CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND ART 683FRANCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIESThe great dramas of the French Renaissance were founded on classical sources,
although their themes were more often taken from Roman history than from
mythology. Thus Gamier (1534-1590) wrote tragedies on the themes of Phaedra
(Hippolyte) and Antigone (Antigone). The first tragedy of Corneille (1606-1684)
was Médée (1635), and Racine (1639-1699) likewise wrote his first tragedy, La
Thébaide (1664), on a theme drawn from classical mythology, the legend of the
Seven against Thebes. His Andromaque (1667) deals with the legend of Andro-
mache and Pyrrhus, with the significant variation that Astyanax is supposed to
have survived the fall of Troy. By far the greatest of Racine's mythological
tragedies is Phèdre (1677), based largely on the Hippolytus of Euripides and the
Phaedra of Seneca.
Classical mythology was the principal source for court entertainments un-
der Louis XIV and Louis XV, whose reigns spanned the period from 1643 to
- In these productions members of the court appeared as mythological be-
ings or as characters from classical pastoral poetry. They included music and
dancing as well as words, and they were performed in elaborate settings, often
designed by the most prominent artists of the day. They were operas, in which
the singing predominated, or court ballets, in which dancing was more promi-
nent. The earliest French opera was Pomone, by Robert Cambert, produced in - Ovid's legend of Pomona and Vertumnus was one of many classical tales
used by court composers (including the great French masters Lully and
Rameau) for their operas and court ballets. Toward the end of the long reign
of Louis XV, critics such as Denis Diderot attacked the frivolity of such artifi-
cial productions and related works of art such as the mythological paintings of
François Boucher (see Color Plate 15). Their opinions helped turn contempo-
rary taste toward the high seriousness of historical subjects (drawn especially
from Roman Republican history as portrayed by Livy and Plutarch) and away
from mythology.
The burlesques of Paul Scarron (1610-1660) comically deflated the preten-
tions of classical epic and mythology. The best known of these was his unfin-
ished parody of the Aeneid, Virgile Travesti. Scarron was a serious writer, and he
was most unfortunately imitated in a host of tasteless and less skillful travesties
in England.
Classical mythology was also the basis of important French prose works, of
which the most significant was the Télémaque of Francois Fénelon (1651-1715),
a didactic romance published in 1699. The basis of this work is the first four
books of the Odyssey, in which Telemachus, accompanied by Minerva, travels
from Ithaca in search of Ulysses. Into these adventures were worked Fénelon's
moral and political precepts.
Classical mythology, therefore, had been an inseparable part of French liter-
ary and artistic life in the two centuries before the French Revolution. By then it