The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

= j. chr istopher war ner

the university of michigan press Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2005 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2008 2007 2006 2005 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warner, J. Christopher (James Christopher), 1961The Augustinian epic, Petrarch to Milton / J. Christopher Warner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11518-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-472-11518-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Epic poetry, European—History and criticism. 2. European poetry—Renaissance, 1450-1600—History and criticism. 3. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304– 1374. Secretum. I. Title. PN1317.W37 2005 809.1'3209'0094'—dc22 2005008442 ISBN13 978-0-472-02680-7 (electronic)

In memory of Alan Fisher, 1940–2003

Acknowledgments

=< This book is dedicated to one of my teachers at the University of Washington, Alan Fisher. It was Alan who introduced me to the Petrarch of the Africa and the Secretum; the Petrarch of the Latin “invectives” and letters; the laurel-bedecked Petrarch, atop the steps of the Capitol, delivering his “coronation oration” in the ‹rst such ceremony since late classical times. Alan showed me a Petrarch who was more audacious, more outrageous, but also more perplexed and perplexing than even the Canzoniere lets on. I soon found myself absorbed by the same mix of wonder and bemusement that had ‹rst inspired Alan to want to ‹gure this Petrarch out. It was ‹tting, therefore, that I began this book during a return visit to Seattle in the summer of 1998. I had the opportunity during those months to test some of my budding ideas on Alan, and by turns, his penetrating questions, skeptical frowns, sudden insights, and friendly encouragement helped me to clarify my thoughts and emboldened me to persevere until I had put this account of Petrarch’s epic and its legacy into its present shape. Alan passed away while I was still writing this book, so I do not know how he would have judged the result. It saddens me that he is not here even to frown at it. That same summer, my wife and I enjoyed the use of a faculty study in the Suzallo Library and a guest apartment at our friends’ house just across the Montlake Cut from campus, so I thank my alma mater and Guy and Pam Generaux for those kind favors. Since that time, my research at other libraries has been aided by several sources: a summer research appointment from Kent State University; grants for travel and lodging through the New-

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< berry Library Consortium; a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; and a short-term fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am tremendously grateful to these institutions for their support of this project, as I am to Ron Corthell, John Webster, and William Sessions for their good-humored willingness over the years to keep writing in support of it. In addition to the staffs of the Folger and Newberry libraries for their abundant assistance during my repeated visits there, I owe thanks to others working in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Cornell University’s Olin Library, which houses the extraordinary Dante and Petrarch Collections of early Italian books and manuscripts assembled by Willard Fiske. My recent relocation to central New York has been an immeasurably happy one on two accounts—both personal, because it ended a hard interstate commute (too commonly the plight of academic couples), and professional, because I joined wonderful colleagues in the English Department of Le Moyne College and made better acquaintance with Cornell’s faculty in my ‹eld. Among the latter, I am most grateful to Carol V. Kaske, William J. Kennedy, and John M. Najemy for giving me the opportunity to present a portion of this study at a meeting of Cornell’s Renaissance Colloquium in spring 2003, where I received suggestions—from them and others—that proved valuable in my subsequent revisions. I am chie›y indebted to William Kennedy, who, after my presentation, generously offered to read the whole of my manuscript and whose incisive critique helped me to make changes that, I trust, have resulted in substantive improvements to my argument and analyses. In addition, I bene‹ted greatly from Sara van den Berg’s detailed and expert comments. Sara was, like Alan Fisher, one of my teachers at the University of Washington. It was just after assuming her new responsibilities as chair of the English Department at St. Louis University that she agreed to read an early draft of my manuscript, so to her I also extend special thanks. For allowing me to appeal to them for assistance with troublesome Latin passages, I thank Radd K. Ehrman at Kent and John McMahon of Le Moyne. Additionally, two anonymous reviewers for the University of Michigan Press supplied excellent and complementary advice that guided me well through a ‹nal stage of streamlining some sections and better developing others. Of course, inevitably, despite my pains to heed advice, pursue leads, and avoid errors, I fear that I have done insuf‹cient

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justice to the efforts and expertise of these wiser scholars. The mistakes and blind spots still remaining in this book are not their fault but mine. I must acknowledge also the coincidental but no less profound debt that I owe to several current and former faculty members of nearby State University of New York at Binghamton whose scholarship was foundational for my own in this book. Aldo S. Bernardo is the author of the stillstandard monograph on Petrarch’s Africa, the subject of my ‹rst chapter; Marilynn Desmond’s important study Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid, informs my analyses particularly in chapter 2; the most in-depth study of Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, the subject of my fourth chapter, remains the book by Mario Di Cesare; and Zoja Pavlovskis (now Pavlovskis-Petit) is the author of far and away the most penetrating work of literary criticism on Faltonia Betitia Proba’s fourth-century Vergilian cento relating the Creation and the life of Christ, which sets up my approach to Alexander Ross’s cento Christiad in chapter 5. Thus my move to the region was truly an auspicious one for this undertaking, given the inspiration of so many local luminaries. I would be tempted to call it “the spirit of the Finger Lakes” except that this is the registered trademark of our local microbrewery, which contributes in its own way to the pleasures of the place. The last stages of work on this project were done in the supremely congenial setting of Le Moyne College: to my students, my department colleagues, and others on campus who made me feel at home so quickly, I give sincere thanks. In particular I am grateful to my department chair, Julie Grossman, for helping to make my transition to a new English program go so smoothly. I furthermore acknowledge with deep gratitude the generous support of Le Moyne’s Committee on Research and Development and of Dr. Linda LeMura, dean of the Division of Arts and Sciences, for their assistance in the form of subvention funds to help defray the cost of this book’s production. The analysis of Petrarch’s Rime sparse in my introduction is partly based on my essay “The Frying Pan and the Phoenix: Petrarch’s Poetics Revisited,” previously published in Rivista di Studi Italiani 14 (1996): 13–24. I thank Anthony Verna for permission to reprint portions of this essay in revised form. Also, I gratefully acknowledge permission from Wayne State University Press to quote extensively from Ralph Nash’s superb translation of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (Detroit, 1987). Finally, I offer my thanks to Ding Xiang—a gifted scholar and teacher of medieval Chinese literature, partner in the pursuit of learning, connoisseur of small-batch Kentucky bourbons, a keen wit, constant friend, my dear wife.

Contents

Introduction

1

Petrarch’s Culpa and Augustine’s Counsel

1

Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa

2 Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid

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The Doctrine of the Two Venuses and the Epic of the Two Cities

3 Petrarch’s Culpa in Gerusalemme liberata 4 The Epic Imitation of Christ

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108

Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

5 Vergil the Evangelist

135

The Christiad of Alexander Ross

6 Augustinian Epic in Paradise Lost Afterword

156

183 Augustinian Epic in Romance Epic—Re›ections on Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Notes

195

Bibliography Index

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245

Introduction Petrarch’s Culpa and Augustine’s Counsel

=< st a r t i n g w i t h p e t r a rch In the beginning, there was the tormented soul of Francis Petrarch. This book offers a history of Renaissance epic poetry that starts at the beginning. It therefore starts with Petrarch’s tormented soul, which—if we accept the most brazen of his self-publicity—was a soul so exquisitely tormented that it fueled the energies that wrought the achievements that marked the dawn of the Renaissance after ages of darkness. Also, this history begins with Petrarch’s Africa, which has a genuine claim to being the ‹rst Renaissance epic, however skeptical we might be of its author’s other pretensions. That these two de‹nitions of the beginning are related is the premise behind this book’s central argument, which is that three of Petrarch’s works—his Canzoniere (or Rime sparse), his epistle to Frederigo Aretino on the veiled meaning of Vergil’s Aeneid, and his imagined dialogue with St. Augustine in the Secretum—together supply a guide to reading the Africa as autobiographical spiritual allegory and that our attention to this allegorical dimension of the poem enables new insights into the history and interpretation of Renaissance Christian epic through John Milton’s Paradise Lost. By “Petrarch’s culpa” in this chapter’s title, I refer to the familiar pair of

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< ignoble loves that Petrarch so often con›ates, that he confesses are the source of his torment, and that, in the Secretum, he has Augustine condemn in him: his passion for Laura, which Augustine dismisses as merely the burning of carnal desire, and his passion for the laurel, a burning to achieve literary fame. The Africa, so I argue, represents Petrarch’s ‹nal reply to Augustine’s charges, and it is the reverberation of this reply through subsequent epics of the Renaissance that in part leads me to call them “Augustinian.” I also do so because Renaissance epic tradition is rooted—even more deeply than has been realized—in the precedent of Augustine’s Confessions as a work of the literary and religious imagination. Not only does the Confessions chronicle its author’s own struggle against the temptations of the ›esh and the seductions of poetry (which a wayward Petrarch could imitate and ask his readers to measure him by). It also supplies aspiring epic poets with a plotline, a symbol system for allegory, and a Christian motive. By framing the narrative of his personal conversion in the terms of a Vergilian epic journey, Augustine conversely furnished the terms for writing Vergilian epic as a personal conversion narrative and, like the Confessions, a ministering instrument.1 Thus I call these epics Augustinian not for their theology but for their two linked agendas: to induce a version of Augustine’s spiritual journey in the experience of their readers and to claim by that motive a justi‹cation for the poet’s vocation. This history of Augustinian epic is presented in two parts, according to its two basic types, each represented by works famous and obscure. The ‹rst, the allegorical epic, works demonstratively, presenting an allegory of the good man’s journey from a life of earthly pleasures to a life of heavenly contemplation, from being lost in sin to ‹nding peace in faith and God’s grace. This type is represented by Petrarch’s Africa when it is read according to the prompts that Petrarch gives us in his other writings; by Vergil’s Aeneid when it is read according to the explications of medieval and Renaissance allegorical commentaries; and by Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata when it is read in light of the commentary editions of Vergil that were published while Tasso was at work on his epic and according to the exegesis Tasso supplies in his own “Allegory of the Poem.” The second type, the biblical epic, works rhetorically, meaning seductively and suasively, to prompt emotional and intellectual responses that will facilitate in readers their escape from the life of earthly pleasure to a life of heavenly contemplation, from being lost in sin to ‹nding peace in faith and God’s grace. This type is represented by the Christiads of Marco Girolamo Vida and Alexander Ross and by the epic that is written both in and against the

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Augustinian epic tradition, Milton’s Paradise Lost. What is most new about this schematization of allegorical and biblical epics is the revelation that both types share patterns of organization and ‹guration that serve like ends, that they exploit an allusive poetics that is mutually informing, and that they have a common source of inspiration in the tormented soul of Francis Petrarch. So there we must start, with this tormented soul that Petrarch subjects to severest examination in the Secretum, or My Secret. The poet claims in his preface to recount a dream in which he has been visited by Lady Truth and a specially selected mentor, St. Augustine, who together intend to lead Petrarch back to the path toward salvation. Petrarch is confronted in this dream dialogue with his most grievous sins: “On the left and on the right,” Augustine charges against him, “you are bound by chains as hard as steel that do not allow you to meditate on death or on life.”2 The “chains” are of course Petrarch’s two passions, his love for Laura and his love for the glory that he wins through his literary achievements. Augustine urges Petrarch to free his soul from these earthly bonds, to devote himself wholly to God, but Petrarch cannot do so without struggling through stages of denial. He says, in defense of his love for Laura, Do you not know about this woman whom you mention, that her mind knows nothing of earthly concerns and burns only with a desire for heavenly ones? that in her face, if there is any truth at all, a sign of divine grace shines? that her character is an exemplum of perfect honor? that her voice, and the life-spark in her eyes, and her movements betray no trace of being merely human?3 Laura’s virtues being what they are, Petrarch de‹antly claims, “Love of her undoubtedly con‹rms my love of God.”4 But Augustine scoffs at the suggestion that Laura might serve as the poet’s mediatrix. Petrarch is attempting to associate Laura with Beatrice, Dante’s intervening angel in the Divine Comedy, but Augustine sees through the gambit because he recognizes that his spiritual patient, in praising his beloved, has echoed Vergil’s description of the goddess of love (Aeneid 1.327–28). The allusion betrays to Augustine that Petrarch is sickened by an ignoble and idolatrous passion—not “love of God,” but what Dante had called “the poison of Venus” (di Venere . . . il tòsco [Purgatorio 25.132]).5 Augustine scolds in the Secretum: “[Laura] has removed your mind from the love of heaven and inclined it away from the Creator to desire for a created thing. . . . And that perverts the order.”6

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< The same distracting idolatry characterizes Petrarch’s pursuit of immortal literary fame. “You would rather abandon yourself than your little books,”7 Augustine complains, and he attacks speci‹cally two of Petrarch’s works in progress: the Africa, an epic poem on the victory of Scipio Africanus over Hannibal in the Second Punic War, and his massive prose tribute to “illustrious men” of antiquity, De viris illustribus, in which the life of Scipio is treated at more length than the lives of most other Roman nobles by a factor of ten.8 It was on the promise of the un‹nished Africa that the city fathers of Rome, reviving the ancient ceremony, crowned Petrarch with the poet’s laurel,9 but Augustine is hardly impressed by such tokens of earthly triumph. He tells Petrarch: Cast off the great burden of the histories: the deeds of the Romans are made known well enough by their own fame and the talents of others. Abandon Africa, and leave it to its owners; you will not increase your own glory nor that of your Scipio. . . . Put these things aside, restore yourself at last back to yourself, and to return to the issue from whence we strayed, begin to meditate on your death, which comes upon you slowly when you are unaware. Fasten your eyes on it, once you have torn away the veil and scattered the darkness.10 The wayward pilgrim of the Secretum resists this advice just as he does Augustine’s earlier admonishment to abandon Laura, but eventually there are two very different outcomes to his instruction. As for his ‹rst sin, Petrarch admits at last that from the day he ‹rst caught sight of Laura, his soul has been turned away from God, and he agrees henceforth to avoid her presence and to think no more of her. “I accept [your advice], and thank you,” he says, “for I think that the remedy is suited to my illness; I now intend my escape.”11 Apparently he is true to his word. Petrarch does not mention Laura again in the Secretum, and there are no hints that his promise to expel her from his thoughts was insincere.12 He has, we must conclude, successfully navigated that leg of his spiritual journey, which allows Augustine, for the remainder of the dialogue, to concentrate on the remaining chain that binds Petrarch’s soul—his passion for literary projects. In contrast to his earlier progress, however, by the end of the Secretum, Petrarch yet clings to this sinful desire. Even as he concedes that it would be best to follow Augustine’s counsel, still he makes excuses and delays. In fact, he is anxious to conclude their meeting so that he can “hasten to other matters” (meaning, get back to his books), and he offers

Introduction

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Augustine only the very weak promise that he does so the more “studiously” in order that he may sooner be done with them and “return to these affairs” (meaning, his soul’s salvation). Petrarch says ‹nally, “I am not ignorant that, as you were just saying, it would be much safer for me to attend to this one care and, shunning the byways, commit to the straight road to salvation. But I cannot curb my desire.”13 Augustine is dismayed by such prevarication in the face of his warnings, but he agrees to conclude the debate: “We are slipping back into the old quarrel, where you say the will is powerless. But let it pass, since it cannot be otherwise, and I shall pray to God that he will go with you in your travels and lead your wandering steps to safety.”14 By telling Augustine in the Secretum that he intends to “escape” from Laura, Petrarch is promising to abandon an idolatrous love that he had already renounced, more famously, in the two framing poems of the Canzoniere. But as many critics have stressed (and as the second section of this introduction revisits, though in different terms), that ‹rst renunciation is equivocal and unconvincing. The 364 intervening verses of the Canzoniere revel in the lost lover’s idolatry with more vigor and delight than the framing poems can persuasively repudiate. Indeed, at times they dare even suggest that Laura might prove the poet’s saving mediatrix, though all the while they anatomize her destructive power over his soul. The Africa, in contrast, unequivocally renounces this love that Petrarch admits is ignoble—explicitly (as in the Secretum) and through its allegory. But as for Petrarch’s second sin, we shall see that the Africa, like the Secretum, equivocates in a way that corresponds to the Canzoniere’s problematical renunciation of the poet’s love for Laura. On the one hand, the Africa’s un‹nished state seems to imply that Petrarch has at last accepted Augustine’s counsel, by abandoning work on the poem and renouncing the literary fame it promised. On the other hand, the Africa’s spiritual allegory signals Petrarch’s resolve to show that he can celebrate “the deeds of the Romans” for Christian purposes and with felicitous results for reader and poet alike, af‹rming thereby that God attends his “wandering steps” along the path of literary achievement even to salvation. In this way, the Africa represents Petrarch’s bid to compose the epic plot of a life journey that is at once Vergilian and Augustinian. From my explication of the Africa in chapter 1, I follow the path of Petrarch’s epic exemplar through late Renaissance commentaries on the Aeneid to Gerusalemme liberata and through the two Neo-Latin Christiads to Paradise Lost. My study thus takes a unique, alternative via to the analyses of the famous vernacular epics. Ordinarily, Gerusalemme liberata and

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< Paradise Lost are approached either directly from discussions of their models in classical tradition (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid) or from their counterparts in epic romance literature (Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Spenser’s Faerie Queene). My alternative route recovers strategies of reading the Neo-Latin epics that have been unrecognized by modern scholarship, and these strategies are shown in turn to be productive for interpreting the vernacular epics’ aims, methods, and meanings. In that sense, this new approach to the epic promises a story that is yet untold, a segment of literary history that ‹lls a gap in Renaissance studies and deepens our understanding of Tasso, Milton, and—in an afterword re›ecting on this study’s implications to our understanding of romance epic— Spenser. In many instances, this trek through the byways of the Neo-Latin tradition to Gerusalemme liberata and Paradise Lost will illuminate features that have been little remarked in these epics. In others, it will lead to new readings of passages whose meanings remain much debated in contemporary scholarship. And in still others, it reinforces and elaborates interpretations that have been previously formulated by way of traditional approaches to the history of epic poetry.15 My aim throughout will be to recover intended meanings in the poems and to describe the supposed experiences of those readers who responded according to the poets’ designs. Thus I “alternate between the approach of the intentionalist and that of the reader-response critic” (as Carol Kaske describes her practice in Spenser and Biblical Poetics [1999, 3]), and I would emphasize that the process by which past readers could have interpreted Augustinian epics in the manner that I describe is neither complicated nor preciously subtle. My explications of the allegorical epics, for example, do not depend on our adoption of any novel or even very precise understanding of the nature and modes of allegory. The rudimentary, classical de‹nition of the trope—such as we ‹nd in the anonymous handbook Ad Herennium: “Allegory is a manner of speech denoting one thing in words, another in meaning”16—was the one invariably repeated in the medieval and early modern periods, and it conveys adequately enough what poets conceived of the technique and how readers understood what allegorical interpretation required of them. I would only go farther than this basic de‹nition to note two major features that the interpretation of allegorical epic shared with medieval scriptural exegesis, in order to underscore just how familiar, if not routine, this manner of reading would have been to many among the epics’ original audiences. These features are de‹ned and abundantly illustrated in Henri de

Introduction

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Lubac’s classic study of the medieval Christian search for scripture’s “four senses.” In fact, it is largely on their basis that Lubac argues, “Christian and pagan allegory, if they use a certain number of analogous procedures, are nonetheless two functionally heterogeneous things” (1959, 2:396; 2000, 19).17 Christian—speci‹cally Pauline—allegory, to begin with, assumes that it discovers “another meaning” not just in myths or ‹ctions but in historical events. Citing Augustine’s teaching that “the very history of the Exodus was an allegory of the people to come” (De utilitate credendi 3.8, commenting on 1 Corinthians 10:1–11) and that “where the Apostle calls something ‘allegory,’ he ‹nds it not in the words but in the fact” (De Trinitate 15.9.1), Lubac asserts that “it is always . . . the allegory ‘in the fact’ or the ‘allegory of the fact’ which is speci‹cally Christian allegory” (1959, 2:381; 2000, 7–8). Consider thus Petrarch’s epic on the Second Punic War and Tasso’s on the First Crusade. Rather than judging that these poems’ bases in history oppose them to allegorical literature, as is frequently done, we might perceive that it was exactly this feature that alerted readers to the possibility of their Christian allegory. Indeed, we may even most properly understand Petrarch’s and Tasso’s poetic embellishments on their historical sources as being none other than their elaborated clues to the “allegory in the fact” that they presumed to reside in the history itself. The other feature that is shared by allegorical epics and medieval biblical exegesis is their ultimate goal in “anagogy,” the last stage of scripture’s “four senses” and journey’s end for the epics’ heroes and readers. To illustrate this trajectory, Lubac cites one of many pithy formulae de‹ning the four senses: “The letter teaches events, allegory what you should believe, / Morality teaches what you should do, anagogy what mark you should be aiming for” (Littera gest docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quis agas, quo tendas anagogia [1959, 1:23; 1998, 1]). (This distich is often attributed to Nicholas of Lyra but is traced by Lubac to Augustine of Dacia.) Like anagogical interpretation, the allegorical epic yearns toward God, representing the spiritual pilgrim’s progress from a desire for earthly things to the contemplation of heaven while striving to inspire the same progress in its readers. “The anagogical sense is that which leads the thought of the exegete ‘upwards,’” Lubac explains; “it leads the mind’s consideration ‘from things visible to those invisible,’ or from things below ‘to the things above.’” Just as we recognize Tasso’s aim in celebrating the Christian army’s liberation of the Lord’s sepulcher, anagogy (Lubac continues) is “the sense that lets one see in the realities of the earthly Jerusalem those of the heavenly Jerusalem”: it is a vision of, but also a prompt toward, that “which is to be

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< desired, namely, the eternal felicity of the blessed” (1959, 2:622–23; 2000, 180–81, my emphasis). If a studied alertness to such prompts was one aspect of an interpretive practice that was habitual for many readers of the Bible, then in this respect, too, the transition from seeking multiple meanings in scripture to extracting the allegory of Augustinian epic would have been a natural and easy one. Lubac marks the decline of allegorical interpretations of scripture at the start of the Reformation, when Luther’s denunciations of the method put its practitioners on the defensive (1959, 1:34–36; 1998, 9–11). It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that the ‹rst major biblical epic—Vida’s Christiad—appeared in 1535. In obvious ways, biblical epic elicits a different range of responses than does allegory, but to sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury readers the process was surely no less accessible or customary. One of its main features, we shall see, is the recurring challenge of Vergilian allusions that would seem, in the contexts in which they occur, to elicit inappropriate, “earthly” responses based on the implications of their original contexts (“original” meaning perhaps Vergil’s Aeneid, perhaps the allegorized Aeneids of the commentators); or at least, the responses to these allusions would be inappropriate but for one’s effort to “read against” those implications and discern the “heavenly” meaning lent by their new context. Again, this should not strike us as a specialized operation: inherent in every allusion is some level of contextual disjunction requiring a corresponding degree of imaginative agility from readers. Nevertheless, my explications of this process must eventually draw me into one of the most heated of longstanding critical controversies, for it will evoke among Miltonists the thesis that Stanley Fish argues in Surprised by Sin: that Paradise Lost invites inappropriate responses from its readers in order to correct the errors and so assist them in their efforts to recognize and surmount the defects of their fallen condition. In fact, it is one of my claims that Milton could have developed such a way of working, as Fish describes it, by attending to how Vida and Ross work in their Christiads. But that is an argument I defer to the ‹nal chapter. This study’s participation in current discourse on the historical representations of women, in contrast, merits noting here at the outset, for a central focus of all my chapters is a recurring image of woman whose appearance and function in other contexts has been well documented by scholars. Designed as a rhetorical device to be an instrument of spiritual aid for men, this is an image that Petrarch (in the voice of Augustine) scolds himself for trying to exploit but exploits anyway, and the image subse-

Introduction

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quently appears throughout the Neo-Latin and vernacular epic tradition— to wit, the alluring woman who is the potential object of sinful desire in the male pilgrim (the epic hero or the epic reader, perhaps both) but who in some way facilitates his journey to salvation. Consequently, my analyses of these epics as “Augustinian” presume a male readership, not because men were their only intended readers (although that could well be so in the case of the Latin poems), but because only men would have been invited to read them in the way that my analyses suggest. As Jorunn Buckley has shown, the idea that heaven may be “accessible” to these devout males “through paradox or a negative via” pervades Christian discourse on the nature of woman as early as Gnostic texts of late antiquity (1986, xi–xii), and in some respects, my study traces the continued utility of this idea through the span of the Renaissance.18 In the Canzoniere, as we shall see later in this introduction, Petrarch manipulates the ambiguity of the phoenix image to support the claim that his love for Laura, idolatrous as it was, could nevertheless testify to the strength of his subsequent love for Mary and his devotion to God. In the Secretum, as we have just seen, Augustine succeeds in getting Petrarch to reject that claim to a negative via through Laura and to accept instead a pair of mutually exclusive categories: there is either the idolatrous love of Laura or there is love of God, an opposition corresponding to the clichéd dichotomous images of woman herself as, on the one hand, “the Devil’s Gateway” (in Tertullian’s infamous formulation) and, on the other hand, the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven (or the Church as bride of Christ).19 Such categories are essentially maintained in the Africa (Rome and Carthage are personi‹ed as chaste maiden and crafty hag), but the tactic of asserting the possibility of salvation through a negative via is transferred to the goal of justifying Petrarch’s other love, “desire for study” and pursuit of literary fame, which he could not relinquish, just yet, in the Secretum.20 Thus we encounter the paradoxical assertion that the study of classical pagan texts and the composition of new texts modeled on the classics imperil the soul but might contribute to one’s salvation after all, or as Petrarch will dare to suggest (capitalizing on the paradox that he had put into Augustine’s ‹nal prayer), his steps though “wandering” might lead him to heaven because God attends them. What makes this paradox so fruitful for the epic poets is their coupling of the former negative via with the new one. Similar to the oft-made observation on the Canzoniere that Petrarch’s two “chains” are really one (his pursuit of Laura is entirely a literary one; it is his pursuit of the laurel),21 we discover that it is in those epic details that represent (in the epic hero) or

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< invite (in the male reader) feelings of sexual attraction to a woman, modeled primarily on Vergil’s account of Aeneas’s liaison with Dido, that the negative via is invoked to assert the epic’s ‹tness for doing Christian work.22 Only in part does this mean the obvious: that the epics’ monitory tales of controlling the passions and avoiding dangerous women justify their composition and reading by Christians. Yes, in the Africa, Petrarch recalls his too-tardy “departure” from Laura, and he delivers an explicit lesson on restoring the self to virtue by retelling, in the story of Massinissa’s renunciation of Sophonisba, Aeneas’s “escape” from Dido. Tasso delivers the same lesson in Rinaldo’s ›ight from Armida. But far more interestingly, Petrarch and later epic poets will devise ways to suggest that the process of writing and reading these epics can be saving rather than damning— despite their being modeled on pagan classics and despite Augustine’s charge that such literary pursuits are a “byway,” a negative via rather than the straight path to salvation—by linking this process and this paradox by way of analogy with the activity of differentiating opposing images of dangerous woman and female divinity: Laura versus Beatrice or Mary; the “vulgar” versus the “heavenly” Venus; Eve versus the “second Eve” who redeems the sins of the ‹rst. Behind these contrasting pairs is of course the analogous master trope of male versus female, Adam versus Eve, which itself proved useful in the medieval period for justifying the study and imitation of classical literature by Christians. As R. Howard Bloch comments, medieval poets generally followed the tradition of biblical exegesis that conceived of “the relation between Adam and Eve” as “the relation of the proper to the ‹gural, which implies a derivation, de›ection, denaturing, a tropological turning away” (1991, 38),23 but it was precisely “the metaphorical status of women” that made available the “possibility of interpretation that enables the Christian recuperation of the pagan past” (215 n. 6). Bloch cites for illustration Augustine’s commentary on Genesis 1:28—God’s decree that humankind will “increase and multiply.” In the Confessions, Augustine interprets this verse ‹guratively, by drawing an analogy between the procreative power of men and women and the mind’s power to state one meaning in different ways or to comprehend multiple meanings in one statement. “By this blessing” to “increase and multiply,” Augustine explains, “I understand that [God has] granted us the faculty and the power not only to express in several ways that which we understand in one sense but to understand in several senses that which we read obscurely stated in one way.”24 The power to give birth to children ‹gures the power to discover multiple routes of expression and interpretation toward one destination: it is Adam and Eve’s,

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more particularly Eve’s, biological/“tropological” faculty that sanctions the quest for God in unlikely, unpromising places. The God-granted “faculty” and “power” of ‹guration will authorize Petrarch, for one, to test the byways of Vergilian epic for alternative paths to heaven. In his other (early) writings, Augustine would seem to allow for such expeditions as Petrarch intends, and he himself famously invokes the image of the good-faith wanderer who may yet reach Truth by a circuitous and unpromising route.25 In a frequently cited passage from De doctrina Christiana describing one whose “interpretation of the scriptures . . . differs from that of the writer,” Augustine is not hasty to pronounce such a man lost, for if “he is misled by an idea of the kind that builds up love, which is the end of the commandment, he is misled in the same way as a walker who leaves his path by mistake but reaches the destination to which the path leads by going through a ‹eld.”26 In this respect, too, therefore, Augustine informs the Africa’s spiritual allegory and enables its rejoinder against the Augustine who is Petrarch’s accuser in the Secretum. Though a number of the Africa’s explicators have suggested that the poem contains some such allegory and a few have ventured to describe it in brief and general terms, chapter 1 of this study aims to demonstrate its centrality to the purpose and within the structure of the poem, showing that the great battle between Hannibal and Scipio, Carthage and Rome, is also the battle within the soul to break loose of the earthly city’s chains and to enter the City of God.27 We know that on one level, this particular Punic war represents the ful‹llment of Dido’s curse in book 4 of the Aeneid—that Hannibal is the “unknown avenger” who rises from her ashes “to chase with ‹re and sword the Dardan settlers” of Rome.28 I will argue that on another level, the reiteration of Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido symbolizes Augustine’s and Petrarch’s victories over the Carthaginian culpa in themselves—their personal victories over the Carthage of the heart. Petrarch’s poem on Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal, in other words, replays Augustine’s quelling of his own youthful passions, his own escape from the ‹res of Carthage, and it claims the same achievement for Petrarch. The Africa, as such, is Petrarch’s other Secretum, his Confessions by way of allegorical epic.29

the fr y ing pan and the phoenix: t h e p o e t i c s o f t h e canzoniere and the promise of the africa If, as I claim, the history of Augustinian epic starts with the Africa’s exchange of one sin’s justi‹cation—that ventured in the Canzoniere—for

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< another, then a revaluation of the Canzoniere’s poetics is in order so as to de‹ne the ‹gural “justi‹cation by equivocation” that Petrarch invented there and afterward reprised in his epic. I say “revaluation” because, for nearly three decades, critics of the Canzoniere have generally shared a different understanding of its method, based on John Freccero’s landmark essay “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics” (1975), whose thesis was soon extended in essays by Guiseppe Mazzotta (1978) and Thomas Greene (1982a, 81–146). Mazzotta best characterizes the interpretive crux of Petrarch’s rime as a discrepancy between the framing poems’ declarations of spiritual reformation and the rest of the sequence’s too-ardent revelry in “giovenile errore.” Although, “on the face of it,” the poet “speaks with a voice of moral authority, the voice of a public self who ‹nally confesses his past errors and disavows them,” Mazzotta explains, critics, “with few exceptions,” have perceived that the “extended ironies” of the sequence “disrupt the notion that the Canzoniere is the poetic narrative of a conversion” (1978, 272). The framing poems try to claim that the poet has “reached the vantage point from which a structure of intelligibility can be imposed on the temporal fragmentation of the self” (ibid.), but that structure has not seemed convincing to most readers, who have looked instead to the “labyrinth” of poems within the frame in attempting to characterize the Canzoniere’s poetics.30 Toward that end, John Freccero opposes the contrasting tropic functions of the ‹g tree in Augustine’s Confessions and the laurel in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, as Augustine himself recommends in the Secretum.31 Freccero notes that the ‹g tree “was already a scriptural emblem of conversion before Augustine used [it] to represent the manifestation of the pattern of universal history in his own life” (1975, 34). Thus, Freccero maintains, it is an allegorical sign, “just as it is in the Gospels when Christ says to his disciples that they must look to the ‹g tree if they would read the signs of the Apocalyptic time,” and it operates on two levels: it precipitates, on the one hand, Augustine’s conversion, “the revelation of God’s Word at a particular time and place, recapitulating the Christ event in an individual soul” (36); on the other hand, it “stands for a tradition of textual anteriority that extends backward in time to the Logos and forward to the same Logos at time’s ending” (37), thereby inviting Augustine’s readers to apply to their own lives the “trajectory” of God’s Word. In contrast, the laurel in Petrarch’s Canzoniere “has no such moral dimension of meaning”: it is, says Freccero, “the emblem both of the lover’s enthrallment and of the poet’s triumph,” because “it stands for a poetry whose real subject matter is

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its own act and whose creation is its own author” (34). Freccero determines that unlike Christian allegory, in which “all signs point ultimately to God,” the laurel “cannot mean anything: its referentiality must be neutralized if it is to remain the property of the creator”; accordingly, the laurel is “the emblem of the mirror relationship Laura-Lauro, which is to say, the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him.”32 Through this “poetic strategy” of circular, “self-contained dynamism,” Freccero concludes, the Petrarchan lover stakes his claim to autonomy (37). In this account of Laura, however, Freccero’s powerful reading of the Canzoniere depends upon a contradiction of its own. He claims that the “narcissistic lover ‹nds spiritual death” in Laura’s eyes—indeed, that she is an “Anti-Christ” (39)—while he states, in another place, that “many of the later poems suggest that the love for Laura was ennobling, at least in a literary or humanistic sense” (40). As other scholars have rightly emphasized, Petrarch’s moral universe was wholly, traditionally Christian—such that we always ‹nd him compelled to de‹ne anything that is ennobling in a literary or humanistic sense to be likewise ennobling in a religious sense.33 This is why it is necessary to our understanding of “Petrarch’s poetics” that we observe one premise of the Canzoniere that is implied throughout but eventually made explicit in the concluding poem of penitential prayer: that the poet’s love for Laura, though sinful, functions positively by testifying to the strength of his future devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He puts this claim in a rhetorical question to her: se poca mortal terra caduca amar con sì mirabil fede soglio, che devrò far di te, cosa gentile?34 [If I am accustomed to love a little mortal, ›eeting dust with such marvelous faith, how then will I love you, a noble thing?] These lines do not imply that Laura is a mediatrix in the way that Beatrice is for Dante (in the same poem [line 52], as Freccero reminds us [1975, 40], the “Queen of Heaven” is said to be the only “vera beatrice”). But if the strength or “marvelous faith” of Petrarch’s idolatry vouches for the strength of his subsequent love for the Blessed Virgin, then the sinful desire represented throughout the previous rime proves valuable, even justi‹ed, as a comparative measure and anticipation of the holy love for which it will be rejected. To see how Petrarch advances this idea in the intermediate

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< poems of the sequence, I would propose an alternative image to the laurel (and the labyrinth that Mazzotta prefers [1978, 295]) as an emblem best be‹tting the poetics of the Canzoniere: the phoenix, the immortal bird that rises anew each year from its own ashes. There are obvious ways in which the phoenix is suited for symbolizing Petrarch’s poetic strategy. As Mazzotta points out, the sequence of the Canzoniere “is governed by recurrent motifs, such as the phoenix, the sun, the cycle of seasons, metamorphoses, and the like,” which emblemize the manner in which “each poem attempts to begin anew” while “inevitably repeat[ing] what has already been tried before” (295). The phoenix represents particularly well the poet-lover’s oxymora and paradoxical self-evaluations, as in his admission “I am consumed by the ‹re from this living stone, upon which I rest” (m’à concio ’l foco / di questa viva petra, ov’io m’appoggio [no. 50, lines 77–78]), through which he quizzically asserts that what destroys him springs from what supports him. On occasion, he speci‹cally invokes the phoenix to make this lament, as in no. 135. Così sol si ritrova lo mio voler, et così in su la cima de’ suoi alti pensieri al sol si volve, et così si risolve, et così torna al suo stato di prima: arde, et more, et riprende i nervi suoi, et vive poi con la fenice a prova.

(lines 9–15)

[Thus is my desire unique, and thus at the height of its lofty thoughts it turns toward the sun, and thus does it dissolve, thus does it return to its original state; it burns, and dies, and renews its courage and lives again, vying with the phoenix.] Similarly, in no. 207, the sight of Laura at once nourishes and burns him: così dal suo bel volto l’involo or uno et or un altro sguardo; et di ciò inseme mi nutrico et ardo.

(lines 37–39)

[Thus from her beautiful visage I steal now one and now another glance; and by these I am at once nourished and set a‹re.]

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In these last lines, the origin of the ›ames is ambiguous. Is he saying they are set by Laura or by his desire? In no. 165, he is precise: Laura “sparks” the ‹re on which he lives and burns, and it is this ‹re that makes him phoenix-like. Amor, che solo i cor’ leggiadri invesca né degna di provar sua forza altrove, da’ begli occhi un piacer sì caldo piove chi’i’ non curo altro ben né bramo altr’ésca. Et co l’andar et col soave sguardo s’accordan le dolcissime parole, et l’atto mansüeto, humile et tardo. Di tai quattro faville, et non già sole, nasce ’l gran foco, di ch’io vivo et ardo, che son fatto un augel notturno al sole.

(lines 5–14)

[Love, who entraps only gracious hearts and does not deign to prove his power elsewhere, makes her lovely eyes rain with such warm delight that I care for no other good nor long for different bait. And with her walk and with her gentle glance her words most sweet accord, as well do her gestures—mild, humble, and demure. From those four sparks, and not from them alone, is born the great ›ame on which I live and burn, for I am become a night-bird in the sun.] The difference between the two potential sources of the ›ame may appear slight, a quibbling distinction between the poet saying that he burns with desire for Laura and that Laura sets him burning with desire. But the distinction is functional. If lover and beloved share one ›ame that has its source in the beloved, the ‹gural justi‹cation for Laura’s quasi-mediatrix effect on the poet is established. So it proves, for in passing from the in vita to the in morte portion of the Canzoniere, we discover (in no. 321) that the phoenix symbolizes both the burning desire that Laura instills in the poet and her “›ight to heaven.” The phoenix has become Petrarch’s symbolic link between Laura’s ascension to God and the poet’s repentance and spiritual renewal. E’ questo ’l nido in che la mia fenice mise l’aurate et le purpuree penne,

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< che sotto le sue ali il mio cor tenne, et parole et sospiri anco n’elice? O del dolce mio mal prima radice, ov’è il bel viso onde quel lume venne che vivo et lieto ardendo mi mantenne? Sol’ eri in terra; or se’ nel ciel felice. Et m’ài lasciato qui misero et solo, talché pien di duol sempre al loco torno che per te consecrato honoro et còlo; veggendo a’ colli oscura notte intorno onde prendesti al ciel l’ultimo volo, et dove li occhi tuoi solean far giorno. [Is this the nest in which my phoenix donned gold and purple feathers, where she kept my heart beneath her wings, and still extracts my words and sighs? O ‹rst root of my sweet illness, where is the beautiful visage whence came the light that sustained me in life and happy burning? A sun on earth; now you are happy in heaven. And you have left me here miserable and alone, so that full of grief I always return to this place that, consecrated to you, I honor and revere; I am gazing at the dark night round the hills whence you took your last ›ight to heaven and where your eyes once brought the day.] In the ‹rst stanza of the preceding sonnet, the poet ostensibly remembers Laura as a phoenix in her nest, enclosing his heart within her gold and purple feathers—a nurturing image but for the statement that she also “extracts” from it his “words and sighs,” referring of course to the words and sighs of the Canzoniere, which are nurtured by this love for Laura. In the following stanza, the phoenix image is then transferred from her, now “happy in heaven,” to him, who is being sustained in “happy burning.” The transference is underscored by the repetition of “Sol” and “solo” in the lines bridging the octave and sestet: the ‹rst is applied to her, the second to him, implying—we surely are meant to suppose—that her phoenix-like rebirth in heaven shall afterward be followed by the poet’s own phoenixlike conversion. But for now, as the poet admits in the stanzas that conclude this poem, he is stuck in circularity, always returning in his narrative to this place of grief and adoration, returning yet again to the same eyes that brought the same light that were already the subject of the second stanza and of too

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many poems before. This phoenix is arrested, “sustained” in a prolonged burning midway between its former and future self: “On this side of the pass still closed to me,” he cries, “I half remain, alas, and half cross over” (di qua dal passo anchor che mi si serra / mezzo rimango, lasso, et mezzo il varco [no. 36, lines 7–8]). The Canzoniere captures the poet’s extended transformation in progress, a metamorphosis whose articulation in oxymora evokes the phoenix caught at mid-con›agration, roiling around in apparent self-contained circularity. We get the impression that the poet is “petri‹ed” (Freccero 1975, 34), trapped in a “labyrinth,” or “locked in a cosmos of his own creation” (Mazzotta 1978, 295–96), because for so long his consuming defers consummation.35 But Petrarch expects us to remember that the phoenix’s eventual rebirth is destined. As Augustine objects in the Secretum, by contrast, such self-indulgence in the phoenix’s ›ames only postpones the discovery that spiritual death, not new life in heaven, awaits the poet. Augustine’s allowance in De doctrina Christiana for the possibility of negative viae hardly admits the notion that narcissism and idolatry could testify to the strength of a subsequent conversion, let alone enable one, and such suspension as the Canzoniere’s is conceivable neither as a moral condition nor as a stage in his own literary self-representation. From the opening of book 3 of the Confessions, where Augustine, before Petrarch, renders the experience of burning with wrongful love as a circling around in paradoxical self-analysis, the frying pan (sartago), just as well as the ‹g tree, presents itself as an appropriate emblem to contrast with Petrarch’s phoenix. I came to Carthage, and a frying pan of shameful loves roared round me on every side. I was not yet in love and yet I longed to love, and having a more hidden want I hated myself for wanting less. I sought what I might love, loving to love, and I hated peace of mind and the road without pitfalls because the hunger within me was for an inner food, You Yourself, my God, and yet I was not hungering in my want, but was without the desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was ‹lled with it, but because the more empty I was of it the more loathsome it was to me. And so my soul was sickly and ulcerous, and miserably it thrust forth, desiring to be scratched by the touch of sensual things. But if these had no soul, they were not to be loved. To love and to be loved was to me more sweet, and the more so if I might enjoy the body of the one I loved. Therefore I de‹led the spring of friendship with the ‹lth of concupiscence and

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< beclouded its luster with the hellishness of lust, and yet, though so foul, in my over›owing vanity I sought to be elegant and re‹ned. I then rushed headlong into love, because I desired to be so taken. My God, my Mercy, out of goodness to me you sprinkled the enjoyment with bitterness, because I was loved and reached secretly for the bond of pleasure, and I was tied fast, happy in my bitter servitude, so that I was scourged with the burning iron rods of jealousy and suspicions and fears and angers and quarrels.36 Augustine remains long suspended in the sinful state described here, and it is this experience in particular that quali‹es him to counsel Petrarch in the Secretum. Lady Truth there reminds Augustine of this, telling him: “When you were locked up in the prison of the body, you suffered much the same as he does. That being so makes you the best physician to cure these passions that you have experienced.”37 Even after renouncing all the other pleasures of “secular life,” Augustine says in the Confessions, “still I was bound tightly for the sake of a woman.”38 To be suspended in this state, for Augustine, is always, strictly, to be in error. Whether hanging on the lips of Aristotle (4.16.28) or burning with lust in a ‹gurative frying pan, he was only prolonging his time in spiritual darkness. This suspension carries no such guarantee of conversion as the phoenix can pledge; on the contrary, says Augustine, “by being suspended I was the worse killed.”39 Accordingly, for him, conversion is sudden. It comes under the ‹g tree “statim,” quickly and steadfastly, so that Augustine is, in the moment, wholly God’s: “For you converted me to You, so that I sought neither a wife nor any hope of this age.”40 In the Secretum, Petrarch likewise emphasizes the suddenness of Augustine’s rebirth, having his spiritual guide recall to him, “After I was fully willing, then was I able, and with amazing and blessed speed I was transformed into another Augustine.”41 The contrast between the phoenix and the frying pan underscores just how far the Canzoniere is from achieving decisively the same breakthrough to enlightenment, the same irrevocable rejection of his love for Laura, as is claimed by the spiritual pilgrim of the Secretum. For Petrarch to advertise such a breakthrough in verse, it remains for the Africa to demonstrate unequivocally his rejection of loving basely. There at last, Petrarch renounces his sinful lust as Augustine of the Secretum had requested and as Augustine himself had modeled in the Confessions. But in so doing, Petrarch plays for other stakes. Whereas the Canzoniere audaciously cites the poet’s idolatrous love for Laura as testimony to the strength of his sub-

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sequent love for heaven, the Africa abandons that claim in order to make another much like it—an equally audacious suggestion that such devotion as Petrarch’s to the byways of pagan literature and the acquisition of literary fame can provide real testimony to his devotion to God. In the allegory that advances this idea, and in the drama of sexual temptation and renunciation that conveys the allegory, we experience the self- and reader-justifying poetics of Petrarch’s Augustinian epic.

chapter one

Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa

=< the enig ma of pet r arch’s africa That Petrarch’s Africa would pose challenging and interesting interpretive problems might seem, on its ‹rst encounter, an unlikely proposition. Its account of Scipio’s victory over Hannibal follows Livy’s narrative closely, and most of the details of Scipio’s prophetic dream upon his landing in Africa come right out of the Somnium Scipionis fragment of Cicero’s De republica (known to Petrarch and his contemporaries through the commentary on it by Macrobius). The Africa’s references to the coming of Christ and the glory of Christian Rome have struck many readers as clumsy, too “forced,” and no less distracting than Petrarch’s trademark, hyperbolic encomiums to poetry and poets (his and himself especially). But most problematic of all is the Africa’s depiction of its hero. Scipio seems merely to embody a catalog of pre-Christian virtues (which Petrarch lays on thickly indeed), and there is no escaping the now-embarrassing circumstance that Petrarch’s celebration of Scipio’s achievements recalls nostalgically Rome’s imperial conquests and subjugation of “barbarian” peoples. For all these reasons, the Africa is not widely read even in translation, and since even avid students of Renaissance epic are not likely to have read it recently, I will take a few paragraphs to summarize its action before explaining how we may recognize it as our foundational Augustinian epic. In book 1, we learn that Scipio has recently driven the Carthaginians out of 20

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Spain, but instead of returning directly to Italy to protect Rome from Hannibal’s approaching army, Scipio has landed in Africa to prepare a siege of Carthage. In a revised version of Scipio Africanus the Younger’s dream from the Somnium Scipionis, Scipio the Elder dreams that he meets the spirits of his father and uncle, both killed in battle, who recite the names of Roman heroes and, in book 2, inspire Scipio with a prophecy of his and Rome’s future glory, although Scipio also learns that his ungrateful countrymen will spurn him in later years. His uncle brings Scipio up to the heavens to view the smallness of the world and pettiness of human affairs, but he nevertheless admonishes Scipio to remember that his destiny in this life is to earn honors for noble service in the current war to save his homeland. He also tells him to ‹nd some small consolation in the knowledge that his fame will endure for many centuries—thanks in part to the labors of a future “second Ennius,” meaning Petrarch—and to enjoy much consolation in the prospect of eternal peace in the next life. In book 3, Scipio sends his friend and captain Laelius to persuade the African king Syphax to break his alliance with Carthage and join forces with Rome. Laelius is received by Syphax, delivers rich gifts, and recites the exploits of Roman heroes and former kings to demonstrate the nobility and manifest destiny of Mother Rome. At the king’s request, he also tells of the rape of Lucretia and the expulsion of the Tarquins, “the cause of [Rome’s] change of state” from kingdom to republic. At the opening of book 4, Syphax agrees to the proposed alliance with Scipio against Hannibal and asks for a full account of the young Roman general. Laelius obliges, telling the story of Scipio’s life up through the recent Spanish campaign and praising him for his many virtues of character. Book 5 then opens abruptly after a substantial lacuna, with Massinissa, Rome’s other African ally, entering the defeated capital of Syphax’s kingdom. As we know from Livy, during the interval that Petrarch has left unnarrated, Syphax had married the daughter of Hasdrubal, the leader of Carthage’s troops in Spain, and reverted back to his old alliance. By the time of Massinissa’s appearance in the poem, Syphax has been routed in battle and is a prisoner. At the opening of book 5, we meet Sophonisba, Syphax’s queen, coming to the doorway of the palace to surrender herself to Massinissa. Overwhelmed by her beauty and by pity for her plight, Massinissa offers to be her protector and new husband, and they are married shortly afterward. Once Scipio hears of this, he confronts Massinissa with his trespass, lectures him on the dangers of unbridled passion, and demands that Sophonisba be relinquished to him for transport to Rome.

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< Massinissa is persuaded to break off the hasty marriage, but he ful‹lls his promise to Sophonisba that she will not become Scipio’s war prize, by arranging to have a cup of poison delivered to her tent. She drinks it, and in book 6, her spirit joins others in Hades who have died for love. Scipio is shocked by Massinissa’s role in Sophonisba’s suicide, but he consoles his heartbroken ally and then rallies him and the Roman troops to prepare for war against Hannibal, who has set sail from Italy to defend Carthage. In book 7, Scipio agrees to meet Hannibal to hear his peace proposals, but Hannibal’s attempts to cajole and dupe the young Roman general into breaking off his siege are ignored. Scipio will accept only total surrender. Since neither side ›inches, the great enemies ready for battle; meanwhile, in the court of heaven, two matrons, young Rome and aged Carthage, plead their cases before Jupiter, whose verdict is that Rome must be victorious. The battle commences near the end of book 7, and the Carthaginians are swiftly defeated. Book 8 describes Hannibal’s ›ight and Carthage’s surrender. In the ‹nal book of the poem, Scipio returns to Rome, accompanied in his ship by Ennius, who tells him of his dream of Homer and his vision of a future poet—Petrarch again—who will immortalize Scipio and his deeds. The poem ends with Scipio’s arrival at Rome and triumph on the steps of the Capitol. At his side is Ennius, “his temples likewise crowned” with laurel, “honored for his great learning and life-giving Poetry.”1 Whether one knows the Africa only on the basis of this plot summary or is well acquainted with the poem, it is probably just as startling to encounter the exuberant declaration of Giuseppe Toffanin, ‹rst published in 1933, that “the Africa remains . . . the poem of Humanism par excellence, the great bridge ›ung to us across the pagan centuries by God.” “The Africa,” says Toffanin, is “the real Divine Comedy,” the true “Christian sequel to the Aeneid.”2 As we might expect, the initial critical reaction to Toffanin’s grandiose assessment of Petrarch’s epic was one of skepticism. Most scholars downplayed or rejected the Africa’s potential to be read as Christian fable or allegory, instead arguing that it only praises the virtues of the perfect pre-Christian man, virtues that now may be hailed as universal because they are consistent with Christianity. In the same year that Toffanin’s Storia dell’umanesimo appeared in English translation, for example, E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that “the principal importance of Africa . . . is that it marks a complete transfer of the centre importance from the allegory to the heroic poem, from the theme of the soul’s pilgrimage towards its heavenly home to that of the politics of the world” (1954, 190). Published eight years later, Aldo Bernardo’s seminal monograph on Petrarch’s epic faults earlier scholars for having largely “failed to grasp the signi‹cance of

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the fact that the Africa was, in effect, the ‹rst and perhaps last sincere attempt to write a purely classical epic since Virgil and Statius” (1962, 168). In Scipio, says Bernardo, “we have the portrayal of the humanistic ideal of the supreme man of action acknowledging beauty, art and re‹nement” (47); or as he puts it shortly after, “Petrarch was conceiving of Scipio as the most perfect exemplar of the cardinal virtues offered by antiquity” (54)— “prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice” (63). Despite these statements, Bernardo recognized that Petrarch’s “ultimate goal” was not actually to write a “purely classical epic” but to strike “a compromise between the classical and the Christian conceptions of poetry” (43), with Scipio being “either the instrument of a Christian Providence or the unconscious follower of the three Christian virtues [i.e., faith, hope, and charity]” (63). Indeed, he notes also, Scipio’s “ultimate exploit”—the defeat of Hannibal—“will be instrumental in making Rome both the City of Man and the City of God” (158–59), re›ecting Petrarch’s long obsession with reconciling not just classical and Christian poetics but classical culture with Christian faith. Ultimately, as so many scholars have stressed, this was a reconciliation that Petrarch could never realize. “Scipio summarizes in Latin a humanistic ideal whose counterpart Petrarch had tried all his life to de‹ne in Italian through the image of Laura,” says Bernardo; but this ideal, rather than being a “concept of virtue that complements a concept of glory in a way that makes both acquire” Christian meaning, merely is one that attains “near-Christian hues” (64, my emphasis).3 Other scholars who have likewise emphasized the strain of Petrarch’s effort to reconcile his Christian faith with the study of pagan classics and the celebration of a pagan hero—most notably, Francisco Rico and Enrico Fenzi—have argued that the irresolvable paradox led eventually to Petrarch’s “paralizzante senso d’inutilità” (Fenzi 1975, 85), a “paralysis” that made it impossible for him to complete the Africa. David Groves, for example (in an essay titled “Petrarch’s Inability to Complete the Africa”), maintains that it is possible to examine “the structure of the work” in order to “suggest what some of the dif‹culties” were that “Petrarch was unable to overcome” (1975, 11). He concludes that “there are two reasons combining to paralyze Petrarch in his writing of the epic: the spiritual crisis made manifest in the Secretum; and the inability to harmonize satisfactorily different sources of inspiration [i.e., Christian and pagan] which result in different types of poetry” (18).4 At this juncture, one might observe that in Petrarch’s mind there need not have been any necessary con›ict between the Africa’s classical subject and its ostensible Christian aim. In the Secretum, it is true, Augustine

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< admonishes Petrarch to “abandon Africa,” to leave off chronicling “the deeds of the Romans”—yet Petrarch understood that “the deeds of the Romans” could and ought to inspire men to love heaven, according to Augustine’s own words in The City of God. There we are told that “it was not only for the sake of rendering due reward to the citizens of Rome that her empire and glory were so greatly extended in the sight of men”; rather, “this was done for the advantage of citizens of the eternal City, during their pilgrimage here, so that they might diligently and soberly contemplate such examples, and see how great a love they owe to their supernal fatherland for the sake of life eternal, if an earthly city was so greatly loved by its citizens for the sake of merely human glory.”5 Thus Petrarch could reasonably claim to be performing a service according to this formulation, by contributing, in his histories and Roman epic, to that stock of “examples” of virtuous pagan actions for Christian pilgrims to “soberly contemplate.” But Petrarch does not claim this. The Africa’s justi‹cation resides instead in its Christian allegory, whose ‹rst clue is the poem’s un‹nished state. The Africa’s apparent “abandonment,” in other words, indicates a strategically advertised—rather than any actual—“paralysis” or “crisis” in Petrarch’s soul. As Pier Paulo Vergerio and Hieronimo Squarza‹co both point out in their biographies of the poet that prefaced most early editions of Petrarch’s collected works, there is hardly anything missing that would interfere with the progress of the poem’s narrative, even though whole segments of the Second Punic War are passed over. Echoing Vergerio, Squarza‹co writes: The published edition of the poem proves to be imperfect because the progression of its events does not proceed as the subject has them, for if the whole of the war is considered, we may perceive that much is wanting, such as the journey of Scipio from Spain to meet Syphax [etc.]. . . . and besides this, neither the crossing of the army into Africa, nor the nighttime burning of Syphax’s camp is explained, or how afterwards Syphax and Hasdrubal were beaten in battle; nor how at last the impious king was conquered and captured in his realm by Massinissa and Laelius: but all these things, as Vergerio writes, may be supplied by reason [by which Squarza‹co means the memory of Livy’s history that Petrarch’s readers generally possessed]. “And besides,” Squarza‹co concludes, “these other things which reveal the work not to have been completed, the half-lines and imperfect meter, they

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are as frequent in our Maro.”6 By this point, Squarza‹co implies—wittingly or not—that incompleteness is one feature of Vergilian imitation. As for the most glaring lacunae, such as that between books 4 and 5 (which skips over all the events listed by Squarza‹co as “wanting”), I would direct us back to Francisco Rico’s casual suggestion that we should understand by these “imperfections” that Petrarch “did just what Augustine admonishes Francis to do” in the Secretum; 7 that is, Petrarch eventually abandoned the poem rather than further risk endangering his soul—and the evidence of this decision is there for all to see. So, characteristically, Petrarch means to have his cake and eat it too: the poem is un‹nished, but it is not too un‹nished. Yet the implications of Rico’s insight, which he leaves unpursued in his own study, are still to be articulated. If, in part, the Africa is supposed to be taken as Petrarch’s belated acceptance of Augustine’s counsel, a confession of his sin and testimony of his penitence, then it is worth asking in what other ways, besides its un‹nished state, the poem re›ects Petrarch’s effort to compose an Augustinian epic. The lacuna between books 4 and 5, I will argue, as much as it is a gap that leaves out Livy’s history, is also one that allows Petrarch’s readers to glimpse that Christian meaning behind the poem’s classical narrative. At the end of book 4, Laelius is describing to King Syphax the aftermath of Scipio’s successful siege of the Spanish city of Cartagena, established by Hasdrubal and named by him after “great Carthage” (4.260–62; 353–55). Laelius praises his general for having taken special care to assure the women of the city that they would be safe from sexual assault by his soldiers. Scipio had ordered the women to be set apart from the other prisoners, indoors and out of sight, “because seducing eyes insult modesty and the bloom of a chaste face is plucked by gazes” (quod lumina blanda pudori / Insultant, castique oculis ›os carpitur oris [4.382–83; 514–16]). Then, in the very last lines of the book, Laelius marvels speci‹cally at Scipio’s self-discipline when confronted by the temptation of female beauty. Proh, superi, mortali in pectore quanta Maiestas! spectate senem iuvenilibus annis. Nam simul etatis stimulos formeque virentis Blanditias perferre grave est.

(4.385–88)

[Ah, what majesty, gods, in this mortal breast! Behold maturity at a young age! For to endure both the incitements of youth and the allure of blooming beauty is very hard. (519–22)]

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< Abruptly, book 4 ends and book 5 opens with another hero “at a young age,” Scipio’s African ally Massinissa, entering the defeated city of Cirta. He immediately encounters there Syphax’s beautiful queen, Sophonisba. Petrarch emphasizes her beauty in this passage and the sexual attraction that beholding her excites. Ille nec ethereis unquam superandus ab astris Nec Phebea foret veritus certamina vultus Iudice sub iusto. Stabat candore nivali Frons alto miranda Iovi, multumque sorori Zelotipe metuenda magis quam pellicis ulla Forma viro dilecta vago.

(5.20–25)

[Her face, unsurpassed by the stars of heaven, would not fear Phoebus in a contest under the eyes of a just judge. Her brow, white as snow, stood a wonder to high Jove, and to his jealous sister a source of much greater fear than any mistress’s beauty prized by her errant husband. (27–34)] In contrast to Scipio, whose restraint was just extolled, Massinissa will take one look at Sophonisba and feel “a burning wound spread through all his marrow” (Vulnus inardescens totis errare medullis / Ceperat [5.70–71; 93–94]), so that rather than serving as the protector of his female prisoner from his soldiers’ lustful eyes, Massinissa himself is in›amed with desire. This side-by-side contrast between the two leaders’ behaviors is surely Petrarch’s design, hardly the coincidental result of “wanting” material. That is, judging only in terms of the sequence of events, we mark a major lacuna between books 4 and 5, one so vast that we cannot help but recognize that Petrarch has “abandoned” the completion of his epic, as he admits in the Secretum that he ought to do; but in terms of what he was unwilling to abandon in the Secretum, his study and imitation of classical literature toward a Christian end, there is no lacuna. We are looking at a two-part but single segment of the Africa, comprised of the last episode of book 4 and the ‹rst episode of book 5, whose function is to alert us to the theme of sexual temptation and renunciation that will be developed in the coming books and that is central to the poem’s Christian meaning. This theme is obvious in the subplot of Massinissa’s liaison with Sophonisba, as all the Africa’s critics have noted. Yet most of them seriously misrepresent the episode by condemning Sophonisba as an evil temptress. She has been compared to Circe (Bernardo 1962, 151), interpreted allegori-

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cally as “the embodiment of lust” (Seung 1976, 145), and called “an earthly demon” who, like “her model Dido,” is one of the “evil forces in the world” (Wilhelm 1976, 588–89). Craig Kallendorf similarly comments that she is “an unmistakable Dido ‹gure,” and he asserts that she is “pure evil, the incarnation of an all-consuming passion” (1989, 40, 47). Even Donald Gilman, who states his intent to read her character sympathetically “within the contexts of patriarchal prerogatives and the limitations of liberty,” declares that Sophonisba “embodies attributes of the stereotypical seductress” (1997, 111–12). The ›aw in such pronouncements is that nowhere in the Africa are we told or encouraged to suspect that Sophonisba is lustful or that she even considers trying to seduce Massinissa. Petrarch embellishes on Livy’s description of her stunning beauty, but he follows his source faithfully in reporting only that she meets Massinissa upon his arrival in the defeated city, kneels before him, and, clasping his knees and right hand, begs to be killed rather than turned over as a prisoner to the Romans.8 In Livy, a single comment after this scene suggests it might be Sophonisba’s intention to seduce Massinissa: at the conclusion of her tearful prayer, he says that “her speech was now more like blandishment than entreaty” (propriusque blanditas iam oratio esset quam preces [30.12.17]).9 But Petrarch does not include that comment. He gives no indication that her pleas are insincere or designed to ensnare her captor’s heart, and more important, both authors stress that it requires no machinations on her part for Massinissa to become in›amed with desire and resolve to make Sophonisba his queen. Before even consulting her on his plan, he announces on the same day he sees her that he will marry her (Livy 30.12.20; Africa 5.114–15). Later, as in Livy, we will see Syphax, as a prisoner, attempting to explain away his breach of faith with Scipio by claiming he was under the spell of Sophonisba’s love, but clearly it is Petrarch’s intention not to mitigate Massinissa’s culpa by suggesting that the young gallant has come under the powers of a “seductress,” let alone an “embodiment of lust” or “evil demon.” Just as Augustine, in the Secretum, reminds Petrarch that Laura is not to blame for Petrarch’s idolatrous love for her,10 the fault and the epic drama reside entirely in the male soul. The manner of Sophonisba’s association with Dido works to illustrate the same point, for only after Massinissa has fallen for her and declared that she will become his wife is Sophonisba explicitly associated with Vergil’s Carthaginian queen. In her ‹rst plea to Massinissa, she is compared by Petrarch to the goddess Venus, but to the “tremulous” (corusca) Venus who begs Jupiter to save Aeneas from shipwreck in the storm of Aeneid 1,

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< not to Venus as symbol of cupidity (5.59–62; 79–82). After Sophonisba has been married to Massinissa, her conscience is troubled despite his assurances that Syphax’s defeat and capture in war free her from her ‹rst marriage bond, which is similar to the guilt that Dido feels for breaking her vow never to remarry after the murder of her husband, Sychaeus. In a dream, Sophonisba “clearly saw herself torn away from her second husband, and heard the threats and rebukes of the ‹rst” (Visa est sibi nempe, secundo / Rapta viro, sentire minas et iurgia primi [5.262–63; 346–48]). Later, when she is about to take her life by drinking the poison Massinissa has sent her, she curses Scipio, Rome, and Massinissa in a speech that echoes Dido’s curse against Aeneas and the Trojans (5.748–66; 977–1004). She laments, too, that she departs to Styx “before my day” (adeo, licet ante diem [5.737; 963]), and when her spirit appears in Hades, Rhadamanthus rules that she has not merited this suffering (immerite neque hec iniuria [6.22; 37–38]), in lines that echo what Vergil says of Dido’s suicide in the Aeneid—that “she did not die a merited death, but a wretched one before her day” (merita nec morte peribat, / sed misera ante diem [4.696–97]). It is Massinissa, then, not Petrarch, who makes a dangerous Dido ‹gure out of Sophonisba. For Petrarch, she is a Dido ‹gure only in respect to her feelings of guilt, her required sacri‹ce for the preservation of Rome’s national destiny, and her resentment of this role. In most other respects, Massinissa himself is the Dido of the Africa. Like the restless queen who wandered her palace at night, who was “tormented by heavy care, and fed her wound with her blood, and was wasted by hidden ‹re” (regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura / volnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni [Aeneid 4.1–2]), Massinissa is the one, we have seen, who suffered “a burning wound through all his marrow” (Africa 5.70–71; 93–94). He, not Sophonisba, “turns in his bed: because all night love rages in his breast and cruel cares tear his heart, he burns with desire,” and “grief, fear, anger and madness bar him from sleeping” (Volvitur inde thoro: quoniam sub pectore pernox / Sevit amor lacerantque truces precordia cure, / Uritur; invigilant meror, metus, ira furorque [5.527–29; 693–96]). Furthermore, Petrarch’s determination to remove the ‹gure of Dido as an exemplum of female lust helps to explain his rejection of Vergil’s fanciful version of Dido’s fate,11 as we hear in the song of a prophetic bard at Syphax’s court. Post regina Tyro fugiens his ‹nibus ampla Menia construxit magnam Carthaginis urbem.

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Ex re nomen ei est. Mox aspernata propinqui Coniugium regis, cum publica vota suorum Urgerent, veteris non immemor illa mariti, Morte pudicitiam redimit. Sic urbis origo Oppetiit regina ferox. Iniuria quanta Huic ‹at, si forte aliquis—quod credere non est— Ingenio con‹sus erit, qui carmine sacrum Nomen ad illicitos ludens traducat amores!

(3.418–27)

[Later a queen, ›eeing to these parts from Tyre, built within vast walls the great city of Carthage. On this account it has its name.12 Soon after, having spurned marriage with a neighboring king, never forgetful of her former husband though her subjects’ prayers were urging her to wed, she redeemed her virtue in death. Thus the ‹erce queen, founder of the city, perished. How great an injury to her will be done—it is not possible to believe—if perchance there will be someone who, having trusted in his talent, would mockingly in verse drag her sacred name into a forbidden love affair! (524–37)] This is the noble Dido extolled in an alternative tradition, the Dido whom Petrarch knew from Justin (the second- or third-century historian) and from Tertullian and Jerome, a model of chastity rather than of uncontrolled passions.13 Petrarch chooses to disperse the “injurious” traits of the falsely represented Dido among other characters in the Africa—and not only Sophonisba and Massinissa. For example, he transfers Vergil’s description of Dido’s suicide to Laelius’s story of Lucretia’s tragic end and, in the process, reminds us again of Dido’s properly “sacred name.” In the Aeneid, Dido falls on Aeneas’s sword, with “the blade foaming and her hands spattered with blood” (ensemque cruore / spumantem sparsaque manus [4.663–65]). In the Africa, Lucretia kills herself in the same way, and her husband, Brutus, kneels beside her, “drawing the bloody steel from the foaming wound and raising it, vehement, in his hand” (cruentum / Fervidus educens spumanti vulnere ferrum / Attollensque manu” [3.740–42; 942–44]). So Syphax, hearing this story, remarks: Sentio . . . quid femina vestra pudica Morte velit: ne cunta sibi iam candida Dido Arroget.

(4.4–6)

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< [I understand . . . what your chaste lady desired in death: that the already fair Dido not claim it all to herself. (5–8)] With the drama of a woman’s soul tormented by love thus transferred, in the Africa, to the soul of a man, Massinissa, it is up to the hero, who is steadfast in his virtue, to counsel the sufferer. In an elaboration on Scipio’s boast to Massinissa in Livy (30.14.6), Scipio in the Africa declares that his chastity is his greatest honor. Certe ego, si proprio michi non sordescit in ore Gloria, non alia tantum virtute superbum Me fateor, quam quod blande michi ‹rma tenere Frena voluptatis videor. ..................... Precipue tamen hec nitide suspecta iuvente Pestis, et etati pretendit retia nostre. ............................... [D]amnosa voluptas Nocte dieque furit; numquam tu menibus illam Arcebis: mediis veniet penetralibus inter Excubias vigilesque canes, ferrata potentum Limina transiliet. ............... Gloria magna quidem magnum vicisse Siphacem; Sed maior, michi crede, graves domuisse tumultus Pectoris atque animo frenum posuisse frementi.

(5.395–420)

[If my glory does not turn foul coming from my own mouth, certainly in no other virtue do I acknowledge more pride, than that I am seen to hold pleasure’s lure ‹rmly in check. . . . In youth especially this evil is a danger, and spreads nets at our age. . . . Ruinous pleasure rages day and night; never will you keep her from the walls. She will come within the inner chambers past guards and vigilant dogs, and pass through the iron gates of the powerful. . . . Indeed, to have conquered great Syphax is a great glory; but believe me, greater still to have tamed the mighty disturbances of the heart and to have reined in a raging spirit. (519–50)]

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As Aldo Bernardo recognizes, “in many ways, the relationship between Scipio and Massinissa during the latter’s affair with the African queen is highly reminiscent of the relationship depicted by Petrarch in the Secretum between himself and St. Augustine” (1962, 150). Unlike Scipio, however, Augustine counsels Petrarch in the Secretum from the position of one who has indulged his lusts before he was able to overcome them. When he observes of his charge, “your condition has been that of many others” (contigisse tibi hactenus quod multis [49]), we are expected to keep in mind that Augustine was once among their number and is now able, in consequence, to penetrate more deeply into Petrarch’s sufferings than Scipio attempts with Massinissa. In the very same sentence, in fact, Augustine accuses Petrarch of false penitence for bewailing his imprisonment by Laura. “[Your condition],” Augustine continues, “can be expressed in that verse of Vergil’s: ‘The mind remains unmoved; the tears ›ow in vain’” (quibus dici potest versus ille Vergilii: mens immota manet, lacrime volvuntur inanes [49]). This familiar line from the Aeneid (4.449) occurs after Dido tearfully and angrily pleads with Aeneas not to abandon her. According to its usual reading, his mind “remains unmoved” by her distress because he is now ‹rm in his purpose to leave Carthage.14 But in Augustine’s statement in the Secretum, both halves of the verse apply to Petrarch, and both are negative: his mind remains unmoved by the tears that he himself weeps, because they are not sincerely tears of contrition. A praiseworthy application of this allusion would have been such as that which Petrarch knew from The City of God, where Augustine writes: The mind [that clings to virtue] permits no disturbances to prevail in it contrary to reason, even though these assail the baser parts of the soul; instead the mind itself is master of all such disturbances and, by withholding its consent from them and resisting them, exercises a reign of virtue. Such a mind was that of Aeneas, whom Vergil describes when he says, “the mind remains unmoved; the tears ›ow in vain.”15 One way to characterize Petrarch’s progress in the Secretum is as a shift in the application of Vergil’s verse. Petrarch is freed from the chains of lust (as spiritual pilgrim, he reaches his destination) when he is able to alter his erring mind with honest tears of contrition, moving it to a state of steadfast resolution in virtue, from which it will remain unmoved by lust or any

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< other disturbance of the soul that can be represented allegorically in the ‹gure of Dido and her tears. That is exactly the transformation required of Massinissa in the Africa, and thus I have formulated at this point two initial answers to the question, how can the Africa be called an Augustinian epic? The ‹rst and most obvious answer is that it conveys, once more, Augustine’s message in his own writings, especially in the Confessions, and his counsel to Petrarch in the Secretum—that one must abandon ignoble love and dedicate oneself to what really matters, which in Scipio’s pre-Christian time would mean the cardinal virtues and such noble worldly goals as protecting and building Roman imperium. The second and not much more interesting answer is that Petrarch’s insistence in the Africa that Vergil’s Dido never existed and his alteration of the Aeneas-Dido story into one in which all of love’s ‹re is located in the male sufferer rather than in the female object of desire (and it is a passion that is overcome by Massinissa rather than fatal to him) supply an epic of male pilgrimage toward virtue rather than the distracting tragic love story that the Dido episode represented for Augustine during the stage of his adolescent straying from God. Says Augustine in the Confessions: Unmindful of my own wandering, I was made to learn the wanderings of Aeneas and to weep over the death of Dido because she killed herself for love, while all during those times I was a wretch with dry eyes, dying apart from you oh God, my Life. What indeed could be more pitiful than such a wretch, unpitying of his own misery and shedding tears for Dido’s death, which was caused by her loving Aeneas, yet weeping no tears for his own death, which is caused by not loving you, oh God, who are the light of my heart, bread of my inmost soul, and the goodness conjoining my mind and heart’s thoughts? But I did not love you . . . and I did not weep over this, but wept for Dido who met her death at the end by the sword.16 These two answers to the question might be minimally adequate, but they are unsatisfying because, to be “Augustinian,” Petrarch’s epic should refer more speci‹cally to Christian salvation, not just the overcoming of destructive passions. So far, we have only seen that the Africa’s rejection of lust redelivers a moral lesson already available in Livy’s history. We might reasonably expect more from the poet of the Canzoniere, and besides, Petrarch indicates to us at least twice that a deeper meaning, a “truth,” resides behind a “veil” in the Africa. On the journey back to Rome after the decisive defeat of Hannibal, ‹rst of all, Ennius instructs Scipio,

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licuisse poetis Crede: sub ignoto tamen ut celentur amictu, Nuda alibi, et tenui frustrentur lumina velo, Interdumque palam veniant, fugiantque vicissim.

