The Virgilian Tradition II (Variorum Collected Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367710422, 9780367710439, 9781003149057, 0367710420

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1 Renaissance readings of Virgil
1 Allusion as reception: Virgil, Milton, and the modern reader
2 Historicizing the “Harvard school”: pessimistic readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance scholarship
3 Representing the other: Ercilla’s La Araucana, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the New World encounter
4 Epic and tragedy – Virgil, La Cerda, Milton
5 Nicodemus Frischlin’s Dido: Virgil on the German stage
6 The Neo-Latin epic
Part 2 Early books and manuscripts, mostly Virgilian
7 The medium is the message: from manuscript to the hand press to the computer age
8 Using manuscripts and early printed books
9 A humanist annotator of Virgil: Coluccio Salutati
10 Virgil and printed books, 1500–1800
11 Virgil and the ethical commentary: philosophy, commonplaces, and the structure of Renaissance knowledge
12 Virgil in the Renaissance classroom: from Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae
13 Canon, print, and the Virgilian corpus
Index

Citation preview

The Virgilian Tradition II

The Virgilian Tradition II brings together thirteen essays by historian Craig Kallendorf. The essays present a distinctive approach to the reception of the canonical classical author Virgil, which is focused around the early printed books through which that author was read and interpreted within early modern culture. Using the prefaces, dedicatory letters, and commentaries that accompanied the early modern editions of Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, and Appendix Virgiliana, they demonstrate how this paratextual material was used by early readers to develop a more nuanced interpretation of Virgil’s writings than twentieth-century scholars believed they were capable of. The approach developed throughout this volume shows how the emerging field of book history can enrich our understanding of the reception of Greek and Latin authors. This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern history, as well as those interested in book history and cultural history. Craig Kallendorf is Professor of English and Classics at Texas A&M University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author or editor of 27 books and more than 170 articles, book chapters, and reference work entries.

Also in the Variorum Collected Studies series:

CRAIG KALLENDORF The Virgilian Tradition II Books and Their Readers in the Renaissance (CS1103)

TERENCE O’REILLY Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain John of the Cross, Francisco de Aldana, Luis de León (CS1102)

DORINDA OUTRAM Science, Enlightenment and Revolution Selected Papers, 1976-2019 (CS1101)

BRIAN CROKE Roman Emperors in Context Theodosius to Justinian (CS1100)

STEPHEN KNIGHT Medieval Literature and Social Politics Studies of Cultures and Their Contexts (CS1099)

EKMELEDDIN İHSANOGLU Studies on Ottoman Science and Culture (CS1098)

DAVID S. BACHRACH and BERNARD S. BACHRACH Writing the Military History of Pre-Crusade Europe Studies in Sources and Source Criticism (CS1097)

PAMELA M. KING, edited by Alexandra F. Johnston Reading Texts for Performance and Performance as Texts Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies (CS1096)

FELICE LIFSHITZ Writing Normandy Stories of Saints and Rulers (CS1095)

STEPHEN GERSH Metaphysics and Hermeneutics in the Medieval Platonic Tradition (CS1094) For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Variorum-Collected-Studies/book-series/VARIORUM

The Virgilian Tradition II

Books and Their Readers in the Renaissance Craig Kallendorf

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2022 Craig Kallendorf The right of Craig Kallendorf to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-71042-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-71043-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14905-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1103

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

PART 1

Renaissance readings of Virgil

5

1 Allusion as reception: Virgil, Milton, and the modern reader

7

2 Historicizing the “Harvard school”: pessimistic readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance scholarship

21

3 Representing the other: Ercilla’s La Araucana, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the New World encounter

32

4 Epic and tragedy – Virgil, La Cerda, Milton

51

5 Nicodemus Frischlin’s Dido: Virgil on the German stage

64

6 The Neo-Latin epic

75

PART 2

Early books and manuscripts, mostly Virgilian 7 The medium is the message: from manuscript to the hand press to the computer age 8 Using manuscripts and early printed books v

91

93 113

CONTENTS

9 A humanist annotator of Virgil: Coluccio Salutati

126

10 Virgil and printed books, 1500–1800

147

11 Virgil and the ethical commentary: philosophy, commonplaces, and the structure of Renaissance knowledge

160

12 Virgil in the Renaissance classroom: from Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae

174

13 Canon, print, and the Virgilian corpus

190

Index

210

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every effort has been made to contact the original publishers of the essays in this collection, but this has not been possible in every case. The original places of publication for the essays in this collection are listed here. All essays are reprinted with permission. “Allusion as Reception: Virgil, Milton, and the Modern Reader,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 67–79. “Historicizing the ‘Harvard School’: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99 (1999): 391–403. “Representing the Other: Ercilla’s La Araucana, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the ‘New’ World Encounter,” Comparative Literature Studies 40 (2003): 394–414. Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University Press. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. “Epic and Tragedy – Virgil, La Cerda, Milton,” in Syntagmatia. Essays on NeoLatin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Gilbert Tournoy, ed. Dirk Sacré and Jan Papy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 579–93. “Nicodemus Frischlin’s Dido: Virgil on the German Stage,” Studi Umanistici Piceni 27 (2007): 263–73. “The Neo-Latin Epic,” in Encyclopedia of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. P. Ford, J. Bloemendal, and C. Fantazzi, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 1.449–60. “The Medium Is the Message: From Manuscript to the Hand Press to the Computer Age,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 109 (2015): 429–59. “Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books,” in The Cambridge Guide to Reading Neo-Latin Literature, ed. V. Moul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 379–93. © Cambridge University Press 2017. “A Humanist Annotator of Virgil: Coluccio Salutati,” in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. J. Hankins, J. Monfasani, and F. Purnell Jr. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 65–148 (original version co-authored with Virginia Brown). “Virgil and Printed Books, 1500–1800,” in A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and Its Tradition, ed. J. Farrell and M. Putnam (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 234–50. vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Virgil and the Ethical Commentary: Plato, Aristotle, and the Function of Literature,” in Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1300–1700), ed. K. Enenkel and H. Nellen, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia, 19 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), 201–20. “Virgil in the Renaissance Classroom: From Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae,” in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. J. F. Ruys, J. Ward, and M. Heyworth, Disputatio, 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 309–28. “Canon, Print, and the Virgilian Corpus,” Classical Receptions Journal 10 (2018): 149–69.

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The essays that have been collected in this volume contribute to one overarching idea: that a classic like Virgil’s Aeneid means what generations of readers over the centuries have decided it means and that this reception has both a purely textual component and an inextricable link to the media in which the ancient work has been encountered. The first group of essays focuses more on the intertextual aspects of reception while the second group explores its material component. The dominant interpretation of the Aeneid, from antiquity to the present, puts Aeneas forward as the embodiment of pietas, that peculiarly Roman virtue through which people fulfill their duties to gods, country, family, and self, in that order. As he searches for a new home for himself and his people in Rome, Aeneas also establishes the principles on which the new society will be founded. This interpretation is sometimes called “optimistic” because it stresses the positive achievements of Rome and its founding hero, achievements that were appropriated by later cultures that saw themselves as the political and cultural heirs of ancient Rome.1 As part of the process by which a richer and more accurate understanding of the classics was gained in the Renaissance, this “optimistic” interpretation was filtered through the late antique commentary of Tiberius Claudius Donatus, which was seen as authoritative because it came from the classical past, albeit from the end of that period. In this commentary, poetry became enmeshed with epideictic rhetoric, whose goal was the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice. As Giovanni Boccaccio put it, “[T]he poets were the greatest in praising virtues and condemning vice”; in accordance with this theory, Virgil described in Aeneas “the qualities and character of the perfect man,” so that “in the first six books of the Aeneid, contemplation and deliberation have their place. However in the second six books, action is praised.”2 This approach was especially appropriate

1 For a discussion of the “optimistic” and “pessimistic” interpretations of the Aeneid, see the essay “Historicizing the ‘Harvard’ School: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship.” 2 These judgments come from Francesco Petrarca and Francesco Filelfo, respectively. See Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 9, 12–13.

1

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INTRODUCTION

for educational purposes, as we see in the most popular school commentary of the period, that of Philipp Melanchthon,3 and in “Nicodemus Frischlin’s Dido: Virgil on the German Stage,” which examines a Renaissance paraphrase of Book 4 of the Aeneid as an admonitory epic written for use in the schools. The epideictic reading of the Aeneid was not restricted to educational uses, however. More than a hundred epics were written in Latin during the Renaissance, and since the Aeneid was the most widely read ancient epic in this period, it stands to reason that it would provide the dominant model for literary imitation in this genre. In “The Neo-Latin Epic,” we see that later epic poems written in Latin can be organized and interpreted according to what kind of hero was chosen for praise. Another interpretation of the Aeneid, however, also gained prominence during the second half of the twentieth century. According to this interpretation, Aeneas is a flawed hero whose efforts to become “remarkable for goodness” (Aen. 1.10) ultimately failed, and Virgil’s great achievement as a poet was to create a poem in which “other voices,” those that were sacrificed in the process of founding Rome, were also audible. It has been argued that this interpretation, the “pessimistic one,” is a modern creation, one that reflects a cynicism that is not present in the Aeneid and was not seen there by earlier readers.4 The remaining essays in Part 1 show that this is not the case. In “Allusion as Reception: Virgil, Milton, and the Modern Reader,” a method is developed for recreating the way in which a later writer understood the Aeneid, and when this method is applied to Paradise Lost, it becomes clear that Milton heard the same “further voices” in Virgil as his twentieth-century readers did. The same method clears up the critical confusion surrounding a sixteenth-century Spanish epic written in imitation of the Aeneid in “Representing the Other: Ercilla’s La Araucana, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the New World Encounter.” There are, however, other more direct ways to establish this point. “Historicizing the ‘Harvard School’: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship” shows that five prominent early humanists addressed directly the same issues as their counterparts did five hundred years later, and “Epic and Tragedy – Virgil, La Cerda, Milton” traces a direct line from the Aeneid through an influential commentary that was probably known by Milton to the last major epic written in imitation of Virgil. While the boundary between Parts 1 and 2 is by necessity porous, the second group of essays is focused more on what happens when attention is directed to the physical form in which a text is encountered. The prevailing, unexamined assumption has been that a modern critical edition of any earlier work is to be desired whenever possible, but “Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books” argues not only that this is not always practical but that it is often not desirable either because modern editions delete the paratexts, early modern commentaries, 3 Craig Kallendorf, “Uncommon Commonplaces: Melanchthon’s Virgil Commentary and the Paradox of Popularity,” Vergilius 65 (2019): 107. 4 See, for example, Karl Galinsky, “The Anger of Aeneas,” American Journal of Philology 109 (1988): 322.

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INTRODUCTION

and handwritten marginalia from early printed books, even though they are necessary to fill out the reception history of the text. “The Medium Is the Message: From Manuscript to the Hand Press to the Computer Age” shows that on a general level, manuscripts tended to link Virgil’s poetry to the medieval church and to encourage interpretations that were compatible with Christianity; early printed books provide evidence of the Renaissance practice of reading for commonplaces and examples of stylistic felicity; and the computer by its very nature tends to highlight the subversive, polyvocal readings of the “pessimistic” variety. The remaining five essays show in detail what happens when this general approach is applied in practice. “A Humanist Annotator of Virgil: Coluccio Salutati” uses evidence from a manuscript owned by Coluccio Salutati, who passed along the scholarly accomplishments of Petrarca to the next generation of humanists, to show how an understanding of the literal text was necessary both to link Virgil to the Christian allegory of the medieval manuscript world and to open up the poem to the epideictic reading that would dominate in the Renaissance. In “Virgil and Printed Books, 1500–1800,” paratextual material, marginal notes, and illustrations from early printed books show that Renaissance scholars sometimes pursued paths that do not extend to the present, but they often responded to the same things in Virgil’s text that interest modern readers. “Virgil and the Ethical Commentary: Philosophy, Commonplaces, and the Structure of Renaissance Knowledge” addresses an issue that has been much discussed in modern scholarship on Renaissance humanism: the gap between what educational theory said about the importance of fostering virtuous behavior in students and the failure of the surviving evidence of classroom practice to emphasize this point.5 Three early printed books provide examples of how Virgil’s poetry could be read with an eye on its ethical content. This content, along with examples of well-turned stylistic expressions, was often marked in their books by early readers, transferred to commonplace books, and then reused in the writers’ own compositions and speeches. As “Virgil in the Renaissance Classroom: From Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae” shows, the evidence for this widespread Renaissance reading practice only survives within the material evidence from the period. The final essay, “Canon, Print, and the Virgilian Corpus,” provides a climactic, striking example of how classical texts, Renaissance scholarship, and the medium of print worked together in a reciprocal practice to determine what was accepted as a work of Virgil’s. Collecting these essays here serves several functions. Most obviously, this volume brings together in one place material that was published over three decades but is often difficult to find now. Just as important, however, has been the opportunity to arrange the essays so that they tell a larger story, one that I did not see at 5 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), xiv; see also Robert Black, “Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspectives and Continuing Controversies,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 315–34.

