Lavinia and Beatrice: The Second Half of the "Aeneid" in the Middle Ages
Author(s): David Scott Wilson-Okamura
Source: Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, No. 119 (2001), pp. 103124
Published by: Dante Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40166614 .
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Laviniaand Beatrice:
The Second Half of the
Aeneidin the Middle Ages
DAVID SCOTT WILSON-OKAMURA
What key wordcan onefind in the Divine Comedy
that is absentfrom the Aeneid? . . . The term . . . is
amor. It is, aboveall others, the key wordfor Dante.
. . . Certainly,the love of Aeneas and Dido has great
tragicforce. But Love is nevergiven, to my mind, the
same significanceas a principleof orderin the human
soul, in societyund in the universethat pietas is given;
and it is not Love that causesfatum, or movesthe sun
and the stars. . . . Vergilwas, among all authorsof
classicalantiquity,onefor whom the worldmadesense,
for whom it had orderand dignity,andfor whom, asfor
no one beforehis time exceptthe Hebrewprophets,history had meaning. But he was denied the vision of the
man who couldsay: l 'Within its depthsI saw ingathered,boundby love in one volume,the scatteredleavesof
all theuniverse.Legato con amore in un volume."
- T. S. Eliot, "Virgiland the ChristianWorld"
did Virgil mean to Dante?1 The question is usually posed
at one of two levels. The first is directed at the level of the
text, and takes the form of commentary on a particularreference or allusion. What does it mean, for instance, when Dante frames his
initial response to Beatrice- "conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma" (Purg.
30:48) - in language that recalls Dido's incipient love for Aeneas: "Agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae" (Aen. 4:23)? The answer to this kind of
103
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
question, as Christopher Kleinhenz points out in another context, "depends ultimately on whether we believe Dante wanted us to understand
Virgil's verses in their original context or out of it."2 This is the first level.
The second operates at one or two removes from the text, and evaluates
the cumulative effect of allusion and characterization. What does Virgil
represent? To what end is his authority diminished over the course of
Dante's poem?3 Why is Virgil damned?4And how does Dante engage our
sympathy on his behalf?5 At this level, the allusive presence of Virgil's
poetry coalesces with the personaggioof its author, and becomes at once a
father-figure that threatens to curtail the new poet's independence unless
it is deposed,6 and an embodiment of the achievements and limitations of
classical culture.
But there is a third kind of question, and one that is seldom asked. Not
"What did Dante do to Am. 4:23 in Purg. 30:48?" Not even "What did
Virgil mean to Dante?" But rather, "What did Dante think Virgil meantT
How, to be blunt, did he construe Virgil's intention?7
To be sure, we do know something of how Dante used the Aeneid to
justify the ideology of empire.8 We know that Dante's Statius used Virgil's
Fourth Eclogue to become a Christian, finding in that poem hints of the
true religion which were hidden from the author himself.9 We also know
that Dante deliberately "misread" parts of Virgil's epic, appropriating it
to his own ends.10
There is a distinction to be made, however, between final product and
raw material, between the reappropriation of classical poetry (what
Thomas Greene has called heuristic imitation)11and the exegetical act that
precedes it. We usually go about defining this difference by measuring the
distance between the text of the Commedia(the final product of Dante's
labor) and the text of Virgil (his putative source). In doing so, however,
we make a tacit assumption, namely, that we are reading the same Aeneid
that Dante read. The problem with this assumption is not just that no one
has ever established the state of Virgil's text in Trecento Italy (though
scholars who cite Virgil from modern editions like the Loeb would do
well to acknowledge this difference, as well).12 My point, rather, is that
even if we did share a common text with Dante, we cannot take a common interpretation of that text for granted, as if the meaning of Virgil's
text were transparent as well as transcendent, a fixed point of reference
that will yield itself up to us, more or less as it yielded itself up to Dante, if
only we are patient and receptive. Too often, we discount this interpretive
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Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
distance, and when we do the result is predictable: instead of comparing
Dante with Virgil, we compare Dante with whatever interpretation of
Virgil happens to be current with our colleagues in Classics.
The kind of distortion that this produces is unfortunately not hard to
illustrate. In MonarchiciII.ix.21, Dante says that the Roman empire was
established by Aeneas in "trial by combat" (duellum)with Turnus.13According to Robert Hollander, this proves that Dante regarded the Aeneid
as a tragedy. "Dante," he writes,
noticesthatAeneas,moved by dementia,almostsparesTurnus,but then killshim,
"ut ultimacarminanostriPoete testantur."That the work ends with a deathand
that Roman history will continue with many another such duellum("Et iam
manifestumest quod Romanuspopulusper duellumacquisivitImperium". . .)
probablyindicatethatDante thought of the Aeneidas tragic.14
This has been the standard (American) reading of the Turnus episode for
thirty years or so.15 Hollander's citation is selective, however, and misses
the thrust of Dante's argument. The fiali text of the sentence Hollander
cites here reads as follows:
Et iam manifestumest quod romanuspopulusper duellumacquisivitImperium:
ergo de iure acquisivit;quod est principalepropositumin libro presenti.(Mon.
II.ix.21) [And now it is clear that the Roman people acquired the Empire
throughtrialby combat:thereforethey acquiredit by right,which is the principal
thesisof the presentbook.]
Per duellumacquivisitImperium:ergode iureacquivisit.This last phrase, which
Hollander omits, borders on jingoism; in any case, it is hardly the stuff of
tragedy. As for the hero's dementia,Dante brings it up here, not (as Hollander's paraphrasesuggests) in order to lament the fact that it failed to
save Turnus' life, but in order to compliment Aeneas on his merciful
disposition:
In quo quidem agone tantavictoris Enee dementia fiiit, ut nisi balteus,quern
TurnusPallantia se occiso detraxerat,patuissset,vieto victorsimulvitamcondonassetet pacem, ut ultimacarminanostriPoete testantur.(Mon.II.ix.14) [Indeed,
so greatwas the mercy of Aeneas,the victor in this struggle,that, had the baldric
which Turnusstrippedfrom the corpse of Pallasnot appeared,the conqueror
would have grantedlife as well as peace to the conquered,as the final versesof
our Poet testify.]
105
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
The encomiastic tendency of this last statement is unmistakeable. How
great was the mercy of Aeneas? It was so great that ... he almost spared
his helpless rival. Not a hint of regret, much less tragedy.
Dante, it would seem, has not been reading Virgil's American critics
after all. Instead, he has been reading the ancient grammarian Servius (fl.
C.E. 500), whose popular commentary on the Aeneid has this to say about
the poem's ending:
omnis intentio ad Aeneae pertinet gloriami nam et ex eo quod hosti cogitat
parcere,pius ostenditur,et ex eo quod eum interimit,pietatisgestatinsigne:nam
Euandriintuitu Pallantisulcisciturmortem.16[both intentionsfurtherthe glory
of Aeneas:insofaras he considerspardoninghis enemy, he is shown to be pius;
likewise he bearsthe markof pittasfor killing [Turnus],in that he avengesthe
deathof Pallasout of regardfor [hisfather]Evander.]
Pius if you do, pius if you don't - the commentary on our own lives
should be so generous! Apparently, though, it really is the thought that
counts: ultimately, the hero's obligation to the dead boy's father outweighs his impulse to leniency, but the vengeful deed does not cancel the
compassionate inclination.
Dante's debt to Servius is well-established,17 but generally neglected.
