Rawlinson Excidium Troie

The Rawlinson Excidium Troie is a medieval manuscript preserved among the Richard Rawlinson collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is notable for presenting a version of the Trojan War that is fully independent of the accounts by Dictys and Dares, and has been described as strikingly different from any other known medieval version. The text consists of eight and a half folios written in a fine late thirteenth-century hand, forming part of a volume of fragments collected by Peter Le Neve. Two-thirds of the manuscript is a condensed epitome of the Aeneid, while the opening third contains a history of the Trojan War from the marriage of Thetis to the building of the Trojan Horse, set in a question-and-answer format. Its editor, E. Bagby Atwood, concluded that the work is a recension of a considerably older Latin chronicle, possibly as early as the Augustan age.