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- LUCRECE 9
Classical authorities.
accuses contemporary poets in his *Sonnets*. Ingenuity was wasted in devising ‘what strained touches rhetoric could lend’ to episodes capable of narration in plain words. There is much in the poem which might be condemned in the poet’s own terminology as the ‘helpless smoke of words’.
## II
The theme of Shakespeare’s poem was nearly as well-worn in the literature of Western Europe as that of his first poem *Venus and Adonis*. For more than twenty centuries before Shakespeare was born, the tale of Lucrece was familiar to the western world. Her tragic fate was the accepted illustration of conjugal fidelity, not only through the classical era of Roman history, but through the Middle Ages. The hold that the tale had taken on the popular imagination of Europe survived the Renaissance, and was stimulated by the expansion of interest in the Latin classics.
Among Latin classical authors the story was told in fullest detail by Livy in his *History of Rome* (Bk. i, c. 57–9). Ovid in his poetic *Fasti* (ii. 721–852) gave a somewhat more sympathetic version of the same traditional details which Livy recorded. The main outlines of the legend figured, too, without variation in the contemporary Greek historians, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus, and in their successor, Dio Cassius, as well as in the work of a later Latin historian, Valerius Maximus.’
Dionysius alone tells the story at length. The other writers narrate it very briefly. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, *Antiquitatum Romanarum quae supersunt*, ed. Riessling, vol. ii, Leipzig, 1864; Dio Cassius, *Historia Romana*, ed. Melber, vol. ii, x. 12–18, Leipzig, 1890; Diodorus Siculus, *Bibliotheca Historica*, ed. Dindorf, vol. ii, lib. x. 20–21, Leipzig, 1867; and Valerius Maximus, *Facta et Dicta Memorabilia*, vi. 1. 1. In three papers on Shakespeare’s poem—*Shakespeare’s Lucrece. Eine litterarhistorische Untersuchung*,—which appeared in *Anglia*, Band xxii, pp. 1–32, 343–63, 393–455 (Halle, 1899),
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