Deception and Ambush

A curious but salutary adjunct to the wresting of authorship of the Poema de Mio Cid from the oral tradition, and its subsequent attribution to an educated clerk, specifically of the legal profession, has been heightened attention to the substance of the poem and to the realization of its poetic art. It is a far cry, indeed, from Menendez Pidal's blanket assumption of traditionality of the art and historicity of the events to Colin Smith's insistence on a learned author and, later, his determined attack on the more stubborn and widespread belief that the events of the poem are historically accurate. Focussing, in a recent effort, on the capture of Castej6n and Alcocer,l he first applies final blows to the dead horse of historicity (some twenty years before, Peter Russell had removed the last traces of reasonable evidence that the battle of Alcocer, at least, can be equated with any known events at any identifiable place2), and then uses exploded historicity as a pretext for seeking (and finding) literary sources for the two episodes. The awful fate of those who seek sources is, of course, that they find them: Smith first detects (with at least a degree of scholarly caution because of the manifest verbal dissimilarities) what he regards as significant parallels between the events at Castej6n and similar ones described in Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum; he then proceeds to declare categorically that the taking of Alcocer is based on a particular section of the Strategemata of Frontinus

Deception · Archaeological and Historical Studies · Classical Studies and Legal History · Medieval Iberian Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

• La acción como forma religiosa en el Poema de Mio Cid

  Jose Terradas, José Carlos Terradas•Modern Language Notes•2013

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