This is unfortunate, because (as this example suggests) reading Servius is
one way, not only to avoid anachronistic readings, but to reconstruct
the
context
for
Dante's
encounter
with
the
Antext.
interpretive
Virgilian
other commentary that Dante may, or may not, have known is the one
usually attributed to Bernardus Silvestris (d. ca. 1160). David Thompson
thinks Dante knew (and used) the Bernardus commentary,18as does Maria
Corti.19 Hollander, by contrast, admits that Dante may have known the
Bernardus commentary, but maintains that he abandoned the allegorical
approach it represents when he stopped working on the Convivio;Ulrich
Leo adopts a similar position.20 But my concern in this essay is not with
the allegorical tradition as such.21 Instead, I would like to approach
Dante's interpretation of the Aeneid by a more prosaic route: how much
of Virgil's poem did Dante actually assimilate?
From the time of Servius onward, critics have traditionally divided
Virgil's epic into two parts: Odyssean wanderings in the first half, and
Iliadic wars in the second. The Odyssean section culminates in Book 6
with a journey to the underworld, the Iliadic section in Book 12 with the
death of Turnus. As a group, medieval readers tended to focus on the
106
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
Odyssean half at the expense of the Iliadic. In short, they were six-book
readers, not twelve-book readers.
Chaucer's synopsis of the poem (in the House of Fame) is typical in this
respect: Books 1 through 6 are summarized in 310 lines, Books 7 through
12 in 15 lines, or just under five percent of the total.22If we look at the
commentaries that probably underlie this reading of the epic, we find a
similar situation. The most famous of these, that of Bernardus Silvestris,
interprets Virgil's poem as an allegorical description of the ages of man,
beginning with infancy, moving on to childhood, adolescence, manhood,
and finally wisdom. This final stage in human development is symbolized,
among other things, by the hero's acquisition of the golden bough. Normally, this would be the climax of the story, but since the golden bough
appears at the midpoint of the poem, the allegorical exegete had a problem: what to do with Books 7 through 12? Apparently Bernardus either
died or ran out of ideas, since the commentary attributed to him breaks
off in the middle of the underworld journey.23 John of Salisbury (ca.
1115-1180), who offers a similar allegorical reading of the poem in his
Policraticus
(ca. 1159), also halts at Book Six.24One commentary that does
not halt at Book Six is that associated with Anselm of Laon (d. 1117).
This commentary, which Christopher Baswell dates to the latter part of
the eleventh century or the early part of the twelfth, was actually far more
popular than the Bernardus commentary, but here too the commentator
focuses most of his attention on Book Six. Most of what he says about
Books 7 through 12 is a digest of Servius.25Again, the underworld descent
is read allegorically, as the attainment of wisdom.
But what of Dante? Was he a six-book reader or a twelve-book reader,
and if he was a twelve-book reader, what did he make of the last six
books? Dante's most explicit remarks on the meaning of the poem are
found in Convivio IV.xxvi. Like John and Bernardus, Dante reads the
poem as an allegory of the ages of man, and again, like John and Bernardus, he goes no further than Book 6. For Dante, however, the underworld journey is not a representation of the wisdom that comes to a man
in his old age, but rather the fortitude appropriate to youth, which is the
second age of man in Dante's schema (Conv. IV.xxiv). In other words,
Dante did not regard the sixth book as the climax of the epic. Was Dante,
then, a six-book reader after all?
To answer this question, we must turn to the Commediaitself. Dante's
107
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
most definitive statementon this point falls in Inferno20, where Virgil
indicatesone of the falseprophetsand says
Euripolo ebbe nome, e così '1 canta
l'alta mia tragedia in alcun loco:
ben lo sai tu che la sai tutta quanta.
(Inf.20:112-14)
The words are placedin Virgil'smouth, but the boastis Dante's:he did
know all twelve books (tuttaquanta)of Virgil'sepic, or at leasthe wished
his readersto believe so.
Fortunately,we can test this claim by statisticalanalysis.Accordingto
z
Hollander'srecent survey of the evidence, there are in the Commedia
total of 310 "secure or probable"referencesto Virgil'sAeneid.26If we
breakthis total down by canticle,we find thatthere are 180 referencesin
the Inferno,80 in the Purgatorio,
and 50 in the Paradiso.
Broadlyspeaking,
then, we can say that there are more referencesin the Infernothan in the
other two canticlescombined;that the Infernocontainsmore than twice
in turncontains
andthatthe Purgatorio
asmanyreferencesasthe Purgatorio;
almosttwice as many referencesas the Paradiso.Although the fallingoff
in the final canticle is not as precipitousas was once thought,27it does
seem that the authorityof the Roman poet diminishesover the courseof
the poem.28
But thereis anotherway of looking at the numbers.Hollander'scensus
is arrangedto show where, and how often, Dante referredto Virgil's
works in the Commedia.
This makesit relativelyeasyto see thatthereare,
for instance,fourteenechoes of Virgilin Inferno1, and ten in Inferno
2. By
the
data
a
different
we
can
also
show
axis, however,
organizing
along
which partsof Virgil'sepic Dante favored(see table 1).
When we do so, we find that 127 of Dante'sAeneidreferences,nearly
half of the total, come from Aeneid6, the journey to the underworld.
This makesintuitivesense,since the majorityof Dante'sVirgilechoes are
concentratedin the Inferno.Virgil does describea paradiseof sorts,in the
Elysianfields, and accordingto Anchises, the souls there do undergo a
processof purgation.Most of Virgil'sdescription,however, is devoted to
areasthat correspondto the circles of Dante's hell: limbo, the place of
those who died for love, and the sufferingsof the damnedin Tartarus.It
was natural,therefore,for this materialto find its way into the Inferno.If
we look more closely at the table,however, we find that the preponder108
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
Bookofthe^4eweù/
Inf.
15
17
14
8
7
Purg.
9
4
7
6
2
Par.
Total
1
2
3
4
5
8
5
2
5
2
32
26
23
19
6
83
28
16
7
8
9
10
11
12
6
10
4
8
5
3
5
8
2
3
2
4
Total
180
80
1
5
17
2
2
18
11_
127_
12
23
13
9
50
310_
Table Figure 1. References to Virgil's Aeneid in Dante's Commedia.
ance of Book 6 references is not restricted to the Inferno,but extends to
the other canticles as well. A broader explanation is necessary, therefore,
and we find one I think in the reputation that the underworld journey
enjoyed in the Middle Ages, as an allegory of the quest for wisdom. We
have already observed this phenomenon in the remarks of John of Salisbury and the commentary associated with Bernardus Silvestris. The basic
idea, however, is at least as old as Servius, who observes in the introduction to his commentary on Book 6 that "Virgil is everywhere full of
knowledge (sdentici),but especially in this book."
Given this historical bias and the subject matter of his own poem, it is
not hard to see why Dante focused most of his attention on Virgil's description of the underworld journey. But what of the other books? The
preponderance of references to Book 6 distorts our sense of scale, and
makes it hard to compare the other, less-cited books with one another. If,
however, we set Book 6 off to the side as sui generis,we find that Dante
refers to the first half of the Aeneid 111 times in the Commedia,and to the
second half 72 times. This suggests a preference for the first half of the
poem, but not so marked as to overshadow the second half.29We may
conclude, then, that when Dante claimed to know the whole of Virgil's
"high tragedy," it was not an idle boast.