(9.97–102)

[Believe this to have been allowed to poets: that their illuminations, elsewhere exposed, are concealed under a cloak, though it be unknown, and they deceive the eye behind a light veil, one moment coming into the open, the next taking ›ight. (131–39)] If this is so and the Africa only serves to celebrate Scipio’s virtues of character, then what cloak veils them? In particular, how concealed is Scipio’s direct admonishment to Massinissa that it is a great glory to maintain one’s chastity—“to have tamed the mighty disturbances of the heart and to have reined in a raging spirit”? No, Scipio’s merits and such strictures are all plainly in sight. As in the Secretum, Petrarch’s moral on avoiding ignoble love is explicit and ‹nal. Ennius invites us to seek something else, something that is “concealed” in the poem. Lady Truth, in the Secretum, does the same. Referring to the Africa when she ‹rst appears to Petrarch in his dream, she says to him: “That I have been well known to you for a long time is witnessed by [the Africa’s] subtle circumlocution.”17 I translate the last phrase (arguta circumlocutione) very literally: Draper renders it “‹nelywrought allegory” (Petrarch 1911, 2), while Carozza and Shey have Lady Truth praise the “intricate allusions in [Petrarch’s] poem” (Petrarch 1989, 37). She is telling us, we would all agree, that there is some hidden meaning in the Africa—a truth subtly or cleverly veiled by the poem’s roundaboutness. But where do we ‹nd subtle circumlocutions, and to what truths do they bear witness? The few suggestions put forth thus far, such as Toffanin’s that the Africa is “the real Divine Comedy,” are left similarly vague by their proponents or for other reasons have not won acceptance, let alone inspired elaboration, in subsequent scholarship on Petrarch’s epic.18 Its Punic allegory remains to be detailed, so to this task I now turn.

the allegor y of the africa In a letter to the young poet Frederigo Aretino in Petrarch’s Epistolarum de rebus senilibus (cited here as Seniles 4.5),19 Vergil’s Aeneid is subjected to an allegorical interpretation that is generally described as thoroughly traditional, in that it seems to depart little from earlier explications of the Aeneid

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< that have come down to us from medieval times. This letter tends to be treated as just another example of the “ages” or “stages of man” interpretation of the Aeneid, with Aeneas representing the vir bonus, without any consideration given to the potential value of Petrarch’s local interpretations to our understanding of his purposes in his own epic.20 But in fact, in one startling respect, Petrarch departs signi‹cantly from other commentators on Vergil, and the next chapter will suggest that this difference may have had more of an in›uence on Renaissance epic poetry than scholarship has yet allowed for Vergil commentaries generally. Here, however, I have the more restricted aim of identifying the clues in Seniles 4.5, together with those in the Secretum, that indicate the allegory of the Africa. Just as Ennius claims of poetry in general and as Lady Truth attests of the Africa, Petrarch opens his letter to Aretino by asserting that there are hidden meanings in the Aeneid that are “as gems wrapped in linen.”21 He then promises his correspondent that he will reveal these gems, “once having removed the veil of allegories that is covering the truth,” for as it is commonly known, explains Petrarch, Vergil “intended something loftier than what he says in that divine work.”22 When Petrarch commences his explication of the poem with a statement of Vergil’s overall design, he indeed only repeats conventional wisdom (even as he takes personal credit for it) in saying that Vergil’s “goal and subject, in my judgment, is the perfect man” and that “this perfection consists either solely or principally in virtue.”23 But in turning to the interpretation of speci‹c details in the Aeneid, Petrarch emphasizes one theme far more than do other commentators whom we know. Traditionally, the story of Aeneas’s affair with Dido represents the stage of adolescent abandon, of youthful lust that is brie›y indulged before being controlled, but Petrarch extends that allegory of man’s battle against lust from the ‹rst to the very last event in the poem. An overview of this unique characteristic of Petrarch’s interpretation is in order, for it is too little known or discussed.24 On the subject of the violent storm that tosses Aeneas’s ›eet in the opening scene of the Aeneid, Petrarch says, “the winds have seemed to me to be nothing other than the soul’s attacks of anger and disturbances of lust residing in the breast and within the heart,” while “Aeolus,” the god who keeps the winds from exerting their fullest force, “is reason itself controlling and restraining the wrathful and concupiscent appetite of the soul.”25 Aeneas and other survivors of the storm then ‹nd themselves washed up on an unknown shore, and as he explores the terrain, his mother appears to him in disguise: “Venus, visible in the middle of a wood, is lust,” explains Petrarch, “and she takes on the

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habit of a maiden in order to deceive the unknowing.” He continues: “For if anyone were to perceive her as she is, no doubt terri‹ed by that one glimpse he would run away, for as nothing is more attractive than lust, so too nothing is more foul. . . . Further, she wears the habit of a huntress, because she hunts the souls of the wretched.”26 He tells us, too, that Venus befriends the Trojans because they have been devoted to “the life of lust and pleasure, which is allotted to Venus,”27 and that she “is called the mother of Aeneas because even strong men are begotten by lust and because he had such singular grace that, though he was a needy exile, he is described as one who was pleasing even to chaste eyes”28—a reference to Dido, to whose kingdom the goddess directs him.29 At the end of book 2, Aeneas loses track of his wife, Creüsa—“that is, the one joined to his mind in the habit of pleasure from an early age”30— during the panicked ›ight from burning Troy. This interpretation means that Aeneas’s arrival in Carthage represents a backsliding into ›eshly pleasures, rather than a new fall. In Carthage, “he begins to be loved disgracefully” by Dido, and “for a while he too is overcome because it is dif‹cult, even for perfect men, not to be moved by the sight of excellent things, especially when they perceive themselves to be loved and desired.”31 Once Jupiter determines that Aeneas has too long delayed his destined journey to Italy, he instructs Mercury to visit Aeneas with a message to set sail immediately. Yet before describing Mercury’s visit, Petrarch makes a comment that might as well refer to the experience he claims for himself in the Secretum, after Augustine has demonstrated the error of his sinful love for Laura. “That man is indeed blessed,” he remarks to Aretino, “who though he has consented and succumbed to sin, or—what is more grievous—is caught in the lime of evil habit and bound with chains and stooped under the burden, yet at long last, through the silent inspiration of God or the warning of someone who relates what is pleasing to God, rises up, and having neglected what had restrained him, pleasure, returns to the straight path of virtue and glory.”32 Aeneas is thus rebuked by Mercury, and though Aeneas is “given over to suffering, ‘and with his heart shaken by great love,’” writes Petrarch, “nevertheless he obeys the command from heaven.”33 Aeneas leaves Carthage, and Dido “in the end kills herself, because,” Petrarch declares, “truly, as the Apostle [Paul] teaches, when the soul, forgetting past ways, converts back to honest things, foul lust destroys itself.”34 For other allegorizers of the Aeneid, the conclusion of book 4 marks the end of the good man’s bout with youthful passions: he moves on to the last

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< stages in his progress toward perfection (which they have him attaining by the end of book 6). But for Petrarch, this struggle continues in Aeneas’s breast right up to his ‹nal battle against Turnus. King Latinus, whose daughter, Lavinia, is fated to marry Aeneas, “is the mind,” Petrarch explains, while “her mother is the ›esh betrothed to the mind.” Because the mother is “weaker, and incapable of reason, she troubles to wed her daughter with one born at home and of the same race (that is, to carnal desires and earthly endeavors).”35 So Turnus as well symbolizes the sin of lust (and “earthly endeavors,” the signi‹cance of which phrase is treated in the next chapter), and the details of Aeneas’s duel with Turnus are interpreted accordingly.36 When Turnus ‹nds that he must abandon his chariot, “falling with a headlong leap, he goes on foot into battle: since even after the urgings of the ›esh have been conquered and extinguished, the internal ›ame still does not subside.”37 When the two warriors meet, Turnus succeeds in wounding Aeneas ‹rst: “Aeneas is struck by an arrow, and totters on his knee (because to be sure a man, however well he is armed with virtue, sometimes is wounded by temptations, just as if he limps toward his goal).”38 Aeneas throws a spear, but it lodges in a bitter olive tree, for “so long as the spear-point of the mind is directed against carnal desire, I know not what it will ‹nd of love.”39 It is Venus who removes the spear for Aeneas, but now she is said to represent “delight in the accomplishment and in good and honest pleasure,”40 not concupiscence. Finally the battle is decided: “The foreigner Aeneas—that is, virtue, or the brave man, conqueror of the ›esh—picks up in his hand the spear that is now easy and compliant and hurling it more fruitfully and surely at the native, carnal rival, strikes passion to the ground.”41 As Petrarch thus interprets it, then, there is one moral that consistently lies behind the veil of the Aeneid, a moral that “accords with that most famous doctrine of Plato, which Augustine and many others reverently embrace”—that “nothing more impedes the human mind from the consideration of divinity than Venus and a life devoted to lusts” (151).42 Thus Dido and Turnus both demonstrate, in this view of Vergil’s allegory, that “with lust dominating, there is no place for temperance, nor in a realm completely given over to pleasure is virtue able to exist, and so in the end it extinguishes all the light of the mind.”43 We must pause to take in the signi‹cance of this letter. If for Petrarch, reading the Aeneid means reading it allegorically (according to Vergil’s presumed intentions), then ‹rst of all, to assert that Petrarch intended to write “a purely classical epic” would mean, for him, to write an epic that contains “something loftier” than merely “what he says”: an epic that can be read allegorically.44 But in the second place, Petrarch’s partly conventional but

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partly idiosyncratic interpretation of the Aeneid should alert us to the possibility that the Africa shares with Petrarch’s Aeneid the defeat of lust as a major theme, not just in the obvious places—the stories of Massinissa and Sophonisba, of Aeneas and Dido—but elsewhere throughout, on an allegorical level. It is for this reason that, when Craig Kallendorf considers the relevance of Seniles 4.5 to the Africa (Turnus, he notes, represents “the spiritual blows of temptation, but [Aeneas] overcomes the lures of evil pleasure and drives to the ground his opponent, carnal passion” [1989, 50]) and when he then observes that “Scipio is to Hannibal as Aeneas is to Turnus,” it seems to me he stops short of the implications of his own insight by concluding merely that Scipio’s victory over Hannibal represents “the victory of praiseworthy virtue over damnable vice” (53). Petrarch invites us to be more precise than this. Scipio is to Hannibal as Aeneas is to Turnus because Scipio represents the virtuous man and Hannibal—defender of Dido’s Carthage and ful‹llment of her curse—represents carnal passion. That allegory of the Africa’s action is implied by Petrarch’s explication of the Aeneid, but it is likewise suggested by the ‹gure of Augustine, who sharpens the de‹nitions of its terms. As we have already seen, Augustine, too, associates Carthage with carnal sin in the story of his life journey: there, he reports in the Confessions, “a frying pan of shameful loves roared round [him] on every side,” infecting his soul with “the ‹lth of concupiscence,” “the hellishness of lust” (3.11). But additionally, in the Secretum Petrarch has his admonisher, Augustine, make an explicit link between Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and Petrarch’s battle against lust. In reply to Petrarch’s justi‹cation of his love for Laura (fully quoted in my introduction) that “her mind knows nothing of earthly concerns and burns only with a desire for heavenly ones,” Augustine scolds: Ah, madman! Is this not how you have fed the ›ames of your soul with false ›atteries for sixteen years? Truly Italy’s most famous enemy was not longer threatened, nor did she more frequently suffer the assaults of arms nor blaze with more raging ‹res, than have you in these times endured the ›ames and assaults of a most violent passion. At last one was found who forced that man to retreat; but who will ever drive your Hannibal from your neck, if you forbid him to go and, now a willing slave, invite him to remain with you?45 What Petrarch most desperately needs to save himself, says Augustine, is a Scipio to defend him from Hannibal—that is, the exercise of the virtue given him by God’s grace to drive out the lust that invades his soul. I pro-

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< pose that this passage in the Secretum invites us to discern in the Africa an allegory that works not only as a general morality tale and admonition to defeat one’s carnal passions, as Petrarch reads the Aeneid, but also as an autobiographical allegory. “Petrarch,” says Aldo Scaglione, “is the last Augustinian Christian autobiographer” (1984, 33). If that is so, then I suggest that the Africa so distinguishes him no less than does the Secretum. The Africa is the con‹rmation and celebration of Petrarch having once and for all driven Hannibal from his neck.46 A series of comparisons between passages in the Africa and the Aeneid illustrate this symbolic function of Hannibal and the city of Carthage. I start with one of Petrarch’s references to Carthage that, given the praises heaped on Dido’s character elsewhere in the poem, seems contradictory and baf›ing. During Scipio’s dream in book 1 of the Africa, his father, Publius Cornelius, points out Carthage to him not by name but with reference to its founding. Viden illa sub Austro Menia et infami periura palatia monte Femineis fundata dolis?

(1.179–81)

[Do you see the walls to the south, and the per‹dious palace built by a woman’s guile upon the mount of infamy? (244–46)] As legend had it, and as Vergil reports, having ›ed from her brother Pygmalion, the murderer of her husband, Dido came to the realm of King Iarbas, who offered her as much land as could be enclosed by an oxhide, which she then cut into strips and used to mark the boundaries of Carthage. It seems obvious that Scipio’s father is alluding, in the preceding lines, to this tale of “a woman’s guile.”47 But this is strange indeed. Dido’s “guile” in the story is ordinarily treated as evidence of her resourcefulness in desperate circumstances, not anything that would be associated with Carthage as a “per‹dious palace” on a “mount of infamy.” And why would Petrarch damn Dido so after having praised her as a paragon of chastity in book 3 (as discussed in the ‹rst section of this chapter), as one whose “sacred name” should never have been tainted by Vergil? The key is in the word dolis (with guile or deceit). In Vergil, this word is used several times in reference to the guile directed against Dido—‹rst her “poisoning” by Cupid in the form of young Ascanius, which causes her, as

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Petrarch says, to begin to love Aeneas “disgracefully” (Secretum 83), and later the scheme to bring her to a cave to be joined with Aeneas, in a union that it will be her culpa to call marriage (coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam [Aeneid 4.172]). Says Venus to Cupid in the ‹rst instance, “I mean to catch the queen by guile and encircle her with ›ames” (quocirca capere ante dolis et cingere ›amma / reginam meditor [1.673–74]), and she instructs her son that she will lull Ascanius to sleep “so that in no way may he know this guile or come between it” (ne qua scire dolos mediusve occurrere possit [1.682]). With the success of their plot, Juno confronts Venus and says sarcastically, “Such great and remarkable divinity, if one woman is conquered by the guile of two gods!” (magnum et memorabile numen, / una dolo divum si femina victa duorum est [4.94–95]). Finally, Juno proposes the scheme that supplies the inevitable outcome of Dido’s infection by Venus’s poison, and Venus smiles at its articulation. “speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem devenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa voluntas, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo; hic hymenaeus erit.” non adversata petenti adnuit atque dolis risit Cytherea repertis.

(4.124–28)

[“Dido and the Trojan prince shall come to the same cave. I will go there and, if certain of your good will to me, I shall join them in ‹rm wedlock and declare it perpetual; this shall be their nuptial.” Not averse to this entreaty, the Cytherean nodded her assent and smiled at the guile discovered.] If the guile of any woman has made Carthage the site of per‹dy and infamy, it is the guile of Vergil’s Venus, the goddess “who is lust,” says Petrarch, the Cytherean who “revolves in her breast new wiles, new schemes” (Cytherea novas artis, nova pectore versat / consilia [1.657–58]), converting Dido from chastity to disgraceful love and ultimately provoking Dido’s curse against Aeneas, which calls Hannibal into the world.48 And he, we discover in the Africa, is to be feared for possessing the same guile. Scipio is warned by his father to be wary of Hannibal, in words Vergil uses to describe Venus: “He will attempt to circumvent your intentions by various devices and new tricks” (Ille quidem varia tentabit ›ectere mentem / Arte dolisque novis [2.47–48; 61–62]). Also, Vergil’s comment at the moment

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< that Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, is playing in Dido’s lap—that she is “ignorant how great a god takes possession of her, to her sorrow” (inscia Dido, / insidat quantus miserae deus [Aeneid 1.718–19])—is slightly echoed in Scipio’s father’s warning “Beware the insidious schemes of this man” (Tu furta caveto / Insidiasque viri” [Africa 2.39–40; 52–53]). After their meeting in the cave, Aeneas settles with Dido in Carthage, and “immediately” (extemplo) malicious Rumor races through the land, spreading “facts and lies together” (pariter facta atque infecta [Aeneid 4.190]), a report that Aeneas and Dido are “neglectful of their kingdoms, and in thrall to shameful lust” (regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos [4.194]). When rumors spread in the Africa, it is of Hannibal’s invasion and burning of Italy. Turbida quin etiam rumoribus omnia miscens Fama procul nostro veniens crescebat ab orbe Arcibus instantem Ausoniis volitare sub armis Hanibalem, patrieque faces sub menia ferri; Illustres cecidisse duces, ardere nefandis Ignibus Hesperiam, atque undantia cedibus arva.

(1.139–44)

[Murky reports arose, arriving from afar with rumors confounded, that the invading Hannibal was speeding toward the citadels of Ausonia, bringing torches to the very walls of the fatherland; great generals had fallen, Italy was burning with nefarious ‹res, and the countryside was welling in blood. (190–97)] In the Aeneid, Rumor “in›ames the soul” (incendit . . . animum [4.197]) of nearby King Iarbas with jealousy, but in contrast to this and in contrast to Dido’s soul, which has been so “in›amed by love” that she has “lost her shame” (animum in›ammavit amore . . . solvitque pudorem [4.54–55]), a “noble ›ame was burning in [Scipio’s] eager heart” (Fulgentes calido generosas corde favillas [Africa 1.151; 206]). Speci‹cally, “revenge spurred and ‹lial piety moved” Scipio “to pursue the work he had begun,” which was “to cleanse the shame from Italy’s face” (Urgebat vindicta patris pietasque movebat / Ut ceptem sequeretur opus. . . . Itala detergi fronte pudorem [1.145–48; 198–202]). In reporting this eagerness to Syphax, Laelius declares that Scipio “already in his mind shakes the walls of lofty Carthage” (Carthaginis alte / Menia iam quatit ille animo [4.150–51; 200–202]), echoing Vergil’s phrase

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“the walls of lofty Rome” (altae moenia Romae [Aeneid 1.7]). The fact that the assault on Carthage is “already in his mind”—or, just as accurately, “in his soul” (animo)—is key to this spiritual allegory. Scipio’s victory over Hannibal is destined in part because his personal commitment to chastity is unshakable—as Massinissa admires when he says to himself, “I could have lived a king without a wife, and this would have been preferable, just as our Scipio has lived a celibate” (Licuit sine coniuge regem / Vivere, et id satius fuerat, quia celibe vita / Scipio noster erat [Africa 5.579–81; 760–63]). But also, Scipio’s siege of Carthage represents a reversal of the situation in the Aeneid and the Confessions, where Carthage is the site of the soul’s capture by lust’s encompassing ‹re.49 Whereas Vergil, as we have seen, describes Venus’s plan to “encircle the queen with ›ames” (cingere ›amma / reginam [Aeneid 1.673–74]), and whereas Augustine tells us, “I came to Carthage, and a frying pan of shameful loves roared round me on every side” (Veni Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago ›agitiosorum amorum [Confessions 3.1.1]), Scipio asserts, “It is my design to encircle the city and walls of cruel Carthage” (Michi menia circum / Cingere propositum et seve Carthaginis urbem [Africa 6.117–18; 152–53]). He will contain and extinguish the ›ames that endanger the soul. In a similar sense, we see that Scipio “‹ghts ‹re with ‹re.” With Hannibal routed and Carthage conquered, Scipio’s departure for Rome at the end of Africa 8 and beginning of book 9 is modeled on and contrasts with Aeneas’s ›ight from Carthage at the end of Aeneid 4 and beginning of book 5, in a manner that underscores that the city’s defeat in Petrarch’s poem is conceived as both historical event and allegorical sign. The image of ‹re, in particular, functions differently in these episodes. In the Aeneid, just after Dido falls upon Aeneas’s sword, the palace handmaids respond as if Carthage were being razed by a foreign army. lamentis gemituque et femineo ululatu tecta fremunt, resonat magnis plangoribus aether, non aliter quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis Karthago aut antiqua Tyros, ›ammaeque furentes culmina perque hominum volvantur perque deorum.

(4.667–71)

[The buildings clamor with lamentations and with groans and women’s howling, and heaven resounds with loud wails, as if all of Carthage or ancient Tyre were falling to invading enemies, and raging ›ames were rolling over the roofs of men and gods.]

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< In the Africa, Carthage is defeated by an army, although Scipio restrains his ‹rst impulse to destroy the city. Instead, he orders the Carthaginian ›eet to be burned so that it cannot be used to invade Italy again. Petrarch describes the citizens’ reaction to the destruction of their ships in familiar terms. Scipio provectus paulum subsistit et omnes Imperat hostiles ›ammis absumere puppes. ..................................... Torpuerant miseri cives sua damna gementes, Haud aliter quam si subito predulcia cuntis, Coniugia et nati atque arces et templa deorum Ipsaque Carthago ›ammis arderet in illis.

(8.1069–84)

[Scipio, departing, pauses brie›y and orders that all the enemy ships be destroyed in ›ames. . . . The wretched citizens, grieving for their losses, had been struck dumb, as if suddenly everything else they cherished, their wives and children, their citadels and temples of the gods, even Carthage itself, were burning in those ›ames. (1521–41)] By repeating the Vergilian simile—as if Carthage itself were being destroyed by ‹re—Petrarch invites us to perceive an equivalence between the two calamities, the death of Carthage’s queen and the destruction of its ships. This equivalence is con‹rmed and its purpose clari‹ed as we move to the opening lines of the next books.50 At the start of Aeneid 5, Aeneas and his ›eeing shipmates look back to see that the walls of Carthage are aglow with the ›ames of Dido’s funeral pyre. Interea medium Aeneas iam classe tenebat certus iter ›uctusque atros Aquilone secabat moenia respiciens, quae iam infelicis Elissae conlucent ›ammis. quae tantum accenderit ignem causa latet; duri magno sed amore dolores polluto, notumque furens quid femina possit, triste per augurium Teucrorum pectora ducunt. ut pelagus tenuere rates nec iam amplius ulla occurrit tellus, maria undique et undique caelum, olli caeruleus supra caput astitit imber, noctem hiememque ferens et inhorruit unda tenebris.

(5.1–11)

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[Meanwhile Aeneas with his ›eet held steadfast to the course out to sea and cleaved the waves with the north wind, looking back on the city walls that now shine with the ›ames of unhappy Elissa. What cause set alight so great a ›ame is hidden to them; but the cruel woes from great love de‹led, and what a woman in rage is able to do, is known, and it leads the hearts of the Trojans to grim foreboding. As the ships reached the open ocean and the land no longer could be seen, with only sea and sky in all directions, black rain clouds appeared overhead, bringing night and a winter storm, and the waves bristled up in the darkness.] In pointed contrast, the opening lines of Africa 9 describe Scipio and his crew sailing across calm seas in perfect weather. Scipio provectus pelago Romanaque classis Iam placidum sulcabat iter. Non rauca procellis Equora fervebant; ventisque silentibus undas Victorem sensisse putes. Tranquillior illis Vultus erat, celo facies composta sereno. Sic hostile fretum, sic cunta elementa videres Obsequio mulcere ducem. Iam litora longe Africa linquebant alacres et bella canentes Ibant ac valido frangebant remige ›uctus.

(9.1–9)

[Scipio, departing with the Roman ›eet, now cleaved his way across the placid open ocean. The rough seas were not roiling with storms; the waves, it seemed, acknowledged the victor with quiet winds. A countenance more tranquil was that composed by the serene sky. Thus the hostile waters, thus the elements all around, seemed to yield to the general in obedience. Now the shores and battles of Africa have been left far behind, and the crewmen, cheerfully singing, dash the waves with powerful oars. (1–11)] Dido’s suicide in book 4 of the Aeneid may represent for Petrarch “lust destroying itself,” but he also sees that as Aeneas and his companions look back on the ›ames of Dido’s funeral pyre, a literalization of the ›ames of love with which Venus had surrounded her, the sight ‹lls them with foreboding of future misery. They rightly guess that the cause of the ‹re is Dido’s “de‹led” love and “rage,” and immediately, as if to seal their fears

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< and to signal that Dido’s curse against the Trojans has been heard, the sky darkens and they ‹nd themselves battling another storm. Lust is not dead; it will return to threaten the “good man” again in the form of Turnus. The two images of a burning Carthage, ‹rst in the simile describing the despair of Dido’s handmaids and then in the glowing walls seen by Aeneas and his companions, alike foreshadow the future sufferings of Romans and Carthaginians, because the fruit of Dido’s curse will be not only the rise of Hannibal and Rome’s near destruction at his hands but, ultimately, Hannibal’s defeat, the surrender of Carthage, and Scipio’s burning of its ships. In the terms of the Africa’s allegory, it takes the ›ames of Carthage’s burning ships to extinguish the ›ames of burning Dido, and for the good man who sets those ships a‹re, safeguarding virtue from the shameful invasions of carnal passion, the sea and soul are placid. Another version of the same logic appears in a startling simile comparing the behavior of Hannibal after his defeat in battle with that of a ravished matro. Mestissimus ergo, Confususque pudore gravi ac merore, latebris Edgreditur, qualis rapto matrona decore, Que quamvis culpa careat, sibi conscia tanti Dedecoris, silet ipsa tamen refugitque videri Exhorretque viri aspectum faciemque suorum.

(8.263–68)

[At length, after long resisting, he is unable to ignore the commands of his people and city fathers. Wretched and bewildered by deep shame and grief, he leaves his hiding place, as if in the manner of a raped matron who, altogether without fault but conscious of her disgrace, is silent, tries not to be seen, and fears the glance of her husband and the sight of her kin. (376–83)] Scipio has “cleansed the shame [pudor] from Italy’s face” by conquering Hannibal, so in a strange expression of symbolic justice, Hannibal ‹guratively now suffers the same shame that he had before in›icted on Italy: that is, as symbol of lust, Hannibal is likened to a victim of lust, becoming a case in point for a dictum stated earlier in the Africa: “The conqueror of love is love and lust by lust is conquered” (Victor amoris amorque libidine victa libido est [6.202; 261–62]). That line, however, was applied to Massinissa, who replaced his ignoble

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love for Sophonisba with a renewed commitment to conquering his and Rome’s enemies and adding new kingdoms to his own. It may just as well apply to Petrarch, who, through the Africa’s allegory, glori‹es chastity in the person of Scipio and celebrates victory over his own carnal passions— the victory of having driven Hannibal from his neck—but who still remains shackled in the chains of his other culpa, his desire for literary fame, if the Africa is a poem he still intends to complete. In his opening invocation to Jesus, Petrarch confesses to the problem. Tuque, o certissima mundi Spes superumque decus, quem secula nostra deorum Victorem atque Herebi memorant, quem quina videmus Larga per innocuum retegentem vulnera corpus, Auxilium fer, summe parens. Tibi multa revertens Vertice Parnasi referam pia carmina, si te Carmina delectant; vel si minus illa placebunt, Forte etiam lacrimas, quas (sic mens fallitur) olim Fundendas longo demens tibi tempore servo.

(1.10–18)

[And you, the world’s surest hope and glory of heaven, whom our age knows as the conqueror of all gods and of hell, whom we see bearing ‹ve deep wounds upon your innocent body, bring me aid, Father on high. I shall bring back many pious verses to you from the heights of Parnassus, if verses delight you; but if they please you little, perchance I may offer my tears as well, which formerly (for so my mad mind was deceived) a long time I kept from shedding for you. (14–25)] Petrarch here offers us the same mix of enlightened progress and strategic waf›ing that he represented in himself in the Secretum. He offers tears of repentance in this poem, tears that for too long he held back while his “mad mind was deceived,” which can only refer to the mad desire for Laura that he has since renounced. Because that battle is won, he is now in a position to write the personal morality tale that is veiled behind Scipio’s decisive defeat of Hannibal. What he dares to hope is that his tears of repentance for that sin will make his verses, if not a delight to God, then perhaps palatable to him and at least not damning, even though they testify to Petrarch’s continued delay of meditating on death, of putting the care of his soul before the mere worldly fame that his “little books” might win for him. Petrarch’s personal references in the last book of the Africa even more

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< explicitly confess to his vainglory, and again he hints at the troubled condition of his soul that this sin has wrought. On the trip back to Rome, Ennius tells Scipio that he was recently visited in a dream by Homer, who told him of a future poet: “His name will be Franciscus,” says Homer to the dreaming Ennius, “and all the great exploits that you have witnessed with your eyes, he will gather in one work,” and “the title of that poem will be Africa” (Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grandia facta, / Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum / Colliget . . . titulusque poematis illi / AFRICA [9.232–36; 318–22]).51 “Yet,” Homer next admits, “how much will faith in his own talent, how much will the spur of praise drive him!” (Quin etiam ingenii ‹ducia quanta, / Quantus aget laudum stimulus! [9.236–37; 323–24]). Ennius then is shown this Franciscus, sitting in a grove with a pen in his hand, “weighed by cares” (curis gravidum [9.274; 377]). Eventually, Homer says, Franciscus will succeed in winning fame. He will “at last ascend the Capitol in a tardy triumph” (seroque triumpho / Hic tandem ascendet Capitolia [9.238; 325–26]). But we and Petrarch know that his suffering is greater than Homer or Ennius can imagine, for his faith is in his talent, not in God. That would seem to bring us back to the Africa’s un‹nished condition as evidence that Petrarch at last abandoned his writings and made a tardy recovery. Yet I insist that Petrarch strives for something more audacious in the Africa than justi‹cation by fragment alone. That is only the safety net. These are “pious” verses, says Petrarch. Their purpose is to convey tears of contrition for his ignoble love rather than to elicit tears of pity for an ignoble love story. Unlike the Aeneid, Petrarch can insist, the Africa will not lead wayward readers (such as another young Augustine) astray.52 Instead, through its moral allegory, the poem encourages its readers to lead a virtuous life, and through its scattered references to Christ it reminds them that all virtue has its source in God. But the allegory of the Africa does not merely celebrate victory over lust. It also makes a statement about Petrarch’s other culpa, his imitation of classical epic and pursuit of worldly fame, the very activity in which Petrarch is engaged while writing the poem. This statement, as we would expect, is as equivocal as the conclusion of the Secretum. There Petrarch admitted to Augustine that it would be best for him to abandon his writings even as he hurried off to complete them. In the Africa, Petrarch announces his rejection of classical epic within a work that is modeled on classical epic, and he rejects its martial theme even as he glori‹es the exploits of one of Rome’s greatest generals. The statement is barely veiled behind the story of Marcus Curtius,

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which Laelius relates in Africa 3 (and which Petrarch knew from Livy 7.6 and Augustine’s City of God 5.18). As Laelius explains to Syphax in his summary of the deeds of noble Romans, “Once in the past, either by a thrusting wind hidden in the earth or by some other cause, a sudden chasm opened up in the Roman Forum and terri‹ed the city” (Namque olim, aut vento terram impellente latenti / Aut causa quacumque alia, prerupta vorago / Romano patefacta foro conterruit Urbem [3.547–49; 689–92]). To the citizens, “it was at once manifest that the anger of the gods was roused,” says Laelius, “and it was deemed the intention of the gods to stamp out the evil” (simul ira deum manifesta moveret, / Consilio superum visum est compescere pestem [3.554–55; 698–700]). The citizens rushed therefore to seek instruction from their priests, who told them, “The gaping pit seeks those things that are valuable to you, of which the opening may be ‹lled with just a portion” (Sunt que vobis pretiosa dehiscens / Fossa petit: paucis plenus concurret hiatus [3.563–64; 711–13]). Most of the citizens misunderstand this message, as we see in the passage that follows, but at last, one Marcus Curtius interprets it rightly and saves the city. His dictis riguere animi, pallorque per omnes Mestus erat: multi gemmas aurumque ferebant Argentumque alii, namque hec meliora putantur Inter inexperta et verorum ignara bonorum Corda hominum, quos ceca ligat terrena cupido Nigraque corporei quos carceris occupat umbra. Unus ibi ante alios iuvenum fortissimus alte Exclamat: “Que tanta animis ignavia, ceci? Vilia pro caris, pro magnis parva tulistis. Nil opus est auro, fedis quod terra cavernis Evomit, aut lectis inter deserta lapillis. Unum ego vos moneo: nobis virtute vel armis Nil melius tribuisse deos: hec summa profecto, Hec vere Romana bona, et si summa reposcunt, Arma virumque dabo!” Dicens hec lumina celo Erexit, templumque Iovis quod presidet arci Suspiciens tendensque manus sursum atque deorsum Atque omnes superosque deos manesque precatus, Ad quos tendebat, validum calcaribus ultro Urget equum baratroque volens infertur aperto.

(3.565–84)

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< [At the priests’ words hearts stood still and everyone was pale with woe. Many brought gems and gold, others silver, for these things were considered most valuable by the simple and by those ignorant of what is truly good in the judgment of men, by those who were bound by blind, earthly greed and lived in the dark shadows of their mortal prison. But then a certain youth, more brave than the others, cried out from the back: “Blindmen! Why such faintness of heart? You bring things that are worthless instead of precious, small instead of great. There is no need for gold, which the earth vomits out from fetid caverns, or for stones gathered in the desert. I make you this one warning: the gods have given us nothing better than our excellence and our arms. These true Roman virtues are without question our greatest possessions, and if the greatest are requested, then arms and the man I shall give!” Thus speaking, he lifted his eyes to heaven, and gazing on the temple of Jove that stood atop the citadel, and raising his hands high in prayer to all the gods above as well as to the spirits of the underworld, to whom he lay his course, he spurred his horse and deliberately plunged into the wide chasm. (714–37)] There was a mighty crash then, followed by a ›ash of his armor as he disappeared, Ceu quondam immodico celum splendore dehiscit Et velut etherei reserat penetralia mundi; Inde repentino transcurrens turbine ›amma Visa fugit celoque redit sua forma sereno.

(3.588–91)

[just as sometimes the sky splits with a great ›ash and, as it were, reveals the hidden realms of the heavenly universe; then at once, having been seen, the ›ame whirling in the wind is gone, and the sky returns to its former calm. (742–46)] Consider ‹rst what sort of sacri‹ce is demanded in this anecdote and how it plays in the context of Petrarch’s “pious” poem. The gods were angry and wished to purge some evil in the Romans, so they opened up a chasm in the middle of the Forum into which “a portion” of the “things that are valuable” had to be thrown. At ‹rst it was assumed that the gods were demanding gems, gold, and silver: many citizens brought out these

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things, therefore, and threw them into the pit. From Laelius’s commentary, it is clear that such was a reasonable guess, because it revealed an evil that resided in the character of the “many” who were “bound by blind, earthly greed and lived in the dark shadows of their mortal prison.” Riches were valuable to the people, so riches must be what the gods were demanding. But a “youth,” Marcus Curtius, then states the right meaning of the priests’ instructions: “our excellence and our arms” are Rome’s most valuable gift from the gods, he tells them, adding, “These true Roman virtues are without question our greatest possessions.” The distinction, then, is between what genuinely is most valuable to Rome, on the one hand, and, on the other, what many Romans mistakenly most value. The gods demand a “portion” of their gifts to be returned to them as a reminder not to take these gifts lightly, not to covet mere riches, but to safeguard Roman virtue and military might. Curtius understands this, and so he casts himself, vir in full armor, into the chasm. Yet, given the Africa’s references to the future coming of another, more “valuable” gift from God—that is, Christ, the Son of God, who will make a sacri‹ce on humankind’s behalf that is in‹nitely more ef‹cacious than Curtius’s for Rome’s—readers are invited to perceive that those touted “true Roman virtues” have now become, in the Christian era, merely the virtues of the “blind,” the lost, the wretched living “in the dark shadows of their mortal prison.” Even as the poem praises Scipio and the achievement of his greatest exploit (the defeat of Hannibal and subjugation of Carthage), Petrarch concedes that Scipio’s virtues and deeds alone, disconnected from the truth of salvation through Christ and from the epic’s Christian allegory, lack meaning or value beyond the merely mundane. Furthermore, Curtius’s last words in the performance of his sacri‹ce imply “loftier” meanings in Petrarch’s epic than just its quintessentially Roman moral. “Arms and the man I shall give” (Arma virumque dabo), Curtius shouts, which we recognize as a variation on the Aeneid’s opening line, “Arms and the man I sing” (Arma virumque cano). As words that announce Curtius’s act as a pious offering to the gods, uttered as he raises his eyes and hands in prayer, they invoke all the grand connotations of the epic invocation and epic poet’s career, the Christianized cursus Virgilii upon which Petrarch has embarked, and they re›ect on the Africa’s own professed purpose as an offering to God. Petrarch gives this poem that sings of arms and a man, a gesture that works on different levels. On one, the heroic exploits and Roman values of Scipio, in themselves, are given up, in the sense that they are scorned and rejected in favor of this new era’s Chris-

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< tian ethos—while the activity of singing about those exploits and values, for their own sake, is likewise given up, abandoned because Petrarch realizes that these are things that he had blindly valued but now recognizes as “worthless instead of precious, small instead of great.” On another level, the Africa is a poem that can be given up to God as an offering because, like Vergil, Petrarch “intended something loftier than what he says,” making it a “divine work” like the allegorized Aeneid. The gods’ approval of Curtius’s sacri‹ce was signaled by a sudden ›ash, “just as sometimes the sky splits . . . and, as it were, reveals the hidden realms of the heavenly universe.” Just so, the Africa bids for God’s approval because “once having removed the veil of allegories that is covering the truth,” there will be revealed the hidden realms of the poem’s heavenly meaning. In this gesture, there lies a paradox that corresponds to that in the Canzoniere, where Petrarch claims to have rejected his love for Laura as ignoble and yet clings to the assertion that it testi‹es to the strength of his love for the Queen of Heaven. The Africa as we have it testi‹es that Petrarch abandoned his epic poem, but it also claims for itself a divine purpose. The Dido whose story brought tears to the eyes of Augustine and who symbolizes the lust to which Petrarch was formerly chained is categorically rejected by the poem. But the story of Marcus Curtius exempli‹es the manner in which Petrarch rejects Vergil so as to follow Vergil, as Dante follows Vergil, with God guiding the poet’s wandering steps through regions of error and peril past Vergil to safety.

ch a p ter t wo

Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid The Doctrine of the Two Venuses and the Epic of the Two Cities

=< ver g i l b e t we e n p e t r a rch a n d t a s s o In the ‹rst of a series of “discourses on Vergil,” published posthumously as the Sopra Virgilio Discorso, Sperone Speroni has harsh words indeed for the portrayal of Venus in Aeneid 4. Now this fourth book displays the grand stupidity of Venus, she who rescues Aeneas by way of the help of the Carthaginians, in so far as he is harbored by her in Carthage. For she then inspires love in Aeneas for Dido as she does Dido for Aeneas, and were it not for the admonition of Jove delivered through Mercury, it would have been the case that Venus, more than Juno herself, had obstructed Aeneas’s going to Italy.1 In the ‹fth discourse, Speroni repeats his criticism of Aeneas’s mother with even more exasperation: “she had Dido fall in love with Aeneas, and consented with Juno that they would be wedded, to the harm of Venus and to the satisfaction of Juno. A ridiculous affair.”2 In this censure of a nodding Vergil by a renowned Aristotelian critic 51

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< (and acquaintance of Torquato Tasso at Padua), we encounter an interpretive practice that refuses any appeal to allegorical explanations for behavior that seems inexplicable if it is assessed in terms of narrative logic or consistency of motive, as Speroni insists it should be. By either criterion, there is no need for Venus to take her extra precautions to protect Aeneas’s destiny—to “revolve in her breast new wiles” and “new schemes” (Aeneid 1.657–58) to ensure Dido’s favorable reception of Aeneas and his shipwrecked crew—for Jupiter has already arranged for that reception through Mercury: Maia genitum demittit ab alto, ut terrae utque novae pateant Karthaginis arces hospitio Teucris, ne fati nescia Dido ‹nibus arceret. volat ille per aera magnum remigio alarum ac Libyae citus astitit oris. et iam iussa facit, ponuntque ferocia Poeni corda volente deo; in primis regina quietum accipit in Teucros animum mentemque benignam.

(1.297–304)

[He sends the son of Maia down from heaven, so that the land and towers of newly founded Carthage may be open in hospitality for the Teucrians, and Dido, ignorant of fate, might not protect her borders. He ›ies through the air on the oarage of his wings and soon alights on Libyan shores. Now he obeys the command, and by the god’s wish the Phoenicians lay aside their ferocity; above all, the queen adopts a gentle spirit and benign disposition toward the Teucrians.] Given Jupiter’s orders and Mercury’s swift obedience, it is counterproductive for Venus to incite an insatiable passion in Dido, because it ultimately means that Mercury has to make another trip (4.259–78)—or, rather, two trips, if we include his appearance to Aeneas in a dream, when Mercury again admonishes the poem’s sluggish hero to set sail for Italy (4.554–70). As Speroni complains, Venus’s actions in this episode interfere with her own interests: love keeps Aeneas in Carthage, and when, against his will, he is at last impelled to order his ships readied for departure, Dido’s passion turns to a frenzied despair that could well have led (as Mercury warns in 4.563–68) not to her suicide but to murderous vengeance against Aeneas and his companions. We have already seen, in Petrarch’s exegesis of the Aeneid, an allegorical

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interpretation of Venus that conveniently removes this problem of her apparently inconsistent motives and self-defeating behavior. Following ancient and medieval sources that are discussed in this chapter, Petrarch credits the origin of this interpretation, called “the doctrine of the two Venuses” or “two Aphrodites,” to Plato; he refers to it as “that most famous doctrine of Plato” (famosissimum dogma platonicum [2003, 101]). There is, explains Pausanias in the Symposium, a younger, “earthly Aphrodite,” whose offspring Love “governs the passions of the vulgar” and “does his work entirely at random,” as well as an elder Aphrodite, whose “intellectual” and “heavenly Love” is “innocent of any hint of lewdness” (Plato 1961, 181c–d).3 Thus, Petrarch can explain, while Venus represents lust in most passages of the Aeneid, in other places she may represent “delight in the accomplishment and in good and honest pleasure,”4 and though it is true that Venus means to look after her son and protect him from Juno’s anger and from hostile nations, when it comes to opportunities to incite love in human hearts, she will be obliged by her nature to do so, even if it seems arbitrary or contrary to her aims as her son’s protector. Hence, when Petrarch interprets the reason for Venus appearing to Aeneas during the destruction of Troy in Aeneid 2 and for stopping him from taking revenge on Helen, even “excusing Helen and Paris” for their lust, he simply asks his correspondent, Aretino, “But why shouldn’t Venus excuse venereal acts, when often even strict censurers are given to indulgence in love?”5 Yet I submit that in medieval and Renaissance commentaries on the Aeneid, the function of the doctrine of the two Venuses extends beyond its utility for explaining away seeming contradictions. The following chapters argue that it serves also as an underlying trope and device for posing interpretive and spiritual challenges in the epics of Vida, Tasso, Ross, and Milton. Such a purpose, we might say, is a natural one for a twofold Venus, who is now earthly or vulgar passion, a symbol of lust, now protective and divine mother, a symbol of heavenly love or honest pleasures: in these facets, she corresponds roughly to the pairs of contrasting images of women in Christian discourse—Eve, who brought sin into the world, and Mary, the “second Eve” who redeems the sins of the ‹rst; or woman as the devil’s gateway versus the Church as the bride of Christ, with Christ’s sacri‹ce making man’s entry through the gates of heaven possible. But additionally, this image of Venus supplies a facilitator and an emblem for the Aeneid’s own saga of glory attained by way of negative via: Aeneas will gain “Lavinian shores” and establish New Troy only after replaying the crime that brought Old Troy to its destruction. The cause of the “wars, the

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< grim wars” (bella, horrida bella [Aeneid 6.86]) that the Cumaean Sibyl prophesies will have to be endured to win the Trojans a home in Italy “is again an alien bride, again a foreign marriage” (causa mali tanti coniunx iterum hospita Teucris / externique iterum thalami [6.93–94]). Thus Lavinia will be a second Helen and Aeneas a second Paris; or more accurately, in Italy, Aeneas will play the role of Paris for a second time but in a different way, because he did so ‹rst at Carthage with Dido (as Iarbus charges at 4.215, calling him “ille Paris”). In Carthage, Aeneas was, like the ‹rst Paris, under the sway of the earthly Venus. In Italy, he will instead enjoy the protection of the heavenly Venus, now in her role as safeguard of the Roman race, so that the alien bride and foreign marriage will be (as Pausanius says of the heavenly Aphrodite) “innocent of any hint of lewdness.” Aeneas will there achieve his destiny, founding a dynastic line that has been promised empire without end by Jupiter in heaven. Was it in some way necessary, then, for Aeneas to rehearse the role of Paris at Carthage, to his temporary shame, before he could play the role in Italy to his everlasting fame? We may be right to sense, in other words, that in some way the burning desire that is fanned in Dido when Venus schemes to “kindle the queen to madness and spread the ›ame throughout her marrow” (furentem / incendat reginam atque ossibus implicet ignem [1.659–60]) is linked with, though opposed to, the burning desire that is sparked in Aeneas by the parade of future Roman generations who pass before his eyes in the underworld, the sight of which “kindled his soul with love of coming fame” (incenditque animum famae venientis amore [6.889]). We are witnesses, then, not to the “grand stupidity of Venus” but to Jupiter’s grand design. Additionally, for Christian interpreters and imitators of the Aeneid, the doctrine of the two Venuses provides the classical grounds for Augustine’s discovery that the Aeneid’s epic plot and generic features are suited to a narrative of spiritual progress, as well as the grounds for their own presumption that spiritual progress is the stuff of epic poetry.6 Having these two Venuses is like having an angel and a devil at the ear of Everyman, who is consequently torn between good and evil desires. His journey through the world and through time represents his advancement toward being wholly good, wholly under the in›uence of the heavenly Venus. The enabling link, in his story, between the pagan and Christian imaginative spheres is the image of the city—for cities are not cities so much as they are base or noble conditions of the mind or soul. Hence, the hero’s aim is to escape (as do Aeneas and Augustine) from the Carthage of the heart, the earthly city gov-

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erned by the earthly Venus, and to strive to reach the city that symbolizes a pure soul and is nurtured by the heavenly Venus—that is, to be among the number of the elect who are bound for the City of God.7 The Africa conforms to this template, not, of course, because Scipio is a Christian pilgrim whose odyssey takes him from wretchedness to salvation, but because Petrarch is such a pilgrim, claiming at least some small progress for his soul’s journey, on the basis of having written this epic account of Rome’s defeat of Carthage ‹guring chastity’s defeat of lust. In some ways that are obvious, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata is the epic account of the City of God conquering the city of the earthly Venus, but in several ways that have not been noted, the allegory of this poem builds upon two major precedents: the allegory of Petrarch’s Africa and the allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid, to which Petrarch contributed. This chapter serves to bridge our analyses of Petrarch’s and Tasso’s epics by tracing the developing connection between the doctrine of the two Venuses and the idea of an “epic of two cities” in successive commentaries on the Aeneid, culminating in its fullest elaboration in Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses. There, we shall see, Landino de‹nes Aeneas’s ultimate destination as a life devoted to contemplation of higher things, a state of pure intellect nurtured by the divine Venus that corresponds to residence in the heavenly city. But furthermore, Landino expands the signi‹cance of the story of Aeneas and Dido in book 4 of the Aeneid accordingly, to represent the contrasting values of the earthly city ruled by the earthly Venus so that it represents not only lust but all the desires and cares of a life devoted to the earthly city of men. In this way, Landino’s commentary on book 4 should not be considered, as it is commonly, “his most remarkable departure from the general critical tradition of Aeneid commentary” (Kallendorf 1983, 541). It is, rather, a logical extension of ideas in that tradition, a making explicit of what had long been implied—in Augustine’s Confessions and The City of God, in commentary on Vergil’s epic, and in Petrarch’s Augustinian epic—by the ‹gural relation between the contrasting Venuses, the contrasting cities of Carthage and Rome, and the contrasting cities of man and God.

p e t r a rch b e t we e n s e r v i u s a n d l a n d i n o Don Cameron Allen has remarked that the earliest surviving commentaries on Vergil’s Aeneid (ca. fourth century) offer contrasting models of exegetical practice. The annotations of Donatus, on the one hand, “are as literal as

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< those of Aristarchus on Homer,” in that he “scrupulously omits any moral or physical form of interpretation”; on the other hand, in the annotations of Servius—who “introduces the very important word ‘polysemus’ into the critical vocabulary of Europe” in his explication of the Aeneid’s very ‹rst line (see Servius 1961, 1:6)—we ‹nd moral and allegorical interpretations alongside the lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical notes (D. Allen 1970, 137).8 Yet in Servius, allegorical readings are almost haphazard. They are limited to scattered moralizations on the myths, to numerology and historical prophecy (e.g., the three Punic Wars are signi‹ed by Dido rolling three times on her deathbed), and to explanations of the gods as physical or natural forces (e.g., Juno’s relationship with Jove as both sister and wife is said to correspond to the different relations that air has to ether and ‹re).9 When we move to the commentary attributed to Fabius Planciadus Fulgentius (ca. ‹fth or sixth century), we encounter a comprehensive allegorical account of the Aeneid’s ‹rst six books, the well-known “stages of man” interpretation that has Aeneas moving from infancy through adolescence to maturity over the course of his adventures. In book 4, we are told, Aeneas is in the “blindness of adolescence,” and with his “soul on holiday from paternal control,” he “goes off hunting, is in›amed by passion and, driven on by storm and cloud, that is, by confusion of mind, commits adultery.”10 The assertion that Aeneas’s soul is “on holiday from paternal control” (feriatus . . . a paterno iudicio) is interesting for its distinction between the positive in›uence of the father and the negative effect of his “vulgar” mother, for Aeneas is anything but liberated from her control. It was she who informed him of Dido’s history—starting with the details of her widowhood—and who then directed Aeneas to Dido’s city. Next she in›amed Dido with love for Aeneas and agreed to cooperate (at least, not to interfere) with Juno’s scheme to brew up a storm, to arrange for Aeneas and Dido to ‹nd shelter in the same cave, and to oversee what Fulgentius calls their “adultery.” This is the Venus who blinds the soul and confuses the mind, the goddess of shameful loves, not the protective mother who shrouds Aeneas with mist so that he can travel unmolested or who provides him with Vulcan’s armor. Venus is not associated with heavenly love or a love of wisdom in Fulgentius’s imagination, for that role is assigned to Mercury, “the god of the intellect,” who descends to prompt Aeneas toward the next stage of his maturation. We are only reminded that “it is by the urging of the intellect that youth quits the straits of passion,” and like Dido on the pyre, “passion perishes and dies of neglect”; it is “burnt to ashes, . . . disintegrates,” because “when lust is driven from the heart of youth by the power of the mind, it burns out, buried in the ashes of oblivion.”11 All the

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same, as we see in this excerpt, we have in Fulgentius the notion that Aeneas’s story represents Everyman’s ideal progress from culpa to a state of virtue and wisdom, with his escape from lust being the climactic event in this progress. That idea is underscored in the meeting between Aeneas and the spirit of Dido in book 6, where Fulgentius tells us that “Dido is seen, a shade now void of passion and its former lust,” and that “this lust, long dead of indifference, is tearfully recalled to mind as, now penitent, Aeneas re›ects on wisdom.”12 The twelfth-century commentary on the Aeneid commonly attributed to Bernardus Silvestris shows us that the “stages of man” interpretation retained its appeal and was much re‹ned over the centuries. “One must remember,” Bernard instructs us, that in Vergil’s poem “as well as in other allegorical works . . . there are equivocations and multiple signi‹cations, and therefore one must interpret poetic ‹ctions in diverse ways.”13 Much like Fulgentius, Bernard asserts that “in the fourth book Vergil allegorically expresses the nature of young manhood,” with Aeneas being driven “by excitement of the ›esh” into the cave with Dido and into “impurity of the ›esh and of desire.”14 “This impurity of the ›esh is called a cave,” says Bernard, “since it beclouds the clarity of mind and of discretion”; Aeneas “is united with Dido” at this point “and remains with her a while”—despite “the public disgrace of a bad reputation”—“because a young man, having been snared by passion, does not know ‘what is beautiful, what is disgraceful, what is useful, or anything else.’”15 Likewise following Fulgentius, Bernard states that “Dido dies” after “having been abandoned,” because “abandoned passion ceases and, consumed by the heat of manliness, goes to ashes, that is, to solitary thoughts.”16 So again, Dido’s suicide marks a stage in Aeneas’s advance toward wisdom.17 That is evident from the preceding excerpts, but by itself this statement inadequately conveys Bernard’s thinking about the Carthaginian queen. We discover, by examining three other passages of his commentary, that Dido represents something more complicated than just an emblem of youthful lust to be rejected by a maturing Aeneas. The ‹rst is in Bernard’s exegesis of book 1, where he explains the signi‹cance of Aeneas’s parentage. His father, Anchises, whose name means “inhabiting the heavens,” we are to interpret as “the father of all who presides over all.”18 On the signi‹cance of his mother, Bernard says: we read that there are indeed two Venuses, one lawful, and the other the goddess of lust. The lawful Venus is the harmony of the world, that is, the even proportion of worldly things, which some call

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< Astrea, and others call natural justice. . . . The shameless Venus, however, the goddess of lust, is carnal concupiscence which is the mother of all fornications.19 Bernard advises us to stay alert to Venus’s shifting identity, to distinguish between the love goddess who “sometimes designates concupiscence of the ›esh” but at other times represents “the concord of the world.” He explains, whenever you ‹nd Venus as the wife of Vulcan, the mother of Jocus and Cupid, interpret her as pleasure of the ›esh, which is joined with natural heat and causes pleasure and copulation; but whenever you read that Venus and Anchises have a son Aeneas, interpret that Venus as the harmony of the world and Aeneas as the human spirit.20 Bernard’s invocation here of the doctrine of two Venuses is interesting in part for the way it sets up a contrast not only between a negative and positive Venus but also between both Venuses and Aeneas’s “heavenly father,” who symbolizes “the father of all who presides over all,” or in the language of Christian allegoresis that Bernard’s language parallels, the Father in Heaven guiding Everyman to his ultimate destination. Hence Aeneas, as the son of Anchises and as the leader of the Trojan exiles to safety, may be interpreted typologically by Bernard’s readers as a ‹gure for Christ, the Son of God and Savior of Man. For those habituated to identifying multiple senses of scripture, such a reading would surely have seemed an elementary operation, even if unorthodox (given the pagan text). It is as readily apparent that a “lawful Venus” who represents “natural justice,” “the harmony of the world,” or “the even proportion of worldly things” must ‹nd herself the subservient spouse to an Anchises who symbolizes the Father in Heaven, because law, justice, harmony, and proportion have their source in God as do all things that are good, and wisdom reveals that they are not ends in themselves. If treated as such, they would distract the good man from his heavenly destination as surely as would the “shameless Venus,” that “mother of all fornications.” These implications of Bernard’s commentary on Aeneas’s parentage clarify his subsequent remarks on Aeneas’s entry into Carthage, which seem at ‹rst barely to pertain to “young manhood” about to be “snared by passion.” Bernard notes that in Vergil’s poem, Aeneas is “hidden under a

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cloud” as he “comes to Carthage,” a cloud that Venus has cast to shield him from Carthaginian eyes until a propitious moment for his appearance in the city. Bernard explains: “just as a cloud obscures light, so too does ignorance obscure wisdom”; therefore, “in ignorance [Aeneas] comes to Carthage, that is, to the new city of the world, the city which indeed has all inhabitants in itself” (my emphasis).21 Carthage, in this formulation, is not merely, not strictly, a city of sin or a state of adolescent lust. It is by synecdoche the world and all its inhabitants, the world of men living in ignorance and governed by the earthly passions that the earthly Venus symbolizes. Bernard’s statement immediately following functions in the same way: “Dido, that is, passion [libido], rules this city.”22 Dido is not just a ‹gure of lust but, again by synecdoche, the representative of all the earthly passions that distract a man from wisdom and from heaven. Another way to characterize the allegorical signi‹cance of Dido and Carthage in Bernard’s commentary is as a con›ation of the earthly Venus and Juno, where Juno symbolizes “the active life” in the city of man. Bernard’s discussion of the Judgment of Paris provides the terms for this idea. One reads that the three goddesses Juno, Pallas, and Venus approached Paris so that he might judge which of them should have the golden apple. We interpret Pallas as the life of contemplation; Juno, the active life; Venus, the life of pleasure. . . . Certain people such as philosophers prefer the contemplative life over the others; certain people such as politicians, the active life; certain people such as the Epicureans, the life of ease over the active and the contemplative. Venus seems more beautiful to Paris, because the senses place contemplation and action below pleasure, and therefore Pallas and Juno take revenge upon Troy. Because it is pleasing for the senses to wallow in pleasures, it is very painful to the ›esh to contemplate or act.23 The assertion that Paris and Troy were destroyed for being bound to shameful pleasure recalls the interpretation of the Aeneid that we encountered in chapter 1 in Petrarch’s Seniles 4.5. But if Pallas and Juno team up to “take revenge upon Troy,” then it must be Pallas, “the life of contemplation,” who alone destroys Carthage, which is Juno’s city but whose ruler has succumbed to a “life of pleasure.” In Carthage, in other words, the earthly Venus and Juno have teamed up to stall Aeneas in his journey to

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< wisdom by means of a culpa that Dido will mask by the name of marriage, that moralists will call adultery and lust, and that spiritual allegorizers will understand as a sinful devotion to the things of this world. It still is not explicit, but the various allegorical functions of Dido, Carthage, Venus, and Juno may, without too much violence, be lumped under one heading, idolatry, the worship of earthly things as false gods, with lust being the part that stands for the whole. That point returns us again to Petrarch’s allegorical reading of the Aeneid, clarifying for us a feature of his commentary on Aeneas’s fated marriage with Lavinia and con›ict with Turnus. King Latinus, we recall Petrarch saying, “is the mind,” while “her mother is the ›esh betrothed to the mind” (2003, 87; see chap. 1 n. 35). In the same place, he explains that Lavinia is “destined by fate for one of foreign blood (that is, for painstaking explorations into dif‹cult and unknown things)”24—that is, for a life of contemplation. Her “weaker” mother desires to see Lavinia married to Turnus, “that is, to carnal desires and earthly endeavors,” because these represent the life of pleasure and the active life that are in opposition to the contemplative life. The “new city” or “New Troy” that will be founded upon the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia will be a city not “of the world” but of the mind and of God. It is a very big step, to be sure, from the allegorizing imaginations of Bernard and Petrarch to that of Cristoforo Landino. But we shall see that it is a logically consistent one. Bridging the gap between them, moreover, is one other precedent in the tradition of Vergiliana: the “thirteenth book” of the Aeneid by Maffeo Vegio, which “completes” the poem according to prompts of the allegorical commentaries that we have so far reviewed.25 Vegio’s Supplement, as it was usually titled, was written in 1428 but ‹rst printed in 1471 (at Venice); for nearly two centuries afterward, it was included in most editions of the Aeneid and Vergil’s Opera.26 It picks up where the Aeneid leaves off, with “magnanimus Aeneas” (3) standing over the body of conquered Turnus, and it proceeds with the action as we would expect it to unfold: Aeneas takes the belt of his friend Pallas from Turnus and returns it to King Evander; the fallen warriors are honored, and the victors, foremost among them Aeneas’s son Iulus, are congratulated; peace is established between the Italians and Trojans, and Aeneas begins to lay out the foundations of the new city; but then, as Jupiter foretells in book 1, our hero expires and (as the Supplement ’s “argumentum” puts it), “Venus conveys the blessed Aeneas to the highest stars.”27 Our focus is on the role of Venus and the image of the city in the Sup-

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plement’s ‹nal scenes. Vegio tells us that, after the wedding feast for Aeneas and Lavinia had extended into its ninth day, “then the great hero Aeneas began to inscribe a city with curved plough, and he established homes and trenches enclosed by a rampart” (tum maximus heros / Aeneas urbem curvo signabat aratro / fundabatque domos et amictas aggere fossas [537–39]). This phrasing echoes and invites us to contrast a parallel passage in book 5 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas is described plotting the city of Acesta in Sicily, to be occupied by those among his Trojan companions who are “old men far advanced in age, matrons wearied by the sea,” and the younger men who are “weak and afraid of danger” (longaevosque senes ac fessas aequore matres / . . . invalidum metuensque pericli [5.715–16]). Aeneas urbem designat aratro sortiturque domos; hoc Ilium et haec loca Troiam esse iubet.

(5.755–57)

[Aeneas marks out the city with a plow and allots homes; this he declares to be Ilium and these lands Troy.] Vergil refers to the healthy men who only lack courage and faith to reach the site of future Rome as “souls with no craving for high praise” (animos nil magnae laudis egentis [5.751]), and Aeneas—as if to console them, but perhaps to remind them forever of their wasted travels—bestows on their new home the place-names of the ruins that they had left behind. Just as in book 3, when Aeneas and his band visited the “little Troy” built by Helenus, with its “semblance of great Pergamus and a dry brook by the name of Xanthus” (parvam Troiam sumulataque magnis / Pergama et arentem Xanthi cognomine rivum [3.349–50]), this city in Sicily is a sorry substitute for the “empire without end” promised to Aeneas and the gens Iulia. Vegio reemphasizes this point—that the only meaningful new city is the one to which Aeneas is destined—through his allusion to the lines from book 5 and by the sudden arrival of a sign from the heavens, which he describes immediately following, as soon as Aeneas begins to lay out his city. Ecce autem, fatu haud parvum, diffundere ›ammam ingentem et fulgore levem et se nubibus altis miscentem e summo Lavinia vertice visa est.

(540–42)

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< [But behold, by heavy fate, Lavinia seemed to pour forth from her head’s crown a ›ame both vast and gentle in its fulgence, which mingled with the high clouds.] In one respect, Vegio is merely innovating on Vergil’s accounts of ›ames that descend from heaven to touch the head of the blessed, indicating the ful‹llment of decrees that were stated earlier in the Aeneid. One occurs in Aeneid 2, as a sign to Aeneas and his father to escape from the destroyers of Troy so as to safeguard the Trojan race and Rome’s destiny through Iulus: ecce levis summo de vertice visus Iuli fundere lumen apex, tactuque innoxia mollis lambere ›amma comas et circum tempora pasci.

(2.682–84)

[Behold, from high above the head of Iulus a light was seen cast down, a ›ame with harmless touch that licked his soft locks and coursed about his temples.] Another such ›ame alights upon Lavinia’s head in book 7, indicating her part in Rome’s future glory. Lavinia virgo, visa, nefas, longis comprendere crinibus ignem atque omnem ornatum ›amma crepitante cremari, regalisque accensa comas . . .

(7.72–75)

[The maiden Lavinia was seen, oh horror, to have her long locks wrapped in ‹re, all her adornment burned by a rustling ›ame, and her regal hair ablaze . . . ] In Vegio’s Supplement, when “father Aeneas” sees the marvelous portent, he is “astounded” (Obstipuit pater Aeneas [543]), and immediately he prays to Jupiter to give some sign of what more is asked of him or to con‹rm that he has earned peaceful retirement. Just at this point, Venus appears, and “with kindly speech” (almo . . . ore [551]), she assures her son that the ›ame symbolizes the “coming praises of your race” (ventura tuae praeconia gentis [567]). This is the heavenly Venus, obviously, whose participation in the episode is “innocent of any hint of lewdness.” Whereas the

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earthly Venus sent a love-›ame through Dido’s marrow, this Venus descends to interpret the meaning of a ›ame that travels up to heaven, a ›ame that anticipates Aeneas’s own journey thither upon his marriage to Lavinia. After her speech to Aeneas, she ascends to heaven to ask Jupiter to grant her son immortality with the rest of the gods (for this scene, Vegio is drawing on the account of Aeneas’s translation in Metamorphoses 14.581–607—though, to be sure, without any hint of Ovid’s ironic tone). “For now,” she explains to Jupiter, “Aeneas’s mature virtue longs for the heavens” (Iamque optat matura polos Aeneia virtus [605]).28 The phrase “matura virtus” is Vegio’s nod to the “stages of man” interpretation of the Aeneid: the good man has attained the ‹nal stage of his progress; his goodness is fully mature. It is a mark of this maturity that Aeneas is not really thinking about the city that he is in the process of plotting; he instead “longs for the heavens”—meditating on death and the afterlife. On this basis, he is ripe for heaven: when he dies shortly after, at his allotted time, Venus “with joy led his renewed and happy soul with her up above the air” (laeta recentem / felicemque animam secum super aera duxit [627–28]). Aeneas’s “happy soul” in these lines ‹nally supplies the resolution that had been lacking—the positive counterimage not only to the unhappy spirit of Dido, who, “still hostile” to Aeneas when they met in the Fields of Mourning, “›ed” from him “into the shady grove” (tandem . . . inimica refugit / in nemus umbriferum [Aeneid 6.456, 472–73]),29 but also to Turnus, whose soul, in what was formerly the poem’s last line, “›ew indignant to the shades below” (fugit indignata sub umbras [12.952]).

the two venuses and the cit y of the soul: cr istoforo landino’s disputationes camaldulenses By 1473, Cristoforo Landino completed work on an elaborate allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid based largely on ideas he had acquired from his association with Marsilio Ficino and the so-called Platonic Academy at Florence, under the patronage of Lorenzo de’Medici.30 The result occupies books 3 and 4 of a treatise in dialogue form, ‹rst referred to as Quaestiones Camaldulenses, later published as Disputationes Camaldulenses (the ‹rst known edition in Florence in 1481), and ‹nally retitled the Allegorica Platonica in two sixteenth-century Basel editions of the Aeneid to which it was appended in 1577 and 1596.31 The principal speaker in the dialogue is Leon Battista Alberti, with Lorenzo taking the role of primary questioner among

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< a dozen or so others at the gathering, including Marsilio Ficino, the great translator and exegete of Plato’s dialogues. It would have been in Ficino’s writings that Landino knew the fullest account of the doctrine of the two Venuses, and this is signi‹cant because it provides an even stronger basis than Vegio’s suggestive ending of the Supplement for associating a heavenly Venus in the Aeneid with the life of contemplation (alongside Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, as in Bernardus Silvestris) and with a yearning for heaven, thereby making it fully explicit for Landino that this one allegorical ‹gure could embody the oppositional vice and virtue—carnal pleasure and contemplative wisdom—that de‹ne the starting and ending points of Aeneas’s epic journey. We ‹nd this account in a section of Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium titled “On the Two Types of Love, and the Dual Nature of Venus” (De duobus amoris generisbus, ac de duplici Venere [2.7]).32 Here Ficino repeats the conventional idea that “Venus is two-fold,” and he de‹nes her two aspects in a manner that re›ects his assumption of a basic consistency between Platonic philosophy and Christian faith: “one is clearly that intelligence which we said was in the Angelic Mind,” while “the other is the power of generation with which the World-Soul is endowed.”33 Because this section goes on to develop further the association of the doctrine of the two Venuses with the Christian ideas that are basic to the epics we are examining, it is worth quoting a substantial excerpt. Each Venus, Ficino continues, “has as consort a similar Love.” The ‹rst, by innate love is stimulated to know the beauty of God; the second, by its love, to procreate the same beauty in bodies. The former Venus ‹rst embraces the Glory of God in herself, and then translates it to the second Venus. This latter Venus translates sparks of that divine glory into earthly matter. It is because of the presence of sparks of this kind that an individual body seems beautiful to us, in proportion to its merits. The human soul perceives the beauty of these bodies through the eyes. The soul also has two powers. It certainly has the power of comprehension, and it has the power of generation. These two powers in us are the two Venuses which are accompanied by their twin Loves. When the beauty of a human body ‹rst meets our eyes, the mind, which is the ‹rst Venus in us, worships and adores the human beauty as an image of the divine beauty, and through the ‹rst, it is frequently aroused to the second. But the power of generation in us, which is the second Venus,

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desires to create another form like this. Therefore, there is a Love in each case: in the former, it is the desire of contemplating Beauty; and in the latter, the desire of propagating it; both loves are honorable and praiseworthy, for each is concerned with the divine image. Of what, therefore, does Pausanias disapprove in love? I shall tell you. If a man is too eager for procreation and gives up contemplation, or is immoderately desirous of copulation with women, or consorts unnaturally with men, or prefers the beauty of the body to that of the soul, insofar he abuses the dignity of love. It is this abuse of love which Pausanias censures. Therefore, a man who properly respects love praises, of course, the beauty of the body; but through it he contemplates the more excellent beauty of the soul, the mind, and God, and admires and loves this more fervently than the other.34 In this passage, we recognize the characteristically Augustinian distinction between the proper use and culpable abuse of God’s gifts.35 We should also observe how this emphasis distinguishes Ficino’s conception of the second Venus from that of the medieval Vergil commentators. She is “earthly,” but she is not a symbol of shameful lust for Ficino, for the desire to “procreate beauty” in this world only becomes lust when a man abandons the contemplative life for carnal desire. In this sense, then, to say that a pilgrim on his journey may come under the power of the goddess of shameful passion is really to observe that he has the power to transform the symbol of Venus into one of lust, by misusing beauty and abusing the dignity of love when he should be pursuing his quest “to know the beauty of God.” This opposition between proper and improper love, or beauty’s proper use versus its abuse, is adopted and extended in Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid to inform the notion of a corresponding opposition between a proper and improper active life.36 These oppositions are coupled in the explication of Dido and the city of Carthage, suggesting even more strongly the synecdochical relation that was implied in Bernard’s commentary between lust and earthly desires in general. Landino is also more explicit than Bernard in conceiving Aeneas’s journey of the soul to be consistent with the experience of Christian pilgrimage.37 At one point, in fact, Alberti pauses in his commentary on the poem to exclaim of its author: “O divine intellect! O excellent man even among the rarest of men and truly worthy of the name poet! who although not a Christian all that he uttered is most similar to the truest teachings of Christians. Read the Apostle Paul! . . .

