Penthesilea was an Amazonian queen in Greek mythology, the daughter of Ares and Otrera and the sister of Hippolyta, Antiope, and Melanippe. She assisted Troy in the Trojan War, during which she was killed by Achilles or Neoptolemus. The asteroid 271 Penthesilea, discovered in 1887, was named in her honor.
Briseis, also known as Hippodameia, is a significant character in the Iliad. Her role as a status symbol is at the heart of the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon that initiates the plot of Homer's epic. She was married to Mynes, a son of the King of Lyrnessus, until the Achaeans sacked her city and was given to Achilles shortly before the events of the poem. Being forced to give Briseis to Agamemnon, Achilles refused to reenter the battle.
Diomedes or Diomede is a hero in Greek mythology, known for his participation in the Trojan War.
Pandarus or Pandar is a Trojan aristocrat who appears in stories about the Trojan War.
According to the medieval poet Jean Bodel, the Matter of Rome is the literary cycle of Greek and Roman mythology, together with episodes from the history of classical antiquity, focusing on military heroes like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Bodel's division of literary cycles also included the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain. The Matter of Rome includes the Matter of Troy, consisting of romances and other texts based on the Trojan War and its legacy, including the adventures of Aeneas.
Cressida is a character who appears in many Medieval and Renaissance retellings of the story of the Trojan War. She is a Trojan woman, the daughter of Calchas, a Greek seer. She falls in love with Troilus, the youngest son of King Priam, and pledges everlasting love, but when she is sent to the Greeks as part of a hostage exchange, she forms a liaison with the Greek warrior Diomedes. In later culture she becomes an archetype of a faithless lover.
Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem, it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).
Troilus is a legendary character associated with the story of the Trojan War. The first surviving reference to him is in Homer's Iliad, composed in the late 8th century BC.
Ripheus was a Trojan hero and the name of a figure from the Aeneid of Virgil. A comrade of Aeneas, he was a Trojan who was killed defending his city against the Greeks. "Ripheus also fell," Virgil writes, "uniquely the most just of all the Trojans, the most faithful preserver of equity; but the gods decided otherwise". Ripheus's righteousness was not rewarded by the gods.
Benoît de Sainte-Maure was a 12th-century French poet, most probably from Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine near Tours, France. The Plantagenets' administrative center was located in Chinon, west of Tours.
There are a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Trojan War in literature and the arts.
Troilus and Cressida is the first of the two operas by William Walton, and was premiered in 1954. The libretto was by Christopher Hassall, his own first opera libretto, based on Geoffrey Chaucer's poem Troilus and Criseyde. Walton dedicated the score to his wife, Susana.
The Rawlinson Excidium Troie, discovered among the manuscripts collected by Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755) conserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is unique in that it contains the only medieval account of the Trojan War that is fully independent of Dictys and Dares, "strikingly different from any other known mediaeval version of the Trojan War", according to its editor, E. Bagby Atwood. Its discovery revealed a source for many details in medieval texts whose sources had been obscure, not appearing in the familiar Latin epitomes of the Iliad, through which Homer was transmitted to medieval culture, the Greek text being lost to Western Europe.
Le Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, probably written between 1155 and 1160, is a 30,000-line epic poem, a medieval retelling of the theme of the Trojan War. It inspired a body of literature in the genre called the roman antique, loosely assembled by the poet Jean Bodel as the Matter of Rome. The Trojan subject itself, for which de Sainte-Maure provided an impetus, is referred to as the Matter of Troy.
The Testament of Cresseid is a narrative poem of 616 lines in Middle Scots, written by the 15th-century Scottish makar Robert Henryson. It is his best known poem. It imagines a tragic fate for Cressida in the medieval story of Troilus and Criseyde which was left untold in Geoffrey Chaucer's version. Henryson's cogent psychological drama, in which he consciously resists and confronts the routine depiction of Cressida (Cresseid) as simply 'false', is one of the features that has given the poem enduring interest for modern readers and it is one of the most admired works of Northern Renaissance literature. A modern English translation by Seamus Heaney, which also included seven of Henryson's fables from The Morall Fabillis, was published in 2009.
Robert Kay Gordon (1887–1973) was an English scholar of medieval and early modern English literature and administrator at the University of Alberta in Canada.
Troy Book is a Middle English poem by John Lydgate relating the history of Troy from its foundation through to the end of the Trojan War. It is in five books, comprising 30,117 lines in ten-syllable couplets. The poem's major source is Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae.
The Face of Love is a 1954 BBC TV movie produced and directed by Alvin Rakoff, and adapted from Troilus and Cressida as a modern-language and modern-dress drama by Ian Dallas, a RADA graduate later better known as a scholar of sufism. This was only Dallas' second play, but won him a contract with BBC, where he stayed till the mid-60s. The 90-minute drama was broadcast on October 5.
The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida, often shortened to Troilus and Cressida ), is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1602.
Pandrasus is the fictional king of Greece and father of Innogen in Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-history Historia Regum Britanniae.
