Reading the “First Pagan Historiographer”: Dares Phrygius and Medieval Genealogy

Abstract

This article traces the medieval reception and transmission of pseudo-Dares Phrygius’s De excidio troiae historia, a late antique forgery long regarded as an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. By examining selected manuscripts of the De excidio, copied at the height of the text’s influence in twelfth-through fourteenth-century England, it considers the importance of codicological context in gauging the uses of spurious “ancient” materials in the Middle Ages. In particular, it examines how Dares served as a prologue to genealogical accounts of the “origins of peoples” or origines gentium, which chronicled the supposed Trojan antecedents of Franks, Britons, and other medieval gentes. Such codices speak to the varieties of classical historiography which flourished in the high and late medieval world, while highlighting how compilatory strategies fused hitherto disparate texts and traditions. Accordingly, this study explores how medieval genealogy repeatedly refashioned the classical tradition, both challenging and reaffirming its authority.