ἐρωτοπαιδευμένος, and he who denies its claims is χωρικός—rustic or provincial.
The Erotokratia of this poem cannot fail to remind us of the close, surrounded by castled walls, in the Romance of the Rose. It, too, is a dream-castle, peopled with allegorical figures; the dreamer, like Lybistros, is a scorner of Love, and like him makes complete submission to the god. This mansion, in which Love dwelled, was not an invention of the thirteenth-century poet William de Lorris. He owed it, as M. Langlois has shown, to older poems in which a garden and palace of Love were described, especially the fableau of Dieu d'amours and the Altercation of Phyllis and Flora; and in the Dieu d'amours, as in Lybistros and the Romance of the Rose, the divine place is seen in a dream. These works establish that the idea of a beautiful dwelling of Love appeared in French literature in the twelfth century:[1] But we may safely say that this idea did not travel from the West to the East. The courts to which Belthandros wandered, and of which Lybistros dreamed, have no features which a Greek poet need have looked abroad
- ↑ M. Langlois thinks that the idea was suggested by lines of
Tibullus (i. 3, 58):—
Ipsa Venus campos ducet in Elysios.
hic choreae cantusque uigent passimque uagantes
dulce sonant tenui gutture carmen aues, &c.Compare, in the Altercatio Phyllidis et Florae,
sonant omnes uolucrum linguae uoce plena, &c.
I may point out, as some support for the conjecture, that in the Dieu d'amours Love's abode is called Champ fleuri. Now, in Floire et Blanceflor, when Floire supposes that Blanceflor is dead, he says (l. 777):
M'ame la m'amie sivra,
En camp-flori la trovera
Ou el queut encontre moi flors.This perhaps supplies the link.
