Wallace has recently characterised Alceste's plea for mercy on the poet's behalf as ‘the first sustained attempt in English to represent the delicate art of addressing a lord who is imagined to embody (or imagines himself as embodying) absolute power’. Although made up of medieval political commonplace, the speech gives evidence of Chaucer's broad familiarity with the different strands of the tradition of the de regimine principum. There are at least three significant groups of texts which influence late medieval English writing in a political vein. One of the most popular was the Secretum Secretorum, a pseudo-Aristotelian work ultimately of Arabic origin and much enjoyed in England; this is a brief work, rather gnomic in character, which deals with matters of science and hygiene as well as political advice. Secondly, there were the medieval works that genuinely derive from Aristotle's political thinking, of which the most influential was the De Regimine Principum of Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus); it was long, dry, schematic, repetitive, short on imaginative appeal, but highly prestigious. There was, thirdly, an older tradition of literature advising rulers, such as the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, which called on a hoard of exemplary material drawn from classical and Biblical sources.