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INTRODUCTION

the time when they were originally written but that only became clear as my own thinking matured. There are exceptions, but in general the earlier essays focus on reception as a disembodied intertextual process, while the later ones explore what happens when attention is paid to the medium in which texts are encountered as well as to what is said in the texts. I hope that this book will not only say something important about what Rome’s greatest poet has meant through the early modern and modern periods but will also provide a model for how a richer, more materialized reception history can be written for other authors from other periods. College Station, Texas 16 February 2021

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Part 1 RENAISSANCE READINGS OF VIRGIL

1 ALLUSION AS RECEPTION Virgil, Milton, and the modern reader

It is common knowledge that fragments of the Aeneid are embedded in Paradise Lost, but surprisingly, over three hundred years of critical activity has yet to clarify either the full extent of the relationship or what it might mean for our understanding of the two poems. Milton’s first commentator, Patrick Hume, began the practice of identifying the Latin root of an unusual word in Paradise Lost and then citing passages from the Aeneid in which that word is used, generally without further comment. As Richard Thomas has reminded us, however, such references must then be interpreted.1 Unfortunately those critics who have proposed interpretive patterns in Milton’s allusions to Virgil remain divided on the most fundamental of issues. Davis Harding, for example, claimed that Satan rewrites Turnus, serving like his model as epic antagonist;2 C. M. Bowra and Francis Blessington, however, linked Satan to Aeneas, but with different interpretations, with Bowra claiming that Satan indeed takes on Aeneas’s grandeur but as part of Milton’s larger critique of the value system of ancient epic,3 while Blessington saw Satan as a parody of Aeneas, a posturer who fails to attain the nobility of his model.4 In the face of such disagreement Charles Martindale has suggested that Milton’s relationship to Virgil is exaggerated, or at very least needs to be defined much more precisely.5 Some disagreement, of course, is part of the normal business of literary criticism, but problems of this magnitude suggest an aporia in theory, some fundamental operating premise that has not been thought through carefully enough. It happens that the past several decades have seen a good deal of theoretical discussion of allusion. Earlier debates about the importance of authorial intention took a decisive turn in the 1960s, when Julia Kristeva introduced the term “intertextuality” to highlight the relationship between two texts without reference to authorial subjectivity. Structuralist critics helped fill out the implications of this approach,6

1 2 3 4 5 6

Thomas (1986) 174. Harding (1962) 44–51. Bowra (1948) 229–30. Blessington (1979) 1–8. Martindale (2002) 107. Allen (2000).

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but among classicists, authorial subjectivity returned through the back door in the work of Gian Biagio Conte, who recognized a reconstructed author writing for an implied reader whose literary experience allowed for the recognition of intertextual references. More recent work is beginning to acknowledge Martindale’s assertion that “meaning is always constructed at the point of reception”7 and to privilege the role of the reader in defining the meaning of allusions.8 I shall begin here, but propose a somewhat different model that focuses on the relationship between the modern critic and the alluding author as two different but interconnected readers. The validity of this model, I believe, is confirmed by its ability to guide us to a new appreciation of the role of the Aeneid in Paradise Lost.

I A number of poststructuralist responses to intertextuality have focused attention on a reader who in some way or other does more than passively recognize a reference embedded in a text. As early as 1966, Earl Wasserman suggested that allusion “ought to be defined broadly enough to include a creative act by the reader”; that is, as Pucci puts it, the reader “constitutes the allusion” and “makes meaning.” The reader of an allusion “configures on his own terms the interpretive outcomes of this connection. . . . [T]he language of the allusion makes possible but does not determine the creation, function, or conceivable interpretations of the allusion.”9 The consequences of this approach depend on something that has been noticed but not adequately explored, the fact that there are two readers operating in allusion: the critic who notices an allusion and the author who wrote it. The alluding author begins the process by reading an earlier text, then working out an interpretation of that text. As he or she begins writing, the new text unfolds in dialogue with the old one, in such a way that the potential meaning of one or more words resonates against their original usage in another text, where they meant something that is seen as relevant again. The critic, the second reader, works backwards and recreates this process as he or she is able to understand it, reading the second text and coming to a preliminary idea about what it means, then noticing a relationship to an earlier text that the author could have known, then going back and forth between the two to reconstruct the author’s reading of the first text on the basis of the allusions and what they appear to reveal. Schematically the process might be represented like this: text1 (T1)-----[reading of author (R-A)]----text2 (T2)----reading of critic (R-C) I have placed R-A in brackets to indicate that it is normally a reconstruction of a reading that is not available in the same way as R-C is. The critic will have his or 7 Hinds (1998) 47–51. 8 Fowler (2000) 111, 130; Edmunds (2001) xi–xx, 39–62, 133–69; Pucci (1998) 3–48. 9 Pucci (1998) 22, 43, 36.

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her own reading of T1 that may be independent of T2, and certainly was so before the allusion was noticed, but the recreation of R-A also generates a reading of T1 through the filter of T2. To help explain this model and its significance, I suggest four axioms: (1) The active agent in recognizing and interpreting allusion produces R-C and, by extension, R-A, and has to work within the hermeneutic possibilities for T1 and T2 as he or she understands them. In other words, R-C is always the result of a critic who is situated, in time and place, as a member of an interpretive community that fosters some hermeneutic options for given texts and discourages, even blocks off, others. The common interpretations of T1 will foreground some lines and scenes in the mind of the reader-critic, who will be more likely to recognize and attribute meaning to them in T2 than the lines and scenes from T1 that are neglected by comparison within his or her interpretive community.10 (2) R-A is not the product of Iser’s implied reader, the appropriate and sympathetic receiver of the cues embedded in T1 by its author,11 but is instead a construct that emerges from the recognition of fragments of T1 in T2 and the effort of the reader-critic to interpret their significance in T2 in relation to their original significance in T1. Often, especially with older works, this construct is all there is. The recreated reader-author, however, can merge with the author as actual reader if relevant external evidence like criticism of T1 or a copy of T1 annotated by the reader-author can be found.12 In cases like this, the reader-author’s actual reading of T1 provides a check on the constructed R-A, supplementing and, if necessary, correcting the work of the critic. (3) Some allusions will remain local, a fragment of one text embedded in another that serves primarily to enrich verbal texture, but the most richly rewarding allusive contact will be systematic, one of a number of references that contribute substantially to meaning.13 Classicists have tended to focus on local allusions,14 but Joseph Farrell uses the relationship between Homer and Virgil to suggest that more attention should be paid to systematic allusions in cases when “a totalizing relationship” has been created.15 References that enter an allusive system have the added advantage of the system as a guide to their interpretation – that is, the understanding of any given allusion from T1 in T2 can be checked at least in part against the understanding of other allusions from T1 in R-A for plausibility and coherence.

10 11 12 13 14 15

Pucci (1998) 44. Iser (1978) 37–38. Kallendorf and Kallendorf (2000). Hebel (1991). Hebel (1991). Edmunds (2001) 154.

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(4) In allusion, meaning flows both chronologically backwards as well as chronologically forwards.16 In other words, R-C is created when the critic reads backwards, first reading T2, then T1 through it. However R-A is recreated in a reciprocal process by which T1 and the critic’s provisional understanding of it are pulled forward into T2 and the critic’s provisional understanding of it, with both matrices of meaning being adjusted and readjusted as the critic moves between the two texts to recreate R-A. Quoting Pope, Rudat refers to this as a “mutual commerce” between alluding and allusive contexts, an intense interaction that seems to go both ways.”17 In order to test the value of this model, let us now turn to Virgil and Milton.

II As Francis Blessington has noted, Paradise Lost begins in medias res just like the Aeneid, when a figure of manifest grandeur is driven by divine wrath across a body of water, then forced to explore a new land in search of a new home.18 Indeed Satan’s first words to Beëlzebub, “If thou beest hee; But O how fall’n! how chang’d/From him . . . ” (PL 1.84–85), echo Aeneas’s words when he first saw Hector’s ghost, “ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo/Hectore qui redit . . . ” (“Oh this/was Hector, and how different he was/from Hector back from battle”; Aen. 2.274–75), making us wonder right away if Satan is a new Aeneas. Initially the answer seems to be ‘yes,’ for Satan concludes this speech with another conspicuous gesture toward Aeneas: So spake th’ Apostate Angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair: (PL 1.125–26) Talia voce refert curisque ingentibus aeger Spem uultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem. (These are his words; though sick with heavy cares, he counterfeits hope in his face; his pain is held within, hidden.) (Aen. 1.208–9, trans. Mandelbaum) 16 Kallendorf (1994); Fowler (2000) 130. 17 Rudat (1981) 46. 18 Blessington (1979) 6–7. There are two main modern sources for parallels between Paradise Lost and the Aeneid: the index to Patterson’s Columbia edition of the Works of Milton, under the lemma ‘Vergil’ in the second index volume ((1931–1940) 2026–29), and the appendix to Verbart’s Fellowship in Paradise Lost ((1995) 253–302). Both are extremely helpful, but neither is complete, so I have returned to the commentators of the long eighteenth century, whose sensitivity to classical allusion is often greater than that of modern readers (Oras (1967) 5–21). I have relied primarily on the editions of Hume (1695), Bentley (1732), the Richardsons (1734), Newton (1750), and Todd (1809), but will not normally reference each parallel to avoid overburdening the notes.