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< What indeed does he describe profusely and openly that [Vergil] does not encapsule in his sparer poetic style?”38 This is the aspect of Landino’s treatise that has been of most interest to scholars, naturally, for it supplies the sort of evidence that is looked for to document the endeavor of some Renaissance humanists to “Christianize Vergil” or at least to defend and accommodate the value of classical authors to a Christian world.39 In the context of this study, however, I am more speci‹cally interested in the way it supplies Christian epic poets with their spiritual plotline. The story of Aeneas, says Alberti to begin with, is of “a man who was gradually expiated of many great vices and ‹nally, having been adorned with marvellous virtues, attained that which is the highest human good and which no one can attain without being wise”; and that “highest good”—the summum bonum—as Vergil “had learned from Plato,” “consists in the contemplation of the divine.”40 As in Petrarch’s interpretation of the poem, the idea of the two Venuses is introduced in the explanation of the symbolic signi‹cance of Troy, which Alberti explains may be understood as “the ‹rst age of man, in which, since reason is yet asleep, the senses reign alone.”41 He notes that “both Paris and Aeneas were raised in Troy,” but “because one [Paris] prefers Venus over Pallas, that is, pleasure over virtue, it is necessary that he perish with Troy,” while Aeneas, on the other hand, is “ruled by his mother Venus” but “extricates himself from the con›agration.” Alberti avers, “What else may we understand by this, except that those who are urged toward a knowledge of the truth by a great love having been set ablaze in them are easily able to achieve anything? On this account we will rightly interpret Venus as divine love.”42 At the prompting of Lorenzo, Alberti expands upon his explanation of the two Venuses. First (at 125) he reminds his listeners of the earthly and heavenly Aphrodites described in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, and then he applies to Vergil (whom he calls at this point “Platonicus poeta”) the same ideas of Venus and love that we saw developed by Ficino. Alberti explains: Because the human soul itself has certain corresponding powers of contemplating and begetting, it is also said to have two Venuses, which are accompanied by twin desires. For when corporeal beauty is presented to our eyes, our mind, which is the ‹rst Venus, admires and loves it and is raised up by it, as if by a certain path, to heaven, not because it is corporeal but because it is an image of divine beauty, while the power of begetting, which is the second Venus,

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desires to beget a form similar to it. For this reason each is properly called love, in that one is the desire of contemplating beauty, the other of begetting it. No one, therefore, unless he is utterly devoid of reason, would dare condemn these two loves, since each is necessary to human nature; for the race of mortals would no longer exist without the propagation of offspring, and in turn neither would it exist well without investigations of the truth. Hence, guided by that more excellent Venus, Aeneas was able to arrive in Italy.43 As for Paris, contends Alberti, he was “harmed” by Venus “because he used her”—that is, he loved—“badly” (quia illa male usus est [126]). He was not able, like Aeneas, to free himself “from the Trojan blaze, that is, from the burning of carnal pleasures.”44 Alberti’s explanation of the Aeneid’s opening books continues to rely heavily on the doctrine of the two Venuses and the idea that Aeneas is struggling against the ›esh as he escapes Troy and makes his way over troubled waters to Italy (e.g., the monster Scylla in book 3 is said to symbolize lust). Because one of Aeneas’s parents was a goddess and the other one a mortal, notes Alberti, there “arises” in him “that unremitting and ‹erce struggle of the spirit against the ›esh, as we say, when the mind tries to draw the whole man to the divine and to bring the senses under its power.”45 But in the early books of the poem, Alberti explains, Aeneas “does not yet know in what the summum bonum consists,” so “he is justly called an exile.”46 Aeneas is yet susceptible to abusing the dignity of love, as Ficino would say. And indeed, Aeneas will misuse “corporeal beauty” when he sees it in “the most beautiful Dido” (pulcherimma Dido), as Vergil twice describes the queen of Carthage (Aeneid 1.496, 4.60), whereas if we are properly guided by divine love, then the mind “meditates nothing else, strives for nothing else, labors in no other matter, attempts nothing else and endeavors nothing except that, aroused by the sight of corporeal beauty, it might take us to divine beauty.”47 Alberti af‹rms again later, “We will never arrive at true contemplation unless sensuality, to use a Christian word, is not only extinguished in us but truly and completely entombed.”48 So far, Landino’s version of the Aeneid’s allegory could be considered just a more highly wrought, Platonized version of the traditional “stages of man” interpretation, but when he treats the subject of Aeneas and Dido, he seems to many critics (as we have noted previously) to interpret the episode “in a radically different manner” than did his medieval predecessors.49 While Troy represents the life given over to pleasure and while Italy is “a

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< ‹gure for contemplation,” explains Alberti, “Carthage is a ‹gure for action.”50 Yet it is crucial that we avoid the usual oversimpli‹cations about Landino’s allegory of this episode—that Carthage is a model republic, for example, or that Dido is not a ‹gure of lust but, instead, a ‹gure of the civic life—because, as indicated earlier, Landino posits a more complicated relationship between the life of carnal pleasure and the life of civic activity than just a maturation from one to the other. In the same way that corporeal beauty may be used improperly or properly, tending a man toward indignity or toward divine beauty, the civic virtues may be valued for their own sake or as a prompt toward the heavenly virtues. Says Alberti, invoking the language of the ‹rst moral to convey his point about the second, “When we have for a long time cultivated, on account of their beauty, those things in civic life which are honest and proper, we are led to the divine, of which they are as images.”51 When Aeneas and the Trojans arrive at the city of Carthage and enter upon the active life, therefore, they have the potential, as “they become adorned with civic virtues and gather no small praise,”52 to be spurred to know the virtues of God in the same way that they should long to know the beauty of God.53 Carthage is, at ‹rst, a seemingly ideal city in which the Trojans might dedicate themselves, temporarily, to a vitam socialem, as Alberti af‹rms: “[Its residents] have a leader whom they follow and whose rule they never condemn. They divide their labors among themselves with the utmost equity. They accomplish their works and ward off their enemies in supreme harmony. Whatever is sought, it is sought entirely in common.”54 “Indeed,” Alberti goes on to exclaim, “if you were to transfer all these qualities to a republic, you would establish a Platonic state.”55 Even so, the residents of Carthage “are a long way from that divine state that we are seeking,” Alberti asserts, for the active life in and of itself is without value: “the virtues of civic life are inchoate rather than absolute.”56 In Aeneid 4, Aeneas devotes himself to those inchoate civic virtues, for “having abandoned his plan of leaving,” observes Alberti, “he dedicates himself to building the arches of Carthage and renewing construction of its houses”; he also “joys in wearing purple and a bejeweled sword, which are both insignia of imperial rule.”57 That his distraction from a life of contemplation is owed also to his liaison with Dido betrays, for Landino, the basic equivalence of carnal passion and the active life enjoyed for its own ends, just as “carnal desires” and “earthly endeavors” were both symbolized by Turnus in Petrarch’s allegory. Both are forms of cupidity. Once Alberti explains, in the passage following, the relation between Aeneas’s desire for

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Dido and his desire to rule, these two passions are inextricably linked for the remainder of the dialogue. The desire to rule desires to marry Aeneas to Dido, that is, to put the superior man in command, but it is not strong enough to achieve this without the assent of love. But love recognizes that this kind of union bene‹ts Dido, not Aeneas; for it does not pro‹t the souls of men born for greater things, but only the empire itself. Hence it is better to advance toward true wisdom than to become diverted into activity, but if the administration of public matters is abandoned by the wise then inevitably love shall pass away from human affairs. Therefore, although it knows that what the desire to rule urges is false, it yet assents, whether because it is now entangled in that desire, or because it is moved by pity for those who must be helped.58 Note the way that the word amor, in this passage, strategically straddles the fence between divine and earthly senses. It signi‹es divine love insofar as it “knows” that the active life is “false,” prompts the man toward wisdom, and, one assumes, “is moved by pity.” But it can also be “entangled in desire” for the active life, as one seduced to carnal pleasures. Accordingly for Landino, Dido’s descent into shameful love corresponds to and ‹gures the “gradual fall into degradation” of men who are wholly devoted to civic virtues. Mirroring their fall, “she who had been most chaste and most vigilant in administering her realm is conquered by a shameful love and falls into lasciviousness and a life of ease.” “In all of these things it is shown,” says Alberti in sum, “how easily in times of prosperity human minds are diverted from labor to pleasure.”59 Conversely, Landino’s detailed analysis of Dido’s “fall” from civic virtue “into lasciviousness and a life of ease” is a negative mirror image of the scale of ascending virtues that he describes as leading from the active life to the life of contemplation. In Dido’s case, Alberti explains, just as “republics that rise up from small foundations are nobler at the start than at their fall, for that reason the queen at the beginning is temperate in all things, but a little later, with love surging within her, she slips from temperance into continence, and later being conquered by love she is rendered so incontinent that in the end she falls into the greatest intemperance.”60 We may contrast this scheme of moral descent with Alberti’s earlier one of “the triple order of human life” based on levels of “right thinking.”

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< Of these three the lowest is occupied by those living the social and civic life who undertake the administration of public affairs. Next to them, but constituting a higher grade, are those who avoid public activity just as if ›eeing from a violent storm—in which the chance of fortune completely governs—into a tranquil harbor, retreating from the mayhem to a life of ease and quiet, but not, however, such a life that there is not something against which they must continue to struggle. Then in the highest order you will discover those who are completely removed from the throng and tumult of human affairs and engage in nothing that must be repented.61 The “highest order” of virtue, the life of contemplation, is the one that Aeneas neglects by having “undertaken the administration of his wife’s city,” as Alberti explains—but not only on the grounds that this city “represents a life dedicated to action.”62 The fact that it is Dido’s city and that her lust or abuse of the dignity of love—her culpa—functions in Landino’s imagination as an emblem of the abuse of civic virtues asserts once more a ‹gural link between lust and worldly cares in general.63 In addition, Alberti’s articulation of scales of moral descent and ascent, downward to depravity or upward to happiness, provides the epic with an itinerary of spiritual progress that is nearly as precise as the poem’s geographical description of the hero’s wanderings. Having been warned away from the active life, Aeneas is urged “to think of Ascanius, his heir and successor, to whom the kingdom of Italy and land of Rome is due,” as Alberti paraphrases Mercury. He then asks his listeners, “What else can we understand by Ascanius in this passage but that future and eternal life which follows this brief and temporary one?”64 The good man, in other words, progresses toward holiness by meditating on heaven and “the beauty of God,” but just as in Petrarch’s version of the Aeneid’s allegory, Aeneas still must battle the temptations of lust. The hero remains susceptible to backsliding, from contemplation to labor and “from labor to pleasure.” Says Alberti, “Aeneas has come into Italy with the kind of virtues that are called purgative, but before the mind can be completely cleansed by them a bitter war is necessary, just as we say that the spirit wars against the ›esh. For the higher that these virtues lie above our human weakness, the greater is the danger as we reach for them.”65 It is at this point, too, that Landino recalls the hero of Petrarch’s Africa as an exemplar not only of a man’s victory over the temptations of the ›esh but of contemplation in solitude. Quoting from Cicero’s De republica, Alberti remarks, “You cannot easily ‹nd a Scipio who is ‘never less alone than when alone.’”66

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In 1488, Cristoforo Landino’s line-by-line commentary on the Aeneid appeared in an edition of Vergil’s works published in Venice (no. 26 in Kallendorf 1991), and this has sometimes been cited as evidence that Landino renounced the practice of allegorical interpretation upon the maturer considerations of his later years. This is not at all so. The commentary is merely scholarship in a different mode, as Landino clearly enough explains in the proem: “we took up the work of philosophical interpretation in the Camaldulenses, so in this commentary we instead furnish grammatical and rhetorical explanation.”67 Also, several times within the commentary itself, Landino encourages his readers to consult the Disputationes Camaldulenses for indispensible insights on various points. For example, in his commentary at the word “Mater” in Aeneid 1.314, where Venus appears before her son in the garb of a huntress, he writes: “Why Venus reveals herself to her son as a goddess when Troy is burning and here as a huntress, we explained in our Camaldulenses—which work, reader, I beg you not to ignore. You will see what lofty and profound meaning the divine poet hid beneath the ‹gures of this type of fable.”68 On occasion, Landino even incorporates some of his earlier allegorical interpretations into his commentary, and signi‹cantly, several instances occur in notes on the role of Venus and on Aeneas’s liaison with Dido. An example occurs in commentary on Aeneid 1.657–75, where Landino introduces the doctrine of the two Venuses, including a reference to “our Petrarch” (noster Petrarcha), who “rightly asserts” that “lasciviousness . . . arises from ease and wantonness” (lascivia . . . ex ocio lasciviaque natum asserit [142r]). Later, on the opening lines of Aeneid 5, in which Aeneas and his crewmates are described looking back at the distant glow of Dido’s funeral pyre, Landino observes that “there was nothing else but for Aeneas to leave Dido, as we revealed in our allegory on how the excellent man was warned by Jove through Mercury, which is to say that through doctrine he learned to move from the active life to the contemplative life.”69 The Disputationes Camaldulenses, furthermore, continued to attract a readership in the sixteenth century, with independent editions in Venice, Strasbourg, and Paris, besides its inclusion in the two editions of Vergil’s works printed in Basel, mentioned earlier.70 It has yet to be considered to what extent the Basel edition of 1577, in which Landino’s dialogue was retitled the Allegorica Platonica, or to what extent the Italian paraphrase and elaboration of Landino’s allegory by Giovanni Fabrini, published in two Venice editions of Vergil’s L’Eneide in 1575–76 (nos. 104–5 in Kallendorf 1991), may have in›uenced the development of Tasso’s thinking about his own epic. When these editions of Vergil

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< appeared—between 1575, when Tasso began to share drafts of his poem (then tentatively titled Goffredo), and 1581, the year Gerusalemme liberata was ‹rst published—the Aeneid was accompanied for the ‹rst time by extensive details of its allegorical meaning: in one case in a dialogue appended to the poem, and in the case of the Venice editions, fully incorporated into the line-by-line commentary. A unique feature of Fabrini’s commentary is his division of the content under various headings: for example, “The Arrangement of Words” (Ordine de le parole) and “Exposition of Words” (Expositione de le parole); “On Grammatically Dif‹cult Passages” (De luoghi grammaticali dif‹cili) and “Notes on the Rhetoric of Passages” (Annotationi de luoghi rettorici); “On the Fable” (Dele favole) and “On the History” (De le istorie); and, in forty separate places, “The Allegorical and Moral Meaning” (Sensi allegorici e morali).71 Don Cameron Allen’s assessment of Fabrini’s allegorical interpretations, that “often Fabrini adds nothing more to his great predecessor [Landino] than words, words, words” (1970, 160), is largely accurate. However, as Craig Kallendorf observes in his discussion of this commentary, Fabrini reaches for some heights that “cannot be squared with what Landino wrote,” when he suggests in several places that Vergil “was directly inspired by the Holy Spirit,” if not “conscious of the Christian meaning contained in his poem” (1995, 57–58). This inclination, on Fabrini’s part, not only to make more explicit the obvious parallels between Landino’s Platonized Aeneid and tenets of Christianity, but also to blend the language of Christian faith in with the interpretation of particular details in the poem, is revealed right from the start, when he explains that Aeneas’s departure from Troy represents his desire to leave “the ‹rst era of man, which is not ruled at all by reason, but by the senses,” and to move on not just to the active and contemplative life but to “the civil and holy life” (la vita civile, e santa [my emphasis]).72 One of the most explicit instances occurs in Fabrini’s commentary on the passage in which Jupiter sends Mercury down to Carthage to rouse Aeneas from his shameful dallying in the arms of Dido. Fabrini explains this “fable’s meaning” by way of our understanding that “God made the ‹rst man with twofold reason, that is, natural, and divine,” but “on account of his pride, God removed the divine understanding, and divided him,” so that “he was reduced to the natural like a beast, but having compassion for him, he ordered Mercury to reclaim him, as did Christ, who freed man, and repurchased him who was lost through his own sin: and thus man is now saved by the remedy of the Passion of Christ.”73

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Fabrini’s conviction that, in his own words, “the opinion of Vergil is the opinion of a most holy, true Christian”74 was not widely shared, needless to say, so although his commentary was reprinted several times in the ‹fteenth and sixteenth centuries (with a last edition in 1710), I do not propose that it was in›uential in that respect. Fabrini’s commentary is signi‹cant, rather, for disseminating Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid in the vernacular tongue and possibly for rekindling the interest in Vergilian allegory that inspired the reprinting of Landino’s so-called Allegorica Platonica in 1577 and afterward. Also relevant to the focus of this study, Fabrini kept in current circulation the doctrine of the two Venuses as an explanatory device, reporting its source in Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium and translating Landino faithfully in his assertion that the heavenly Venus “means nothing else than the Intelligence, that is, to us, the Angelic mind, which by a certain natural love desires to contemplate the beauty of God.”75 Likewise, Fabrini’s commentary articulates the ‹gural link between Dido’s lust and the mere earthly or “inchoate” civic virtues, when he explains that “through Dido Vergil shows the active and civil life,” but because this life “is occupied with things corporeal,” Dido herself is “assaulted by the beauty of the body”—“diverted from an honest and chaste aim to a dishonest and shameless one”—while Aeneas and the Trojans, “by the allurements of mortal things, abandon virtue and give themselves to vanity.”76 In sum, at the very least there was good reason—in the form of a massive, elaborate, recent precedent—for Torquato Tasso, when he ‹rst endeavored to defend his Gerusalemme liberata against its critics, to do so in the form of an explication of its “allegorical and moral meaning.” But I would go further. An analysis of Tasso’s epic, which follows in chapter 3, reveals that the Augustinian allegory of Petrarch’s Africa and the tradition of allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid were as fundamental to Tasso’s conception of his aims and methods in Gerusalemme liberata as was his other, far better known intention to reconcile the dangerous multiplicity of romance with the ideal unity of epic.77

ch a p ter t h re e

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=< the “allegor y of the poem” In the Folger Shakespeare Library is a copy of one of the ‹rst editions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Ferrara, 1581), replete with marginal notes and verses in Italian and English that were penned by various seventeenthand eighteenth-century hands. Those that do not serve the purpose of elucidation are laudatory, but for one. On the ‹rst page of the essay that Tasso appended to his poem to explain the deeper, veiled meaning behind its “imitation of action,” directly under the essay’s title, “Allegorica del Poema,” one of the book’s previous owners has penned, “alias, the nonsense of the Poem.”1 That derisive comment pretty well captures what had been, from the early seventeenth to the last quarter of the twentieth century, the prevailing critical assessment of Tasso’s own key to his poem’s allegorical meaning. Until the 1980s, editions and translations of Gerusalemme liberata rarely included Tasso’s essay: it was considered a mere afterthought, an interpretation “superimposed on his poem ex post facto” (Steadman 1974, 73) in response to the criticisms of literary men with whom he had shared early drafts of his poem; or alternatively, it was assumed to represent Tasso’s hasty effort to justify the poem’s religious orthodoxy, for fear of the Inquisition’s disapproval and censorship; or it was even deemed a sad sign of Tasso’s deteriorating mind and wavering commitment to Aristotelian 74

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poetic principles—a “passion for allegory” that “increased with [his] mental disorder” (D. Allen 1970, 287). This antipathy toward the allegorical interpretation of Gerusalemme liberata was given its ‹rst, most direct challenge in an essay by Thomas Roche (1977), who pronounced hyperbolically that “the much-maligned Allegoria del poema” is “the best criticism Tasso’s poem has ever received” (51). Roche stressed the city of Jerusalem’s conventional signi‹cance in Christian allegory as the “‘visio pacis,’ the vision of peace that is the stay and goal of every true Christian,” and he showed that Tasso’s poem clearly invokes Augustine’s distinction, in The City of God, “between the earthly city of Babylon and the heavenly city Jerusalem,” which supplies Tasso’s poem with its contrasting “symbols of the ways in which the Christian can regard his journey in this life” (54).2 Shortly after Roche’s essay appeared, Michael Murrin published his argument that “the essential basis for Tasso’s allegorization existed in the original draft of the whole poem” (1980, 89) and that “the Prose Allegory gives a proper explication” of all the scenes it treats (89). Claimed Murrin, “The poem is both the mimesis of a historical event, in which characters have complete and individualized personalities, and a symbolic paradigm for the psychological growth of Everyman” (107).3 It should not surprise us if the language employed by Roche and Murrin (and others more recently) to defend and detail the allegory of Gerusalemme liberata echoes the terms of Vergilian allegorical commentary, because Tasso’s essay is heavily indebted to that tradition, and in his other writings as well, he af‹rms such conventional ideas as the doctrine of the two Venuses and hardly varies on the interpretations that he and his contemporaries found in Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses and in Fabrini’s Landino-based commentary on the Aeneid. For example, in his dialogue Il Messagiero, published in 1582, Tasso illustrates the difference between “earthly” and “heavenly Love” (il vulgare . . . il celeste Amor) with citations from Petrarch’s Canzoniere and a line from Vergil’s epic describing Dido’s tormenting passion (Tasso 1998, 322–24). He applies the doctrine of the two Venuses to an explication of Aeneas’s relationship to his mother in the Platonizing fashion of Landino: Venus is “the goddess of love,” but in both a corporeal and spiritual sense, so “where Aeneas sees Venus and through her grace sees idea and reason,” here the poet “means that he is raised up above his humanity by contemplation.”4 Tasso’s wellknown, 1575 letter to his friend Cardinal Scipione Gonzaga, written after Tasso began to receive critical responses to the draft of “Goffredo” (as he initially called his epic), also suggests Landino’s in›uence on Tasso’s poetic

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< aims—at least insofar as Tasso describes their crystallization during the process of composing Gerusalemme liberata.5 He recalls in this letter, “when I commenced my poem I did not have any thought of allegory, it seeming to me an excessive and vain labor because everyone will interpret the allegory to his own fancy . . . and because Aristotle does not make any mention of allegory in his Poetics or his other works”—except, adds Tasso, to de‹ne it as “a continued metaphor.”6 “But then,” Tasso explains next, “it was when I was further on toward the middle of my poem that I began to surmise of the pressures of the time, and I began to consider allegory as something greatly necessary to assist with dif‹culties”—among them, his correspondent is told, the aim of “coupling Plato with Aristotle.”7 In the “Allegory of the Poem” itself, Tasso opens with an anatomy of allegory that we recognize is inspired by Ficino’s explanation of the “twofold Venus,” particularly his idea of the heavenly Venus as “that intelligence which we said was in the Angelic Mind” (cited in chap. 2 in the present study). That inspiration, however, could just as well have been routed through Landino’s explication of the Aeneid as a poem of Platonic philosophy and, even more recently, through Fabrini’s translation of Landino, in particular through their elaboration on Ficino in construing the heavenly Venus as (quoting Fabrini) “nothing else than the Intelligence, that is, to us, the Angelic mind, which by a certain natural love desires to contemplate the beauty of God” (Vergil 1588, 103r). Says Tasso: As the life of man is two-fold, so Allegory is customarily a ‹guring now of one and now of the other side. For ordinarily we understand by “man” this compound of body and soul and mind; and “human life” then means a life proper to such a compound, in whose actions its several parts concur. . . . Sometimes, though more rarely, by “man” is understood not the compound, but its noblest part, i.e., the mind. And according to this usage “the life of man” will mean contemplating or acting purely with the intellect (although such a life seems in large degree to participate with divinity, and going beyond the human, so to speak, to become angelic).8 Thus, Tasso then illustrates, we understand that “Dante’s Commedia, and the Odyssey in virtually all its parts, are ‹gurings of the life of contemplative man,” but in Vergil’s Aeneid “we ‹nd rather a mingling of action and contemplation”; for when Vergil describes Aeneas descending alone to the Elysian Fields of the underworld, “he is signifying for us his contemplation

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of the rewards and punishments that are held in store in the other world for good and evil souls.”9 This summary prepares the way for Tasso’s explanation of his own poem’s allegory as what we would recognize to be the anatomy of man in the ‹nal stage of his earthly life, for he tells us that the Christian army that lays siege to Jerusalem “signi‹es mature man,” a corporate pius Aeneas, with a body and soul that is “divided into many and various faculties”: Goffredo, the leader of the army, “stands for the intellect,” while “Rinaldo, Tancredi, and the other princes stand for the other faculties of the soul; and the body is represented for us by the less noble soldiers.”10 As for the city of Jerusalem, Tasso does not tell us explicitly that it is a simulacrum of the City of God. Rather, it “signi‹es civic felicity, to the degree be‹tting Christian man.” He explains: “this felicity is a good very dif‹cult to pursue, being placed atop the steep and wearying hill of Virtue, and toward it are directed, as toward an ultimate goal, all the actions of political man.”11 Just as Landino had said that the highest happiness requires looking past the active life to the afterlife, valuing the “beauties” of the civic virtues only insofar as they spur one to love the beauties of heaven, so, says Tasso, the conquest of Jerusalem represents a “state of civic blessedness” that “ought not to be the Christian’s ultimate goal”; rather, “he ought to look higher, to Christian Felicity.”12 In other words, it is up to the Christian Everyman to make of Jerusalem, in his contemplative eye and in his heart, a simulacrum of the City of God. Tasso continues: Goffredo does not desire to take the earthly Jerusalem simply in order to have a temporal dominion over it, but in order that holy religion may be observed there, and the Sepulcher freely visited by devout and pious pilgrims. And the poem concludes with Goffredo’s Adoration in order to show that the intellect wearied in civil affairs ought ‹nally to rest itself in prayers and in contemplation of the goods of that other life most blessed and immortal.13 Thus, right from the ‹rst year of its publication, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata was advertised by its author as an allegorical Vergilian epic, such as Landino and Fabrini had de‹ned it in Vergil’s great Platonic prototype, but with the important difference that its Christian meanings are wholly intended by the poem’s author and divided by him between the explicit and the implicit—some imitated in the action, others veiled behind its allegory. Moreover, the various appendices and commentaries that accrued to the

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< poem in its ‹rst reeditions reinforced, rather than downplayed, Tasso’s guide to his loftier meaning. In 1582, for instance, the year after Gerusalemme liberata was ‹rst published, its “faculties of the soul” allegory was given a canto-by-canto exposition by “an unknown author” who informs us, for example, that Jerusalem, upon its capture by the Christian army, represents “the purgation of our soul,”14 similar to Landino’s claim that the mature Aeneas arrives in Italy with “the kind of virtues that are called purgative.”15 And in the 1590 edition that contained the commentaries of Scipio Gentili and Giulio Guastavini, the gloss on Gerusalemme liberata 16.34 (in which Rinaldo recovers his senses and escapes Armida’s palace) asserts that this episode illustrates the “opinion of Plato” that “Cupidity is in opposition to Reason.”16 Tasso’s Apologia . . . in difesa della sua Gierusalemme liberata (1585) and Discorsi . . . del poema heroico (1587 and, in expanded form, 1594) supply additional encouragement, even though they are primarily characterized by an effort to answer his critics and de‹ne the art of epic poetry according to Aristotelian criteria made fashionable by Ludovico Castelvetro and others, rather than by way of Platonic allegory.17 Tasso concludes the latter tract, for example, with an epic simile (literally, a simile that represents his conception of epic) that not only reaf‹rms his attraction to the allegorical epic of the Vergilian commentary tradition but imagines the epic as an alternative via, even a negative one, to a fair and noble city, an imagined earthly city that represents knowledge and truth and that surely—in the righteous reader’s eye— inspires a vision of God’s heavenly city. Let me be then permitted to part company with Aristotle on this and some few other matters [Tasso has been disputing Aristotle’s claim that tragedy achieves its ends better than epic], that I may not abandon him in things of greater moment, that is, in the desire to discover truth and in the love of philosophy. In this divergence of view I shall imitate those whom a branching of the road separates for a brief while; later they return and meet on the broad highway that leads to some lofty destination, some noble city, ‹lled with magni‹cent regal dwellings, and adorned with temples and palaces and other majestic architectural marvels.18 Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata aims to ful‹ll just such a vision of epic and of the epic poet’s vocation, by imitating the action of Christian warriors in their battle to capture the holy city of Jerusalem and by ‹guring the

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mature Christian man’s battle to overcome ›eshly failings and contemplate the City of God. What is more, Tasso understood that this allegorical project was Petrarch’s before his, but the un‹nished Africa, composed in a Latin that by then struck erudite umanisti as quaintly if not crudely classicizing, with pagan Scipio instead of a proper Christian for its hero, was due to be superseded by a new and de‹nitive Christian epic. This chapter argues that Tasso took up that task: in Gerusalemme liberata, he rewrites the allegory of the Africa—“completes it,” one might say—having the advantage of his choice of a Christian action and a more sophisticated allegory of the Aeneid. Like Petrarch in the Africa, Tasso strives in his poem to negotiate the challenge of Augustine’s warning and Petrarch’s admission, in the Secretum, that the poet’s vocation and pursuit of worldly fame distract the faithful Christian from his necessary meditation on death and contemplation of God. Tasso’s imaginative energy is also stoked by the same anxious desire that so pervades Petrarch’s Augustinian epic and motivated its “veiled meaning”—the desire to cling stubbornly to the proposition, and to show artfully by way of his poem’s dark ‹gures, that this detour down a “branching of the road” may also lead to the “lofty destination” toward which every Christian pilgrim guides his steps.

t h e s p e c ter o f p e t r a rch Tasso’s readers have, from the beginning, observed the virtual omnipresence of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the twenty books of Gerusalemme liberata. In particular, Petrarch’s verses supplied Tasso with a rich stock of images for the catalog of Armida’s seductive charms and the story of Rinaldo’s dissipation in her arms, as well as for the descriptions of Olindo’s secret passion for Sofronia and Tancredi’s vain love for Clorinda. In an inventory of Tasso’s literary sources that was published with the 1590 edition of the poem, Guastavini lists seventy-nine borrowings from the Canzoniere, demonstrating—by that basic measure, at any rate—that Petrarch’s in›uence on Tasso’s epic was even as great as Vergil’s.19 In contrast, Guastavini lists only two allusions to the Africa in Gerusalemme liberata (they are to separate speeches of Hannibal, in Africa 7),20 and today even such glancing acknowledgment of Tasso’s familiarity with Petrarch’s epic is rare. Yet it is by examining Gerusalemme liberata in light of the Africa that we perceive the poetic means by which Tasso endeavors to resolve the spiritual struggle that Petrarch puts on display in his writings. I suggest that Tasso announces this intention and invites us to read Gerusalemme liberata as

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< another, but repaired, Africa, through his poem’s opening invocation, which is modeled on Petrarch’s. It is so, ‹rst, in its two-part structure: each poet prays to the heavenly muse for inspiration; Petrarch then dedicates his epic to King Robert, and Tasso dedicates his to Alfonso d’Este. Both poets, too, voice the concern that their verses will not be pleasing to God, and both propose a tentative recompense. Recall Petrarch’s promise and prayer for pardon, “I shall bring back many pious verses to you from the heights of Parnassus, if verses delight you; but if they please you little, perchance I may offer my tears as well, which formerly (for so my mad mind was deceived) a long time I kept from shedding for you” (1.14–25). Tasso, in a similar tone of trepidation, prays: tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori, tu rischiara il mio canto, e tu perdona s’intesso fregi al ver, s’adorno in parte d’altri diletti, che de’ tuoi, le carte.

(1.2.5–8)

[breathe into my breast celestial ardors, illuminate my song, and grant me pardon if with the truth I interweave embroiderings, if partly with pleasures other than yours I ornament my pages.]21 Then, in the next stanza, Tasso proposes a way to look at his verses that might make them less displeasing to God, despite their testimony to his attention to “pleasures other than” heaven’s. Sai che là corre il mondo ove più versi di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso, e che ’l vero, condito in molli versi, I più schivi allettando ha persuaso. Così a l’egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi di soavi licor gli orli del vaso: succhi amari ingannato intanto ei beve, e da l’inganno suo vita riceve.

(1.3)

[You know that the world ›ocks there where feigning Parnassus most pours out her sweetnesses, and that the truth in ›uent verses hidden has by its charm persuaded the most froward. So we present to the feverish child the rim of the glass sprinkled over with sweet liquids: he drinks deceived the bitter medicine and from his deception receives life.]

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We recognize in this simile one of the most timeworn of apologies for poetry, its most familiar classical source being Lucretius’s defense of writing in verse where he compares himself to a physician, applying “the sweet yellow liquor of honey” around “the rims of cups” to disguise “the bitter juice of wormwood” administered to young patients.22 If this seems a weak justi‹cation on Tasso’s part, merely a transparent disguise of the same real, worldly motives for devoting his life to poetry that Petrarch knew he had to answer for, we might remark ‹rst that the image of poet as “good physician” lays claim also to the Petrarchan gambit of the negative via, the “bitter” path to the “sweet” destination that restores life. In the Lucretian simile now employed by Tasso, it is signi‹cant that what is bitter—the truth—is only bitter to a child, the immature Aeneas or Everyman who has yet to relinquish the life of ›eshly pleasures. By means of this simile, Tasso divulges that there is a loftier meaning to be sought in Gerusalemme liberata, a “truth in ›uent verses hidden” (’l vero, condito in molli versi),23 which both more mature readers and more perceptive readers striving to be more mature will know to look for behind the deceptive veil of allegory and, having found it, the sooner be spurred to drink in its truer sweetness and so “receive life.” In this way, Tasso, like Petrarch, acknowledges the spiritual danger he courts in composing so audacious a poem as a Vergilian epic, but nearly in the same breath, because this is Vergilian epic in the allegorical tradition, he ventures to declare that this supreme act of gloryseeking in the world is devoted to the salvation of souls and the glory of God, perhaps justifying poem and poet alike. Tasso’s clearest imitation of Petrarch’s epic may be seen in canto 14’s account of Goffredo’s dream, which, like Scipio’s dream in Africa 1–2, is based on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. The original has been credited for inspiring Vergil in some details of Aeneas’s journey to the underworld, and it was widely imitated and routinely cited in the medieval and Renaissance periods as testimony to the truths, both mundane and celestial, that dreams are capable of revealing to us (Le roman de la rose and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls contain well-known examples).24 But it was the Africa that provided Tasso with a precedent for incorporating a version of the Dream of Scipio into Vergilian epic, and more important, Petrarch modeled for Tasso its combination with details from Aeneas’s conference with his father in Aeneid 6 to supply a heavenly counterpart to the classical epic’s meeting in the underworld. In Cicero’s account, Scipio Africanus the Younger, hero of the Third Punic War, is visited by his grandfather Scipio Africanus the Elder and his

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< father, Paulus Macedonicus, who foretell his defeat of Carthage and dif‹culties at Rome afterward, take him up to view the heavens and the tiny earth below, and use the occasion to deliver lessons on the nature of the eternal versus the merely mortal, the smallness of human affairs, and the emptiness of human glory. In the Africa, Scipio the Elder is the bene‹ciary of these same prophecies and lessons when he is visited in a dream by his father, Publius Cornelius, and his uncle, Gnaeus Cornelius. In Gerusalemme liberata, the late Hugh, previous captain of the Frankish army, is sent from “the Heavenly City” (la città celeste [14.7]) on God’s instructions to reveal to Goffredo that Jerusalem will be won once Rinaldo is rescued and the rift between them has been repaired. Goffredo’s experiences and reactions in his dream replay those of the elder and younger Scipios in Petrarch and Cicero. All three, for example, request to join their visitors in the “templum” of heaven: “Why should I remain longer on earth? Why not make haste in coming to you?” (quid moror in terris? quin huc ad vos venire propero?), asks Scipio the Younger;25 the Scipio of the Africa complains, “Why must I remain any longer on earth? Why may my soul not rather ›y up here, to wherever it should be permitted, rising up from the world relinquished?” (quid demoror ultra / In terris? quin huc potius, quacumque licebit, / Evolat assurgens animus tellure relicta? [1.462–64]); and in response to Hugh’s explanation that Goffredo is seeing in his dream “a temple of God” for “His warriors” and that one day he “will be among them,” Goffredo asks, “When will that be? . . . Let the mortal coil be loosed even now, if it is impediment to my staying here” (Questo è tempio di Dio: qui son le sedi / de’ suoi guerrieri, e tu avrai loco in queste. / Quando ciò ‹a? . . . il mortal laccio / sciolgasi omai, s’al restar qui m’è impaccio [14.7.5–8]). Goffredo’s obvious advantage over the two Scipios, as one sees in this instance as elsewhere, is his Christian faith. There is no despair in his responses, and he needs only a brief lecture on the smallness of the earth and its affairs (two stanzas, compared to nearly 150 lines for the elder Scipio in the Africa) before replying, “Then since it does not as yet please God to release me from my earthly prison, I pray you now instruct me of the road that is least fallacious”—the via that is the least negative—“among the mazes of the world” (Poi ch’a Dio non piace / dal mio carcer terreno anco disciorme, / prego che del camin, ch’è men fallace / fra gli errori del mondo, or tu m’informe [14.12.1–4]). In details that depart from the Ciceronian model, as I remarked, Petrarch and Tasso transform the Dream of Scipio from philosophical treatise to Vergilian epic by invoking particular scenes from Aeneid 6. In the

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same way that Anchises had there shown Aeneas all the noble line of his future progeny—“Behold this race and your Romans” (hanc aspice gentem / Romanosque tuos [6.788–89])—so, in the Africa, Scipio is shown kings and heroes of the Roman past and future. In Gerusalemme liberata, the correspondence with the Aeneid occurs at Goffredo’s and Hugh’s ‹rst greeting. Cicero and Petrarch had allowed the dreaming Scipios to embrace their fathers (De republica 6.14 and Africa 1.224, respectively), but when Goffredo attempts to embrace Hugh in Gerusalemme liberata, tre ‹ate le braccia al collo intorno, e tre ‹ate invan cinta l’imago fuggia, qual leve sogno od aer vago.

(14.6.6–8)

[three times he reached his arms about his neck; and three times embraced in vain the image escaped him, like an empty dream, or shifting air.] These lines paraphrase Aeneas’s failed efforts to embrace his father’s spirit in Hades in the Aeneid (a scene modeled, in turn, on Homer’s account of Odysseus attempting to embrace the spirit of his mother). Vergil writes, ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.

(Aeneid 6.700–702)

[Three times he tried to throw his arms about his neck; three times embraced in vain the image ›ed from his hands, like light winds or, more so, a ›eeting dream.] Yet in comparing these passages, we discern that in Tasso’s innovations on the Dream of Scipio, he is again fashioning a Vergilian epic not only on Vergil’s model. He has in mind as well the Vergil of Landino’s allegorical commentary on the Aeneid, the Vergil of Neoplatonic philosophy. When, in Gerusalemme liberata, Hugh invites Goffredo to contemplate the heavenly sights before him, he points out the shining towers and living ›ames that “Eternal Intellect informs and moves” (mente eterna informa e gira [14.9.4]). Goffredo’s dream has the additional function of associating his mission with that of the two Scipios—that is, to conquer Carthage—but

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< whereas the meaning of that phrase was historical in Cicero and both historical and allegorical in Petrarch, in Tasso’s poem it is now purely allegorical. It is the Carthage of the heart that Goffredo’s army must conquer in order to liberate Jerusalem, which is the reason for Hugh’s message that Rinaldo must be extricated from his state of dissipation in lust before the war can be won. Because of Rinaldo’s “‹erce youth,” says Hugh (attributing to him the failings of Turnus as well as Paris and Aeneas), he originally “fell through excess of wrath” into “error,” and so “the young man now is giddy and fondly babbles in idleness and love” (il fer garzon di quell’errore / in cui trascorse per soverchio d’ira, / . . . il giovene delira / e vaneggia ne l’ozio e ne l’amore [ 14.17.2–6]). In the Africa, as I claimed in chapter 1, the story of Massinissa and Sophonisba at once emblemizes and serves as metonymic pointer to the “loftier” meaning of the epic’s allegory. By intervening to rein in the ignoble lust of Massinissa for Sophonisba, Scipio symbolizes the mature and noble mind that defeats the lust symbolized by Carthage and its general, Hannibal. The story of Olindo and Sofronia in canto 2 of Gerusalemme liberata serves a parallel function in Tasso’s epic. Sophonisba’s and Sofronia’s similar names might even be Tasso’s signal that he is rewriting the drama of Massinissa and Sophonisba, with the difference between the two women’s characters and fates emphasizing the poetic and spiritual advantages that he could claim to enjoy in having Christian actions with which to convey his hidden truths. I suggest that this revision is one aspect of Tasso’s strategy to respond more persuasively than had Petrarch to Augustine’s criticism of literary ambitions in the Secretum. It is one dimension of his design to overgo the Africa. Olindo and Sofronia’s story begins when the tyrant king of Jerusalem, Aladin, is advised by the sorcerer Ismeno to steal an image of the Virgin Mary from the Christians’ temple and place it within the city’s mosque, on the claim that it can be made to work as a charm against the approaching Christian army. Aladin takes the advice, but the next morning, it is discovered that the image has disappeared from the mosque. Even the narrator of Gerusalemme liberata is unsure of the cause. O fu di man fedele opra furtiva, o pur il Ciel qui sua potenza adopra, che di Colei ch’è sua regina e diva sdegna che loco vil l’imagin copra.

(2.9.1–4)

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[Either it was the secret work of the hand of one of the faithful, or indeed Heaven exercises here its power, because it scorns that a vile place should conceal the image of Her who is its queen and goddess.] Aladin assumes that the Christians must have stolen the image back, but a search of all their churches and houses fails to produce it. He grows “all enraged with hatred against them, and burn[s] with anger and a vast uncontrollable fury” (tutto in lor d’odio infellonissi, ed arse / d’ira e di rabbia immoderata immensa [2.11.3–4]), ‹nally vowing to slaughter them all. “Up and take ›ame and steel,” he cries, urging the followers of Mahomet to “burn and kill” (su via prendete / le ‹amme e ’l ferro, ardete ed uccidete [2.12.7–8]). At this point, from among the terri‹ed Christian populace, one young woman offers herself as a martyr to save the rest: Sofronia goes to the king and confesses to the “crime” of having removed the image from the mosque. Her introduction emphasizes two qualities, her beauty and her modesty. Vergine era fra lor di già matura verginità, d’alti pensieri e regi, d’alta beltà; ma sua beltà non cura; o tanto sol quant’onestà se ’n fregi. È il suo pregio maggior che tra le mura d’angusta casa asconde i suoi gran pregi, e de’ vagheggiatori ella s’invola a le lodi, a gli sguardi, inculta e sola.

(2.14)

[A maiden there was among them, her maidenhood fully ripe, of lofty and queenly thoughts, of lofty beauty; but she cares nothing for her beauty, or only so far as it may adorn her chastity. Her greatest merit is that she hides her great merits within the walls of a narrow house, and steals away from the praises and glances of admirers, alone and unsolicited.] Here Sofronia takes the precautions for herself that Scipio is praised for taking on behalf of the women of Cartagena in the Africa, when he orders them to be kept indoors and out of sight of his soldiers “because seducing eyes insult modesty and the bloom of a chaste face is plucked by gazes”

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< (4.382–83). Yet we must also observe that Tasso, in another passage of Gerusalemme liberata shortly after, describes Sofronia’s presentation to the eyes of her beholders much more ambiguously, when they see her going to sacri‹ce herself to Aladin’s wrath. La vergine tra ’l vulgo uscì soletta, non coprì sue bellezze, e non l’espose, raccolse gli occhi, andò nel vel ristretta, con ichive maniere e generose. Non sai ben dir s’adorna o se negletta, se caso od arte il bel volto compose. Di natura, d’Amor, de’ cieli amici le negligenze sue sono arti‹ci.

(2.18)

[The maiden went forth alone among the crowd, she did not conceal her beauties nor set them forth. She lowered her eyes, she walked along wrapped in her veil, with manners modest and spirited. You do not quite know whether to say she adorns or neglects herself, whether accident or art composed her lovely face. Her negligences are the arti‹ces of Nature, of Love, of her friendly stars.] Sofronia’s description earlier as “matura verginità” (2.14.1–2, already cited) recalls the Virgin Mother, as such critics as Naomi Yavneh (1993, 150) have observed. The veil with which she is wrapped in this passage does the same, for the ef‹gy of Mary that had been removed by Aladin was also “in un velo avolto” (Gerusalemme liberata 2.5.6). Sofronia claims, furthermore, that she has burned the ef‹gy, and her sentence will be death by ‹re. Thus she goes to offer herself to the tyrant king in a same-for-same exchange, one image of the Virgin Mother for another. But as Yavneh and other critics remark, the expression of uncertainty in the narrator’s portrait of Sofronia is characteristic of the ambiguity of beauty that pervades Gerusalemme liberata just as it does Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The manner of her progress down the street of Jerusalem anticipates Armida’s calculated allurement of Christian warriors as she enters their camp in canto 4 (stanzas 28–31), for Armida is likewise partly veiled and partly revealed, with lowered eyes and gifts of nature that she seems unaware of possessing. So, says Yavneh, out of the same Petrarchan fabric, Tasso creates both a mediatrix and an idol, for while the beauty of Sofronia, imitating a virgin mar-

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tyr and the Virgin Mary, points not to rei‹cation but to heaven, Armida, two cantos later, transforms the saving power of Sofronia’s appearance and uses that same force to corrupt ends, just as Petrarch employs Marian and Dantesque elements to create his own unique idol [in the ‹gure of Laura]. Quite troubled by this parallel, Yavneh asks, “in the poem’s visually ambiguous universe, how can we distinguish between what leads to grace, and what to idolatry?” (1993, 155).26 Yet reference to the role of Sophonisba in the Africa and to allegorical readings of the Aeneid reminds us that beauty itself is not the issue. Our focus should not be on the signs but on the level of “maturity” of the mind that beholds them and either gives in to idolatry or contemplates a loftier goal. I stressed in chapter 1 that Petrarch avoids any implication that Sophonisba tried to seduce Massinissa. Petrarch clearly wishes to oppose Massinissa’s moral failing in that episode to Scipio’s unswerving virtue, a contrast that is the more stark without the mitigating factor of a temptress’s scheming. Likewise, in Gerusalemme liberata, “what leads to grace, and what to idolatry,” is what capacity the individual has or does not have in him to “enjoy” earthly beauty correctly as a spur to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. “Armida’s beauty is dangerous because it is generic,” Yavneh rightly states (1993, 155), but equally, Armida’s beauty in the eyes of the right-minded beholder is no more dangerous, is no less a prompt to heavenly contemplation, than Sofronia’s. The character of Aladin in the story of Olindo and Sofronia exempli‹es the most wrong-minded of beholders of beautiful images. In describing his theft of the Virgin Mother ef‹gy, Tasso invokes the language of Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia—after the king enters “the house of God” (la magion di Dio [2.7.2]), “irreverent[ly] he ravished away from there the chaste image” (irreverente / il casto simulacro indi rapio [2.7.3–4]). Then, on seeing Sofronia approach him, at “the unexpected dazzle of lofty and saintly beauties” (l’improviso / folgorar di bellezze altere e sante [2.20.1–2), he is said to be “as if confused, as if overcome” (quasi confuso . . . , quasi conquiso [2.20.3]). “It was amazement, it was desire, and it was pleasure, if it was not love, that moved his villainous heart” to postpone the general slaughter and hear what the maiden had come to tell him (Fu stupor, fu vaghezza, e fu diletto, / s’amor non fu, che mosse il cor villano [2.21.1–2]). Aladin’s is an intellect clouded by ignorance and wrath and the desires of the ›esh, the opposite of one informed or moved by the “Eternal Intellect.” We might say that he supplies, here near

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< the beginning of the poem, Tasso’s image of man at the stage of moral and intellectual infancy. The crucial distinction between Sophonisba and Sofronia, of course, is the latter’s Christian faith, and although ultimately she cannot (any more than Armida) control the minds that would rightly or wrongly enjoy her beauty, she can, by her example and her words, at least admonish men to loftier sights and thoughts. Olindo, the “young man” whose name recalls Ariosto’s Orlando and who harbors a cupidinous desire (un giovenetto a i cupidi desiri [2.15.4]) for Sofronia, represents the progress youth can make to maturity by heeding her example and words. When he hears of her confession to Aladin, Olindo presents himself as the real thief of the image and offers to die in her place, but the king instead orders both of them to burn on the same stake. His self-sacri‹ce is courageous and generous but, at this point, not to be interpreted as the noble decision of a mature man’s mind, for in this scene, Tasso physically arranges the action that Olindo’s mind has yet to take—a turning away from Sofronia’s beauty to a contemplation of heavenly beauty: “Both are tied to the same stake; and back is turned to back, and face hidden from face” (Sono ambo stretti al palo stesso; e vòlto / è il tergo al tergo, e ’l volto ascoso al volto [2.32.7–8]). Olindo betrays the error of the youthful mind by complaining that these are not the ›ames of love that he had longed to enjoy.27 Quest’è dunque quel laccio ond’io sperai teco accoppiarmi in compagnia di vita? questo è quel foco ch’io credea ch’i cori ne dovesse in‹ammar d’eguali ardori? Altre ‹amme, altri nodi Amor promise, altri ce n’apparecchia iniqua sorte.

(2.33.5–34.2)

[Is this then that knot with which I hoped to yoke myself in life-long company with you? Is this that ‹re that I thought should in›ame our hearts with equal ardor? One kind of ›ames, one kind of knots Love promised, another kind our unjust fate prepares us.] The consolation Olindo then invents for himself is hardly more praiseworthy. “At least it gives me pleasure,” he says, “to be your partner in the funeral pyre, even if I have not been partner in your bed” (Piacemi almen

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. . . del rogo esser consorte, / se del letto non fui [2.34.5–7]). Hearing these sentiments of the self-deluded Petrarchan lover who has made an idol of his beloved, Sofronia advises him to turn his thoughts to God. Amico, altri pensieri, altri lamenti, per più alta cagione il tempo chiede. Ché non pensi a tue colpe? e non rammenti qual Dio prometta a i buoni ampia mercede? Soffri in suo nome, e ‹an dolci i tormenti, e lieto aspira a la superna sede. Mira ’l ciel com’è bello, e mira il sole ch’a sé par che n’inviti e ne console.

(2.36)

[My friend, the time requires other thoughts, other laments, for a loftier reason. Why are you not thinking upon your sins and calling to mind what ample reward God promises the righteous? Suffer in His name and your torments will become blessed; and gladly aspire to your heavenly station. Behold the sky how beautiful it is, and behold the sun how it comforts us and seems to invite us there.] Not only do Sofronia’s words bring together the array of images that Tasso has been assembling in this episode from their sources in the Petrarchan sonnet and epic verse, but they also administer to Olindo a quick lesson on Neoplatonic Christian allegory and the imperative—now especially, when soon he will be called to account for his “colpe,” as Sofronia reminds him—to practice it wisely. She directs him to admire the beauty of the sky above and to feel the comfort of the sun only after stating explicitly the loftier meaning of these instructions, thereby inviting him to convert his own earlier words to their properly sacred allegorical meaning. He must now turn his back on his former attraction to the idols of love that only promise despair: the young lover who burns with desire to have his beloved’s heart burn for him; the unhappy Dido, consumed ‹rst by love’s ›ames and then, her love rejected, by the funeral pyre’s. Olindo mistakes a literalization of the lovers’ hearts’ burning as some sort of recompense for missing out on the metaphorical consummation, but Sofronia reminds him that there are much better metaphors available: the heat of the burning sun that stands for God’s grace, for example, or the ›ames that at once consume and give rise to the phoenix, representing Christ’s and his faithful followers’ death in this life and rebirth in heaven. Like Petrarch, according to

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< Augustine in the Secretum, and like Aeneas, according to the Aeneid’s allegorizers, he must learn to enjoy earthly beauty for its incitement to contemplate “how beautiful heaven is” (’l ciel com’è bello). Olindo will be allowed to learn that wisdom in later stages of his development, because of the intervention of Clorinda, the pagan (though chaste and soon to be converted) warrior who arrives just at this moment and requests Aladin, for pity’s sake, to release the condemned prisoners. But Olindo’s spiritual progress is not the story of Gerusalemme liberata. His culpa serves only as a pointer to Everyman’s (whose tale is that of the Christian army in the epic’s primary action), and the poem leaves him. “Truly fortunate was the fate of Olindo,” says Tasso, concluding the episode, for he “had opportunity to perform a deed that in the end in her generous heart awakened love through love” (Aventuroso / ben veramente fu d’Olindo il fato, / ch’atto poté mostrar che ’n generoso / petto al ‹ne ha d’amore amor destato [2.53.1–4]), so that after their release he and Sofronia get married. But although, in one respect, Yavneh is correct in saying their wedlock “restores the Christian status quo” (1993, 152), the exile to which Aladin immediately banishes them also symbolizes the severer judgment of Augustine, who upon his conversion “sought neither a wife nor any hope of this age,” and it is likewise the severer judgment of this poem: that Olindo has not yet achieved the proper state of wisdom and piety in this life to which Sofronia’s words had urged him. A married Christian couple is not worthy of blame, but neither is it a subject worthy of an epic’s spiritual drama; consequently, we do not hear of them again. Tasso more directly warns his readers against the liability of marriage in his commentary on the deaths of the knights Odoarado and Gildippe, the “lovers and marriage-partners” (amanti e sposi [1.56.6]) who are said to be “noble prodigies of virtue and love” (di virtute e d’amor v’additi [20.94.6]) and who have, as Walter Stephens argues, “enacted . . . the ideal of marriage as enunciated by Saint Paul” (1989, 183). Yet in the same sentence that they are ‹rst introduced to us, their violent death is prophesied, and the scene of their last battle makes their signi‹cance as negative allegorical markers plain. Seeing his wife mortally injured by Soliman, Odoarado attempts to support her and avenge her at the same time. Con la sinistra man corre al sostegno, l’altra ministra ei fa del suo disdegno. Ma voler e poter che si divida bastar non può contra il pagan sì forte

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tal che non sostien lei, né l’omicida de la dolca alma sua conduce a morte.

(20.97.7–98.4)

[With his left hand he makes haste to sustain her; the other he makes the minister of his wrath. But a will and power divided against itself cannot suf‹ce against the pagan so strong; so that he does not hold her up, nor does he bring to death the man who murdered his sweet soul.] Instead, Soliman kills Odoarado and Gildippe both. Like the Aeneas who still clings to the pleasures of the ›esh or the pleasures of civic virtues even as he moves in the direction of the contemplative life (or like Fabrini’s “divided” Aeneas, who represents the state of man after “God removed the divine understanding” of the ‹rst man “and divided him on account of his pride”), Odoarado is encumbered by a will and power divided against itself, illustrated by the encumbrance—which is physical as well as spiritual in this moment—of having a wife. As we shall see shortly in the case of Goffredo, it is not enough for Tasso, as for Augustine and the allegorizers of the Aeneid, that a Lavinia has no words or (beyond a brief blush) actions of her own to associate her with the human passions of a Dido. She and her marriage with the poem’s hero must strictly be symbolic of the mind’s attainment of its highest goal, a life of contemplation in this world (as in Landino) or apotheosis to the next (as in Vegio).

jer usalem delivere d from car thage For Tasso, the sin of concupiscent love functions as shorthand for the distractions of earthly pursuits generally, for he follows Landino in linking the hero’s battle to overcome the pleasures of the ›esh with his struggle to turn from the enjoyment of civic to holy virtues. This is indicated in the ‹nal two stanzas of the same canto that contains the story of Sofronia and Olindo, in a passage that includes a near-direct translation of lines from Aeneid 4. Tasso describes the peaceful evening before the Christian army’s ‹nal march to Jerusalem. Era la notte allor ch’alto riposo han l’onde e i venti, e parea muto il mondo. Gli animai lassi, e quei che ’l mar ondoso o de’ liquidi laghi alberga il fondo,

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< e chi si giace in tana o in mandra ascoso, e i pinti augelli, ne l’oblio profondo sotto il silenzio de’ secreti orrori sopian gli affanni e raddolciano i cori. (Gerusalemme liberata 2.96)28 [It was night, at that moment when the winds and the waves are deep in slumber, and the world seemed silenced. The weary creatures, both those to whom the wave-washed sea or the depths of the watery lakes give shelter, and those who lie hidden in den or fold, and the colorful birds, under the silence of the secret shades, in profound oblivion soothed their hearts and allayed their anxieties.] The Aeneid passage on which Tasso’s stanza is based sets up an extreme contrast between the picture it paints of all the world’s escape to rest and peace, on the one hand, and, on the other, unhappy Dido’s restless burning for Aeneas. at non infelix animi Phoenissa, neque umquam solvitur in somnos oculisve aut pectore noctem accipit: ingeminant curae rursusque resurgens saevit amor magnoque irarum ›uctuat aestu.

(4.529–32)

[But not so the mind of the unhappy Phoenician queen, which never dissolves in sleep or receives the night into her eyes or heart: her cares redouble and her surging love rages again, and she is borne by a violent tide of passion.] In Gerusalemme liberata, the ‹rst stanza’s description of rest and peace also sets up a contrasting image of restlessness, but now it is the Christian army’s zeal to reach the walls of Jerusalem that robs the mind of sleep. Ma né ’l campo fedel, né ’l franco duca si discioglie nel sonno, o almen s’accheta, tanta in lor cupidigia è che riluca omai nel ciel l’alba aspettata e lieta, perché il camin lor mostri, e li conduca a la città ch’al gran passaggio è mèta. Mirano ad or ad or se raggio alcuno spunti, o si schiari de la notte il bruno.

(2.97)

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[But neither the camp of the faithful nor the Frankish chieftain is dissolved in sleep, or even rests; such is their desire that at last the cheerful and welcome light of dawn should shine in the sky so that it can show them their road and guide them to the city that is the goal of the great crossing. Now and again they look to see if any ray be broken forth or if the dark of night be growing lighter.] One would think by this allusion that Tasso intends for us to measure the Christian army’s noble desire to capture Jerusalem against Dido’s utter surrender to an ignoble love. But to accept that positive reading of these stanzas is to ignore the possibility that the allusion works instead to associate the soldiers’ desire with Dido’s, speci‹cally with the allegorized Dido’s—such that their “cupidigia,” to use Tasso’s word, is in some way to be recognized as equivalent to hers rather than different.29 We should sense that it is as potentially troubling as it is praiseworthy that the army waits anxiously for the sunlight to guide them “to the city that is the goal of the great crossing,” for this characterization of their goal can only be true in the most literal sense that Jerusalem is the destination of their long “crossing” from Europe to the Middle East. The phrase “gran passaggio” clearly encourages us not to take the sense so plainly but to think of the “great crossing” to “la città” of God that is truly the pilgrim’s “mèta,” as opposed to Jerusalem or any other earthly city. Is it possible that the soldiers have confused the two cities—that they have mistaken their ultimate goal as Jerusalem merely delivered from pagan rule, or Jerusalem as “civic felicity” solely, as opposed to the City of God for which Jerusalem should be a reminder? If so, then Landino and Fabrini have shown us that the soldiers are really on the road to Carthage and that their devotion to the active life is bound eventually to put them on the downward path of Dido, who, as we know, was “at the beginning . . . temperate in all things,” but “with love surging within her,” she “slipped from temperance into continence,” so that later, “conquered by love,” she was “rendered so incontinent that in the end she fell into the greatest intemperance” (Landino 1980, 183). In fact, the Christian soldiers do prove to represent a mind confused, and their slide downward occurs immediately, in the cantos following. In canto 3, in the very ‹rst battle between the Christian and pagan armies, Tancredi encounters Clorinda—an African, it happens—whose beauty he has glimpsed before and has burned for ever since as her “secret lover” (occulto amante [3.25.2]).30 She gets the better of him in their combat because he will not return her blows or even adequately defend himself, since he counts himself already “a prisoner of hers, already defenseless and suppliant and

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< trembling” (un prigion suo fère / gìa inerme, e supplichevole e tremente [3.25.3–4]). His desperate plea to her at this point supplies the poem’s second image of a sacri‹ce for earthly love and a will divided from God. I patti sian, dicea, poi che tu pace meco non vuoi, che tu mi tragga il core. Il mio cor, non più mio, s’a te dispiace ch’egli più viva, volontario more: è tuo gran tempo, e tempo è ben che trarlo omai tu debbia, e non debb’io vietarlo. Ecco io chino le braccia, e t’appresento senza difesa il petto: or ché no ’l ‹edi?

(3.27.3–28.2)

[Let the terms be (he said) since you do not want peace with me, that you tear out my heart: my heart, no longer mine, is willing to die if it is displeasing to you that it live on. It has long been yours, and now it is truly time that you should take it, and I ought not to refuse it. See, I lower my arms and present to you my breast without defense; now why do you not strike it?] Tancredi has long forgotten the goal of this crusade, as will the soldiers who fall for Armida in the next canto and who abandon the camp to be her protecting knights and paramours in canto 5—and as will Rinaldo, who also leaves the camp in canto 5 after a quarrel that puts him in a “great wrath,” but who eventually succumbs likewise to Armida’s charms. The chaste Scipio, we might remember at this point, having successfully reined in the passions of the errant Massinissa, encircled Carthage with his forces and was able to defeat Hannibal quickly. In Gerusalemme liberata, the spiritual weakness of Tancredi and Rinaldo means that Goffredo is handicapped, in comparison to Scipio, by a degree of two-thirds. Da quel giro del campo è contenuto de la cittade il terzo, o poco meno, che d’ogn’intorno non avria potuto (cotanto ella volgea) cingerla a pieno.

(3.65.1–4)

[A third of the city, or little less, is compassed by the circle of the encampment; for he could not fully encircle it all round, so far it spread out.]

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At the urging of devils in hell, the sorcerer Idraote sends his niece, the “lovely Armida,” to divert the Christian soldiers from their goal. In the terms of Tasso’s “Allegory of the Poem,” however, we can say that she has been summoned up by the soldiers themselves, who represent the confused faculties of the soul and intellect that are only too eager to ‹nd and devote themselves to an earthly idol. Tasso illustrates this condition by way of another variation on the image of the “burning lover” and another allusion to the Aeneid. When Eustazio, younger brother to Goffredo, sees Armida entering the camp, the narrator comments, “Like the moth to the ›ame he turned himself to the splendor of her divine beauty” (Come al lume farfalla, ei si rivolse / a lo splendor de la beltà divina [4.34.1–2]), and true enough, it is his fatal desire to obtain this beauty’s love that leads him to mimic Aeneas’s lines, in Aeneid 1, on meeting his mother, the goddess of love, in disguise. Donna, se pur tal nome a te conviensi, ché non somigli tu cosa terrena, né v’è ‹glia d’Adamo in cui dispensi cotanto il Ciel di sua luce serena, che da te si ricerca? ed onde viensi? qual tua ventura o nostra or qui ti mena? Fa’ che sappia chi sei, fa’ ch’io non erri ne l’onorarti; e s’è ragion, m’atteri. (Gerusalemme liberata 4.35)31 [Lady, if indeed such name be‹ts you—for you resemble no terrestrial creature, nor is there any daughter of Adam on whom Heaven sheds so much of its light serene—what are you seeking? and whence do you come? what fate of yours, or ours, now leads you here? Let me know who you are; let me make no mistake in honoring you; and, if there is reason, kneel down.] Eustazio, eager for the pleasures of the vulgar Venus, makes an idol of Armida, and with many others he volunteers to leave Jerusalem to avenge the wrongs that she feigns to have suffered in her distant country. Goffredo instead imitates Aeneas (as well as Augustine) in the maturer stages of his spiritual development, by remaining ‹rm in his purpose and withholding his tears for Armida. He denies her request to divert his forces, and when, like Dido’s, “her weeping poured forth unchecked, as an anger mingled with grief is wont to do” (Il pianto si spargea senza ritegno, / com’ira suol produrlo a dolor mista [4.74.5–6]), Goffredo is constant. Eustazio ‹ercely

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< objects: “Your mind,” he tells Goffredo, “is too tenacious of its ‹rst intention if now it does not yield itself somewhat pliable to what the common will desires and requests” (troppo tenace / del suo primo proposto è la tua mente, / s’al consenso comun, che brama e prega, / arrendevole alquanto or non si piega [4.78.5–8]). Eustazio is youth, as yet disinclined to admire the wisdom and strength of his elder brother, whose “mind remains unmoved” as “the tears ›ow in vain.” As Petrarch vainly attempted in the Secretum in the case of Laura, Eustazio gestures toward a claim of mediatrix status for Armida, when he protests to Goffredo, “surely the man who protects the innocent virgin is not removing himself from the service of God” (ch’al servigio di Dio già non si toglie / l’uom ch’innocente vergine difende [4.80.1–2]), while Goffredo exempli‹es the clear-thinking and steadfast mind of pious Aeneas. In van cerca invaghirlo, e con mortali dolcezze attrarlo a l’amorosa vita, ché qual saturo augel, che non si cali ove il cibo mostrando altri l’invita, tal ei sazio del mondo i piacer frali sprezza, e se ’n poggia al Ciel per via romita, e quante insidie al suo bel volo tende l’in‹do amor, tutte fallaci rende.

(5.62)

[In vain she tries to arouse desire in him, and draw him with ›eshly sweets to the amorous life, for like the well-fed bird that does not descend where someone, showing him food, is calling him down, so he, satiated with this world, despises its frail pleasures; and mounts to Heaven by the solitary way and whatsoever nets false Love spreads forth in the path of his noble ›ight he renders wholly useless.] Gerusalemme liberata’s main dramatic narratives are the tales of Tancredi’s and Rinaldo’s eager self-entrapment in just such “nets of false Love” and their eventual extrication, which represents the Christian army’s and Christian Everyman’s attainment of Goffredo’s “satiat[ion] with this world” and mind that “mounts to Heaven.” After being seriously injured in combat in canto 6, Tancredi is nursed by Erminia, who has stolen into his tent wearing Clorinda’s armor; and when he sees her, he follows, losing her trail but taking that which he had already committed himself to, the trail that leads him, in canto 7, “to the fatal country of Armida” (al paese fatal d’Armida [7.32.2]). He there meets Rambaldo, a knight formerly in Gof-

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fredo’s service, who has abandoned his faith and now ‹ghts on the side of the pagans. Tancredi calls him a “damned traitor” (empio fellone [7.34.2]) and declares himself “Tancredi that always buckled on the sword for Christ” (quel Tancredi son io che ’l ferro cinse / per Cristo sempre, e fui di lui campione [7.34.3–4]). The force of this claim and of his next one—that his hand “is the chosen vessel of the wrath of Heaven to wreak its vengeance” (ché da l’ira del Ciel ministra eletta / è questa destra a far in te vendetta [7.34.7–8])—is compromised by our recollection of the ‹nal lines of canto 4, which Tancredi unknowingly echoes. Qual meraviglia or ‹a s’il fero Achille d’Amor fu preda, ed Ercole e Teseo, s’ancor chi per Giesù la spada cinge l’empio ne’ lacci suoi talora stringe?

(4.96.5–8)

[Now what kind of marvel will it be if ‹erce Achilles was the prey of Love, and Hercules and Theseus, if even him who buckles on the sword of Christ the impious fellow catches in his toils?] Tancredi is an impius Aeneas, in other words, and so, in his ‹ght with Rambaldo, “Scorn, Shame, Conscience, Love—all these together are eating at his heart” (e gli rimorde insieme il core / sdegno, vergogna, conscienza, amore [7.40.7–8]). Rambaldo ›ees from Tancredi but leads him into a trap, an underground dungeon that represents a den of error generally, if not a Carthaginian cave more precisely; and it is a trap of Tancredi’s own making. His words of lament con‹rm that he has consigned himself to this place cut off from the sun. Leve perdita ‹a perdere il sole, ma di più vago sol più dolce vista, misero! i’ perdo, e non so già se mai in loco tornerò che l’alma trista si rassereni a gli amorosi rai.

(7.48.8–49.4)

[Light loss will it be to lose the sun; but wretch! I am losing the sweeter sight of a lovelier sun, and I know not if I shall ever return to a place where my unhappy soul can recover its good cheer in her amorous rays.]

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< The feature of the Tancredi plot that most interestingly marks him as a lost Petrarchan lover, however, is the continuation of his state of sinful desire past Clorinda’s death, mimicking the Canzoniere’s division into two sections that move from plaints of frustrated desire for Laura in vita to idolizing remembrances of her in morte. After Tancredi’s rescue from his dungeon cell, he meets Clorinda again in battle, but this time, not recognizing her in the borrowed armor that she wears, he slays her. With Clorinda’s dying breaths, she feels a “spirit of faith, of charity, of hope: a grace that God now sheds upon her” (spirto di fé, di carità, di speme: / virtù ch’or Dio le infonde [12.65.6–7]), and she is converted to the Christian faith of her parents: for “if she has been a rebel in her life, He wants her now in death His handmaiden” (e se rubella / in vita fu, la vuole in morte ancella [12.65.7–8]; my emphasis).32 She asks Tancredi to baptize her, and he agrees, recognizing her (to his horror) as he removes her helmet. The irony is that while “repressing his grief” and “giving her life with water whom with the sword he killed” (premendo il suo affanno a dar si volse / vita con l’acqua a chi co ’l ferro uccise [12.68.3–4]), Tancredi remains oblivious to the grievous condition of his own soul, which remains in darkness despite his physical escape from Armida’s prison. It is at this point that Peter the Hermit warns Tancredi of his danger, imitating Mercury’s descent from the heavens to urge Aeneas to rededicate himself to his original mission by ›eeing from Carthage to Italy. O Tancredi, Tancredi, o da te stesso troppo diverso e da i princìpi tuoi, chi sì t’assorda? e qual nuvol sì spesso di cecità fa che veder non puoi? Questa sciagura tua del Cielo è un messo; non vedi lui? non odi i detti suoi? che ti sgrida, e richiama a la smarrita strada che pria segnasti e te l’addita?

(12.86)

[O Tancredi, Tancredi, O too far wide of yourself and your beginnings, who is making you so deaf? and what cloud of blindness so thick is causing it that you cannot see? This your misfortune is a messenger from Heaven: do you not see him? do you not hear his words, how he is chastening you, and calling you back to the forgotten path that you trod before, and pointing it out to you?]

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Just afterward, Clorinda herself visits Tancredi in a dream and delivers the same warning, telling him: “Here in beatitude I enjoy my life of adoration, and here I trust that a place may be prepared for you also” (Quivi io beata amando godo, e quivi / spero che per te loco anco s’appresti [12.92.5–6], if only, she continues, “you do not begrudge yourself to Heaven, and lose your way with the dreaming of the senses” (tu medesmo non t’invidii il Cielo / e non travii co ’l vaneggiar de’ sensi [12.93.1–2]). But since neither Tancredi nor any of the other Christian warriors can recover from their error until Rinaldo has been restored to spiritual health and to their ranks, he remains trans‹xed by the poison of Venus. He is not a Christian soldier ‹ghting for the Jerusalem that would signify bending toward heaven but is instead a resident of Carthage, as his experience in the enchanted wood illustrates. In canto 13, the sorcerer Ismeno infests the nearby forest with demonic images that prevent Goffredo’s men from gathering the materials they need to build siege weapons against Jerusalem’s pagan defenders. Yet as Michael Murrin points out, this “wood of fear exists properly not for the martial hero but for the victims of love” (1980, 114).33 Tancredi, though still “pale and languid in appearance” (in volto sia languido e smorto [13.32.3]) after Clorinda’s burial, determines that he will try his courage against the apparitions of the wood, and upon arriving at its edge, he sees rise up before him “a City of Flame” (la città del foco [13.33.8]), whose allegorical import we readily recognize. Cresce il gran foco, e ’n forma d’alte mura stende le ‹amme torbide e fumanti; e ne cinge quel bosco, e l’assecura ch’altri gli arbori suoi non tronchi e schianti. Le maggiori sue ‹amme hanno ‹gura di castelli superbi e torreggianti . . .

(13.27.1–6)

[The great ‹re grows, and stretches its turbid and smoking ›ames in the shape of towering walls, and girdles round with them that grove and secures it against anyone’s hewing or felling its trees. Its tallest ›ames have the shape of castles proud and turreted . . . ] Tasso rei‹es for Tancredi and the Christian army Augustine’s metaphor of Carthage as “a frying pan of shameful loves” that “roared round [him] on every side,” combining it with the Dantean “Wood of Error” that leads the

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< soul to “the Inferno.” Therefore, when Tancredi, sti›ing his fear and leaping through the ›ames, ‹nds that “under his armor he did not at all feel heat or glare” (Né sotto l’arme già sentir gli parve / caldo o fervor [13.36.1–2]), we understand not that he has won the battle by overcoming the ›ames but, rather, that his soul continues to burn within him, though he will not acknowledge it. He pushes farther into the wood, coming to a towering cypress that stands in the center of a clearing and is inscribed with a plea not to disturb this site of “souls that are now deprived of light” (l’alma omai di luce prive [13.39.7]). Here Tancredi relives Aeneas’s discovery of the spirit of Polydorus trapped in a Thracian bush (Aeneid 3), as well as Dante’s vision of the forest of souls in the realm of the suicides (Inferno 13). Tancredi strikes the tree, which bleeds and speaks to him in the voice of Clorinda, telling him that these trees lodge not only her soul “but every other too, pagan or Frank, that left his limbs at the base of the lofty walls” of Jerusalem (ma ciascun altro ancor, franco o pagano, / che lassi i membri a piè de l’alte mura [13.43.3–4]). This statement presents Tancredi with a test of his faith that he fails, for in contrast to Aeneas, who rightly obeys the urging of Polydorus to “spare the pollution of [his] pious hands” (parce pias scelerare manus [3.42]), Tancredi should perceive that the pious act in this situation is rather to continue his felling of the tree, just as the pious act in hell—on the part of the Harpies or of Dante the pilgrim passing through—is to snap the branches of the suicides and so contribute to their just suffering.34 He should reject the possibility that Christian souls could go anywhere but as his Christian faith teaches. But instead, “the intimidated lover” (il timido amante [13.44.7]) doubts God’s grace, doubts Christ’s sacri‹ce on another “tree,” and doubts Clorinda’s baptism. Trans‹xed by confusion and fear, his heart is so “overcome with various passions” that it “congeals and quakes” (il cor gli è in molo tal conquiso / da vari affetti che s’agghiaccia e trema [13.45.1–2]), an image of dumbfounded intellect that represents Tancredi’s spiritual suicide—or as Augustine puts it in a phrase from the Confessions cited previously, “by being suspended I was the worse killed” (6.4.6). Finally, because Tancredi represents one of the faculties of a soul ‹gured by the Christian army generally, his failure infects the army generally—in the form of a drought that follows Tancredi’s return to camp and admission of defeat. The soldiers’ suffering is one more extension of Tancredi’s burning, its description recalling the “hidden ›ames” that course through Dido’s veins:

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dal calore aduste giacciono a se medesme inutil peso; e vive ne le vene occulto foco che pascendo le strugge a poco a poco.

(13.61.5–8)

[parched by the heat, they lie a useless weight to their own selves; and in their veins there lives a hidden ‹re that feeding on them destroys them bit by bit.] Goffredo’s prayer, in 13.73, brings temporary relief from physical suffering in the form of rain, but the spiritual aid that the rainstorm also symbolizes is only provisional, in part perhaps because Goffredo’s well-known allusion to Vergil’s “Messianic” Fourth Eclogue must await the ful‹llment of the poem’s allegory to justify such a problematic vehicle for prayer. It is a rainstorm, we might say, that counters the one that drove Aeneas and Dido into the cave together, an antidote to their and Tancredi’s ignoble love—though as Goffredo learns in his Scipionic dream at the beginning of the next canto, the victory that will be fully recuperative can only be won with the return of Rinaldo from Armida’s castle.35 Because, in the scheme of the poem’s allegory, Rinaldo’s recovery has so sweeping and general an import, the ‹gure who represents what he must recover from—Armida—is likewise sweeping and general. She is, in Luisa Del Giudice’s analysis, a virgo ‹ngens in all “its many facets,” an “evil sorceress, seductive Eve, blushing ‘verginella,’ goddess Venus, ‹erce warriorqueen, regal court dame, passionate Dido, humble and pious handmaiden,” all rolled into one; and to that list can be added the names of Circe, Helen, Cleopatra, and Sophonisba. In all her many manifestations taken together, Armida represents the mind’s confusion, the will divided from itself, while each of her facets singly represents an idol that each errant soldier makes of her.36 More precisely still, Armida symbolizes love of self over love of God, for the willful attachment to “a life of pleasure” or “the active life” in preference to one devoted to contemplating truth and heaven is fundamentally a narcissistic and fatal pride, placing faith in the illusion of one’s own judgment and powers in this life rather than in God’s plan for eternal life in heaven. Just as we have described Petrarch of the Canzoniere imitating the phoenix in a weak bid to claim Laura as mediatrix and, as it were, to avoid John Freccero’s charge that he is a “narcissistic lover” who “‹nds spiritual death” in Laura’s eyes (1975, 39), Rinaldo is reported “avidly

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< feeding” on Armida “his ravenous gaze” but “consumed and destroyed” by that which he feeds on (i famelici sguardi avidamente / in lei pascendo si consuma e strugge [16.19.1–2]). “Their love,” as Andrew Fichter describes it, “is cupidity by the Augustinian de‹nition, passion moving within the sphere of the self rather than toward God” (1982, 134).37 This is the same cupidity, the same culpa, that the allegorized Aeneas must overcome in order to renounce the earthly pleasures of Carthage and resume his journey to Italy; it is the same cupidity for which Augustine, in the Secretum, faults Petrarch, both in his idolizing Laura and in making literary fame his idol. In this penultimate stage of our analysis of Gerusalemme liberata, we will see that Tasso models Rinaldo’s recovery and rededication to his original purpose on Aeneas’s departure from Carthage, but again—because Tasso imitates a Christian crusade—we will also recognize that he employs Vergil’s material in a way that makes the allegorical meaning of Aeneas’s rejection of Dido explicit. When Rinaldo, in his dissipated condition in Armida’s castle, is shown his re›ection in a mirror and sees himself for what he has become (16.29–30), he rouses himself to an awareness of his error and prepares to return to the Christian camp. Armida tries to dissuade him with tears and scolding words, but like Aeneas after Mercury’s warning, Rinaldo sti›es his emotions and is ‹rm of purpose:38 resiste e vince; e in lui trova impedita Amor l’entrata, il lagrimar l’uscita. Non entra Amor a rinovar nel seno, che ragion congelò, la ‹amma antica; v’entra pietate in quella vece almeno, pur compagna d’Amor, benché pudica e lui commove in guisa tal ch’a freno può ritener le lagrime a fatica. Pur quel tenero affetto entro restringe, e quanto può gli atti compone e in‹nge.