If, then, Dante was a twelve-book reader, how did he interpret the last
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Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
six books? In the Convivio,Dante tells us that he will give a fuller account
of the Aeneid "in the seventh book of my treatise" (IV.xxvi.8). Unfortunately, all known manuscripts of the Conviviobreak off after Book IV. To
recover Dante's interpretation, we shall therefore have to reconstruct it
from the context in which he read the poem - the interpretive tradition
or community in which he encountered it- and from hints and fragments
in his own writings. The key, I would suggest, is Lavinia, the hero's Italian
bride.
Our first clue comes from Fulgentius, an African cleric from the late
fifth century whose Exposition of the Contents of Virgil according to Moral
Philosophywas the first sustained attempt to interpret Virgil's epic as an
allegory of the ages of man. His treatment of the last six books is brief only four pages out of twenty-five in the Teubner edition - but suggestive. When Aeneas gets to Italy, Fulgentius says that the hero "seeks for
his wife Lavinia, that is, the way of labors, laborumuiam."30Now many of
us have always suspected that life with Lavinia would be hard, or at least
boring, for a man who has sampled the more robust pleasures of a woman
like Dido. But while Dido is the elder of the two women, she represents
(for Fulgentius) adolescent libido, so that (for Aeneas) marrying Lavinia
means growing up.
A similar logic seems to inform John of Salisbury's remarks on the
poem. We have already alluded to his six-book reading of the poem,
in which the climactic journey to the underworld is interpreted as the
experience of an old man reflecting on his past. This, rather than Fulgentius, was probably Dante's immediate source for the ages of man allegory
in ConvivioIV.xxiv.31If, however, we turn back a few chapters in John's
work, we find him citing a passage from Aeneid 8 in a way that suggests
he had thought about the second half of the poem, and had begun to
formulate (if only in his own mind) a reading of it. The passage cited is a
description of the humble fare served at the table of the Arcadian king
Evander (Aen. 8:175-83), which John contrasts with the rich banquet
served earlier by Dido (Aen. 1:723-41, 743-49). The context is a discussion of the dangers of Epicureanism, and it should not surprise us, therefore, that John liked the second meal better, deriding Dido's offerings as
"the lascivious," or perhaps "lechery-inducing feasting of female intemperance" ["luxuriosum muliebris intemperantiae conuiuium"].32
Ignoring for the moment the very real misogyny in this passage, the
contrast between Dido and Evander's tables suggests thatJohn was starting
no
Ltwinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
to read the Aeneid typologically. The meaning of this last term is somewhat elastic: I use it here to mean that John finds the type, or fallen
version of an appetite, in the first half of the epic, and contrasts it with
the antitype, or corrected version of that appetite, in the second half of
the poem. Although John never states this typological principle explicitly,
his treatment of Dido and Lavinia in the aforementioned six-book reading
indicates that this was, in fact, his general method. Again, the discussion
of Virgil's poem arises in the context of John's assault on the Epicurean
idea that pleasure is the highest good. As in Fulgentius, Dido is allied here
with adolescent libido,33which apparently seeks only "perverse pleasure"
(peruersauoluptate) and "impure love" (immundo amore).34Later, when the
hero reviews the errors of his past in the underworld, Aeneas is said to
learn that
alia uia incedendumesse his qui uolunt ad dukes Lauiniaecomplexus et fatale
regnumItaliaequasiad quandamarcembeatitudinisperuenire.[thosewho long
for the sweet embracesof Laviniamustfollow a differentpath,if they would gain
the destinedkingdom of Italy- the castle,as it were, of beatitude.]35
Again, Aeneas learns this in the underworld journey of Book Six, at which
point John stops interpreting. But we can see where he was going: Dido
is the fallen type of desire, and Lavinia, with her "sweet embraces," is the
corrected antitype.
Hints of the Dido-Lavinia typology can be found, as Giuseppe Mazzotta has shown, in the allegorical commentary attributed to Bernardus
Silvestris.36 Dante may, or may not, have known this commentary
Mazzotta also demonstrates,
(though he probably knew the Policraticus).37
the
transcends
however, that the poet
allegorical tradition on which he
builds. Although Dante suggests that Aeneas and Lavinia are destined for
one another by placing them together in limbo (Inf. 4:122), the actual
status of Lavinia in the allegorical commentaries is (as we noted above)
marginal: an epilogue, if not a footnote, to the underworld journey and
the achievement of wisdom in Book 6. The allegorical tradition also
leaves important features of Dante's vision unexplained and without precedent: the parallel between secular history and its salvific counterpart, as
well as the affective dimension of the personal transformation. Thus,
while he speaks of "sweet embraces," the pleasures that John holds out to
the pilgrim are "purely intellectual."38Aeneas, according to John, is by
this time an old man whose mind is clear only because his emotions are
ill
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
numb and his "powers" are failing ("frigescat affectus uiresque deficiant").39 To be sure, Lavinia corrects what was perverse or deficient in
Dido; yet she is not felt to be an adequate replacement for Dido.40
John remains an interesting case, however, because he straddles the
border between two interpretive communities: the allegorical tradition
(of the commentaries) and what I should like to call the courtly tradition.
Like his contemporary, Bernardus Silvestris, John was a philosopher in
the tradition of Chartres. Unlike Bernardus, however, John was also an
ecclesiastical statesman and a keen observer of court life: not for nothing
was the Policraticus,from which we have been quoting, subtitled De nugis
curialiumet vestigiisphilosophorum,"On the Frivolities of Courtiers and the
Footsteps of Philosophers." This courtly connection is important, because
it associatesJohn with an interpretive tradition distinct from that of the
grammarians and philosophers- a tradition in which the twelfth, rather
than the sixth, book of the Aeneid was regarded as the climax of the epic.
This is the vernacular tradition of the anonymous Roman dfEneas, and it
represents what Christopher Baswell has called "the romance approach to
the Aeneid"
Probably composed by one of John's contemporaries at the Angevin
court, the Eneas depicts Dido as a temptation for the hero, a digression
from his real destiny- -justasJohn does. However, in the courtly tradition
of the story, Virgil's tragic queen is pitied, rather than demonized.41 Lavinia, though, is the character who benefits most from the courtly adaptation. In the Aeneid, she had been (as many readers have noticed) little
more than a blushing cipher. John and Fulgentius improved her standing
somewhat, by presenting her as a corrected version of Dido. The Eneas
does the same,42but goes into more detail, describing Lavinia's thoughts
and emotions, her relationship with her mother, and perhaps most importantly, her courtship with Aeneas, a protracted event that is rendered here
in the Ovidian manner of courtly love poetry.43To be sure, the wedding
that follows the courtship still has (as in Virgil's text) a political dimension,44but in the Eneas, the royal marriage is also a love match. Moreover,
unlike John's Lavinia, the vernacular princess is no allegorical "castle of
beatitude"; she has been sanitized, to be sure, but in such a way (and this
is the important point) that correct love now seems attractive, rather than
laborious. Still more remarkable is what the author of the Roman does to
Virgil's hero: no longer merely "pius Aeneas," he becomes, in the vernacular tradition, "Eneas, li cortois, li fins amis, li douz amis, gentilz Eneas";
112
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
he burns "de fine amor toz tens estable."45Later redactions of the text
only intensified this emphasis,46and by the early thirteenth century, the
poem was actually known as the "roman d'Eneas e da Laivine,"47suggesting that contemporary readers viewed the love story as the main point of
the whole poem.