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Then God withdraws the hail and thunderbolts from the fiery lake of Hell (PL 1.169–77), just as Neptune calmed the seas and ceased to afflict Aeneas in the famous “Quos ego . . .” scene at the beginning of the Aeneid (1.124ff.). Another series of allusions links Satan to Aeneas in Carthage. As Satan prepares to speak to the other fallen devils, “attention held them mute” (PL 1.618), just as when Aeneas began to tell his story to Dido, “conticuere omnes attentique ora tenebant” (“A sudden silence fell on all of them;/their eyes were turned, intent on him”; Aen. 2.1). Similarly the description of Pandaemonium, which Satan observes in PL 1.728ff., recalls the description of Dido’s palace, which Aeneas observed in Aen. 1.710ff., even down to the same number of lamps (Aen. 1.726–27); what is more, the devils swarming to the newly constructed Pandaemonium (PL 1.768–76) are depicted in terms of the famous bee simile that described the Carthaginian builders (Aen. 1.430ff.). Book 2 of Paradise Lost rewrites Virgil’s descensus ad inferos, suggesting that Satan in Hell parallels Aeneas in the underworld. In counselling war, Moloch claims that there will be no problem leaving Hell because “Th’ ascent is easy then” (PL 2.81), echoing the Sibyl’s advice to Aeneas, “facilis descensus Auerno” (“easy –/the way that leads into Avernus”; Aen. 6.126). PL 2.528ff. is clearly based on Aen. 6.653ff., suggesting that the devils in Hell parallel the blessed in Virgil’s Elysian fields. When Satan announces his plan to leave Hell in search of Adam, he again describes the challenges of the journey in reference to Aeneas’s descent to Hell, noting that “long is the way/and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light” (PL 2.432–33; cf. Aen. 6.128–29, “sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras,/ hoc opus, hic labor est,” “But to recall your steps, to rise again/into the upper air: that is the labor;/that is the task”), with the ninefold restraint of Hell’s fiery adamantine gates (PL 2.436) recalling the details of Virgil’s underworld (Aen. 6.439, 552) and the “four infernal Rivers” (PL 5.575ff.) giving a pronounced Virgilian flavor to Milton’s Hell. Satan is also linked to Aeneas through references to other books of the Aeneid, brandishing his dart in PL 2.786, for example, like Aeneas on his way to kill Turnus in Aen. 12.919. By this point, Satan appears to be a new Aeneas, described in terms and situations that link him systematically to Virgil’s hero. The allusions diminish in Book 3, where decorum perhaps makes it more difficult to link God’s discussions with Jesus to classical literature; as Newton explained, “. . . Milton’s divine Persons are divine Persons indeed, and talk in the language of God, that is in the language of Scripture.”19 In Book 4, however, the allusive pattern resumes. Satan finds Adam and Eve in “A Silvan Scene” (PL 4.140) that closely resembles the “siluis scaena coruscis” (“the backdrop . . . a black/grove thick with bristling shadows”; Aen. 1.164) of the Libyan shore on which Aeneas landed. Signs that something may be wrong with this interpretation, however, begin to appear. When Satan enters Paradise, he is compared to a wolf entering a sheepfold (PL 4.183–92), a comparison that echoes Aen. 9.59–66, but that links Satan not to 19 Newton (1750) 1:211.

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Aeneas, but to Turnus.20 Milton’s first description of Adam (PL 4.288–94), in turn, recalls Virgil’s description of Aeneas (Aen. 1.588–93), although Adam’s hyacinthine locks are perhaps closer to Odysseus’s.21 Our sense of confusion grows when Adam’s first words to Eve, “Whom fli’st thou?” (PL 4.482), clearly echo Aeneas’s last words to Dido in Virgil’s underworld (Aen. 6.466, “quem fugis?” “whom do you flee?”), suggesting again that perhaps Adam, not Satan, is the new Aeneas.22 A reader who has noticed these clues will therefore not be totally unprepared when Milton settles the matter definitively in the final twenty-five lines of Book 4. We see Satan, “and on his Crest/Sat horror Plum’d” (PL 4.988–89), which recalls the Chimaera on the helmet of Turnus in Aen. 7.785–86. Then God hung “his golden Scales” (PL 4.996–97) in heaven, just as Jupiter had done before the final battle in the Aeneid, so that Satan, who must lose in his confrontation with the angels who have come to Adam’s defense, is associated with Turnus, who had to lose to Aeneas so that Italy could be established. The confrontation ends by associating Satan with Turnus in a way that anyone who has ever read the Aeneid will recall instantly: Satan fled, Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night. (PL 4.1014–15) uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. (and with a moan his life, resentful, fled to shades below.) (Aen. 12.952) Until almost the very end of Book 4, the clues suggest that Satan is the new Aeneas, the hero of Milton’s rewritten Aeneid. But the clues are there to deceive: Satan is not the new Aeneas, but the new Turnus, just as he was in a group of minor (and now unread) epics written by Crashaw, Fletcher, and Beaumont, Milton’s literary milieu from his Cambridge days.23 As long ago as Dryden, readers of Paradise Lost have been tempted to see Satan as the hero of the poem, even though they know that, theologically speaking, this cannot be. Part of Satan’s appeal, I submit, is the strength of his association with Aeneas, the hero of the greatest epic of the ancient world and the one whose virtues are most compatible with Christian values. In Stanley Fish’s now-famous phrase, however, such a reader has been “surprised by sin,”24 having allowed himself or herself momentarily to be taken in by appearances and to forget what 20 21 22 23 24

Blessington (1979) 86–87. Harding (1962) 69–72. Verbart (1995) 2. Burrow (1993) 251–52. Fish (1967) 1–56.

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must be true, that the evils of Satan cannot really be associated with the virtues of Aeneas. Reading Paradise Lost, like living in the world, is a dynamic process in which perceptions must be corrected against the eternal verities. And for Milton the stakes were high: “The rewards for reading that text were not earthly jouissance but eternal joy; the punishment for inept reading was eternal perdition.”25 Richardson understood at least part of this when he tried to explain that Milton sent his Cherubim from the ivory gate, the portal of false dreams by which Aeneas left the underworld at the end of the first half of the Aeneid, because what he had just written “was to be consider’d only as a Pure Fiction, and Poetical Invention, . . . [and] did not Answer the End.”26 Indeed the entire Virgilian underpinnings as they had been presented so far “did not Answer the End.” We must therefore look elsewhere for the rewritten Aeneas in Paradise Lost.

III Milton, like Virgil, tells parts of his story out of chronological order, so that the account of the battle in Heaven that led to Satan’s expulsion does not come until Book 6. Here there is no question about it: Satan is associated with Turnus, not Aeneas. At the decisive aristeia between Michael and Satan, the “Uplifted imminent” (PL 6.317) of both warriors’ swords comes from Aen. 12.728–29, “corpore toto/Alte sublatum consurgit Turnus in ensem” (“Turnus . . ./rises up to his full height; with sword/uplifted”). In the next lines, Satan’s sword is broken by Michael’s, which was taken from the armory of God (PL 6.320ff.), just as Turnus’s sword was broken by Aeneas’s, which he had also received from a deity (Aen. 12.731ff.). A little later a collective reference to Satan’s army, “so thick a Cloud/ He comes” (PL 6.539–40), recalls the references to Turnus’s troops as “nimbus peditum” (“like a cloud . . . of the infantry”; Aen. 7.793) and “nubem belli” (“the cloud of war”; Aen. 10.809). Who, then, is the new Aeneas? In this context one might like to say ‘Jesus,’ whose army conquers Satan’s and who, as Addison pointed out, could make sense as the hero of Paradise Lost.27 In Milton’s allusive system, however, this identification does not work. Satan’s opponent in the aristeia in Book 6 is Michael, not Jesus, and when Jesus on occasion is linked with a textual reference to the Aeneid, the association is generally not with Aeneas. In Book 3, for example, Jesus offers himself in place of Adam to fulfill the terms of divine justice, using a repeated “mee . . . mee” that recalls the “me . . . me” of Nisus and Euryalus’s mother (PL 3.236–38; Aen. 9.427, 493–94). There is another option, however. At the beginning of Book 5, Raphael descends from God to warn Adam to keep his sexual passion from deflecting him from his proper duty to those who will come after him. When Milton writes “Like Maia’s 25 Wood (1991) 204. 26 Richardson (1734) 178–79. 27 Addison (1720) 547.

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son [Mercury] he stood” (PL 5.285), he makes the link to the Aeneid explicit (cf. Aen. 4.238ff.), and Adam later addresses Raphael as “Divine Interpreter” (PL 7.72), which recalls the description of Mercury as “interpres diuum” in Aen. 4.378. If Raphael, not Satan, is the new Mercury, then Adam might be the new Aeneas for whom we are searching, with Eve being a new Dido. And indeed, they are. As Verbart notes,28 Adam and Eve consummate their union in language that recalls the union of Dido and Aeneas, such that “the Earth/ Gave sign of gratulation” (PL 8.513–14; cf. Aen. 4.165–68). And for Adam, as for Aeneas, the relation between sex and duty is crucial. At Aen. 4.265–76 Mercury reminded Aeneas that he had put the lesser before the greater in indulging his passion at the expense of his duty. He therefore had to break off his union with Dido and leave Carthage so that he could found Italy, as the gods had commanded. Raphael likewise warns Adam that “attributing overmuch to things/Less excellent” (PL 8.565–66) is a mistake and that Eve is “worthy well/Thy cherishing, thy honoring, and thy love,/Not thy subjection” (PL 9.568–70). Again, lest the point be missed, Raphael repeats it on his way out: “take heed lest Passion sway/Thy Judgment to do aught, which else free Will/Would not admit” (PL 8.635–37). In other words, Adam must be careful not to make Aeneas’s mistake and elevate his passion for Eve above his willing obedience to God.29 Milton’s story continues to unfold in Virgilian terms. At PL 5.48ff., Eve’s distress at not finding Adam when she wakes up recalls Dido’s dreams of being abandoned (Aen. 4.465ff.). And when the Fall takes place, it does so in decidedly Virgilian terms. When Eve eats, the earth responds much as it had at Dido’s marriage: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. (PL 9.782–84) prima et Tellus et pronuba Iuno dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscius aether conubiis summoque ulularunt uertice Nymphae. (Primal Earth and Juno, queen of marriages, together now give the signal; lightning fires flash, the upper air is witness to their mating, and from the highest hilltops shout the nymphs.) (Aen. 4.166–68)

28 Verbaert (1995) 127–30. 29 Blessington (1979) 25–33.

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When Adam hears that Eve has eaten, his blood runs cold and his joints relax (PL 9.888–91), linking him to Aeneas in several places: in the storm that opened the Aeneid (1.92); in front of Polydorus, the bleeding bush (Aen. 3.29–30), after a dream in which the gods told him his destiny lay not in Crete, but in Italy (Aen. 3.175); and (most importantly) in response to Mercury’s warning (Aen. 4.279– 80).30 Eve is “now to Death devote” (PL 9.901), linking her yet again to Dido, who was “pesti deuota futurae” (“doomed to face catastrophe”; Aen. 1.712).31 Adam in turn resolves to die with her, “not deceiv’d,/But fondly overcome with Female charm” (PL 9.998–99), which is compatible with the sentiment of Aen. 4.412, “improbe Amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!” (“Voracious Love, to what do you not drive/the hearts of men?”). He eats, and “Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again/in pangs” (PL 9.1000–1), reechoing the passage in which the earth responded to the ‘sin’ of Dido and Aeneas (Aen. 4.166–68). Now Death offers “a passage broad,/Smooth, easy, inoffensive down to Hell” (PL 10.304–5), another echo of “facilis descensus Auerno” (“easy –/the way that leads into Avernus”; Aen. 6.126). Once again Satan attempts to clothe himself in the image of Aeneas, returning to his legion of devils in Hell within a cloud (PL 10.441ff.), from which he bursts out as Aeneas had in his entry to Carthage (Aen. 1.439ff.); now, however, he can no longer deceive and is immediately turned into a snake (PL 10.504ff.).32 Adam remains the new Aeneas, “arming to overcome/By suffering” (PL 11.374–75) as Nautes had urged Aeneas to do in Aen. 5.710. Michael appears in order to remove the mists from Adam’s eyes (PL. 11.411ff.) as Venus did for Aeneas at the fall of Troy (Aen. 2.603–5). He gives Adam a vision of all that his descendants would accomplish, much as Anchises gave Aeneas a vision to encourage him: in fact, “Things by thir names I call, though yet unnam’d” (PL 12.140) echoes Aen. 6.776, “haec tua nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae” (“These will be names that now are nameless lands”; Aen. 6.776). The vision ends with Jesus, who will “bound his Reign/With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heav’ns” (PL 12.370–71), placing him in the same position as Augustus in Virgil’s prophecy (Aen. 6.791ff.). So encouraged, Adam and Eve trudge away from Paradise out into the world. And one last time, they do so in Virgilian terms, for over the receding gates stood the fiery arms and faces of the divine beings (PL 12.641–44; cf. 12.589–94), recalling the gods and goddesses that the departing Aeneas saw above the walls of Carthage (Aen. 5.1–7).33 Unlike Aeneas, Adam has a companion, but both have fallen, and a lifetime of toil awaits them both.

30 31 32 33

Verbart (1995) 291–92. Verbart (1995) 122–23. Fallon (1984). Verbart (1995) 72.

