ABSTRACT
Chrétien de Troyes' second extant romance, Cligès, initially appears as a liminal work teetering between the epic battle scenes of its eleventh and twelfth-century predecessors, such as the Chanson de Roland 1 and the Siège de Barbastre, and a moral critique of the contemporary romance, Tristan et heult. A first reading of Cligès might even appear as a banal continuation of the themes and motifs so common to the literary stock of the chansons de geste and romances of Chretien's predecessors and contemporaries—such as the Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d'Enéas or the Chanson de Guillaume d'Orange—that it lacks innovation. Yet, this seemingly unoriginal and composite work—albeit poetically deft—contains, in subtle form, a slight shift in terms of the traditional stock of protagonists who, in Chretien's romance, become Greek, or almost so. Cligès is, in the final account, an oriental retelling of the medieval canons of Western European literature, and a veiled critique of the social and moral decadence of the twelfth-century.