The impact of the Eneason medieval Europe, as measured by the number and distribution of extant manuscripts, was both enduring and extensive. English scribes, for instance, were still making copies of the poem
well into the fifteenth century.48The troubadours, where they refer to
Virgilian episodes at all, usually do so by way of the Eneas.49Unfortunately, early (and negative) assessments of the work's influence on Italian
literature have, for the most part, been allowed to stand unchallenged.50
However, a 1973 census of the nine extant Eneas manuscripts shows that
three of them were actually produced in Italy, two of them in the fourteenth century.51In the world of Dante scholarship, however, the courtly
tradition of interpretation that these Italian manuscripts represent has
hardly registered.
There is, of course, a good reason for this: in De vulgatieloquentiaI.x.2,
Dante associates the literature of lingua oil (which is to say, the Norman
dialect in which the Eneas was composed) with vernacular prose (vulgate
prosaycum).The Eneas, however, is in verse; moreover, unlike Tristanand
the Roman de Troie,it was never rendered into prose.52This suggests that
Dante was not, in fact, aware of the Eneas- not yet, anyway. Not that
this should come as any surprise. De vulgati eloquentia,like the Convivio,
was probably written between 1303 and 1305, when Dante was still approaching Aeneid through the Latin commentary tradition, as an allegory
of moral development. Although he projected a twelve-book reading of
the epic in the Convivio,his method (when he wrote that linguaoil favors
vulgareprosaycum)was still that of the six-book philosophical commentators.
Dante's citation practice in the Commedia,however, tells a different
story (as we have seen). By the time he finished work on the Inferno
(1310-11), Dante had begun to think seriously about the second half of
the Aeneid, and he had abandoned, if not the allegorical method, then at
least the six-book orientation that the method seems to have imposed on
those who employed it.
A brief analysis of Dante's citation practice in the Monarchia(1317?)
reveals a similar trend.53Dante quotes from the second half of the Aeneid
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Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
three times in Monarchici,twice from Book 8 (at II.iii.ll and II.iv.8) and
once from Book 12 (at II.iii.16):
Vicisti, et victum tenderepalmas
Ausoniividere:tua est Laviniaconiunx.
(Aen. 12:936-37)
You have conquered,and the Ausonianshave seen me stretchout my handsin
defeat;Laviniais your wife.
This last quotation is especially interesting, and repays careful consideration. These are, of course, the dying words of Turnus. As with the reference to duellum (discussed above), Dante's quotation appears in the
context of a legal argument about the rights of the emperor:54in this
instance, Dante is trying to demonstrate that the founder of the Roman
empire was noble by marriage as well as by birth. Marriage with Lavinia
(indicated here by the reference to coniunx)provides this.
It also implies something, however, about the way that Dante had
come to think about the Aeneid as a whole. To judge from his reference
here (to Lavinia) and from his reference to the duellumwith Turnus, Dante
was plainly fascinated by Virgil's ending.55 Yet he shows little interest in
the issues that have dominated recent discussions of the ending: the hero's
decidedly un-Stoic anger, and the larger problem of vengeance.56 For
Dante, the terms under which Turnus submits to Aeneas are at least as
important as the fact that he dies: "tua est Lauinia coniunx." Apparently,
Dante conceives of the epic as ending with the anticipation of a marriage.
The problem with saying this is that it threatens to make the Aeneid
into a comedy. Yet in the Commediaitself, Virgilio calls his own poem
"l'alta mia tragedia" {Inf. 20:113). Obviously, much will depend on how
this phrase is parsed. The adjective alta suggests that Dante is thinking of
the high style. This would be consistent with the definition of tragedy
given in De vulgati eloquentiaII.iv.5: "Per tragediam superiorem stilum
inducimus." However, a second definition (turning on plot) is given in
Dante's letter to Cangrande della Scala, where it is said that "tragedia in
principio est admirabiliset quieta, in fine seu exitu est fetida et horribilis"
(Epist. 13.X.29: "tragedy is admirable and tranquil at the beginning, putrid
and horrible at the finish or leave taking"). Robert Hollander has argued
forcefully, not only that this section of the letter is authentic,57but that
this definition of tragedy is operative in Virgilio's description of the Ae-
114
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
neid.58The problem with this view is that the definition of tragedy given
in the letter to Cangrande does not actually fit the plot of Virgil's poem:
regardlessof whether Dante regarded the Aeneid as having a tragic ending
(as Hollander maintains), the opening books of Virgil's epic can hardly be
described as "tranquil": the first treats of a storm at sea, and the second
recounts the sack of Troy. In terms of plot, the Aeneid actually sounds
more like Dante's definition of a comedy: "inchoat asperitatem alicuius
rei, sed eius materia prospere terminatur" (Epist. 13.X.29). It begins with
a harsh situation (in this case, with shipwreck and pillage), but the matter
ends favorably (with the promise of marriage). Where Virgil's "comedy"
differs from Dante's is in the style: Virgil's is consistently high (and therefore tragic), whereas Dante adopts a mixed style.
This is, admittedly, a complicated explanation. In its favor, however, I
would urge that it is the only explanation that does justice to all of the
phenomena. The question that remains is, where did this new, post-Eloquentiaconception of the Aeneid originate?
The importance of the end of the poem (as opposed to merely its first
six books), and in particular the emphasis on Lavinia (a minor figure in
the philosophical tradition of the allegorical commentaries) suggest the
influence of what I have called the courtly tradition of interpretation (as
distinguished from the philosophical tradition invoked in the Convivio).
In short, Dante's approach to the Aeneid, both in Monarchiciand in the
Commedia,suggests that he was now reading the Eneas.
This is indeed an audacious claim to be making about a source that
I am emboldened,
doesn't even have an entry in the Enciclopediadantesca-,
of the Eneas in
echoes
verbal
on
research
Walter
however, by
Pagani's
the Commedia?9Some of the echoes that Pagani has identified are both
rhythmical and lexical: when, for instance, Dante enumerates the torments of the neutral anime, their "sospiri, pianti, e alti guai" {Inf. 3:22),
he seems to recall the "plors et plainz et molt granz criz" of the damned
in Eneas 2706, not only in sound and sense, but also in the three-step
rhetorical progression from sighs to deep groans. Sometimes the French
adaptation seems to be supplying Dante with details that are either omitted in his Latin original (e.g., hell's "l'ampiezza de l'intrare," Inf. 5:20; cf.
Eneas 2297-98, "l'entree / del grant enfer la plus baee" and 2353, "granz
et large estoit l'entree") or, more persuasive still, actually contradicted by
the Latin text, as when Dante speaks of the iron walls of Dis {Inf. 8:78,
115
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
"mura . . . che ferro fosse"; cf. Eneas 2702, "li mur estoient tuit de fer")
in preference to Virgil's iron tower ("ferrea turns," Aen. 6:554).
In the course of his argument, Pagani supplies scores of similar parallels,
some of which are quite striking, and some of which we can probably put
down to coincidence, "derivante da comunanza di temi o da generica
fraternità di lingue romanze."60 Collectively, however, these verbal echoes constitute a powerful argument for reconsidering Dante's encounter
with the Aeneid, not only in light of the Latin commentary tradition, but
also in light of the courtly tradition of vernacular adaptation.
We can trace the influence of the courtly tradition both at the level of
the text and of general trends. I begin with general trends, and in particular, with a trend that has, on the surface at least, nothing to do with Virgil.
The rehabilitation of love in the figure of Beatrice, and with it the
rehabilitation of the "new style" of Dante's old love poetry, is by now a
commonplace of literary criticism.61For most of us, though, the "sublimation of erotic love" entailed by that rehabilitation seems to represent,
not a convergence with, but a departure from the prevailing ethos of
Virgil's poem. "In the political poetics of the Aeneid, the figure of the
Lady is," as Kevin Brownlee notes, "eccentric."