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IV Milton has created a poem that must be read in the same way as sinners move through a fallen world: dynamically, and attentively, for appearances often deceive the unwary. The story of Paradise Lost is also the story of the Aeneid, and one of the attentive reader’s jobs is to figure out how pagan poetry can support Christian truth. A good reading will escape the temptation to see Satan as the new Aeneas and settle on Adam, who, like Aeneas, allowed passion to invert his priorities temporarily but is sent on his way again to try to live in accordance with divine will. It is now time to clarify R-A, Milton’s reading of the Aeneid. For a reader of Virgil at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are two major lenses through which the Aeneid can be interpreted. The first stresses the obstacles that Aeneas overcame on his journey and the success he had in articulating the values that would come to be associated with imperial Rome. By the end of the poem he has overcome the forces of anger and rage, both within himself and as represented by the people who oppose him, so that Aeneas serves as the ideal hero of ancient Rome and the Aeneid celebrates the achievements of Augustus and his age. This approach is often referred to as “optimistic.” Another approach, however, stresses that Aeneas himself was often inconsistent in attaining the values he was searching for, especially in the last scene of the poem, which is reinterpreted as a key failure in which Aeneas surrendered to the very voices of barbarism and fury within himself that he had struggled throughout the poem to suppress. This approach, which is sometimes called “pessimistic,” sometimes the “Harvard school” reading, blurs the boundaries within the poem and listens sympathetically to Aeneas’s opponents as well as to Aeneas.34 It is worth noting that the distinction between the two approaches is not absolute – the “optimists” certainly recognize that success comes at a price in the Aeneid, while the “pessimists” in turn do not argue that the cost is so high that Rome should never have been founded – but for the sake of clarity and brevity, it is important to recognize a basic difference in what the two groups of readers choose to emphasize. So how, then, did Milton read the Aeneid? Unfortunately Milton’s copy of Virgil has not been located,35 and unfortunately again, Milton’s comments on the Aeneid in his other published works are casual and reveal very little about how he read the poem.36 Almost from the beginning, however, the prevailing (although unexamined) assumption has been that Milton was an “optimistic” reader. In writing about Paradise Lost for the Spectator, Addison was adamant that “Aeneas is indeed a perfect Character.”37 Writing over two centuries later, Davis Harding said essentially the same thing,38 and twenty years ago James Sims concurred: “As 34 35 36 37 38

Kallendorf (1999) 391–92. Patterson (1938) 18:557–84; Verbart (1995) 99 n. 1; Martindale (2002) 108–9. Riley (1929); Martindale (2002) 107–8. Addison (1720) 538. Harding (1962) 35.

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illustrated by the works of Camões and Milton, Renaissance writers saw Virgil as a greatly gifted propagandist for the Rome of his emperor and patron Augustus.”39 This approach, however, does not explain much of what we have noticed so far. Less than seventy-five years after the initial publication of Paradise Lost, Bentley saw the problem quite clearly, as his comments on PL 9.13–19 show: . . . Sad task, yet argument Not less but more Heroic than the wrath Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu’d Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d, Or Neptune’s ire or Juno’s, that so long Perplex’d the Greek and Cytherea’s Son . . . The inclusion of Turnus in this list is remarkable, given that the same Renaissance reading of the Aeneid that equated Aeneas with virtue also equated his opponent with vice; as Bentley put it, “Silly, as if the Aeneid was wrote for Turnus’s Sake and Fame, and not for Aeneas’s whose Name it bears.”40 Bentley had a simple solution for the problem caused by lines that complicated the straightforward “optimistic” reading of the Aeneid that he attributed to Milton: he excised them, using the circular argument that lines suggesting sympathy for Turnus could not have been written by Milton because they provide evidence for a reading of the Aeneid that was not Milton’s. Modern readers who do not wish to go to this extreme are forced to argue that since Adam gave in to temptation and Aeneas “had resisted temptation or at least had extricated himself from it before his irresponsibility had consequences fatal to his mission,”41 “it is the contrast with the Virgilian epic that we are left with at the end” of Paradise Lost.42 As Verbart puts it, Adam and Eve share a fate that is ultimately happy, resting in a happy matrimony that makes it difficult to condemn Adam’s love for Eve; Aeneas, on the other hand, is left in miserable loneliness.43 As I attempted to recreate R-A (Milton’s reading of the Aeneid), however, by moving from T2 (Paradise Lost) to T1 (the Aeneid) and back again, this is not what the allusions seemed to be stressing: Adam’s love for Eve led to his fall, which parallels Aeneas’s inappropriate affair with Dido. Both poems, in other words, stress the failure of their hero and the consequences of that failure. The critics in the paragraphs above, however, were forced into their position by a key piece of external evidence: at the time they were writing, it was generally assumed that the “pessimistic” reading of the Aeneid did not come into existence 39 40 41 42 43

Sims (1982) 335. Bentley (1732) 266–67. Porter (1993) 115. Blessington (1979) 42. Verbart (1995) 238–46.

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until after World War II and that the only reading of the Aeneid that was available to Milton was the “optimistic” one, no matter how badly it seemed to fit the allusive system connecting the two poems. Richard Thomas, however, has shown that readers in antiquity were already struggling to make Virgil into the straightforward “optimist” that many of them thought he should be,44 and this inability to fit all pre-modern readings of the Aeneid into the Procrustean bed of “optimistic” interpretation became more pronounced as the years passed. Joseph Sitterson, Jr. suggested over a decade ago that Ariosto’s Orlando furioso is actually based in a “pessimistic” reading of the Aeneid,45 and I have shown that this same reading can be found in a group of scholars and poets of the early Italian Renaissance as well as in La Araucana, a sixteenth-century Spanish epic that was also written in imitation of the Aeneid.46 The “pessimistic” reading of the Aeneid, in other words, was available to Milton and is, I believe, the one that structures his allusive system. Admittedly I find this position easy to adopt because I am writing at a time when this interpretation is widely accepted among Anglophone scholars, but, as the first axiom of my theoretical model suggests, I can only interpret from within my temporal and geographical situation. External evidence does not contradict my recreation of R-A, which was constructed through close textual analysis (my second axiom). Some of Milton’s allusions provide little more than verbal texture, but in the end the totalizing relationship from which R-A was constituted produces a coherent allusive system embracing Paradise Lost and the “pessimistic” Aeneid (my third axiom). And as my fourth axiom suggests, meaning flows both ways. Rather than a contrast between the two poems, a dynamic allusive system in which a sinful Adam parallels a ‘sinful’ Aeneas enriches our reading of both poems, allowing us to see both an Aeneas whose repeated efforts to do what is right take on the resonances of the Christian effort to follow God and an Adam who provides the pattern for all people to follow as he loses sight of his proper priorities, makes a mistake, accepts the consequences of that mistake, and heads off to try again.47 The reading of Paradise Lost that is strengthened by its allusive ties to the Aeneid is therefore both more and less revolutionary than the one that has Milton simply rejecting the classical tradition,48 in that it argues that Paradise Lost simultaneously rewrites the Aeneid by accepting its central argument, but also rewrites it by producing an “argument/Not less but more Heroic” (PL 9.13–14). As the essays in this volume suggest, reception studies have finally received a secure home within the field of classics. The analysis of Virgilian allusions in 44 45 46 47

Thomas (2001). Sitterson (1992). Kallendorf (1999); Kallendorf (2003). The analysis of which way meaning flows here is enriched by the fact that, as Fish points out, Paradise Lost was composed after the Aeneid, but since Adam was the first man, the events that Virgil portrayed had to have happened after the events in Milton’s poem, so that in this sense Paradise Lost is ‘earlier’ ((1967) 37). 48 Steadman (1967) v.

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Paradise Lost, however, warns us that scholars must proceed with some caution in this area. Unless we think carefully about what we are doing, the temptation is to assume that a given classical text was read in the past very much as it is today – in other words, to conflate the reading of the critic (R-C) with the reading of the author (R-A). The growing body of scholarship in the classical tradition, however, warns us against doing this. To take but two examples, few people today would read the Iliad as a guide for fashioning gentlemanly conduct, as Edmund Spenser did, or a Senecan tragedy as a warning to the upper classes that they should behave virtuously, as William Shakespeare did. Yet these were valid readings in the past, and any study of the allusive relationships between Homer and Spenser or Seneca and Shakespeare should unfold from within the general framework of the second author’s reading of the first. The model set forth in this essay provides a way for this to be done, so that the classicist’s traditional preoccupation with allusion might lead to even more satisfying results in the future.

Works cited Addison, J. (1720), Notes upon the Twelve Books of Paradise Lost. London. Allen, G. (2000), Intertextuality. New York and London. Bentley, R., ed. (1732), Milton’s Paradise Lost. London. Blessington, F. (1979), “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic. Boston, London, and Henley. Bowra, C. M. (1948), From Virgil to Milton. London. Burrow, C. (1993), Epic Romance: Homer to Milton. Oxford. Butler, G. F. (1997), “The Wrath of Aeneas and the Triumph of the Son: Virgil’s Aegaeon and Paradise Lost,” Comparative Literature Studies 34: 103–8. Edmonds, L. (2001), Intertextuality and the Meaning of Roman Poetry. Baltimore and London. Fallon, S. M. (1984), “Satan’s Return to Hell: Milton’s Concealed Dialogue with Homer and Virgil,” Milton Quarterly 18: 78–81. Fish, S. E. (1967), Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. London. Fowler, D. (2000), “On the Shoulders of Giants: Intertextuality and Classical Studies,” in Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin. Oxford, 115–37. Harding, D. (1962), The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of Paradise Lost. Urbana. Hebel, U. J. (1991), “Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion,” in Plett, ed., 135–46. Hinds, S. (1998), Allusion and Intertex: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Hume, P., ed. (1695), The Poetical Works of John Milton . . . . London. Iser, W. (1978), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore. Kallendorf, C. (1994), “Philology, the Reader, and the Nachleben of Classical Texts,” Modern Philology 92: 137–56. Kallendorf, C. (1999), “Historicizing the ‘Harvard School’: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99: 391–403. Kallendorf, C. (2003), “Representing the Other: Ercilla’s La Araucana, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the New World Encounter,” Comparative Literature Studies 40: 394–414.

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Kallendorf, H. and C. Kallendorf (2000), “Conversations with the Dead: Quevedo and Statius, Annotation and Imitation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63: 131–68. Martindale, C. (2002), “Virgil,” in John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic. 2nd edn. London, 107–52. Milton, J. (1957), The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. M. Y. Hughes. Indianapolis. Newton, T., ed. (1750), Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books. The Author John Milton . . . . London. Oras, A. (1967), Milton’s Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd (1695–1801): A Study in Critical Views and Methods. 3rd edn. New York. Patterson, F., gen. ed. (1931–40), The Works of John Milton. 18 vols. in 21. New York. Plett, H., ed. (1991), Intertextuality. Berlin and New York. Porter, W. (1993), Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost. Lincoln and London. Pucci, J. (1998), The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition. New Haven and London. Richardson, J., Father and Son (1734), Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost. London. Riley, E. H. (1929), “Milton’s Tribute to Virgil,” Studies in Philology 26: 155–65. Rudat, W. E. H. (1981), “Milton’s Dido and Aeneas: The Fall in Paradise Lost and the Vergilian Tradition,” Classical and Modern Literature 2: 33–46. Sims, J. H. (1982), “A Greater than Rome: The Inversion of a Virgilian Symbol from Camões to Milton,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey. Binghamton, 333–44. Sitterson, J. C., Jr. (1992), “Allusive and Elusive Meanings: Reading Ariosto’s Vergilian Ending,” Renaissance Quarterly 45: 1–19. Steadman, J. (1967), Milton and the Renaissance Hero. Oxford. Thomas, R. (1986), “Virgil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 90: 171–98. Thomas, R. (2001), Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge. Todd, H. J. (1809), The Poetical Works of John Milton. 2nd edn. London. Verbart, A. (1995), Fellowship in Paradise Lost: Vergil, Milton, Wordsworth. Amsterdam and Atlanta. Virgilius Maro, P. (1969), Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford. Virgil (1972), The Aeneid, trans. A. Mandelbaum. New York. Wood, S. N. C. (1991), “Creative Indirection in Intertextual Space: Intertextuality in Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” in Plett, ed., 192–206.