(16.51.7–52.8)

[he struggles and overcomes; Love ‹nds the entrance closed, and tears the exit. Love does not enter to kindle the old ›ame anew in his breast, which reason hardened: pity at least, in place of that, ‹nds entrance there— pity, companion of Love, though chaste; and moves him in such fashion that he can scarcely hold his tears in check. Yet he represses that

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tender affection within him, and as far as he can composes his looks, and pretends.] What distinguishes Rinaldo’s manner of exit from Aeneas’s and marks the superiority of his Christian faith is his attempt to persuade the queen of Carthage to renounce her city. “Armida,” he avows to her, “I am much concerned for you; would that I were able, as I could wish, to free your burning soul of its heat, so ill-conceived” (Armida, assai mi pesa / di te; sì potess’io, come il farei, / del mal concetto ardor l’anima accesa / sgombrarti [16.53.1–4]). In contrast to Aeneas, in other words, who has yet to grasp fully the rewards that await him in an allegorical Italy—whose “mind remains unmoved” by Dido’s heartfelt pleas and who disavows his bond to her, on the one hand, but who, on the other hand, protests, “I do not follow Italy of my free will” (Italiam non sponte sequor [4.361])—it is Rinaldo’s will that Armida follow him on the path that he knows leads to virtue and heaven. He promises, “I shall be your knight, as far as the war with Asia permits, and fealty with honor” (sarò tuo cavalier quanto concede / la guerra d’Asia e con l’onor la fede [16.54.7–8]), which depends upon her concession to his plea “Ah! let there be an end here and now to our sinning” (Deh! che del fallir nostro or qui sia il ‹ne [16.55.1]). The con‹rmation that Rinaldo is done with sinning comes in his easy success in the enchanted wood, where the trees give birth to wanton nymphs (18.6) and the image of Armida appears to re-create the scene of her “fatal country” (18.30), but resolutely “the knight never misses a stroke, nor stays a moment for all that turbulence” (Ma pur mai colpo il cavalier non erra, / né per tanto furor punto s’arresta [18.37.5–6]). The pun on colpo, “stroke” or “blow,” and colpa, “fault,” emphasizes that he does not err (non erra) as either woodcutter or spiritual pilgrim in this moment. “He cuts down the walnut,” Tasso tells us: “it is a walnut, and it seems a myrtle” (tronca la noce: è noce, e mirto parve [18.37.7]), because as the tree of Venus (based on her earliest name, Murcia or Myrtea, “goddess of myrtles”), the myrtle that is really a walnut represents the Venus of earthly love whose false promises of happiness Rinaldo has rejected.39 And so, “here ended the enchantment, the phantoms vanished” (Qui l’incanto fornì, sparìr le larve [18.37.8]). But Rinaldo’s and Tasso’s purposes are not ‹nally ful‹lled as long as Armida continues in error. In the poem’s last canto, Rinaldo encounters Armida on the plains of battle, where she aims either to win him back or have him killed. He captures her, and imagining herself a war prize, Armida

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< repeats the speech of Sophonisba that she would prefer death to being paraded in triumph (20.132–33). Her aim, of course, is to achieve the impression that this speech and the spectacle of forlorn beauty had earlier made on Massinissa, but Rinaldo has achieved Scipio’s control over his passions, and his faith prevents him from considering her request (he may or may not suspect her sincerity). Instead, his reply takes up again his plea for her conversion, the tears and sighs accompanying his suit being a devout parody of the tormented lover’s. Mira ne gli occhi miei, s’al dir non vuoi fede prestar, de la mia fede il zelo. Nel soglio, ove regnàr gli avoli tuoi, riporti giuro; ed oh piacesse al Cielo ch’a la tua mente alcun de’ raggi suoi del paganesmo dissolvesse il velo, com’io farei che ’n Oriente alcuna non t’agguagliasse di regal fortuna. Sì parla e prega, e i preghi bagna e scalda or di lagrime rare, or di sospiri; onde sì come suol nevosa falda dov’arda il sole o tepid’aura spiri, così l’ira che ’n lei parea sì salda solvesi e restan sol gli altri desiri.

(20.135.1–136.6)

[“Behold in my eyes the sincerity of my faith, if you do not wish to trust my words. I swear to restore you to the royal throne where your forefathers reigned: and oh if it should please Heaven that some one of its rays should dissolve the veil of paganism from your mind, how would I see to it that nobody in the Orient should equal you for royal fortune!” So he speaks, and prays; and bathes and warms his prayers now with his scanty tears, now with his sighs; so that, even as the ›akes of snow are wont, where the sun gives heat or the warming breeze is breathing, so is dissolved the wrath that seemed in her so ‹rm, and only her other passions are left behind.] In the most troubling couplet of the poem (is she not just buying time or merely enticed by the promises of peerless fortune?), Armida suddenly acquiesces.

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Ecco l’ancilla tua; d’essa a tuo senno dispon, gli disse, e le ‹a legge il cenno.

(20.136.7–8)

[Behold your handmaid; dispose of her at your discretion (she said), and your command shall be her law.] Understanding that “Armida’s conversion is Tasso’s attempt to create a kind of Magdalen, to bring the object of sensuality into some kind of harmony with the demands of the spirit,” Giamatti describes many readers’ reaction in claiming that “we wince” at “the echo of the words of Mary to Gabriel in Luke 1:38 (‘Ecce ancilla Domini, ‹at mihi secundum verbum tuum’ in the Vulgate)” because it “is too forced”: “We are ‹nally unconvinced of Armida’s redemption” (1966, 209–10).40 Yet if Armida’s conversion seems strained, it only re›ects the strain of Gerusalemme liberata overall in its effort to claim, for itself and for its author, a successful transformation of classical epic for legitimate Christian purposes and motives. Indeed, that is the ‹nal dimension of the poem’s allegory, for the one is a ‹gure for the other. Armida bends to Rinaldo’s words, offering to be ruled by him as his ancilla, which not only alludes to Mary as the “handmaiden of God” when she volunteers to Gabriel, “Let it be to me according to your word,” but also echoes the description of Clorinda’s conversion and baptism by Tancredi, as we saw earlier in the Gerusalemme liberata, when we were told that God “wants her now in death His handmaiden” (la vuole in morte ancella [12.65.8]). These are images of spiritual guidance and healing that reverse the conventional role of the mediatrix, with Christian warriors being moved by the Spirit to seek salvation for the souls of errant women. They are ‹gures, too, of the spiritual guidance and healing that Gerusalemme liberata would offer its readers.

the good physician Tasso signals his loftier meaning and purpose through the character of Erotimo the physician, who is modeled on Iapige in the Aeneid (12.391ff.), but who also shares some of the functions of Ennius in Petrarch’s Africa and, I am sure, is meant to invoke the memory and authority of Bishop Marco Girolamo Vida, whose Christiad is the subject of chapter 4 in the present study. In canto 11, “pio Goffredo” is injured by Clorinda’s arrow, and “old Erotimo”—who was, like Vida, “born on the banks of the Po”—“busies himself about his healing: he who knew thoroughly every virtue, every use

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< of herbs and sovereign waters” (già l’antico Eròtimo, che nacque / in riva al Po, s’adopra in sua salute, / il qual de l’erbe e de le nobil acque / ben conosceva ogni uso, ogni virtute [11.70.1–4]). As in the case of Iapige, though, medicine is not Erotimo’s only art: caro a le Muse ancor, ma si compiacque ne la gloria minor de l’arti mute; sol curò tòrre a morte i corpi frali, e potea far i nomi anco immortali.

(11.70.5–8)41

[Dear he was to the Muses too, but contented himself with the lesser glory of the silent arts. His care was only to snatch from death frail bodies, and yet he had skill to make their names immortal.] The “silent art” of medicine that Erotimo chooses to practice, says Tasso, is of “lesser glory” than his other “skill,” to make men’s “names immortal” in poetry. Potentially one could take this judgment as an ironic reference to that which the world foolishly values as a “higher glory” but which, as Augustine warns Petrarch, threatens to sicken the soul, as opposed to the “lesser glory” of a physician, which is really more useful because it aids the bodies of his patients and, as the means of his good works, testi‹es to his soul’s good health. But the statement of contrast in the ‹nal couplet of the passage, between the physician who “snatch[es] death from frail bodies” and the poet who “make[s] their names immortal,” also alludes to the soul that enjoys an eternal life in heaven after having been snatched from its frail body in this life, and it invites us to remember the medicinal metaphor that Tasso had employed in his invocation to the “Heavenly Muse” to justify his verses at the beginning of the poem. The high aim of the good physicianpoet—Vida or Tasso—is to aid the souls of his reader-patients. It may even be hoped that Tasso’s words, like Rinaldo’s, will have an ef‹cacy that goes beyond their speaker’s mortal skill, just as Erotimo recognizes that a power greater than his medicinal arts is curing the wounded Goffredo. L’arte maestra te non risana o la mortal mia destra, maggior virtù ti salva; un angiol, credo, medico per te fanto, è sceso in terra,

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ché di celeste mano i segni vedo.

(11.74.7–75.3)42

[Not my mortal hand, nor learned science is curing you; a greater virtue redeems you: an angel, I do believe, become a physician for you, has descended to earth, for I see the tokens of a heavenly hand.] If the same may be claimed of Tasso’s epic, that it serves as vehicle of the “highest glory” that heals and gives immortal life, then the epic poet may ultimately claim to have defended his vocation to Augustine. And thus, when Satan—observing events on earth—asks his companions in Tartarus, “do you not see even now how He is trying to call back all the peoples to His religion?” (non vedete omai com’egli tenti / tutte al suo culto richiamar le genti? [4.12.7–8]), we understand that his words refer doubly to Goffredo’s march to deliver Jerusalem and to Tasso’s delivery of Gerusalemme liberata.

chapter four

The Epic Imitation of Christ Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

=< an alter native via to milton With this chapter, I move from unveiling the “hidden truths” of the allegorical epics to conducting rhetorical analyses of the biblical epics—the Christiads by Marco Girolamo Vida and Alexander Ross and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Despite the obvious “allegorical elements” in these poems, such as the personi‹cations of Sin and Death in Milton’s epic, and despite occasional claims that “Paradise Lost may rightly be considered as an allegorical poem and an allegorical epic” (Treip 1994, xiv), the biblical basis of these poems’ narratives distinguishes them in fundamental ways from the works thus far treated in this study. The hero of a Christiad, for example, cannot represent Everyman on pilgrimage from a life of concupiscence to a life of contemplation, because he is the Son of God (made ›esh, as goes the creed, but never made prisoner to ›eshly pleasures). These poems simply work differently, in other words, but while our understanding of “how Milton works” is grounded in a vast body of scholarship that continues to be enriched, the Christiads of Vida and Ross have received minimal attention. In this chapter and the next, therefore, I propose to explain how Vida and Ross work not allegorically but (as I put it in the introduction) rhetorically, meaning suasively, seductively. Yet the emphasis of these chapters is on 108

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continuities as much as on differences, on the directly productive relationship between the allegorical epic and its biblical counterpart as well as on the latter’s unique relationship to its biblical and Vergilian source-texts and its audience. By apprehending the Christiads’ alternative via to the same destinations as those targeted by the allegorized Aeneid and by the epics of Petrarch and Tasso, we recognize their place in the tradition of Augustinian epic and are privileged to new insights into the nature of their example for Milton.1 The relative neglect of Vida’s Christiad today stands in complete contrast to the sixteenth century’s enthusiasm. Appearing on the heels of a number of short biblical poems in epic meter, the most familiar being Macario Muzio’s De triumpho Christi (1499) and the De partu Virginis by Jacopo Sannazaro (1527), Vida’s Christiad, in six books, was greeted as something like the ful‹llment of humanism’s dream. Originally commissioned to write an epic Christiad by Pope Leo X (d. 1521), Vida was ready by 1530 to unveil portions of it in public readings before audiences that included Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Pope Clement VII. Vida was promoted to bishop of Alba in 1532, the year the manuscript was completed and presented to the Holy See. Three years later, it was printed in Cremona, Vida’s hometown by the Po, and afterward, in the sixteenth century alone, it went through three dozen more editions, separately and in copies of Vida’s collected works that were published in Cremona, Venice, Lyon, Basel, Antwerp, and elsewhere, including translations into Spanish and Italian and a massive commentary edition by Bartolomeo Botta (Pavia, 1569), the last of which con‹rmed, at least visually, the Christiad’s status as a modern classic.2 There is evidence, too, that the poem was admired by Tasso and Milton. Besides the fact that the former’s physician-poet character Erotimo shares with Vida a birthplace on the river Po, Giulio Guastavini’s 1590 list of Gerusalemme liberata’s sources identi‹es ten places where Tasso drew on the Christiad for details of Satan’s council in hell, which in turn lies behind Milton’s portrayal of the same scene in his epic. There is also Milton’s well-known praise for Vida in his early poem “The Passion”: among the poets who have sung the “Godlike acts” and “former sufferings” of Christ, he writes, “Loud o’er the rest Cremona’s Trump doth sound” (lines 24–26).3 Such evidence says very little, however, about the qualities that one might hope to ‹nd in Vida’s epic that would merit our praises or, more to our purpose, inspire us to investigate whether the Christiad’s impact on Tasso and Milton was any greater than its having set an example of putting

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< imaginative renderings of biblical material into epic verse. Likewise, most modern histories of Renaissance epic and studies of Milton mention Vida’s poem only in passing, including it among other minor works that supplied descriptive details for the epics that we now value instead of the Christiad.4 Fortunately, since the publication of Mario Di Cesare’s foundational study of the poem in 1964, a few scholars—most notably Craig Kallendorf and Philip Hardie—have taken interest in the more intriguing problem of de‹ning the Christiad’s biblical-Vergilian poetics. But for important initial insights to the Christiad’s aims and methods, we may refer to the commentary of Vida’s most avid contemporary admirer, Bartolomeo Botta. His assessment of the poem’s achievement directs our attention not only to the special nature of the biblical epic in relation to its allegorical counterparts but to their similar anxieties. In his preface, to begin with, Botta colorfully condemns the standard school curriculum by which schoolboys were learning their Latin from classical authors: “Even if the precepts of art are easily passed down to boys without any discrimination for their salvation,” he says, it is not so easy to provide “explanations of the evils of writers, who like sirens destroy students and teachers under the power of the painted eloquence of a charming panderer.” “By eternal God,” Botta goes on to exclaim—now singling out the ancient playwright who poses the gravest danger to these students and teachers—“what seems to them more ornate, or more eloquent, and in Latin speech more proper (for I shall pass over Ovid, Propertius, Catullus, and other venereous pimps) than the comedy of that cunning African, Terence?”5 The Latin playwright Terence, need it be said, was from Carthage. Botta proceeds to cite examples of the immoral acts committed by Terence’s various comic characters, principally Chaerea in the play Eunuchus, who exchanges clothes with the eunuch in order to gain access to a young slave girl whom he ravishes. Botta declares at the conclusion of this review, “with a thousand such examples (and what entices souls more easily than words!), the entire stage of the poets is crammed,” and he complains: if these worldly tri›es indeed count as learning, they are sterile, sounding of vanity, from which there ring praises of idols and fables about the pagan gods in varied speech and songs. [Today’s readers] are delighted by these demons, but when someone hopes to ‹nd in them something that is true and honest, and tending to a blessed life—he is not able.6

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Now, at last, students have an alternative. Instead of continuing to “have faith in the expert sirens and venereous schoolmasters,” avers Botta, they can learn their Latin from Marco Giralomo Vida, whose “intention is this: to draw Christians back from the reading of poetic ‹ctions, for through the delights of fables the minds of readers are aroused toward the incitement of lust.”7 On the one hand, Botta seems to follow the allegorists in maintaining that Vergil’s “fable” is an exception to this rule because it teaches divine wisdom through its “veiled meaning.” Early in his commentary to book 1, on the phrase “along the narrow path” (angustum per iter) in line 59, Botta summarizes the standard interpretation of Aeneas’s journey as a pilgrimage through stages of intellectual and spiritual development and even relates this to the soul’s ascension to “the realm of Christ.”8 But on the other hand, in his preface, Botta censures Vergil for being as corrupting as other pagan authors, and on that account, he explains, the Church has sponsored Vida’s modern masterpiece. Vergil has always been held in the hands, and because it seemed for the sake of necessity to be allowed in boys, they brought about the sin of passion in themselves. Therefore, lest under the power of the image of erudition . . . boys and men of any age should be drawn down toward the impiety of idols and the pernicious passion of lust, it was mandated by Leo X and Clement VII, supreme ponti‹cates, that whatever the reading of Vergil has preserved for the learning of letters, it should be joined to our divine prophets and conveyed in this most pious work.9 Botta would seem to have in mind, in this passage, the errant St. Augustine of the Confessions, who, as we recall, “was made to learn the wanderings of Aeneas and to weep over the death of Dido because she killed herself for love, while all during those times,” Augustine tells us, “I was a wretch with dry eyes, dying apart from you oh God, my Life” (1.13.20). Now, in contrast, Botta may rejoice on behalf of all Christendom that Vida’s piissimum opus will make no such demands on its vulnerable readers: no schoolboy need be drawn to the earthly attractions of a hero in errore or “drawn down to impious idols and the pernicious passion of lust”; he need not endure the trial of hardening his heart to Dido’s tears or exert himself in cumbersome allegorical interpretations in order to make Aeneas’s pietas consistent with his own. The life of Christ has at last become

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< the stuff of epic poetry: book 1 starts in medias res, with Jesus performing many miracles on his journey to Jerusalem but also prophesying his death before the twelve apostles, while Satan plots in hell to thwart God’s plans for his Son. Book 2 provides an account of the Last Supper, Christ’s capture afterward, and his ‹rst interview with Pilate. In book 3, Joseph and John go to seek mercy from Pilate, who hears their pleas and invites them to recount the whole of Jesus’s life. Joseph tells of his miraculous birth and early childhood, and in book 4, John describes Christ’s baptism and teaching of the Word. Pilate is moved by what he hears and would prefer to set his prisoner free, but he surrenders, in book 5, to the will of the priests and the maddened mob, and Christ’s cruci‹xion follows. The last book celebrates the resurrection and describes the forty days that Christ remained in spirit with the apostles, guiding their teachings and prophesying the universal spread of the Word and dominion of the Church (naming Peter as its head). Botta’s imagined schoolboy thus acquires his Vergilian Latin through the Christiad, having absorbed through Vida’s Vergil-saturated verses much, if not quite all, of “whatever the reading of Vergil has preserved for the learning of letters.” Moreover, in Botta’s histrionic condemnations of classical authors as “sirens” or “venereous pimps” (lenones venereos), he puts his ‹nger on the speci‹c manner in which the Christiad functions as an Augustinian epic, which comes into focus when viewed alongside the Confessions, the allegorized Aeneid, and the allegorical epics. Augustine’s memoir transforms the epic journey of Aeneas into that of a spiritual pilgrim, who overcomes the desires of his ›esh by ›eeing Carthage to devote himself wholly to reaching the City of God. By recounting his travels from concupiscence to conversion, Augustine hopes to inspire his readers to undertake a similar conversion or to strengthen their existing faith in salvation through God’s grace. Subsequently, allegorical interpreters of the Aeneid discover in Vergil’s epic the veiled story of the good man’s progress from a life of pleasure to a life of contemplation, from enslavement by the earthly Venus to empowerment by the divine Venus, which they can claim is consistent with Christian faith and should strengthen the will of Vergil’s modern-day readers to reject the pleasures of this world and meditate on heaven. The Africa and Gerusalemme liberata complete the epic’s conversion by singing of historical martial victories that are also allegorical Christian ‹gures for the soul’s victory over the Carthage of the heart and union with God in his city. With Vida’s Christiad, the epic poem works in another way still, but not just in the obvious and simple sense that its biblical subject matter explic-

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itly reinforces the faith without the added step of allegoresis or that it avoids the possibility of errant readers deriving unwholesome pleasures from— say—Tasso’s titillating description of bathing nymphs at Armida’s castle. Botta urges the Christiad’s adoption for safely teaching Latin to schoolboys, but Vida’s intended audience was surely much wider. He wrote his epic at the behest of the pope, for the greater glory of God, for the edi‹cation and succor of Latin readers young and old, and in defense of the Church against the unleashed forces of the Reformation. His eye, in other words, was on those who already had their Latin as he did, who acquired it in large part by studying Vergil, and whose faith in Christ (and the papacy), if it were wavering, could be forti‹ed by the experience of constantly recognizing, and measuring the moral distance between, Vergilian source and Vidaean appropriation.10 By that process of recognition and measurement, the Christiad achieves its purpose of spurring readers in their pilgrimage from idolatry to piety, from shedding tears for Dido to contemplating Christ’s Passion. The episode of Mary Magdeline early in book 1 of the Christiad introduces this process by ‹rst invoking the image of Dido as burning lover and then, abruptly and emphatically, removing it from the poem’s action. When Mary is ‹rst described (1.305–18), she resembles Dido or Sophonisba in the exotic splendor of her dress and jewels, but Vida tells us that “the reckless love of Venus has spread into her senses” (Sensibus illapsa est Veneris malesuada cupido [1.324]), so that, like the poisoned Dido, she “has become enslaved to her wicked madness” (furriis subiecit iniquis [1.325]).11 Learning that a young man of unusual beauty is a visitor at Simon’s house, she goes to see and seduce him. ast ubi conspicuos deperdita vultus Hausit, et egregiae divinum frontis honorem, Divinosque oculos ardentis pabula amoris, Diriguit, penitusque animo sententia versa est, Atque alias longe concepit pectore ›ammas. Ecce autem subito visae spirantis ab ore Septem adeo circum offusa caligine, et atra Nube exire faces, veluti cum torris obusti Ultima sursum ›amma fugit, fumumque relinquit.

(1.341–49)

[But when the ruined woman had taken in his remarkable face, and the divine grace of his illustrious brow, and the divine eyes that fueled

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< her burning love, it changed course and the purpose deep in her soul altered, and a far different blaze kindled in her breast. Then suddenly, behold—seven tongues of ›ame were seen exhaled from her mouth, and a black cloud drifted round, just as when the last ›ame from a burnt ‹rebrand ›ies upward and releases smoke.] At the moment that Mary Magdeline ‹rst sees Jesus and “takes in” his divine beauty, his eyes that “fueled her burning love” expel it from her. This is in contrast to Dido, who was “amazed” (obstipuit) at the ‹rst sight of Aeneas (Aeneid 1.613) and continues to be “wasted with hidden ‹re” while “his looks and words cling fast within her breast” (caeco carpitur igni . . . haerent in‹xi pectore voltus / verbaque [4.2–5]), until, in the end, she takes her life and her body is consumed by the ›ames of her funeral pyre. In the Christiad, the ›ames of ignoble passion have gone from the poem almost as soon as they were ignited, turned to “seven tongues of ›ame,” presumably symbolizing the four moral and three holy virtues that replace the lust in Mary’s heart. Or as Botta surmises in his commentary on this scene, here the poet “describes the ‹re of lust, by which inner sight is made blind and concupiscence is kindled.” Botta continues: The ‹re of charity causes the contrary of this, for it illuminates the intellect and extinguishes the ›ames of concupiscence. For this reason one immediately ›ees the other, for lust (as Augustine says) is the root of all evils, and the root of all other goods is charity, and both are not able to exist at the same time. Unless the one has been wholly plucked out, the other cannot be planted.12 Yet though the Dido ‹gure “has been wholly plucked out” from the Christiad, her “specter,” to borrow the extremely apt term of John Watkins (1995), continues to haunt the poem. At times, we may simply say that this specter provides a negative contrast to the poem’s divine subject, such as when Joseph recounts that he had called his blessed young bride “felicem” (3.313), in contrast to Dido’s identifying epithet “infelix” (Aeneid 1.749, 4.68, 4.596, 6.456). In translations of the Aeneid, infelix is usually rendered “unhappy” or “unlucky,” but its primary meaning is “unfruitful”—a word that also describes Dido, as she bitterly acknowledges in her lament that she has no “little Aeneas” (parvulus . . . Aeneas [4.328–29]) to console her after the ›ight of pater Aeneas. Mary is happy and fortunate (felix) precisely, miraculously, because she is fruitful (felix). When Joseph twice refers to Mary as “pulcherrima virgo” (Christiad

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3.141, 177), however, echoing Vergil’s two references to “pulcherrima Dido” in the Aeneid (1.496, 4.60), the invitation to mark the contrast between the two female ‹gures and to contemplate the nature of Mary’s beauty is a more complicated one, all the more so given that, in the phrase’s ‹rst appearance, its reminder of Dido is linked with an allusion to Lavinia. As Joseph explains to Pilate, on the day her mother announced that Mary must soon be married (as it was determined by prophets consulted long beforehand), the elders of the town prayed at an altar for a portent that would identify her chosen husband, and Mary wept among them. In medio astabat lachrymans pulcherrima virgo, Flaventis effusa comas, demissaque largo Rorantes oculos ›etu. pudor ora pererrans Cana rosis veluti miscebat lilia rubris. (Christiad 3.177–80) [The most beautiful virgin stood among us weeping, her golden hair hanging loose and her lowered eyes shedding steady tears. A blush straying across her face was like white lilies mingled with red roses.] Compare the passage in Aeneid 12 in which Lavinia reacts to her mother’s protest that her daughter cannot marry the newly arrived Trojan chief but must be given to Turnus. accepit vocem lacrimis Lavinia matris ›agrantis perfusa genas, cui plurimus ignem subiecit rubor et calefacta per ora cucurrit. Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro si quis ebur, aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa alba rosa, talis virgo dabat ore colores.

(12.64–69)

[Lavinia received her mother’s words with tears ›owing down her cheeks, upon which a deep blush was set a‹re and coursed across her burning face. Just as if someone had stained Indian ivory with bloody dye, or as when white lilies are tinted red by intermingled roses, so the virgin displayed in the color of her face.] The meaning of Lavinia’s blush is one of the interesting enigmas of the Aeneid. It has been thought to suggest that Lavinia already has developed a love for Aeneas or to con‹rm her love for Turnus; or it could be the blush

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< of a chaste maiden who has never known love and is embarrassed by her mother’s public talk on the subject of her marriage.13 In contrast to this ambiguity, the meaning of Mary’s blush is prescribed by Lavinia’s role in the Vergilian commentary and in Vegio’s Supplement, where she is both an exemplum of chastity and, in the allegorical interpretation of her marriage to Aeneas, a marker of the good man attaining a life of contemplation and love of God. Mary may be, therefore, “pulcherrima” like Dido, but the reader is expected to reject any temptation—suggested by her beauty or by the image of her “golden hair hanging loose”—to think of her as an appropriate object of desire, let alone one in whom there could be even a hint of ignoble “burning,” and instead to read her as the historical chaste maiden whose pending marriage will be a prelude to Everyman’s salvation through Christ. Botta supplies a biblical interpretation of the Vergilian allusion: Because of the purity of her chastity the Virgin is compared to lilies, just as is also said in the Songs: “As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters” [Song of Songs 2.2]. But [Mary] is compared to roses on account of her love of chastity, for which she was truly the most blessed virgin [beatissima virgo].14 Thus the physical beauty that makes Mary a “pulcherrima virgo” is a ‹gure for the spiritual beauty that makes her a “beatissima virgo,” or alternatively, the word “pulcherrima” here in the Christiad properly means “beatissima,” for Mary is most beautiful to those whose hearts are pure and who view her rightly because she is most blessed.15 Accordingly, the admiration of her earthly beauty has the immediate effect of inspiring the contemplation of heavenly beauty and love of God, while her opposite in Vida’s poem, the seductive counterfeit virgo who inspires only idolatry of the self, is Satan in the semblance of a virgo—as we see him represented in a temple mural, gloating over the ‹rst parents’ fall.16 At victor, factusque potens iam fraudis, ahena Effulget squama, teretique volumine serpens Ter superans stirpem, spirisque ingentibus ambit Tortilis, et motis insultat desuper alis Vergineo irridens deceptos improbus ore.

(1.669–73)

[But the serpent, now victorious and powerful in his fraud, glistens with bronze scales and smooth-rounded curls, and surmounting the

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tree he thrice wraps it with great twisting coils, and by other motions he dances aloft, shamelessly mocking the deceived pair in the guise of a virgin.] The “specter” of Venus likewise involves the Christiad’s readers in this process of recognizing the Vergilian source and measuring the distance of its transfer to its new context. For example, still in book 1 of the poem, Vida describes Christ in these familiar terms: per auras Divinum toto spiravit vertice odorem Luminis aetherei specimen, genitoris imago. Nec secus emicuit roseo pulcherrimus ore . . .

(1.938–41)

[Through the winds a divine fragrance breathed from his head, a glow of ethereal light, the image of his father. Likewise the greatest beauty shone from his roseate face . . .] The language of this passage echoes Vergil’s description of Venus in book 1 of the Aeneid, after she has appeared to Aeneas and directed him to nearby Carthage. Dixit et avertens rosea cervice refulsit, ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem spiravere.

(1.402–4)

[She spoke, and as she turned, her roseate neck gleamed, and from her head breathed the divine fragrance of her ambrosial locks.] Botta points out that Vida’s imagery is “just as acquired from Vergil,” and he observes that in both accounts, “the face scarcely appears mortal, nor does the voice sound human.”17 But beyond noting this surface similarity, the Christiad’s readers might be expected to pursue the moral and spiritual implications of the allusion, which are generated by the original context of Venus’s visitation. For not only has Venus, at this point in the Aeneid, just instructed her son to go to Carthage, she has also told him at length of “widow” Dido’s history, inspiring his admiration and pity for the queen, and we know that, soon after, Venus will send Cupid to “poison” Dido with an uncontrollable desire for Aeneas. Recognizing his departing mother just

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< at this moment, Aeneas calls after her in complaint: “Why, so cruel, do you mock your son so often with false images? Why may not I join my hand to yours and hear and speak true words?” (quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis / ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram / non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces? [1.407–9]). In the terms of the allegory of the two Venuses, the good man has met his mother in the form of the earthly Venus, she who will lead him into shameless love and a life of pleasure, despite the intellect’s longing for the divine Venus who would lead him instead to truth. Our task, as readers of the Christiad, is to perceive the particular way in which Christ is “like Venus,” as opposed to the way he is obviously not “like Venus”: he is like her insofar as he, at last, is the answer to Aeneas’s prayer, guiding the good man away from “false images” to “true words,” to the Word, to himself.

the temptation of pilate My account thus far of the Christiad’s allusive poetics suggests that Vida strives to test the strength of his readers’ faith against the temptations of Vergil’s poetry and the distractions of their own desires, an aim that is consistent with Botta’s emphasis on Vergil’s ‹tness for the classroom and with the allegorists’ scheme of the intellect’s progress toward contemplation of the divine. But I would say the feature of Vida’s epic that most clearly signals such a design is in the structure of its narrative around the central spectacle of Pilate’s “test” in books 3–5. Joseph and John’s tale of the life of Jesus, in other words, does more than ‹ll in details of “the story thus far”; it presents an extended study of a man who is deep in error yet whose sense of justice and conversation with Joseph and John puts him at the very threshold of enlightenment and conversion. Hence the Christiad is as much the story of Pilate as it is of Christ, in the sense that Pilate is the epic pilgrim, the Aeneas (or as he is repeatedly called, the “Romanus”) who comes far but, in the end, fails rather than succeeds, because ultimately he clings to the former de‹nition of Romanus, the unallegorized Vergilian one, instead of the new de‹nition that he is offered. In this way, as Philip Hardie has observed, “the theme of the god unrecognized, the subject of local episodes in the Aeneid, becomes a central theme of the Christiad” (1993a, 306). But above and beyond the construction of a “theme,” the process of Pilate’s temptation is a drama of faulty interpretation, the tragedy of a reader who keeps interpreting rightly until the critical juncture when he concludes wrongly, barring his progress in this life to the intellect’s mature devotion to truth and God and dooming him in the next life to hell.

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The passage of the Christiad describing Pilate’s ‹rst impression of Jesus, when the prisoner is brought before him beaten and in chains, indicates the virtues and failings that de‹ne his moral “starting point” in this drama. Ille autem iuvenis procero in corpore ‹xos Intentusque oculos, intentusque ora tenebat. (Nondum illi dulcis ›os prorsum evanuit aevi.) Insolitam speciem, insolitos miratur honores Oris, et expleri nequit. hunc e stirpe fatetur Aut divum, aut saltem magnorum e sanguine regum, Et secum sortem capti miseratur iniquam, Iamque favet, tacitusque agitat, siqua potis illum Impune eripere, et ruptis exoluere vinclis.

(2.976–84)

[He then ‹xed his eyes intently on the youth’s tall stature, and intently beheld his face. (Not yet had the sweet blossom of his age completely disappeared.) He marveled at his rare beauty, the rare dignity of his face, and he could not look enough. He held him to be either of the race of gods or at least the blood of mighty kings, and privately he pitied the prisoner’s unjust fate, and now felt favorable to him, and silently pondered how he might safely rescue him, and free him unshackled.] Two things here speak well of Pilate as potential “good man” and convert: that he rightly perceives there is something special about Jesus and that he is moved to pity him and to plan his release. Yet the statements of these positive signs also betray the obstacles in his character and beliefs that he would have to overcome. He will have to exchange his pagan belief in plural gods for faith in God, to recognize that Jesus is the Son of the King of Heaven, not merely of “the blood of mighty kings,” and he must also conquer his fear and cowardice, not merely pity Jesus “privately.” In his subsequent expostulations on Jesus’s appearance, Pilate seems almost poised to make that transition. ut se Incessu gerit! ut vultuque et corpore toto est Humana maior species! ut lumina honorum Plena! ut regi‹ci motus! verba inde notavi, Nil mortale sonat. sensi illo in pectore numen. Aut certe Deus ille, aut non mortalibus ortus.

(3.88–93)

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< [How he carries himself! How the splendor in his face and entire form is more than human! How full of grace are his eyes! How kingly is his bearing! When I marked his words, they did not sound mortal. I sensed divinity in that breast. Surely he is either God or not born of mortals.] Pilate never makes the necessary progress, in part because he cannot dispense with that waf›ing construction “either . . . or” (aut . . . aut). He is either of the race of gods or of mighty kings; he is either God or not mortal-born. We may also gauge the distance that Pilate has to cover by hearing the echo in his speech of the epic cliché of the “godlike” hero—particularly the parallel scene in which Aeneas suddenly steps into Dido’s view for the ‹rst time, “gleam[ing] in the clear light, godlike in face and shoulders” (restitit Aeneas claraque in luce refulsit, / os umerosque deo similis [Aeneid 1.587–88]). As Dante has Vergil himself acknowledge in the Inferno, he discovered too late that he had lived “in the time of the false and lying gods” (nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi [1.72]), but Pilate now has the opportunity to apply the epithet godlike properly, to modify its meaning in his mind accordingly, so as to acknowledge this man as the Son of God and the only “godlike” hero there ever was. In order to make this transition from a reader of classical epic to a reader of biblical epic, Pilate must give himself fully to Joseph and John’s instruction. While he hears their accounts of Christ’s life and miracles, Pilate is rapt and eager to hear all. “Trace from the beginning why he came to be born,” he requests, “or what this religion entails” (istius causas ab origine partus / Exequere, aut quae relligio [Christiad 3.1012–13]). He has heard, too, that “all Judaea worships only one eternal God, created of no human seed, and forbids dei‹ed persons to share in their altars” (Iudaea Deum non amplius unum / Aeternum colit, haud mortali semine cretum, / Indigetesque suis diuos altaribus arcet [3.1014–16]), so he seems not completely unprepared for the different way of thinking that this new faith requires. Yet, after all that Joseph and John explain to him, Pilate is mistaken in believing that he has comprehended. He still resorts to his original habits of thought. Insonti vero Romanus parcere capto Toto corde petens, huc mentem dividit, atque huc. Fama viri, virtusque animo, egregiique recursat Oris honos, nec iam obscurum genus esse Deorum.

(5.1–4)

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[The Roman, truly desiring in all his heart to pardon the guiltless captive, debates this course and now that. The man’s fame, the virtue of his soul, and the excellence and grace of his features keep recurring to his mind, nor was it unclear now that this man’s race was of the gods.] Pilate seems now to be resolved in his purpose, but as Botta here comments, there can be no resolve or purpose in a mind still blinded by ignorance. The Roman procurator, having heard these things from old Joseph, as well as the miraculous works of Christ which had been narrated by John, yearned as if persuaded [my emphasis] with all intention to rescue him from the impetuous uproar and hands of the Jews. Thus his mind was vexed with contradictory thoughts, turning now toward this end, now to another.18 Pilate’s confused intellect and lost condition manifest themselves in behavior that is blackly humorous when, shortly afterward, he scolds the gentiles for refusing to recognize their Savior. ut visus mihi nil mortale sonare Cuncta Deo similis vultum, vocemque, oculosque! Aut certe Deo ille, Dei aut certissima proles. Cedite. ne regem vestrum ignorate volentes.

(5.97–100)

[How he seems to me not to speak as mortal man but to be wholly godlike in his face and voice and eyes! He is either truly God or most truly the son of a god! Do submit. Do not willfully refuse to acknowledge your king.] Botta parses the lapse in Pilate’s aut . . . aut logic. This is the conclusion of a syllogism, which he knows from the proposition, the assumption, and conclusion. But he adduces ambiguously—negatively and positively. For if [Jesus] sounds nothing like a mortal, therefore he is a god; likewise if he is in all things similar to God, therefore he is God. And on the other hand—“He is

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< either truly God or a true son of a god!”—either is true [i.e., not one or the other is true], for he is God and the Son of God.19 As long as Pilate continues to think in terms of alternatives, to accept the possibility that there can be gods instead of just one God, he will continue to make the error of assuming that different peoples can have different gods and that Jesus belongs to “them.” Thus, from this point, Pilate’s recurring phrases in his efforts to resist the priests’ and mob’s demands for Jesus’s death are vestrum regem and vestrum Deum, “your king” and “your God,” illustrating that even though he has learned as much or more about the Savior as the disbelievers he berates, he fails to apply his learning in the only way that would save his soul.20 Finally, as if God favors him with one last chance, one last sign to guide him in the right direction, Pilate’s wife dreams of the prisoner as a white lamb inexplicably attacked and killed by a band of shepherds with clubs and by their dogs, who then, to their woe, experience God’s wrath (5.285–94). She then hears God’s voice thunder from the heavens: “Spare God, Roman, and curb the madness of men” (Parce Deo Romane, hominum compesce furorem [5.295]).21 Terri‹ed, she hurries to urge Pilate to release Jesus, and though her reasons only reinforce Pilate’s ›awed polytheistic thinking, the echo of Vergil in her plea can be seen as a prompt to recognize his error. Credo equidem hunc (non te fallit) genus esse Deorum. Parce manus scelerare, pio, uir, parce cruori. Ipsi haec coelicolae placidi portenta refutent, Iudaeosque petant solos, generique minentur. (5.296–99) [Assuredly, I believe him to be of the race of the gods, and you too are aware of this. Spare the pollution of your hands, my husband, spare his holy blood. May the serene sky-dwellers themselves ward off these portents from us. May they strike the Jews alone and threaten only that race.] We hear, in the second line of this speech, the words of Polydorus—his spirit trapped within a Thracean bush—as he warns Aeneas not to tear at his branches: “Spare the pollution of your pious hand” (parce pias scelerare manus [Aeneid 3.42]). At its simplest, we can say that this allusion sets up a contrast between Aeneas, who immediately stopped what he was doing and

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performed “fresh funeral rites” for his fallen countryman, and Pilate, who will soon pollute his hands with Jesus’s blood and afterward, to ease his conscience, wash them in water while protesting, “by us, too, piety and the holy gods are honored” (Et nobis pietas colitur, sanctique penates [Christiad 6.27]). Yet the irony of that boast should not prompt us to condemn the emptiness of Pilate’s piety versus the true piety of Vergil’s Aeneas. In the warning from Pilate’s wife, the word pio is not attached to Pilate’s hand, as it would be if the line followed Polydorus’s phrasing; instead, it describes the blood of Jesus, a revision that re›ects the genuine contrast that Pilate has an opportunity here to grasp—that is, that piety resides in honoring the one holy God who stands before him in the ›esh, not the pagan gods (or “sky-dwellers”) and certainly not the penates (household gods), such as Aeneas safeguards on his journey to Italy. Put another way, the allusion to Vergil invites the Christiad’s readers to mark the pollution that already stains the hands of an Aeneas, Pilate, or other “Roman” whose piety and pagan sacri‹ces are given to “the false and lying gods.” The real contrast to Vergil’s “pious Aeneas” in Vida’s poem is not Pilate, then, but Peter, to whom Jesus says, as he entrusts him with the keys of his Church, “I know that your piety is second to none” (nulli pietate secundum / Noui [6.662–63]).

a new r a ce of romans On either side of “the temptation of Pilate,” the drama at the center of the Christiad, Vida similarly invokes the Aeneid frequently, not just in order to give his poem its Vergilian aura, but to relegate Vergil and all that his epic celebrates to the role of points of negative contrast. The glorious race of Romans that Aeneas sees on his journey to the underworld—“all Iulus’s seed” (omnis Iuli / progenies [Aeneid 6.789–90]), as his father calls it, stretching down through the centuries to “Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall found again a golden age in Latin ‹elds once ruled by Saturn” (Augustus Caesar, Divi genus, aurea condet / saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva / Saturno quondam [6.792–94])—has proved but one of the “false dreams” that “the gods of the underworld send up above” (falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes [6.896]), exposed as such by Christ, the true “Divi genus.” His coming, in the time of Augustus Caesar, established a new race of “Romans,” Vida rejoices at his epic’s end, for “from the name of Christ these peoples hereafter were called Christians,” a “golden race” that “rose up over all the earth.” Thus was “born by far the most beautiful

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< epoch”—because, we remember, it is the most blessed—“in all of time” (hinc populos Christi de nomine dicunt / Christiadas. toto surgit gens aurea mundo, / Seclorumque oritur longe pulcherrimus ordo [Christiad 6.984–86]). A major feature of this strategy is the repeated disparagement of the martial prowess and battle‹eld victories that contribute to the classical and allegorical epic hero’s glory but are inappropriate to the biblical epic’s ethos. Take, for example, the scene of Christ’s ascension in book 6, which is compared to the spectacle of a Roman triumph. Non aliter sunt ingressi volucri agmine contra Concentu vario, et multisono modulatu, Quam, prolapsa Remi cum nondum urbs alta iaceret, Tarpeiaeque arces starent, lateque subactis Iura daret populis rerum pulcherrima Roma, Consul victor, ovans pugnatis undique bellis, Intrabat rediens, Capitoliaque alta subibat. Talis nubivago tendebat ad aethera gressu Vera Dei soboles.

(6.701–9)

[In winged vanguard the angels came singing in varied harmonies and modulated measures, not otherwise than when the high city of Remus had not yet been cast into ruin and Tarpeian citadels were standing, when far and wide most beautiful Rome gave laws to subject realms, and the victorious consul, rejoicing in his return from distant-fought wars, entered the city and climbed the lofty Capitol. Just so the true Son of God directs his course through the clouds to the upper air.] “Pulcherrima Roma” anticipates the “pulcherrimus ordo” of the Christian ages to come, but even in the same breath that Vida remembers Rome’s grand achievements and rituals, its military conquests and the reach of its imperial laws, he reminds us of the ruin that awaits “the walls of [Vergil’s] lofty Rome” (altae moenia Romae [1.7]). The comparison can in no way ennoble the image of that “victorious consul,” therefore, whose victory will neither save Rome from destruction nor, far more seriously, save his soul from an eternity cut off from God’s light. As Christ admonishes Peter at the scene of his arrest, after his disciple had severed the ear of Malchus and Christ miraculously had restored it, “I care nothing for the arms of man”

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(hominum nil demoror arma [2.843]). The only salient likenesses between the consul who ascends the lofty Capitol and Christ’s ascension to paradise is in the upward direction of the progress and the fanfare. The reader who fails to register the utter emptiness of the earthly instance consequently mistakes the test of the simile. The angels in heaven play a comparable role in the Christiad’s most extended passage exploiting the martial theme, which again has the effect of rejecting the epic’s traditional martial values and, for readers, is the poem’s most elaborate “setup,” in the way that it invites—even dares—them to become absorbed in the feverish energy and zeal of the angelic army as it musters for a full-scale assault and rescue operation to save Jesus from his persecutors. The buildup to battle extends over a hundred lines and is described in a heightened epic style that correspondingly “builds up” in grandeur to match the intensity of the angels’ fervid war preparations and saber rattling:22 circunfusos coetus, gentem aetheris alti Aligeram, iniussos potis est vis sistere nulla. Omnibus exarsit subito dolor. omnibus ingens Aestuat ira. volunt nato succurrere herili Et prohibere nefas, duroque resistere ferro. Bella cient. arma ingeminant arma acrius omnes.

(5.508–13)

[No power could check the winged race of the upper air from their unbidden assembly. In all of them anguish suddenly burns. In all of them great wrath boils. They desire to rescue the Son of their Master, to prevent this crime, and to make their stand with hard-edged sword. They declare war. Redoubling arms upon arms they grow more furious all.] The outrage of Christ’s sufferings inclines one to share in the angels’ wrath and their urgent desire to intervene, to punish, to save the Savior. But they rally iniussos—“unbidden.” And how strange is the statement “No power could check” them, when we know that one power certainly could and will, the one power, God, who would have bid them to muster if it had been his design. The line communicates, rather, the supercharged emotions and con‹dence of an army steeling itself for decisive battle: they feel that no power could stop them now. As Vida moves to describing the angels’ troop

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< movements, the grand display of arms and grandiose style are alike mesmerizing. Iam passim ingentis properatur vertice Olympi, Et toto ancipitis ferri coelo ingruit horror, Aeratique sonant currus, gemitusque rotarum Audiri, sonitusque armorum desuper ingens.

(5.534–37)

[Now here now there they are sped to the heights of vast heaven, and the terror of the two-edged sword invades all the sky, and bronze chariots resound, and the rumbling of wheels is heard, and the great crash of arms from above.] As the preparations continue, the pace of Vida’s narrative quickens— “This good angel is armed with a javelin, and he shakes the wooden shaft as he advances, that one seizes ‹rebrands, that one snatches arrows” (Hic bonus armatur iaculis, hastamque trabalem / Crispat agens, rapit ille faces, rapit ille sagittas [5.553–54])—and as the heavenly troops reach the gates of heaven, their zeal is fueled by the sight of engravings inlaid with gold, the “handiwork of artists,” depicting their own previous great battle against the rebel angels. What they do not pause long enough to contemplate, however, is the engraved reminder that it was God, not them, who expelled Satan and his crew: pater omnipotens armatus fulmine dextram Deturbabat agens, ›ammisque sequacibus arce Siderea.

(5.613–15)

[The almighty Father, his right hand armed with lightning, strikes them down, driving them from the starry arch with pursuing ›ames.] The loyal angels only see the glorious image of victory, roused as they are now to ‹ght and rescue and punish, but just as they and Vida’s high heroic style build to their crescendo, God suddenly stops them—in two lines (5.623–24) undoing all that rumbling of chariots and crashing of arms. Pugnae igitur superi admoniti, veterisque trophaei Aetheris ardebant fractis erumpere portis.

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Iamque adeo evassent omnes, terrisque potiti Sontem incendissent oram, iamque urbibus igni Correptis Iudaea nocens commissa luisses, Ni pater altitonans stellanti nixus Olympo (Motus enim tanto subito ›agrante tumultu) Coepta redargueret, verbisque inhiberet acerbis Bellum importunum cunctis haud mollia mandans.

(5.616–24)

[Thus the angels, reminded of that battle and that former victory, burned to break through heaven’s gates. And all would even now have burst out and taken over that land, setting its wicked shore a›ame, and now, wicked Judaea, those ‹res would have consumed your cities and you would have paid for your crimes, except that the high-thundering Father who rests upon the stars in heaven (for he was stirred by this so sudden and passionate tumult) denounced the enterprise and halted the un‹tting war, commanding unmildly with sharp words all round.] Philip Hardie correctly states that “Vida’s war in Heaven is much more of a farce than is Milton’s,” because the former “is an epic where defeat and disgrace are paradoxically the means to triumph, where the youthful victim of funus acerbum, ‘premature death,’ is true victor” (1993a, 310). Yet we then must wonder, to what purpose does Vida supply such an elaborate description of farcical war—a “war” that in fact never happens? The answer is in the question that this episode poses to Vida’s readers, which is whether they had allowed themselves to be so swept up in the angels’ righteous indignation and rallying for battle to have forgotten the central tenet of their faith. Did they feel an eagerness for Christ’s rescue from cruci‹xion—so that his sacri‹ce to redeem humankind would not have happened? If so, the sharp words of reproof extend ‹nally to them. Vida’s readers have the bene‹t of hindsight and their Christian faith, which should have helped them recognize all along that this is not only bellum importunum but bellum inane. In reading the Christiad rightly, in other words, the new “Romans” stay alert to the features that classify Vida’s poem as Vergilian epic, but not merely for the sake of con‹rming that hallowed classi‹cation or celebrating the poem as some sort of triumphant union of classical form and Christian content. There are higher stakes in its demand on readers to exercise their Christian judgment and willpower, to reject the earthly values, dangerous passions, and ›awed habits of thought that Vergil’s epic and the Augustinian epic alike incite.

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< the re jection of dido Having put into focus the simultaneously positive and negative relationship between the Christiad and the Aeneid, we may return now, in this chapter’s penultimate section, to examine more closely Vida’s allusions to the story of Aeneas and Dido. The verbal echoes of this episode permeate the Christiad and betray the urgency on Vida’s part to tame, to eliminate by way of co-option, the tragic love story that Botta and Augustine warn can distract Vergil’s readers from the love of God. Consider, for example, the context in which we encounter a variation on Aeneas’s protest to Dido “I do not follow Italy of my free will” (Italiam non sponte sequor [Aeneid 4.361]). In explaining to the angels the purpose of Christ’s incarnation and death in the divine plan, God tells them that Christ “disdains his life and offers to die of his own free will” (morti caput ipse sua sponte obvius offert [Christiad 5.663]). Vida’s revision of the original invites us to dwell on Christianity’s rede‹nition of heroism: whereas Aeneas grudgingly but obediently “follows” Jove’s command to abandon his shameful love for Dido and set sail, Jesus freely “offers” to suffer and die for love of the human race. In an earlier passage also emphasizing Christ’s mortality, the contrast between Aeneas and Christ is achieved without such a reversal of Vergil’s words (i.e., from “non sponte” to “sua sponte”). id enim matris de corpore traxit, Ut quaecunque hominum mortalia pectore terrent, Ipse etiam haec eadem mortali corde paveret. Mens immota tamen, virtusque invicta manebat.

(2.743–46)

[He had inherited mortality through his mother’s body, so that all those things that terrify the mortal breast of man frighten him in his mortal heart as well. But the mind remains unmoved, the resolution invincible.] When Vida employs the Vergilian line “mens immota manet” (Aeneid 4.449), it is as much an allusion to Augustine’s urging, in The City of God, that the faithful resist the “disturbances” of the soul “in opposition to reason” (9.4.98–104) as it is to Vergil’s description of Aeneas remaining unmoved by the tears of Dido. The difference is that Vida now makes it even more explicit than had Augustine that this resolution of the mind is properly an imitation of Christ, not of Aeneas. There is also here a lesson on recognizing profound differences of scale and purpose. Neither the distur-

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bances of Aeneas’s heart nor the earthly glory that he seeks in tearing himself away from Dido are to be compared to Christ’s mortal terrors or the glory of his self-sacri‹ce. As Petrarch had done in the Africa, Vida disperses Dido’s sufferings between different characters in his epic. One is the guilt-wracked Judas, to whom the epithet infelix is applied three times (Christiad 5.30, 34, 51). He decides “to end his hateful life” (abrumpere vitam / Invisam [5.55–56]) because, like Dido, he is “sick of gazing on the vault of heaven” (coelique piget convexa tueri [5.32]).23 But as Vida comments, the vault of heaven above Judas should have an entirely different meaning to him than the one that disturbs Dido’s sight, for he has received the Word of Christ. Judas is “a madman,” says Vida, “who would rather not dare to hope for forgiveness by confessing his crime,” even though he knows “the King of Heaven is ever moved by prayers, and in goodness forgets his righteous anger” (Demens, qui potius veniam sperare fatendo / Non ausus, neque enim precibus non ›ectitur ullis / Rex superum, et iustae bonus obliviscitur irae [5.65–67]). The other ‹gure in the Christiad whose anguish is repeatedly couched in the language that Vergil uses to describe Dido is the Virgin Mary. Earlier in the poem, we saw, Mary was associated with the idealized Lavinia in opposition to the unhappy queen of Carthage, but with the arrest of Jesus, we are told that Mary, too, is “infelix” (5.761, 817), and her wandering through the city in search of her son is likened to Dido’s wandering in the frenzy of her passion for Aeneas. iamque illa per urbem Atque huc, atque illuc errat, tristemque requirit Indefessa locum, nunc hic, nunc haesitat illic Vestigans oculis, atque auribus omnia captans, Sicubi concursum, voces aut hauriat ullas. Ac veluti pastu rediens ubi vespere cerva Montibus ex altis ad nota cubilia foetus Iandudum teneri memor, omnem sanguine circum Sparsum cernit humum, catulos nec conspicit usquam, Continuo lustrans oculis nemus omne peragrat Cum gemitu.

(5.768–78)

[And now she wanders tirelessly through the city, now here and there, seeking that unhappy place. She pauses now here, now there, searching with her eyes and seizing at everything she hears, and if anywhere there

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< is a crowd, she takes in its voices or shouts. She is like a hind that, returning at dusk to her accustomed hideaway after grazing in the high mountains, all the while fearful for her offspring, discovers the earth sprinkled all round with blood, nowhere sees her young, and at once goes wandering through the wood, searching wide in sadness.] By comparing this passage to the corresponding lines from the Aeneid, we observe that Vida has made a crucial variation on the “wounded deer” simile, which in the Christiad refers to the mother hind’s lost fawns but in Vergil describes Dido pierced by Cupid’s arrow. uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta, quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia ‹xit pastor agens telis liquitque volatile ferrum nescius.

(Aeneid 4.68–72)

[Unhappy Dido burns and wanders raging through the city, like a hind shot by an arrow, an unwary deer amid the Cretan woods pierced from afar by the dart of a passing shepherd, who leaves the winged iron inside her, unknowing.] The Christiad’s Vergilian allusion, in this instance, has the effect of calling up a vision of Dido that demands at once to be dismissed, for in viewing her culpable love alongside the wholly untainted love of Mother Mary for her son, the appropriate reaction on the part of readers is to recognize how vast is the moral gulf that separates the two women. The mere fact of their wandering is the one admissible point of comparison, but for the rest, tears may be shed in pity for Mary; for Dido, “mens immota manet.” The same holds true even of Dido’s suicide, the image of which is invoked in Mary’s report of a prophecy of her sorrows. Hos hos horribili monitu trepidantia corda Terri‹cans senior luctus sperare iubebat, Et cecinit fore, cum pectus mihi ‹geret ensis. Nunc alte mucro, nunc alte vulnus adactum.

(5.877–80)

[This, this is the sorrow that the terrifying elder warned my trembling heart to expect in his horrible prophecy, and he said the time would

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come that my heart would be pierced with a sword. Now the point is driven deep, now deep is the wound.] Having thus called up this most pitiable image of Dido—who “perished in a death which was not by fate, not by merit” (quia nec fato, merita nec morte peribat [6.696])—Vida once more invokes but at once disallows any favorable comparison of Dido’s fate to the sufferings of Mary, by having the Virgin Mother lament at this moment, “nowhere is there greater grief than mine” (meo maior nusquam dolor [5.884]). By “nowhere,” we are required to understand that there is greater grief nowhere in the world, nowhere in history, and nowhere in the Aeneid.24 The real test of the Christiad’s allusive poetics, then, is in the timing of its readers’ recognition of the gulf that is continuously asserted between itself and its poetic model. Before Vida calls Judas a “madman” because he fails to turn to prayer, for instance, faithful and alert readers will already have recognized that however much Christ’s betrayer is “sick of gazing on the vault of heaven,” and despite Dido’s precedent in taking her own life when she was described in the same state of despair and helplessness, Judas is mad to dwell in his misery rather than turn in repentance to God in prayer, mad to seek his own death when he knows that through Christ death is conquered. Likewise, the tears that had been shed for Dido are best recalled and rejected in the same moment. If the allusions to Dido cause one instead to associate her suffering with Mary’s, to imagine them as “sisters in sorrow,” then the quality of the pity one feels for Mary has been debased. Ideally, Vida will not have had to remind any of the Christiad’s readers that no suffering is to be compared to Mary’s and no heroism can measure up to Christ’s, but in case he does, the reminders follow soon enough.

veri vates Philip Hardie has noted that “Vida’s inclusion of himself” in God’s prophecy of the reign of Christendom “seems to allude to Ennius’s vision of Petrarch at the end of the Africa.”25 In the same passage, we also see Vida make his most explicit distinction between the Christiad’s action and that of classical epic, and we encounter, too, Vida’s claim—even bolder than Petrarch’s—of being a kind of holy magister to future generations. Says God to the Son, in this prophecy immediately following the Resurrection, mox tempus erit, cum scilicet olim Ter centum prope lustra peregerit aethereus Sol,

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< Tum veri Graium obliti mendacia vates Funera per gentes referent tua carmine verso, Atque tuis omnes resonabunt laudibus urbes, Praesertim laetam Italiae felicis ad oram, Addua ubi vagus, et muscoso Serius amne Purior electro, tortoque simillimus angui, Qua rex ›uviorum Eridanus se turbidus infert Moenia turrigerae stringens male tuta Cremonae, Ut sibi iam tectis vix temperet unda caducis. Illic tum nivei velut inter nubila Cygni Omnibus in ripis pueri innuptaeque puellae Carmina casta canent, mixtique in gramine molli Laudibus incipient certatim assuescere nostris, Et teneri prima coetus te voce sonabunt. Haec tibi certa manent, haec vis movet ordine nulla.

(6.880–96)

[There shall soon be a time, indeed once the sun in heaven has nearly completed thrice ‹ve centuries, that true poets, forgetting the falsehoods of the Greeks, shall in verses transformed spread the news of your death through all nations and every city shall resound with your praises, especially the happy shore of fertile Italy, where the Adda winds and the Sesia, with mossy current, is clearer than amber and twists like a serpent, where the turbulent Po, king of rivers, wildly ›ows hard by the unsound walls of turreted Cremona, so that the waters are barely kept from already tottering houses. There and then, like snowy swans amid the clouds, boys and unwed girls shall sing chaste songs on every bank, and together on the soft grass will begin to learn the custom of singing antiphons in our praises,26 and their voices in choirs will intone your eminence. These things are assured you; no power can change their order.] Something about this picture suggests that Vida, one of the veri vates— which could be translated “true prophets”27 as accurately as “true poets”— has arrived just in time. Perhaps it is the picture of a dilapidated Cremona, Vida’s hometown, threatened by the violent ›oods of the Po and the sinister connotations of a serpentlike Sesia. More concretely, it is the statement that for so long, in the ‹fteen centuries of the Christian era, the children have been singing the wrong songs. Now, belatedly, they will “sing chaste songs”—“chaste songs such as these are,” says Botta, “which we have in our

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hands” (carmina casta, qualia sunt haec, quae pre manibus habemus [193r]). The false heroes and lying gods of classical epic, which belong ultimately to “the Greeks,” are replaced by the song of Christ, a purely Christian epic enabling a purely Christian curriculum that will not corrupt the purity of its pupils, who will be like the “snowy swans amid the clouds.”28 As we have seen, however, that account of the Christiad’s teaching is really too simple. The boys and maidens in this idyllic setting are not vessels of pure virtue to be protected from corruption by pagan literature. They raise their voices to God in songs of praise because through God’s grace they may at the last break all ties to the earthly city—the city that (perforce) has “unsound walls” and “tottering houses”—by shedding the Old Adam in themselves and attaining the purity that is reserved for inhabitants of the City of God. That process depends not on ignorance of classical literature but on its puri‹cation in such poems as the Christiad. Vida’s epic is Christian in its action, but its construction out of Vergilian material demands its readers constantly to interpret phrases and lines against their source, either by resisting altogether the temptation to associate values and emotions from the Vergilian context with Christ’s story or, what is more challenging, by recognizing how values and feelings that were associated with the Vergilian context are given new meaning and justi‹cation in the new context of the Christiad. An instance and a reminder of this process occurs in the Vergilian allusion that closes God’s prophecy in the passage just cited: “These things are assured you,” God tells his Son; “no power can change their order” (Haec tibi certa manent, haec vis movet ordine nulla). The line is not, as we might expect, a variation on one of Jove’s pronouncements of the future glory of the Roman race. Instead, it is closely modeled on Aeneas’s words to Salius, Nisus, and a few other high-spirited youths who, in Aeneid 5, are quarreling over the outcome of a footrace. Says “father Aeneas” in his bene‹cence and wisdom, “These gifts remain assured to you, lads, and no one changes the victory order” (tum pater Aeneas, “vestra,” inquit, “munera vobis / certa manent, pueri, et palmam movet ordine nemo” [5.348–49]); and “having so judged,” Vergil goes on to relate, Aeneas “gives to Salius the huge hide of a Gaetulian lion, heavy with shaggy hair and gilded claws” (sic fatus tergum Gaetuli immane leonis / dat Salio, villis onerosum atque unguibus aureis [5.351–52]). Compare the gifts of the two fathers in these episodes. Aeneas hands out the hide of a lion to appease a young man’s wounded honor after an athletic contest. If the readers’ recollection of this scene is also accompanied by the memory of admiration for the Trojan hero’s generosity and dis-

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< play of mature leadership, that sentiment must perforce be replaced by a much profounder “admiration” for God and by gratitude and contrition as they contemplate God’s far better gift of a “lion” to the human race—that is, the gift of salvation through the resurrected Christ, which conventionally was symbolized by the lion because, according to ancient lore, the lion is born dead but then is brought to life by the breath of its sire. How paltry, really, is the prize in the Aeneid (not less but more so for having “gilded claws”), and how paltry is the Aeneid, except for the service to which Vida here and elsewhere puts it, which turns out to be another version of the gambit of the negative via: the Aeneid supplies the means for the Christiad’s readers to mark their progress from Vergilian falsehoods to Christian Truth.

ch a p ter f ive

Vergil the Evangelist The Christiad of Alexander Ross

=< tolle lege The Christiad that is the subject of this chapter represents nothing less than the ultimate Augustinian conversion of the epic form, and it is a truly stunning accomplishment. But even universal agreement on these points is unlikely to repair the legacy of its author, Alexander Ross (1590–1654). Born and educated in Scotland, Ross emigrated to England to serve as a schoolmaster in Southampton, was later ordained an Anglican chaplain, and is generally remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for having been the champion of losing positions in debates requiring intellectual and technical resources that he wholly lacked. For example, his book The New Planet no Planet, or, The Earth no wandring Star except in the wandring heads of Galileans (1646) makes no use of mathematics to attack the “erroneous, ridiculous, and impious” theory of a heliocentric universe. It therefore contributed not at all to the contemporary scienti‹c debate over the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems (or rather, by Ross’s time, not the Ptolemaic but Tycho Brahe’s compromise geocentric scheme then in favor at Rome). Similarly, the seventeenth-century philosophical controversy over Thomas Hobbes’s mechanist materialism was little affected by Ross’s barrage of scriptural citations and sarcasm in Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook (1653), excepting this tract’s distinction as one of the earliest alarms to be sounded against Hobbes as a thinly disguised atheist.1 To be fair, Ross’s 135

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< achievements range farther than vehement polemic. They include the ‹rst English version of the Koran (1649, not from the Arabic but from Andre du Ryer’s 1647 French translation) and “the Second Part” of Ralegh’s Historie of the World (1652), in addition to the epic poem that is my subject. We also have, in John R. Glenn’s balanced account of Ross’s career, an assessment of the whole of Ross’s scholarly output that leaves a more favorable impression of his intelligence, learning, and talents than do most previous biographies and studies (see Ross 1987, 1–59). Even so, since the publication of Glenn’s critical edition of the Mystagogus Poeticus (1647)—a compendium of classical myths and their allegorical interpretation that is, today, Ross’s most frequently cited work in Milton studies—there has been little indication of any renewed scholarly interest in the writings of Alexander Ross for their own merits. To account for the modern neglect of his Christiad, we could simply observe that it is in Latin and has never been translated. But the real problem lies in its extremely unfashionable form: it is a Vergilian cento, which means, literally, a “patchwork” of Vergil’s poetry. Almost every line of this thirteen-book, 311-octavo-page epic is stitched together out of half-lines, lines, and brief passages from Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, arranged, grammatically adjusted, and with necessary substitutions of the names of people and places to produce a work (as the title page advertises) “in which all those things about our Lord Jesus Christ that are either stated or predicted in either Testament are sounded most sweetly by the divine, sublime trumpet of Maro.”2 As Ross boasts in his preface to the reader, “there is in this work no line (except a few) in which you will not discover a Vergilian song entire, or at least half, or his diction.” 3 This is a truly stunning accomplishment, as I say, but is to most of us a very strange project indeed, one that could only be widely admired in an epoch whose sensibilities were quite alien to ours and, we might ungenerously observe, one that could only be undertaken by a man with far too much time on his hands. But the popularity of cento poetry actually has a very long history, waxing and waning from classical times to its modern revival in French alexandrines, and in the seventeenth century, Ross’s Christiad was a best seller.4 A ‹rst version, covering just the life of Christ in ‹fty-one octavo pages, was published in 1634 with the title Virgilius Evangelisans. It went through a second edition the same year, its success apparently spurring Ross to expand the work to full epic length (i.e., Vergil’s twelve books plus Vegio’s supplement equals thirteen), in which it was published just four years later as Virgilii evangelisantis Christiados libri XIII (1638). Besides another edition

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printed in London (1659), the poem also came out in Rotterdam, Zurich (both in 1653), and Debrecen (1684), re›ecting the period’s remarkable delight, or at least curiosity, in this particular form of Vergiliana.5 In 1660, Ross’s Christiad was even recommended for classroom use in Charles Hoole’s A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (187–88). In modern studies, one occasionally encounters a passing reference to Ross’s Christiad in discussions of the “minor epics” known to Milton.6 Here, I argue that Milton could have learned as much from the rhetorical strategy of Ross’s epic as from Vida’s Christiad.7 To some degree, we will ‹nd that what was observed of Vida’s allusive poetics is true of Vergilian cento as well; but before analyzing Ross’s epic, we should ‹rst look for some helpful guidance in the body of scholarship that has accumulated on the one cento poem that has attracted critical study. I refer to the mid-fourthcentury example of the genre attributed to Faltonia Betitia Proba, usually titled the Centones Virgiliani, which recounts in 693 lines the creation of the world and the life of Christ. It is noteworthy in part for being the earliest surviving instance of Christian Latin poetry and, as its modern translators note, “the earliest complete and extant work in Christian history that we are sure was written by a woman.”8 Most recorded opinions of the cento form—from St. Jerome’s in Proba’s day to D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s in ours—scorn it as mere ingenious hackwork, and Proba’s poem has been doubly denounced for its (implied) aberrant Christian doctrine.9 But Proba has had her cautious defenders, recently including R. P. H. Green. A bit sheepishly, Green concedes that “it may seem faintly absurd to claim or imply that a Vergilian cento has suffered unjusti‹ed neglect” (1995, 551), and he agrees with the general view that “centos are essentially a frivolous genre” (554). Nevertheless, he argues that Proba’s poem should be read more sympathetically, in light of her “serious educational purpose” (1997, 559). It seems that her poem was intended and actually served as a school text, teaching Vergil’s sublime style while avoiding the dangerous in›uence of his pagan gods and unwholesome subject matter.10 This emphasis on the educational utility of Proba’s poem, we recognize, echoes Botta’s reasons for recommending Vida’s Christiad over the teaching of classical authors, and we have Hoole to attest to the realization that Ross’s epic could be similarly employed. However, it should be noted that in Ross’s own preface to his cento, he does not betray any of Botta’s (or Proba’s presumed) fear of Vergil’s potentially corrupting in›uence.11 Ross asserts that the sublimity of Vergil’s phrases in fact re›ects the excellence of his character. “Nothing is more pure, more chaste, more ornate” than

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< Vergil’s diction, he explains, “for Maro is not only the most learned of all poets but the most modest besides, indeed even virginal.”12 Ross then cites the “Messianic” Fourth Eclogue and Georgics 1 to attest to Vergil’s prophetic knowledge of Christ’s coming and to af‹rm the special ‹tness of the transformation of Vergil’s works (we might say, their apotheosis) into the Christiad. Not on account of the superstition of profane peoples ought we to shun their music, or not learn their literature because they say their author is Mercury: so says Augustine [De doctrina Christiana 2.18]. Let it be allowed to me, therefore, to clothe with Hebrew hides this sacred tabernacle of impure beings, and with the ‹rst Christians to honor Christ in the idolatrous temple and to consecrate the profane temple for them. Although I do not see why Vergil’s so chaste and useful poem ought to be called profane. Paul let slip nothing of his piety when he was carried in the idolatrous ship by Castor and Pollux, and neither is the name of Christ profaned if it is carried in the ship of a Vergilian: but whoever dares to say that Maro had no notion about Christ when about him he wrote so plainly in the Fourth Eclogue, and in a digression on the death of Caesar at the end of the First Georgic, no one is so blind but that he sees these things to be said about Christ, as Vives states [in his commentary on Augustine’s City of God 18.46].13 We see, then, that to Ross’s mind, a rearrangement of Vergil to have him sing explicitly of Christ is an improvement on Vergil in the original, but it is not, as Botta would have deemed it, an act of purifying a pimp who seduces with honeyed words, since Ross would count Vergil as, in some special way, among the blessed. Thus, in his recycling of the familiar “good physician” trope, there is no concern, for Ross, that the sweet liquid on the glass might counteract the bene‹ts of the bitter medicine. He writes, still in the preface: “Let it be allowed to me, the counterpart of a wise doctor, to render to those of squeamish stomach the salutary food of scripture made more agreeable with sweet condiment. For here, with pure Vergilian phrases, they may drink true piety and the Mysteries of our Religion from tender ages.”14 Even so, the basic selling point of Ross’s epic is identical to Vida’s as Botta touts it, and it is not any different from Proba’s cento as Green describes it. His Christiad offers itself to the schoolteacher who would have

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his charges acquire Vergilian Latin without departing from a biblical curriculum. In that respect, it was not exceptional for its day but on the same course as other contemporary projects—such as Julius Schiller’s (d. 1627), whose monumental star atlas, the Coelum stellatum Christianum (1627, 1660), replaces all the traditional names of the constellations with Christian ones. Prefaced with a dedication to Ferdinand II assuring him that there is “nothing scandalous” in this new map of the heavens, nothing “adverse to the Orthodox Catholic Religion or the laws of the Holy Roman Empire, or contrary to good morals,”15 the large-folio volume consists of ‹fty-one star maps with facing-page charts itemizing Schiller’s pious changes. The names of constellations in the northern hemisphere are inspired by the New Testament and early history of the Church: Aries is now St. Peter, for example; the Corona Borealis is Christ’s crown of thorns; Cassiopeia is Mary Magdeline; Auriga is St. Jerome; Cygnus is St. Helena with Christ’s cross. The Old Testament supplies the names for the southern hemisphere: Apis is Eve; Centaurus is Abraham and Isaac; Eridanus represents Israel’s ›ight from Egypt. The planets of the solar system also have new names: Saturn is Adam; Jupiter is Moses. The sun is Jesus Christ; the earth’s moon, the Virgin Mary.16 If Schiller’s new star map had only caught on, the faithful would no longer be gazing at a night sky crowded with the relics of a pagan universe. Yet just as was true of my analysis of Vida’s Christiad, I am not so much interested in Ross’s epic as another example of a period effort to “Christianize the classics” or to supply schoolboys with a biblical alternative to Vergil’s narrative. I am concerned with the nature of the attraction of Ross’s cento for those who had already acquired their Vergilian Latin through the traditional route, which I assume describes everyone in the seventeenth century who actually purchased and read Ross’s poem. What I believe primarily worth recovering, in other words, is the interpretive process in which Ross involved his mature readers who knew their Vergil. For guidance on this point, by far the most helpful is a 1989 essay by Zoja Pavlovskis on Proba’s cento. Though largely devoted to an inquiry into the reasons that Jerome might have had for objecting so strongly to the “frivolous” cento form, Pavlovskis’s primary aim is to articulate what she terms “the semiotics of the narrative Vergilian cento.” Two of her observations, though relatively minor and disconnected in the context of her own essay’s argument, deserve to be mentioned ‹rst for their special relevance to my study of Ross’s poem as an example of Augustinian epic. Pavlovskis points out, by way of defending Proba’s practice,

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< that “cento-like literary composition” was long established by the fourth century (it “had been in existence at least since Aristophanes” [71]), and in a footnote, she also remarks that “the technique of composition in Augustine’s Confessions in some ways resembles that of the cento” because of its seamless incorporation of scripture into its author’s personal narrative (71 n. 3). Shortly after, in discussing the contrasting styles of Homer and Vergil, Pavlovskis observes that the “ambiguity and allusiveness” of Vergil’s verse not only lent it to cento composition but made it “eminently appropriate” to such “non-literary, perhaps even perverse,” uses as “the well-known practice of sortes Vergilianae,” in which a passage from Vergil’s works was selected at random and interpreted as having personal signi‹cance to the life of the diviner-reader (75).17 Although in the Confessions, this is one of the superstitious practices that Augustine says he had rejected in his youth (4.3.5), nevertheless, in the pivotal episode of this work (as Pavlovskis also footnotes [1989, 75 n. 18]), Augustine describes his conversion under the ‹g tree as having followed his performance of the scriptural counterpart to the sortes Vergilianae, that is, sortes Biblicae, in imitation of what Augustine had recently heard of St. Anthony’s conversion.18 Upon hearing the voice of an unseen child singing the words, “Take it and read, take it and read” (tolle lege, tolle lege), Augustine picked up the volume of Paul’s epistles that he had just put aside, and, as he recounts, I opened it, and in silence I read the ‹rst passage on which my eyes fell: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in contention and rivalry, but arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the ›esh and its desires.”19 This is the most familiar literary example of sortes Biblicae in history, and as we see, it is based on an exhortation to abandon the ungodly life, including the culpa that Augustine tells us was his last by this point in his narrative: the life given over to lust (“in concupiscentiis”). After reading Paul’s words, Augustine wakens “suddenly” (statim) to his sin and abandons that one last provision he had still been making for his ›eshly appetite, so that he becomes then fully Christ’s. Moreover, this association between Augustine’s conversion and the practice of sortes Biblicae gives us another possible way to understand the Christian cento’s utility and appeal. Taking the bits and pieces of Vergil’s verse that, selected randomly, could be the basis of false prophecies, it instead arranges them ingeniously to tell the Gospel Truth, such that the profane material of sortes Vergilianae is now

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rendered sacred.20 Even, presumably, the phrases and lines describing Dido’s shameful burning, her fury and grief at Aeneas’s betrayal, and her rash and tragic suicide—now that they have been interwoven with other phrases and lines from Vergil to construct a narrative of the life of Christ— are part of a text that could safely and piously be used in turn for a cento counterpart to sortes Biblicae. If one hesitates, in other words, to embrace the view that Vergilian cento poetry “discovers” the Christian Truth embedded within the verses of Vergil, then the argument can be made that it reassembles these verses in order to make them available randomly for the Christian reader who would apply their now-Christian meaning to himself. Pavlovskis also observes of Proba what Philip Hardie does of Vida, that she “must have known all of Vergil by heart, and expected her readers too to be similarly grounded in his poems to appreciate what she was doing” (1989, 80).21 Consequently, Pavlovskis argues, the interaction between author and reader that occurs through the “metalanguage” of cento poetry is of a special nature: “the memory of the author and that of the reader are at work all the time. Both have to be constantly mindful of the original context and denotation and also the new use to which each line or portion of a line has been put, and all the subtleties involved at every step” (80).22 In this way, says Pavlovskis, Proba’s “adaptation gains from the reader’s recollection of the original setting of the borrowings” (74). Pavlovskis brie›y illustrates the point by way of reference to Proba’s narration of the slaughter of innocents, which draws lines from Vergil’s description of the sack of Troy in Aeneid 2. The Greeks’ slaying of the Trojans was “a heartless atrocity, from which Aeneas is divinely saved much as the infant Jesus is snatched from Herod’s maniacal rage,” explains Pavlovskis, who concludes, “The one event is made to pre‹gure the other” (74). In sum, the Christian cento by no means replaces Vergil, because it fundamentally requires “Vergilian memory” for its success. Remove the reader’s familiarity with Vergil’s poetry, and Proba’s poem paradoxically loses all its virtue, becoming an embarrassingly awkward retelling of the Biblical story, with obvious and abrupt gaps and falsi‹cation of much of its material. . . . But then a metalanguage is frequently notorious for its lack of direct meaning. Its impact is oblique, and just as a language is intelligible only to one who has learned it, a metalanguage becomes accessible only to those initiated, who will recognize implicit meanings that elude an outsider. (76)

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< This description of the Vergilian cento’s “semiotics” recovers for us a crucial starting point for an analysis of Ross’s Christiad, although the limitations of space and her essay’s somewhat different focus mean that Pavlovskis’s interpretation of Proba’s verse in light of this semiotics is very brief and although the impact of her sophisticated general description is regrettably diluted by its single, one-dimensional illustration. By focusing exclusively on the effect of pre‹guration in explaining the relationships between the sack of Troy and the slaughter of the innocents and between Aeneas and the infant Jesus, she implies that performing such typological interpretations might be the only exercise of one’s “Vergilian memory” that is required by Proba’s cento. The experience of Proba’s readers would surely have been more complex, more as Pavlovskis imagines it in theory; indeed, it would have had much in common with what we have seen demanded by Vergilian allusions in Vida’s Christiad. Let us therefore examine a passage from Proba’s cento by way of demonstration, which can then lead us into our analysis of Alexander Ross’s epic. The passage is excerpted from Proba’s account of Adam and Eve’s fall and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, beginning with God’s ‹rst words to them after their disobedience. (Book and line references to Vergil’s Aeneid are provided to the side, indicating the source of each cento line.) “procul, o procul este profani” conclamat, caelum ac terras qui numine ‹rmat. atque illi longe gradientem ac dira frementem ut videre, metu versi retroque ruentes diffugiunt silvasque et sicubi concava furtim saxa petunt. piget incepti lucisque, neque auras dispiciunt: taedet caeli convexa tueri.