Eroticlove asfiguredby Dido is a danger,a temptation,an obstacleto the protagonist'staskof (collective)politicaldestiny.In the DivineComedy,the figureof the
Ladyis, by contrast,central.The sublimationof eroticlove asfiguredby Beatrice
is the essentialinstrumentof the protagonist's(individual)salvation.In this sense,
as in so manyothers,Dante's Commedia
is a fusionof (or,perhapsbetter,a dialectic between) first-personlyric and epic narrative.. . .62
The brevity of Brownlee's remarks here belies the profundity of thought
and observation that stands behind them. They are also suggestive, however, of the distance that has opened up between our own conception of
the Aeneid (as a poem about sacrifice) and that of the courtly tradition to
which Brownlee alludes here. For most of us, the real index of the author's attitude toward the Lady is, as Brownlee suggests, Virgil's treatment
of Dido: the gods discard her. But in the courtly tradition, Dido's disappearance is more than made up for by the love story that the anonymous
poet invents for the hero and his new Italian girlfriend. The narrativethat
results is not so much a new poem, as a new conception of the epic, a
conception in which eros does not need to be eradicated, but is susceptible of reform.63This is the context in which (I would suggest) Dante was
116
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
now reading the Aeneid, and this is the conception of the epic telos that
informs his treatment of the Lady in the Commedia,a treatment that does
not reject Virgilian values, but merely reinscribes them in a medieval
mode.
Dante's real break with Virgil lay in other areas, and was, as far as I can
see, two-fold. First, the reconciliation of love and politics, eros and ethics
is, in the Eneas, essentially a secular one.64 Dante did not subtract from
this reconciliation, but he added a religious element to it. Dante's second
innovation, both with regard to his master's Latin text and its vernacular
adaptation, was to reverse the epic tendency to female fragmentation: the
tendency, that is, to distribute various aspects of the feminine among several characters,so that Lavinia (for instance) is the good wife, the mother
of the hero's heir, and Dido is the fallen woman. This process of fragmentation begins with Virgil in antiquity,65but as we have seen, Virgil's
medieval interpreters- Fulgentius, John of Salisbury,and even the anonymous author of the Eneas- do nothing to abate it. Unlike his predecessors, however, Dante does not oppose the good Lavinia to the bad Dido.
Reconciliation in the Commediadoes not come about by means of a sequence of corrupt and corrected love objects. Dante has always known
Beatrice, and always loved her. He has not always loved her, perhaps, in
the right way, and he has been distracted by other loves.66Unlike Aeneas,
however, Dante does not grow up by finding a new girlfriend. Instead of
changing lovers, he is himself changed.67
So much for general trends. I would like to conclude by looking at a
famous passage in the Commediawhich the courtly tradition explains with
some precision, but which a tragic reading of the Aeneid explains only
with difficulty. I refer to the valediction of Virgil, delivered at the summit
of Mt. Purgatory, on the threshold of the earthly paradise:
Come la scala tutta sotto noi
fu corsa e fummo in su '1 grado superno,
in me ficcò Virgilio li occhi suoi,
e disse: "II temporal foco e Tetterno
veduto hai, figlio; e se* venuto in parte
dov' io per me più oltre non discerno.
Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte;
lo tuo piacere ornai prendi per duce;
fiior se' de l'erte vie, fiior se' de l'arte . . .
Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;
117
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
libero, drittoe sano è tuo arbitrio,
e fallo foranon farea suo senno:
per ch'io te sovrate corono e mitrio."
(Purg.27:124-32, 139-42)
Virgil never speaks again in Dante's poem,68 disappearing a few cantos
later, in silence. He cannot accompany the Christian poet to Paradise, of
course, because he is damned. So much a tragic reading of the Aeneid
explains very well. The problem is the speech that Virgil makes: it is not
a gallows oration- the apology (much less the apologia) of a convicted
rebel (Inf. 1:125)- but a graduation address.
Despite the tragedy that overshadows his own situation, the elder poet
proposes to his successor a state of being in which the moral life is free
from strain, in which there is no conflict between the dictates of reason
and the inclinations of appetite- hardly conducive to tragedy! According
to Aquinas, this is the moral state in which Adam and Eve existed before
the Fall.69After the Fall, the passions must be reeducated, and this is only
achieved (if at all) by grace and moral discipline, the arduous nature of
which is suggested by the strenuous climb that Dante has just made. After
the climb has been made, though, the passions no longer need to be
reined in, but serve as a "guide" (duce)to further development.
Why does Dante pick Virgil to bear this message? There are two explanations, one theological and allegorical, the other what we might call
intertextual, or simply literary.The theological explanation is this: "original justice," as this state of moral equilibrium was called by Aquinas, does
not represent the very summit of human beatitude; rather it is only the
best state that human reason can conceive of apartfrom divine revelation.
That is why Virgil, insofar as he represents the best of pre-Christian culture and intellectual achievement, tells Dante "I of myself discern no
farther onward."
But the encounter with Virgil in the Divine Comedy is not just the
encounter with Classical Antiquity or Human Reason, or even with the
poetical father-figure. It is also, as Marianne Shapiro reminds us, the poet's
encounter with Virgil's text, "Dante's living reading of the Aeneid in the
fullest implications of its formative power."70 And that is the literary explanation: Dante makes this Virgil's last speech because the ending of
Virgil's poem (as Dante conceives of it) describes, not the dizzying climax
of a tragedy, but (as in the courtly tradition of interpretation) a moral state
118
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
where reason begins at last to coincide with passion; a state in which eros
is no longer the enemy of rectitude; a state of mental and spiritual felicity,
the onset of which is indicated by a wedding announcement: "tua est
Lavinia coniunx." In short, Virgil's last words in the Commediarepresent
a commentary on the final meaning of his own poem, as Dante construed
it in light of the twelve-book, vernacular tradition of the High Middle
Ages.
East Carolina University
Greenville, North Carolina
NOTES
An early version of this paper was delivered at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval
Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, 7-10 May 1998. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
1. The secondary literature on this subject is, not surprisingly, vast. Otfhed Lieberknecht and I
have made a preliminary census of over two hundred items; see my "Virgil in Late Antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and Renaissance: An Online Bibliography," http://virgil.org/bibliography.
2. Christopher Kleinhenz, "The Celebration of Poetry: A Reading of PurgatoryXXII, Dante
Studies, 106 (1988), 21-41, at 26-27. Kleinhenz goes on to summarize the arguments for both
positions.
3. See Teodolinda Barolini, Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton, New
L'interJersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 202-38 and Robert Hollander, Studies in Dante,
prete 16 (Ravenna: Longo, 1980), 131-218.