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2 H I S TO R I C I Z I N G T H E “ H A RVA R D SCHOOL” Pessimistic readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance scholarship

As any good survey of recent Virgilian scholarship will remind us, the last several decades have been marked by a number of subtle, sophisticated readings of the Aeneid that depart radically from the approach that dominated scholarship at the beginning of this century.1 The traditional approach, set forth by Heinze, nuanced by Pöschl, and disseminated in the Anglophone world by Eliot, is basically “optimistic”: Aeneas serves as the ideal hero of ancient Rome, the Aeneid celebrates the achievements of Augustus and his age, and the poem endures as a monument to the values of order and civilization.2 The new approach, developed initially by Brooks, Parry, Clausen, and Putnam, is profoundly “pessimistic,” for it finds that the Aeneid speaks in two voices, as Parry puts it, those of personal loss as well as public achievement. That is, the poem’s successes are accompanied by failure – of Aeneas, of the Augustan order, and of human nature in general and its ability to attain its ideals.3 The traditional approach still dominates German scholarship and has its adherents in the Anglophone world as well; they are often labelled “New Augustans” today.4 The other approach has been called by several names. 1 See especially A. Wlosok, “Vergil in der neueren Forschung,” Gymnasium 80 (1973) 129–151; and S. J. Harrison, “Some Views of the Aeneid in the Twentieth Century,” in S. J. Harrison ed., Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford 1990) 1–20. 2 R. Heinze, Vergils epische Technik (Leipzig 1903); V. Pöschl, Die Dichtkunst Vergils: Bild und Symbol in der Aeneis (Innsbruck 1950), translated by Gerda Seligson as The Art of Vergil (Ann Arbor 1962); and T. S. Eliot, What Is a Classic? (London 1945). 3 The generally cited, seminal works are Robert A. Brooks, “Discolor Aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough,” AJP 74 (1953) 260–80; Adam Parry, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” Arion 2 (1963) 66–80, reprinted in The Language of Achilles and Other Papers (Oxford 1989); Wendell Clausen, “An Interpretation of the Aeneid,” HSCP 68 (1964) 139–47 (although written in 1949); and Michael C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge, Mass. 1965). This approach has been surveyed by F. Serpa, Il punto su Virgilio (Bari 1987) 76–88. 4 Twentieth-century German scholarship that retains the key features of the traditional approach may be exemplified by K. Büchner, Der Schicksalgedanke bei Vergil (Freiburg 1946), P. Vergilius Maro, der Dichter der Römer (Stuttgart 1955), and Humanitas Romana (Heidelberg 1957) 147–75; the

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“Anglo-American two voices Harvard and Balliol pessimism” offers a certain satisfying fullness,5 but notwithstanding some oversimplification, the most common label is the shorter “Harvard school.”6 One of the criticisms often directed at this approach asserts that it is fundamentally ahistorical: as Karl Galinsky has argued, the ancient Aeneiskritik totally lacks the kinds of criticism of Aeneas’s actions that some modern readers believe they see.7 The implication is that these modern readers are imposing their own concerns on Virgil’s text; as S. J. Harrison puts it, “For an outside observer, it is difficult to separate such an interpretation from the characteristic concerns of US (and other) intellectuals in these years: the doubt of the traditional view of the Aeneid has at least some connection with the 1960s questioning of all institutions, political, religious, and intellectual, and in particular with attitudes towards America’s own imperialism.”8 For A. Wlosok, “. . . this new Virgil is a kind of bastard, which is in the final analysis un-Virgilian. It owes its existence to fundamental misunderstandings of the genuine, true Virgil, misunderstandings that are indeed symptomatic of the increasing neglect of historical interpretation or of the broader incapacity for historical understanding.”9 In short, as Franco Serpa puts it, this approach is “original . . . existentialist and presentizing, independent of exegetical, historical, and political traditions.”10 Recent scholarship, however, has begun to provide some suggestions that one does not have to view the Aeneid through the lens of postwar American culture in

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essays of F. Klingner collected in Römische Geisteswelt (Zurich 1967); and V. Buchheit, Vergil über die Sendung Roms. Untersuchungen zum Bellum Poenicum und zur Aeneis (Heidelberg 1963 [Gymnasium Beiheft 3]). English-language studies from a similar perspective include Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford 1964); and P. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986). This mouthful is from Don Fowler’s survey of recent work in “Roman Literature,” G&R 36 (1989) 235, in reference to Richard Thomas, Virgil: Georgics, 2 vols. (Cambridge 1988). Fowler’s columns, in G&R 33 (1986) through 38 (1991), are useful for placing recent work on Virgil into perspective. The term was coined by W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley 1976) 11 n. 10, who notes that “pessimistic” readings of the Aeneid “were written by critics who have been associated with classics at Harvard from the late forties to the present at some time or other.” Richard Thomas, however, notes that the Harvard connection is often tenuous at best, with the major works often having been produced when their authors were not at Harvard: Parry was at Yale, Clausen at Amherst, and Putnam at Brown (“Ideology, Influence, and Future Studies in the Georgics,” Vergilius 36 [1990] 64 n. 1). Thomas suggests that the term implies a closer collaboration than there actually was, and Clausen makes the same point, noting that while he and Parry were colleagues at Amherst in the mid-fifties and talked often about the Aeneid, he did not meet Putnam until 1957 and met Brooks socially only once in 1959 or 1960 (“Appendix,” in Nicholas Horsfall ed., A Companion to the Study of Virgil [Leiden 1995] 313–14). Karl Galinsky, “The Anger of Aeneas,” AJP 109 (1988) 322. Harrison (above, n. 1) 5. Clausen, however, clarifies the chronology: “The mild-minded pessimism of the Harvard school – the so-called Harvard school – reflects the mood of the fifties: it had little or nothing to do with the dissent and anguish of the sixties . . .” (Horsfall [above, n. 6] 313). Wlosok (above, n. 1) 150. Serpa (above, n. 3) 76, 83.

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order to see signs of failure within the poem. N. M. Horsfall, who is certainly no “two-voicer,” has pointed out that key elements in the “pessimistic” position can be found in essays from the twenties, thirties, and forties by E. Adelaide Hahn, C. M. Bowra, and W. F. Jackson Knight,11 and we should not forget that Matthew Arnold had also found “an ineffable melancholy” and “a sweet, a touching sadness” in the Aeneid.12 What is more, a passage in Lactantius precedes similar comments from twentieth-century “pessimists” by almost 1700 years: “quisquamne igitur hunc putet aliquid in se virtutis habuisse, qui et furore tamquam stipula exarserit et manium patris per quem rogabatur oblitus iram frenare non quiverit? nullo igitur modo pius, qui non tantum non repugnantes, sed etiam precantes interemit” (Div. Inst. 5.19.9).13 There is, however, a lot of ground between Lactantius and Arnold. In this essay I would like to close some of that ground by focusing on extracts from the works of five scholars of the Italian Renaissance whose approach to the Aeneid shows affinities to the “pessimistic” approach of the “Harvard school.” I do not intend to argue direct influence of any sort. But I do wish to note that these Renaissance scholars lived and worked at the time when the basic techniques of modern classical philology were emerging. Unlike many medieval readers, they understood the concept of historical distance and regularly, although perhaps inconsistently, tried to interpret the literature of antiquity from within the cultural norms of its own day.14 Their comments extend through some three hundred years and suffice, I maintain, to anchor the “Harvard school” into the kind of exegetical tradition that scholars like Serpa would deny it.

11 Horsfall (above, n. 6) 192 n. 8, cites three essays that strike me as especially relevant: E. Adelaide Hahn, “Vergil and the ‘Under-Dog’,” G&R (1925) 185–212; C. M. Bowra, “Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal,” G&R 3 (1933) 8–21, reprinted in Harrison (above, n. 1) 363–77; and W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil (London 1944) 299–328 (chapter 7, “Vergil and After”). 12 Matthew Arnold, “The Modern Element in Literature,” his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, 1857, cited in Harrison (above, n. 1) 8. Harrison notes, “Here we have Vergil the musingly melancholic, a picture which has continued to appeal to many British scholars” (ibid.). 13 This passage has been discussed at length by A. Wlosok, “Zwei Beispiele frühchristlicher ‘Vergilrezeption’: Polemik (Lact. div. inst. 5, 10) und Usurpation (Or. Const. 19–21),” in V. Pöschl ed., 2000 Jahre Vergil. Ein Symposium (Wiesbaden 1983 [Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 24]) 63–68; its importance for the present discussion has also been noted by Horsfall (above, n. 6) 197. 14 The standard treatments include P. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme2 (Paris 1907); R. Sabbadini, Il metodo degli umanisti (Florence 1922); S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Florence 1963); R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford 1969); S. Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli umanisti (Rome 1973); R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship 1300–1850 (Oxford 1976); John D’Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism (Berkeley 1988); and Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts” and “The Scholarship of Poliziano and Its Context,” in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 23–75. The efforts that humanist scholars of the Renaissance made to see antiquity on its own terms have also received influential treatment by Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York 1965) 6–9, 14–17.

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I have identified passages from five Renaissance scholars that are relevant to my argument: (1) In De otio religioso Francesca Petrarca (1304–1374) uses the familiar opposition between negotium and otium to contrast the peaceful contemplation of the religious life to the endless, and ultimately meaningless, activity of worldly affairs. Addressed to the monks of the Carthusian monastery at Montrieux to which his brother Gherardo belonged, the treatise examines the actions of Aeneas from this perspective and finds them wanting: Quanto id rectius nobis ille pater celestis, quam apud Virgilium Eneas filio: ‘Disce puer virtutem ex me’ [Aen. 12.435]: Quam, queso, virtutem, Anchisiades? An patrie proditionem, quamvis utcunque hic Virgiliana te excuset eloquentia, quam secuti poete et historici quidam non citata domo Priami sententiis absolutam dimiserunt? An sacrificia demonum amicorum cedibus et sanguine peragenda? Cristus autem verus pater et dominus et magister et Deus noster iure suo precipit ut ab eo non virtutes illas et nequaquam imitabiles discamus, sed, quod est hominis maxime proprium, esse mites et corde humiles, qui ad hoc discendum alio equidem nos misisset, si omnino ullum clarius exemplar mansuetudinis invenisset.15 First a traitor, then a worshipper of false gods, Aeneas is ultimately culpable for not being “pius,” here understood as “mitis et corde humilis.” The comparison of Aeneas to Christ may well appear to be a decidedly un-twentiethcentury maneuver, but it is important to note that Petrarca’s procedure is more in line with modern philological practice than it might at first seem. Many scholars of the early Renaissance believed that pagan authors sometimes saw through the glass darkly into shadowy adumbrations of Christian truth, so Petrarca could have approached Virgil as a prophet of Christ.16 In this passage, however, he did not: Augustan culture was different from that of his 15 Francesco Petrarca, Opere latine, ed. Antonietta Bufano (Turin 1975) 1.740. Petrarca’s copy of Virgil, annotated heavily in his own hand, has been published in a facsimile edition by J. Galbiati, Francisci Petrarcae Vergilianus codex . . . in lucem editus (Milan 1930), with discussion by G. Billanovich, “Il Virgilio del Petrarca da Avignone a Milano,” Studi petrarcheschi n.s. 2 (1985) 15–52. Petrarca’s understanding of Virgil has been treated by Remigio Sabbadini, “Sull’allegoria dei poeti, specialmente di Vergilio,” in Storia del ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell’età della Rinascenza (Turin 1885) 103–04; de Nolhac (above, n. 14) 123–61; Vladimiro Zabughin, Vergilio nel Rinascimento italiano da Dante a Torquato Tasso (Bologna 1921–1923) 1.25–28; P. de Nolhac, “Virgile chez Pétrarque,” StudMed n.s. 5 (1932) 217–25; Don Cmeron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore 1970) 139–40; and Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH 1989) 19–57. 16 On the relationship between poetry and theological truth in the Renaissance, see Ronald Witt, “Coluccio Salutati and the Conception of the Poeta Theologus in the Fourteenth Century,” RenQ

