Argus and Argyve: Etymology and Characterization in Chaucer's Troilus

Abstract

WHEN Criseyde first contemplates the prospect of separation from Troilus, she curses both her father, Calchas, for arranging her impending removal to the Greek camp, and the day on which her mother, Argyve, gave birth to her (IV, 761-763). Neither Boccaccio's Filostrato nor Benoit's Roman de Troie, Chaucer's major sources for his Troilus and Criseyde, includes the heroine's curse of her birth day, and neither makes mention of her mother. Successive editors of Troilus, Professors Skeat, Root, and Robinson, suggest that Chaucer's Argyve is a medievalized form of Argia, the name of Polynices' wife.' This assumed correspondence is no doubt correct, for in Cassandra's later summary of the events of Statius's Thebaid, Argyve appears as the name of Polynices' lamenting wife (V, 1509), while its equivalent in the Latin argument accompanying Cassandra's summary is Argia.2 But none Qf these editors finds any clear reason for Chaucer's selection of this particular name for Criseyde's mother, and one must wonder why he risked possible confusion on his audience's part between Calchas's wife, Argyve, and Polynices' wife, Argyve. I will suggest below that Chaucer invented a literary mother for his heroine and re-used the name Argyve for her because he saw in the medieval etymology of this personal name the opportunity to create in one word a character with some personality or meaning of her own, to create a most appropriate mate for the shrewd Calchas, and to create a highly ironic mother for the improvident Criseyde. Furthermore, in this and other uses of etymology in his Troilus, Chaucer shows awareness of and puts to poetic use contemporary linguistic theories of the origin of words and the nature of language itself.3 The pseudo-Fulgentian Super Thebaidem, a brief moral allegory of the