6.258 6.259/4.269 10.572 10.573 5.677 5.678/6.733 6.734/4.451 (lines 213–19)23

[“Away, away, you profane ones,” he who informs heaven and earth with his divinity proclaims. And when they see him approaching from afar and roaring curses, they turn in fear, ›eeing backwards, and they separate and furtively seek out woods and hollow rocks wherever these might be. They dread the coming light, nor welcome the gentle breeze; they are sick of gazing on the vault of heaven.] The experience of reading this poetry is a constant process of recognizing the Vergilian source and assessing the varying nature of the resonance that

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the original Vergilian context lends to the meaning of Vergil’s words in their new service to a biblical narrative. The ‹rst line of the passage and ‹rst word of the second line (lines 213–14) report the Sibyl’s warning as she turns to guide Aeneas into the underworld. It is Aeneas’s exceptional piety that quali‹es him for that journey and for the reunion with his father that awaits him in the Elysian Fields of the underworld; in contrast, the ‹rst parents’ act of impiety has disquali‹ed them from dwelling any longer in Paradise, and their expulsion anticipates the “underworld” punishments of hell awaiting those who rebel against God their Father. The remaining words of Proba’s second line (line 214) are taken from Mercury’s explanation to Aeneas, in Aeneid 4, that he has been sent by the almighty Jove (“he who informs heaven and earth with divinity”) to command Aeneas to leave Carthage. We note the general similarity between the two moments—a heavenly message is delivered to “leave this place”—but we also perceive the more speci‹c parallels and contrasts between the two sets of circumstances and destinations: Aeneas, at work building Dido’s Carthage when the messenger god appears to him, is scolded for being “uxorius” (Aeneid 6.266) and delaying his fated journey; Adam, who has “listened to the voice of [his] wife” (audisti vocem uxoris tuae [Genesis 3:17]) and eaten the forbidden fruit, is, with Eve, cursed to embark on a journey, to leave the Garden of Eden and wander through the world. Lines 215–16 of Proba’s cento, which, for Proba, describe God’s wrath as he approaches Adam and Eve, were originally applied to Aeneas doing battle against the Latins, just after he had been characterized as “godlike” through comparison to the hundred-handed monster Aegaeon (aka Briarius), who once engaged Jove in battle (Aeneid 10.565–70). Proba’s poem depends on us not only to transfer our recollected awe at Aeneas’s fury and might on the battle‹eld to this new context but, in so doing, to register the absolute disparity between that original “godlike” prompt to awe versus the wrath and power of the one true God. Line 217 and the ‹rst ‹ve words of line 218 originally described the Trojan women, in Aeneid 5, ›eeing the sight of their countrymen in dismay and shame after their realization that Juno had inspired them to set ‹re to their own ships—vaguely paralleling, we might observe, Satan’s deception of Eve before her and Adam’s futile ›ight from the judgment of God. The ‹nal two words of line 218 and the ‹rst word of line 219 emphasize the ‹rst parents’ act of disobedience as the original sin transmitted to all their offspring: they come from Aeneas’s meeting with his father in the underworld, just when Anchises is beginning to relate

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< to Aeneas the process of each soul’s atonement for and purgation of its “stain of guilt” (infectum . . . scelus [Aeneid 6.735–43]). Finally, in the rest of line 219, we encounter the familiar description of Dido in her deep despair, when she sees no hope of future happiness or safety after Aeneas’s departure and decides to take her own life. That Adam and Eve are “sick of gazing on the vault of heaven” is a much graver indictment of their moral failing (as it was of Judas’s) than is the same phrase applied to Dido, for they have known the goodness of God and yet they run away from him, seeking to hide from his anger rather than abandoning themselves to his will and praying for his mercy. Thus the pity that we have felt for Dido is invoked, but it is then transferred to our ‹rst parents, commingled with a censure far severer than that which Augustine and the moral interpreters of the Aeneid level against Dido for the extremity of her passions. Obviously, different readers of Vergilian cento poetry, even among those who have “all of Vergil by heart,” would be able to draw upon their memories in different ways at different times, such that they would be sensitive to the moment-to-moment resonance of the original Vergilian contexts in varying degrees producing varying experiences, so my “readerresponse” analysis of these lines from Proba’s cento is intended only to illustrate the nature of a process. What should be convincing, in any event, is that this process is not con‹ned to a hunt for typological meanings, in the form of ostensible Vergilian prophecies of Christ’s coming, but, rather, entails the constant apprehension of subtle narrative, ‹gurative, and ironic parallels and contrasts between each text, line after line and phrase after phrase. Such a reading experience perhaps could be compared to participating in a trivia game. Yet I suggest that the perceived value of this game in testing and strengthening its players’ faith might partially explain the popularity of cento poetry among Christians, from Proba’s in the fourth century to Alexander Ross’s in the seventeenth.

arma virumque maro cecinit, nos acta deumque; cedant arma viri, dum loquor acta dei. As we might expect of a cento epic that stretches over three hundred pages, Ross’s Christiad is not always so “ingenious” in its composition as Proba’s poem, in that one periodically encounters lines in Ross’s poem that have no

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speci‹c source in Vergil’s works. Some, as Ross admits, contain only Vergil’s “diction”: words and phrases that can merely be found in Vergil and that allude to no single Vergilian passage. (There are also a number of lines, especially in the ‹nal book, that have no basis in Vergil whatsoever.) Yet frequently, as we shall see, there are certain Vergilian words that resonate powerfully and participate fully in the poem’s intertextual “metalanguage,” to borrow Pavlovskis’s term, even when they appear to be detached from any particular, identi‹ably Vergilian context. In addition, Ross relies on multiline passages from Vergil’s works to a much greater extent than does Proba, which is another laborsaving device to be sure, but the effect is a sustained juxtaposition of the Vergilian and the biblical moment, allowing readers more time and more details for their discovery of relevant points of similarity and dissimilarity and for responding with appropriate moral judgments. Finally, we will also observe that the experience of reading Ross’s epic would likely have been further in›uenced by memory of Vida’s Christiad and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Ross seems to have been inspired by these works’ general themes and by their speci‹c Vergilian images and allusions for his selection and arrangement of lines from the Aeneid to recount certain events in Christ’s history, such that the poem’s intertextual “metalanguage” in these scenes proves all the more interestingly layered. This quality strikes us right at the beginning of the Christiad, where Ross supplies the conventional announcement of his theme. Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena Carmen, et Aegypto egressus per inhospita saxa Perque domos Arabum vacuas et inania regna Deduxi Abramidas; at nunc horrentia Christi 25 (5) Acta, Deumque cano, coeli qui primus ab oris Virginis in laetae gremium descendit et orbem Terrarum invisit profugus, Chananaeaque venit Littora, multum Ille et terra jactatus et alto Ni superum, saevi memorem Plutonis ob iram; (10) Multa quoque in monte est passus dum conderet urbem. Nam ligno incubuit, dixitque novissima verba, Et sacram effudit multo cum sanguine vitam; Atque ausus penetrare sinus nigrantis Averni, Sed tandem patrias atque altae victor remeavit ad oras?

1.a24 1.b/5.627 6.269 1.634 1.1 G2.326 4/1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 4.650 2 (7.534) 1.243 1.7

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< (15) Evertitque deos Latii, et genus omne Latinum,

Albanosque patres atque altae moenia Romae.

1.6 1.7 (1–2)

[I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, and sang of him who, leaving Egypt, led the children of Abraham across inhospitable rocks and through empty homes and vacant realms of Arabia; but now of the bristling acts of Christ, and of God I sing, he who ‹rst from the regions of heaven descended in the lap of the joyful Virgin and, a fugitive, visited this world, and came to Canaan shores, much tormented on earth and sea on account not from above, but of the unforgetting wrath of Pluto. And he suffered long upon the mountain until the time he would build a City. For he set himself on the cross, and said his last words, and poured out sacred life with much blood; and having dared to invade the hollow of black Avernus, did he not at last return victorious to his native regions? And he then overthrew the gods of the Latins, and the whole Latin race, and the Alban lords and walls of lofty Rome.] After introducing himself as having sung formerly of Old Testament history (Ross is referring to his ‹rst published works, the Rerum Iudaicarum Memorabiliorum [1617, 1619]), our poet offers a synopsis of his epic that is, as we would expect, mainly composed of lines from the Aeneid’s opening summary. But we also recognize that Ross’s synopsis invokes the allegorical interpretation of Aeneas’s wandering and warfare as the life journey of a good man’s soul, culminating in its victory over sin and ascent to heaven—and, I suggest as well, Tasso’s version of this allegory in his epic of the Christian army’s capture of Jerusalem. First, Aeneas’s exile in this passage is converted into Christ’s brief sojourn in this world. For in contrast to the journey of the unallegorized Aeneas from the ashes of one destroyed city on earth to the site of a future new city on earth, but like the soul of the allegorized Aeneas that returns to its divine source, the Son of God makes a round trip from and back to his “native regions” in heaven (coeli . . . ab oris [5] / patrias . . . ad oras [14]). Second, Christ as “victorious” epic hero will, like Aeneas, “invade” and “overthrow” to ful‹ll his divine mission to “build a City.” This “City” is capitalized in my translation because it clearly refers to the City of God, whose founding entails not defeat of the Latins or toppling the “walls of lofty Rome” but, rather, the Roman Empire’s conversion following the promise of salvation through Christ (though we might also perceive, given Ross’s staunch Protestantism,

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that in these lines he means to prophesy a ‹nal overthrow of the Roman Catholic Church). Like Tasso’s Jerusalem, then, Rome, in this formula, is not destroyed by Christian assault but liberated from darkness, to be newly founded as the earthly city that is a ‹gure for the heavenly city. That statement of the Christiad’s theme thus brings Ross’s biblical epic into loose association with the allegorical tradition, but again, it is the way in which this association contributes to the experience of the reader’s lineby-line encounter with Vergil’s language that makes such an observation meaningful. A passage from the narrative of Christ’s Passion, in book 11, illustrates the point. Nox erat et placidum carpebant fessa soporem Corpora per terras, sylvaque et saeva quierunt Aequora, cum medio volvantur sidera lapsu, Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pulchraeque volucres: (5) Quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis Rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti Lenibant curas, et corda oblita laborum. At non iam Christus (qui tristi in mente volutat Tot curas, cuius divina est ira) medullas (10) Solvitur in somnos, oculisve aut corde quietem Accipit, ingeminant gemitus, semperque recursat Laethi horror, magnoque dolorum ›uctuat aestu.

4.522 4.523 4.524 4.525 4.526 4.527 4.528 6.185 3/4.66 4.530 2/4.531 4.532 (238)

[It was night, and over the earth weary creatures were tasting peaceful slumber, and the woods and wild seas were reposed in sleep, when stars are rolled midway in their gliding, when all the land is still, and beasts and beautiful birds—those that everywhere are in limpid lakes, and those that dwell in ‹elds of tangled brakes—are couched in sleep beneath the silent night. Cares are eased, and the heart forgetful of labor. But Christ (who ponders in his sad mind so many cares, he whose wrath is divine) is not now deep dissolved in sleep, or admits rest into his eyes or heart; his sighs redouble, the dread of oblivion returns again and again, and he is borne by a great tide of sorrow.] In chapter 3, I noted Tasso’s direct translation of the opening lines of this passage (1–7) in Gerusalemme liberata 2.96. The lines in the Aeneid paint a scene of peace and calm to be contrasted with Dido’s restless torment, but

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< in Tasso’s epic, they precede a description of the Christian warriors’ restless desire to reach the city of Jerusalem. By associating their cupidigia with Dido’s culpable desire, so I argued, the allusion works to suggest the soldiers’ moral vulnerability as spiritual pilgrims even as Tasso describes their praiseworthy zeal to liberate Christ’s sepulchre. Recall also that in the cantos of Gerusalemme liberata, vulnerability is made manifest: the warriors succumb to the ignoble passions of lust and wrath, dividing Goffredo’s army against itself and from its purpose. Here in Ross’s epic, Vergil’s lines appear again in a conspicuous block, and here, too, they set up a contrast between a scene of surrounding calm and the burning of human emotion. But this time the words describing Dido’s passion are used to describe Christ’s—and we are required to mark the absolute distinction between them. Unlike our interpretation of Tasso’s warriors, we must not allow Dido’s culpa, through association, to diminish at all our con‹dence in Christ’s blameless character. Instead, Ross would have us recall the properly devout interpretation of Christ “in agonia” (as he is described in Luke 22:43 of the Vulgate). According to the Geneva commentary (to Luke 22:44), Christ’s “great distresse” on this night reaf‹rms that he “was true man.”26 In the reference to his divine wrath (cuius divina est ira [9]), furthermore, Ross includes a reminder that (quoting the Geneva commentary again) “Christ strove not onely with the feares of death, as other men use to doe . . . but with the fearefull judgement of his angry Father: and the matter was for that he tooke the burden of all our sinnes upon himselfe.” Thus, a good part of what is involved in the reading of this passage is a recognition of how it distinguishes, rede‹nes, and redistributes the passions that it portrayed before in Vergil and Tasso. In contrast to Dido’s shameful desire for Aeneas, her violent anger at his departure, and her suicidal despair—and in contrast, also, to Tancredi’s eagerness to die by the sword of his beloved Clorinda and to the fury of Rinaldo followed by his dissipation in the arms of Armida—there is the “agonie” and “distresse” that Christ feels at his pending torture and execution and in his desire to do God’s will. And it is God’s will that Christ sacri‹ce his life for the redemption of the human race, to die for love in the sense that most merits our and Augustine’s tears, because these are tears of gratitude and joy as well as of pity. For an example of a passage in Ross’s Christiad that is complicated by its echo of Vida and the allegorical commentaries, besides its composition out of Vergil, we may turn to the description of the three kings, in book 8, as they are guided by the star to Bethlehem and come upon the infant Jesus in Mary’s arms.

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Postquam digressi coelo constare sereno Cuncta vident, iterum multa cum luce cucurrit Stella ardens donec tandem super astitit aede Virginis, et late lustravit lampade tecta (5) Tunc Reges praeter solitum dulcedine laeti Interiora domus irrumpunt limina, et almum Infantem aspiciunt, quem mater Diva lacertis Ridentem amplexu molli foret; illic vicissim Dat matri amplexus, atque oscula dulcia ‹git. (10) Ut tres conspexit venientes virgo tyrannos Obstupuit primo aspectu tunc plurimus ignem Subiecit rubor, et calefacta per ora cucurrit: Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa (15) Alba rosa, tales virgo dabat ore colores. Mirantur puerum, ‹guntque in virgine vultus Suppliciter Reges, et sanctum Numen adorant. In puero observant divini signa decoris, Ardentesque notant oculos qui spiritus illi, (20) Qui vultus, vocisque sonus; iurat usque videre Virgineum vultum, ut rosea cervice refulget, Utque ›uunt nitidi per lactea colla capilli.

3.518 3.518/2.694 2.694/(6.17) 4.6 G1.412 4.645 8.387 8.387 1.687 3.306 1.613/12.65 12.66 12.67 12.68 12.69 12.70 2.700 G4/5.647 5.648 5.649 3.216/1.402 4/8.660

(166–67)

[Afterwards, having left, they see the star in the calm sky, and brightly the burning star hastened until at last it stood above the house of the Virgin, and far and wide lit the roof with its lamp. Then the kings, with joyous sweetness more than customary, burst into the inner chamber of the house, and they behold the propitious infant, whom the divine mother, smiling, embraces softly in her arms; in turn he gives an embrace to his mother’s side, and she imprints sweet kisses. When the Virgin saw the three kings coming in, she was ‹rst astonished by the sight and then a deep blush was set a‹re, and it coursed across her burning face: just as if someone had stained Indian ivory with bloody dye, or as when white lilies are tinted red by intermingled roses, so the Virgin displayed in the color of her face. Suppliant, the kings marvel at the boy, and they fasten their looks on the Virgin, and they adore holy God. In the boy they observe signs of divine grace, and they note the burning eyes, what spirit, what visage, and the sound of his voice, and all the while he conspires to gaze on the face of the Virgin, as her roseate neck gleamed, and as her shining hair ›owed over her milky neck.]

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< Like Vida, Ross borrows Aeneid 12’s enigmatic report of “Lavinia’s blush” for part of his description of the Virgin Mother. In Vida’s poem, we recall, the occasion of “Mary’s blush” was the prophets’ prayers for a sign that would identify her chosen husband. On either side of the allusion to Lavinia in Ross’s poem, however, the portrait of Mary and the Christ child is composed of readily recognized phrases that were originally applied by Vergil to Venus and Dido. The combination is somewhat startling, even when we account for the restrictions Ross was under in relating the particular details of any given biblical episode (there is, after all, only one scene in the Aeneid in which a woman exchanges caresses with an infant). The challenge of this combination for Ross’s readers is in rightly parsing its moral associations. As we saw in Vida’s Christiad, Mary’s blush in lines 11–16 of Ross’s poem can only have the most positive signi‹cance that critics have ascribed to Lavinia’s original—as a sign, that is, of the maiden’s innocence and modesty. We could also, just as appropriately, surmise in the manner of Botta, by interpreting the lilies and roses to symbolize respectively Mary’s “purity” and “love of her chastity” (Vida 1569, 93r; see discussion in chap.4 of the present study). But this passage in the Christiad also demands of its readers some rather abrupt interpretive adjustments going into and following just after this moment of her blush. Line 9’s description of the infant Christ returning his mother’s embrace while she “imprints sweet kisses” is at once recognized as having come from Venus’s speech to Cupid in the Aeneid, when she is instructing him to approach Dido in the guise of Aeneas’s young son, to play in her lap and receive her kisses, so that he can “inspire a hidden ‹re and beguile her with [his] poison” (occultum inspires ignem fallasque veneno [1.688]). Amor goes as his mother bids, and Dido— “knowing not how great a god settles there to her sorrow”—takes him to her and “fondles him in her bosom” (interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido, / insidat quantus miserae deus [1.718–19]). We register the lowest common denominators of these two scenes from the Aeneid and Christiad—a child in a woman’s lap and a god of love made ›esh—but obviously we are expected to reject immediately all the negative attributes of Vergil’s con‹guration of this scene (especially as the moral commentaries de‹ned them), even as we read his words in Ross’s epic. Venus sent her son to poison the queen of Carthage with a shameful, earthly love, which ultimately brought her sorrow and untimely death, but God, in his in‹nite love and goodness, sent his son as a blessing not only to Mary but to all humankind, for though, by her son’s sacri‹ce, she will know deep sorrow, yet she is

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ennobled (she is the mater Diva who shall become the Queen of Heaven), and by this son’s death, he will conquer all death, not bring more of it. Having thus distinguished Mary from Dido, unhappy victim of Venus, we next contemplate the Virgin Mother in her kinship with Lavinia as symbol of purity and chastity (as already discussed). Then, in line 21, Ross invites us to compare and distinguish between Mary and Venus herself, upon encountering the detail that Mary’s “roseate neck gleamed” (rosea cervice refulget). It was the sign of this gleaming that ‹rst revealed Venus’s identity to Aeneas outside Carthage, eliciting from him the complaint: “Why, so cruel, do you mock your son so often with false images? Why may not I join my hand to yours and hear and speak true words?” (Aeneid 1.407–9). Hence, our ‹rst obligation is to mark the contrast between Aeneas’s frustrated desire for his mother’s honest companionship, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, this image of the baby Jesus freely enjoying the embraces of his mother and the beauty of her face. But this does not quite dispel the potentially unsettling associations attached to the line, particularly given its coordination with the two other remarks on Mary’s beauty that follow: Mary had “shining hair” that “›owed over her milky neck” (›uunt nitidi per lactea colla capilli). These observations are not so much the narrator’s as those of the three kings in the room, men whose hearts could be moved in the wrong way by these sights of feminine beauty—and would be if moved by the passions of the earthly Venus. Our responsibility, when reading these details, is always to understand that when the pious “fasten their looks on the Virgin,” as the kings do in this passage, they are moved by her beauty to “adore holy God” (‹guntque in virgine vultus . . . sanctum Numen adorant [Christiad 16–17]). They are inspired, as it were, by the celestial Venus. In such moments as this, I would submit, Ross’s cento invites its readers to measure themselves by their own pious or imperfect response to Mary’s beauty, to ask whether they are moved like the three kings to the love of God or instead catch themselves in ‹xed admiration of her lovely hair and skin. A similar challenge to revise one’s response to a Vergilian description of physical beauty occurs in what would seem, at ‹rst, the unlikely moment of book 12’s narrative of the cruci‹xion, where Mary and the apostles are grieving at the foot of the cross. On seeing Mary’s suffering, Simon Peter goes to give her comfort. Hanc ubi conspexit curis ingentibus aegram, Demisit lachrymas, dulcique affatur amore est.

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< Ecce tuum natum mulier, tum forte Johannem Conspexit, simul his ardentem affatur amicum: (5) Ecce tuam matrem. Perculsa mente dederunt Adstantes lachrymas; ante omnes ipse Johannes; Atque animum patriae strinxit pietatis imago. Tum coepit solari inopem, et succurrere solae, Et colere ut propriam genetricem; sic pius heros (10) Lugentem matrem nolebat linquere solam, Sed consanguineo lachrymans commendat amico: Foelix sorte tua, foelix hac matre Johannes, Et foelix tectum cui talis contigit hospes, Nempe dei genetrix, forma pulcherrima virgo.27

1/3 9.198 1/9.292 9.293 9.294 9.290 4/4 6/9.482 5.771 12.932/4 2/8 2.788/1.496

(257)

[When he observed her suffering with weighty sorrows, he shed tears and spoke to her with sweet love: “Oh woman, behold your son”—and then by chance he saw John, and at once he addresses his impassioned brother, “Behold your mother.” Standing near with stricken minds they shed tears, John himself before all others; and the image of fatherly devotion moved his soul. Then he began to comfort the helpless woman, and to give aid to her, so forsaken, and to care for her as his own mother. Thus the pious hero was unwilling to leave this mourning mother alone, but weeping commends her to his loving brother: “Happy in your fate, happy in this mother, John, and happy the abode such a guest has touched, truly the mother of God, a virgin most beautiful in form.”] When, in Aeneid 1, Vergil introduces “forma pulcherrima Dido” (496) in progress with her train of youths, it is shortly after Aeneas has heard her story from his mother, Venus, and just as he is marveling at the grandness of Dido’s city and the tragedy of Troy’s destruction depicted on the walls of Juno’s temple, so that when Dido appears to him, he is already “stunned and standing in one ‹xed gaze” (stupet obtutuque haeret de‹xus in uno [495]). He is all too ready, in other words, to be seduced from his divinely appointed destination by the crowning vision of Dido’s splendor and beauty. For readers of Ross’s epic, in contrast, it is hard to imagine a less appropriate moment to pause and admire the Virgin Mother as a seductive “forma pulcherrima virgo” (particularly given the way this phrase emphasizes the quality of shapeliness). We would have to count this as one of the more “embarrassingly awkward” Vergilianisms in cento poetry (as

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Pavlovskis, cited earlier in this chapter, admits is ever risked by the form), except that having read Vida’s Christiad, we understand readily what response Ross aims to elicit by it. The word foelix—meaning both “happy” and “fruitful”—is repeated three times in lines 12 and 13 of this passage, recalling to memory Dido’s epithet infelix just before the words referring to her (now Mary’s) beauty appear in line 14. Here, at this time of tremendous grief for Mary and Christ’s disciples, Dido’s epithet could, in the precise sense of “unhappy,” be decorously applied to her and them. Instead, Ross applies the opposite word, foelix, to those who will offer Mary shelter, who adopt her as their own mother, signifying, of course, all those who will acknowledge her son as Son of God and their Savior and who are thus “happy in [their] fate.” This shift of focus, from the mother’s grief for her martyred son to the happy fruit of his martyrdom, patterns the interpretive move required of readers when Mary is described as “forma pulcherrima.” She is genuinely beautiful, to be sure, just as she is genuinely suffering: but it is understood that her maternal unhappiness at this moment signi‹es the world’s happiness hereafter and that her being “most beautiful” points to her being most blessed, just as Botta understood Vida to mean when he translated Vida’s prior use of the phrase “pulcherrima virgo” as “beatissima virgo” (Vida 1569, 93r; see chap. 4). In a sense, Dido thus haunts Ross’s epic, and Vergil’s lines depicting her torment by love occur regularly in places we would probably not expect. In book 11, for example, Ross employs the familiar passage that opens Aeneid 4 to describe the anxiety that Peter feels after Jesus has been taken prisoner. At mens Bar-Jonae iamdudum saucia cura Vulnus alit venis, et caeco carpitur igne: Multa viri Virtus animo, multusque recurrit Oris honos, haerent in‹xi pectore vultus, Verbaque nec placidam membris dat cura quietem.

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

(242–43)

[But the mind of Peter, long stricken with grief, feeds the wound with his blood and is consumed by hidden ‹re: over and over the virtue of the man, the grace of his features, return to his heart, his image and words remain ‹xed in his breast, and sorrow admits no quiet rest to his limbs.] However much we may have been conditioned to reject our tears for Dido, the burden is on us not to permit our recognition of these lines’ original

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< reference to taint or trivialize Peter’s anguish. Instead, this passage invites us to remember and to revive our feelings of pity for the Aeneid’s tormented lover just long enough to transfer them to this different kind of “lover” in Ross’s Christiad, whose torment, by comparison to Dido’s, is now to be remembered as more worthy of our tears. In a variation on the tradition of negative allegorical interpretations of the queen of Carthage, Ross involves us in a process of repeatedly remembering Dido for the twofold purpose of condemning her as exemplum of ignoble love even while exploiting her emotive power in the praise of Christian virtue. How Dido works in the Christiad is representative of how this patchwork poem works generally. Calling Peter “the pious hero” invites our admiration of his devout and ‹lial character, as it does of Aeneas’s, but it also demands that we mark the distinction between Peter’s faith in the one true God and Aeneas’s (and Vergil’s) reverence of “the false and lying gods.” We are similarly tasked by the title page couplet that advertises the Christiad’s rejection of Vergil’s martial theme—“Arms and the man Maro sang, we, acts and God; away with the arms of Man, while I speak the acts of God” (Arma virumque Maro cecinit, nos acta Deumque; / Cedant arma Viri, dum loquor acta Dei)—even though Ross concludes his epic with an urgent call to arms. As book 13’s “argument” paraphrases (after narrating the Son’s last appearances and instructions to the apostles and his apotheosis to heaven), “Christians are exhorted to mutual peace again, and to wage war against the Turks” (Christiani ad pacem mutuam rursus exhortantur, et ad bellum Turcis inferendum [288]). That this “exhortation” partly is conveyed through a notorious speech of Dido’s from Aeneid 4 complicates its message interestingly and makes a ‹tting close to our analysis of Ross’s epic. In urging a united Christendom to make war on the in‹del, Ross writes, Exoriare aliquis nostratum ex ossibus ultor Qui face barbaricos, ferroque sequare tyrannos Nunc, olim, quocunque dabunt se tempore vires: Littora litoribus contraria, ›uctibus undas Imprecor arma armis pugnent, ipsique nepotes.

4.625 4.626 4.627 4.628 4.629

(309)

[Arise from the ashes, some avenger of ours, who will pursue these barbarian tyrants with ‹re and sword—now, someday, whenever strength may be given its time: let shore with opposite shore, I pray, let waves with waves, and arms against arms do battle, against them and all their children.]

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This passage, we recognize, is from Dido’s curse against the departing Trojans, speci‹cally her prayer for some future Carthaginian-born “avenger,” understood to have been answered in the person of Hannibal, who brought “‹re and sword” almost to Rome’s gates. By converting this prayer to a call for holy war, Ross in one sense “puri‹es” its savagery, by inscribing it within the same ethos that justi‹es Tasso’s celebration of war in Gerusalemme liberata: the modern epic poet may sing of arms as long as they are a Christian’s used to liberate Christ’s sepulchre or to preserve Christendom. But also like Tasso, Ross may mean more than he says in imagining glorious victory over the Turk. He may instead mean just what he had stated in his title-page announcement, “away with the arms of Man, while I speak the acts of God,” for the image of war against the Turk often served allegorically to represent the soul’s battle against the temptations of the ›esh or its defense against temporal or spiritual oppressors.28 We are returned by this point, ‹nally, to Petrarch’s allegorization of Hannibal’s war against Rome and to Hannibal’s defeat by Scipio in the Africa, in which Dido’s prophetic curse is answered by the soul’s victory over the culpa her city symbolizes. But in Dido’s and now Ross’s prayer, victory is not imagined to be ‹nal. The soul’s battles against “barbarian tyrants” is being waged and will be waged in “all [our] children.” One aspect of that battle is the Christian’s duty to interpret devoutly, to distinguish between profane and pious, culpable and innocent, falsity and truth. That, I submit, is the conception behind Ross’s cento Christiad—not to teach “all [our] children” Vergilian Latin without ever exposing them to Vergil’s epic, but to enlist readers’ knowledge of Vergil’s epic in the ongoing defense of their faith.

ch a p ter s i x

Augustinian Epic in Paradise Lost

=< milton’s reading and milton’s readers Every Miltonist will have recognized in the preceding chapters that my analyses of the Christiads by Marco Girolamo Vida and Alexander Ross argue a “way of working” that anticipates the method of Paradise Lost as Stanley Fish interprets it in his landmark study Surprised by Sin. This acknowledgment, however, must be attended by two points of quali‹cation, especially given the heated, but generally confused, polemics still being directed against Fish’s book. For those not familiar with it, a concise statement of its thesis is in the preface to the second edition. Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are; its method, “not so much a teaching as an intangling,”1 is to provoke in its readers wayward, fallen responses which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the narrator, God, Raphael, Michael, the Son). In this way, the reader is brought to a better understanding of his sinful nature and is encouraged to participate in his own reformation. (1997, x)2 So, as Fish explains, “if the reader” of Paradise Lost “loses himself in the workings of the speech even for a moment,” such as in the heroic rhetoric of Satan’s rallying calls to war against God or in the adjectives describing 156

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Eve’s physical beauty, then “he places himself in a compromising position,” for “[h]e has taken his eye from its proper object—the glory of God, and the state of his own soul—and is at least in danger” (12). The way the poem tempts its wayward readers into “mistake,” followed next by their “correction” and “instruction,” is admittedly, says Fish, a humiliating and unpleasant process. But in answer to the question, “why read a poem that treats the reader so badly?” Fish replies that “for the seventeenth-century Puritan and indeed for any Christian in what we might call the Augustinian tradition” (my emphasis), the “discomfort” of that process “would be paradoxically a source of comfort and the unpleasantness a source of pleasure” (44), because “for the Christian reader Paradise Lost is a means of con‹rming him in his faith” (55). The John Milton that Surprised by Sin describes has not been to everyone’s taste. Most famously, he has been condemned as “a knuckle-rapping peremptory prig . . . who already knows the truth of things, humiliates and berates his charges for their errors and requires conformity to his authoritative understanding” (Rumrich 1990, 259).3 But obviously this is a gross caricature of Fish’s argument and underestimates how pleasurable the con‹rmation of deeply held faith could have been to Milton and certain of his readers (certainly his imagined readers), even if stages of the process did involve discomfort. On the other side, Fish probably does underestimate how alert Milton’s ‹ttest readers would have been to the method he describes and how swiftly their performance of a self-correction would have followed hard upon the committing and recognizing of a “mistake.” Indeed, they very likely would have proven quite adept at avoiding mistakes in the ‹rst place4—which would make the experience not so much chastening as self-congratulatory. Just as the intended male reader of the Christiads could recognize the impropriety of indulging in a carnal response upon encountering Mary as “pulcherrima virgo” (even as he perceived the invitation and, perhaps, felt brie›y the inclination to indulge himself), he might be trusted, as he read Paradise Lost, to be on his guard against taking lewd delight in the vision of Eve’s “Heav’nly form” (9.457) or against rushing to negative judgment of Eve’s character when reading that her “unadorned golden tresses” were “wor[n] / Dishevell’d” and “in wanton ringlets wav’d / As the Vine curls her tendrils” (4.305–7). We can imagine the same discernment when this reader encounters the fallen Adam’s accusation that Eve’s “Heav’nly form” is a temptation to sin or the earlier scene in which “hee on Eve / Began to cast lascivious Eyes” and “she him / As wantonly repaid” (9.1014–16)—giving “wanton,” only then, “its fallen

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< meaning,” as Fish notes.5 Instead of feeling shame at his prior carnal response to nakedness or his premature suspicion of Eve’s innocence, in other words, he responds with satisfaction that he saw coming these examples of unbridled passion, unregenerate reason, and the fallen use of language. He saw the poem’s earlier temptations for what they were, as temptations to indulge his own fallen habits of carnal desire and evil thought, and he resisted them triumphantly. That we might so readily envision such a very ‹t reader of Milton’s poem has everything to do with our discovery of how Vida and Ross work and with perceiving that those among Milton’s readers who shared his familiarity with the Neo-Latin Christiads could have come to Paradise Lost already prepared for its temptations.6 They would not, in other words, have been so much surprised. Fish himself locates the theological and psychological basis for his view of Milton’s method in contemporary Puritan writings and Milton’s own prose works, and these do articulate suf‹ciently clearly a theoretical ground for the idea of composing a poem that “teaches by intangling.” In his De Doctrina Christiana, for example, Milton de‹nes “a good temptation” as that whereby God tempts even the righteous for the purpose of proving them, not as though he were ignorant of the disposition of their hearts, but for the purpose of exercising or manifesting their faith or patience, as in the case of Abraham and Job; or of lessening their self-con‹dence, and reproving their weakness, that both they themselves may become wiser by experience, and others may pro‹t by their example: as in the case of Hezekiah.7 In the Areopagitica, Milton similarly declares that he “cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary,” for “that which puri‹es us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary” (Milton 1959, 515). The author of such statements, one can imagine, would make just the sort of poet whom Fish describes. Yet there remains among scholars an uneasy perception that Fish’s Milton seems to come out of nowhere, with insuf‹cient precedent in literary history for attempting what Fish says he attempts “in Prose and Rhyme” (Paradise Lost 1.16). We could reply that this objection overlooks Fish’s own identi‹cation, in Surprised by Sin, of a “Virgilian precedent” (47). He refers us to the resoluteness of mind that “pius Aeneas” exhibits in the face of Dido’s pleas in Aeneid 4, a scene “designed to dramatize for the reader exactly what the adjective pius means” (47–48). Aeneas’s heroism, says Fish,

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“is here measured by the effort of will it requires to leave Dido, and the reader, in turn, must measure himself against the hero’s response” (48)— just as “our response,” in reading Paradise Lost, “measures us” (271). But this is a Vergilian precedent found in many texts other than Vergil’s, as we have seen. In The City of God, Augustine used this episode from the Aeneid to emblemize the steadfast Christian’s resistance to ›eshly temptation, while in the Secretum, the Augustine of Petrarch’s dream recites it for Petrarch’s edi‹cation, contrasting the wayward poet’s steadfastness in error against the steadfast purpose of the pious hero. Subsequently, in Christian epics, we encounter an ongoing response to Augustine’s demand that Petrarch abandon his poetry. Epics do so by claiming a sacred purpose: some proceed demonstratively, through allegorical representations of the good man who overcomes the temptations of the earthly city, follows the path to a life of contemplation, and prepares for entry into the City of God; others proceed rhetorically, through biblical epics that challenge their readers to overcome the temptations that life (including epic poetry) puts in their path. In sum, Milton could look to quite recent precedents for putting readers on trial “by what is contrary” and for “exercising their faith” through “a good temptation.” Exemplars were available, not in Vergil’s epic, but in the epic Christiads.8 Moreover, we shall discover that Paradise Lost engages equally with the allegorized Aeneid and the allegorical epics examined in the ‹rst three chapters of this study.9 We thus have an opportunity to add to the insights of previous Milton criticism by reconsidering Paradise Lost as a poem whose Vergilian echoes are in some instances made fully functional by its readers’ familiarity with these intermediary texts, just as proved to be the case with the biblical epics of Vida and Ross. Of course, as scholarship on Milton continues to demonstrate, the idiosyncratic combination of philosophical and religious beliefs that he came to embrace in later life is in evidence at every turn in Paradise Lost, and we ‹nd that his imitation of elements from the allegorical epic tradition was accordingly in›ected. It has, for example, already been shown (most meticulously by Stephen M. Fallon) that while Milton on occasion employs images and terminology that evoke the conventional dualist de‹nitions of ›esh and spirit as distinct substances, a de‹nition underlying the allegorists’ Neoplatonic scheme of the soul’s pilgrimage from bondage in the ›esh to its puri‹cation in heaven, he nevertheless adjusts that imagery to reject that dualism in accordance with his vision of a monistic universe.10 As much as his own views differed radically from the Neoplatonism of Landino or Fabrini, therefore, or from the

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< Roman Catholicism of Marco Girolamo Vida, bishop of Alba, Milton could ‹nd ways to make their prior transformations of Vergilian epic enabling of his own. Here, I will ‹rst mark how he does so at the local level, by tracing his strategic use of Vergilianisms from the Dido and Aeneas story that we have seen acquired new sets of associations in the contexts of earlier Christian epics. Next, I will attend to Paradise Lost’s echoes of the allegorical epic plot, including Milton’s subtle invocation and revision of the “doctrine of the two Venuses,” the Augustinian contrast between the earthly and heavenly cities, and the spiritual pilgrimage that escapes the one to the other. I will then turn to an analysis of the poem’s variation on the Dream of Scipio motif, which we discover in the education of Adam but more interestingly in the dream of Eve. And ‹nally, I will examine an allusion to Scipio that makes clearest sense when we perceive it as an allusion to Petrarch’s Africa. As such, it signals the manner in which Paradise Lost repudiates the formula by which the Africa responds to Augustine’s warnings in the Secretum. In this way, Milton adopts an alternative via that uniquely avoids the Petrarchan paradox with which this study opened— Petrarch’s contradictory attempt, that is, to win a negative via to heavenly glory by writing an epic of the soul’s victory over lust, even after he had conceded to Augustine that such worldly labors endangered his soul no less than did his lust for Laura.

the happy r hetor ic of paradise lost We have observed the word felix (alternatively foelix) applied in the Christiads by Vida and Ross to various ‹gures, in different contexts with a differing range of implications, but always with an implied contrast to Vergil’s infelix Dido, who meets all three of that word’s de‹nitions: “unhappy,” “unfortunate,” and, its primary sense, “unfruitful”—being still childless at her death. When Milton uses the word happy in Paradise Lost, we discern that it likewise connotes and sometimes denotes the meaning of “fruitful” and that right from the start of the poem these associations juxtapose the Dido-Aeneas story and Adam and Eve’s.11 Readers are challenged by the poem to distinguish the similarities and differences between the two stories; but the interpretive process that this challenge demands is given focus, and its educative purpose is de‹ned, by the biblical nuances that Milton’s poem attaches to such words as happy after the pattern of the Christiads before him. To begin with, a clear instance of Milton investing the word happy with

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its Latin range of meanings may be seen in the passage of Paradise Lost describing Adam and Eve in Paradise, when “the Almighty Father . . . bent down his eye, / His own works and their works at once to view” (3.56–59). On Earth he ‹rst beheld Our two ‹rst Parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy Garden plac’t, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivall’d love In blissful solitude.

(3.64–69)

Eden is a “happy Garden,” literally, because it is a fruitful garden, providing our ‹rst parents with everything they need to sustain their life of joy and love forever. Accordingly, the abundance of actual fruits to be reaped there aptly serves (in the expression “Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love”) as a ‹gure for their “Uninterrupted joy” and “unrivall’d love,” as well as, by implication, their future children. For though the “‹rst Parents” are “yet the only two / Of mankind” at this point, we know they are charged to imitate the garden, to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). That Paradise Lost depicts Eve’s and Eden’s fruitful natures as virtual mirrors of one another has been often remarked and keenly studied.12 A well-known instance is Raphael’s greeting upon his descent from heaven to instruct Adam, when he says to Eve, Hail Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful Womb Shall ‹ll the World more numerous with thy Sons Than with these various fruits the Trees of God Have heap’d this Table.

(5.388–91)

But these linked notions of the ‹rst parents’ and the garden’s “happiness” are juxtaposed, from the start, with the Aeneid’s unhappy love story. In the opening invocation of Paradise Lost, the poem’s narrator prays for the “[Holy] Spirit” (1.17) to “say ‹rst what cause / Mov’d our Grand Parents in that happy State, / Favor’d of Heav’n so highly, to fall off / From thir Creator” (1.29–32). He then asks, “Who ‹rst seduc’d them to that foul revolt?” and answers, “Th’ infernal Serpent; hee it was, whose guile / . . . deceiv’d / The Mother of Mankind” (1.33–36). Even so brief an explanation of the fall—that the loss of happiness occurred after Eve was deceived by Satan’s

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< “guile,” a customary translation of Venus’s “dol[u]s” as she communicates her plot to Cupid at Aeneid 1.673—invites comparison with the story of Dido’s deception and death.13 But once we have observed this, the various analogues between Eve and Dido must be unraveled and sorted from the crucial points of difference. Both women, for example, despite having been deceived, are faulted for the unhappiness that they bring on themselves and the world: on the day that Dido gives herself over to the culpa she “calls marriage” (coniugium vocat; hoc praetexit nomine culpam [Aeneid 4.172]), says Vergil, “that was the ‹rst day of death and ‹rst cause of evil” (ille dies primus leti primusque malorum / causa fuit [4.169–70]). This passage refers not only to her own suffering but to the suffering of those who would be touched by her curse in the three Punic Wars.14 The line is echoed by Milton in Paradise Lost when, earlier in the invocation, he writes that Adam and Eve’s “mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe” (1.2–3). But among the various points of comparison and contrast that this echo might evoke for us, if we should focus our attention especially on the differences between Dido’s unhappiness and Eve’s, then potentially, as we shall see, the steps toward distinguishing between them may lead one to the conclusion that Adam and Eve were right to, even meant to, disobey God’s one prohibition. The process could lead us, in other words, to the most literal conception of the felix culpa, which, for Milton, was a vulgar parody of the doctrine and represented spiritually dangerous error. Being the “Mother of Mankind,” Eve does not become infelix in the other sense that is true of Dido, for although her “sorrow,” as God pronounces, will “greatly multiply” in the conception of children (10.193–95), children nevertheless prove her felix, fruitful, multiplying. That contrast sets up another. Whereas Dido’s culpa is followed only by “death” and “evil,” making it truly an unhappy, unfortunate failing, an infelix culpa, we might presume to perceive the better by this contrast that, in God’s Son’s sacri‹ce to redeem the faithful from sin and death, God so contrives it that happiness follows from Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience, so that theirs literally is a felix culpa—a sin that was good for having been committed. That is an inference we might also draw from other passages in Paradise Lost in which Milton plays upon the felix/infelix opposition, such as when Eve protests, upon being led to the Tree of Knowledge, “Serpent, we might have spar’d our coming hither, / Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess” (9.647–48). What she believes to be “fruitless” and unfortunate, the cause of unhappiness and death only, we may surmise is really the means to “fruits” that are in “excess” of those she sees or can imagine. For Eve

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unknowingly anticipates in her words—does she not?—the “New Heav’ns, new Earth,” and “Ages of endless date” when humankind shall enjoy the “fruits” of “Joy and eternal Bliss” (12.549–51). A comparable prophecy may be heard in Milton’s introduction to Raphael’s greeting, partially quoted already, in which “the Angel [on Eve] Hail / Bestow’d, the holy salutation us’d / Long after to blest Mary, second Eve” (5.385–87). As felix can in ecclesiastical contexts, happy may mean “blessed” or “beati‹ed” (not yet an obsolete usage in Milton’s day),15 so here again we may detect an invitation to rejoice that the ‹rst Eve forfeited her “happy State” to make possible Mary’s and that of the Christian faithful. The Virgin Mother is “blest,” fortunate, made happy, precisely because she is fruitful, bearing the Son of God so that, “to the faithful,” as Michael reveals to Adam, “Death” becomes “the Gate of Life” (12.571), and for them, a “paradise within” awaits that is “happier far” than “this Paradise” from which he and Eve are ejected (12.586–87, with an equivalent statement at 12.463–65). If we go down this road, however—if the contrast of Dido’s infelix culpa encourages us to neglect the complexities of the paradoxical doctrine, if it instills or contributes to an impression that Milton represents Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience as felix itself—then we have not properly compared Dido’s and the ‹rst parents’ acts in a way that recognizes their likeness in culpability and that differentiates the “unfortunate” fall (as Eve confesses it at 10.970) from God’s merciful plan of redemption, which is fortunate. As Denis Burden paraphrases this particular admonishment of Paradise Lost, “It is one thing to say that Adam is, as a result of the Atonement, better off than he was in Paradise, but something altogether different to suggest that he is better off than he would have been if he had stayed obedient” (1967, 37).16 Raphael is explicit in his instruction to Adam that “God made thee perfet, not immutable” (5.524), and he encourages Adam to expect that he may improve his condition far beyond the happy state that he currently enjoys in Eden. “If ye be found obedient, and retain / Unalterably ‹rm his love entire” (5.501–2), says Raphael, “time may come when men / With Angels may participate” (4.593–94). Raphael later continues this thought. And from these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, Improv’d by tract of time, and wing’d ascend Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice Here or in Heav’nly Paradises dwell.

(5.496–500)

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< If such supreme happiness is attainable through continued obedience to God, only fallacious (fallen) reasoning could ever come up with the idea that by an act of disobedience one could reach it faster or obtain it in greater supply. To justify rebellion against God, moreover, on the grounds of God’s power to turn evil to good not only “make[s] nonsense of his justice” (Burden 1967, 37) but, as the scripture that Milton quotes in De Doctrina Christiana testi‹es, is precisely the “snare of the devil” (Timothy 2:26), “the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2).17 Here in Paradise Lost, then, is an example of an effect that we have encountered in the Christiads: a certain range of associations attached to the Aeneid’s Dido and Aeneas episode are summoned up but require careful sorting to avoid erroneous judgments. And therefore we have also arrived, by a different route, at Neil Forsyth’s apt conclusion on the felix culpa in Paradise Lost. “The doctrine of the Fortunate Fall is present in the poem,” he says, albeit in a “hesitant and ambivalent way,” and it is “ever threatening to become a Satanic parody of itself”; yet “as the state of man now is, it is necessary they be intermixed since it is the Miltonic reader’s task to distinguish them” (2003, 328–29). I would again admit that this process is somewhat like a game, but as Milton would insist, the game is a matter of spiritual life and death when the epic matter is biblical and the theme “the ways of God” (Paradise Lost 1.26). A similar instance of a Vergilianism that potentially elicits an improper response is in the passage of Paradise Lost describing Eve’s “Heav’nly form / Angelic” (9.457–58). This subtle allusion to the beauty of Dido, “forma pulcherrima” (Aeneid 1.496) becomes less subtle in the immediately following lines of Paradise Lost, where we read that this sight of Eve’s angelic beauty (“but more soft, and Feminine”) brie›y overawes Satan on his mission to ruin the ‹rst parents’ happiness, so that he “abstracted stood” and “for the time remain’d / Stupidly good” (9.463–66). There is a clear parallel here to the effect of Dido’s beauty on Aeneas, who, as Mercury scolds with disdain (“heu!”), has become stupidly derelict, “forgetful of his kingdom and fortunes” (regni rerumque oblite [Aeneid 4.267]).18 The allegorical interpretation of Aeneas’s delay in Carthage puts into even higher relief the points of similarity and difference between these episodes. The good man, in youth, is shown to be distracted from his goodness by enjoyment of feminine beauty for its own sake, temporarily giving himself to the pleasures of the ›esh before maturing to the realization that earthly beauty is to be enjoyed only as a prompt to the contemplation of heaven, of God, of Truth.

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“The Evil one” of Paradise Lost (9.463) also temporarily gives himself to the enjoyment of feminine beauty for its own sake, but he is distracted from his evil rather than from his goodness—he is “of enmity disarm’d, / Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge” (9.465–66)—and being committed to evil rather than goodness (“Evil be thou my Good,” he has declared [4.110]), there is no “maturation” or improvement of his condition to be looked for: “the hot Hell that always in him burns” eventually “end[s] his delight, / And tortures him now more” (9.467–69). The question to us, in this scene, is the same as that posed, in their respective Christiads, by Vida (3.141, 177) and Ross (257) when they praise Mary as a “pulcherrima virgo.” Will we, Aeneas-like, be distracted from our goodness by our contemplation of Eve’s “Heav’nly form”? Will our attention and thoughts linger in “delight” on this image of the naked Eve’s beautiful shape, thereby rendering us mirror images of Satan’s abstraction from evil to stupid goodness? Or will imagining Eve’s body inspire instead (as the allegorical epic would urge us) our delight in the contemplation of God, who formed Eve’s beauty as an earthly shadow and reminder of the beauty of heaven? The test, we might say, is in the nature of our response to the next line’s mention of Eve’s “graceful Innocence” (Paradise Lost 9.459). We should understand this literally, that her innocence is “full of divine grace” (the ‹rst de‹nition of graceful supplied in the Oxford English Dictionary [2nd ed.], indicated there to be now obsolete, but the sense is obvious). We may also perceive innocently that the words suggest an Eve who “wears her innocence gracefully”: her “grace-full” innocence is evident in the simplicity and elegance of her movements. But graceful ordinarily describes attractively ›uid physical movements, and both the parallel structure of the phrasing—“her Heav’nly form,” “Her graceful . . .”—as well as the string of descriptive modi‹ers—“Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine . . . graceful . . .”—build a momentum that might easily incline us, with Satan, to “delight” in the image of Eve’s physical beauty for itself, to ‹xate on this image despite the word “Innocence” when it appears and to continue to do so as the sentence proceeds to detail Eve’s “every Air / Of gesture” and “least action” (9.459–60). That response would be as inappropriate as admiring the physical beauty of the Virgin Mary for its own sake, rather than, as the two Christiads prompt us, recognizing it as a sign that she is blessed with the fullness of God’s grace. It would be, in effect, to make of Eve’s beauty a “snare,” just as Adam accuses it of being when, after he has persuaded himself to eat the forbidden fruit, he blames his loss of innocence on her “too heav’nly form” (10.872–73).

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< the soul’s pilg r image In Milton’s Areopagitica, the sentence immediately preceding the passage quoted in the ‹rst section of this chapter—on the need to exercise one’s virtue by trial—reads, “He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian” (1959, 514–15). In the volume of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton from which I cite, an editorial note explains that “the printed text has wayfaring,” but the word has been emended because, “in all four presentation copies” of the tract (plus several others), we see “the y crossed through in ink and an r written above it.” Besides this evidence, the note continues, “the image of the Christian pilgrimage, frequently found elsewhere, never occurs in Milton” (1959, 515 n. 102). I have no objection against this emendation itself, for the change does seem to have “Milton’s authority,” and the editor rightly observes that “the main image” of the immediate context “is that of struggle,” implying the adventures of a “warrior” (ibid.). Moreover, it would not be wrong to point out that Milton never wrote anything like The Pilgrim’s Progress. Yet just in the brief space that we have so far given to examining scattered scenes and details in Paradise Lost, we begin to discern already what I would insist is in fact the case, that “the image of the Christian pilgrimage” from allegorical epic tradition is everywhere hovering in the background of the poem, serving as antithetical theme for the backward progress of our ‹rst parents and investing the poem with its relevant typological and demonstrative lessons.19 When we read in Paradise Lost, for example, Raphael’s explanation to Adam (who is already living a life of “contemplation,” for which he was “form’d” [4.297]) that he and Eve may be “Improv’d by tract of time,” re‹ning their very material substance to the point that they might one day “With Angels . . . participate,” we are invited to contemplate with regret this image of the easy, unobstructed journey that humankind could have taken, from an original happy state to an even happier one, if we had but remained obedient to God’s uncomplicated instructions for life in Paradise.20 In contrast to Raphael’s vision of what could have been is the epic journey of the allegorized Aeneas—an arduous and perilous journey that fallen man is fortunate to have at all by the mercy and grace of God—which Milton invokes explicitly when the Almighty Father prophesies for the Son that the ‹rst parents’ sin will be redeemed, that by his sacri‹ce on behalf of humankind, the faithful may, “by degrees of merit,” be “rais’d” and “open

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to themselves at length the way / Up hither, under long obedience tri’d” (7.157–59). Likewise, the contrasting images of the “two cities” recur throughout Paradise Lost: Pandemonium is the “city” of Satan (10.424), a “metropolis” (10.439) that serves as hellish model for the earthly city to come,21 while in God’s conversation with the Son, “Another World” is promised for the saved (7.155). Famously, this world is described in the same Vergilian idiom of ageless empire that Augustine had adopted for identical purpose. Jupiter’s declaration, “I have given [to Rome] empire without end” (imperium sine ‹ne dedi [Aeneid 1.279], elaborated in 3.305–22), for instance, is echoed in Paradise Lost by God’s characterization of heaven as “One Kingdom, Joy and Union without end” (7.161). Later, when the archangel Michael shows to Adam a vision of the coming of Christ, he explains: A Virgin is His Mother, but his Sire The Power of the most High; he shall ascend The Throne hereditary, and bound his Reign With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heav’ns.

(12.368–71)

We perceive here Milton’s invocation of Jupiter’s other promise, that “from this glorious source shall be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall limit his empire with ocean, his fame with the stars” (nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar, / imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris [Aeneid 1.286–87]). By converting the language of Roman Empire into that of a Christian Paradise, the City of God, Milton invokes the same contrast that the allegorical epics pose between the active life on earth and the holy life in heaven, and like the authors of those epics, he urges his readers to dedicate themselves to the second. It has also been remarked that the ‹nal sentence of Paradise Lost, describing Adam and Eve’s departure from Paradise (“They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took thir solitary way” [12.648–49]), recalls Psalms 107:4. As Fowler observes in his note to these lines (Milton 1998, citing Astell 1985), “those who heard this echo would remember the continuation” of the psalm and recall its two images of “seeking” or “traveling to a city.” When they wandered in the desert and wildernes out of the way, and founde no citie to dwell in,

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< Bothe hungrie and thirstie, their soule fainted in them. Then they cryed unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distres, And led them forthe by the right way, that they might go to a citie of habitacion.22 This passage lends itself to allegorical interpretation that may apply equally to our ‹rst parents, to Aeneas as Everyman, or to the wayfaring Christian. There will indeed be “no citie” waiting for Adam and Eve “to dwell in,” just as Aeneas can never settle in any other city but the one he is destined to found in Italy, the one that symbolizes the life of contemplation and puri‹cation of the soul in preparation for its apotheosis; yet, according to Paradise Lost, “Such favor” are they “voutsaft” that God mitigates their suffering on the journey and eventually “shall all restore” through that “Promis’d Seed” (12.622–23), the Savior, who will lead humankind “to a citie of habitacion” in heaven. But let us examine a passage from Paradise Lost in which an allusion to earthly empire may be just perceptible (though to my knowledge it has not been previously remarked) and, if indeed it is there, lends something of a contextual commentary on the signi‹cance of the scene’s action. It is the very moment of Eve’s fall: her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluckd, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.

(9.780–84)

The stark simplicity and slow measure of the words “she pluckd, she eat” detain us just enough to allow due shock and horror at Eve’s “rash” act of disobedience. But the phrase also, I think, ends abruptly, and in some way it disappoints expectation, as if one more something that she did is left wanting, a third “she . . .” to round out the expression. I already noted Milton’s revision of Jupiter’s prophecy in the Aeneid in which Julius Caesar is praised for extending the Roman Empire to every shore and raising his glory to the stars. That shadow of empire is to be contrasted, in Paradise Lost, with the true empire of heaven. Here, I suggest, the brevity of the phrase “she pluckd, she eat” echoes the inscription of Caesar’s Pontic triumph, “I came, I saw, I conquered” (veni, vidi, vici), reported by Suetonius

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and referring, in Suetonius’s words, “to the speed with which the war was won” (celeriter confecti notam [1998, 1.37]). In the case of Eve in the preceding passage from Paradise Lost, by contrast, the phrase stops short after the second part; or, rather, the third is supplied three lines later, in line 784: “all was lost.” Meanwhile, Adam—“divin[ing] of something ill”—“the falt’ring measure felt” (9.846, my emphasis). Eve had vaguely, confusedly, hoped to conquer something by plucking and eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; to become, like the serpent, suddenly “wise” (9.778, 867); to be “growing up to Godhead” (9.877) by virtue of this negative via that the serpent is selling, a get-wise-quick, “God-like food” (9.717). But “all was lost”; or alternatively, what was “won” was precisely the fallen world in which the measure of victory and glory is that which exalts a Caesar, returning with the spoils of war to Rome, seat of earthly empire. The “doctrine of the two Venuses” similarly underlies several Vergilian images and allusions in Paradise Lost. We ‹nd, in particular, that Milton depicts the sin of lust in an emblematic or synecdochical relation to the other sins, a relationship seen in the Aeneid commentaries of Landino and Fabrini (as discussed in chap. 2 of this study), where Dido, victim of the earthly Venus and symbol of earthly love, serves as emblem of earthly desires generally—of the cares of the active life that, if not overcome, lead to more killing forms of cupidity and spiritual death. So, for example, in Paradise Lost, Sin springs from Satan’s head as he plots rebellion against God, and he “Becam’st enamor’d” of her, taking “joy” with her “in secret” (as in a Carthaginian cave), so “that [her] womb conceiv’d / A growing burden” (2.765–67) and Death was born. Later, the “operation” that was “‹rst display’d” in Adam and Eve after both have eaten the forbidden fruit is “Carnal desire in›aming” (9.1012–13), which they indulge (as in a Carthaginian cave) under “a shady bank, / Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowr’d” (9.1037–38), consummating their choice of Death over life in Paradise (9.1167). Lust, in the allegorical epic tradition, is symbolized by Dido but proves Pandora-like, as Milton says of Eve that her disobedience against God made her “O too like” Pandora “In sad event” (4.715–16), because the one sin includes all others.23 It is on this ground that Dido’s culpa, her carnal sin that “was the ‹rst day of death and ‹rst cause of evil” (Aeneid 4.169–70, quoted earlier in this chapter), serves in Paradise Lost as a faint ‹gure of the rebel angels and ‹rst parents’ original culpa, their revolt against God, which we may spy in the reference to Satan and his warring comrades “Hurling de‹ance toward the vault of Heav’n” (1.669). In this line, Milton joins the stock epic gesture of

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< the battle‹eld, the proud warrior “Hurling de‹ance” against his enemy, with a use of the word vault that was common enough in poetic contexts (meaning “the sky”; see Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “vault,” 1c). But the phrase “vault of Heav’n” is also a literal and customary translation of “caeli convexa,” which we have encountered several times in the preceding chapters. It appears ‹rst in the Aeneid, as we know, in Vergil’s description of Dido as she burns for Aeneas and despairs at his departure, when, “awed by her doom,” she “prays for death, . . . sick of gazing on the vault of heaven” (Tum vero infelix fatis exterrita Dido / mortem orat; taedet caeli convexa tueri [4.450–51]). Such an allusion to Dido at this point in Paradise Lost makes sense in two ways. Obviously, it communicates the hopelessness of the rebel angels’ position and the despair underlying and undermining their vaunting words (“Peace is despair’d,” Satan tells his comrades just beforehand [1.660], referring explicitly to the coming battle and unintentionally to his eternal existence). But also, the allusion asserts about their sin what we know to be true of Dido’s, when we recall her role in the allegorized Aeneid and allegorical epics: her culpa and theirs represent all the ignoble passions, all unholy desires. Milton invokes the celestial Venus when the Creator replies to the queries of the Son, O Son, in whom my Soul hath chief delight, Son of my bosom, Son who art alone My word, my wisdom, and effectual might . . .

(3.168–70)

John Steadman (1959) was the ‹rst to note that this passage echoes Venus’s words to Cupid at Aeneid 1.664–65: “Son, my son, alone my strength, my mighty power . . .” (nate, meae vires, mea magna potentia, solus, / nate . . . ). Steadman also points out that this line is used in the same way by Proba in the Centones Virgiliani (line 403), to identify Christ as the “God of Love,” paralleling Cupid. That suggestion of correspondence might seem a particularly unsettling one given the original context of the line in the Aeneid, where it serves as prelude to Venus’s instructions to Cupid to in›ame Dido with the passion that will destroy her. We are familiar, though, with the epic device of transforming the negative exemplum from Vergil into its positive Christian counterpart. Milton invokes the earthly Venus of the allegorized Aeneid in order to replace that image with its true celestial opposite, the God of Heaven, whose Son, in contrast to Cupid (but

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like the celestial Venus who shepherds Aeneas to the contemplative life and, in Vegio’s Supplement, to heaven), saves. Such allusions in Paradise Lost to the allegorical tradition’s “doctrine of the two Venuses,” the scheme of “the two cities,” and the soul’s pilgrimage from the earthly one to the celestial other ask of us constantly to translate the terms of the allegorized Aeneid into the drama of the fall and, in the process, to see its truth more fully. My analysis of the following passage suggests that they have also the aim of prompting us to experience the emotional impact of that truth so that we might all the more strongly feel compelled to cling to it steadfastly, with mens immota. The passage alludes to a stage in Aeneas’s journey that was among the most often imitated, as I previously noted in the analysis of Tasso’s version. Eve has just come from eating the forbidden fruit and, “with Count’nance blithe,” has to Adam “her story told.” But in her Cheek distemper ›ushing glow’d. On th’ other side, Adam, soon as he heard The fatal Trespass done by Eve, amaz’d, Astonied stood and Blank, while horror chill Ran through his veins, and all his joints relax’d; From his slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve Down dropp’d, and all the faded Roses shed: Speechless he stood and pale . . .

(9.886–94)

These lines are dense with biblical and classical allusions, both obvious and faint—from Job to Vergil and possibly Statius, as many have documented24—and they invert into their “fallen form” images that appear earlier in Paradise Lost. Eve’s “›ushing” cheek, for example, contrasts with “her blushing like the Morn” when she was led by Adam “To the Nuptial Bowre” (8.510–11), and now “faded” are the roses that before, through the association with the Virgin Mary, had symbolized Eve’s purity and chastity.25 Here, I will reexamine the implications of the Vergilian allusion in this passage, implications that are multiplied by the allusion’s long history within the allegorical tradition. Adam’s reaction to Eve’s story mimics the response of Aeneas to the sight of “black blood” dripping from the broken branches that encase the slain Polydorus. “Cold horror shakes my limbs,” recounts Aeneas, “and my blood freezes with terror” (mihi frigidus horror / membra quatit geli-

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< dusque coit formidine sanguis [Aeneid 3.29–30]). His paralysis and the act of releasing the rent twigs in response to Polydorus’s plea to “spare the pollution of [his] pious hands” (parce pias scelere manus [4.42]) is mirrored in Paradise Lost by Adam, who, in his shock, “From his slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve / Down dropp’d.” But Aeneas’s original destructive and de‹ling act—the plucking of Polydorus’s branches—was mirrored earlier in book 9 of Paradise Lost by Eve, when she “pluck’d” the forbidden fruit, not sparing her “rash hand” from that act of impiety that provoked a reaction much like, but much greater than, Polydorus’s “piteous groan,” heard by Aeneas “from the depth of the mound” (gemitus lacrimabilis imo / auditur tumulo [Aeneid 3.39–40]). In Paradise Lost, “Earth felt the wound,” we are told, “and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe” (9.782–83). We may be reminded by this detail of the consequence of Tancredi’s failure in the “Wood of Error” (Gerusalemme liberata 13.52–69, discussed in chap. 3 of this study): nature responded with a killing drought. Consistent, too, with Eve’s decision that something she lacks can be obtained by eating the forbidden fruit, the country of Thrace in the allegorized Aeneid represents “avarice,” for the name of its king, Polymnestor, means, as Bernardus Silvestris explains, “plurium mensura, ‘the measure of more things,’” while Polydorus is “multa amaritudo, ‘great bitterness’”; hence, Polydorus “is buried in Thrace because there is great bitterness involved in avarice.”26 It is also signi‹cant that Aeneas’s landing in Thrace is the ‹rst stop that he makes after quitting “in tears” his “native shores and harbors, and the plains where once was Troy” (litora . . . lacrimans portusque relinquo / et campos, ubi Troia fuit [Aeneid 3.10–11]). Thrace represents the beginning of Aeneas’s journey (as Everyman) from youth to maturity, from earthly desires to heavenly contemplation, so in relation to Paradise Lost, we can either contrast that journey with Adam and Eve’s Edenic journey of regression—Adam originally “for contemplation . . . and valor form’d” (4.297), “Hee for God only” and Eve “for God in him” (4.299), but now spending “fruitless hours” in “vain contest,” a wandering in which there “appear’d no end” (9.1188–89)—or translate it into the journey that Christ’s sacri‹ce will make possible for humankind, that by which the faithful may “open to themselves at length the way / Up [to heaven], under long obedience tri’d” (7.158–59). Finally, we perceive that Dante’s transformation, in the Inferno, of the Polydorus episode informs Milton’s imagination, along with—but also through—its intermediate transformation in Tasso’s “Wood of Error” and

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in the warning of Pilate’s wife, in Vida’s Christiad, to spare Jesus’s life. The haunting realm of suicides, where souls are trapped inside of trees and bleed when they are torn, frames Milton’s account of the fall in Paradise Lost to the extent that the ‹rst parents, when they “willingly chose . . . Death” (9.1167), committed a form of suicide. But we also recall the anticipation of Judgment Day in Dante’s canto, when it is explained that the bodies of the suicides will descend and hang in their gnarled branches (Inferno 13.106–8). That image serves as a hellish parody—and a memento—of the cruci‹xion that made their despair unnecessary and their suicide a damning sin, comparable to the way that, in the Gerusalemme liberata, Tancredi’s knowledge of the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross should have preserved him from his fear and from the delusion that the souls of Christ’s followers could be encased in trees. The allusions to Polydorus’s fate in Vida’s Christiad and in this scene in Paradise Lost likewise look ahead to Christ’s sacri‹ce of his “holy blood” on a “tree.” As God had explained to the Son earlier in Milton’s poem, that death will, by God’s grace, enable “all mankind” to “live in thee transplanted, and from thee / Receive new life” (3.286, 293–94; my emphasis).

e ve’s premature scipionic dream In book 11 of Paradise Lost, after the fall, the Almighty Father sends Michael to earth to “drive out the sinful Pair” from Paradise (11.105). “Yet lest they faint / At the sad Sentence rigorously urg’d,” he also instructs the archangel, “Dismiss them not disconsolate; reveal / To Adam what shall come in future days, / As I shall thee enlighten, intermix / My Cov’nant in the woman’s seed renew’d” (11.108–16). Forthwith, we see Adam and Michael “both ascend / In the Visions of God” to the summit of “a Hill” (11.376–77), which was Of Paradise the highest, from whose top The Hemisphere of Earth in clearest Ken Stretcht out to the amplest reach of prospect lay.

