ABSTRACT
The relationship of medieval English literature to classical authors was of tradition rather than translation. The surviving fragment of the translation represents the more elaborate of two versions of the story popular throughout the European Middle Ages and through most European languages. The manuscript is of the mid-eleventh century, and the translation may have been made half a century earlier. In the century following the Norman Conquest translation from Latin into the verna cular lapsed. The principal evidence in favour of the latter — the existence in the text of alternative translations — really points the other way. For the first translation is regularly literal and ambiguous, the second clearer and more idiomatic. In most modern translators, or indeed in most stylists other than Geoffrey Chaucer, this might point to an intention to substitute the second rendering for the first. But when one considers the habitual and delighted irony of Chaucer's own natural style, the case is reversed.
