The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.146

c10.s2.146

⁵ *The Knight’s Tale* l. 1298. The affinity of some of Chaucer’s Tales with Indian stories is notorious: the last section of the *Pardoner’s Tale* is the *Vedabha Jātaka*, though Chaucer cannot have known the Indian story (see the ed. of 1929 by A. W. Pollard and M. M. Barber, Introduction pp. viii–xi; H. T. Francis, *The Vedabha Jātaka* compared with the *Pardoner’s Tale* 1884); for the literature on the Indian and Chinese analogies to the *Franklin’s Tale* see J. Schick, *Studia Indo-Iranica, Ehrengabe für W. Geiger* 1931 p. 89. But the lineage of *The Knight’s Tale* (see A. W. Pollard’s ed. of 1903) goes back through Boccaccio’s *Teseïde* to Statius, and Boccaccio does not mention Emetrius; and Chaucer’s phrase in the preceding line, 1297, ‘in stories as men fynde’, is said to be his way of mystifying his readers as to his source. Seemingly he has succeeded.