4. This is the question that almost all studies of il significatodel Virgiliodantescoaspire to answer m
the end. For recent examples, see Margherita Frankel, "Dante's Anti-Virgilian Villanello (Inf. XXIV,
1-21)," Dante Studies, 102 (1984), 81-109; Steve Ellis, "Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation," Chaucer
Review, 22 (1988), 282-94; Nicolae Iliescu, "Will Virgil Be Saved?" Medi;aevalia, 12 (1989, for
1986), 93-114 (revised as "Sarà salvo Virgilio?" in Dante: Summa Medievalis, Proceedingsof the Symposium of the Centerfor Italian Studies, SUNY Stony Brook, Filibrary 9, ed. Charles Franco and Leslie
Dante
Morgan [Stony Brook, New York: Forum Italicum, 1995], 112-33); Mowbray Allan, "Does
Hope for Virgil's Salvation?" MLN, 104 (1989), 193-205 and Allan's exchange with Barolini, MLN,
105 (1990), 138-49; Riccardo Scrivano, "Stazio personaggio, poeta e cristiano," Quadernid'italianistica, 13 (1992), 175-97; William Franke, "Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth: Dante's Statius," Quaderni d'italianistica,15 (1994), 7-34; Guy P. Raffa, "Dante's Beloved Yet Damned Virgil,"
in Dante's Inferno: The Indiana Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 266-85; and Amilcare A. latinucci, "The Mountainquake of Purgatorioand
Resurrection:
Virgil's Story," LecturaDantis, 20 (1997), 48-58. Albert L. Rossi, "The Poetics of
Robert
80
Hollander, II
Romanic
305-24;
Review,
Bees
XXXI,
(1989),
1-12),"
(Paradiso
Virgil's
eh.
Virgiliodantesco:tragedianella Commedia, Biblioteca di lettere italiane 18 (Firenze: Olschki, 1983),
2
Classical
ed.
in
in
Dante's
Kallendorf,
(New
Heritage
Craig
Vergil,
idem,
Comedy,"
3;
"Tragedy
York: Garland, 1995), 253-69; and idem, "Dante's Virgil: A Light That Failed," LecturaDantis, 4
(1989), 3-9 are worthy of special note, insofar as they revive Kenelm Foster's argument that Virgil's
and
ignorance of Christian truth is culpable and not a mere accident of chronology (The Two Dantes,
119
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
Other Studies [London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977], 179; see also Barolini, Dante's Poets,
253-56).
5. Barolini's account of this process is exemplary; see Dante's Poets, 238-56.
6. See John Freccerò, "Virgil, Sweet Father: A Paradigm of Poetic Influence," in Dante among
the Modems, ed. Stuart Y. McDougal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 3-10
and idem, "The Eternal Image of the Father," in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's
Commedia, ed. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
1991), 62-76.
7. As A. J. Minnis has shown, intentio auctoriswas a key term in the critical vocabulary that
medieval exegetes inherited from the ancient grammarians; in the course of time, the importance of
intentio only increased, as the literal meaning of the text came to dominate scholastic hermeneutics in
the thirteenth century. See Medieval Theoryof Authorship:ScholasticLiteraryAttitudes in the LaterMiddle
Ages (London: Scolar, 1984), chs. 3 and 4. Further examples are given in Medieval LiteraryTheoryand
Criticismc. 1100 - c. 1375: The CommentaryTradition,ed. and trans. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), index, s.v. "intention, authorial {intentioauctoris)."
8. Charles Till Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 100-38 provides a judicious synthesis of older scholarship. For recent studies, see Gerard Maillat, "Dante et
Cesar," Presencede Cesar:Actes du Colloque des 9-1 1 dec. 1983, hommageau doyen Michel Rambaud, ed.
Raymond Chevallier, Caesarodunum 20 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1985), 25-34 and Margherita Frankel,
"Dante's Conception of the Ideology of the Aeneid," in Proceedingsof the Xth Congressof the International ComparativeLiteratureAssociation/Actes du Xe congrèsde VAssociation intemationale de littérature
comparée,New York, 1982, ed. James J. Wilhelm et al. (3 vok; New York: Garland, 1985), 2:406-13.
Virgil's contribution to Dante's political thought is also discussed passim in Donna Mancusi-Ungaro,
Dante and the Empire, American University Studies ser. 2, Romance Languages and Literature 49
(New York: Lang, 1988); Joan M. Ferrante, The Political Vision of the "Divine Comedy" (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984); John A. Scott, Dante's PoliticalPurgatory,Middle Ages
Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and now John Woodhouse, ed., Dante
and Governance(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
9. Purg. 22:55-73. Barolini's formulation is, as usual, enduring and exact: "Although [Virgil's
poem] tells a truth, its truth was not intended by its author, but was revealed retrospectively through
the unfolding of divine providence" {Dante's Poets, 214). On Virgil's failures as a reader, see further
Frankel, "Dante's Anti-Virgilian Villanello"and Hollander, "Tragedy in Dante's Comedy."
10. The classic study of this phenomenon remains Hollander, Studies in Dante, ch. 7, "The Tragedy of Divination in InfernoXX," reprinted in condensed form as "Dante's Misreadings of the Aeneid
in Inferno20," in Jacoff and Schnapp, Poetry of Allusion, 77-93.
11. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in RenaissancePoetry,Elizabethan Club Series 7 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982), 40-43.
12. What text should one cite from then? For the early modern period one can always fall back
on popular printed editions (for instance, the Aldine octavo of 1501). Reconstructing the state of the
text in Dante's time is more difficult. We can, however, make a beginning by considering the variants
from Carolingian manuscripts; fourteen of these are collated and their variants recorded in the most
recent critical edition, P. VergiliMaronis Opera, ed. Marius Geymonat, Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum
Paravianum (Torino: Paravia, 1973). Where these variants concur, a defacto text emerges - Walter
Pagani calls it "la Vulgata Medievale" - but for the ninth century, not the fourteenth. For Pagani, see
"Di alcuni incontri fra Eneas e Commedia," Giornalestoricodella letteraturaitaliana, 160 (1983), 64-77,
at 65 n. 5. 1 shall have more to say about the implications of Pagani's article below.
13. For this translation of duellum, see Prue Shaw, trans, and ed., Monarchy,Cambridge Texts in
the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 53 n. 1. Dante's
prose works are cited from Domenico De Robertis et al., eds., Opere minori, La letteratura italiana:
storia e testi (2 vok in 3 pts.; Milano: Ricciardi, 1979). For the Commedia,the Petrocchi text in The
Divine Comedy, translated with commentary by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 80 (3 vols. in
6 pts.; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970-75) is cited throughout.
14. Robert Hollander, Studies in Dante, 216; see also idem, "Tragedy in Dante's Comedy," 217.
120
Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
15. See, for instance, W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible:A Study of Vergil's"Aeneid" (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 114-34; Michael C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the
Aeneid (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1965), ch. 4; and idem, Virgil's "Aeneid": Interpretationand Influence(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), chs. 8 and 9.
16. Servius Marius Honoratus, Servii grammaticiqui feruntur in Vergila carmina commentarii,ed.
Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen (3 vols. in 4 pts.; Leipzig: Teubner, 1881-1902), on Aen. 12.940.
17. See Edward Kennard Rand, "Dante and Servius," Annual Report of the Dante Society, 33
(1916), 1-11, and Erich von Richthofen, "Traces of Servius in Dante," Dante Studies, 92 (1974),
117-128.
18. David Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1974); see especially chs. 2 and 9.
19. According to Corti, the etymology of "Ulysses" given in the Bernardus commentary may
have contributed to Dante's conception of his character; see Percorsidell'invenzione:H linguaggiopoetico
e Dante (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 136.
20. Hollander, Allegory in Dante's "Commedia" (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1969), 96-103 and idem, Studies in Dante, 71-81. See also Ulrich Leo, "The Unfinished
Convivio and Dante's Rereading of the Aeneid,1*Mediaeval Studies, 13 (1951), 41-64, rpt. in idem,
Sehen und Wirklichkeitbei Dante (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1957), 71-104.
