The first volume of Les histoires de Paul Crose traduites en français contains a free and amplified version of the Thebes. The Thebes is preserved also in several French prose redactions, the first of which, printed in the 16th century under the name of Edipus, belongs to the early years of the 13th century, and originally formed part of a compilation of ancient history, Histoire ancienne jusqu'à Caesar.

It was once attributed to Benoît de Sainte-Maure but all that can be said is that the Thebes is prior to the Roman de Troie, of which Benoît was undoubtedly the author. 1150-55), and is written, not in the tirades of the chansons de geste, but in octosyllabic rhymed couplets. The Roman dates from the 12th century (c. This view is supported by the omission of incidents and details which, in spite of the altered conditions under which the poem was composed, would naturally have been preserved in any imitation of the Thebaid, while again certain modifications of the version of Statius can hardly be due to the author's invention but point to an ancient origin.Īs in other poems of the same kind, the marvellous disappears the Greeks adopt the French methods of warfare and the French code of chivalric love. The Romance of Thebes ( Le Roman de Thèbes) is a poem of some 10,000 lines that appears to be based on an abridged version of the Thebaid of Statius.

Roots of To-Be Templars by Widad Akreyi