settings
Middlemarch vocabulary
10 mythology vocabulary words
help & settings
[x]
-
Cressida
-
synonyms: Cresseid, Criseyde ???
tags: [mythology]
► definition
Definition:a Trojan woman, the daughter of Calchas, a Greek seer. She falls in love with Troilus, the youngest son of King Priam, and pledges everlasting love, but when she is sent to the Greeks as part of a hostage exchange, she forms a liaison with the Greek warrior Diomedes.Cressida has most often been depicted by writers as "false Cressida", a paragon of female inconstancy. As soon as she has betrayed Troilus, she has fulfilled her purpose and the men who have written about her do not mention her again. Such is the case in Benoît, Guido, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Chaucer's poem, however, at least portrays a more sympathetic Criseyde showing a self-conscious awareness of her literary status: "Alas, of me until the world's end shall be wrote no good song".text: from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike
image: by Thomas Kirk, public domain
► uses
Uses:
though Aeneas were too fickle to Dido, yet Troilus was too faithful to Cressida
John Lyly. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)
---
"He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it were otherwise—that I could beat him while he railed at me.—"—Troilus and Cressida.
George Eliot. Middlemarch
help with search