21. For the record, I think that Dante probably continued to read the Aeneid allegorically, though
not exclusively so. The best evidence for this comes from the poet's son Pietro, who employs the
categories of the Bernardus commentary (descensusnaturalis,descensusvirtutis,descensusvitii, and descensus artifidalis)in order to characterize his father's katabasisas a descensusvirtutis,the wise man's contemplation of matter's frailty. See H Commentariumdi PietroAlighieri, ed. Roberto Della Vedova and Maria
Teresa Silvotti (Firenze: Olschki, 1978), 11-17; cf. the discussion of the four descensusin Commentum
quod diciturBernardiSilvestrissupersex librosEneidos Virgilii,ed. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Frances
Jones (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 30. In the third and final redaction of Pietro's
commentary, the four types are rearranged slighdy: the descensusnaturalisis omitted, and the descensus
vitii (habitual vice) is reinterpreted as damnation (Commentarium,15); all three redactions agree, however, that Virgil's hero practiced the forbidden descensusartifidalis,i.e., necromancy.
22. The whole synopsis occupies 325 lines. The majority of these are given to the Dido episode,
which occupies 193 lines, or 59 percent of the total.
23. Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas A. Maresca speculate, however, that the second half of Bernardus' commentary would have described the hero's triumph over vice and his eventual reunion
with God; see Commentaryon the First Six Books of the Aeneid (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1979), xxviii-xxix.
24. John of Salisbury, PolicraticusVIII.xxiv.817a-18a, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb, Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopiCamothensispolicratidsive De nugis curialiumet vestigiisphilosophorumlibri Vili (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909).
25. On the popularity and makeup of the Laon commentary, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in
Medieval England: Figuring the "Aeneid" from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer, Cambridge Studies in
Medieval Literature 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49, 63-68, and 333 n. 42.
26. Robert Hollander, "Le opere di Virgilio nella Commediadi Dante, m Dante e la "bellascola"
della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica, ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci (Ravenna: Longo, 1993), 247-343.
Here and throughout, I have excluded from my tabulations references categorized by Hollander as
"dubious." Hollander's census supersedes that of Edward Moore, Studies in Dante, First Series:Scripture
and ClassicalAuthors in Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 344-48, which listed a total of 135
references (excluding items marked "?").
27. Among other things, Hollander's new census shows two things. (1) There are perhaps as
many as 68 Virgil references in the Paradiso,not 14 (as Moore's survey suggested; on the persistence
"
of Virgilian echoes in the final canticle, see further Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 'Sì pia l'ombra d'Anchise si
porse': Paradiso15.25," in Jacoff and Schnapp, Poetry of Allusion [see above, n. 6], 145-56). (2) Dante
apparently knew the Georgia better than it once appeared (see further Hollander, "Dante's 'Geòrgie'
121
Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
(InfernoXXIV, 1-18)," Dante Studies, 102 [1984], 111-121; cf. L. P. Wilkinson, The "Georgia" of
Virgil:A CriticalSurvey [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969], 288-90).
28. See Barolini, Dante's Poets, 201-02 and Hollander, "Opere di Virgilio," 248.
29. Book 8, which describes the river journey and the embassy to Arcadia, is especially wellrepresented here.
30. Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, Expositio virgiliana*continentiaesecundumphilosophosmoralis§163,
in idem, Opera, ed. Rudolf Helm and Jean Préaux (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1970), 81-107, at 104.
31. Domenico Comparetti, Vergilin the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., tr. E. F. M. Benecke (1895; rpt.
with an introduction by Jan M. Ziolkowski, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1997), 211-12. On Dante's knowledge of the Policraticus,see further Ernst Robert Curtius, European
Literatureand the Latin Middle Ages (1948), tr. Willard Trask, Bollingen Library 36 (1953; rpt. New
York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1964), 364-65 n. 47; Hermann Gmelin, "II X canto del
Purgatorio,"in Letturedantesche,ed. Giovanni Getto (3 vols.; Firenze : Sansoni, 1955-61), 205-14, at
211; Paul Renucci, Dante discipleetjuge du monde Gréco-latin,Les classiques de l'humanisme (Paris:
Société d'édition les belles lettres, 1954), 104, 180 n. 603-04; idem, "Une source de Dante: Le
Policraticusde Jean de Salisbury" (These complémentaire, Université de Paris, 1951); Andre Pézard,
"Du Policraticusà la Divine comédie," parts I and 2, Romania, 70 (1948/49), 1-37, 163-91; Marino
Barchiesi, Un tema classicoe medievale:Gnatone e Taide (Padova: Antenore, 1963), 153-81; and Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, "Time and Eternity in the Myths of Paradiso XVII," in Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio:Studies in the Italian Trecentoin Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and
Anthony L. Pellegrini, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 22 (Binghamton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983), 133-50, at 139-46. I owe these last four references to
Otfried Lieberknecht.
32. John of Salisbury, PolicraticusVIH.vi.730b. The criticism of Dido's banquet may owe something to Macrobius, SaturnaliaIl.i.l (noted by Janet Martin, "John of Salisbury as Classical Scholar,"
in The WorldofJohn of Salisbury,ed. Michael Wilks, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 3 [Oxford:
Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1984], 179-201, at 197).
33. See further Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid,
Medieval Cultures 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), ch. 2, "Dido as Libido:
From Augustine to Dante." Desmond notes that Dante adopts this interpretation in Conv. IV.xxiv,
but argues that the poet adopts something like Dido's own point of view when he describes her in
Inf. 5 and Mon. H.iii.
34. John of Salisbury, PolicraticusVIII.xxiv.817d.
35. John of Salisbury, PolicraticusVIII.xxiv.818a.
36. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the "Divine Comedy"
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), ch. 4.
37. See nn. 18-21 and 31 above.
38. The phrase is Mazzotta's; see Poet of the Desert, 177, where he applies it to Bernardus and
Fulgentius.
39. John of Salisbury, PolicraticusVIH.xxiv.817d.
40. Cf. John Watkins, The Specterof Dido: Spenserand VtrgilianEpic (New Haven, Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 1995), 27: "as an embodiment of Augustan restraint who hardly speaks, Lavinia
pales beside Dido. Her most memorable act is blushing when her mother begs Turnus not to confront
the Trojans. Her blush is so inscrutable that classicists still debate whether it reveals her love for
Turnus or her embarrassment over her mother's hysterics. Her pudor makes her an appropriate ancestor for Augustus, but it can never be as engaging as Dido's passionate intensity."
41. For these points, see further Raymond Cormier, One Heart One Mind: The Rebirthof Virgil's
Hero in Medieval FrenchRomance,Romance Monographs 3 (University, Mississippi: University Monographs, 1973), 136 and 131, respectively.
42. Cormier has analyzed this contrast at length in terms of what he calls "reciprocity" and
"solidarity": a transphysical communion of souls that Aeneas finds in his relationship with Lavinia
but not with Dido (One Heart One Mind, passim and especially 128-38 and 258-75; see further idem,
"Comunalment and Soltaine in the Roman d'Enéas," RomanceNotes, 14 [1972], 184-191). According
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Lavinia and Beatrice:The SecondHalf of the Aeneid in the Middle Ages, david wilson-okamura
to Douglas Kelly, this new emphasis on mutuality is related to larger social forces, and in particular to
twelfth-century developments in the ecclesiastical conception of marriage; see The Conspiracyof Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorshipfrom Macrobiusto Medieval Romance (Leiden: Brill, 1999),
171-94.
43. Erich Auerbach, LiteraryLanguageand Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages
(1958), tr. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series 74 (1965; rpt. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 214-15. Auerbach was critical of this mélange, complaining that it "utterly destroyed" the sublimity of its classical model "by diluting it with long moralistic and ornamental
descriptions" that were, in Auerbach's words, "complete, methodical, and pedantic." He goes on to
contrast this degenerate production with the Divine Comedy of Dante, who not only observed the
classical decorum of style and subject matter, but managed to recapture the sublime style of Virgil's
epic in a new, more personal idiom, which the critic associates with the Christian ideal of incarnation.