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own day, and the “otherness” of the Aeneid is acknowledged at the same time as its values are called into question. (2) De morali disciplina, by Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), is one of several works of its day that explore the relationship between Plato and Aristotle. Filelfo believed that the philosophical systems of these two men were compatible, but since he was not a professional philosopher, he develops his argument using literary examples as well as formal logic.17 In his discussion of courage, he dismisses Aristotle’s doctrine of just anger and defends the proposition that “iracundia debet abesse a fortitudine” in this manner: Irae fervor in magnis etiam viris, si quis apparet, reprehensione non vacat. Itaque non parum mirari Virgilium soleo, qui Aeneam, quem religiosum, quem pium, vel propter Caesarem Augustum laudare debebat plurimum, ostendit quandoque ira inferiorem, cum de illo ita reliquit scriptum: ‘saevae iamque altius irae/Dardanio surgunt ductori’ [Aen. 10.813–814]. Et alio loco circa nobilissimi carminis consummationem ait: ‘Ille oculis postquam saevi monumenta doloris/Exuviasque hausit, furiis accensus, et ira/Terribilis, tune hinc spoliis indute meorum,/Eripiere mihi? Pallas te hoc vulnere Pallas/ Immolat, et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit,/Haec dicens, ferrum adverso sub pectore condit/Fervidus’ [Aen. 12.945–51].18 Filelfo’s Aeneas is “pius,” but not perfectly so, for at several points in the poem, including the crucial last scene, he fails to control his anger. The vantage point here is unambiguously within Augustan values, for as Diana Robin has noted, De morali disciplina stands out in the Plato-Aristotle debate because its perspective is clearly non-Christian.19 What is more, there is evidence that Filelfo attached more than passing significance to Aeneas’s failings as described in this passage. Filelfo also wrote an epic poem, the Sphortias, in imitation of the Aeneid, yet he was careful to make the hero of this poem, his patron Francesco Sforza, consistently “pius.” It is Sforza’s chief lieutenant, Carlo Gonzaga, who falls in love with a married Piacenzan woman, and unlike Aeneas, Sforza himself controls his “ira” on the battlefield.20

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30 (1977) 538–63; and Craig Kallendorf, “From Virgil to Vida: The Poeta Theologus in Italian Renaissance Commentary, JHI 56 (1995) 43–49. Diana Robin, Filelfo in Milan (Princeton 1991) 138–53 situates De morali disciplina within the Plato–Aristotle controversy and the intellectual program of its author. Francisci Philelphi De morali disciplina libri quinque (Venice 1552) 71–72. The Aristotelian doctrine of just anger (NE 1106b20–1126b10) has been cited in Aeneas’s defense by a number of critics, ranging from Angelo Poliziano, “De ira in pueris,” in Opera (Lyon 1537–1539) 3.63 to Galinsky (above, n. 7) 330–35. Robin (above, n. 17) 150. Robin (above, n. 17) 56–81 is the best treatment to date of the Sphortias, for which there is as yet no modern edition. Robin seems a bit ambivalent regarding how Filelfo read the Aeneid: on the one

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(3) One of the more curious contributions to the fortuna of Virgil is the Supplement, or Book 13, to the Aeneid written by Maffeo Vegio (1407–1458). Though largely unknown in our day, Vegio’s Supplement was widely read through the beginning of the sixteenth century and even won praise for its author from the hypercritical Julius Caesar Scaliger (Vegio was a “grandis profecto poeta” in whom “Virgilianae lucis vestigia invenias”).21 The plot of the Supplement picks up where Virgil left off, with the Rutulians acknowledging their defeat and Aeneas accepting their surrender. With the end of hostilities, Turnus’s body is returned home and Latinus dispatches an embassy to Aeneas. Aeneas then leads his men to Laurentum, where Lavinia is betrothed amid speeches and an exchange of gifts. Aeneas establishes his new city, and after three years of rule in peace and prosperity, Jupiter agrees to translate Aeneas’s spirit to the stars in recognition of his meritorious deeds. Initially at least, the Supplement appears to support a straightforward, “optimistic” interpretation of the Aeneid: Turnus is clearly labelled “improbus” (line 354) and roundly condemned for the destruction caused by his “dementia” (line 24) and “furor” (line 31), while Aeneas, the hero “quo nec pietate nec armis/maior in orbe fuit” (lines 332–33), is apotheosized because “iam . . . optat matura polos Aeneia virtus” (line 605). Indeed, Vegio’s Aeneas is never overcome by “ira,” and neither fortitude nor any other virtue is ever attributed to his Turnus. Yet the very relentlessness with which Vegio seeks to impose such a black-andwhite interpretation on the reader suggests that on some level, he must have seen something else in Virgil and been disturbed by it. Vegio undoubtedly felt that he was only clarifying what Virgil intended, but the decision that something needs clarifying is itself a recognition of ambiguity and complexity. We cannot say for sure how much of Virgil’s “pessimism” Vegio saw, but once we note its absence in the Supplement, the decision to complete the Aeneid becomes considerably more comprehensible.22 hand, she dismisses the possibility that Filelfo might have seen within the Aeneid a subtle criticism of Augustus and his policies; but on the other hand, she suggests that “Filelfo seems to have been troubled by the insane rage (ira and furor) that Aeneas evinces in Book 10” (75). 21 Julius Caesar Scaliger Poetices libri septem, ed. August Buck (Stuttgart 1964; facsimile of Lyon 1561 ed.) 303. For the diffusion of the Supplement in manuscript form, see Craig Kallendorf and Virginia Brown, “Maffeo Vegio’s Book XIII to Virgil’s Aeneid: A Checklist of Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 1990 (44) 107–25; for its diffusion in printed editions, see Giuliano Mambelli, Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane (Florence 1954 [Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana 27]). A modern edition has been edited by Bernd Schneider, Das Aeneissupplement des Maffeo Vegio (Weinheim 1985), from which the citations that follow have been taken. 22 Among the few substantive modern discussions of the Supplement are Anna Cox Brinton, Maphaeus Vegius and His Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid: A Chapter on Vergil in the Renaissance (Stanford 1930); D. V. Blandford, “Virgil and Vegio,” Vergilius 5 (1959) 29–30; W. S. Maguinness, “Maffeo Vegio continuatore dell’Eneide,” Aevum 42 (1968) 478–85; George Duckworth, “Maphaeus Vegius and Vergil’s Aeneid: A Metrical Comparison,” CP 64 (1969) 1–6; B. J. Hijmans, “Aeneia virtus: Vegio’s Supplementum to the Aeneid,” CJ 62 (1971) 144–55; and Kallendorf (above, n. 15) 100–128. Richard Thomas also believes that Vegio wrote the Supplement as a response to a disquiet

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(4) De fortitudine, one of a series of treatises on the virtues by Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), works toward a definition of courage and its various manifestations, as the title suggests. Like Filelfo, Pontano was not a professional philosopher, so he also chose to illustrate his arguments with examples from the literature he knew best. Several key examples come from the Aeneid, and they are notable because they focus not on Aeneas, but on his opponents. In arguing that an honorable death is preferable to a base life, Pontano turns to Mezentius and cites his speech in Aeneid 10.862–66 as “verba . . . viro forti digna.”23 What is more, Pontano leaves no doubt that Turnus, too, is a “vir fortis” endowed with several unambiguously positive attributes: “Idem ille Turnus, de quo supra est dictum, docet fortem virum, nihil dolo agere, nihil fraude moliri, sed sola niti virtute, eamque unam sequi.”24 In an especially interesting passage, Pontano argues along with Filelfo that courage cannot be joined to anger, and that Turnus shows how “fortitude” can be preserved by controlling “ira”: Unde Virgilius ut fuit egregius pictor fortitudinis ait, ‘Olli surridens sedacto pectore Turnus,/Incipe si qua animo virtus, et consere dextram’ [Aen. 9.740–41]. . . . [I]ram quoque abjecit illam, quae mentem atque consilium, rationem denique ipsam a vero rectoque detorquet, atque ubi vehementior fuerit, prope ad insaniam impellit. Quamobrem iratus aliquis, aut furoris stimulis percitus, virum fortem praestare nequit.25 Pontano does not discuss the last scene of the Aeneid, but the points he does make suggest clearly that he sees Turnus as a carrier of positive values and a worthy challenger to Aeneas within the Virgilian moral world. (5) The last passage is taken from a letter to Giovanni de’ Bardi da Vernio by Lionardo Salviati (1540–1587). Salviati did not qualify as a major scholar even in his own day, but he did participate over a period of years in an important literary quarrel focused on Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and its relationship to ancient epic. Salviati was a “modern,” a critic who rejected both the authority of the classics over volgare literature and the effort to evaluate the latter in relation to the former.26 In his efforts to defend Ariosto, Salviati

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aroused by some perception of “pessimism” in the Aeneid (private conversation, 7 February 1997), as I suggested very tentatively some years ago ([above, n. 15] 127–28). I have cited from the Aldine edition of De fortitudine, in Ioannis Ioviani Pontani Opera omnia soluta oratione composita (Venice 1518–1519) 1.54r–v. 1.65v, discussing Aen. 9.150–53. 1.64v–65r. The quarrel between the “ancients” and the “moderns” over Ariosto’s Orlando furioso can be followed in detail in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago 1961) 954–1073. Salviati’s letter has been published and discussed by Peter Brown, “In Defence of Ariosto: Giovanni de’ Bardi and Lionardo Salviati,” Studi seicenteschi 12 (1971) 3–27.

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levels a series of stinging objections to the Aeneid, objections that fall into two categories. The first is structural – “io direi imprima in prima [sic] che la favola di Vergilio non è tutta, come comanda Aristotile anzi non ha né principio né fine” – and asserts that the action as Virgil presents it does not ultimately resolve anything: “Fine oltr’ a ciò, dico, che non ha quel poema, percioché se il fine d’Enea era di fondar la nuova città, e d’unire insieme i due popoli per mezzo del maritaggio, fino a quel termine doveva distendersi l’azione.” Salviati’s second objection is moral: Direi oltr’a questo, che Virgilio havesse peccato nel costume d’Enea in due modi, contra ’l comandamento d’Aristotile prima dipignendolo coraggioso, contr’a quell, che gl’era prima stato descritto dagl’autori, di poi facendolo diseguale a se stesso, col fare a colui, che egli ci haveva preposto per esempio di pietà, e di virtù morale, fare una impietà, et una sceleratezza detestabile qual fu il violar la castità d’una donna reale, a cui egli doveva la vita stessa, a poi esserle traditore e spergiuro, e cagionarle morte di sempiterna infamia commettendo ancor qui un peccato gravissimo contro la storia.27 These charges against Aeneas are serious: lack of courage, perjury, betrayal, and seduction. And it is important to note that Salviati does not mitigate them by suggesting moral growth or development on the part of Virgil’s protagonist, who simply does not live up to the standard of pietà established for him.28 What is more, Salviati questions Aeneas’s achievements as well as his character by suggesting that the end of the Aeneid fails to propel him clearly into the new civilization he was supposed to establish. Taken together, these passages undercut and complicate any straightforward reading of Virgilian accomplishment. Aeneas is a perjuror and a worshipper of false gods, a seducer and a traitor, a warrior who repeatedly gives in to an anger that is incompatible with true courage. His opponents, on the other hand, show positive attributes; this is especially true of Turnus, whose courage is free from guile and able to dominate “ira.” It is therefore no surprise to find that the end of the poem requires clarification, even completion, to direct the reader toward a proper appreciation of the moral values on which the Augustan achievement is supposed to rest.

