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Sébastien Peyrard
Who was Simon Aurea Capra? We know very little from this mid-12th century Latin poet, apart from the scarce information provided by the manuscripts. Simon was known enough in his own time to be chosen for writing the epitaphia of Suger, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Queen Constance of Castille and others. He wrote a seminal poem, the "Ilias", in two versions. The shorter one rewrites the "Ilias" and the "Aeneid" in 432 lines, and was dedicated to Henry I, count of Champagne, while the longer one (994 lines) was written later when Simon was a canon at Saint-Victor of Paris. This paper tries to show that the poetical project behind the "Ilias" was grounded in its own time, while remaining profoundly original.
The "cognomen" of the poet itself, «Aurea Capra» or «Golden Goat», embodies the very nature of its stylistical project, when the Goat refers to "brevitas", or concision, while the Gold refers to the brilliance of the style. Simon indeed overloads its elocutio with rhetorical figures, which is typical of the poetical revolution of the Latin mid-12th century, while remaining starkly brief. The article illustrates this dual aspect with quotations from the "Ilias", and also points out a colourful pose of a medieval poet that puts the mythological material at a playful distance.
This text in its short version has been seminal in the Middle Ages as is shown by the manuscript tradition and literary influence across Europe. Some areas remain open to further research, notably comparisons of the text with the medieval visual arts.