44. Baswell, Virgilin Medieval England, 200-10.
45. Annie Triaud, "Survie de YEnéas dans une version tardive," in Relire le "Roman d'Eneas,"
ed. Jean Dufoumet, Collection Champion 8 (Paris: Champion, 1985), 169-87, at 80.
46. Triaud, "Survie de YEnéas," 17780. The couple's romance also formed the model for that of
Caesar and Cleopatra in the thirteenth-century Histoire du Jules Cesar, see J. J. Salverda de Grave,
"Un imitateur du Roman d'Eneas au XlIIe siècle en France," Studi medievali,n.s., 5 (1932), 309-16,
at 311-14.
47. This title appears in the text of the Histoire andennejusqu'à Cesar,which refers to the Eneas in
a discussion of the Virgilian underworld; see G. Raynaud de Lage, "Les 'romans antiques' dans
YHistoireandennejusqu'à Cesar," Le Moyen Age, 4th ser., 12 (1957), 267-309, at 297 (emphasis mine).
48. See Baswell, Virgilin Medieval England, 178 and 379 n. 42.
49. Aurelio Roncaglia, "Les troubadors et Virgile," in Lecturesmédiévalesde Vxrgile:Actes du Colloque organisepar VEcolefrancaise de Rome (Rome, 25-28 octobre1982), Collection de l'Ecole francaise
de Rome 80 (Roma: Ecole francaise de Rome, 1985), 267-83, at 268-72.
50. See Pagani, "Alcuni incontri," 64-65 n. 3.
51. Full descriptions of all nine Eneas manuscripts (including date and provenance) are given m
Raymond J. Cormier, "Gleanings on the Manuscript Tradition of the Roman d'Eneas," Manuscripta,
18 (1974), 42-47.
52. Although the Histoire andennejusqu'à Cesarlooks to the Eneas for details on occasion, it omits
the most Roman's most distinctive feature, the courtship of Aeneas and Lavinia; see Lage, "Les 'romans antiques' dans YHistoireandenne," 297-305.
53. The date of Dante's Monarchiahas been a subject of some controversy for the better part of a
the evidence
century. I defer here to the judgment of the work's most recent editor, who discusses
and the history of the controversy in her introduction; see Prue Shaw, ed., Monarchia,Cambridge
Medieval Classics 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xxxviii-lxi. My argument does
not, in any case, depend on a late date for the treatise: the important point is that the Monarchiaand
the Commediarepresent a departure from the reading and citation practice of early works such as the
Eloquentiaand the Convivio.
54. Here, as elsewhere in the treatise, Dante's citation practice seems to vary from book to book;
see Richard Kay, "The Mentalitàof Dante's Monarchia,"Res publica litterarum,9 (1986), 183-191.
55. See also Inf. 1:106-08, where Dante prophesies that a Greyhound will save Italy, per cui
morì la vergine Cammilla, | Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute." Hollander's suggestion that this passage
characterizes Turnus as "a victim sacrificed ... for the greater glory of Rome" ("Tragedy in Dante's
Nisus and
Comedy," 263) is piquant, but misses the point of the passage, which is a call for solidarity.
to Dante, however, they
Euryalus are Trojans; Camilla and Turnus are, of course, latini. According
all died for Italy. The successful integration of the races they represent is further emphasized by the
chiastic arrangement of their names: Latin, Trojan, Latin, Trojan.
56. See Putnam, cited above, n. 15.
57. Robert Hollander, Dante's Epistle to Cangrande,Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts
2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
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Dante Studies, CXIX, 2001
58. Hollander, "Tragedy of Divination"; idem, "Tragedy in Dante's Comedy"; idem, U Virgilio
dantesco,eh. 3: "Tragedia nella Commedia."
59. Pagani, "Di alcuni incontri fra Eneas e Commedia" and idem, "Analisi testuale di alcuni
momenti della catabasi nell'Enea* e nella Commedia" Linguisticae letteratura,3 (1978), 137-47. The
examples that follow are cited from Eneas: romandu XIP siècle, ed. J.-J. Salverda de Grave, Classiques
Francais du Moyen Age 44 and 62 (2 vols.; Paris: Champion, 1925-29).
60. Pagani, "Incontri," 76.
61. On the recuperodello stil nuovo, see Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, eds., La Divina
Commedia (3 vols.; Firenze, 1979), 2:391-94.
62. Kevin Brownlee, "Dante, Beatrice, and the Two Departures from Dido," MLN, 108 (1993),
1-14, at 14. Charles Williams makes a similar point in The Figure of Beatrice:A Study in Dante (1942;
rpt. Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), 15: "The image of the woman was not new in [Dante], nor even
the mode in which he treated it. What was new was the intensity of his treatment and the extreme
to which he carried it. In his master's great poem - in Virgil's Aeneid- the image of the woman and
the image of the city had both existed, but opposed. Dido had been the enemy of Rome, and
morality had carried the hero away from Dido to Rome. But in Dante, they are reconciled; the
appearance of Virgil at the opening of the Commediahas about it this emphasis also. Virgil could not
enter the paradise of that union, for his poem had refused it."
63. On the recuperation of eros in the Eneas, see further Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading
Myth: ClassicalMythology and Its Interpretationsin Medieval FrenchLiterature(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), 36; Blumenfeld-Kosinski argues that the Eneas rehabilitates the figure
of Venus as "maternal and protective" love.
64. Cormier, One Heart One Mind, 274, 286.
65. This point is developed at length in Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphosesof Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 3.
66. This is Beatrice's charge in Purg. 30:121-35; 31:22-63. Dante probably modeled his truancy
on that of Aeneas at Carthage. According to BarbaraJ. Bono, "Francesca da Rimini is Dante's Dido"
insofar as she represents the "improper celebration of woman as an object of love" in Dante's juvenalia; see Literary Transvaluation:From VergilianEpic to ShakespeareanTragicomedy(Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 53-56. Watkins makes a similar argument in The
Specterof Dido, 41-44.
67. Tasso's Armida represents yet another variation on this theme: instead of replacing the Dido
figure, the author converts her.
68. Dante does, however, cite Virgil's Latin directly (for the first and last time in the Commedia)
at Purg. 30:21: "Manibus, oh, date lilia plenis" ( = Aen. 6:883). For commentary, see John Freccerò,
Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 207-08. Later in the same canto, Dante responds to Beatrice's arrival by translating
Dido's confession to Anna, "Agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae" (Aen. 4:23; cf. Purg. 30:48, "conosco
i segni de l'antica fiamma"). The allusion is at once Dante's farewell to Virgil, an expression of filial
piety, and an another indication that Beatrice is, in some sense, a corrected version of Virgil's erotic
heroine. See further Hollander, "Tragedy in Dante's Comedy," 263 and especially Peter S. Hawkins,
"Dido, Beatrice, and the Signs of Ancient Love," in Jacoff and Schnapp, Poetryof Allusion (see above,
n. 6), 113-30.
69. See Charles S. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice,Dante Studies 2 (1958; rpt. Baltimore, Maryland:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), ch. 13, and Domenico Consoli, Significatodel Virgiliodantesco,
Saggi di letteratura italiana 22 (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1967), chs. 4 and 5.
70. Marianne Shapiro, Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), 109.
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