27 Brown (above, n. 26) 7–8. Relying on this passage, Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr. has argued that Ariosto himself may have seen as much pessimism in the ending of the Aeneid as a twentieth-century scholar of the “Harvard school” (“Allusive and Elusive Meanings: Reading Ariosto’s Vergilian Ending,” RenQ 45 [1992] 1–19). I find this argument intriguing, but I am not yet convinced from the evidence that Sitterson has gathered. 28 James D. Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (University Park, Penn. 1992) 117–26 offers some interesting observations on the semantic shifts, which occur sometimes during the mutation of “pietas” into postclasssical derivatives like “pietà”.

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These observations, I maintain, show a clear recognition of a “pessimistic” strain within the poem. Nevertheless, it is important not to overstate the case. For one thing, such “pessimism” is decidedly not the dominant strain in Italian Renaissance approaches to the Aeneid, since a predominantly “optimistic” reading of the Aeneid results inevitably from the rhetorical filter through which epic was generally read in the Renaissance. As good philologists, humanist scholars turned to the ancient commentators for guidance on how Virgil was understood by his Roman readers, and Donatus in particular encouraged them to assess Virgilian epic as if it were an epideictic speech, designed to praise virtue and condemn vice.29 As the humanist Pope Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini) put it, “est igitur utilis poetica quae laudando virtutes in earum amorem allicit homines. . . . Est in iterum utilis quia vitia detestatur, arcetque ab his homines.”30 In theory at least, Aeneas should have been a potential source for both virtues to praise and vices to condemn, but this is not what generally happened. Most Renaissance critics proceeded as Vegio did and made Aeneas the man “omni virtute praeditus” and Turnus the incarnation of vice to be condemned.31 This positive assessment of Aeneas in turn was reinforced by other broad tendencies in Italian Renaissance thought. The Augustan culture that traced its origins to Aeneas marked the high point of Roman civilization, always more accessible to the Latin West than Greece and positioned now in center stage by Petrarca and his followers as the moral and spiritual model for their new cultural movement. The Aeneid, as the great national epic of Rome, could teach virtue to those who saw both the angelic and the bestial in themselves, and who believed that study and effort would strengthen the former at the expense of the latter.32 It is little wonder, then, that for most scholars of the Italian Renaissance, Aeneas serves as the ideal hero of ancient Rome, the Aeneid

29 O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill 1962) 24–42; Brian Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” New Literary History 14 (1982–1983) 497–537; and Kallendorf (above, n. 15) 1–18. Marisa Squillante Saccone, Le Interpretationes Virgiliane di Tiberio Claudio Donato (Naples 1985) offers a reading of Donatus that is more sympathetic than that of many modern scholars. 30 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Opera quae extant omnia (Basel 1551) 596 (epistle 104); cf. 943 (epistle 402) in this same edition. 31 Maffeo Vegio, De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus, ed. M. W. Fanning and A. S. Sullivan (Washington 1933–1936) 1.87–88. 32 The role of Virgil’s Aeneid and the ideal of Augustan Rome can be followed through a series of educational treatises from this period that rest in a belief in the perfectibility of the student when guided by a good humanist schoolmaster; in addition to Vegio’s treatise (above, n. 31), see Leonardo Bruni, De studiis et litteris, in Leonardo Bruni Aretino. Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften, ed. H. Baron (Leipzig 1928) 5–19; Battista Guarino, De ordine docendi et studendi (Ferrara ca. 1474); Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione, ed. J. S. Nelson (Washington 1940); and Pier Paolo Vergerio, De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus studiis adulescentiae, ed. Attilio Gnesotto, in Atti e memorie della R. Acc. di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padova n.s. 34 (1918) 75–117. See also William H. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (New York 1963).

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celebrates the achievements of Augustus and his age, and the poem endures as a monument to the values of order and civilization. Such “optimism” was so strong that it even dominates other treatments of the Aeneid by the very scholars whose work we have been looking at. In the allegory of the Aeneid that appears in Seniles 4.5, for example, Petrarca interprets Aeneas as “virtus” and the “vir fortis ac perfectus,” while his Africa makes Scipio into a new Aeneas and Hannibal into a new Turnus, so that Petrarca’s Virgilian epic marks the victory of praiseworthy virtue over damnable vice.33 Filelfo’s basic reading of the Aeneid is found in his letter to Cyriaco d’Ancona, where he accepts the standard approach to the poem as moral allegory and praise of Augustus.34 For Vegio, Virgil wished “sub Aeneae persona virum omni virtute praeditum, atque ipsum nunc in adversis, nunc in prosperis casibus, demonstrare,” so that Aeneas “veram ille virtutis et sapientie laudem consecutus [est].”35 And for Pontano, Aeneas is a model of obedience to parents and courage in battle; even what first appears to be a lie is given a positive “spin” to praise the prudence of the hero.36 Of the five scholars examined here, only Salviati consistently sees the dark side of the Aeneid, but I suspect that at least some of this is due to his determination to find Virgil wanting in comparison to his beloved Ariosto. Nevertheless, at least now and again these five scholars caught a glimpse of an Aeneid that is not bathed in “the clear sunshine of the Augustan enlightenment.”37 This, too, is probably the result of their rhetorical approach to literature. As Victoria Kahn has noted, humanist rhetoric recovered the ability to argue questions “in utramque partem,”38 to see both sides of debatable issues and to recognize ambiguity and complexity. It would have been an easy matter to transfer this ability from deliberative and judicial rhetoric to epideictic and the literature associated with it in humanist theory. But whatever the explanation, there is a “pessimistic” tradition of sorts in Virgilian criticism. At the very least, it begins with Lactantius; extends through Petrarca, Filelfo, Vegio, Pontano, and Salviati; reappears with Arnold, Hahn, Bowra, and Knight; and flowers with Brooks, Parry, Clausen, Putnam, and their successors. In the final analysis, one may not wish to accept the

33 The text of Seniles 4.5 may be found in Opera quae extant omnia (Basel 1581) 786–89. A critical edition of the Africa has been edited by Nicola Festa (Florence 1926 [Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Francesco Petrarca 1]), with discussion in Aldo S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Scipio, and the “Africa”: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream (Baltimore 1962); and Kallendorf (above, n. 15) 19–57. 34 The letter to Cyriaco d’Ancona may be found in Epistolarum Francisci Philelphi libri sedecim (Paris 1513) 5r-v; see Robin (above, n. 17) 75. 35 Vegio (above, n. 31) 87–88. For a survey of Vegio’s remarks on Virgil throughout his oeuvre, see Kallendorf (above, n. 14) 100–28. 36 The texts of Pontano’s moral treatises may be found in Opera omnia (above, n. 23): on filial piety, De obedientia 1.15r–v; on courage in battle, De fortitudine 1.65v–66r; and on dissimulation as a mark of prudence, De prudentia 1.202r. 37 The phrase is Johnson’s (above, n. 6) 9. 38 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca 1985).

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conclusions of the “Harvard school,” but one should not dismiss the “pessimistic” reading of the Aeneid out of hand as an unprecedented, ahistorical approach that flies in the face of scholarly tradition.39

39 I would like to thank Richard Thomas for his interest in and support of this project. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 1997 annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago.

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3 REPRESENTING THE OTHER Ercilla’s La Araucana, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the New World encounter1

I Like De Soto and Cortés, the reader of La Araucana also becomes a voyager, by extension one of the conquistadores who spread Spanish imperial power across the New World from Mexico to South America. The author, a courtier to Philip II of Spain, participated himself in the colonial adventures in Peru and Chile, and one approach to the poem has stressed what at one level seems obvious: La Araucana was dedicated to Philip II, the Indians depicted had rebelled against Spanish authority, and Ercilla’s contemporaries understood clearly that the poem depicted the legitimate punishment of those who stood in the way of divinely sanctioned imperialism.2 La Araucana contains three sections – accounts of the battles of St. Quentin and Lepanto and the invasion of Portugal – that are not integral to the Spanish activity in Chile, but they do serve to emphasize the grandeur of Spain and its ruler and therefore seem to reinforce the pro-imperial theme.3 Curiously the poem does not have a dominant Spanish hero, but the pro-imperial line of criticism makes a virtue of necessity and posits that this space is filled by Philip II himself, thereby helping to construct and legitimate a national identity for Spain 1 I would like to express my appreciation to the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, which funded the research on which this essay is based; the faculty of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Texas A&M University, which provided a supportive audience for an earlier version of it; and David Lupher, who read a draft of this essay and provided valuable comments and bibliographical references. In order to avoid overburdening the essay with scare quotes, I shall not place them around terms like Old World, New World, and the like. I am sympathetic to the effort to conduct discussions like these in non-Eurocentric terms, so I shall use encounter rather than discovery, for example, in the pages that follow. But it is impossible to erase terms like Indian from the language, and I trust that my argument will do more to problematize the issues involved than anything else I might do. 2 Francisco Javier Cevallos, “Don Alonso de Ercilla and the American Indian: History and Myth,” Revista de estudios hispánicos 23 (1989): 5–17. Isaías Lerner, “Felipe II y Alonso de Ercilla,” Edad de Oro 18 (1999): 87–101, observes that the current fascination with power and its complexities threatens to obscure the obvious, that Ercilla was employed by Philip II in his New World project. 3 Luis Íñigo Madrigal, “Alsonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga,” in Luis Íñigo Madrigal (ed.), Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, 2nd edn. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1992), 196–98.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-5

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at a key point in its historical development.4 Indeed, a study of the book trade in the New World reveals that La Araucana was the most widely disseminated representation of the conquest among the colonizers themselves.5 Yet as sometimes happens in literary criticism, the opposite interpretation has been developed with equal persuasiveness. Menéndez y Pelayo, for example, notes that the natives had little direct influence on much of Latin American literature, but a significant indirect impact on poetry in Chile, for the determined resistance of the Araucanians became the principal theme of early colonial literature in that country.6 This resistance was heroic, and in the process of writing about it, Ercilla ended up “presenting his clear preference for his enemies.”7 The female characters are treated with special sympathy, so that in the end, one can argue that the poem is presented from the perspective of the Indians.8 From here, the next step is the appropriation of the poem into the national culture of Chile as “un libro nacional i querido: él es la fé de bautismo de nuestra naciόn” (“a beloved national book: it is the baptismal certificate of our nation”).9 Thus Ercilla becomes in the words of Pablo Neruda 4 Elizabeth B. Davis, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 10–11, 23–39. 5 Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave, 2nd edn. (New York: Gordian Press, 1964), 119–20, 164, 224. 6 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de la poesía chilena (1569–1892), Ediciones de los anales de la Universidad de Chile, serie roja (letras), 9 (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de los anales de la Universidad de Chile, 1957), 9–10. This study has been extracted from a larger work, Historia de la poesía hispano-americana (Madrid: Librería Victoriano Suárez, 1913). 7 Frank Pierce, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 101. 8 On Ercilla’s treatment of the Indian women, see José Toribio Medina, “Las mujeres de La Araucana de Ercilla,” Hispania 11 (1928): 1–12; María Rosa Lida, “Dido y su defensa en la literatura española,” Revista de filología hispánica 4 (1942): 373–82; in a lightly retouched version this magisterial essay was reprinted as María Rosa Lida Malkiel, Dido en la literatura española: su retrato y defensa (London: Tamesis, 1974). Walter Cohen, “The Discourse of Empire in the Renaissance,” in Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (eds.), Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, Parallex series (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 275–76 claims that La Araucana is presented from the perspective of the Indians and that this is done primarily through its female characters (275); see also E. Michael Gerli, “Elysium and the Cannibals: History and Humanism in Ercilla’s La Araucana,” in Bruno M. Damiani (ed.), Renaissance and Golden Age Essays in Honor of D. W. McPheeters (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1986), 83–93. As support for this position, one could note that some Indians had reached higher levels of development than others, and that the Peruvians and Mexicans were among those who therefore seemed more like the Europeans; see Giuliano Gliozzi (ed.), La scoperta dei selvaggi: antropologia e colonialismo da Columbo a Diderot (Milan: Principate Editore, 1971), 1, 7–10; and Sergio Landucci, I filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580–1780, Biblioteca di cultura moderna, 721 (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1972), 9. 9 Abraham König (ed.), La Araucana de Don Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, ediciόn para uso de los chilenos, con noticias histόricas, biográficas i etimolόjicas (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes, 1988), viii. This point is made forcefully by a number of other critics, e.g., Gaston von dem Bussche (ed.), Homenaje a Ercilla (Concepciόn: Instituto de Lenguas, Universidad de Concepciόn, 1969), 3; and Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana, ed. Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), 50. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker (eds.), The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, vol. 1: Discovery to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–18 stresses the importance of José Toribio Medina, whose Historia de la literatura colonial de Chile