(11.378–80)

The scriptural inspirations for this ascent and for Adam’s visions are well known: there is the testimony of the “divine vision” of Ezekiel, when “the Lord,” says that prophet, “set me upon a verie hie mountaine” (Ezekiel 40:2, Geneva version); and as Milton acknowledges in Paradise Lost, right after the lines just quoted, Adam’s ascent anticipates the temptation of

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< Christ as reported in Matthew, when “the devil toke [Jesus] up unto an exceading hie mountaine” (4:8, Geneva version), “Whereon for different cause,” writes Milton, “the Tempter set / Our second Adam in the Wilderness, / To show him all Earth’s Kingdoms and thir Glory” (Paradise Lost 11.382–84). Milton was no less aware that precedent was to be found in epic tradition for Adam’s vision of the future, and not only in Aeneid 6, where Aeneas sees all his future progeny stretch out before him, including a second Aeneas in the Emperor Augustus, who has now been supplanted, as we might say, by Christ, “Our second Adam.” Goffredo’s dream meeting with Hugh in Gerusalemme liberata is also a model, but more similar to Adam’s experience is Scipio’s dream in the Africa, which is based more closely than Tasso’s on its Ciceronian source (and Macrobius’s commentary), even as it also recycles (as I noted in chap. 1) the Vergilian motif of the dead father instructing the divinely appointed hero of his destiny. Adam and Scipio are both taken up to a great height for the purpose of gazing down on the earth and learning the course of human history. Because one of the lessons expressed in Paradise Lost for this scene is to scorn “this transient World” (12.554), in the knowledge of earthly vanities and wretchedness in contrast to the true glory that is promised to the virtuous in heaven, one reaction provoked by Scipio’s father and by the archangel Michael is an outburst of despair from their auditors and yearning for early death. In the Africa, Petrarch’s Scipio, on hearing that his fated victory over Hannibal will only brie›y postpone Rome’s inevitable downfall, tearfully protests: Quid superest? dominam quis nunc manet exitus Urbem? Corruet, an stabit? Quod si frustra arma movemus, Exime, tot curas animo tantosque labores: Somnum redde oculis et membris redde quietem. Nam michi si, cogente Deo, patrieque cadendum est, Quid iuvat obniti contra Fatoque prementi Humanas affere manus? Moriamur inermes! Vivat et in toto regnet ferus Hanibal orbe! (2.23–30) [What besides? What end now remains for our imperial City? Will she fall, or stand? For if in vain we brandish arms, release us from so many cares of the soul and such labors: return slumber to our eyes and rest to our limbs. If, in God’s plan for me and the fatherland, we must fall, what help to human beings is it to struggle against fate and resist what

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is foretold? Let me die unarmed! Let savage Hannibal live and reign over all the world! (28–40; see chap. 1 n. 1 for explanation of line numbers to translation)] This speech, including its string of interrogatives, is echoed in Paradise Lost, when, after Adam has been shown the “many shapes / Of Death” (11.467–68), he cries out, O miserable Mankind, to what fall Degraded, to what wretched state reserv’d! Better end here unborn. Why is life giv’n To be thus wrested from us? rather why Obtruded on us thus? who if we knew What we receive, would either not accept Life offer’d, or soon beg to lay it down, Glad to be so dismist in peace.

(11.500–507)

In the Africa, Scipio’s father is “indignant” and will “not bear” such talk (Non tulit indignantem animo pater [2.31]). He proceeds to instruct his son on what he must do to live worthily so that he may merit the eternal happiness that is his fate in the next life. In Paradise Lost, in reply to Adam’s speech, Michael similarly counsels, Nor love thy Life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st Live well, how long or short permit to Heav’n.

(11.553–54)

I review this correspondence between the Dream of Scipio and the vision of the fallen Adam because of the perspective that it offers on the Satan-inspired dream recounted by the unfallen Eve in Paradise Lost 5.27 Indeed, I assume that Milton expected readers to recognize in this episode that Eve begins to embark on a Scipionic dream, because knowing where such a dream would be headed helps us to understand the reason for its being so soon aborted in her case and to discern, too, how it works to af‹rm Eve’s untainted innocence at this point in her history.28 During Eve’s narrative of this dream, she tells Adam that she saw “One shap’d and wing’d like one of those from Heav’n” (5.55) standing by “the Tree / Of interdicted Knowledge” (5.51–52). His “dewy locks,” she says, “distill’d / Ambrosia” (5.55–56), a detail that alludes to the “ambrosiae . . . comae” of Venus at the

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< conclusion of her meeting with Aeneas outside Carthage in the Aeneid (1.402). It was one of the signs that revealed Venus’s identity to her son in that scene, so in Paradise Lost, it could indicate to us that Eve is about to experience a temptation equivalent to Aeneas’s: the enticements, that is, of the earthly Venus, from which the Trojan hero must extract himself in order to resume his divinely appointed journey and enjoy at last the gifts of the celestial Venus.29 In Eve’s dream, though (as we would expect), Satan couches his earthly enticements in terms that promise celestial rewards. Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods Thyself a Goddess, not to Earth con‹n’d, But sometimes in the Air, as wee, sometimes Ascend to Heav’n, by merit thine, and see What life the Gods live there, and such live thou.

(5.77–81)

At the moment that this dream angel plucks and holds the fruit to Eve’s mouth, we notice, she does not confess herself tempted by his promises but only refers to the sensual attraction of the fruit—its earthly or “›eshly” temptation: “the pleasant savory smell / So quick’n’d appetite,” she says, “that I, methought, / Could not but taste” (5.84–86).30 Perhaps (it is an issue of some controversy) she did taste, but immediately (as a result of tasting?) Eve ascended into the sky, so that she enjoyed a sweeping view of all the earth below. Forthwith up to the Clouds With him I ›ew, and underneath beheld The Earth outstretcht immense, a prospect wide And various . . .

(5.86–89)

For Cicero and Petrarch, elevated perspective assists the dreaming Scipio to comprehend fully the moral and metaphysical messages that he has been selected to receive, but these lessons, if the equivalent were articulated here, could only be baf›ing to an unfallen Eve, for neither could be reconciled to her past instruction or experience. The hero Scipio is informed, ‹rst, of a personal destiny that it is his duty to ful‹ll. Scipio must conquer Carthage and restore peace to Rome. Second, he receives instruction on the immortality of the soul, so that he will learn to “look down on” the narrowness of the mortal world. He must scorn its transient rewards and live

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to merit heaven’s eternal joy. But it is Eve’s understanding that she has already been informed of her “destiny” in the world: to populate it, not to abandon it. And besides, peace in Paradise has not been lost, so there is none to restore. Rather, this dream attacks her peace of mind, urging Eve to scorn life as she knows it, to resent being “to Earth con‹n’d” and to reach, by disobeying God’s law, for “What life the Gods live.” But life as Eve knows it is not “con‹n’d.” Life in Paradise is eternal and literally, in Milton’s monistic universe, of a piece with the life enjoyed by the angels. In sum, though it is true that she and Adam have much to learn about themselves and the world, life’s essentials have been spelled out to them: they know their duties, their rewards, and the experience of eternal bliss that is theirs simply by continuing to be as they are. So a question such as is posed, in the Africa, to Scipio by his father—“To what end are such labors in a ›eeting world?” (quo tanti mundo fugiente labores? [2.351])—would make no sense to Eve, who is yet sinless, yet innocent of that fallen perspective to which Satan would entice her from that high vantage. In terms of the action of Paradise Lost, Eve’s dream is interrupted when the angel Ithuriel discovers Satan sitting “Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve” (4.800). With a prod of his spear, Ithuriel averts the arch‹end’s design to “raise” in Eve “distemper’d, discontented thoughts, / Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires / Blown up with high conceits ingend’ring pride” (4.806–9). But I suggest that there is also a simple cognitive explanation for the dream ending just when it does. Eve cannot comprehend it.31 As she continues the report of her experience, Eve remembers “wond’ring at [her] ›ight and change / To this high exaltation,” when “suddenly” (as a result of “wond’ring”?), My Guide was gone, and I, methought, sunk down, And fell asleep; but O how glad I wak’d To ‹nd this but a dream!

(5.89–93)

It is telling, I think, that when Satan, in book 9, approaches Eve in the form of a serpent and “His fraudulent temptation . . . began,” his very ‹rst words to her are “Wonder not” (9.531–32). On the one hand, the imperative is disingenuous: Eve’s “wonder” can be useful to his purpose, in that wonder turned to inquisitiveness might be turned to cupidity and perhaps, hope of hopes, to disobedience. But a “wond’ring” Eve might equally frustrate Satan’s designs, because wonder stalled at amazement or confusion is cog-

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< nitive impasse. Of course, there is enough in this dream to push Eve to another stage yet, the stage of suspecting ill, for her “guide” urges her to disobey God’s command. She does not state such a suspicion, but given her “gladness” at waking and discovering that the experience was “but a dream” (as well as the physical evidence of her perturbations, as Adam witnesses), we might reasonably infer that it was she, uncomfortably uncomprehending of her dizzying ›ight and change, who sent her bad guide away no less effectively than Ithuriel’s spear.32 When Satan later goes to tempt Eve in the garden, therefore, the trick will be to provoke in her a wonder that leads to a desire for change, not a wonder that only amazes or confuses. He ‹nds the trick in having the change (apparently) wrought in the serpent (though really in him), rather than in her, so that when she hears him speak, she is “much marvelling” and “not unamaz’d” (9.551–52), but she is not completely dumbfounded or made stupidly bad (she must freely fall).33 Instead, she is inquisitive. “What may this mean? Language of Man pronounc’t / By Tongue of Brute, and human sense exprest?” (9.553–54). In being inquisitive, she is yet sinless; she will not fall unless she tastes. But at this point, Satan has avoided her falling out of his hands, which she did when she “sunk down” out of the clouds in his botched ‹rst attempt to tempt her, in the Scipionic dream that he had prematurely devised for her unfallen unconsciousness.

p e t r arch’s culpa and milton’s cal ling The poet of Paradise Lost is no less mindful than previous Christian epic poets of the need to justify his “advent’rous Song” (1.13) even as he sings it. He seeks to “justify the ways of God to men” (1.26), he tells us, but we may ask, can that pious aim compensate for the prideful boast of an epic poet who would out-Vergil Vergil, venturing “Things unattempted yet in Prose and Rhyme” (1.16)? From the beginning, Milton leaves himself open to the same charge that Augustine levels against Petrarch in the Secretum, that his very vocation as an epic poet undermines his prayer that his might prove an “upright heart and pure” (1.18). Perhaps it is enough that the poem affords readers opportunities, as Stanley Fish has described Milton’s method, to test the power of their reason and the strength of their faith.34 I have argued that both the method and the justi‹cation have precedent in the epics I am calling Augustinian, primarily the Christiads by Vida and Ross, so that by the time we read Milton’s famous request of Urania, in the invocation to book 7 of Paradise Lost, that she “govern” his “Song / . . . and ‹t audience ‹nd,

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though few” (7.30–31), we understand that he well could have hoped that some of these few would be found, ready-‹t for the temptations of Paradise Lost. But as for his other readers, Milton will endeavor to train them up. Indeed, the process of learning to read rightly is so integral a theme to Paradise Lost that it is modeled for us, as Fish points out, in Adam’s instruction under Michael. The major milestone in Adam’s progress occurs in his response, after a vision of the Flood, to “a Bow / Conspicuous with three listed colors gay.” Milton informs us that this rainbow “Betok’n[s] peace from God, and Cov’nant new” (11.865–67), and he reports that “the heart of Adam, erst so sad / Greatly rejoic’d” at the sight (11.868–69). For though Michael’s pupil still must inquire about the mechanical purpose of these streaks of color in the sky—“serve they as a ›ow’ry verge to bind / The ›uid skirts of that same wat’ry Cloud / Lest it again dissolve and show’r the Earth?” (11.881–83)—he has nevertheless already guessed that they have a greater signi‹cance for human history, in the way that he perceives that the streaks are “Distended as the Brow of God appeas’d” (11.880). The insight prompts him to exclaim: “I rejoice / For one Man found so perfet and so just, / That God voutsafes to raise another World / From him, and all his anger to forget” (11.875–78). Says Fish, “Adam’s great success occurs when he infers the spiritual sense of the rainbow without Michael’s prompting (one might say he invents ‹gurative reading here)”; but equally, “the reader too now ‹nds that the connections he had been struggling to make (between his own experience and Adam’s, between individual lessons learned and the great lesson to be learned from the example of Christ) are now made for him” (1997, 321).35 Milton’s conception of the Christian epic poet’s ministering vocation, however, is in one respect radically different from that of his predecessors in the tradition of the Augustinian epic and may indeed be seen as a rebuttal of one of its central elements. Milton communicates this idea, I suggest, in an allusion to Petrarch’s Africa that de‹nes his calling as a poet in contradistinction to Petrarch’s culpa.36 It occurs in book 8 of Paradise Lost, during Adam’s appeal to God to repair his initial, solitary condition in Eden. Pointing to the “inferior” creatures that are “far beneath [him] set,” Adam asks the Maker, “Among unequals what society / Can sort, what harmony or true delight?” (8.382–84), and “th’ Almighty,” though “not displeas’d” (8.398), “tr[ies]” him with a query (8.437). What think’st thou then of mee, and this my State, Seem I to thee suf‹ciently possest

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< Of happiness, or not? who am alone From all Eternity, for none I know Second to mee or like, equal much less. How have I then with whom to hold converse Save with the Creatures which I made, and those To me inferior, in‹nite descents Beneath what other Creatures are to thee?

(8.403–11)

Adam’s reply, it is invariably noted, echoes Cato’s famous praise of Scipio Africanus—reported twice in Cicero’s works and previously quoted in this study—that the conqueror of Hannibal was “never less alone than when alone” (numquam minus solum esse, quam cum solus esset [De republica 1.17.27]; nec minus solum, quam cum solus esset [De of‹ciis 3.1]). Says Adam to God: Thou in thy secresie although alone, Best with thyself accompanied, seekst not Social communication . . .

(8.427–29)

That Milton would ask us to recollect Scipio’s solitude just at this moment, when Adam is requesting a companion and will soon be given Eve, makes most sense not in light of Cato’s or Cicero’s political and moral philosophy but in light of Petrarch’s epic poem on Scipio, who, in his own estimation (not only in the Africa’s allegory), is worthy of most praise because he has conquered lust in himself and lives single (as he boasts at Africa 5.395–420, 519–50). In the Africa, Massinissa, having learned (as we saw in chap. 1 of this study) from the counsel and example of Scipio, chides himself by musing, “I could have lived a king without a wife, and this would have been preferable, as our Scipio has lived a celibate” (5.579–81). That, in turn, evinces the familiar example from the Confessions of Augustine, who, on his conversion, was able to say at last, “I sought neither a wife nor any hope of this age” (8.12.30). But now, in Paradise Lost, Milton applies Cato’s words of praise to the only being to whom they can properly apply. From Milton’s Protestant perspective, a life in solitude is contrary to what the Bible instructs is an essential feature of human life. Only God can be “never less alone than when alone,” for “the Lord God” had “said,” “It is not good that the man shulde be him selfe alone: I wil make him an help mete for him” (Genesis 2:18, Geneva version). In Paradise Lost, Raphael famously

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admonishes Adam to avoid the pitfalls of “carnal pleasure” (8.561–96), but for Milton, it is not good enough—it is too simple—for the good man merely to conquer lust in himself or even to learn to enjoy a woman’s beauty as a spur to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. Milton demands his readers to take seriously the notion that Eve is “an help mete for him,” ‹t for him, or as the Vulgate has it, “similar to him” (similem sui). There is a passage in Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that is typically cited for its apparent illumination of Milton’s aims in depicting Adam and Eve’s wedded relationship before the fall.37 The same passage also articulates a parallel in Milton’s thinking between the optimal lapsarian marriage relationship (one modeled on the prelapsarian ideal) and the ideal relationship that Milton posits between epic poet and his ‹t readers. He reminds us of St. Paul’s dictum that “It is better to marry then to burne” (citing 1 Corinthians 7:9), and he then interprets as follows: Mariage therefore was giv’n as a remedy of that trouble: but what might this burning mean? Certainly not the meer motion of carnall lust, not the meer goad of a sensitive desire; God does not principally take care for such cattell. What is it then but that desire which God put into Adam in Paradise before he knew the sin of incontinence; that desire which God saw it was not good that man should be left alone to burn in; the desire and longing to put off an unkindly solitarines by uniting another body, but not without a ‹t soule to his in the cheerfull society of wedlock. (Milton 1959, 251)38 Just as Milton reconceives the “burning that mariage is to remedy” as a “rationall burning” (ibid.), he also reconceives Petrarch’s other culpa, the desire to be an epic poet, as a “rationall burning” for the company of ‹t readers. For Milton, it is not good enough—again, it is too simple—for the epic poet to admonish us to conquer the “meer motion of carnall lust” or even to urge us, as the allegorical epics do, to enjoy the literary depiction of feminine beauty as a spur to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. The province of Christian epic poetry is more profound than that, requiring the epic poet to serve in a role akin to that which, in Paradise Lost, Michael directs Adam to assume, as Eve’s spouse and spiritual counselor (“Hee for God only, shee for God in him” [4.299]), imparting to her “Chie›y what may concern her Faith to know,” that they “may live . . . Both in one Faith unanimous though sad, / With cause for evils past, yet much more cheer’d / With meditation on the happy end” (12.599–605).

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< In this way, Paradise Lost asserts two complementary states of Christian virtue against the paired sins that constitute Petrarch’s culpa, by rejecting the sin that Augustine the convert called “seeking a wife,” rejecting the celibacy of Scipio, and extolling instead the pious relationship of man and woman in holy wedlock—for itself, and for its ‹guration of the holy bond between pious poet and pious reader. With far more con‹dence than Petrarch that his epic is doing God’s work, in other words, Milton rejects Petrarch’s conception of the poet as an anxious Christian pilgrim pursuing a negative via perhaps to safety, perhaps to damnation. In Milton’s moral universe, the vocation of the Christian poet ‹nds its defense—is reconceived as a sacra via—by this correspondence between the scripturesanctioned burning to unite with a “‹t soule” in marriage and the poet’s noble burning to unite with his ‹t audience.

Afterword Augustinian Epic in Romance Epic—Re›ections on Spenser’s Faerie Queene

=< For some readers, possibly, the rhetoric of my argument in chapter 6, especially the ‹nal section’s characterization of Milton’s answer to what could only be, for him, an unacceptable binary opposition in the Augustinian epic between being a prisoner to lust and living a life of contemplative celibacy, will imply a picture of the poet that has of late been much decried by those critics who lament that it is the prevailing one: a Milton who is supremely con‹dent in the tenets of his faith, in his self-knowledge and understanding of human nature, in the aims and art of his epic masterpiece. Yet to observe that Milton evinces, in Paradise Lost, “far more con‹dence than Petrarch that his epic is doing God’s work” is not, after all, to claim so very much, given Petrarch’s skyscraping anxieties.1 I do hope that I have demonstrated in this study that Milton was working as deeply as he was broadly within a tradition that includes both Neo-Latin and vernacular exemplars: that he adapted certain features and adopted certain strategies of the allegorical and biblical epics that he knew, and that by crafting a ‹gural link between the ideal relation of husband and wife (as he conceived it) and that of poet and reader, he imagined an alternative to the stark logic of the “doctrine of the two Venuses” and yielded a new apology for the vocation of Christian poet. Thus our alternate course through the literary 183

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< history of Renaissance Christian epic illuminated some aspects of Milton’s poem that we otherwise neglect or, more typically the case, that we attend to but less ably interpret when their precedents are mainly sought in Spenser’s Faerie Queene or in Vergil’s Aeneid directly. The same I hold true of our understanding of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata when its primary points of reference are Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso or the Aeneid without its allegorical dressing. Even so, I will be the ‹rst to concede that there are good reasons for the comparatively more intensive study that scholars have given to the vernacular romance epics. These much vaster poems not only re›ect but interrogate and critique many more facets of their cultural milieu, and speak to us across the centuries on several more levels, than do the Latin works discussed in this book. And they do so not only because they speak in living modern languages rather than in a “dead” classical one. Petrarch’s Africa, the Christiads by Vida and Ross, and other normally neglected Latin works do merit and will reward more critical attention for their own sake; but even if such attention originally should be motivated, as mine was here, by a curiosity about the intertextual commerce between the Latin and vernacular traditions, we in the ‹eld of Renaissance studies stand to gain by whatever more light can be shed on both traditions, because in at least some respects, they are not different traditions but one. We might anticipate, therefore, future studies of epic poetry that explore more systematically than I have done here (in my analysis of Ross’s Christiad in chap. 5) the in›uence of vernacular epics on Latin ones, rather than, as has so far been the rule, the other way around. Here, however, there is opportunity to take up the related question of how my analyses of Augustinian epics might supply new terms for characterizing both the differences and the relations between their kind and romance epic. For this purpose, it is only ‹tting that I return to the poem that was most conspicuously passed over in my alternative history of the epic, The Faerie Queene. Though I would not claim, as I have of Paradise Lost, that The Faerie Queene was written both within and against the Augustinian epic tradition, it has nevertheless been long established that Spenser’s allegorical method owes much to Tasso’s example in Gerusalemme liberata, and important studies by Patrick Cheney, John Watkins, and others have greatly enhanced our understanding of Vergil’s and the allegorized Aeneid’s place in Spenser’s imagination.2 In many episodes where it is obvious, The Faerie Queene at once playfully and seriously (or, to reapply Harry Berger’s words, in ways to be “taken seriously as

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play” [1988, 60]) evokes the themes and structures of the allegorical epic and incorporates its imagery—albeit with widely varying purposes, attending its romance form and Spenser’s unique psychological, moral, and theological vision. Having here discussed the allegorized Aeneid and Gerusalemme liberata as Augustinian epics, I am now in a position to revisit The Faerie Queene and to perceive afresh some dimensions of its “Vergilianism” and its depiction of the Christian warrior/wayfarer. When we consider, for example, the structural design of The Faerie Queene, we may be led to reevaluate the nature of its “un‹nished state” in a manner that modi‹es somewhat Michael Murrin’s keen and well-known statement on the issue. Murrin af‹rms that “no allegorical tale ever really ends,” and he dismisses the question of whether The Faerie Queene is a fragment or a ‹nished work. No allegorical poem was ever ‹nished in our sense of the term; and, therefore, it was quite appropriate that so many medieval and Renaissance poets should try to write immensely long poems, beyond human ability to complete. They did not absolutely need to ‹nish them. Their plots were made up of episodes, but the plots themselves functioned in the manner of an episode: they led on to something else. An allegorical tale resembles a maze of separate rooms through which the critic picks his way, only to discover that the maze itself is part of a larger complex, which in turn is a maze. (1969, 101)3 This characterization seems to apply best to books 2–6 of The Faerie Queene, not to book 1, where we could well argue that Spenser does ‹nish his allegory—indeed, that “the Legende of the Knight of the Red Crosse, or of Holinesse” contains the beginning and end of the whole poem, not just as we have it in its present length, but however much more of it Spenser might have written had he lived longer. Redcrosse, of course, is Spenser’s version of Aeneas as Everyman: as Lawrence Rhu puts it, Spenser “begins Book 1 proper with his own arma virumque: ‘A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Y cladd in mightie armes and silver shielde’” (1994, 105). Like every spiritual pilgrim, his physical appetites, his pride and bouts of wavering faith, get him into trouble, until at last, through the grace of God, he is brought to heavenly contemplation and his faith is reforti‹ed, enabling him to ful‹ll his divine calling by defeating the last of his ›eshly weaknesses.

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< For Redcrosse, the Turnus-like ‹gure is a dragon that symbolizes the beast of Revelation, whose slaying in canto 11 therefore alludes to Christ’s Second Coming and ‹nal victory over Satan, besides representing the personal salvation of Redcrosse as Everyman. Truly, then, this event must mark the end—the conclusion and the divine purpose—of the poem, of human life, of all human history. Along the way toward this end, moreover, Spenser periodically invites us to associate the legend of book 1 with Augustinian epic. Like Scipio and Goffredo, for example, Redcrosse is given the bene‹t of a Scipionic dream just before his decisive battle: he is delivered into the care of “an aged holy man” named “heavenly Contemplation” (1.10.46.5, 8),4 who takes him up “the highest Mount” (1.10.53.1) to view the “new Hierusalem” (1.10.57.1). There he is reminded of his duty to the earthly city Cleopolis, and he learns of his future fate as “Saint George of mery England,” spending eternity “emongst those [other] Saints” in the heavenly city (1.10.61.6, 9). Also like Scipio and Goffredo, Redcrosse, when he hears this prophecy, yearns to join the heavenly ranks at once. O let me not (quoth he) then turne againe Backe to the world, whose ioyes so fruitlesse are; But let me here for aye in peace remaine, Or streight way on that last long voyage fare, That nothing may my present hope empare.

(1.10.63.1–5)

As we know by now to expect, Contemplation gives Redcrosse the requisite, familiar lecture at this point—directing him on to the performance of his martial obligation and achievement of earthly glory and instructing him to await his time for translation to the celestial spheres. Once he kills the dragon, Redcrosse is ripe for apotheosis, and this is of course symbolized by his betrothal to Una—at which there was heard “an heavenly noise” that sounded “through all the Pallace pleasantly, / Like as it had bene many an Angels voice, / Singing before th’eternall maiesty” (1.12.39.1–4)—just as Aeneas’s readiness for heaven was signaled by his marriage to Lavinia in Vegio’s Supplement. But this is not the allegory of Augustinian epic tradition; it is allegorical romance. Redcrosse returns to Cleopolis because he owes more service to the Faerie Queene. To say that the poem is ‹nished when Redcrosse slays the dragon is true only in the sense that Spenser has sped us through Everyman’s story, allowing us to witness the highlights and to glimpse the ending. The images of Redcrosse

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in the House of Pride, in the arms of Duessa, in the dungeon of Orgoglio, and in the cave of Despair portray the soul in its direst states, while the killing of the dragon represents his attainment of holiness, the ultimate, completing virtue that marks the end of the pilgrim’s progress. The Faerie Queene continues past book 1 because we have to go back to ‹ll in all the gaps that we missed in our ‹rst “sneak overview.” For such endless work, Spenser utilizes not one hero but several, not one Aeneas or Redcrosse to represent the Christian warrior/wayfarer but (after Tasso) many errant knights to anatomize each learning experience at every stage of the good man’s life. And in romance, these stages are not in any coherent, let alone necessary, order. So, for instance, when Arthur is delayed in his attempt to rescue Redcrosse by Ignaro’s inability to direct him to the captive knight’s cell in Orgoglio’s dungeon, he is at ‹rst “displeased” and then grows angry; but once he “ghest [Ignaro’s] nature by his countenance,” Arthur “calmd his wrath with goodly temperance” (1.8.33.3, 34.4–5). We might ask ourselves at this point: What is “goodly temperance”? How does one de‹ne it, possess it, and practice it? Sir Guyon will seek answers to these questions in book 2. Similarly, questions about what comprises chastity are raised not only by the narrator’s praise of Una’s “chast person” (1.3.9.3) and the ever-childbearing Charissa, who is “chast in worke and will” (1.10.30.6), but by the ‹gure of Contemplation, who “pyn’d his ›esh, to keepe his body low and chast” (1.10.48.7). It seems we are being called upon to conceive of this virtue more deeply than as mere sexual abstinence or spousal loyalty, but how so? We will pick up this question in book 3 with the legend of Britomartis. And when, moreover, we read that Arthur and Redcrosse bind themselves to each other in “fast friendship” (1.9.18.7), that Redcrosse means to exercise “iustice” in avenging Sir Terwin’s suicide (1.9.37.8), and that a group of knights are behaving with “fair courtesie” (1.4.15.4), we have the subjects of our inquiries in books 4–6. Yet, with every step, the questions multiply. Spenser’s original plan for twenty-four total books would have ›eshed out much more of this life of the Romance Everyman, but there would always be many more mazeswithin-mazes still to be explored. Consequently, we do not look in any of the later books for the kind of major breakthrough or ‹nal victory that Redcrosse enjoys, nor do we even expect as much clarity in the outcome of the other knights’ legends, because theirs are lesser stages of progress tenuously won in the unpredictable world of Faerie. We follow them on their journeys to ambiguous revelations of what temperance is, what friendship

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< is, what courtesy is, and all the while, we remain (like them) wrapped in error’s train, until we reach the end of the poem and Redcrosse kills the dragon.5 As we would expect, then, Spenser relies on our acquaintance with the allegory of Augustinian epic as much as he does our acquaintance with the conventions of pastoral poetry, the Petrarchan sonnet, and other modes and genres: we have a better sense of what he is up to in any given episode when we perceive the various ways that he is playing off such conventions. But just as I hope was true of my analyses of other works in the preceding chapters, it is in the interpretation of the details of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, rather than its overall design, that this reading process is the most instructive and entertaining. There is no better illustration than the opening stanzas of book 1, which take Redcrosse up to his discovery of the den of Errour. As intensely studied as these stanzas are, their identi‹cation of Redcrosse as a quasi-Aeneas ‹gure means rather more than has yet been suggested.6 To begin with, when we meet Redcrosse, he is at the same stage of development that Aeneas is at when he enters the allegorized Carthage and sees Dido: youth. Redcrosse has the necessary equipment and piety, like Aeneas, but “armes till that time did he neuer wield” (1.1.1.5).7 Redcrosse lacks the workplace experience needed to avoid mistakes; his strength and faith are untested. But Spenser is also aware that we know what attends youth. It is the age that delights in love and is confused by passion, when the mind is compelled by the perturbations of lust to commit lascivious acts. In youth, in Carthage, Aeneas abandons himself to lust, and therefore that must be where Redcrosse is headed—to a meeting with Dido in the Carthaginian cave. There are suf‹cient signs pointing him and us in that direction. He is riding with a “louely Ladie” (4.1); they are caught in “an hideous storme of raine” (6.6); they arrive at “a hollow caue, / Amid the thickest woods” (11.6–7). There are, however, as many signs to steer Redcrosse away from this course. His companion Una is as “pure an innocent” as the lamb she leads (5.1); the “blustring storme is ouerblowne” before they discover the cave, eliminating their need for its shelter (10.2); and once they do ‹nd it, Una and her attendant dwarf recognize the danger and warn Redcrosse to avoid the place (13.3). But he goes in anyway. Why? Our narrator explains that Redcrosse is “full of greedy hardiment” (14.1); hence, The youthful knight could not for ought be staide, But forth vnto the darksome hole he went,

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And looked in: his glistring armor made A litle glooming light, much like a shade, By which he saw the vgly monster plaine, Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th’other halfe did womans shape retaine, Most lothsom, ‹lthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.

(14.2–9)

In Watkins’s analysis (1995, 93–102), the ‹rst Dido ‹gure of The Faerie Queene makes her appearance in the form of Duessa in the second canto of book 1. But in a sense, Duessa is the third Dido whom we meet, or rather, she is the third rei‹cation of Redcrosse’s desire for a Dido. Errour is the ‹rst. (The second is the demonic, loose-loving Una, whom Archimago conjures up to disturb—we should also say, to answer—Redcrosse’s dreams.) We are told that our “youthful knight” is “full of greedy hardiment”—hardiment meaning “courage, boldness,” as Roche glosses it in his 1978 edition. But greedy denotes appetite, desire, a boldness that is hungry for something, and hardiment has sexual connotations, not only for the reason that is obvious and puerile. Chaucer has Pandarus use the word hardiment when he is urging Troilus to run away with Criseyde—to “ravisshe hire,” as Pandarus phrases it: “Artow in Troie,” he asks, “and hast not hardyment / To take a womman which that loveth the[e], / And wolde hireselven ben of thyn assent?”8 Redcrosse is so eager to enter that “darksome hole” (more puerile sexual innuendo, but this is the stage of youth, remember) because he is brimming over with lust, and there is a side of him that cannot wait for what he thinks should be waiting for him there: his ‹rst Dido experience. Una, being the character that she is, could never be tempted to participate in such a sin, and in fact there is another side of Redcrosse that does not want her to, because that part of him is “Right faithfull true” (2.7). But his virtue is now seriously compromised, such that his “glistring armor” casts only “A litle glooming light,” so faint it is “much like a shade,” which does not sound like any light at all but is yet just the right measure of his virtue’s light to enable him to see plainly “the vgly monster” summoned up by his desire. It is a monster that is “Halfe like a serpent,” like the serpent that he must kill at the end of his journey, because this serpent is really part of that one and anticipates it by synecdoche. “But th’other halfe” that Redcrosse sees “did womans shape retaine,” a shape retained from the forma pulcherrima virgo, the whole and wholly beautiful woman who took shape in Redcrosse’s imagining, but who now, in his confusion, his shame, and

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< his frustrated sexual desire, is “Most lothsom, ‹lthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.” She is like a horrible monster, mostly, and a little like a proud lady who scorns the sighs of the unrequited lover. His Dido has turned out to be an aloof Laura, and part of him did not want that, so she is ugly in his eyes. Landino’s allegorical reading of the Aeneid best helps us to understand why the monster that Redcrosse discovers in Errour’s den is not strictly a lust monster but Everyerror, breeding “A thousand young ones, which she dayly fed / Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs” (15.5–6). In Landino’s scheme of the good man’s development (discussed in chap. 2 of this study), lust is generalized to represent all the sins intrinsic to a life devoted to earthly activity rather than heavenly contemplation, such that Dido’s lust, by synecdoche, encapsulates Aeneas’s every error. This aspect of Redcrosse’s experience in the cave, I argue, has already been anticipated in Spenser’s excursus on the different kinds of trees that attract the wanderers’ admiration as they “beguile the way” through the wood in stanzas 8–9. In this passage, Redcrosse and Una wonder at The sayling Pine, the Ceder proud and tall, The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar neuer dry, The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all, The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall. The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still, The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours, The Eugh obedient to the benders will, The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill, The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill, The fruitful Oliue, and the Platane round, The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound. Spenser’s sources of inspiration for this passage are many, we know. They include Orpheus’s forest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s wood at the opening of the Inferno, the catalog of trees in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, and the enchanted woods in Huon of Bordeaux and Gerusalemme liberata. The wood deludes and confuses the mind; it is a place deprived of God’s light, and our travelers’ beguilement in its arboreal variety is imme-

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diately recognized as an illustration of their not seeing the forest of spiritual danger for the trees. However, in a line of inheritance that stretches from Homer’s Circe and Vergil’s Polydorus through Dante and Ariosto to Tasso, these lines already invite us to recognize the speci‹c cupidity that is in our young knight’s heart and to comprehend its ‹gurative relation to every other form of sin to be enumerated in The Faerie Queene.9 In the Orlando Furioso, as Ruggiero learns from the hapless Astolfo, the witch Alcina is in the business of snaring new lovers and turning her former ones into trees: altri in abete, altri in oliva, altri in palma, altri in cedro, altri secondo che vedi me su questa verde riva.

(Ariosto 1974, 6.51.4–6)

[one into a ‹r, another to an olive, another to a palm, another to a cedar, another as you see me on this verdant bank.] In the role of spokesman for Alcina’s victims, Astolfo appropriately enough is a myrtle, the tree of Venus. He informs Ruggiero as well that, like Homer’s Circe, Alcina sometimes turns her former paramours into wild beasts, welling springs, or whatever “best pleases that proud fairy” (altri in liquido fonte, alcuni in ‹era / come più agrada a quella fata altiera [6.51.7–8]). In canto 1 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser likewise tells us that Errour’s teeming brood is “eachone / Of sundry shapes” (15.6–7), for not only are there a thousand errors, but each error has a thousand forms. Our analysis of the enchanted wood in Gerusalemme liberata, moreover, helps us to recognize the manner in which Tasso followed but inverted Ariosto’s revision of the Polydorus episode from the Aeneid: as Murrin notes (1980, 114–15), Tasso’s is again a wood speci‹cally for “the victims of love,” but instead of being trees themselves, Tancredi and Rinaldo encounter “demonic imitations” of the women they burn for, plus city towers of ›ame that symbolize this burning. For all we know, then, and perhaps we should assume it, each and every one of the trees admired by Redcrosse and Una as they wander through Errour’s wood is a victim of love, a youth lingering (rooted) in a Carthage of the heart by a lust that mirrors Redcrosse’s. In canto 2, after Redcrosse has separated from Una and linked up with Duessa, he will come upon Fradubio—“once a man . . . now a tree” (1.2.33.4)—and will fail to recognize himself in Fradubio’s guilty tale of having abandoned

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< his true love for the bewitching Duessa. But this episode only literalizes the condition of our hero in Errour’s wood. There, already, Redcrosse, in his heart, was exchanging Una for Duessa, a Dido who will join him in a cave, toward which he wanders even as he passes many signs of warning.10 The trees comprise a warning, in the ‹rst place, because beyond their immediate association with lust, Redcrosse’s ‹rst failing, is the spiritual sin of despair that will be his last in canto 9. We anticipate his encounter with Despair, in other words, because Dante’s conversion of the Polydorus episode into hell’s realm of suicides also informs our reading of Spenser’s catalog of trees by contributing to its range of allegorical meaning. The scene outside of Despair’s cave in canto 9 will further con‹rm the association: Redcrosse will see there “old stockes and stubs of trees, / Whereon nor fruit, nor leafe was euer seene, / . . . On which had many wretches hanged beene” (34.1–4). Thus we see again that in the part is contained the whole; all of Redcrosse’s earthly error is ‹gured in Dido’s culpa. For Tasso, similarly, the enchanted wood may speci‹cally pertain to the “victims of love,” but the purgation of every sin that is infecting the corporate Everyman— from anger to pride to despair—requires the wood to be felled. If one should object that these signs of warning in the trees are seen by us but not yet by Redcrosse, then there is, in the second place, the sign of the “bloudie Crosse [that] he bore” on his breast and on his shield, “The deare remembrance of his dying Lord” (1.2.1–2)—“who [here I quote 1 Peter 2:24 in the Geneva version] his owne self bare our sinnes in his bodie on the tre, that we being deliuered from sinne, shulde liue in righteousnes.” On this basis, the trees in Errour’s wood not only look ahead to our knight at his lowest point, in canto 9; they also look ahead to the “goodly tree,” the tree of life, that reforti‹es him before his ‹nal battle and victory against the dragon in canto 11. Loaden with fruit and apples rose red, As they in pure vermilion had beene dide, Whereof great vertues ouer all were red: For happie life to all, which thereon fed, And life eke euerlasting did befall.

(46.2–6)

Redcrosse carries with him the key to this allegory of the trees in Errour’s wood. Hidden within them, there may be Astolfos and Fradubios who are ‹gures for every error of Redcrosse’s to come, but externally there are

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“great vertues ouer all” the trees, which may be “red” toward the same “remembrance” that Redcrosse’s red cross is intended to keep always before his sight. If Spenser had written no more of The Faerie Queene after canto 11 of book 1, or if canto 12 described his marriage to Una with nothing to distract us from interpreting it as contemplative man’s attainment of perfection (his soul’s union with Truth and God), then we could call the poem an Augustinian epic.11 But in the middle of the betrothal ceremony in canto 12, Archimago reappears to announce that Redcrosse has already given “sacred pledges” to one Fidessa (27.3). Redcrosse explains to the consternated company that this “Fidessa” was, in fact, the witch Duessa, and Una guesses who this “craftie messenger” is (34.2), so Archimago is discovered and bound and tossed in the dungeon. But the clear point of the episode is that there will be no keeping him there, just as there is no keeping Redcrosse here with Una in the kingdom of Eden. He has a six-year term of service to perform in war “Gainst that proud Paynim king” (18.8). So Redcrosse takes his leave, “Vnto his Faerie Queene backe to returne” (41.8), but the reason he must and the reason that Archimago and other evil types must soon be out of the bag again is not because book 1’s allegorical victory was not all it appeared to be. Spenser is just, himself, returning back again, to pick up questions left unanswered and ‹ll in details left wanting in the narrative of the master plot. “Now strike your sailes ye iolly Mariners,” the narrator sings in the last stanza of book 1 (canto 12), For we be come vnto a quiet rode, Where we must land some of her passengers, And light this wearie vessel of her lode. Here she a while may make her safe abode, Till she repaired haue her tackles spent, And wants supplide. And then againe abroad On the long voyage whereto she is bent: Well may she speede and fairely ‹nish her intent.

(42)

One reason that we are grateful to Spenser for continuing The Faerie Queene past the point of an Augustinian epic is that it is such a very funny poem, even in these lines. This supertanker of a poem indeed will “speede,” in the sense of “prosper,” quite marvelously in its subsequent pages and

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< future fame, but the idea that it might go speeding to some destination, any destination, let alone to the end of its projected conclusion in book 24, is something of a hoot. But again, a part of the joke is that the decisive victory that we expect to mark a poem’s climax just before its conclusion (the vessel’s presumed “intent”) has been “fairely” ‹nished already in the preceding canto, and the actual “wants” to be “supplide” are the earthly trials and errors and dubious achievements of the poem’s wayfaring Christian warriors during the “long voyage” ahead. Thus Spenser, in an odd way, appropriates the teleology of Aeneas as Everyman, and our study of Augustinian epic helps to foreground this for ready view; but as a work of romance, The Faerie Queene is decidedly of a very different nature. It is, rather, the poetry of Everyerror, the fable of man’s time between youth and holiness, whose Aeneas is allowed to escape Carthage but never to reach Lavinian shores, whose Augustine will always weep for Dido killed by love.

Notes

=< introduction 1. My view of the Confessions’ relation to epic history is thus distinct from that argued in such studies as Fichter 1982 (40–69) and Røstvig 1994 (75–130). Despite their own very different interests (Fichter studies the theme of imperium in “dynastic epic”; Røstvig pursues “topomorphical” or structural/numerological analyses of various literary works, including Renaissance epics), they share a common focus on the question of a poem’s unity (artistic, conceptual, and metaphysical), crediting the unifying vision of the Confessions for supplying an important bridge from the classical to a Christian epic ethos. Cf. McMahon 1989 for a study of “the literary form” of Augustine’s Confessions. In another volume, McMahon brie›y discusses the idea that the Confessions is “a counter-Aeneid or an anti-Aeneid” in the context of an analysis of Milton’s effort to resolve the “tension between Christianity and epic” in Paradise Lost (1998, 157–58). 2. Duabus adhuc adamantinis dextra levaque premeris cathenis, que nec de morte neque de vita sinunt cogitare (Petrarch 1977b, 110). All subsequent citations of Petrarch’s Secretum are from the 1977 edition, although I do not follow its style of setting off Petrarch’s quotations of other works in italicized block quotes; instead, these quotations are incorporated in the text within quotation marks. For discussion of Augustine’s moral teaching in the Secretum, see Heitmann 1960 and, with a speci‹c focus on Augustine’s demand that Petrarch abandon the Africa, Martinelli 1983. For analyses of his role from the perspective that the Secretum testi‹es to the “crisi psicologico-religiosa del Petrarca,” see Tateo 1965, 4–9, 39–51; Martinelli 1982, 31–35. A standard study of the Secretum’s broader signi‹cance in Petrarch’s thought and place in history is Dotti 1978. In contrast, see Oscar Giuliani’s argument that “the ‘fable’” of Petrarch’s exchange with Augustine is not a confession of the poet’s “conscienza interiore” but an allegory of moral philosophy—“not a narrative of his own chronological development, but the revelation of an ideal development by means of a moral system, one that reveals the phenomenology of sin” (La ‘fabula’ di Francesco è narrata non nel suo svolgimento crono-

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< logico, ma spiegata nel suo svolgimento ideale mediante un sistema morale, che spiega la fenomenologia del peccato [1977, 200–201]). An essay that appeared after the present study was completed, Rigolot 2004, stresses as I do Petrarch’s immense historical in›uence—though in the context of an analysis of Renaissance dialogue—with a hyperbolic opening sentence that is virtually identical to my own (“In the beginning was Petrarch’s Secretum, . . .” [3]). The nature of Augustine’s importance to Petrarch generally continues to inspire a striking range of opinions. See Verdicchio 2002 for the startling notion that Augustine is the subject of demolishing critique in Petrarch’s writings—that “Augustine, for Petrarch, is only another pagan writer, more in the line of Pygmalion, with gods always within reach listening to his prayers, and always prepared to make his wishes real” (145). Cf. the very different interpretation in Quillen 1998, 182–222: Petrarch’s “invented Augustine,” she argues, “not only sanctioned but insisted on the use of classical literature in the human search for spiritual health and ful‹llment” (216); his “example and words,” therefore, “could authorize humanist textual practice” (222). 3. . . . scis ne de ea muliere mentionem tibi exortam, cuius mens terrenarum nescia curarum celestibus desideriis ardet; in cuius aspectu, siquid usquam veri est, divini specimen decoris effulget; cuius mores consumate honestatis exemplar sunt; cuius nec vox nec oculorum vigor mortale aliquid nec incessus hominem representat? (116). 4. Deum profecto ut amarem, illius amor prestitit (126). 5. This and all subsequent references to Dante’s Divine Comedy are to Charles Singleton’s text and translation in Dante 1973. 6. Ab amore celestium elongavit animum et a Creatore ad creaturam desiderium inclinavit. . . . At pervertit ordinem (126–27). 7. Te ipsum derelinquere mavis, quam libellos tuos (186). 8. The modern critical edition of De viris illustribus is in Petrarch 1964. 9. On this event, see Wilkins 1951, 9–69. Hans Baron (1985, 133–36) speculates on its relation to the Secretum. The text of Petrarch’s coronation speech (known as the Collatio laureationis) is in Godi 1970, with an English translation in Wilkins 1955, 300–13. 10. Abice ingentes historiarum sarcinas: satis romane res geste et suapte fama et aliorum ingeniis illustrate sunt. Dimitte Africam, eamque possessoribus suis linque; nec Scipioni tuo nec tibi gloriam cumulabis. . . . His igitur posthabitis, te tandem tibi restitue atque, ut unde movimus revertamur, incipe tecum de morte cogitare, cui sensim et nescius appropinquas. Rescissis velis tenebrisque discussis, in illam oculos ‹ge (186). 11. Amplector et gratias ago. Sentio enim languori meo consentaneum esse remedium; fugamque iam meditor (152). 12. The Petrarch of the sonnets maintains a powerful hold on the modern critical imagination, inclining many scholars to want to interpret every work by him as if it were the Canzoniere. So, e.g., one reads in Miller 1997 that Petrarch “never agrees” in the Secretum “to abandon his love for Laura” (155), which quite misrepresents the dialogue, even if we allow for potential backslide in Petrarch’s statement “I intend my escape” (surely we are expected to understand at this point that Petrarch will keep his promise just as Aeneas carried out his intention to “escape” Dido). We should resist the temptation, in other words, to overgeneralize Petrarch’s exploitation of the Laura/Lauro pun by assuming that these are never divisible in Petrarch’s imagination, that the pursuit of one must always, in all of his writings, mean pursuit of the other, for that is to err in two

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respects: ‹rst, it neglects Petrarch’s other favorite persona besides the tormented unrequited lover of Laura—that is, Petrarch the rehabilitated Laura addict (the Petrarch who narrates the Africa); second, it assumes that Petrarch’s own moral and artistic distinctions between his vernacular lyric poetry and his Latin compositions, particularly the genres of epic and history that he professes to hallow so greatly, must always be disingenuous. 13. Neque aliam ob causam propero nunc tam studiosus ad reliqua, nisi ut, illis explicitis, ad hec redeam: non ignarus, ut paulo ante dicebas, multo michi futurum esse securius studium hoc unum sectari et, deviis pretermissis, rectum callem salutis apprehendere. Sed desiderium frenare non valeo (194). 14. In antiquam litem relabimur, voluntatem impotentiam vocas. Sed sic eat, quando aliter esse not potest, supplexque Deum oro ut euntem comitetur, gressusque licet vagos, in tutum iubeat pervenire (194). 15. By “traditional,” I mean only the traditional models of epic history followed in previous studies of the subject. These studies nevertheless exemplify the whole spectrum of contemporary critical approaches to literary analysis, including, e.g., Elizabeth J. Bellamy’s 1992 psychoanalytic study of “narcissism and the unconscious” in the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme liberata, and The Faerie Queene and Susanne Lindgren Wofford’s 1992 deconstructionist explication of “the ideology of ‹gure” in the Iliad, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene, and (more brie›y) Paradise Lost and Don Quixote. 16. Permutatio est oratio aliud verbis aliud sententia demonstrans (Ad Herennium 1954, 4.34.46, with the translation by Caplan slightly adjusted). Cf. the de‹nition of allegory in the seventh-century Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville: “Allegoria est alieniloquium, aliud enim sonat, aliud intelligitur” (1982–83, 1.37.22). 17. At the time of this writing, only the ‹rst two volumes of the English translation of Lubac’s four-volume Exégèse Médiévale have appeared. Here I quote from the translated volumes but also supply page references to the original. For a more succinct account of “the four senses of scripture,” see Caplan 1929. 18. It is understood that I adopt the term “negative via” in this study in the sense that Buckley uses it in the quote cited in text, referring merely to the idea of taking the wrong path to the right destination. It is not to be confused with the “theology of negation” or “apophatic theology” associated with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who recommended negative statements about God (what God is not) over positive ones (what God is) on the grounds that the in‹nite vastness of God’s being exceeds the possibility of human predication. Recent feminist histories and critiques of medieval tradition have described various versions of a “gendered” negative via that constitute one important context for the particular type that is charted here. Caroline Bynum, for instance, in her survey of patristic and other medieval Christian texts, notes that frequently “men saw male and female as contrasting sets of values or behaviors and used gender reversal as an image of their exchange of ordinary (male) for extraordinary (female) status” and that men’s “description of themselves as ‘weak women’ expressed something positive: their desire to reject the world, to become the meek who inherit the earth” (1991, 165). Further comments on this image may be found in Bynum’s study of the medieval representation of “Jesus as Mother” (1982) and in the essays by Barbara Newman gathered under the title, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ (1995). Elizabeth Fiorenza notes a parallel trend in medieval representations of Christ and the Christian male as subjugated female, which

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< she argues served the purpose of a “positive” salvation theology based on the notion of “redemptive victimization” (1994, 98–99; a study of the same idea in “the Christology of Paradise Lost” is in Labriola 1981). 19. The starkness of this dichotomy is just one re›ection of a well-documented aspect of Augustine’s portrayal in the Secretum (see, e.g., the chapter “Augustine Invented” in Quillen 1998, 182–216): Petrarch’s strategic simpli‹cations of complex ideas in Augustine’s thought, not least his view of the relation between the single source of love in God versus fallen man’s “divided will” (on which see Rist 1994, 148–202) and his corresponding belief in the essential “unity of love for God and neighbor” (as described in Canning 1993). 20. For a survey of Petrarch’s writings showing that they evince such “a restless humanist’s dialogue with Christian antiquity” over the course of his whole career, see Schildgen 1996. Cf. the account of “Petrarch’s maturation from ‘philologia’ to a ‘philosophia’” in Rico 1986. 21. Cf. (with the caveat stated in n. 12 of this introduction) Aldo Bernardo’s irresolute assessment of the Secretum’s conclusion: “We thus have in Petrarch’s Secretum the poet’s near acceptance of Augustine’s dismissal of his love of Laura as a woman but not as a goad to the higher reaches of Parnassus and to the laurel crown. Indeed, what really appears to happen at the very end of the Secretum is the discovery by the poet that he can almost logically substitute one passion for another. He cannot ‘bridle his desire’ to write or to justify his laureate. In short, he feels con‹dent that although his passion for poetry is not detrimental to ultimate salvation, Laura might be. He had, however, already confessed that the distinction between Laura and poetry was very slight indeed” (1974, 81). 22. In this regard, I am indebted to, and strive in this book to complement, two important studies of the ‹gure of Dido in medieval and early modern literature: Marilynn Desmond’s Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (1994) and John Watkins’s The Specter of Dido: Spenser and the Virgilian Epic (1995). See also the study of “Dido as an example of chastity” in Lord 1969 and the analysis of “the two faces of Dido” in “classical images and medieval interpretation” in Ortiz 1986. On the AeneasDido story in the Renaissance period, see Roberts-Baytop 1974 and Garrison 1992, while a survey of the “Aeneas-Dido-mythe” in medieval French, Italian, and Spanish vernacular literature is in Leube 1969. Finally, cf. Mihoko Suzuki’s study of the “metamorphoses of Helen” in epic history (1989), in which Suzuki argues that (beginning with Homer’s Iphigeneia) “woman as Other is consistently assigned the role of sacri‹cial victim or scapegoat so that epic community among men can be maintained and af‹rmed,” such that “the substitution of sacri‹cial victims motivates the metamorphoses of Helen into other female ‹gures” (6)—including Dido (92–149). 23. Cf. Ruether 1983, a critique of the traditional formulation of women’s “direction of salvation” up through the chain of being, from female to male to spirits to God, as being obversely a “trajectory of alienation” (79). 24. In hac enim benedictione concessam nobis a te facultatem ac postestatem accipio et multis modis enuntiare, quod uno modo intellectum tenuerimus, et multis modis intellegere, quod obscure uno modo enuntiatum legerimus (13.24 in Augustine 1992; all subsequent references to the Confessions are to this edition, and translations are my own). I cite a slightly later passage in this chapter than does Bloch—as he quotes, “I have known a thing to be signi‹ed in many ways by the body that is understood in one way by the mind, and a thing to be understood in many ways by the mind that is signi‹ed in

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but one by the body” (1991, 215 n. 6)—but the point is the same. For a discussion of this and Augustine’s other citations of Genesis 1:28 in the context of a study of the verse’s interpretation in ancient and medieval exegesis, see Cohen 1989, 245–59. 25. As John Fleming puts it, “Augustine the convert had said that many paths led to Truth, only to be contradicted by Augustine the bishop” (1984, 48). 26. Sed quisquis in scripturis aliud sentit quam ille qui scripsit, illis non mentientibus fallitur. Sed tamen, ut dicere coeperam, si ea sententia fallitur qua aedi‹cet caritatem, quae ‹nis praecepti est, ita fallitur ac si quisquam errore deserens viam eo tamen per agrum pergat quo etiam via illa perducit (Augustine 1995, 1.88, with facing-page translation by R. P. H. Green). Petrarch was well aware, of course, that this sentence is immediately followed by one in the sterner tone recreated in the Secretum’s Augustine: “But he must be put right and shown how it is more useful not to leave the path,” the passage continues, “in case the habit of deviating should force him to go astray or even adrift” (Corridendus est tamen, et quam sit utilius viam non deserere demonstrandum est, ne consuetudine deviandi etiam in transversum aut perversum ire cogatur [ibid.]). The implication is that Petrarch can go through one or two more ‹elds—can work at one or two more of his tasks, like the Africa—before his going “astray” becomes being “adrift.” 27. Cf. Andrew Fichter’s useful explanation (1982, 10–12) of the Augustinian ontology underlying the apparent opposition in Christian epic between the earthly and the heavenly city, such as Carthage and Rome represent: “The city of man is a false objective, not only in the sense that it is the locus of moral error but also it is the negation of that upon which being depends. To follow one’s cupidinous desires, the promptings of one’s own pride or passion, is to move not toward an alternative city, a Carthage rather than a Rome, but toward nonbeing” (11). On the idea of the two cities in Augustine’s thought, see also Rist 1994, 216–25. 28. Aeneid 4.624–25: exoriare, aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos . . . This and subsequent citations of the Aeneid are from Vergil 1969, with my translations. 29. Cf. Fleming’s observation in the context of his study of medieval dialogues between “Reason” and “the Lover”: “we look in vain for a dramatic conversion of Franciscus in the Secretum. Perhaps we are searching in the wrong book. The evidence may lie in the Africa, or rather in the silence of blank leaves that lie between the Africa as we know it and the poem that is the object of the reproaches of Augustinus” (1984, 167). Fleming stresses that the Secretum has much more in common with Augustine’s Soliloquia than with the Confessions (136–83, esp. 146–48 and 153–54), a point that is also made in Murphy 1980, 239 (see also Fleming 1984, 156–57, and Rico 1974, 17, for discussion of Petrarch’s allusions at the start of his dialogue to the Soliloquia’s opening lines). 30. E.g., see Pamela Williams’s assertion that “the signi‹cant point about 366 . . . is that while Petrarch repudiates Laura he is still in love with her; the last canzone is a prayer for rescue not an assertion of freedom” (1996, 31). The effort to de‹ne the poetics of the Canzoniere is an ongoing preoccupation among Petrarchan scholars and may, without too much exaggeration, be characterized as a continuing engagement with Freccero’s thesis, implicitly if not explicitly. See, e.g., Waller 1980, 27–104; Sturm-Maddox 1985 and 1992; Boyle 1991; Scaglione 1992; Estrin 1994, 41–90; and my own essay from

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< which this discussion derives (J. C. Warner 1996). A reading of the Secretum that is inspired by Freccero’s essay is in Miller 1997. The strongest objections to Freccero’s thesis and the studies it has inspired are still those of Thomas Roche (1989, 1–69), who stresses the circumscribing function of the Canzoniere’s framing poems and calls on readers to take Petrarch’s expressions of penitence at face value. 31. Petrarch 1977b, 22, cited in Freccero 1975, 37. 32. Cf. the extensive “reexamination” by Sturm-Maddox “of Laura and of the laurel” at the center of “two ‘readings’ of the poet’s story” in the Canzoniere, “one a redemptive itinerary, the other a fall” (1992, 9). This extends Sturm-Maddox’s previous analyses of the sequence’s allegory of the fall (1983) and of its “redemptive” and “confessional subtexts” (1985, 65–127). 33. On this point, see the critique in Roche 1989, 483 n. 30. Similarly, in a major recent study of “the origins of humanism from Lovato to Bruni,” Ronald Witt describes Petrarch as “a third-generation humanist” whose deeply held Christian faith “divert[ed] humanism from the secular-civic orientation given it by the ‹rst two generations of humanists.” It was not until the ‹fteenth century, Witt shows, that Bruni and other “‹fth generation humanists” succeeded in “return[ing] humanism to its original secular context, whence it had been wrenched by Petrarch” (2000, 497). Nevertheless, as Witt is quick to concede, however much “Petrarchan humanism balanced a passionate classicism with a traditional Christian devotion,” we witness throughout Petrarch’s writings that “the two could often be held together only by verbal subterfuge” (290). 34. No. 366, lines 121–23; this and subsequent citations of the Canzoniere are from Petrarch 1996, with my translations. 35. Cf. Lisa Freinkel’s characterization of Petrarch’s “poetics of deferred meaning” (2002, 164): “Petrarch’s lyrics will ‹ll page after page, gesturing toward a plenitude of meaning that they continually hold at bay. In this way the lyrics emerge as the work of an eternal pilgrim—as the consummate work of an unconsummated desire” (49); or put another way, “he strives consistently . . . to keep the moment of conversion present, self-conscious: to keep turning without ever having turned” (127). 36. Veni Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago ›agitiosorum amorum. nondum amabam, et amare amabam, et secretiore indigentia oderam me minus indigentem. quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare, et oderam securitatem et viam sine muscipulis, quoniam fames mihi erat intus ab interiore cibo, te ipso, deus meus, et ea fame non esuriebam, sed eram sine desiderio alimentorum incorruptibilium, non quia plenus eis eram, sed quo inanior, fastidiosior. et ideo non bene valebat anima mea et ulcerosa proiciebat se foras, miserabiliter scalpi avida contactu sensibilium. sed si non haberent animam, non utique amarentur. amare et amari dulce mihi erat, magis si et amantis corpore fruerer. venam igitur amicitiae coinquinabam sordibus concupiscentiae candoremque eius obnubilabam de tartaro libidinis, et tamen foedus atque inhonestus, elegans et urbanus esse gestiebam abundanti vanitate. rui etiam in amorem, quo cupiebam capi. deus meus, misericordia mea, quanto felle mihi suavitatem illam et quam bonus aspersisti, quia et amatus sum, et perveni occulte ad vinculum fruendi, et conligabar laetus aerumnosis nexibus, ut caederer virgis ferreis ardentibus zeli et suspicionum et timorum et irarum atque rixarum (3.1.1). For discussion of the Cartago/sartago pun in Augustine’s imagination, see Fleming 1984, 89–91; on Augustine’s use of the terms libido and concupiscentia, see Bonner 1962 and the entries for these words in Mayer 1994.

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37. . . . multa tu, dum corporeo carcere claudebaris, huic similia pertulisti. Quod cum ita sit, passionum expertarum curator optime (4). 38. . . . adhuc tenaciter conligabar ex femina (8.1.2). 39. . . . suspendio magis necabar (6.4.6). 40. Convertisti enim me ad te, ut nec uxorem quaererem nec aliquam spem saeculi huius (8.12.30). 41. Postquam plene volui, ilicet et potui, miraque et felicissima celeritate transformatus sum in alterum Augustinum (20).

chapter one 1. Ennius ad dextram victoris, tempora fronde / Substringens parili, studiorum almeque Poesis / Egit honoratum sub tanto auctore triumphum (Petrarch 1926, 9.400–402). All subsequent references to the Africa are to the 1926 edition. Translations are my own, but for convenience I provide the corresponding line numbers from the English verse translation by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (Petrarch 1977a; for the passage cited here, lines 558–60). 2. I cite the translation in Toffanin 1954, 111, 113–14. 3. Bernardo summarizes Petrarch’s various depictions of Scipio in the Secretum, De viris illustribus, Rerum memorandarum libri, and all his other writings (1962, 1–126); see especially his discussion subtitled “Scipio vs. Laura” (47–71), which rather stresses the af‹nity between Scipio and Laura in Petrarch’s imagination, since they are representatives of “the oneness of true glory and virtue” (55). Many of the more recent studies of the Africa continue to stress Petrarch’s aim to write a “purely classical epic” or, following Bernardo in his other claim, Petrarch’s troubled effort to strike a “compromise” between the classical and the Christian, to create something “near-Christian.” So, e.g., Thomas Greene describes the Africa as Petrarch’s “most sustained effort to revive ancient heroism” (1982b, 49), while Craig Kallendorf, contending that Petrarch’s “views about poetry, especially epic poetry,” are much “more thoroughly colored by epideictic than has been previously recognized” (1989, 22), argues that “the entire poem functions [and pretty much only functions] to praise Scipio’s many virtues” (23). For an earlier study of the Africa that, like Kallendorf’s, takes as its guiding interpretive principle the assumption of Renaissance humanists that “poetry in general ought to praise virtue and condemn vice” (ibid., 24), see Seagraves 1980, which catalogs all of Scipio’s merits. Such strict focus on this principle (really, it is a lowest common denominator in the literature of the period) unfortunately leaves little for interpretation and, in the end, tends to elicit such negative judgments as Bergin and Wilson’s that “the Africa has a fatal ›aw” in that “it presents us with a ›awless hero” who “is simply too good to be true” (Petrarch 1977a, xv). Also in this line of the poem’s critics is Philip Hardie, who recognizes, with Kallendorf, that “Scipio is the historical embodiment of supreme virtue,” but who echoes Bernardo, too, in viewing the poem’s hero as “a ‹gure for Petrarch’s own search for a form of virtue that satis‹es both humanist and Christian requirements” (1993a, 299; cf. Klecker 2001). 4. Hans Baron, while rejecting some of the direct connections that Fenzi and Rico draw between the Secretum and Africa (Baron 1985, 124–27), nevertheless agrees that Petrarch experienced a “religious crisis” in the early 1350s and that this crisis is re›ected in the soul-searching of the Secretum and the un‹nished state of the Africa (129–31).

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< 5. Proinde non solum ut talis merces talibus hominibus redderetur Romanum imperium ad humanam gloriam dilatatum est; verum etiam ut cives aeternae illius civitatis, quamdiu hic peregrinantur, diligenter et sobrie illa intueantur exempla et videant quanta dilectio debeatur supernae patriae propter vitam aeternam, si tantum a suis civibus terrena dilecta est propter hominum gloriam (Augustine 1955, 5.16.9–16; translation [here slightly modi‹ed] by R. W. Dyson in Augustine 1998, 166; subsequent references to The City of God are also to these editions). 6. Librum imperfectum esse eius demonstrat editio, quia ordo ipsius rei prout res se habuerit non procedit. Nam si secunda belli summa spectetur, multa deesse conspiciemus, ut Scipionis ex Hispania transitum ad Siphacem. . . . Sed praeter hoc, neque traiectionem exercitus in Africam, neque castrorum Syphacis nocturnam exustionem, aut ut postea Syphax atque Hasdrubal aperta acie victi sunt; neque ut in‹dus rex tandem in suo regno a Massinissa et Laelio superatus et captus sit: sed haec omnia, ut Vergerius scribit, ratio inducere potuit, cum supremam pugnam, quae inter duos summos duces, scilicet Sipionem et Hannibalem fuit, descripturus esset, quae bello ‹nem posuit. . . . Sunt praeterea, quae monstrant non fuisse correctum opus, versus dimidiati et imperfecti, ut est creberime apud Maronem nostrum (Solerti 1904, 358; for the identical argument by Vergerio, see ibid., 300). On Petrarch’s alleged wish, in imitation of Vergil, to have his poem burned, see Bernardo 1962, 173. 7. Hizo, en suma, lo que Agustín amonestaba hacer a Francesco (1974, 422). 8. See Haley 1989 for a study of Livy’s characterization of Sophonisba (Sophoniba). Petrarch, of course, had a special relationship with Livy’s history on account of his instrumental role in its textual transmission (for this story, see Billanovich 1951). Thus, for the same reason that Petrarch so often alludes to Cicero’s Pro Archia (a “lost speech” rediscovered by Petrarch), we might surmise here in passing that Petrarch’s seeming obsession with the ‹gure of Scipio throughout his writings is in part a dimension of Petrarchan self-promotion—that is, it is no less a sustained campaign to advertise the importance of Livy and of the guardian of Livy’s legacy than it is an expression of humanistic admiration for the virtues of Scipio’s character. 9. This and subsequent references to Livy’s history of the Second Punic War are to Livy 1949, but with my translations. 10. Augustine scolds Petrarch: “What you could have been she has snatched from you, or rather you have tossed it away. For she is innocent” (quod esse poteras illa preripuit, imo tu potius abstuli. Ista enim innocens est [126]). 11. The usual explanation for Petrarch’s correction (e.g., see Kallendorf 1989, 40–44) is that he believed poets are bound not to contradict the historical record, which, as Petrarch knew, depicted Dido as “an exemplum of chastity” (ibid., 41). 12. Petrarch here alludes to the etymology of the name Carthago, meaning “new town,” as Servius (citing Livy) explains: “Carthago enim est lingua Poenorum nova civitas, ut docet Livius” (1961, 1:124, commentary to Aeneid 1.366; cf. chap. 2 n. 21 in the present study). 13. On this tradition, see Lord 1969, which includes discussion of Petrarch’s references to his sources (219–20). 14. Scholars have long debated whether the tears ›ow from Dido, Anna, Anna and Dido, Aeneas, or all three. See the survey and evaluation of these interpretations in the commentary on Aeneid 4 by Arthur Stanley Pease (Vergil 1935, note to line 449). 15. Ita mens, ubi ‹xa est ista sententia, nullas perturbationes, etiamsi accidunt infe-

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rioribus animi partibus, in se contra rationem praevalere permittit; quin immo eis ipsa dominatur eisque non consentiendo et potius resistendo regnum virtutis exercet. Talem describit etiam Vergilius Aenean, ubi ait: Mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes (9.4.98–104; 364–65, with translation slightly revised). 16. . . . quam illae quibus tenere cogebar Aeneae nescio cuius errores, oblitus errorum meorum, et plorare Didonem mortuam, quia se occidit ab amore, cum interea me ipsum in his a te morientem, deus, vita mea, siccis oculis ferrem miserrimus. Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et ›ente Didonis mortem, quae ‹ebat amando Aenean, non ›ente autem mortem suam, quae ‹ebat non amando te, deus, lumen cordis mei et panis oris intus animae meae et virtus maritans mentem meam et sinum cogitationis meae? non te amabam . . . et haec non ›ebam, et ›ebam Didonem extinctam ferroque extrema secutam (1.13.20–21). As Nancy Ruff notes, this passage has been “oddly and frequently taken to indicate Augustine’s sympathy for Dido”; she rightly emphasizes that its aim is “to illustrate his poor spiritual state in those days” (1994, 881). For references to this passage in the context of discussions of Augustine’s reception of Vergil, see Bono 1984, 45–50; Desmond 1994, 75–79; Watkins 1995, 34–39. 17. . . . quam pridem tibi sat familiariter cognitam arguta circumlocutione testatus es (3). Just after this statement, Lady Truth commends Petrarch for having “built” for her, “with poetic hands” (poeticis . . . manibus erexisti) in the Africa, “a beautiful and glorious palace, in the far west atop Mount Atlas” (in extremo quidem occidentis summoque Atlantis vertice habitationem clarissimam atque pulcerrimam [2]). Strangely, I think, a number of critics have interpreted this passage not as Petrarch’s invitation to discover the “subtle circumlocution” or allegory of the Africa—the truth that lies within the palace that is his poem—but as evidence that the apparent description of Laelius’s entry into Syphax’s palace (3.88ff.), which begins after an obvious lacuna, is instead a misplaced fragment describing an ethereal “Palace of Truth.” This view was ‹rst asserted by the Africa’s modern editor, Nicola Festa, and is most fully developed in his introduction to the poem (Petrarch 1926, lxvii–lxix). In Festa’s view, the passage belongs at the end of book 4. A summary and evaluation of Festa’s argument is in Bernardo 1962, 128–42, but I am not persuaded, as is Bernardo, that Festa makes a strong case. At any rate, if we may cite as evidence the argumenta that preface the Africa’s books in early Venice editions of Petrarch’s works, then book 3’s argument indicates that the passage in question was understood, at least by the editors of these early editions, to belong to Petrarch’s account of Laelius’s reception at Syphax’s palace (see Petrarch 1501, 16v: “Postquam visa ducis sol excutit optimus heros / Acciri propere lelium iubet illicet ille. / Mittit ad reges syphacem ut federa ponat. / Hospitis inde thoro fruit citharista iocosus / Carmine pangebat”). 18. Bernardo, e.g., suggests that “perhaps the sixty-eight verses . . . added by Petrarch to Book IX, following the death of King Robert of Naples, may provide some hint” to the “important truths” hidden in the Africa. He proposes that Robert’s death symbolizes “the death of the arts, with the result that this poem must now wander unrecognized through the centuries until the present ‘Lethean sleep’ is over” (1962, 45). But again, this is a message in plain view, and it does not indicate that there are any “hidden truths” to be sought in the characters or events of the poem itself. Closer to my view of the Africa, Janet Smarr encourages us to search for Petrarch’s Christian allegory, noting that “Augustine had written that Romans who acted well on behalf of the Earthly City shadowed forth or presented models for Christian actions on behalf of the Eternal

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< City, where Christ is ‘the giver of true glory and citizenship.’” Smarr only goes on to observe, however, that “with the serpent as a recurring image for the Carthaginian foe [Africa 2.103–13, 6.544–48], Biblical resonances clearly emerge,” and that “thus Petrarch may have hoped that the Africa, like Dante’s Commedia, could be read polysemously: a history of Rome, a moral war in the soul; and a shadow of Christ’s victory over sin, the triumph of the truly Eternal City” (1982, 138). I would also include among allegorical interpretations of the Africa Paul Colilli’s singular poststructuralist reading based almost exclusively on Petrarch’s self-references in book 9. Collili proposes that the poem can be read as a kind of Heideggerian and Derridean allegory of “the revealing and concealing of the signi‹cance of Being” (1993, 31), what he terms “l’aletheia poetologica” and “l’aletheia ‹lologica.” A portion of this argument is available in English in Colilli 1990. Finally, the most ambitious reading of the Africa’s allegory would have to be T. K. Seung’s chapter on Petrarch’s epic in Cultural Thematics: The Formation of the Faustian Ethos (1976). For Seung, the poem represents a stage in the Western development of individualism and the insatiable acquisition of personal power; hence Scipio is an exemplar of this “Faustian ethos.” That thesis produces many bizarre interpretations of details in the Africa, but Seung is to be credited for two insights that I develop in the present analysis: ‹rst, that for Petrarch, “the Africa is ultimately an epic of his own soul” (155), or rather, we are meant to interpret it as such; and second, “Petrarch’s epic can indeed be read as the Psychomachia (‘our mind is a battle‹eld’) of his tormented soul of the Secretum” (155), which requires “reading it on an allegorical level” (156). 19. In some editions of Petrarch, including the 1554 Basel publication of his works, this is letter 4.4: the discrepancy is a result of other editions including the treatise De of‹cio et virtutibus imperatioriis as Seniles 4.1 rather than printing it separately. The letter is numbered 4.5 in the modern critical edition of the Rerum senilium to which I refer (Petrarch 2003, with facing-page French translation) and in the English translation by Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo (Petrarch 1992, 139–51; see 115 n. 2 for their explanation of the letter’s numbering). 20. E.g., see the reference to this letter in Bernardo 1962, 199. The most sophisticated treatments of Petrarchan allegory concern, as we would expect, the Canzoniere (e.g., Sturm-Maddox 1992), the Secretum (e.g., Giuliani 1977), and Petrarch’s account of his “Ascent of Mount Ventoux” (Familiares 4.1), which, like the Secretum, testi‹es to the poet’s struggles between his literary ambitions and his faith ‹ltered through a response to St. Augustine. On the “Ascent,” see Durling 1974, 1977; Greene 1976; O’Connell 1983; Robbins 1985; Ascoli 1991; Asher 1993; and, for a determinedly skeptical reading, Verdicchio 2002. Cf. the argument in V. Kahn 1985 that Petrarch’s Secretum is “a metadiscursive re›ection on the use and abuse of the divinely given will to signify”—on “the difference,” that is, “between a character in an allegory and being an interpreter of allegory” (164). However, given my position that the Africa’s allegory operates conventionally even if it has gone largely unremarked, I would incline toward Thomas Roche’s view, expressed in response to Durling and Greene but with relevance to the later studies just listed, that a convincing argument has not been made “that Petrarch differed radically from other writers of allegory in his time” (1989, 484 n. 33). 21. . . . quasi gemmas linteo obvolutas (868). Translations are my own. 22. . . . quidnam, dimoto quam circumfusum vero est allegoriarum velo (73); . . .

