ABSTRACT
There are six romances in Greek written before the sixteenth century which were translated more or less closely from Western originals. The term 'romances of chivalry', commonly applied today to all the later Greek romances, can only properly be applied to this group (and even here with the exception of Apollonios ).1 Although not unknown to the authors of the original romances, as we shall see in the next chapter, the world of Western chivalry first enters the Greek romance around the year 1350, when the compendious Roman de Troie by Benoit de Saint-Maure was translated into Greek.2 There is an interesting irony here, in that the chivalric world of the medieval West first became known to Greek readers through a work which had in its turn superimposed the manners of this world upon an ancient Greek story.3 Nor is this merely a random curiosity of literary history: as we shall see, the Greek translators of Western romances were highly selective in the originals they chose to translate, and all their sources have some sort of connection with the fictional or historical world of older Greek literature.
