[Sidenote: Was Polo's Book Materially Affected By The Scribe Rusticiano?]

72. A question naturally suggests itself, how far Polo's narrative, at least in its expression, was modified by passing under

The pen of a professed litterateur of somewhat humble claims, such as Rusticiano was. The case is not a singular one, and in our own day the ill-judged use of such assistance has been fatal to the reputation of an adventurous Traveller.

We have, however, already expressed our own view that in the Geographic Text we have the nearest possible approach to a photographic impression of Marco's oral narrative. If there be an exception to this we should seek it in the descriptions of battles, in which we find the narrator to fall constantly into a certain vein of bombastic commonplaces, which look like the stock phrases of a professed romancer, and which indeed have a strong resemblance to the actual phraseology of certain metrical romances.[15] Whether this feature be due to Rusticiano I cannot say, but I have not been able to trace anything of the same character in a cursory inspection of some of his romance-compilations. Still one finds it impossible to conceive of our sober and reticent Messer Marco pacing the floor of his Genoese dungeon, and seven times over rolling out this magniloquent bombast, with sufficient deliberation to be overtaken by the pen of the faithful amanuensis!

[Sidenote: Marco's reading embraced the Alexandrian Romances. Examples.]

73. On the other hand, though Marco, who had left home at fifteen years of age, naturally shows very few signs of reading, there are indications that he had read romances, especially those dealing with the fabulous adventures of Alexander.

To these he refers explicitly or tacitly in his notices of the Irongate and of Gog and Magog, in his allusions to the marriage of Alexander with Darius's daughter, and to the battle between those two heroes, and in his repeated mention of the Arbre Sol or Arbre Sec on the Khorasan frontier.

The key to these allusions is to be found in that Legendary History of Alexander, entirely distinct from the true history of the Macedonian Conqueror, which in great measure took the place of the latter in the imagination of East and West for more than a thousand years. This fabulous history is believed to be of Graeco-Egyptian origin, and in its earliest extant compiled form, in the Greek of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, can be traced back to at least about A.D. 200. From the Greek its marvels spread eastward at an early date; some part at least of their matter was known to Moses of Chorene, in the 5th century;[16] they were translated into Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac; and were reproduced in the verses of Firdusi and various other Persian Poets; spreading eventually even to the Indian Archipelago, and finding utterance in Malay and Siamese. At an early date they had been rendered into Latin by Julius Valerius; but this work had probably been lost sight of, and it was in the 10th century that they were re-imported from Byzantium to Italy by the Archpriest Leo, who had gone as Envoy to the Eastern Capital from John Duke of Campania.[17] Romantic histories on this foundation, in verse and prose, became diffused in all the languages of Western Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, rivalling in popularity the romantic cycles of the Round Table or of Charlemagne.

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