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constat divino illo in opere . . . altius aliquid sensisse quam quam loquitur (75). 23. . . . Virgilium revertar, cuius ‹nis ac subiectum, ut ego arbitror, vir perfectus est (que perfectio vel sola vel praecipua ex virtute con‹citur (79). 24. The classic treatment of Petrarch’s understanding of Vergil is in de Nolhac 1965 (1st ed. 1892), 1:123–61, which includes a description of Petrarch’s marginal notes to his personal copy of Vergil’s Opera (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Madrid, S.P. 10, 27). These notes are moral in nature, but in their scattered responses to local details, they make no attempt to relate to one another or to an overall interpretation of the Aeneid’s meaning (cf. my discussion in chap. 2 of the present study of the same distinction between Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses and his commentary edition of the Aeneid). However, the case for “allegorie und empire in Petrarcas Virgilglosse” is brie›y made in Berschin 1986, 116–21. A facsimile of the “Ambrose Vergil” is in Petrarch 1930. Petrarch’s letter to Frederigo Aretino and a passage from the Secretum quoted (in note 29 below) are frequently cited in order to make the point that Petrarch knew of and transmitted the medieval tradition of reading Vergil allegorically, but I am not aware of an attempt to connect this insight to a comprehensive interpretation of the Africa. 25. . . . videri michi solent venti illi nichil aliud quam irarum impetus et concupiscentie motusque animi in pectore subterque precordia habitantes . . . Eolus autem, ipsa ratio regens frenansque irascibilem et concupiscibilem appetitum anime (79). 26. . . . Venus obvia sylve medio ipsa est voluptas . . . os habitumque virgineum gerit ut illudat insciis. Nam siquis eam qualis est cerneret, hauddubie visu solo tremefactus aufugeret: ut enim nichil blandius, sic nichil est fedius voluptate. . . . Habitu demum venatricis, quia venatur miserorum animas (81). 27. . . . vit[a] . . . voluptatis et libidinum, que Veneri assignatur (81). 28. Hec Enee genitrix fertur, quod etiam viri fortes ex voluptate generantur et quod singularis quedam illi fuerit venustas, qua, exul atque inops, castis etiam oculis placuisse describitur (81, 83). 29. In the Secretum, Petrarch mentions this allegorical reading of Aeneas’s relationship with his mother again, when he refers to the destruction of Troy in the Aeneid to illustrate the miseries that attend a life devoted to the pleasures of Venus. Petrarch recalls for Augustine: As long as he wandered amid the enemy and ›ames accompanied by Venus, he was unable to see the wrath of the offended gods even with eyes wide open, and as long as she was speaking to him, he understood nothing but earthly matters. But, after she departed from him, you know what followed; it at once happened that he saw the angry faces of the gods, and recognized the dangers round him: “The fearful sight of gods was visible, divine powers hostile to Troy” [Aeneid 2.622–23]. From these lines I picked out this: occupation with the concerns of Venus removes one’s sight of the divine. [Atqui quam diu Venere comitante inter hostes et incendium erravit, apertis licet oculis, offensorum iram numinum videre non potuit, eaque illum alloquente, nil nisi terrenum intellexit. At, postquam illa discessit, quid evenerit nosti; siquidem mox iratas deorum facies eum vidisse subsequitur, et omne circumstans peric[u]lum agnovisse: “apparent dire facies inimicaque Troie / numina magna deum.” Ex quibus hoc excerpsi: usum Veneris conspectum divinitatis eripere. (84)]

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< 30. . . . hoc est consuetudine voluptatum a prima etate copulata animo (97). 31. . . . ‹lius Veneris nudus remanet turpiterque incipit amari. Ipse quoque nonnunquam ›ectitur quia dif‹cile est, etiam perfectis, excellenti rerum specie non moveri, presertim ubi se amari senserint, atque appeti (83). 32. . . . ille etiam sat beatus qui, etsi consenserit peccatoque succubuerit, sive— quod est gravius—male consuetudinis visco implicitus fuerit et astrictus vinculis et fasce curvatus, aliquando tamen, Dei instinctu tacito vel alicuius monitu Deiplacitum nunciantis, assurgit neglectaque, qua tenebatur, voluptate, ad virtutis et glorie rectum iter redit (83). 33. . . . ille, licet passionatus ‘magnoque animum labefactus amore’ [Aeneid 4.395], paret tamen imperio celesti (83). 34. . . . tandem ipsa se perimit, quia nimirum animus dum, Apostoli consilio, preterita obliviscens, ad honesta convertitur, voluptas feda per se ipsam perit (85). 35. . . . huius siquidem puelle, cuius de connubio certatur, pater animus, mater vero sponse animi caro . . . mater tamen, in‹rmior et consilii inops, natam domesticis et iuxta se genitis iungere satagit (hoc est carnalibus desideriis studiisque terrestribus) (87). 36. Numerous studies of the Aeneid note the verbal parallels between Vergil’s accounts of Dido and Turnus (e.g., Monti 1981, 95–96), parallels that could have encouraged Petrarch to equate them allegorically as he does. In addition, see Mackie 1992–93 for the point that some of Vergil’s sources had Dido and Turnus sharing common ancestral connections. 37. . . . precipiti ruens saltu pedes pergit in prelium: quia etiam post edomitos atque extinctos carnis motus, adhuc fomes interior non quiescit (89). 38. Eneas, et sagitta ictus et labante genu (quia scilicet vir, quantumlibet virtute armatus, interdum tentationibus [temptationibus in Petrarch 1554] vulneratur, sic ut in proposito claudicet . . .) (89). 39. . . . dum adversus carnale desiderium acies mentis intenditur, nescio quid amarum reperit (91). 40. Venus (id est delectatio operis ac voluptas bona quidem et honesta) (91). 41. Proinde Eneas advena—idest virtus seu vir fortis carnis victor—iam facilem ac sequacem hastam manu arripit libransque felicius ac certius competitorem suum indigenam, carnalem, humi sternit affectum (91). 42. . . . quia, iuxta famosissimum dogma platonicum, quod Augustinus reverenter amplectitur multique alii, nil magis humanum animum impedit a divinitatis intuitu quam Venus et vita libidinibus dedita (101). Petrarch alludes in this passage to the description of “the two Venuses” in Plato’s Symposium, which is discussed in chap. 2 of the present study. 43. . . . neque “libidine dominante temperantie locum esse, neque omnino in voluptatis regno virtutem posse consistere,” denique “omne illam animi lumen extinguere” (103). Here Petrarch is quoting Cicero (De senectute 12.41). 44. Cf. C. S. Lewis’s observation that “the importance of Fulgentius [an allegorizer of the Aeneid to be discussed in chap. 2 of the present study] is plain,” that “once the ancients are read in this way, then to imitate the ancients means to write allegory” (1938, 85). 45. Ah demens! Ita ne ›ammas animi in sextum decimum annum falsis blanditiis aluisti? Profecto non diutius Italie famosissimus olim hostis incubuit, nec crebriores illa

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tunc armorum impetus passa est, nec validioribus arsit incendiis, quam tu his temporibus violentissime passionis ›ammas atque impetus pertulisti. Inventus est tandem qui illum abire compelleret; Hanibalem tuum quis ab his unquam cervicibus avertet, si tu eum exire vetas et, ut tecum maneat, sponte iam servus invitas? (117–18). 46. Cf. Thomas Greene’s discussion of the passage just cited from the Secretum, where he interprets its ambiguous representation of Laura as “a subversive psychic force” indicating Petrarch’s “lapse” once more “into narcissism” (1982b, 37). 47. Bergin and Wilson state in their note to the passage, “The woman referred to is Dido” (Petrarch 1977a, 243). 48. Venus’s guile is a trait that Aeneas himself objects to, in a passage from the Aeneid that is alluded to frequently in the other epics discussed in the chapters to follow: quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces?

(1.407–9)

[Why, so cruel, do you mock your son so often with false images? Why may not I join my hand to yours and hear and speak true words?] In one sense, of course, this plaint of Vergil’s hero is a piece of moral one-upmanship over Homer, whose ever-scheming Athena, right to the end of the Odyssey, is hatching plots to aid the ever-wily Odysseus. 49. A brief but compelling discussion of the “cumulatively evocative ‘burnings’ of Carthage” in literary history, from the Aeneid to Augustine’s Confessions to T. S. Eliot’s “Fire Sermon” (“To Carthage then I came / burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out”), is in Reckford 1995–96, 43–53. Also, see Edgeworth 1976–77 for an argument that Vergil drew on Polybius’s account of the self-immolation of Hasdrubal’s wife over Carthage’s surrender to Scipio for the image of Dido’s burning pyre at the end of Aeneid 4. “It is quite plausible,” Edgeworth suggests, “that the manner of the historical queen’s death gave rise, at least as a partial cause, to the motif of the interior ‹re which blazes within Dido throughout the book” (133). 50. Jonathan Foster observes that this passage in the Africa is inspired by the similar lines from Vergil’s Aeneid, but his only assessment of the parallel is that it “give[s] a new cohesion to the context in Petrarch” (1979, 295). Cf. Bernardo’s comment that the “heat” of this “symbolic burning of the Carthaginian ›eet . . . surpasses in intensity even the most renowned mythological examples of puri‹cation” (1962, 160). 51. As Otto Skutsch describes and as Petrarch was of course aware, this episode is modeled on “fragments and direct testimonia” related to the early Latin poet Ennius that “attest a dream encounter with Homer, who revealed in a discourse on the natura rerum that his soul had passed into Ennius” (Ennius 1985, 147–67; see, in the same volume, Annales book 1, fragments ii–x). 52. The link between the dangers of sexual desire and of pagan texts in Augustine’s imagination has been well described by Marilynn Desmond: “In the Confessions Augustine pointedly identi‹es Carthage with lust (3.1), so that the queen of ancient Carthage might ‹gure female sexuality and pagan literature simultaneously”; “indeed,” she continues, “this section of the Confessions ends with Augustine’s pointed juxtaposition of the affective experience of reading Dido in Aeneid 4 to the comforting knowledge of the

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< ‹ctionality of the affair between Aeneas and Dido,” thereby supporting “Augustine’s view of his schoolboy self as a naïve reader, seduced by the rhetorical veneer of pagan texts” (1994, 77–78). John Watkins cites the same passage to make the point that “as an alternative to Virgil’s dangerously alluring poetry, Augustine advocates the rudimentary studies of grammar and mathematics,” for “just as Aeneas abandoned Dido for Rome, Augustine ought to abandon Virgil for truth” (1995, 35–36). Yet Watkins also makes the crucial observation that “as straightforward as these dichotomies might seem, Augustine’s own Virgilian allusiveness dismantles them.” Watkins explains: “The passage’s central paradox lies in its conspicuous appropriation of classical ‹ctions to renounce classical in›uence. For all Augustine’s talk about rejecting Virgil, the Aeneid provides him a narrative for understanding and describing his spiritual autobiography. He does not absolutely abandon Dido but translates her into an image of classical culture” (36).

chapter two 1. Ma questo quarto mostra una gran stupidità di Venere, la quale per scampare Enea dalle mani di Cartaginesi, quanto è a lei lo con‹na in Cartagine. Perciocchè ella fa innamorare così Enea di Didone, come Didon di Enea, e se non era la ammonizione di Giove per Mercurio, più avea fatto Venere a impedir la andata di Enea in Italia, che Giunone istessa (Speroni 1740, 4:434–35). 2. . . . l’ aver fatto innamorare Didon di Enea, e consentito a Giunone che facessero nozze, era a danno di essa Venere, ed a satisfazion di Giunone. cosa ridicula (4:543). 3. The idea of the two Aphrodites also underlies the discussion of love in the ‹rst half of the Phaedrus (Plato 1961, 230e–257b), but this is less often cited than Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium. Plato’s distinction in the latter work between the ‹rst goddess, “whose nature partakes of both male and female,” and the second, “whose attributes have nothing of the female, but are altogether male” (181d), is not a point that is stressed in the explications of the two Venuses discussed in the present chapter. Robert Hollander, in Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, notes that medieval authors in fact had more than two images of Venus available to them: “There has generally existed an understandable tendency to associate three kinds of love with Venus: 1) a perfect intellectual love, having no physical component, 2) a positive sexual love, present in matrimony and resulting in the creation of offspring, 3) a negative sexual love, seeking mere sexual satisfaction, and having destructive and anti-social results. Since the basic literary (or painterly) tradition tends to polarize rather than triangulate the aspects of Venus, a given writer (or painter) will formulate his particular double Venus from among these three basic possibilities” (1977, 159). For studies of the tradition of “the two Venuses,” see Wind 1958, 100–29; Schreiber 1975; Economou 1975. Also informative is Hughes 1929, which suggests that Spenser may have drawn on medieval and Renaissance Vergilian allegory, particularly the scheme of the two Venuses, for imagery in The Faerie Queene. This question is pursued in the study of “Spenser’s Venus-Virgo” in di Matteo 1989. 4. Venus (id est delectatio operis ac voluptas bona quidem et honesta) (2003, 91). 5. Venus illi iterum ‹t obvia, excusans Helenam Paridemque. Quidni autem Venus venereum opus excuset, cum sepe etiam apud rigidos censores data venia sit amori? (2003, 99, 101). In the passage following just after is another illustration of Petrarch’s conception of Venus in both her negative and positive aspects: “With these

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words Venus departs: for among the dangers and harshness of life’s events, lust, the friend of secure and soft ease, knows no place; and although later returning when she accompanies [Aeneas] as he is leaving, now she is not lust, but that honest pleasure arising from his escape from danger” (Hic dictis et Venus abscedit: inter pericula enim rerumque asperitates libido non habitat, securi lenique otii amica; que, etsi post rediens abeuntem comitetur, non iam libido est, sed honesta quidem e periculi fuga oriens voluptas [101]). In contemporary criticism of the Aeneid, many scholars ignore Mercury’s ‹rst mission to Carthage and accept as unproblematic that Venus merely “seeks to ensure Aeneas’ safety at Carthage by using Cupid to make [Dido] fall passionately in love with him” (Harrison 1989, 10; for similar interpretations, see H. Kahn 1968 and Swanepoel 1995, 36; the long-standard study of “Venus und die missverstandene Dido” is in Pabst 1955). Others, however, do attempt to justify Venus’s seemingly counterproductive behavior in books 1 and 4, and their accounts bear an uncanny resemblance to the traditional appeal to “two Venuses.” Kenneth Reckford, e.g., while insisting that Venus should not be “reduced to allegory” (1995–96, 35), explores Vergil’s representation of Venus “as seductive mother” (8), “her disreputable other self” (22), in addition to her role as Venus Genetrix, “mother of the gens Iulia and ancestress of the Roman race” (7). Similarly, G. H. Gellie observes that “there is no easy accord between serene motherhood and the passion that [Venus’s] name equally suggests” (1972, 142), for she has “a rag-bag of functions” in the Aeneid: “we ‹nd her shifting and fragmenting under our gaze” because there is a “blend of functions within the single Venus” (143). To cite one last example, in the context of an analysis of Venus’s enigmatic smile at Aeneid 4.128, Charles Segal states: “Venus may be smiling ‘at the wiles that Juno has invented,’ or she may be smiling because she has ‘found out or detected the wiles’ with which her rival thought to deceive her, or she may be ‘smiling at her own wiles that she has (thus) invented.’ Commentators are divided about which of these meanings is the ‘correct’ one. Venus, of course, is just being herself: the love-goddess works by guile, deviousness, and treachery and acts out her characteristic mode of behavior within the human heart” (1990, 1–2). Also on Venus’s smile and motives, see Konstan 1986 and Bandini 1987. More broadly, contemporary debate over Venus and Dido re›ects the larger tension in Vergil studies between “positive” and “pessimistic” accounts of Vergil’s intentions in the poem. What is often called “the Harvard School” of Aeneid criticism, characterized by its vision of an “anti-imperial” Vergil whose hero, Aeneas, loses his humanity in service to Rome’s manifest destiny, is credited to Pöschl (1966, which is a translation of the original edition of 1950) and Parry (1963) for its inception. “We hear two distinct voices in the Aeneid,” says Parry famously, “a public voice of triumph, and a private voice of regret” (79). A number of subsequent studies have extended this insight: see, e.g., Putnam 1965; Quinn 1968, 1972; Johnson 1976; R. D. Williams 1967, 1983–84 (a representative rebuttal may be found in Stahl 1981). Focusing just on the debate over the Aeneas and Dido story, we ‹nd that earlier inquiries into the nature of Dido’s culpability or “fatal ›aw” (given that her character and unhappy fate are so clearly rooted in the conventions of Greek tragedy) have evolved into a debate over whether Vergil wanted his readers to view Dido as culpable at all or instead to hold Aeneas—and the whole Roman imperial telos—as morally culpable for her death and the destruction of all that is “other.” See, to begin with, the monograph study of the

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< Dido and Aeneas episode by Richard C. Monti, who emphasizes its con‹rmation of Roman social and political values and characterizes Dido as a “convergence” of “the ideal Roman dynast” and “a Greek sentimental heroine” (1981, 37; for more recent studies of Dido as tragic heroine, see Harrison 1984 and Swanepoel 1995). For an argument that the death of Dido represents a purgation of evil in the Aeneid, a necessary sacri‹ce to Augustan moral values in Vergil’s eyes, see duBois 1976. Similarly, Perkell (1981, 370) stresses the signi‹cance of the fact that at Aeneid 4.393—following Aeneas’s last conversation with Dido, in which he resists her demands that he stay in Carthage—he is called “pius” for the ‹rst time in book 4 and for the ‹rst time since Aeneid 1.378. In contrast, Rudd (1976) insists on the dif‹culty of de‹ning “Dido’s culpa”: “So what was Dido’s moral ›aw? I must admit I am quite unable to say” (34); “we must ask whether Virgil means us to judge the queen as harshly as she judges herself” (42). Of course, the extent to which Dido represents Cleopatra must also in›uence critics’ estimates of her character; on this point, see duBois 1970. One effort to divert the course of the debate is in Farron 1993, which asserts that the Dido episode is designed to be nothing more than “a love story which arouses pity” and that, as such, the episode “makes no comment on Aeneas or Rome, whether positive, negative, or ‘two voices’” (70; note that this is a reversal of Farron’s position in an earlier essay, in which he claims that “Vergil deliberately portrays Aeneas’ mission as brutal and destructive” to evoke sympathy for defeated peoples [1980, 34]). Cf. the contention in O’Hara 1993, which makes a ‹tting cap to this brief overview of the range of perspectives in Vergil studies: “Too often literary criticism of Vergil has been like a courtroom trial,” says O’Hara, but “questions of right, wrong, duty, loyalty, piety, guilt, and innocence in the story of Dido and Aeneas are blurred and ambiguous beyond any simple resolution.” O’Hara concludes, “Those who want to ‹nd in the Aeneid only blame for Dido and Turnus, and only praise for Aeneas, and those who seek to defend Dido and Turnus and castigate Aeneas, must read selectively and myopically” (112). 6. On Augustine’s complex relationship with the Aeneid, see primarily MacCormack 1998 (esp. 175–224, for a discussion of Vergil’s Rome in Augustine’s imagination) and Bennett 1988. Studies that have previously explored the in›uence of this relationship on epic literary history include Fichter 1982, 40–69; Spence 1988, 55–80; and Watkins 1995, 35–36. Studies of Augustine’s experience of the classics in general appear in Hagendahl 1967, Stock 1996, and Brown 2000. Cf. also the references in chap. 1 n. 52 of the present study. 7. In de‹ning the “norms of epic,” Thomas Greene states that “the epic is the poem which replaces divine worship with humanistic awe, awe for the act which is prodigious but yet human. It is the City of man, not of God” (1963, 14). That “norm” is not just challenged but reversed in Christian epic, but for a study that already problematizes Greene’s characterization of “the City of man” in classical epic, see Morwood’s compelling analysis of the profound ambiguity and interminable deferral of the New Troy that is Aeneas’s quest (“No city, sacked cities, a Theme Park city, the wrong city, an escapist city, a dream city, aborted cities, stopgap cities—these interlinking ideas clearly constitute a Leitmotiv in the poem” [1991, 216]). See, too, Di Cesare’s discussion of “the search for the city” as “controlling metaphor of Books I–IV and, in important ways, of the entire poem” (1974a, esp. 1–37) and Bettini’s characterization of the surviving Trojans’ dilemma in the Aeneid as between “an endless nostalgia” for their lost Troy, on the one hand, and, on the other, a “future requir[ing] that they forget their own selves, losing contact with the very city that gave them birth, abandoning their language

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and their customs” (1997, 30–31). On Vergil’s ambivalent vision of the interdependent relation between the founding of Rome and the destruction of Carthage, see Carney 1986 and Wilhelm 1987. 8. On Servius and the early tradition of Vergil exegesis, see Starr 1997; Kaster 1988, 169–97. For analyses of the different types of allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid from Servius to the late Middle Ages, see Baswell 1985 and 1995, 1–163; Jones 1960–61, 1964, 1986, 1987, and 1989; Starr 1991–92. On the exegetical tradition through to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see D. Allen 1970, 135–62; Kallendorf 1989, 1–18; Kallendorf 1995; and the references (to studies of Landino) in n. 31 in the present chapter. It is clear, from the present chapter, that my assessment of this tradition differs from Andrew Fichter’s, who states that “the preoccupations of the commentators are not congenial to the production of epic literature” (1982, 19). The argument could be made that one other tradition of interpreting Vergil is represented by the divination practice known as sortes Vergilianae, although see my discussion of this practice in chap. 5, in addition to Distler 1966, 151–56, and R. Hamilton 1993. Still a standard reference on the medieval reception of the Aeneid is Comparetti’s Vergil in the Middle Ages (1966, reprint of the 1908 translation; orig. pub. 1872, with an expanded edition, by Pasquali, in 1937–41), though this has been superseded in many respects by Baswell 1995. The classic account of Vergil’s reception in medieval and Renaissance Italy is in Zabughin 1921–23. However, for what may still be the most discerning study of Vergil’s place in Italian humanist poetic theory, see Alan Fisher’s examination (1987) of three epistles written in response to the destruction of Vergil’s statue at Mantua in 1397. 9. Juno, explains Servius, represents air, and Jupiter represents ether and ‹re both, so “because the elements” of air and ether “are equally thin, they are said to be siblings, but since Juno, that is the air, is subject to ‹re, which is Jove, she is rightly given the name of spouse to the higher element” (physici Iovem aetherem, id est ignem volunt intellegi, et Iunonem vero aërem, quoniam tenuitate haec elementa paria sunt, dixerunt esse germana. sed quoniam Iuno, hoc est aër subiectus est igni, id est Iovi, iure superposito elemento mariti traditum nomen est [Servius 1961, 1:32, commentary to Aeneid 1.47]). These examples are discussed also in Jones 1960–61, 218–21. 10. . . . iuventutis . . . cecitas . . . Feriatus ergo animus a paterno iudicio in quarto libro et venatu progreditur et amore torretur, et tempestate ac nubilo, velut in mentis conturbatione, coactus adulterium per‹cit (Fulgentius 1997, 62; translation by Leslie George Whitbread in Fulgentius 1961, 127; subsequent citations of Fulgentius are also from these editions). 11. Mercurius enim deus ponitur ingenii; ergo ingenio instigante aetas deserit amoris con‹nia. Qui quidem amor contemptus emoritur et in cineres exustus emigrat; dum enim de corde puerili auctoritate ingenii libido expellitur, sepulta in oblivionis cinere favillescit (62, 64; 127, with punctuation slightly modi‹ed). The anonymous “Virgil Commentary of mixed type” recently edited by Julian Ward Jones (a fragment that picks up at book 4) was presumably written in the fourteenth century and in some places indicates an awareness of the commentary of Bernardus Silvestris, but it follows Fulgentius closely in its interpretation of the Aeneas and Dido story (Jones 1996, 73, with my translation): Great continence is what in the beginning Aeneas was seeking on his hunt in this fourth book, but he was in›amed with love, forced by a storm into com-

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< mitting the meanest adultery. In this sojourn a long while, by the instigation of Mercury, he cast off his love of pleasure: thence Dido died and was turned into ashes. By all this youth is denoted. . . . He commits adultery, incensed by love and dragged by a storm because youth are delighted in love and in being compelled by the perturbation of the mind with lust, but Mercury inciting him, he leaves such things. For Mercury is interpreted as the god of natural wisdom and prudence. Thus with wisdom inciting, he scorns and leaves love. Dido dies scorned and turns into ashes because love scorned is annihilated and departs as if burned in ›ames. [Continencia huius quarti voluminis tanta est quod in principio Eneas venatum progreditur, amore incenditur, tempestate coactus ad ultimum perpetravit adulterium. In quo diu commoratus, Mercurio instigante, libidinis sue amorem reliquit: deinde Dydo moritur et in cineres mutatur. Per hoc totum iuventus designatur. . . . Qui per‹cit adulterium, amore incensus et tempestate tractus quia iuvenes in amore et libidine mentis perturbacione compellente delectantur, sed Mercurio instigante, talia relinquit. Mercurius enim deus ingenii et calliditatis interpretatur. Ergo ingenio instigante, amorem contempnit et deserit. Dydo contempta moritur et in cineres mutatur quia amor contemptus annichilatus et quasi in cineres exustus migrat.] 12. Illic etiam et Dido videtur quasi amoris atque antiquae libidinis umbra iam vacua. Contemplando enim sapientiam libido iam contemptu emortua lacrimabiliter penitendo ad memoriam revocatur (70; 131). 13. Notandum est vero in hoc loco, quemadmodum in aliis misticis voluminibus, ita et in hoc equivocationes et multivocationes esse et integumenta ad diversa respicere (Bernardus 1977, 9; translation by Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca in Bernardus 1979, 11). Subsequent references to this commentary and its translation are also to the editions cited here, and for the sake of convenience, I refer to the author as “Bernard” rather than “pseudo-Bernard/us,” though the latter is increasingly common. 14. Bernard also ascribes to Aeneas in this passage “an abundance of humors coming from a super›uity of food and drink” (In hoc quarto volumine natura iuventutis exponitur mistice . . . Tempestatibus et pluviis ad cavernam compellitur, id est commotionibus carnis et af›uentia humoris ex ciborum et potuum super›uitate provenientis ad immundiciam carnis ducitur et libidinis [23–24; 25]), but he then provides an involved physiological account of how this “super›uity of food and drink” is also linked to carnal passion, since it is converted into “foam” and “emitted through the male member,” and he concludes, “thus one reads that Venus is born of sea foam and is therefore called froden” (Cum autem spume nimia est super›uitas . . . per virilem virgam . . . emittitur. . . . Unde legitur Venerem de spuma maris natam et ideo proprie vocatam esse “afroden” [24; 26]). 15. Que immundicia carnis cavea dicitur quia serenitatem mentis et discretionis obnubilat. . . . Itaque ducunt pluvie Eneam ad caveam iungiturque Didoni et diu cum ea moratur. Non revocant eum turpia preconia fame quia iuventus libidine irretita nescit “quid pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non” (24; 25–26). Bernard is quoting Horace (Epistulae, 1.2.3). 16. Discedit a Didone et desuescit a libidine. Dido deserta emoritur et in cineres excocta demigrat. Desueta enim libido def‹cit et fervore virilitatis consumpta in favillam, id est in solas cogitationes, transit (25; 27).

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17. Bernard’s commentary leaves off at Aeneas’s entrance to the Blissful Groves in Aeneid 6.31–36, but we see clearly enough in Bernard’s last remarks (114) that the hero is approaching a state of divine wisdom. Atque fornice: this is the vault of the human brain. Portas: the three chambers. We come to heavenly contemplation by exercising wit, reason and memory. Adverso: Aeneas turns his head and looks to heaven. Hec ubi: at the gates, since Aeneas and the Sibyl are presently in the cells of memory. Dona: philosophy. . . . Viarum: of virtues. Medium: that virtue which is the mean between human and divine substances. (106–7) [ATQUE FORNICE: fornix est humanum cerebrum testudineum. PORTAS, id est celulas. Per has enim ut supradiximus exercendo ingenium, rationem, memoriam celestia contemplatione ingredimur. ADVERSO: Respicit capud ad celum. HEC UBI, id est in quibus portis, quia in cellula memorie. DONA: pholosophiam . . . VIARUM: virtutum. MEDIUM: ipsam virtutem que est media hominum et divinarum substantiarum.] 18. Anchises enim celsa inhabitans interpretatur quem intelligimus esse patrem omnium omnibus presidentem (9; 10). 19. Veneres ergo duas legimus esse, legitimam scilicet et petulantie deam. Legitimam Venerem legimus esse mundanam musicam, id est equalem mundanorum proportionem, quam alii Astream, naturalem iusticiam, vocant. . . . Impudicam vero Venerem et petulantie deam dicimus esse carnis concupiscentiam que omnium fornicationum mater est (9; 10–11). 20. Venus ut supra dictum est aliquando carnis concupiscentiam, aliquando mundi concordiam; . . . Ubi ergo invenies Venerem uxorem Vulcani matrem Ioci et Cupidinis, intellige carnis voluptatem, que naturali calori coniuncta est et iocum et coitum parit. Ubi vero leges Venerem et Anchisem Eneam ‹lium habere, intellige per Venerem mundanam musicam, per Eneam humanum spiritum (10; 11, with punctuation slightly modi‹ed). 21. Tectus nube Carthaginem venit. Quemadmodum nubes coruscationem abscondit, ita ignorantia sapientiam. Sub ignorantia Carthaginem venit, id est ad novam civitatem mundi scilicet qui quidem civitas est omnes habens in se habitores (12; 13). Here Bernard alludes to the etymology of the name Carthago in calling the city a “novam civitatem”; see the discussion in chap. 1 n. 12. 22. In hac civitate regnum habet Dido, id est libido (12; 13). 23. Legitur namque treas deas, Iunonem, Palladem, Venerem, Paridem adisse ut iudex existeret que earum aureum pomum haberet. Per Pallada theoricam vitam accipimus, per Iunonem activam, per Venerem voluptatem. . . . Quidam enim preferunt contemplativam vitam reliquis, ut philosophi; quidam activam ut politici; quidam philarginam active et contemplative sicut Epicuri. Paridi videtur pulchrior Venus quia sensus contemplari et agere voluptati postponit ideoque Pallas et Iuno Troiam persecuntur. Namque sensui pulcrum est dif›uere voluptatibus, laboriosum carni contemplari vel agere (46; 46–47, slightly revised). Craig Kallendorf points out, in discussing the relation between Ficino’s commentary on Philebus and Landino’s commentary edition of the Aeneid, that Ficino, in an appendix to his work, likewise “allegorizes the Judgment of Paris so that Minerva presides over wisdom, Juno over political power, and Venus over sensual pleasure” (1983, 541).

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< 24. . . . externis hanc generis fata destinassent (hoc est operosis et dif‹cilia atque ignota penetrantibus) (2003, 87). 25. Cf. the opposing view—that Vegio “avoids any step that would lead the reader toward any medieval, anagogical interpretation of the hero’s life”—expressed by Michael C. J. Putnam in Vegio 2004 (xviii), from whose Latin text I cite in this discussion, though with my translations. Also see Kallendorf 1989, 100–128, for an analysis of the Supplement that stresses Vegio’s care to “complete” the Aeneid following the poem’s rhetorical precedents (e.g., in the comparative length of its speakers’ speeches) and according to an understanding of Vergil’s epideictic aims that was then current. Cf. Hijmans 1971–72 and Fichter 1982, 12–15, on the Supplement’s moral and religious designs. 26. The ‹rst edition of Vergil’s Opera to include the Supplement is item 2 in Kallendorf 1991. For a discussion of its rise and fall in popularity, see Anna Cox Brinton’s introduction to her edition of the Latin text and two sixteenth-century translations, by Thomas Twyne (into English) and Gavin Douglas (into Scots), in Vegio 1930. 27. Transtulit Aeneam Venus astra in summa beatum (Vegio 1930, 52; the “argumentum” is not included in Vegio 2004). 28. Cf. Metamorphoses 14.581–84 (Ovid 1933–36, with translation by Frank Justus Miller): Iamque deos omnes ipsamque Aeneia virtus Iunonem veteres ‹nire coegerat iras, cum, bene fundatis opibus crescentis Iuli, tempestivus erat caelo Cythereius heros. [Now had Aeneas’s courageous soul moved all the gods and even Juno to lay aside their ancient anger, and, since the fortunes of the budding Iulus were well established, the heroic son of Cytherea was ripe for heaven.] See also Putnam’s discussion of Vegio’s use of Ovid (Vegio 2004, xiv–xviii). 29. For discussions of Vegio’s conventionally moralistic treatment of Dido in his Supplement and in his pedagogical tract De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus, see D. Allen 1970, 141, and Kallendorf 1984; 1989, 100–128; and 1999, 52–53. A modern critical edition of the De educatione liberorum is available in Vegio 1933–36. 30. For the date of completion, see Fubini 1995. As manuscript evidence attests, Landino had incorporated allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid into the university lectures he gave on Vergil over a decade before. On the chronology and content of these lectures, see Cardini 1973, 16–17; Field 1978, 1981, and 1988, 243–56. 31. For summaries of Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid and discussion of its relation to the medieval tradition of commentary on the poem, see D. Allen 1970, 144–54; Murrin 1980, 27–50, 197–202; Kallendorf 1983; Kallendorf 1989, 129–64; Di Cesare 1984. A monograph study of the Disputationes Camaldulenses within the milieu of the “Platonic Academy” is in Müller-Bochat 1968. From the ‹fteenth century, there are, of course, many other, briefer articulations of the “stages of man” interpretation of Vergil’s Aeneid. One of the most familiar is in Francisco Filelfo’s letter to Ciriaco d’Ancora (see Filelfo 1488, 4r–5v, discussed in Robin 1991, 53–55). 32. Citations of the Commentarium in Convivium Platonis are from Ficino 1944, which includes Sears Reynolds Jayne’s English translation following the Latin text. The standard critical edition of the Commentarium is now Ficino 2002, with facing-page

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French translation by Pierre Laurens; however, in the passage discussed in the present analysis, the differences between the two are insigni‹cant. 33. . . . duplex est Venus. Una sane est intelligentia illa quam in mente angelica posuimus. Altera vis generandi animae mundi tributa (49; 142). 34. Utraque sui similem comitem habet amorem. Illa enim amore ingenito ad intelligendam Dei pulchritudinem rapitur. Haec item amore suo ad eandem pulchritudinem in corporibus procreandam. Illa divinitatis fulgorem in se primum complectitur; deinde hunc in Venerem secundam traducit. Haec fulgoris illius scintillas in materiam mundi transfundit. Scintillarum huiusmodi praesentia singula mundi corpora, pro captu naturae, speciosa videntur. Horum speciem corporum humanus animus per oculos percipit. Qui rursus vires geminas possidet. Quippe intelligendi vim habet. Habet et generandi potentiam. Hae geminae vires duae in nobis sunt Veneres, quas et gemini comitantur amores. Cum primum humani corporis species oculis nostris offertur, mens nostra quae prima in nobis Venus est, eam tamquam divini decoris imaginem, veneratur et diligit, perque hanc ad illum saepenumero incitatur. Vis autem generandi, secunda Venus, formam generare huic similem concupiscit. Utrobique igitur amor est. Ibi contemplandae, hic generandae pulchritudinis desiderium. Amor uterque honestus atque probandus. Uterque enim divinam imaginem sequitur. Quid igitur in amore Pausanias improbat? Dicam equidem. Si quis generationis avidior contemplationem deserat, aut generationem praeter modum cum feminis, vel contra naturae ordinem cum masculis prosequatur, aut formam corporis pulchritudini animi praeferat, is utique dignitate amoris abutitur. Hunc amoris abusum vituperat Pausanias. Quo qui recte utitur, corporis quidem formam laudat, sed per illam, excellentiorem animi mentisque et dei speciem cogitat, eamque vehementius admiratur, et amat (49; 142–43, but without Jayne’s paragraph breaks). 35. Says Augustine in De doctrina Christiana 1.7 (citations are from Augustine 1995, with facing-page translation by R. P. H. Green): There are some things which are to be enjoyed, some which are to be used, and some whose function is both to enjoy and use. Those which are to be enjoyed make us happy; those which are to be used assist us and give us a boost, so to speak, as we press on towards our happiness, so that we may reach and hold fast to the things which make us happy. And we, placed as we are among things of both kinds, both enjoy and use them; but if we choose to enjoy things that are to be used, our advance is impeded and sometimes even diverted, and we are held back, or even put off, from attaining things which are to be enjoyed, because we are hamstrung by our love of lower things. [Res ergo aliae sunt quibus fruendum est, aliae quibus utendum, aliae quae fruuntur et utuntur. Illae quibus fruendum est nos beatos faciunt; istis quibus utendum est tendentes ad beatitudinem adiuvamur et quasi adminiculamur, ut ad illas quae nos beatos faciunt pervenire atque his inhaerere possimus. Nos vero, qui fruimur et utimur inter utrasque constituti, si eis quibus utendum est fruit voluerimus, impeditur cursus noster et aliquando etiam de›ectitur, ut ab his rebus quibus fruendum est obtinendis vel retardemur vel etiam revocemur inferiorum amore praepediti.] In the immediately following passage, Augustine draws an analogy that is relevant to the allegorical epic: he imagines those who “enjoy” what should only be “used” in this world

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< as “travellers” (peregrini) who are “fascinated by the delights of the journey and the actual travelling, . . . perversely enjoying things that [they] should be using” and so “being ensnared in the wrong kind of pleasure and estranged from the homeland whose pleasures could make us happy.” “So,” he says, “we are like travellers away from our Lord” (quod si amoenitates itineris et ipsa gestatio vehiculorum nos delectaret, conversi ad fruendum his quibus uti debuimus nollemus cito viam ‹nire et perversa suavitate implicati alienaremur a patria, cuius suavitas faceret beatos. sic in huius mortalitatis vita peregrinantes a domino [1.8–9]). Cf. the discussion of these passages in Fish 1972, 24–25. On Ficino’s appeals to Augustine, however, see M. Allen 1998, 86–88; Allen observes that “Augustine was in many ways a stalking-horse for an un-Augustinian programme” (86), particularly in the way that Ficino “does not predicate the surrender of the reason to the puri‹ed will, at least in this life, except perhaps in states of ecstasy, suggesting instead a religion of the reason, or at least for the reason” (88). 36. In book 1 of the Disputationes Camaldulenses, it is Landino’s contention that the active life properly lived is not opposed to the contemplative life and that the contemplative life should not be simplistically conceived as either pure meditation or otium. In fact, Landino maintains, action and contemplation can really be divided only in philosophical speculation (on this point, see Field 1988, 195, 262; for extensive treatment of the vita activa and vita contemplativa in Landino’s thought, see Rombach 1991, and on these ideas’ currency in the Renaissance generally, see the essays collected in Vickers 1991). Nevertheless, the very logic of the plot of a hero’s spiritual journey entails, in Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid, some simplifying of his theory by representing activity and contemplation as opposed stages in the good man’s progress rather than as complementary modes of virtuous living. 37. A skeptical way to characterize this, of course, is that Landino preferred his own Christian Platonism to Vergil’s originally intended meaning. But that, as Michael J. B. Allen recently has observed (describing Ficino’s less than generous terms for bringing poets back in from “outside the city”), re›ects what was at heart Neoplatonic philosophy’s “censorious vision” of poetry (1998, 118). “For whatever the poet’s express intentions,” explains Allen, “be they good, bad, or indifferent, and whatever the affective or imitative success of his poetry, the allegorical meaning is both postulated and possessed by the theologizing interpreter. . . . In short, bad poets and their bad passionate poetry would be administered in the Platonic city if all its citizens were philosophers and could interpret any poetry in the light of Platonic theology and the soul’s ascent to the true and the good” (105). This vision is clearly the basis of Landino’s comments in the treatise De laboribus Herculis that “when the mystical interpreter opens up the hidden things of the poet and has changed them by referring individual things to God, to nature, or to customs, although he has found what the author could not have known or said, no doubt he should consider himself to have lit upon a permissable meaning,” and that “if perchance it was not the true teaching and the names do not correspond to what the author intended, he will have found a meaning far more suitable than what the author had purposed” (Cumque poetarum abdita misticus interpres aperiet, et ad deum, naturam, vel mores singula referens adaptaverit, sine dubitatione reputet se, quamvis incogitatum ab autore dici queat id quod invenerit, in sententiam tolerabilem incidisse. . . . aut si forsitan [veram sententiam] non fuerit, et ad id quod autor intendisset nomina non accedant, longe commodiorem sensum quam autor cogitaverit invenisse [quoted and translated in Field 1988, 250]). For recent scholarship on Landino

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and his views on poets (both ancient and modern), on poetry, and on the relation of poetry to philosophy, see McNair 1999; Parker 1993, 77–85, 89–97; Field 1988, 231–68; Di Cesare 1986, esp. 166–76; Weiss 1981, 23–36, 66–117. For the broader context of Landino’s interpretive theory and practice, see James Hankins’s useful “typology of reading in the ‹fteenth century” (1990, 1:18–25). 38. O divinum ingenium! O virum inter rarissimos viros omnino excellentem et poetae nomine vere dignum! qui non Christianus omnia tamen Christianorum verissimae doctrinae simillima proferat. Lege apostolum Paulum! . . . Quid enim ille fuse lateque describit, quod hic poeticis angustiis non coarctet? (Landino 1980, 175). Subsequent citations of the Disputationes Camaldulenses are also from the edition cited here, and the translations are mine, although I have at times bene‹ted from consulting Stahel 1968. (At time of this writing, an I Tatti Renaissance Library edition of the Disputationes Camaldulenses is planned.) Cf. Maffeo Vegio’s similar question in De perseverantia religionis 1.5: “if we substitute heaven for Latium and life for Troy, why might the passage not have come from the pen of the Apostle Paul?” (si pro latio celum: pro troia vitam immutantes verba dicamus: quid obstiterit quin ex of‹cina pauli apostoli deprompta ista esse videnture [Vegio 1511, 11v; translation by Anna Cox Brinton in Vegio 1930, 28]). Landino furthermore justi‹es his allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid in the Disputationes by referring to the practice of scriptural exegesis, when he says, “we see in our theology that the weightiest passages are interpreted in various ways by the most learned men” (Videmus enim et gravissimos in nostra theologia locos variis modis a doctissimis viris interpretari [237]). 39. See Kallendorf 1995 (subsequently incorporated into chap. 3 of Kallendorf 1999) for a discussion of the ways that “several of the commentaries most frequently published in Italian Renaissance editions of Virgil attempted to provide enough interpretive clues to steer between the Scylla of ahistorical syncretism and the Charybdis of a pure classicism that had little bearing on an everyday life infused with the goals and values of Christianity” (43), with an acknowledgment that “a clear, consistent approach” was not found by any of them (49). “For Landino,” explains Kallendorf in the same essay, “a Platonizing version of the traditional theologia poetica provided the guidance he needed for bringing Virgil into conjunction with the Christian faith” (53), which was taken much further in the Italian commentary based on Landino by Giovanni Fabrini (56–58)—discussed later in the present chapter. Kallendorf establishes a crucial point in this essay, one supported further in his scholarly work generally, that “the modern argument that ‘it was humanism which placed Virgil back into his historical context’ is certainly based on what some Renaissance authors believed themselves to have been doing,” but “this view is only a partial one.” Kallendorf explains, “Behind Renaissance reading practices was a theory, linking the poet to the theologian, which encouraged the reader to accommodate classical texts to Christian meanings” (62). 40. . . . virum . . . qui plurimus ac maximis vitiis paulatim expiatus ac deinceps miris virtutibus illustratus id, quod summum homini bonum est quodque nisi sapiens nullus assequi potest, tandem assequeretur. Verum cum illud in rerum divinarum speculatione consistere a Platone didicisset (119). 41. Troiae igitur oritur Aeneas, per quam urbem recte, ut puto, primam hominis aetatem intelligemus, in qua, cum ratio ad huc omnis consopita sit, solus sensus regnat (120). 42. Troiae igitur et Aeneas simul et Paris aluntur. Verum alter, quoniam Venerem

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< Palladi, id est virtuti voluptatem anteponit, necesse est, ut una cum Troia pereat; alter autem duce matre Venere se ab omni incendio explicat. Quod quid aliud intelligamus nisi eos, qui magno amore in›ammati ad veri cognitionem impelluntur, omnia facile consequi posse? Quapropter Venerem divinum amorem recte interpretabimur (121). Cf. Kallendorf’s discussion (1983, 537–38) of the doctrine of the two Venuses in Landino’s 1488 commentary edition of the Aeneid. 43. Animus autem noster cum et ipse similes quasdam vires habeat intelligendi atque gignendi, duas itidem Veneres habere dicitur, quas gemini comitentur cupidines. Cum enim corporea pulchritudo oculis nostris obicitur, mens nostra, quae prima Venus est, eam non quia corporea sit, sed quia simulacrum divini decori admiratur atque diligit eaque veluti via quadam ad caelos effertur, gignendi autem vis, quae secunda Venus est, formam gignere huic similem concupiscit. Quapropter uterque amor iure dicitur, ut alter contemplandae, alter gignendae pulchritudinis desiderium sit. Nemo igitur nisi totius rationis expers sit duos istos amores damnare audebit, cum uterque humanae naturae necessarius sit; neque enim diu esse mortalium genus sine sobolis propagatione neque rursus bene esse sine veri investigatione poterit. Praestantiori igitur illa Venere duce in Italiam pervenire potuit Aeneas (125–26). 44. Aeneas . . . paulatim ex Troiano incendio, id est ex corporearum voluptatum ardore . . . (127). 45. Aeneas huiuscemodi parentibus natus est, ut Venus dea, Anchises mortalis sit. . . . Hinc igitur assiduum atroxque certamen illud exoritur spiritus adversus carnem, ut nostri dicunt, cum mens totum hominem ad divina trahere conetur et sensus in potestatem redigere et sibi obtemperantes reddere cupiat (130–31). 46. In qua autem re summum bonum consistat, nondum cognoscit. Iure igitur exul appellatur (133). 47. Divinus enim amor nil aliud meditatur, nil molitur, nulla alia in re laborat, nihil tentat, nihil nititur, nisi ut iam corporeae pulchritudinis aspectu concitus ad divinam nos pulchritudinem rapiat (128). 48. Nunquam enim ad veram contemplationem deveniemus, nisi prius ipsa, ut Christianorum verbo utar, sensualitas non modo extincta, verum etiam penitus sepulta in nobis fuerit (158). 49. I quote the judgment of Schrieber and Maresca in Bernardus 1979 (112 n. 4). 50. Puto vos meminisse Italiam speculationis, Carthaginem actionis ‹guram habere (170). 51. Nam cum in vita civili quae recta et honesta sunt diu coluerimus, ex illorum pulchritudine ad divina, quorum haec veluti simulacra sunt, erigimur (180). 52. . . . se in vitam socialem conferunt, in qua civilibus virtutibus exculti cum versentur laudem non mediocrem reportant (174). 53. Cf. Fichter’s comment that “Augustine . . . ultimately accepts Rome, when Rome can be regarded with eyes that do not stop at its physical reality.” Fichter explains, “The objective is to contemplate Rome to see God indirectly rather than to see only Rome, or only a monument to human pride” (1982, 65). 54. Ducem in primis habent, quem sequantur, cuius imperium nunquam contemnant. Labores inter se summa aequitate distribuunt. Summa concordia et opera sua faciunt et hostes arcent. Quicquid quaeritur, id omne in commune quaeritur (182). 55. Quae quidem omnia si in rem publicam aliquam transferas, Platonicam civitatem constitues (182).

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56. Longe tamen ab ea divinitate, quam quaerimus, absunt (174); . . . virtutes in vita sociali potius incohatae quam absolutae sunt . . . (182). 57. . . . consilio abeundi abiecto arces Carthaginis fundare ac tecta novare instituat purpuramque et ensem lapillis exornatum, quae omnia imperii insignia sunt, gestare gaudeat (187). 58. Libido enim imperandi Aeneam Didoni coniungere, id autem est virum excellentem regno prae‹cere cupit, sed rem per‹cere non valet, nisi assentiatur eius amor. Amor autem animadvertit huiuscemodi coniunctione non Aeneae, sed Didoni consuli; non enim animis hominum ad maiora natis, sed ipsi imperio conducit. Praestat enim nobis ad veram sapientiam pro‹cisci quam in actionibus versari, sed rerum administratio a sapientibus si deseratur, actum sit de rebus humanis oportet. Itaque quamvis falsa esse cognoscat, quae libido regnandi persuadet, tamen assentitur, sive iam illa irretitus sit, sive eorum quibus consulendum est misericordia motus (185). 59. Sed ita paulatim in deterius labuntur, ut quae pudicissima fuerat mulier et in re publica administranda vigilantissima turpi amore victa in lasciviam otiumque labatur. Quibus omnibus ostenditur, quam facile rebus secundis humanae mentes a labore in libidinem declinent (182). 60. . . . quod paulo ante dicebam, fundamenta rerum publicarum, quae ex parvis crescunt, habere meliora initia quam exitus, iccirco reginam a principio in omni re temperatam posuit, paulo vero postea amore insurgente paulatim ex temperantia in continentiam labitur, postremo victa amore incontinens ita reditur, ut demum in summam intemperantiam incidat (183). 61. Est enim triplex hominum recte et ex ratione viventium ordo. Horum trium inferior est eorum, qui in sociali ac civili vita degentes rerum publicarum administrationem suscipiunt. His proximi, sed tamen erectiori gradu constituti ii sunt, qui a publicis actionibus veluti tempestuosis ac procellosis et in quibus fortunae temeritas omnino dominetur se in portum tranquillitatis transferunt et a turba in otium se recipientes quietam vitam degunt, non ita tamen, ut non aliquid adhuc restet, adversus quod luctandum sit. Supremo autem loco eos cernes, qui penitus a rerum humanarum concursatione ac tumultu remoti nihil cuius paenitendum sit conmittunt (153). 62. Recte igitur arguitur Aeneas, quod uxoris urbis—ea enim est vita in actione posita—administrationem susceperit (194–95). 63. Cf. Nancy Ruff’s conclusion to her survey of allegorical interpretations of Dido from Servius through Landino: “In his Disputationes the Aeneid is transformed to an allegory expounding the virtues of the contemplative life over the active. . . . Perhaps appreciating the dignity of Virgil’s Dido, not to mention that of her historical counterpart, Landino allowed the character to represent something a little loftier than the meretrix of Servius and the libido of Silvestris, something corresponding to the amor ferinus of his own Platonic system. Nonetheless, by the time Landino had added his ‹nal twist to the accumulated interpretations of her story, Dido had been thoroughly transmuted into the symbol of a concept, and the concept is still a variety of cupidity” (1994, 880). 64. . . . contemplationis, qua sola mentes humanae regnant . . . Ascanio saltem heredi successorique suo consulat, cui regnum Italiae ac Romana tellus debetur. Quo in loco quidnam aliud Ascanium intelligemus nisi futuram aeternamque vitam, quae huic brevi et momentaneae succedit? (195). 65. Venit in Italiam Aeneas, verum eo virtutum genere, quae purgatoriae appellantur, a quibus antea quam penitus expiata sit mens necesse est, ut acerrimum bellum,

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< quemadmodum nostri aiunt, spiritus adversus carnem gerat. Nam quanto magis haec supra humanam imbecillitatem sunt, tanto maiori periculo aggredimur (210). 66. . . . non enim facile Scipionem invenias, qui nunquam minus solus esset, quam cum solus (210). Cf. Cicero 1928, 1.27: “[Africanus] numquam se plus agere, quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse, quam cum solus esset.” This statement is also made, in slightly different form, in Cicero’s De of‹ciis 3.1; I shall return to it in chap. 6. As John Fleming would also remind us, the De of‹ciis of St. Ambrose forms part of the context of this common Ciceronian allusion. Ambrose’s “third book,” notes Fleming, “begins not with Scipio, but with David and Solomon, models of contemplation, and what he has to say of Scipio is that ‘he was not the ‹rst to understand that he was not alone when he was alone, nor less at leisure than when he was at leisure’ [revising Cicero].” “The ‹rst,” adds Fleming, “was Moses” (1984, 74). 67. Nam quemadmodum in chamaldulensibus philosophi interpretis munus obivimus: Sic in his commentariis grammatici rhetorisque vices praestabimus (Vergil 1499, 112r; subsequent citations of Landino’s commentary are also to this edition, and the translations are mine). 68. Mater: quare Venus in excidio troiano se ut deam ‹lio ostendit: et quare hic ut venatricem: in nostris chamaldulensibus expressimus: qui locus non te fugiat obsecro lector. Videbis quam altos quamque profundus sensus divinus poeta sub huiuscemodi fabularum ‹gmentis abscondet (130r). 69. . . . enim aeneam a didone nihil aliud est: ut in allegoriis ostendimus: quam virum egregium a Iove per Mercurium monitum. id est adeo per doctrinam eruditum a vita activa ad contemplativam trans‹re (200v). 70. The other major Aeneid commentary printed with sixteenth-century editions of Vergil’s Opera was that of Jodocus Badius Ascensius, whose annotations are also predominantly “rhetorical and grammatical” in nature rather than allegorical (or “philosophical”); yet it is the subject matter of book 4 that inspires Ascanius to mention that “Saint Augustine confessed that he was compelled to tears by the complaints of Dido,” and Ascanius admonishes his readers to search for the moral allegory of the poem, repeating the “stages of man” account of its “deeper meaning”: “You shall observe that the poet constructs a lifetime in the arrangement of his book. For in the ‹rst book infancy is described,” “in the second, boyhood,” “in the third, adolescence,” which “contains the errors of Aeneas” and is the stage of life in which “the most wise Solomon admitted he utterly knew himself not”; the fourth book represents “youth, which involves love”; the ‹fth represents “virility”; and in the sixth, we see “old age tending toward death and contemplating the future” (. . . ut divus Augustinus sese ad lachrymas compulsum, Didonis querela con‹teatur. . . . Idque servato aetatum cum libris ordine facit poeta. Nam in primo libro infantiam describit. . . . In secundo pueritiam. . . . In tertio adolescentiam, cuius vitam sese penitus nescire fatetur sapientissimus Solomon: unde recte Aeneae continet errores. In quarto iuventam, quae amoribus implicatur. In quinto virilitatem. . . . In sexto senium ad manes tendens, et futura praemeditans [Vergil 1544, 266v]). See Renouard 1908 for a bibliography of Ascensius’s writings, including a list of the many Renaissance editions of Vergil’s works that contain his commentary. 71. Citations of Fabrini’s commentary are from the 1588 Venice edition of Vergil’s L’opere (no. 121 in Kallendorf 1991), with my translations. In this edition, interestingly, the “allegorical and moral meaning” of the poem receives all the more emphasis with a set of special illustrations for Aeneas’s descent into the underworld in book 6, which

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were taken from Alessandro Vellutello’s 1544 commentary edition of the Divine Comedy. For discussion of these illustrations see Kleiner 1989, 30–31; Kallendorf 1994, 146–51; Kallendorf 1999, 118. 72. . . . la prima erà de l’huomo, done non domina punto la ragione, ma il sense. . . . parte da Troia, . . . cioè à la vita civile, e santa (103r). 73. Questa favola signi‹ca, che Iddio fece da principio l’huomo doppio di lume, cioè naturale, e divino: per il che insuperbiti, Iddio tolse loro il divino, che fu il dividergli, e andava togliendo loro il naturale, e gli riduceva come bestie: ma havuto di loro compassione, mandò Mercurio a risanargli, che fu Christo, che liberò l’huomo, e lo ricomperò, che era perduto per il suo peccato: & cosi l’huomo è salvo hora per la medicina de la passion di Christo (290v). 74. . . . l’opinione di Virgilio è santissima opinione vera Christiana . . . (309r). 75. Dice adunche Platone nel Fedro, che Venere è sopra à l’amore divino, e lascivo. E nel Sinfosio, che sono due Veneri l’una celeste, e l’altra vulgare, e che la celeste nacque del cielo senza madre. per laquale ‹ntione non signi‹ca altro, che quella intelligenza, che è ne la mente de l’Angelo, e che per un certo amore naturale si volta à contemplare la bellezza di Dio (103r). 76. . . . accioche ella fusse assaltata da la bellezza del corpo, e al ‹ne d’onesta e casta, diventasse disonesta, e impudica: perche per Didone Virgilio mostra la vita attiva, e civile, la quale vita civile da principio è di questa natura, ch’ella ha per ‹ne la virtù, ma occupandosi ne le cose corporee, e mortali alettata da le lusinghe loro, abbandona la virtù, e si dà a le vanità (199v). 77. The chapter on Tasso in Fichter 1982 (112–55) is in this respect representative— not only of contemporary criticism on Gerusalemme liberata, but of the debate that raged in Italian literary circles through the end of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries—for its preoccupation with Tasso’s (successful or failed) effort to compose an epic that would respond to the artistic challenge posed by romance literature, speci‹cally Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (cf. the essays collected in Finucci 1999). A recent account of the early controversy over Ariostan romance and Tassoan epic, with selections from some of the more important treatises, is in Sberlati 2001.

chapter three 1. PQ 4638 A881b Cage in the Folger collection, marginalia on p. 261. 2. Of course, Tasso could well have drawn these symbols immediately from the commentary tradition on Vergil and from allegorical literature generally, but I am in agreement with Roche that they were, more deeply, Augustinian. Cf. Lubac’s argument that “the most privileged symbol of all” in medieval exegetical tradition “is that of Jerusalem,” which provides “much more than an example; for in this single name of Jerusalem the whole history of the people of Israel is summed up, and in it also is contained the whole substance of the Old Testament; and along with it is the whole Church of Christ, the whole Christian soul, the whole city of God—and the whole mystery of the ‘Virgo singularis’ as well—so much so that the explication of Jerusalem condenses ‘in nuce’ as it were, the total explication of Scripture and the total exposition of the Christian mystery” (1959, 2:645; 2000, 109). 3. Like Roche, Murrin concentrates on the episode of the enchanted wood in his defense of Tasso’s “Prose Allegory.” To appreciate the range of perspectives on Tasso’s

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< guide to his poem, see Kennedy 1972; Steadman 1974, 73; Derla 1978; Savoia 1984; Olini 1985; Larivaille 1987, 140–46; Rhu 1988. In a subsequent study by Lawrence Rhu of “the genesis of Tasso’s narrative theory” (along with which, cf. Patterson 1971), Rhu af‹rms the role of allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata but also sounds the usual, judicious caution against interpretations that force the poem into an allegorical straitjacket. Tasso came to write an allegory for his epic somewhat reluctantly, and his misgivings about doing so have led to the accurate perception that he felt compelled to protect his poem from censorship by providing a high-minded rationale for its vulnerable passages; but that insight about his motives by no means implies that the allegory is merely a postfactum addition without an organic connection to the Liberata. Recent critics have convincingly demonstrated otherwise. In the process, however, they tempt us to ‹nd secure meanings in the very aspects of Tasso’s poem that disclose instability and danger symptomatic of his cultural moment and indicative of his own second thoughts as he composed his epic. The desire for a snug ‹t between the allegory and the poem or between the history of Tasso’s ideas that demonstrate how he developed the allegory and the resultant document itself may lead us to overlook the space between them and the tensions that these gaps betray. (1993, 51) For the insight that the poem’s allegory is much more topical than has previously been recognized, see David Quint’s excellent chapter “Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata” (1993, 213–47), in which he argues that the poem “celebrates the triumph of the imperial, Counter-Reformation papacy” (230). A rather abstract yet compelling account of the poem’s allegory is in Dennis Looney’s chapter “Tasso’s Allegory of the Source” (1996, 142–64), in which Looney analyzes the story of the desert spring in canto 13 to delineate “an allegory of imitative poetics which provides the critic with a theoretical gloss on the poet’s use of sources” (142). Finally, among allegorical interpretations of the Gerusalemme liberata, I would also include those studies that proffer psychoanalytic interpretations of the poem, meaning they read it as an allegory of Freudian psychology. Samples are in Ferguson 1983, 110–36 (where we ‹nd the statement that “to understand what is really at stake in Tasso’s attitude toward his two poems [Gerusalemme liberata and Gerusalemme conquistata] and his act of revision itself, we must see that the Conquistata, that ‘new birth’ of his intellect, is associated in Tasso’s mind not only with his assumption of a new paternal authority, but also with a triumph over the realm of the ›esh which allows him to imagine spiritual reunion with his mother” [116]), and Bellamy 1992, 131–88 (in which Tancredi’s horror in the enchanted wood is glossed as a fear of castration [171]). Comparable arguments are in Zatti 1983 and Günsberg 1998. 4. . . . Venere ad Enea, s’ella era dea de l’amore . . . dove Enea vede Venere e per sua grazia le idee e le intelligenza, vuole intendere ch’egli si solleva sovra l’umanità con la contemplazione (Tasso 1998, 316–17, with my translation). 5. This letter is no. 48 in Tasso 1995, to which subsequent page citations refer. Translations are mine. 6. . . . quando cominciai il mio poema non ebbi pensiero alcuno d’allegoria, parendomi soverchia e vana fatica; e perché ciascuno de gli interpreti suole dar l’allegoria a suo capriccio . . . e perché Aristotele non fa più menzione dell’allegoria nella Poetica e nell’altre sue opere . . . ma intende per allegoria la metafora continuata (456–57). 7. Ma poi ch’io fui oltre al mezzo del mio poema e che cominciai a sospettar della

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strettezza de’ tempi, cominciai anco a pensare all’allegoria come a cosa ch’io giudicava dovermi assai agevolar ogni dif‹cultà (458); . . . [per esempio] accoppiando Platone con Aristotle (463). 8. Ella, sì come è doppia la vita de gli huomini, così hor dell’una, hor dell’altra ci suole essere ‹gura; però che, ordinariamente per huomo intendiamo questo composto di corpo, e di anima, e di mente: et all’hora vita humana si dice quella che di tal composto è propria, nelle operationi della quale ciascuna parte d’esso concorre; . . . . Alcuna volta, benché più di rado, per huomo s’intende non il composto, ma la nobilissima parte d’esso, cioè la mente: e secondo questo ultimo signi‹cato si dirà che il viver dell’huomo sia il contemplare e l’operare semplicemente con l’intelletto; come che questa vita molto paia participare della divinità, e quasi trashumanandosi angelica divenire (Tasso 1988, 1–2; translation by Ralph Nash in Tasso 1987, 469; subsequent citations of the “Allegoria del poema” are also from these editions). 9. Hor della vita dell’huomo contemplante è ‹gura la Comedia di Dante e l’Odissea quasi in ogni parte; . . . e nell’Eneide ancora, benché in questa sci scorga più tosto un mescolamento d’attione e di contemplatione. . . . quando [Enea] scende all’Inferno et a i Campi Elisi . . . ci è signi‹cata una sua contemplatione delle pene e de’ premi, che nell’altro secolo all’anime buone et alle ree si riserbano (2; 469–70). 10. Essendo composto l’essercito di varii Principi e d’altri soldati Christiani, signi‹ca l’huomo virile, il quale è composto d’anima e di corpo: e d’anima non semplice, ma distinta in molte e varie potenze. . . . Goffredo . . . è in vece d’intelletto . . . Rinaldo, Tancredi e gli altri Principi sono in luogo dell’altre potenze dell’animo; et il corpo da i soldati men nobili ci vien dinotato (3; 470). 11. Gierusalemme . . . segna la felicità civile, qual però conviene al buon Christiano; . . . la quale è un bene molto dif‹cile da conseguire, e posto in cima all’alpestre e faticoso giogo della virtù: et a questo sono vòlte, come ad ultima meta, tutte l’attioni dell’huomo politico (3; 470). 12. . . . Ma perché questa civile beatitudine non deve essere ultimo segno dell’huomo Christiano, ma deve egli mirar pìu alto alla Christiana felicità (9; 474). 13. . . . per questo non desidera Goffredo d’espugnar la terrena Gierusalemme per averne semplicemente il dominio temporale, ma perchè in essa si celebri il culto divino, e possa il Sepolcro liberamente esser visitato da pii e devoti peregrini; e si chiude il Poema nella adoratione di Goffredo, per dimostrarci che l’intelletto affaticato nelle attioni civili, deve ‹nalmente riposarsi nelle orationi, e nelle contemplationi de’ beni dell’altra vita beatissima, et immortale (9; 474). 14. Gierusalemme, che è la purgatione dell’anima nostra (Tasso 1593, 12r). The 1593 edition is one of several late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century editions that reprints the allegorical glosses from Il Goffredo . . . con gli argomenti e allegorie a ciascun canto d’incerto auttore (Venice: G. Perchacino, 1582). 15. Landino 1980, 210. Cf. Landino’s commentary to the opening lines of Aeneid 5: “Sed cum nondum in eo virtutum gemine quo anima iam purgati dicuntur consistat: sed in virtutibus purgatoriis constitutus sit quamvis divina praecepta quibus caelestia contemplari: et terrena despicere iubemur sequi decreverit” (Vergil 1499, 172r). 16. Sentenza di Platone . . . la Ragione contra le Cupidigie (Tasso 1590, 60). 17. On the intense industry of Italian scholars in the ‹eld of literary criticism during the sixteenth century, fueled largely by the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, see Weinberg 1961 and Hathaway 1962. 18. Concedamisi dunque ch’in questa e in alcune altre poche opinioni lasci Aris-

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< totele, per non l’abbandonare in cosa di maggiore importanza, cioè nel desiderio di ritrovar la verità e nell’amore della ‹loso‹a; percioché in questa diversità di parere io imiterò coloro i quali nella divisione delle strade sogliono dividersi per breve spazio, e poi tornano a congiungersi nell’amplissima strada la qual conduce a qualche altissima meta o ad alcuna nobilissima città, piena di magni‹che e di reali abitazioni, e ornata di templi e di palazzi e d’altre fabriche reali e maravigliose (Tasso 1964, 259; translation by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel in Tasso 1973, 205). My interpretation of this passage is opposite that of Thomas Greene, who cites it intending to show that for Tasso, epic “replaces divine worship with humanistic awe,” celebrating “the City of man, not of God” (1963, 14). 19. In contemporary scholarship, this fact that the Canzoniere so thoroughly pervades the text of Tasso’s epic has meant that the most in›uential account of the Canzoniere’s poetics—Freccero 1975—likewise pervades accounts of Gerusalemme liberata’s. So, e.g., in James Chiampi’s essay “Tasso’s Deconstructive Angel and the Figuration of Light in the Gerusalemme liberata” (1987), the subject is Tasso’s own version of the struggle between the theology of the ‹g tree and the poetics of the laurel. Like Petrarch, says Chiampi, “Tasso fears that the matter of poetry will become the occasion of wandering, of errare as error” (113), and Chiampi sees Tasso “at constant pains” to avoid this error, to achieve “a univocal conformity to a truth that exists fully formed before its inscription in a text” (114). Cf. Timothy Hampton’s argument that “Gerusalemme liberata explores a struggle between two ideologies, one of which is seeking to control the other.” Hampton continues: “Tasso seeks to merge Counter-Reformation piety and the discourse of heroic exemplarity, de‹ning a new type of epic with new models of action and selfhood. The interplay of Goffredo and Rinaldo constitutes the allegorical representation of this struggle” (1990, 101). For a study—published earlier than Freccero’s— that treats the relation between the poet of the Canzoniere and “the ‹gure of the poet in Renaissance epic,” see Robert Durling’s chapter on Petrarch in Durling 1965, 65–87; cf. Della Terza 1963 speci‹cally on “Tasso’s experience of Petrarch.” 20. Tasso 1590, “Luoghi osservati dai Mag. Giuliu Guatavini” (paginated separately after the poem), 5 and 39 (indicating verbal parallels between Gerusalemme liberata 2.66 and Africa 7.283–87, and between Gerusalemme liberata 20.110 and Africa 7.1093–96, respectively). 21. Citations of Gerusalemme liberata, hereafter provided in text, are from Lanfranco Caretti’s edition (Tasso 1983). I quote the English prose translation by Ralph Nash in Tasso 1987, except that I occasionally revert names to their Italian forms (e.g., Tancredi rather than Tancred). 22. De rerum natura 1.936–43 (text from Lucretius 1992, but with my translation): sed veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum contingunt mellis dulci ›avoque liquore, ut puerorum aetas inprovida ludi‹cetur labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum absinthi laticem deceptaque non capiatur, sed potius tali pacto recreata valescat, sic ego nunc . . . Tasso is also echoing in this formula what had become by his time the standard explanation of the meaning of tragic catharsis in Aristotle’s literary theory—that like a strong

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purgative, tragedy expels the unhealthy emotions of pity and fear from its spectators. For examples and discussion of the notion of catharsis and of the medical simile in sixteenth-century Italian criticism, see Weinberg 1961, esp. 343, 658; Hathaway 1962, 205–300, esp. 254, 382. On Tasso’s conception of catharsis related to his epic, see Kates 1983, 21, 67. On “the aesthetic of the good physician,” see also Fish 1972, 1–77; see esp. 21–43, on its version in Augustine’s imagination. 23. Tasso’s use of the word condito in this line, which Nash translates “hidden,” is particularly apt, for it has the primary meaning of “seasoned” or “dressed,” “made savory,” which describes the sweetening of the bitter medicine. In Latin, condire, “to season, to spice,” and condere, “to conceal” (in one of its senses), share the same past participle, conditus. 24. See Zetzel 1996 for a compelling argument that Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis “played a much larger role in Virgil’s thinking” than merely as one of many sources for Aeneas’s underworld journey in Aeneid 6, that it supplied him, rather, with “a way to understand the destiny of Rome and its empire as something inherent in the natural law of the cosmos” (311). However, in Zetzel’s view, both these texts provide “poetic visions of justice as a philosophical” myth that are “like Plato’s ideal state in their unreality” (318). Also, see Fleming 1984 on perceived parallels between Petrarch’s Secretum and Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis (160). For a general study of the “celestial journey” motif from antiquity to 1700, including the various manifestations of the Dream of Scipio in literature, see Hammil 1980. 25. De republica 6.15 in Cicero 1928. Subsequent citations of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio are also from the Loeb edition cited here, though the translations are mine. 26. Like James Chiampi’s, Yavneh’s reading of Petrarch’s in›uence on Tasso is indebted to John Freccero’s account of the self-referential, idolatrous poetics of the Canzoniere. Hence Armida’s pledge of submission to Rinaldo at Gerusalemme liberata 20.135–36, which is much debated (and vili‹ed) because it seems to incorporate a startling biblical allusion to Mary (see discussion in the present chapter, esp. n. 40), is unconvincing in Yavneh’s view because Armida’s “status as idol—as both character and ‹ctive poetic construct—is too strongly con‹rmed by the Petrarchan allusions which emphasize an alternative, and idolatrous, incarnation” (1993, 134). Cf. the characterization of Armida in Stephens 1989 as “a counterfeit Blessed Virgin, a new, sinister Laura conscious of and willing to manipulate the pseudo-religious sexual fantasies that men spin about her, as the Christian soldiers do so intensely in cantos four and ‹ve.” “Indeed,” Stephens continues, “Petrarch’s sonnet 213, the echo of which introduces Armida, provides an intertextual ‘prophecy’ of her counterfeit Mariological power over men” (197). See Del Giudice 1984a on “the metaphor of the veil” that “‹lters deep into the lexicon of the entire poem and is immediately associated with Armida” (40); see Johnson-Haddad 1992 for the argument that “Armida, particularly in her alternations between Siren and Virgin Annunciate, stands as an emblem of Tasso’s textual material” (212). Also comprising the critical background to my analyses is the discussion of Sofronia in Hampton 1990, 116–17 (which stresses her and particularly the veil’s “curious ambiguity”); the study of Sofronia “as Martyr Manqué” in Yavneh 1999; the comparison of Sofronia and Armida in Migiel 1993, 115–16; and the discussion of Sofronia and Dante’s Beatrice in Larivaille 1987, 178. 27. As Naomi Yavneh comments, “their presence together on the funeral pyre is a literalization and parody of the ›ames of love, to which Olindo draws attention” (1993, 151).

