditions of obedience."^[139] The translator, in contrast, proclaims that Caesar's sole intent by these acts is to maintain the cities of France in peace and love.^[140] Caesar does not compel the surrender of the French princes; rather, he calls them together in council, where he speaks to them cortoisement and gives them riches dons as befits an ally. He acts, that is, like the ideal courtly ruler toward his princes, respectful of their rights and liberal with largesse, by means of which he legitimizes his rule. Instead of submitting to Caesar, the French voluntarily accede to his rule,

et por ce qu'il le troverent douz et debonaire et sanz grevement au derrien, il les tint assez plus legierement en pes.^[141]

and because they found him gentle and merciful and in the end without cause for blame, he maintained them all the more easily in peace.

French national honor and independence are preserved.

Ironically, the final narrative of the Faits des Romains calls into question the very basis of this historical scheme even as it unfolds. The textual revisions that the author imposes on the conclusion to the

Gallic wars profoundly contradict the overall thrust of the historiographical argument developed up to this point in the Old French translation. To the extent that the author of the Faits des Romains had "corrected" his Latin source in order to offer French history as the history of liberty, he had opposed to the French desire to maintain their franchise the ruthless ambition of the Romans and Caesar's insatiable appetite for territorial expansion. Although the narrative denouement preserves the "liberty" of the French by construing their surrender as an act of voluntary submission, it does so at the price of reconfiguring the image of Caesar, who emerges in this final act as a courtly ruler whom it is honorable to serve. The "voluntary" submission of Gaul becomes thereby an act of incorporation into the wider orbit of Rome, a position that conceptually undermines the idea of French freedom, unmasking it as the loss of autonomy.

By rewriting the final subjugation of the Gauls as an act of alliance, the author of the Faits des Romains creates an interpretive impasse, in which the contradictions generated by his narrative and ideological goals subvert the historical framework that he had elaborated. And this interpretive impasse discloses the discrepancies within aristocratic ideology itself between the desire for autonomy and the realities of monarchical government. As in the case of their ancient ancestors, the fiction of the nobles' voluntary adherence to royal authority, consented to in open council, seeks to mantle the deeper historical reality of decline and the necessity to submit to the centralizing policies of a newly powerful king. The fantasy of French franchise as a legacy of noble status, rights of lordship, and chivalric honor is fractured by the inconsistency entailed in its articulation. Casting French submission to Caesar as an act of voluntary self-surrender reveals the gap between ideological assertion and political reality.

The "corrected" past cannot, in the end, rectify the historical situation of the aristocracy, for it bears within it the same contradictions in ideology and aspirations. The alternative vision to an unpalatable present that the past re-visions merely reenacts the loss of autonomy and sense of alienation that it attempts, in vain, to dissimulate. The lack of coherence in the historical narrative discursively replicates the contradictions of aristocratic life and underscores the inability of history to recuperate a pristine state of aristocratic freedom and authority. The failure of the ancient past to overcome the burdens of the present betrays the limitations of history, just as the submission of the "Franois" to Roman domination bespeaks the impossibility of sustaining liberty in the face of superior force. The past cannot redeem

the present, for it is too deeply marred by the contradictions of the contemporary world. The redemptive language of history is condemned to repeat again and again the terms of its own failure. The writing of history is compromised by the very conditions of the possibility of its production. The vernacular history of France's ancient past, in the end, discloses the very brokenness of contemporary experience that it disavows.

In recounting the earliest struggles of the "Franois" to secure their existence within a historical space understood as France, the Faits des Romains functions equally as a "livre des origines," as Mireille Schmidt-Chazan has called it,^[142] ç and as the story of national resistance to illegitimate attempts by powerful rulers to restrict and undermine the natural, because ancient, freedom and autonomy of the "Françcois." Understood as an allegory of contemporary society, the message of the Faits des Romains is that aristocratic resistance to royal centralization is historically authorized as the principal means to preserve the liberty of the French people.

That the author of the Faits meant his history of France's ancient past to be read in this way is confirmed by his treatment of Caesar in the translation of Lucan's Pharsalia that follows the Gallic Wars . At the same time, the translation of Lucan, found also in Jean de Thuin's Hystore de Jules César , which uses the Faits des Romains but offers a strikingly different image of the Roman emperor, addresses the question of the role of the hero in history, a question central to chivalric ideology. To the degree that the chivalric past is a heroic past, the paradigmatic value of heroic deeds and figures was critical to the attempt to ground aristocratic ideology in a legitimizing and usable past. The heroic character of medieval chivalry emerges in the vernacular histories of the Faits des Romains and the Hystore de Jules César as a problem around which the sociomoral character of aristocratic life is both organized and interrogated. Thus, it is to the issue of the heroic in an-dent historiography that we must now turn.