The Fourth Temple of The Knight’s Tale: Athenian Clemency and Chaucer’s Theseus

The Fourth Temple of The Knight's Tale: Athenian Clemency and Chaucer's Theseus David Anderson University ofPennsylvania Te Latin epigraph to The Knight) 'Jide, "lamque domo, pa­ trias,..." which also appears at the beginning of Anelida and Arcite, comes from the middle of the last book of Statius's Thebaid, a part of the epic which enjoyed notoriety in late-medieval literary culture and which Chaucercertainly knew verywell. Lookingbackabouteightylinesfromthe verses he cites, we find the description ofthe funeral pyre ofEteocles and Polynices, imitated by Dante in the contending flames of Ulysses and Diomede, and by Chaucer in the altar flames of Diana's "oratorie"(KnT 2331ff.).1 Looking ahead a few hundred lines to the end of Statius's epic, we find the envoy that Chaucer imitates at the end ofhis Trozlus. Chaucer's description of Theseus's triumphal return to Athens at the beginning of TheKnight's Taleis based directly on Statius's text as well as the elaboration of it in Boccaccio's Teseida.2 In the Thebaid the verse paragraph immediately preceding "Iamque domos patrias..."is a thirty-eight-line description ofthe temple ofClem­ entia, that "temple of the goddesse Clemence" which stands in The Knight's Tale as well, in the background of Theseus's encounter with the 1 In his description of the flames on Diana's altar, Chaucer follows Boccaccio, Teseida 7.91-92, who had conflated Thebazd 4.443ff. (Manto's rites), 10.597ff. (the sacrifice of Menoeceus), and perhaps 12.430ff. (the funeral pyre ofPolynices and Eteocles), with Inferno 26.85-89 and 13.40ff. 2 Fully demonstrated by B. A. Wise, The Influence o/Statius upon Chaucer(Ba!timore, Md.: Furst, 1911), pp. 46ff., who concludes: "In the Tesezde II.13-80, Boccaccio follows Statius, Thebaid XII.94-808 rather closely, all the essential elements of his account being drawn from his original. Chaucer, while writing the corresponding portion of the Knight's Tale(A. 893-996), evidently had Statius open before him.... He combined the same sources in the introduction to the Anelzda, where he follows Statius much more closely than here in the Knight's Tale" (p. 47). 113 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS Argive widows. Statius's lengthy ekphrasis plays an important role in the conclusion of the epic, for it describes a potential in human thought and deed which promises some remedy for that strife (acies) the poem takes as its subject. It is at the temple of Clementia, Statius tells us, that Oedipus wassheltered in his old age. Here his impiousdesire forrevenge on hissons, which had opened the narrative twelve books earlier, was finally overcome. Theseus, who now appears in conjunction with the temple, will embody this spiritual abstraction. He is not only forgiving with the Argive widows but the agent by which the long cycle ofrevenge at Thebes is brought to an end, for the corpses ofthe Greeks have been exposed by Creon to spite the vanquished, an act of political malice promising to extend the strife between Argos and Thebes into another generation. Chaucer's Thebazdwas not, ofcourse, the same as ours, in the sense that his reading wasmediatedby differentfashions ofliterary analysis and even by a differentphysicalpresentation ofthetext, so that wewouldnot want to assume haphazardly that a modern understanding ofthe temple ofClem­ entia was necessarily his as well. But a number of external considerations suggest that Chaucer would have thought the description especially note­ worthy and even suggest the way he may have been disposed to view it, while the text ofThe Knight's Tale reveals the influence of Statius's descrip­ tion at a number of places. The temple of Clementia frequently attracted explanatory glosses in the later Middle Ages, and it enjoyed a kind of independent life of its own, outside the text of the Latin epic.3 Especially for Chaucer, who knew Dante's presentation of Statius in the Purgatorio (cantos 21-22) as a "concealed Christian" baptized after hearing the Apos­ tles preach and while he was in the midst of composing the Thebaid, the Latin poet's handling of temples and the old gods would have offered a heightened interest, just as it did for some of his contemporaries who...