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< 28. Cf. the corresponding lines in the Aeneid: Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant aequora, cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu, cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes pictaeque volucres, quaeque lacus late liquidos quaeque aspera dumis rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti lenibant curas et corda oblita laborum.

(4.522–28)

29. Cf. Andrew Fichter’s discussion (1982, 75–77) of Ariosto’s prior use of this Vergilian passage in Orlando Furioso 8.79, where it is applied to Orlando’s frenzied lovesufferings. 30. As an African, Clorinda invites association with Dido and Sophonisba, but consider also David Quint’s compelling answer to the question “Why is Clorinda an Ethiopian?” (234): “Her long-deferred baptism represents . . . the conversion not simply of a Muslim to the Christian faith, but of a schismatic Ethiopian to the Church of Rome. As royal Clorinda ‹nally becomes the handmaiden of Christ [referring to her baptism by Tancredi after he has unknowingly wounded her mortally in battle], she ful‹lls the same act of obedience that King Atani Tingil had, it was once thought, pledged to the pope in Bologna, placing his national church under the authority of the Apostolic See. Tasso thus depicts an ideal return of Ethiopia into the Roman fold that was being disappointed by historical events” (1993, 245). 31. Cf. the corresponding lines in the Aeneid: o quam te memorem, virgo? namque haud tibi vultus mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat; o dea certe (an Phoebi soror? an Nympharum sanguinis una?)

(1.327–29)

32. In her remarks on Tancredi’s “Petrarchan adoration” of Clorinda, Elizabeth Bellamy points out that he apostrophizes Clorinda as “Oh meraviglia!” when he sees her in person at Gerusalemme liberata 1.47–48 and that he then repeats this phrase in 13.41, when he thinks he has discovered her spirit in a tree (1992, 168). To him, Bellamy notes, she is already a phantasm in life, and it is her “image” that is “a constant fuel to his ›ame” (169). Before she has died, in other words, Tancredi is guilty of the idolatry for which he is scolded by Peter the Hermit in 12.86, quoted shortly. 33. In addition to Murrin’s analysis of the enchanted wood’s allegory, see Roche 1977. Presumably, my reinterpretation of this scene supports Elizabeth Bellamy’s diagnosis of contemporary criticism’s preoccupation with the enchanted wood episode, which, she says, is “the inevitable meeting place of critics of the Liberata and their interpretive will-to-power.” “Thus,” Bellamy concludes, “the impulse to analyze the Liberata will inevitably become an overdetermined compulsion to return to the trees as the central enigma of Tasso’s epic” (1992, 183). 34. For a superb analysis of Dante’s transformation of the Polydorus episode in Inferno 13 for the purpose of highlighting the unbridgeable gap between Vergil’s conception of pietas and Dante’s in the Christian age, see Biow 1991. See also Spitzer 1942, to which nearly all contemporary studies of this canto are indebted. 35. Cf. Timothy Hampton’s comment that it will be Armida’s “recuperation” that

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ultimately “offers what might be called a recuperation of all the scenes [before],” a “conversion” that “redeems and replaces the earlier moments of error and confusion” (1990, 127–28). 36. It is, says Del Giudice, Armida’s “polymorphism, through its mutability and illusion,” that “embodies the Tassian concept of the chaos and void of Hell” (1984a, 29). Cf. Naomi Yavneh’s characterization of Armida as a “false mediatrix—the passive vessel—by which the creator of words, rather than the Word, is ultimately the ‹nal referent of his creation”; she “is both creation and creator, the uninterested Laura and the ‘author’ of the Petrarchan lover-like projections of Goffredo’s men” (1993, 148). In a different assessment of her character, Marilyn Migiel describes Armida’s “narrative power,” her “interpretive and narrative control,” which Migiel argues is the source of Armida’s threat to the Christian army (1993, 113–44). Andrew Fichter, also cataloging Armida’s various exemplars (Dido, Cleopatra, Omphale, etc.), observes that her variety is mirrored by Rinaldo, who “is another Antony, or another Aeneas as Mercury ‹nds him in Carthage, or another Ruggiero as Melissa ‹nds him in the seventh canto of Orlando Furioso.” Fichter adds that Rinaldo is also “Aeneas as Iarbas labels him, a second Paris with his eunuch train” (1982, 133). 37. Fichter observes: “Rinaldo and Armida are not so much in love with each other as bound together in mutually gratifying narcissism. She sees herself re›ected in his crystal pendant; he gazes on his own image in her eyes” (1982, 133). See Giamatti 1966, 203, for a similar analysis. 38. For a discussion of this passage’s basis in Aeneid 4.331ff. and 4.393–96, see Giamatti 1966, 208–9. 39. On Armida’s “sweet poison” of Venus and her several associations with myrtle as both the tree of Venus and the tree of death, see Del Giudice 1984a, 32, 36, 49 n. 5, 50 n. 11). On the signi‹cance of Rinaldo’s success in the wood to the poem’s own commentary on allegory, Migiel observes: “when Rinaldo brings the forest back to its ‘natural’ state, so that it can be used in order to construct Christian war machines, he gives new meaning to Tancredi’s experience. He establishes the parameters for the control of the interpretation of the literal and ‹gural; he de‹nes acceptable stories of identity and acceptable forms of thought” (1993, 170–71). See, too, Murrin’s discussion of the value of “the Prose Allegory” in explicating Rinaldo’s reestablishment of right reason to the Christian army (1980, 113–14). 40. Similarly, see Rhu 1988 for the judgment that Armida’s last words are evidence of “the violence that this poet must work upon his material to make everything come out right in the end” (128), and see Del Giudice’s view that in the image of a “redeemed Eve” being “reconciled with her redeemed Adam” in this passage, “the reader, although accustomed to Armida’s changeability, is nonetheless shocked by this discordant statement and by Armida’s ‹nal transformation to a Marian ancilla and suspects that this phase too is a ‹ctio” (1984a, 48). For unsuspicious readings, see Fichter 1982, 113 (for the observation that “Armida . . . by virtue of the transforming power of grace can ful‹ll the roles of both Virgil’s Dido and his Lavinia”); Roche 1977, 70–71; Stephens 1989, 187 (stressing Tasso’s vision of women’s “acceptance of subjection to men within the hierarchy of relations”; Stephens quotes, too, Milton’s famous description of Adam and Eve, “He for God only, she for God in him”). “Goffredo’s powers over the army,” explains Stephens, “are exactly congruent with the powers Armida gives Rinaldo over herself; that is, Armida’s words allusively declare her the ‘body’ of Rinaldo, in covert

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< response to his overt proposal of matrimony” (194). Stephens adds that “the movement from the ‘Edenic’ canto sixteen to canto twenty thus plays upon the traditional view of the Blessed Virgin as the woman who reversed and redeemed the sin of Eve (Eva-Ave) through her humility” (195) and that “when Rinaldo seizes Armida, preventing her from killing herself on a literalized Petrarchan arrow of love (20.123–128.7), his act is expressed through the ironic recall of a verse in Petrarch’s apotheosis of Laura: ‘le fe’ d’un braccio al bel ‹anco colonna’” (198). In the end, Stephens argues, “her imitatio of the Virgin’s words signals an ideal subordination that embraces both Christianity and a speci‹cally Pauline wifely virtue by pointing to the ideal of Christian womanhood” (198). As I noted earlier in the present chapter, however (in connection to the tales of Olindo and Sofronia and of Odoarado and Gildippe), if Armida’s subjection does function as such a “pointer,” it would be to an ideal and idealized marriage relation that is outside the epic’s narrative. In contrast to these interpretations of Armida as a “religious ‹gure,” ‹nally, an important cautionary note is sounded by Jo Ann Cavallo (1999, 97): “Critics,” she says, “have treated this phrase as a direct quotation from the Bible, whereas Tasso had already found the same expression used in the Italia liberata without any overt religious connotations. In the earlier epic, Elpidia offered herself in marriage to the knight of the Captain’s choosing”; Elpidia’s “exact words that she uses to signal her obedience to Captain Belisardo,” Cavallo shows, include the phrase “ecco la vostra ancella” [behold your handmaid]. 41. Cf. the parallel lines in the Aeneid: iamque aderat Phoebo ante alios dilectus Iapyx ipse suas artis, sua munera, laetus Apollo augurium citharamque dabat celerisque sagittas. ille, ut depositi proferret fata parentis, scire potestates herbarum usumque medendi maluit et mutas agitare inglorius artis.

(12.391–97)

42. Cf. the parallel lines in the Aeneid: non haec humanis opibus, non arte magistra proveniunt, neque te, Aenea, mea dextera servat: maior agit deus atque opera ad maiora remittit.

(12.427–29)

chapter four 1. A convenient survey of late Renaissance biblical epics (in the context of a study of the literary background to Paradise Regained) is in Lewalski 1966, 78–92. For background on early medieval hexameter versions of biblical books, referred to variously as epics or “epic paraphrases,” see Roberts 1985 and Nodes 1993. 2. For a bibliography of Renaissance editions of Vida’s works see Di Cesare 1974b. 3. I cite from Milton 1957, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. 4. See, e.g., Drake 1980; Revard 1980, 146–47, 213–14; Steadman 1987, 187; Quint 1993, 276. Cf. the comments of Tillyard, who grudgingly allows that Vida’s one “true talent was descriptive” (1954, 220), and Thomas Greene’s expression of incredulity that, in

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its day, “so frigid a work as Vida’s Christiad was received as a masterpiece” (1963, 4). Among Vida’s defenders is Craig Kallendorf, who declares the Christiad “an epic poem whose fusion of the Christian and the Virgilian resolves the tensions within the commentary tradition” between “ahistorical syncretism” and “pure classicism” (1995, 43). In Vida’s epic, he tells us, “form and content become one” (62), thereby achieving “a ‹nal union of theologica poetica and Christianity” (58). More modest appraisals of the Christiad are Hardie 1993a, 303–10; Lewalski 1966, 61–65; and Mario Di Cesare’s Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (1964), which purposes “to examine the Christiad critically as an epic poem and to appraise critically Vida’s Vergilian humanism” (vi). Di Cesare is to be credited for saving scholarly interest in Vida’s epic just when it was threatened with extinction, but his summary overview of the Christiad’s plot, style, characterizations, and themes supports only very general conclusions. On Vida’s heroic style, for instance, he concedes that its “echo” of Vergil “adds a luster that is sometimes dubious,” yet he maintains that at other times, “the allusion well employed draws directly on the masterwork, bringing to signi‹cant or highly charged scenes the weightiness or the feeling associated with that work” (161). One way to de‹ne my purpose in this chapter is as an attempt to invest such generalizations with speci‹city and illustration, by working ‹rst toward a more precise de‹nition of the Christiad’s poetic and spiritual designs. Not surprisingly, given the central argument of this study, I would suggest that Di Cesare’s analysis of the Christiad is hindered from the start by his dismissal of Petrarch’s Africa and subsequent “chronicle epics” of the quattrocento as “better history than poetry,” with “their only importance for literature” being “that they indicate the continuing attraction to literary men of Vergil’s style and Vergil’s epic achievement, and the complete lack of distinction between epic and annales” (75–76). He asserts this even though, just previously, in the context of discussing Vida’s Ars poetica (58–59), he quotes Petrarch’s explicit invitation in the Africa to read his epic allegorically (Africa 9.90–102, discussed in chap. 1 of the present study). 5. Nam et si artis praecepta sine ullo salutis discrimine pueris facile tradi possint: non tamen autorum explanationes malorum, qui veluti syrenae quaedam sub blando fucatae eloquentiae Lenocinio discipulos perdunt et magistros. per deum immortalem (ut Ovidium, Propertium, Catullum, ceterosque Lenones venereos praetermittam) quid ornatius, quidve disertius, latinoque sermoni videtur aptius afri versipellis Terentii comedia? (Vida 1569, i; subsequent references to Botta’s commentary are also to this edition, with my translations). Cf. Augustine’s similar complaints about Terence in the Confessions (1.16). 6. At mille talibus exemplis (quae facilius animos alliciunt quam verba) tota poetarum scena referta est. . . . Si quidem hae siliquae seculares sunt doctrinae, steriles, vanitatem personantes, de quibus laudes idolorum, fabularumque ad deos gentilium pertinentium vario sermone atque carminibus percrepant. quibus demonia delectantur. cumque in his aliquid solidum et rectum quod ad beatam vitam pertineat quispiam cupiat invenire: non potest (i). 7. Expertae credite syreni venerisque magistrae . . . Intentio haec est. retrahere christianos a poeticorum lectione ‹gmentorum. quia per oblectationes fabularum, mentes legentium excitantur ad incentiva libidinum (i, iii). 8. His verbis quibus etiam Aeneas usus est ad corroborandos sociorum animos, videtur signi‹cari Vergilium per Aeneam intellexisse, virum prudentem. per longam navigationem, errores pericula ac tempestates peregrinationis nostrae per mare huius

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< seculi diversas prudentum mondanorum opiniones: quae divinae sapientiae comparatae erroneae sunt multaque discrimina vitae praesentis quae patitur unusquisque. per italiam vero coelestem patriam. unde quidam versus illos sic mutavit. per varios casus per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in coelum: sedes ubi fata quietas ostendunt. illic fas regna resurgere Christi (5r). 9. Virgilius semper in manibus habebatur. et quod in pueris videbatur permitti causa necessitatis, crimen in se faciebant voluptatis. ne igitur sub eruditionis ‹gmento . . . ad impietatem idolorum, et perniciosam voluptatem libidinum, pueri et cuiusvis aetatis homines deducantur: mandatum fuit a Leone x. et Clemente vii. summis ponti‹cibus. ut quaecumque ad litterariam eruditionem virgiliana lectio continebat, ea noster divinus vates colligeret. et in hoc piissimum opus transferret (iii). 10. Cf. Philip Hardie’s observation that “Vida’s ideal reader is one who from early childhood has immersed himself in Virgil, alive to the echoes at the smallest verbal level” (1993a, 305). 11. All citations of the Latin text of the Christiad are from Vida 1978, which is edited with facing-page translation by Gertrude C. Drake and Clarence A. Forbes. However, the translations provided in the present text are my own. 12. Cupiditatis ignem describit. quo visus interior excecatur, et accenditur concupiscentia. cuius contrarium operatur charitatis ardor. illuminat enim intellectum et concupiscentiae ardores extinguit. quamobrem alter ab altero protinus effugatur. est enim cupiditas (ut inquit Augustinus) radix omnium malorum. et radix omnium bonorum charitas. et simul ambae esse non possunt. nisi una penitus evulsa fuerit. alia plantari non potest (18r). 13. For interpretations of Lavinia’s blush, see, e.g., Todd 1980; Lyne 1983; Dyson 1999. 14. Propter mundiciam castitatis virgo liliis compararatur. sicut et in canticis dicitur. Sicut Lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter ‹lias. rosis autem assimilatur propter ardorem charitatis: qua plenissima fuit beatissima virgo (93r). 15. Cf. the angel’s greeting to Mary at Luke 1:28: “have gratia plena Dominus tecum benedicta tu in mulieribus.” 16. As Botta reminds his readers in his comment on virgineo ore (and as Michelangelo depicts on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, e.g.), “learned ones say that this deceitful serpent had such an appearance” (Tali facie dicunt doctores dolosum hunc serpentem fuisse [34r]). 17. Sicut ex Virgilio colligitur. namque haud tibi vultus mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat (45v). 18. Romanus preses auditis quae a seniore Iosepho, quaeque ab Ioanne de mirabilibus Christi operibus fuerant enarrata, tanquam persuasus tota intentione nitebatur eum de manibus, ac impetuoso tumultu iudeorum eripere. iccirco mens illius variis cogitationibus angebatur. versans nunc modum hunc, nunc illum (148v). 19. Conclusio est sylogismi: qui constat ex propositione, assumptione, et conclusione. sed hic dupliciter colligitur. negative, et af‹rmative. nam si nihil mortale sonat, ergo deus, item si per omnia Deo similis est, ergo Deus est. et rursus, “Deus ille. dei aut Cer, Prol,” utrumque verum est. nam et deus est et dei ‹lius (150v). 20. The passage of the Christiad that most fully reveals the extent of Pilate’s wasted knowledge, ending again with his call to the Jews to “acknowledge your God,” is 5.160–74:

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Nec se progeniem superi negat ipse parentis, Quem vos promissum coelo divinitus olim Venturum tandem auxilio mortalibus aegris Non latet, ut veteres genitoris molliat iras Concilians generi vestro, culpamque parentum Ipse sua virtute luat. sic ferre priorum Accepi monimenta, patres id prodere vestros, Et rebus probat ipse. adeo circum oppida lustrans Arrexit totam monstris ingentibus oram, Quae non ullae artes hominum, non ulla potest vis. Quin etiam in lucem quosdam revocavit ab umbris, Quis penitus iam mors totos immissa per artus Solverat haerentes animae de corpore nexus. Quare agite o odiis miseri desuescite iniquis. Ne frustra pugnate, Deum sed discite uestrum. [He himself does not deny that he is the son of a heavenly father, and there is no secret it was promised to you that one would come from heaven someday, by divine agency to help af›icted mortals, so as to mitigate the ancient wrath of the creator, redeeming your race and washing away the sin of your forefathers by his merit. I have heard that the scriptures of the patriarchs say this, your forefathers proclaimed it, and he himself proves it by his deeds. You know that while wandering in the surrounding towns he roused the whole coast with great miracles, which not any art or any power of man could accomplish. What is more, he has recalled from darkness into light those in whom death, thoroughly admitted, had dissolved the bond of the lingering soul from the body. So go, o wretched men, lay aside your unjust hatred. Do not ‹ght in vain, but acknowledge your God.] 21. In this episode, Vida has much elaborated the report in Matthew 27:19 of Pilate’s wife having suffered a bad dream and sent warning to him not to harm the innocent prisoner. 22. Stella Revard’s summary of this scene also emphasizes the matched intensity of the angels’ activity and Vida’s style (1980, 146–47). 23. Cf. the corresponding lines in the Aeneid: Tum vero infelix fatis exterrita Dido mortem orat; taedet caeli convexa tueri.

(4.450–51)

[Then, indeed, awed by her doom, unhappy Dido prays for death; she is sick of gazing on the vault of heaven.] 24. Not even greater, we must add, is the grief of Euryalus’s mother for her dead son (Aeneid 9.493–94), which, as Philip Hardie notes (1993b, 53), is echoed “in the Virgin’s lament at the cross in both Vida’s Christiad, 5.850–8 and Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis, 1.344–67.” 25. “With Christiad 6.881–2,” suggests Hardie (1993a, 312 n. 39), “cf. Africa 9.404–9.” 26. I defer to Drake and Forbes in this line in understanding that the children who have learned to sing “certatim” (i.e., “emulously”) are singing antiphons.

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< 27. This is the translation of Drake and Forbes in Vida 1978. 28. Cf. the analysis of John’s role in the Christiad as a model of divine poet and prophet in Ogilvy 1978, 145–54.

chapter five 1. As Samuel I. Mintz observes in his survey of Hobbes’s contemporary reception, “the Leviathan Ross hooked was a queer heretical ‹sh, and Hobbes the very type of heresiarch; Ross called him an Anthropomorphist, Sabellian, Nestorian, Sadducean, Arabian, Tacian, Manichee, Mohammedan, Cerinthian, Tertullianist, Audean, Montanist, Aetian, Priscillianist Luciferian, Originist, Socinian, and Jew” (1962, 55). It seems, says Mintz, that “the ‹rst task of a seventeenth-century divine would be to destroy Leviathan; the second might be to understand it” (45). 2. In quibus omnia quae de Domino nostro Iesu Christo in utroque Testamento, vel dicta vel praedicta sunt, altisona Divina Maronis tuba suavissime decantantur (Ross 1638, title page; all subsequent citations of the Christiad are to this edition, although a few obvious typographical errors are silently corrected according to the 1659 edition). Translations are my own. 3. Nulla autem est in hoc opere (exceptis paucis) linea in qua non invenies integrum Virgilianum Carmen, vel saltem Dimidium, aut phrases illius (A6r). 4. There is one history of cento poetry available, but it is more an anthology of excerpts than a study: see Delepierre 1868 (298–334 for Ross’s epic). Perhaps Ross’s most immediate inspiration for his cento was Lelio Capilupi’s Cento ex Vergilio de vita monachorum (1555), a short satire on monks that was reprinted in Edinburgh in 1565 and translated into English by George Lauder in 1622 as The Popes New Yeares Gifts. On this poem’s composition and popularity, see Calitti 1987 and Tucker 1997. Interestingly, Lauder’s 1623 revision of his translation, printed in The Anatomie of the Romane Clergy, is accompanied by “certaine verses taken out of the Epistles of Francis Petrarch, Archdeacon of Parma, which were sine titulo, written to his friend whom he might not name for feare of the Roman clergie” (15). Here, of course, we are making acquaintance with Petrarch in his guise as enemy of papist Rome, a favorite ‹gure during the Reformation. Lauder, in his preface, repeats the much-circulated tale that Petrarch was once “earnestly solicited” by Pope Benedict XII, “who offered to giue him a Cardinals Hat if he would perswade his sister, a very faire young woman dwelling in Auignion, to prostitute her bodie to his desire”; Petrarch, “the honest man abhorring his ‹lthie Hat, was not to be receiued vpon such an vnhonest condition” and used “his penne [to] paint forth [Benedict’s] knauerie” in “certain Epistles sine titulo” (A3v–A4r). 5. The work was also reprinted in the eighteenth century, at Leipzig (1733) and London (1769). 6. E.g., see Lewalski 1966, 87, 117. For a survey of England’s Latin writings (including Ross’s) during the Renaissance, see Binns 1990. 7. Historically, this assertion is hardly the boldest on Milton’s debt to Ross. I do not go so far as William Lauder, the eighteenth-century classicist and critic of Milton who included Ross’s epic among the sources from which, he claimed to much scandal, Milton had plagiarized. After the initial publication of Lauder’s charges in The Gentleman’s Magazine (1748), a book was printed in 1750 by the same title as the original essay (An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns in His Paradise Lost), with the

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publishers’ disclaimer that “as this man . . . has been guilty of such a wicked imposition upon us, our friends, and the public . . . we declare, that we will have no further intercourse with him, and that we now sell his book only as A CURIOUSITY OF FRAUD AND INTERPOLATION, which all the ages of literature cannot parallel” (iii). The interpolation of spurious material into various of his sources, to which Lauder confessed when it was discovered, was not perpetrated in his discussion of Ross’s poem, for which see Lauder 1750, 94–102. In Ross 1987, 46 n. 45, Glenn provides a bibliography of Lauder’s publications and Milton’s defenders. 8. Proba 1981, 6. For a time, there was some controversy over the identi‹cation of Proba and the poem’s dating, but the conventional attribution seems to have been well defended in Matthews 1992 and Green 1995, over the objections in Shanzer 1986 and 1994. Cf. Sivan 1993 for discussion of the apparent political context of the poem’s composition. 9. Jerome’s criticism of “Homerocentonas et Vergiliocentonas” occurs in Epistles 53. Though he does not name Proba there, he quotes from her cento and sniffs, “these things are puerile and like the foolery of a quack” (puerilia sunt haec et circulatorum ludo similia [Jerome 1949–63, 3:16]). Disapproving of the earlier editor’s decision to include centos in the ‹rst edition of the Anthologiae Latinae (1894), Bailey writes, “Vergilian centos . . . , scandals of literature, do not require much in the way of critical ability, and neither am I one who, in doing honor to the poet, could bear to insult my readers by printing them again” (Centones Vergiliani [Riese 7–18], opprobria litterarum, neque ope critica multum indigent neque is sum qui vati reverendo denuo haec edendo contumeliam imponere sustineam [1982, iii]). See Opelt 1964 for a condemnation of Proba’s unorthodox theology. 10. Green thus expands on Clark and Hatch’s observation that “children [supplied with Proba’s cento] might . . . learn Vergilian Latin, without needing to hear of Dido’s passion or of bloody warfare” (Proba 1981, 7; cf. Green 1995, 559). He argues, too, that we should probably view Proba’s motives in the context of the 362 decree of Julian the Apostate prohibiting Christians from teaching classical authors. Here he elaborates on a point ‹rst suggested in Amatucci 1929, 147, which was subsequently supported by Cariddi (1971) and Clark and Hatch (Proba 1981, 98–100). 11. Nor does Hoole, who recommends supplementing, not replacing, the traditional Latin curriculum with Ross’s epic. “Virgil,” he says, is “the Prince and purest of all Latine Poets . . . [so] I would have him to be constantly and throughly [sic] read by this form on Mondaies and Tuesdaies for after-noon lessons” (1660, 178). Hoole continues in a later passage: But for gaining a smooth way of versifying, and to be able to expresse much matter in few words, and very fully to the life, I conceive it very necessary for Scholars to be very frequent in perusing and rehearsing Ovid and Virgil, and afterwards such kind of Poets, as they are themselves delighted with all, either for more variety of verse, or the wittinesse of conceit sake. And the Master indeed should cause his Scholars to recite a piece of Ovid or Virgil, in his hearing now and then, that the very tune of these pleasant verses may be imprinted in their mindes, so that when ever they are put to compose a verse, they make it glide as even as those in their Authours; Mr. Rosse his Virgilius Evangelizans will easily shew a young Scholar may imitate Virgil to the life. (187–88)

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< 12. Quod vero ad phrasin attinet, elegi Virgilianam, nihil enim illa purius, castius, ornatius; est enim Maro, non solum omnium Poetarum doctissimus, sed modestissimus quoque, et vere virgineus (A4r). Cf. W. F. Jackson Knight’s reference to Vergil’s “feminine intensity” (1966, 125). As Knight elsewhere admits, the alternate spelling of Vergil’s name with an i had long contributed to the notion that the poet’s character was “maidenly” (55), but Knight seems to have believed, with Ross, that it had historical basis. 13. Non propter superstitionem prophanorum debemus musicam fugere, aut literas non discere, quia earum repertorem discunt esse Mercurium: inquit D. Augustinus. Liceat ergo mihi cum Hebraeis sacrum hoc tabernaculum immundorum animalium pellibus convestire; et cum primis Christianis Christum in idololatrico templo colere; illique aedem profanam consecrare; quamvis non video quare tam castum et utile Virgilii poema profanum dici debeat; imo illi potius profani sunt, qui licet Christiani, impudici amoris ille cebras carminibus immodestis doceant; Paulus nihil suae sanctimoniae amisit, quando vectus fuit in nave idolatrica Castoris et Pollucis, nec Christi nomen profanatur, si in nave Virgiliani vehatur: sed quis audet dicere Maronem, de Christo nullam habuisse cognitionem, cum de eo tam aperte scribat in 4. Egloga, et in degressu de morte Caesaris, in ‹ne 1. Geor. nemo tam coecus est, quin haec de Christo esse dicta perspiciat, inquit L. Vives (A4v). 14. Fastidienti stomacho salubrem Scripturarum cibum, mihi liceat, sapientis Medici instar, suavi condimento gratiorem reddere. Hic enim pura Virgiliana phrasi, veram pietatem, et Religionis nostrae Mysteria a teneris annis imbibent (A5v). 15. . . . nihil in se scandalosum, aut Orthodoxae Religioni Catholicae, Sacrique Romani Imperii Constitutionibus adversum, vel bonis moribus contrarium . . . (Schiller 1627, A1r). Following this dedication are several “approbations” from the Theological Faculty at the University of Ingolstadt and other noble bodies and personages, likewise con‹rming that Schiller’s atlas “nihil continet contra ‹dem Catholicam” (A1v). 16. For descriptive accounts of the 1627 and 1660 editions of Schiller’s atlas, with a reproduction of the star map of the Innocents (the constellation Draco), see D. Warner 1979, 229–32. 17. The earliest known use of the term sortes Vergilianae occurs in the Historia Augusta, where Hadrian, anxious about his standing with the emperor and an approaching military campaign, “consulted the Vergilian oracle” (Scriptores Historiae Augustae 1921, 2.8). For discussions of this instance, see R. Hamilton 1993; Distler 1966, 151–56. 18. Another famous literary example of the practice is Petrarch’s. In the account of his “Ascent of Mount Ventoux” (Familiares 4.1), he opens and reads a random passage from Augustine’s Confessions. 19. [A]rripui, aperui, et legi in silentio capitullum quo primum coniecti sunt oculi mei: “non in comessationibus et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus et impudicitiis, non in contentione et aemulatione, sed induite dominum Iesum Christum et carnis providentiam ne feceritis in concupiscentiis” (8.12.29, quoting Romans 13:13–14). 20. In Ross’s day, the practice of sortes Vergilianae was presumed to have survived since late classical times, was universally condemned by scholars, and was of‹cially prohibited by the Church. As Richard Hamilton remarks in his review of the evidence, however, it is quite possible that “this practice did not exist at all in the Medieval period and was, in fact, a Renaissance invention based on the Christian procedure” of sortes

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Biblicae (1993, 323, with reference in n. 49 to Ganszyniec 1930, the foundational study on the subject). 21. See chap. 4 n. 10. 22. Pavlovskis (1989, 80 n. 39) points out that comparable claims are made by Rosa Lamacchia in two essays (1958a, 1958b) on the technique of cento composition by (primarily) the poet Hosidius. In this respect, Pavlovskis’s argument controverts the view of R. P. H. Green (1997, 559) that in Proba, “the context of each original line is, strictly speaking, irrelevant.” 23. This citation of Proba’s cento, with the identi‹cation of source-lines from Vergil, is from Schenkl 1888. The translation is my own. 24. Ross indicates his source for each line only by work and book number (G refers to the Georgics, E to the Eclogues; no initial indicates the Aeneid). Whenever possible, I have supplied references to each line number. Where I have not been able to locate the source for a given line or half-line (e.g., the ‹rst half of the seventh line of this passage), only Ross’s citation of a particular book number is provided. References in parentheses provide the actual book and line number of Ross’s source when the book indicated seems an error (e.g., the twelfth line of this passage is supposed to be found in Aeneid 2, but Aeneid 7.534 seems to be the closest match). Note that the ‹rst line of this passage and the ‹rst word of the second line are from the now usually deleted opening lines of the Aeneid (admitted by Donatus and Servius, but rejected by Varius; see Vergil 1936 [where the lines are numbered 1a–d], 240–41, including 240 n. 1), in which the poet advertises his shift of theme from pastoral (in the Georgics) to martial (in the Aeneid). 25. For convenience, I provide line numbers for the longer passages cited from Ross’s poem; however, only here (a quote of the opening lines of book 1) do they correspond to the actual line numbers within the book cited. 26. I cite the London 1607 edition of the 1602 Geneva New Testament commentary. 27. Both London editions have die in this line, which I emend to dei; not only does this make better sense, but it matches up with Aeneid 2.788’s “deum genetrix,” and as my colleague John McMahon noticed before me, die does not scan. 28. The great exemplar in English literature was Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1553).

chapter six 1. Fish quotes from Milton’s Tetrachordon. Explicating Matthew 19:3 (“And the Pharises came unto him tempting him and saying unto him”), Milton writes, “The manner of these men coming to our Saviour, not to learne, but to tempt him, may give us to expect that their answer will bee such as is ‹ttest for them, not so much a teaching, as an intangling” (1959, 642). 2. Subsequent references to Surprised by Sin are also to the 1997 edition, which, after the preface, is paginated identically to the ‹rst, published in 1967. 3. In Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (1996), John Rumrich similarly calls Fish’s Milton “a carping didact,” a “censorious parrot,” and a “redundant pedant” (xii, 19, 21), but the alternative that Rumrich would have us embrace—Milton the enlightened “poet of indeterminacy” (24; cf. Herman 2003)—strikes me as a singularly unpersuasive corrective to the “prig” that he accuses Fish of inventing. I refer readers to Fish’s critique (1997, xli) of those who would have their Milton be Richard Rorty.

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< Unfortunately, caricature of Fish’s argument in Surprised by Sin proves the frequent resort of critics whose reading of Milton is contradicted by Fish’s thesis but who are disinclined to commit themselves to the sustained argumentation that would be required of a serious effort to dispute it. Even Rumrich hardly engages the text of Surprised by Sin, either in his original essay (1990) or in his 1996 book (see Fish 1997, preface, esp. xv–xxiv, for replies to Rumrich’s concrete criticisms). To cite just one, more recent instance, Neil Forsyth dismisses Fish’s Milton with the remark that “a poet who keeps luring his reader into mistakes and then saying ‘Gotcha!’ is unlikely to appeal to any but masochistic students” (2003, 72). The idea that “student appeal” is our measure for Milton’s aims and methods is a problem in addition to the caricature, but ultimately what is most disturbing about such statements is that they disallow any possibility that scholars might be swayed by Surprised by Sin as a plausible historical argument about what Milton strived to achieve by his poem. Instead, such “pro-God” critics, or “neo-Christians,” as Rumrich calls them (echoing the language of Empson [1961]), must be motivated by religious “orthodoxy” (or as Forsyth asserts—in truly a hit below the belt— their right-wing political commitments [2003, 74–75]). Rumrich will even denounce the “common critical tenet” that Milton is “a poet who still produces spiritual pro‹t by entrapping sinful readers and inculcating standard Protestant doctrine” (1996, 249–50), a situation that Rumrich calls “a pedagogical disaster” (3); but I am skeptical that either the “tenet” or the pedagogy is common, and even if they were, they certainly do not represent Fish’s aims and practices as a literary critic, either in Surprised by Sin or in How Milton Works (2001)—and (lest there be any mistake) neither do they represent mine. 4. This is also John Rumrich’s contention, but his zeal to substantiate it leads to his report of what can only be called a bizarre experiment: “poll[ing] over ‹fteen-hundred students, from Freshmen and Sophomores in large surveys to Ph.D. candidates in small seminars,” over a period of “‹fteen years of teaching Milton at various universities in various cultures” (including “Charlottesville, Virginia; the Bronx, New York; Austin, Texas; Beijing, China; Kyoto, Japan; Wellington, New Zealand, and Montpellier, France”), to con‹rm that not a single one of these students experienced two particular lines in Paradise Lost (1.125–26) in the way that Fish claims the reader does or should—that is, as a “humiliating ‘rebuke’” from the poem’s narrator (Rumrich 1996, 21). As much as I am ready to admit that any one of Fish’s claims about “the reader’s experience” of a particular line or passage may actually be untrue to any reader’s experience in history, nevertheless it seems to me that it should occur to Rumrich that the absence of seventeenth-century readers in his poll rather diminishes its relevance to the evaluation of Fish’s thesis as a historical argument—that is, the question of whether it does or does not plausibly describe how Milton intended his poem to work upon the readers of his day (those whose responses he most reliably might predict and whom most immediately he hoped to “move and delight”). 5. See Fish 1997, 92–130 (esp. 93, 101, 130), for his discussion of the “carnal responses” provoked and corrected by the word wanton and similar language in Paradise Lost. 6. I would suggest, as well, that the kind of “concordantial” habit of reading scripture that Carol Kaske recovers in Spenser and Biblical Poetics (1999), entailing the recognition of repeated images that appear in bono et in malo, would also have contributed to the ability of Milton’s readers to anticipate and accommodate themselves to the shifting meanings and nuances of such words as wanton, from positive to negative or from neg-

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ative to positive. Striking a similar note, Dayton Haskin, in his study of Milton’s reading strategies and understanding of scripture, argues that Milton came to “a view to getting readers to forebear making too much of any particular biblical place,” for “he regarded the Bible less as a stable frame of reference than as a starting point for a massive and potentially pleasurable project of interpretation” (1994, 236). 7. Bona tentatio est qua Deus etiam bonos probandi causa tentat, non sua causa quasi ipse quales futuri sint nesciat, sed vel ad eorum ‹dem aut patientiam exercendam, aut illustrandam, quemadmodum Abrahamum et Iobum tentavit; vel ad eorum con‹dentiam minuendam in‹rmitatemque redarguendam, ut et sic ipsi rectius noscant aliique erudiantur: Sic Ezechiam (Milton 1933–34, 15:86, 88, with facing-page translation by Charles R. Sumner that is also quoted, in part, in Fish 1997, 40). 8. My sense is that the Christiads’ method of “teaching by intangling” in›uenced Milton’s strategy more so than The Faerie Queene’s, but even so, those who object to Fish’s interpretation of Paradise Lost on the grounds that Milton lacked literary precedents for such a method neglect Maureen Quilligan’s argument, in Milton’s Spenser, that “the rhetorical strategy Milton learned from Spenser was how to make the reader interpret his or her own interpretations, to judge the moral quality of his or her own response to reading, to feel the work as a large rhetorical appeal to the will, and to make a choice” (1983, 41). 9. Here, though, I avoid the debate over whether or not, or to what extent, Paradise Lost is an allegorical epic itself. For recent, ambitious studies arguing both sides of this question, see Treip 1994; Martin 1998; Borris 2000. I recommend Stephen Fallon’s chapter on “the substance of allegory” in Paradise Lost (1991, 168–93) for the clarity and utility of its basic distinctions. For major studies of the Aeneid’s in›uence on Paradise Lost, see Bowra 1945; Harding 1962; Blessington 1979; Webber 1979; Lewalski 1985; Porter 1993; Cook 1996. For interpretations of “Milton’s Dido and Aeneas” that most closely correspond to my analysis of the biblical epics’ allusive poetics, see Rudat 1981 and Verbart 1997, which argue that allusions to Dido and Aeneas in Paradise Lost invite readers to compare and contrast the Vergilian and biblical contexts for the purpose of opposing the one’s false vision of earthly glory to the other’s divine Truth. However, because Rudat and Verbart focus almost exclusively on Vergil’s and Milton’s texts in their “direct relation” to each other, they share with others who have studied the thematic parallels between the Aeneid and Paradise Lost an implicit assumption that Milton’s engagement with Vergil was unmediated by any other text besides the book that was the foundation of his faith. (Rudat 1981 is exceptional for acknowledging that “Milton and his contemporaries did not read Vergil ‘cold’ but together with the commentaries written by the exegetists” [40], but this vital point prefaces Rudat’s discussion [40, 43] of only two brief notes by Servius). Many other studies comprise the critical context of my analysis of Paradise Lost. A comparison of the theological positions of Augustine and Milton is in Fiore 1981. On the question of Neoplatonic ideas and imagery in the poem, see Madsen 1968, esp. 85–144 (although one must heed Fallon’s caution [1991, 242] that Madsen’s account undervalues the evidence and implications of Milton’s monism); Daniel 2004. A reading of Eve’s association with “the Neoplatonic Graces” as conceived by Ficino is in Boyette 1976. See Gossman 1971 on the question of Milton’s possible debt to allegorical commentaries on Vergil. “It is impossible,” she judges, “to prove the direct in›uence on Milton of such commentaries as those of Fulgentius and Landino,” but in her view, “Milton’s synthesis

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< is the logical continuation of the Christian humanism, especially the Christian Neo-platonism, of the age preceding his” (118). See also the chapter on Paradise Lost as a “drama of the soul” in Muldrow 1970, 54–107. Samuel 1947 is still important on “Milton’s Plato.” For brief discussions of the “doctrine of the two Venuses” in Milton’s imagery, see McColley 1983, 72–73; Mulyran 1996, 100. Studies of Vida’s in›uence on Milton include Di Cesare 1980 and Haan 1992, 1993a, 1993b, and 1995. Any new study of Milton’s debt to earlier biblical epics must also acknowledge the argument of Ryken 1984 that certain books of the Bible itself offered epic models for Milton, while the standard study of Paradise Lost “in the Genesis tradition” is Evans 1968. The major study of Tasso and Milton is by Kates, who astutely perceives that both poets “constructed their poems out of a similarly problematic relationship to epic tradition” (1983, 11), but whose conception of this tradition is essentially limited to the classical and vernacular romance epics. Finally, McColley 1983 and Gallagher 1990 are important for distinguishing Milton’s “idea of woman” from the misogyny that many scholars argue characterizes Western literary and intellectual tradition generally, including the epics treated in this study. See also, in this line, Wittreich 1987; Lewalski 1990; Guillory 1990; the opposing view in Walker 1998, 158–87, 219–23; the essays on “Milton and the idea of woman” collected in Walker 1988. 10. In addition to Fallon’s convenient summation of this point (1991, 240–43), see his explanation (esp. 153, 180–81) of the contrast between the monism of Paradise Lost and the Neoplatonism of such seventeenth-century “philosophical epics” as Edward Benlowe’s Theophila, or Love’s Sacri‹ce (1652) and Henry More’s Platonick Song of the Soul (1647). 11. Of course, the word happy participates in other contexts and resonates with other words besides those discussed here, such as are discussed by David Gay, who studies the manner in which “Milton plays upon the words ‘hap’ and ‘happiness’ . . . [as well as] ‘hapless’” (2002, 63–98). 12. See esp. Ricks 1963, 73–74; McColley 1983, 110–35, 145–47; Shoaf 1993, 144–53. 13. Cf. the discussion of dolus and its synonyms in chap. 1. 14. For discussions of this line and the analogous relations that might be seen to exist between Dido’s curse against Rome and God’s judgment on humankind, see Rudat 1981, 37–38; Verbart 1997, 114; DuRocher 2001, 148–50. 15. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “happy,” 2b. 16. Cf. Virginia Mollenkott’s discussion in “Milton’s Rejection of the Fortunate Fall” and her frequently cited statement of Milton’s view that “the grace is fortunate, the sin is not” (1971, 2), which counters the long-standard treatment of the subject in Lovejoy 1937. For other debate on this issue, see M. Bell 1953; Ulreich 1971; Danielson 1982, 202–33. An excellent recent analysis is in Forsyth 2003, 324–28. See Fiore 1981, esp. 92–93, for a relation of Milton’s understanding of the felix culpa to Augustine’s, but with a caveat. Fiore cites the relevant lines in Paradise Lost 12 that con‹rm Milton’s agreement with the traditional Pauline and Augustinian view that (as Fiore quotes from Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana) man being “freed from sin and death by God the Father through Jesus Christ” is “raised to a far more excellent state of grace and glory than from which he fell” (92), although “no praise of the sin of Adam is implied in this doctrine” (93); however, Fiore does not clearly enough stress Milton’s rejection of the proposition that this “excellent state of grace and glory” could not have been attained, or would not

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have been more easily and more swiftly (not to mention universally) attained, through man’s continued obedience. 17. Milton 1933–34, 15:206–7, with facing-page translation by Charles R. Sumner. 18. Barbara Pavlock (1990, 198–201) also notes the parallel between Eve’s effect on Satan in these lines of Paradise Lost and Sofronia’s on Aladin in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. 19. Isabel MacCaffrey observes: “the Adam who leaves Paradise to wander down to a lower world is a wayfarer, and will always be, until the end returns to the beginning. He is, besides, a warrior who must do battle with a monster within himself in order to complete his journey” (1959, 24). On the journey motif in another sense, see Fish’s statement that “the dif‹culties of reading [Paradise Lost] are to be equated with the dif‹culties of the earthly pilgrimage” (1997, 207), especially his explanation of the fourth step of this reading experience, the “invitation to ascend,” wherein “the reader is invited to ascend on the stylistic scale by ‘purging his intellectual ray’ to the point where his understanding is once more ‘‹t and proportionable to Truth the object and end of it,’ and his affections follow what his reason (the eye of the mind) approves” (90). As Fish acknowledges, this “describes a Platonic ascent, which culminates (for the reader who is able to move with it) in the simultaneous apprehension of the absolute form of the Good and the Beautiful,” which “in Christian terms . . . imitates the return of the soul to God and pre-‹gures Christ’s victory over death” (90 n. 1). A different conception of the reader’s “journey,” one more congenial to Rumrich’s view of Milton as “a poet of indeterminacy” (see n. 3 in the present chapter), is in Carrithers and Hardy 1994, which argues an understanding of Milton’s writings as a progressive “hermeneutic journey” that “undertake[s] not to unveil but rather to participate in a Miltonic method that disquali‹es closure or pretended monopoly of truth” (17). Discussions of the theme of the active life versus the life of contemplation in Milton are generally focused on Paradise Regained, such as in Steadman 1987, 209–10, where it is noted that Christ “rejects Satan’s version of the ‘life contemplative’ just as decisively as he has hitherto refused the devil’s offers of the life of pleasure and the apparent goods of the active life” (209). 20. This understanding of Raphael’s vision runs counter to Robert McMahon’s assertion that “the poem as a whole . . . reveals Raphael’s NeoPlatonism to be erroneous, a nostalgic ‹ction,” not just in today’s fallen world, but in Eden too, for “Raphael’s speech constitutes not a prelapsarian vision but only the fallen poet’s aspiration to one” (1998, 9). However, McMahon’s intriguing interpretation of Paradise Lost’s narrator as an exemplum of man’s fallen perspective, a fallible “character” in the poem in his own right, produces, here as elsewhere in his book, some confusion on the question of which aspects of his representation of the prelapsarian world Milton intends for us to accept as true and which should be recognized as ‹gments of a fallen nostalgia. On the same page, McMahon states that “Raphael’s ladder is no longer a viable way to heaven,” which allows that the ladder was once viable and therefore not “erroneous” or “a nostalgic ‹ction.” 21. Davis Harding (1962, 37) observes a “remarkable verbal parallel” between Vergil’s comment on Aeneas’s speech to his followers after their landing in Africa (Aeneid 1.208–9) and Milton’s comment on Satan’s speech after he and the other fallen

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< angels have landed in hell (Paradise Lost 1.125–26), which Harding argues associates the cities of Carthage and Pandemonium as emblems of error and sin. 22. Psalms 107:4–7 (Geneva Bible 1969, 258v). 23. Correspondingly, the ‹rst parents’ disobedience, says Milton in De Doctrina Christiana, stands for all other sins that can be committed by man (1933–34, 15:180–83). For what sin can be named, which was not included in this one act? It comprehended at once distrust in the divine veracity, and a proportionate credulity in the assurances of Satan; unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony; in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband, in both an insensibility to the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; parricide, theft, invasion of the rights of others, sacrilege, deceit, presumption in aspiring to divine attributes, fraud in the means employed to attain the object, pride, and arrogance. [Sub hoc enim quid non perpetravit homo, credulitate in Satanam, in credulitate in Deum iuxta damnandus, in‹delis, ingratus, inobsequens, gulosus, uxorius hic, mariti illa inobservantior, uterque suae prolis, totius generis humani, parricida, fur, et alieni raptor, sacrilegus, fallax, divinitatis insidiosus, et indignus affectator, superbus, arrogans.] 24. See the notes to this passage in Milton 1957 and 1998 for summaries. 25. See Fowler’s notes to Paradise Lost 9.217–19 and 9.426–27 in Milton 1998 for a summary of both the rose’s and the myrtle’s relevant symbolism in these scenes. 26. . . . Traciam, id est in avaritiam; . . . Polimestor . . . id est plurimum mensura. . . . Polidorus autem multa amaritudo interpretatur. . . . Hic Polidorus in Tracia sepultus est quia multa amaritudo in avaricia involuta est (Bernardus 1977, 17–18; translation of Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca in Bernardus 1979, 21). 27. Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis has, of course, been recognized and discussed brie›y as part of the general context of Eve’s dream (e.g., see McColley 1983, 102), but in terms of its signi‹cance in epic literature as the model of a celestial journey, it has not been compared alongside Eve’s dream as is carried out in the present analysis. 28. Harding (1962, 82–84) locates Milton’s literary models for this scene in the dreams of Dido and Turnus at Aeneid 4.464–68 and 7.406ff., respectively. Others have noted the correspondence between Eve’s dream inspired by Satan and Redcrosse’s dream inspired by Archimago in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (see, e.g., Martin 1998, 262). Much of the most compelling commentary on Eve’s dream has focused on its basis in the conventions of witchcraft or demonic sorcery in late Renaissance culture: see esp. Hunter 1946; Steadman 1965 (revised in 1984, 160–66); van den Berg 1986. A psychoanalytic approach to its interpretation is in Schwartz 1994. 29. Many critics have been alert to the way that Satan, here and in the temptation scene of book 9, adopts the “manner of a courtly lover worshipping his lady,” suggesting an attempt at sexual “seduction” (McColley 1983, 188). 30. George Musacchio rightly stresses this point: “To accuse Eve of being overwhelmed by the smell of the fruit because she desires its proffered knowledge is to read into the poem that which is not there” (1991, 103). Similarly, see the discussion of Eve’s dream in Burden 1967, 124–49 (esp. 128–30), in the context of an analysis of “the

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provocative fruit” in Milton’s poem; and see McColley 1983, 98–104, including her objection to interpretations that would place the dream within the “felix culpa tradition” (99–100). 31. Cf. Diane McColley’s comments on Satan’s temptation of Eve in book 9, when Satan again exalts Eve and “degrades everything else”: “the contemptus mundi is preposterous,” McColley observes, “and so Eve is too surprised to rejoin at once (if preposterousness deserves rejoinder)” (1983, 196). At the same time, as Neil Forsyth rightly stresses, we ought not forget the central paradox that is Satan, the “unimaginable” spectacle of “evil aris[ing] in bliss” when he began to “hate in Heav’n” (2003, 24). The fact of Satan thereby presents at least the possibility for evil to arise, untempted by Satan, in bliss again. 32. Or, rather, this may be an ancillary illustration of the effect of Ithuriel’s spear, if we take it to be “a poetic principle,” as John Guillory suggests, representing “an ideal relation between the object and the process of representation.” Guillory argues that the “touching of Satan,” like Eve’s return to her proper place in Paradise, “is recognizably an apotropaic ritual, a warding off of the evil spirit, as well as a translation of truth” (1983, 149). 33. For an acute analysis of Eve’s movement in book 9 from “not unamaz’d” to “more amaz’d unwary” (9.614), “without traversing the intermediate space of amazement,” see Gallagher 1990, 58–59. 34. On the related issue of Milton’s “equation of preaching and writing,” see Shawcross 1993, 67, and Lares’s monograph study Milton and the Preaching Arts (2001). 35. Cf. Kathleen Swaim’s comment that “Michael is Adam’s instructor in typology and Scripture, as Raphael is Adam’s instructor in analogy and the book of nature.” She continues: “Raphael sets forth a hierarchical structure by which our bodies may at last turn all to spirit in contemplation of created things; Michael also presents a prospect of translation from ›esh to spirit, but that transition is now to be effected not through climbing a ladder of analogies but through leaps of faith and ›ashes of revelation. In Raphael’s universe and pedagogy, things expand in clearly widening circles to open up the luminous ideas they contain. In Michael’s allegorical world it is a given that things have been separated from their meaning by time and sin and that the perceivers must supply the meaning by searching their sometimes contradictory books and their memories and aligning the meanings there secured to the outward evidences” (1986, 24–25). Swaim expands on these insights in her chapter on “lapsarian poetics” (159–214). 36. In his commonplace book, Milton refers to the 1635 life of Petrarch by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini (Milton 1953, 468), which is reprinted in Solerti 1904, 568–665, and has the full title Petrarcha redivivus integram poetae celeberrimi vitam iconibus aere celatis exhibens. Accessit nobilissimae foeminae Laurae brevis historia. In it, Tomasini quotes Boccaccio’s praises of the “divina Africa,” including the latter’s reference to Petrarch being awarded the laurel at Rome for his epic: “Esto, aevo nostro tertius exsurgat Africanus, gloria non minori maiori tamen iustitia delatus in aethera, versu viri celeberrimi Francisci Petrarchae, nuper laurea Romae insigniti” (Solerti 1904, 582, 586). Tomasini lists all the titles of Petrarch’s works printed in the Basel editions of his Opera (the ‹rst in 1554), which Boswell includes as a “possible or likely” volume in Milton’s library (Boswell 1975, item 1095). Milton certainly knew of the Africa, therefore, and it is probably safe to conjecture that he read it. Predictably and reasonably, previous schol-

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notes to pages 181–86

< arship on Petrarch’s possible in›uence on Milton has focused on the poet of the Canzoniere and “Petrarchan tradition,” such as in Iona Bell’s essay “Milton’s Dialogue with Petrarch” (1992). 37. E.g., see Fish 2001, 521. Milton’s portrayal of Adam and Eve’s “mysterious marriage” in Eden has been much studied and debated: see Berkeley 1987 and, in particular, Luxon 2001 and Pruitt 2003 for treatments of the special nature of the ‹rst parents’ “wedded love.” 38. Cf. Augustine’s assertion, in De bono coniugali, that “the explanation why marriage is a good lies, I think, not merely in the procreation of children, but also in the natural compact itself between the sexes” (Quod mihi non videtur propter solam ‹liorum procreationem, sed propter ipsam etiam naturalem in diverso sexu societatem [Augustine 2001, 6, with facing-page translation by P. G. Walsh).

afterword 1. Most recently, this Milton is the object of critique in Herman 2003 and Forsyth 2003 (esp. 64–113), which both presume that a Milton who was deeply con›icted about many aspects of his experience and religion contradicts, perforce, Fish’s view of him. But there is no necessary reason that we cannot have an Empsonian Milton ‹lled with many doubts—and a Paradise Lost that betrays all the strain and incertitude of a poet who means to “justify the ways of God to men” (1.26)—and yet still also have a Milton who works or at least intends to work, if not all the time then much of the time, the way Stanley Fish describes him working in Surprised by Sin. 2. On the question of Spenser’s appropriation of the cursus Virgilianus, see Cheney 1993 and Donnelly 2003. On Spenser’s response to the Aeneid and the allegorical commentary tradition, see Hughes 1929 and Watkins 1995. Also see Quitslund 2001, 108–20, for a discussion of Christopher Landino’s commentaries on Dante and Vergil in the context of an examination of Platonic natural philosophy in The Faerie Queene (cf. the earlier study of “neo-Platonism in Spenser’s poetry” in Ellrodt 1960). More generally, among the numerous studies of the nature, sources, and structure of Spenserean allegory, the classic treatments are in Berger 1957; A. C. Hamilton 1961; J. E. Hankins 1971; Nohrnberg 1976; and Murrin 1980, 131–52. 3. Cf. Murrin’s statement, in a subsequent study, that “if someone believes in resurrection, then the life of the individual literally has no end, and teleology becomes impossible” (1980, 150). We might observe, however, that Murrin’s imagery in the paragraph just quoted in the present text parallels Milton’s in his description of the devils in hell when they are in the throes of philosophical inquiry. Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

(Paradise Lost 2.558–61)

4. Throughout, I cite from Thomas Roche’s edition of The Faerie Queene in Spenser 1978.

Notes to Pages 188–93

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5. For a contrasting view of The Faerie Queene’s design, see Dixon 1996, which argues for a rhetorical motive and structure that focus the effusiveness of The Faerie Queene and bring it to formal closure in the Mutability Cantos. Even so, Dixon’s characterization of each quest in the poem as a dialectic of “undifferentiated alternative answers to a speci‹c question as data” that “narrow inductively through a series of ordered abstractions to a single principle of principles at the apex,” an “answer” that “transcends any individual answer” (11–12), offers a compelling elaboration of the view that the momentum of The Faerie Queene is explained primarily by its unceasing drive to inquiry, that is, the way it continuously “inventories, questions, and evaluates received wisdom,” in John Webster’s formulation (1994, 82). 6. The “Errour episode” is one of the most analyzed in Spenserean criticism; see Blisset 1989 and Rhu 1994 for excellent treatments of the literary background, though not including the allegorized Aeneid. 7. All subsequent references to the ‹rst canto of book 1 are indicated by stanzas and line numbers only. 8. Chaucer 1989, 4.530, 533–35. 9. For Watkins, it is the “Fradubio episode” in the second canto of book 1 that ‹rst “brings a Virgilian subtext, Aeneas’s encounter with Polydorus, into dialogue with its Ariostan parody” (1995, 95), but I think that encounter begins in 1.1.8–9. 10. On the various “analogical links between the Fradubio episode and the rest of Book I,” and for a nuanced interpretation of “the centrality” of Redcrosse’s encounter with Fradubio qua Doubt in light of the Polydorus motif in Vergil, Dante, Aristo, and Tasso, see the seminal essay by William J. Kennedy (1973). On Redcrosse eventually “learning to read,” see Lees-Jeffries 2003. 11. Yet it would be one, to be sure, heavily in›ected by Spenser’s Protestant theology of grace. See Watkins 1995 (esp. 103–12) for a careful examination of Spenser’s Vergilianism in light of this theology, with observations on points of contrast in the allegorized Aeneids of Bernard, Vegio, and Landino.

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Index =< Page numers in italics refer to chapters or sections dedicated to the subject of the entry or subentry Adam allegorically interpreted in Augustine’s Confessions, 10–11 in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167–68, 169, 171–75, 178, 179– 81 in Proba’s Centones Virgiliani, 142–44 in Schiller’s star atlas, 139 Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid, 10, 11, 31, 39, 40, 42–43, 44, 49, 51–52, 53–54, 63, 95, 98, 100, 101, 111, 114, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 128–29, 133, 141, 143–44, 146, 151, 152, 154, 158–59, 160, 164, 165, 167, 171–72 in allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid, 11, 32, 34–36, 37, 53, 54, 55, 56–63, 65, 66–71, 72–73, 75, 76–77, 81, 90, 91, 102–3, 111, 112, 118, 164, 166–68, 171– 72, 176, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190; in Vegio’s continuation of the Aeneid, 60–63, 91, 186; invoked in Augustine’s City of God, 31; in Augustine’s Confessions, 11, 32, 111;

in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 160, 164–65, 166–68, 171–72, 176; in Petrarch’s Africa, 10, 11, 39, 43, 44; in Petrarch’s Secretum, 31, 49; in Proba’s Centones Virgiliani, 143–44; in Ross’s Christiad, 146, 151, 152, 154; in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 185–90, 192, 194; in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 89–90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102–3; in Vida’s Christiad, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 128–29, 133–34 allegory, de‹nitions of, 6–8, 10–11, 185, 194 Allen, Don Cameron, 55–56, 72, 75 Allen, Michael J. B., 216 Aretino, Frederigo, Petrarch’s letter to. See under Petrarch, Seniles 4.5 Ariosto, Ludovico, 6, 184, 191 Aristarchus of Samothrace, 56 Aristophanes, 140 Aristotle, 18, 76 Armida, 10, 78, 79, 86–87, 88, 94, 95–96, 101–5, 113, 148 Ascensius, Jodocus Badius, 220

265

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index

< Augustine, St. (Aurelius Augustinus), 46, 107 City of God, The, 24, 31, 47, 55, 75, 128, 138, 159 Confessions, 2, 10–11, 12, 17–18, 37, 54, 55, 95, 99, 100, 111, 112, 128, 140, 180, 181 De bono coniugali, 242 De doctrina Christiana, 11, 17, 65, 138 De Trinitate, 7 De utilitate credendi, 7 in Petrarch’s Secretum, 1, 2, 3–5, 10, 11, 17, 18, 23–24, 25, 27, 31, 37–38, 46, 79, 84, 89–90, 106, 159, 160, 178 Augustine of Dacia, 7 Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, 137 Beatrice, 3, 10, 13 Berger, Harry, 184–85 Bernardo, Aldo, 22–23, 26, 31, 198, 203 Bernardus Silvestris, commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid attributed to, 57–60, 64, 172 Bloch, R. Howard, 10–11 Botta, Bartolomeo. See under Vida, Christiad, Botta’s commentary on Buckley, Jorunn, 9 Burden, Denis, 163, 164 Bynum, Caroline, 197 Carthage (as symbol) in allegorical interpretations of Vergil’s Aeneid, 54–55, 58–60, 65, 68, 70, 93, 112, 164, 199 in Augustine’s Confessions, 11, 17–18, 37, 41, 112 in Petrarch’s Africa, 11, 37, 38, 40–44, 84, 94 in Ross’s Christiad, 155 in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 83–84, 93, 97, 99 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 78 Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 110 Cavallo, Jo Ann, 228 Chaucer, 81, 189, 190 Cheney, Patrick, 184 Chiampi, James, 224

Christ, Jesus in allegorical interpretations of Vergil’s Aeneid, 58, 65–66, 72–73, 111 in allegory of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 186 in epic Christiads, 108, 112, 113–14, 117, 118, 119–29, 136–37, 146–51, 153–54, 173 in Milton’s Paradise Lost (the Son), 162, 166, 167, 168, 170, 173, 179 Petrarch’s prayer to in the Africa, 45, 49, 80 in Proba’s Centones Virgiliani, 170 in Schiller’s star atlas, 139 Tasso’s prayer to in Gerusalemme liberata, 80 Cicero, 6, 20, 70, 81–84, 180 Clorinda, 79, 90, 93–94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 105, 148 Curtius, Marcus, 46–50 Dante Alighieri, 3, 13, 22, 33, 50, 76, 99–100, 120, 172–73, 190, 192, 221 Del Giudice, Luisa, 101, 227 Desmond, Marilynn, 207–8 Di Cesare, Mario, 110, 229 Dido as historical queen of Carthage, 29–30 invoked in Augustine’s City of God, 31; in Augustine’s Confessions, 32, 50, 91, 111, 194; in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 160, 161–63, 164, 169–70; in Petrarch’s Africa, 27–30, 32, 38, 42–44; in Petrarch’s Secretum, 31–32, 38–39; in Proba’s Centones Virgiliani, 143, 144; in Ross’s Christiad, 148, 150–51, 152–55; in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 188–90, 192; in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 89, 92–93, 95, 101, 103, 147–48; in Vida’s Christiad, 113–15, 116, 120, 128–31 in Vergil’s Aeneid, 10, 11, 27–29, 31, 32, 38–39, 40, 41, 42–44, 50, 51–52, 63, 67, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 101, 103, 111, 113, 114–15, 116, 117, 120, 128–31, 141, 143, 144, 147–48, 150, 152–55, 158–59, 160, 161, 162, 164, 169, 170, 194

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in allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid, 11, 34, 35, 36, 37, 44, 50, 54, 55, 56–57, 59–60, 63, 65, 67–70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 89, 93, 113, 154, 169, 170, 188–90, 192 Dixon, Michael F. N., 243 doctrine of the two Venuses. See under Venus Donatus, Tiberius Claudius, 55–56 dream of Scipio (the Elder’s) in Petrarch’s Africa, 20, 21, 38, 81–84, 174–75, 176–77, 186 invoked in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 160, 173–78; in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 186; in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 81–84, 101, 186 (the Youngers) in Ciceros De republica, 20, 81–84, 174, 176–77 Ennius, Quintus, 21, 22, 32–33, 34, 46, 105, 131 Erotimo, 105–7 Eve, 10, 53, 101 allegorically interpreted in Augustine’s Confessions, 10–11 in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 157–58, 160, 161–65, 166, 167–69, 171–72, 175–78, 181 in Proba’s Centones Virgiliani, 142–44 in Schiller’s star atlas, 139 Fabrini, Giovanni, 71–73, 75, 76, 77, 91, 93, 159, 169 Fallon, Stephen M., 159 felix culpa, 162–64 Fenzi, Enrico, 23 Festa, Nicola, 203 Fichter, Andrew, 102, 199 Ficino, Marsilio, 63, 64–65, 76 Fiore, Peter Amadeus, 238–39 Fish, Stanley, 8, 156–59, 178, 179, 235–36, 239 Fleming, John V., 199, 220 Forsyth, Neil, 164, 236, 241 Fowler, Alastair, 167 Freccero, John, 12–13, 17, 101 Fulgentius, Fabius Planciadus, 56–57

Gentili, Scipio, 78 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 105 Gildippe, 90–91 Gilman, Donald, 27 Giuliani, Oscar, 195 Goffredo, 77, 81–84, 91, 94, 95–96, 101, 105, 106–7, 174, 186 Green, R. P. H., 137, 138 Greene, Thomas, 12, 210 Groves, David, 23 Guastavini, Giulio, 78, 79, 109 Hannibal invoked in Petrarch’s Secretum, 37–38; in Ross’s Christiad, 154–55 in Livy, 20 in Petrarch’s Africa, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 32, 37–38, 39–40, 41, 44–45, 79, 84, 94, 155, 174 prophesied by Dido in Vergil’s Aeneid, 11, 39, 44, 155 Hardie, Philip, 110, 118, 127, 131, 141 Helen, 53, 54, 101, 198 Hobbes, Thomas, 135 Hollander, John, 208 Homer, 6, 46, 56, 76, 191 Hoole, Charles, 137, 233 Huon of Bordeaux, 190 Jerome, St., 29, 137, 139 Jerusalem (as symbol), 75, 77, 78–79, 93, 94, 99, 146, 147, 186 Jesus. See Christ Judas Iscariot, 129, 131, 144 Justin, Marcus, 29 Kallendorf, Craig, 27, 37, 55, 72, 110, 201, 217, 229 Kaske, Carol V., 6, 236–37 Knight, W. F. Jackson, 234 Landino, Cristoforo annotated edition of Vergil’s works, 71 De laboribus Herculis, 216 Disputationes Camaldulenses, 55, 60, 63, 65–73, 75, 76, 77, 83, 91, 93, 159, 169, 190

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< Lauder, George, 232 Lauder, William, 232–33 Laura invoked by later poets, 10, 87, 190 invoked in Petrarch’s Africa, 10, 45; in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 5, 9, 13, 14–16, 50, 51, 101; in Petrarch’s Secretum 2, 3, 4, 5, 27, 31, 37–38, 96, 160 Lavinia invoked in Ross’s Christiad, 150, 151; in Vida’s Christiad, 115–16, 129, 150 in Vergil’s Aeneid, 62, 91, 115–16, 129, 150, 151; in allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid, 36, 60; in Vegio’s continuation of the Aeneid, 61–63, 116, 186 Lewis, C. S., 206 Livy (Titus Livius), 20, 25, 30, 32, 47 Lubac, Henri de, 6–8, 221 Lucretia, 29, 87 Lucretius, 81, 87 Luther, Martin, 8 Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, 20, 174 Magdeline, Mary, 113–14, 139 Mary, Virgin Mother, 9, 10, 53 in epic Christiads, 114–16, 129–31, 148–53, 157, 165 invoked in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 163, 167; in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 13, 50; in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 84, 86–87, 105 in Schiller’s star atlas, 139 Massinissa in Livy, 27, 30 in Petrarch’s Africa, 10, 21–22, 26–27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 41, 44–45, 84, 87, 94, 104, 180 Mazzotta, Guiseppe, 12, 14, 17 McMahon, Robert, 239 Migiel, Marilyn, 227 Miller, Paul Allen, 196 Milton, John, 109, 110, 136, 137 Areopagitica, 158, 166 De Doctrina Christiana, 158, 164, 240

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 181 Paradise Lost, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 53, 108, 109, 127, 156–82, 183–84, 242. See also names of main characters “Passion, The,” 109 Tetrachordon, 235 Murrin, Michael, 75, 99, 185, 191 Muzio, Macario, 109 Nicholas of Lyra, 7 Odoarado, 90–91 Olindo, 79, 84, 88–90, 91 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 63, 110, 190 Paris (of Troy), 53, 54, 59, 66, 67, 84 Paul, St., 35, 65–66, 90, 138, 140, 181 Pavlovskis, Zoja, 139–40, 141–42, 145, 153 Peter, St., 123, 124, 139, 151–52, 153–54, 192 Petrarch, Francis (Francesco Petrarca) Africa, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 7, 10, 11, 18–19, 20–50, 55, 73, 79–80, 81–84, 87, 109, 112, 131, 155, 160, 174–75, 176–77, 179–80, 182, 183, 184. See also names of main characters Canzoniere, 1, 5, 9, 11–19, 32, 50, 75, 79, 86, 89, 98, 101 De viris illustribus, 4 Secretum, 1, 2, 3–5, 9, 11, 17, 18, 23–24, 25, 26, 27, 31–32, 33, 37–38, 46, 79, 84, 89–90, 96, 102, 106, 159, 160, 182, 205 Seniles 4.5, 1, 33–37, 55, 59, 60, 70 Pilate, Pontius, 118–23 Plato, 36, 53, 64–65, 66, 76, 78 Polydorus, 100, 122–23, 171–73, 191–92 Proba, Faltonia Betitia, 137, 139–44, 170 Propertius, Sextus, 110 Quillen, Carol Everhart, 196 Quilligan, Maureen, 237 Quint, David, 226 Rhu, Lawrence, 185, 222 Rico, Francisco, 23, 25 Rinaldo, 10, 77, 78, 79, 82, 94, 96, 101–5, 106, 148

Index

269

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Roche, Thomas, 75, 189, 200, 204 Roman de la rose, Le, 81 Ross, Alexander Alcoran of Mahomet, The, 136 Christiad, 2, 5, 8, 53, 108, 109, 135–55, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 178, 184. See also names of main characters History of the World: The Second Part, 136 Iudaicarum Memorabiliorum, 146 Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook, 135 Mystagogus Poeticus, 136 New Planet No Planet, The, 135 Vergilius Evangelisans, 136 Ruff, Nancy, 203, 219 Rumrich, John, 157, 235–36 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 109, 231 Satan, 143 invoked in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 186 in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 109, 156, 161–62, 164–65, 169–70, 174, 175–78 in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 107, 109 in Vida’s Christiad, 109, 112, 116–17 Scaglione, Aldo, 38 Schiller, Julius, 139 Scipio Africanus the Elder historical ‹gure in St. Ambrose, 220; in Cicero, 70, 180, 220; in Livy, 30; in Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, 4; in Petrarch’s Secretum, 37 in Petrarch’s Africa, 11, 20–22, 23, 25–26, 30–31, 32–33, 41–45, 49, 81–84, 85, 94, 104, 155, 160, 174–75, 176–77, 180, 181, 186, 202. See also dream of Scipio Servius, 56 Seung, T. K., 27, 204 Sofronia, 84–90, 91 Somnium Scipionis. See dream of Scipio Sophonisba in Livy, 27, 202 in Petrarch’s Africa, 10, 21–22, 26–28, 29, 37, 45, 84, 87, 88, 101, 104, 113 sortes Biblicae/Vergilianae, 140–41 Spenser, Edmund, 6, 184–94

Speroni, Sperone, 51–52 Squarza‹co, Hieronimo, 24–25 Steadman, John, 74, 170 Stephens, Walter, 225, 227–28 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus), 168–69 Swaim, Kathleen, 241 Tancredi, 77, 79, 93–94, 96–101, 105, 148, 172, 173 Tasso, Torquato, 52 “Allegoria del poema,” 7, 74, 75, 76–77, 95 Apologia in difesa della sua Gierusalemme liberata, 78 Discorsi del poema heroico, 78 Gerusalemme liberata, 2, 5, 10, 53, 55, 71, 73, 74–107, 109, 112, 113, 146, 147, 147– 48, 155, 171, 172–73, 174, 184, 185, 187, 190, 191, 192. See also names of main characters Il Messagiero, 75 Letter to Scipione Gonzaga, 75–76 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 110 Tertullian of Carthage, 9, 29 Tillyard, E. M. W., 22 Toffanin, Giuseppe, 22, 33 Tomasini, Jacopo Fillipo, 241–42 Treip, Mindele Anne, 108 Turnus, 36, 37, 44, 60, 84, 115 Vegio, Maffeo. See Vergil, Aeneid, Vegio’s continuation of Vellutello, Alessandro, 221 Venus, 101, 103, 191 in Vergil’s Aeneid, 3, 27, 39, 43, 51, 52, 117–18, 150–51, 152, 162 in allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid, 34–35, 36, 39, 53–55, 56, 57–60, 64, 65, 66–67, 71, 73, 75, 112, 113, 170; in Vegio’s continuation of the Aeneid, 60–61, 62–63 the doctrine of the two Venuses 10, 53–55, 56, 57–60, 62–67, 71, 73, 75, 76, 112, 118, 160, 169–71, 176, 183 invoked in Dante’s Divine Comedy, 3;

270

index

< Venus (continued) in Milton’s Paradise Lost, 162, 169, 170–71, 176; in Petrarch’s Africa, 27–28, 38–40; in Ross’s Christiad, 150–51, 152; in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 103; in Vida’s Christiad, 113, 117–18 Verdiccio, Massimo, 196 Vergerio, Pier Paulo, 24 Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro) Aeneid, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 25, 27–29, 31, 32, 38–41, 42–44, 49, 51–52, 53–54, 60, 62, 63, 67, 81, 82–83, 89, 91–92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 102–3, 105–6, 111, 112, 113, 114–16, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 124, 127, 128–31, 133–34, 141, 143–44, 145, 146, 147–55, 158–59, 160, 161–62, 164–65, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171–72, 174, 175–76, 184, 191, 228; allegorical interpretations of, 1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 32, 33–37, 43, 44, 49–50, 52–73, 75, 76–77, 79, 81, 84, 89–90, 91, 93, 102–3, 109, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118, 147, 154, 159–60, 162, 164, 166–68, 169, 170–73,

176, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188–92, 205; other types of commentary on, 51–52, 55–56, 71, 136, 138; Vegio’s continuation of, 60–63, 91, 116, 136, 171, 186. See also names of main characters Eclogues, 101, 136, 138 Georgics, 136, 138 works converted into cento poetry, 142–55 Vida, Marco Girolamo, 160 Christiad, 2, 5, 8, 53, 105, 106, 108–34, 141, 142, 148, 150, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 173, 178, 184; Botta’s commentary on Christiad, 109, 110–12, 113, 114, 117, 121–22, 128, 132–33, 137, 138, 150, 153. See also names of main characters Watkins, John, 114, 184, 189, 208, 243 Wilhelm, Robert M., 27 Witt, Ronald, 200 Yavneh, Naomi, 86–87, 225, 227