Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars

Abstract

The ‘story’ in The Complaint of Mars of Mars’s love for Venus is usually said to be taken from Ovid’s account of how Vulcan surprised the lovers at the instigation of the Sun (Metamorphoses, iv, 171–89). Ovid’s amusing anecdote was undoubtedly the main source of this information in the Middle Ages. But the story was also treated by astrologising mythographers. The earliest of these known to the Middle Ages was Hyginus, who drew on Greek sources now lost. He probably lived in the second century Al) but was for long confused with the librarian and freedman of Augustus of the same name. In his Poetica Astronomica he refers to the planet Mars, and to Mars’s love for Venus, thus:

Tertia [i.e. planeta] est stella Martis, quam alii Herculis dixerunt, Veneris sequens stellam; hac (ut Eratosthenes ait) de causa: Quod Vulcanus cum uxorem Venerem duxisset, et propter eius observantium Marti eius copia non fieret, ut nihil aliud assequi videretur, nisi sua stella Veneris sidus persequi a Venere impetravit. Itaque cum vehementer eum amor incenderet, rem significans, e facto stellam Pyroenta appellavit.¹

It is to be noted that Hyginus calls Mars the ‘third planet’, which may have suggested Chaucer’s reference to Mars as ‘the thridde hevenes lord’ (Complaint, 29), for the usual though not the only method of numbering the heavens was from the earth outward, which makes the third heaven that of Venus.

First published in N & Q, 199 (1954) 462–3.