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the “inventor y libertador” (“inventor and liberator”) of Chile,10 and La Araucana stands as an anti-imperialist poem.11 These two positions would seem to be impossible to reconcile, and as we might expect, the efforts to do so thus far have not been very satisfactory. Margarita Peña states simply that the poem supports both the Indians and the Spanish,12 and Luis Leal suggests that it is both pro-Chilean and pro-Spanish,13 but neither explains precisely how the same work can support two opposing positions at the same time. William Melczer at least attempts to do this, but his explanation strikes me as too subtle, arguing that Ercilla’s ideological commitment differs from his moral commitment, so that he can identify both with the Spaniards’ desire to conquer and the Indians’ manifest virtues.14 Elizabeth Davis describes both national readings of the poem and ends by assigning responsibility for what appear to be mutually contradictory lines of reasoning to “Ercilla’s own split subjectivity”;15 that, however, strikes me as simply an indirect suggestion that the poet could not make up his mind where he was trying to go and left us with a bad poem. Fernando Alegría sees in La Araucana “una maravillosa uniόn, el nacimiento épico de un nuevo pueblo hecho con la sangre hispana y la sangre india” (“a marvelous union, the epic birth of a new people made with the blood of both Spaniards and Indians”),16 which sounds good but is difficult to support from the poem, where intermarriage between the Spanish and Indians does not take place. Resolving such contradictory readings of La Araucana is an important critical desideratum, but at this point the matter seems intractable, and there is clearly a need for a different beginning place that will lead to a different resolution. In this essay, I shall attempt to develop such a line of reasoning through a carefully controlled study of the intertextual environment of the poem. At first glance it may seem almost perverse to try to stabilize the ideological stance of an early modern work through what used to be called “source study,” but I hope to show that reading the classics through the filter of postcolonial theory enables a new kind of intertextuality that can help solve problems like this.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

makes La Araucana the foundation of Chilean literature and had great influence on those critics who followed him. Pablo Neruda, “El Mensajero,” in Don Alonso de Ercilla, inventor de Chile, Ediciones Nueva Universidad, Universidad Catόlica de Chile (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Pomaire, 1971), 12. Íñigo Madrigal, “Alsonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga,” describes La Araucana as the first piece of antiimperialist American literature (193). Margarita Peña, “Epic Poetry,” in González Echevarría and Pupo-Walker, Cambridge History, 233–34. Luis Leal, “La Araucana y el problema de la literatura nacional,” Vόrtice 1 (1974): 68–73. William Melczer, “Ercilla’s Divided Heroic Vision: A Re-Evaluation of the Epic Hero in ‘La Araucana,’” Hispania 56 (1973): 218–21. Davis, Myth and Identity, 20–21. Fernando Alegría, La poesía chilena, origines y desarrollo, del siglo XVI al XIX (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 39.

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As an epic poem written by an author with a standard humanist education, La Araucana invites comparison with the poems in its genre from classical antiquity and with the early modern epics written in imitation of them. It should therefore not surprise us to find that for several generations, critics have agreed that Ariosto, Lucan, and Virgil are the most important models for La Araucana. The relationship between Ercilla’s poem and the Orlando furioso has been thoughtfully studied by Maxime Chevalier, and there is little question that some parts of La Araucana owe a great deal to Ariosto.17 A half dozen scholars have worked on Ercilla’s debt to Lucan, and again, there is little question that much can be learned here. One of these scholars, Isaías Lerner, ends his analysis, however, with the unexpected conclusion that the Aeneid, not the Pharsalia, was the most important epic source for La Araucana.18 David Quint would not go this far, but in what is undoubtedly one of the more thoughtful recent studies of Ercilla’s poem, he found himself returning to Virgil again and again even when the thesis of his book requires reading La Araucana as a poem written in the tradition of Lucan.19 Andrés Bello in turn refers to Ercilla’s poem as “la Eneida de Chile” (“the Aeneid

17 Maxime Chevalier, L’Arioste en Espagne: recherches sur l’influence du “Roland furieux” (Bordeaux: Institut d’Études Ibériques et Ibéro-Américanes de l’Université de Bordeaux, 1966), 144–64. Lía Schwartz Lerner, “Tradiciόn literaria y heroínas indias en La Araucana,” Revista Iberoamericana 38.81 (1972): 615–25 argues that the amorous portions of the poem in particular derive primarily from Ariosto and help us concentrate on the literary rather than the historical dimensions of the poem. 18 Isaías Lerner, “Ercilla y Lucano,” Hommage à Robert Jammes, Anejos de Critícon, 1 (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, ca. 1994), 691. James Edward McManamon, “Echoes of Virgil and Lucan in the Araucana,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1955, 282–84, came to the same conclusion. On Ercilla’s debt to Lucan, see also Gilbert Highet, “Classical Echoes in La Araucana,” Modern Language Notes 62 (1947): 329–31; Dieter Janik, “Ercilla, lector de Lucano,” in von dem Bussche (ed.), Homenaje a Ercilla, 83–109; and Gareth A. Davies, “‘El incontrastable y duro hado’: La Araucana en el espejo de Lucano,” in A. Gallego Morell (ed.), Estudios sobre literatura y arte dedicados al professor Emilio Orozco Díaz (Granada: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad, 1979), 417. 19 Quint, Epic and Empire, argues the general thesis that there are two rival epic traditions, the Virgilian one, which is associated with the imperial victors, and that of Lucan, the epic of the defeated (8–9). This is a rich, subtly nuanced book, however, and I would not want to oversimplify Quint’s position. The predominance of Lucanian over Virgilian arguments in La Araucana, he claims, is tied to Ercilla’s sympathies for the Indians, but Quint recognizes that Ercilla also imitates Virgil and that this imitation is important as well (157). In part this is due to the fact that the Pharsalia never fully separates itself from the Aeneid: Lucan’s own model was Virgil, and Quint argues that Lucan in fact accepted Virgil’s imperial bias at the same time as he lamented the loss of republican government within Rome (156–57). What is more, Quint recognizes the “further voices” (see below, n. 25) within the Aeneid (11, 23, 52–53, 60, 78–79), and this recognition at least begins to link Virgil to Ercilla’s widely recognized sympathies toward the Indians, although Quint does not develop this point in detail.

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of Chile”),20 and notwithstanding the hesitations of Frank Pierce,21 it seems generally accepted that La Araucana owes a substantial debt to the Aeneid. Surprisingly, however, no one has attempted a thorough study of the subject, which, therefore, invites development.22

II The intertextual relationship between La Araucana and the Aeneid is complicated initially by the fact that Virgil’s poem is open to the same diversity of critical approaches as Ercilla’s. The traditional approach rests in what seems obvious on a first reading of the poem, in which Aeneas leads a group of survivors away from the ruins of Troy across the Mediterranean to Italy, where he founds the city that will eventually rule the world. Along the way he overcomes a series of obstacles and in the process learns a good deal about what it means to be a leader. As Aeneas lands in Italy and conquers its indigenous inhabitants, he articulates more and more successfully the values that would come to be associated with imperial Rome, until in the final scene of the poem he slays Turnus, the enemy leader, and removes the last obstacle to Roman power and glory. At this point he has overcome the forces of “furor” and “ira,” both within himself and as represented by the people who oppose him, so that he successfully embodies “pietas,” that particularly Roman virtue that embraces one’s duties to God, country, and family. This approach is fundamentally optimistic, with Aeneas serving as the ideal hero of ancient Rome, the Aeneid celebrating the achievements of Augustus and his age, and the poem enduring as a monument to the

20 Andrés Bello, “La Araucana,” in Obras completas, vol. 9: Temas de crítica literaria (Caracas: Ministerio de Educaciόn, 1956), 360; the same phrase appears in the introduction to Alonso de Ercilla, The Araucaniad, trans. Charles Maxwell Lancaster and Paul Thomas Manchester (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1945), 11. A rudimentary comparison of the two poems may be found in Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de la poesía chilena, 21 n. 3; and Frank Pierce, “Some Themes and Their Sources in the Heroic Poem of the Golden Age,” Hispanic Review 14 (1946): 95–103. 21 Pierce, Alonso de Ercilla, recognizes some Virgilian elements in the poem but concludes, surprisingly, that “the Araucana does not follow the established pattern of the Virgilian epic” and that Ercilla “chose not to write his own ‘American version’ of the Aeneid” (70). 22 In preparing the analysis that follows, I have gone carefully through McManamon’s dissertation and the notes to Lerner’s edition. In order to avoid overburdening the notes, I will not provide references to these two works but will simply acknowledge my debt to both of them for noting many, but by no means all, of the structural and verbal parallels on which my analysis depends. McManamon, 6–10, follows José Toribio Medina, La Araucana de D. Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga, Ediciόn del centenario, ilustrada con probados, documentos, notas histόricas y bibliográficas y una biografía del autor, 5 vols. (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1910–1918), 3:13 in assuming that Ercilla used a Spanish translation of the Aeneid, probably the version of Hernández de Velasco, but he is forced to admit that there are few verbal similarities to this translation, and I see no reason to deny Ercilla, who had received the standard education of his day, knowledge of the poem in the original Latin.

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values of order and civilization, so that modern studies of Virgil that rely on it are often labelled “optimistic.”23 This is the Aeneid that most readers thought they knew for almost two thousand years. But after World War II, a group of Anglophone scholars centered at Harvard and Oxford began listening more sympathetically to what have come to be called the “further voices” in the Aeneid – not the voice of Aeneas as the prototype of Roman imperialism, but the voices of those who stood in opposition to him: Dido, the Carthaginian queen whose love is sacrificed to Aeneas’s higher mission; Turnus, the Italian prince who fell before Aeneas while he was trying to defend his country against the Trojan invaders; and so forth. These scholars also pointed out that in the course of the poem, Aeneas himself sometimes speaks in one of these “further voices.” That is, Aeneas himself is often inconsistent in the set of values he articulates, especially in the last scene of the poem, which was reinterpreted as a key failure in which Aeneas surrenders to the very voices of barbarism and fury within himself that he had struggled throughout the poem to suppress. Within the narrative structure of the poem, these other voices also project worthy values, and this new school of criticism has helped us see Virgil’s sympathy for what is now fashionably referred to as the Other, especially women and indigenous peoples. Modern scholars who have developed this second approach are sometimes said to follow “Anglo-American two voices Harvard and Balliol pessimism,” but are more commonly described either as “pessimists” or as members of the “Harvard school.”24

23 The traditional approach has received its most influential modern treatment in R. Heinze, Vergils epische Technik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903), translated now as Virgil’s Epic Technique, trans. Hazel and David Harvey and Fred Robertson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), as nuanced by V. Pöschl, Die Dichtkunst Vergils: Bild und Symbol in der Aeneas (Innsbruck: Margarete Friedrich Rohrer, 1950), translated as The Art of Vergil, trans. G. Seligson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). This approach received wide dissemination in the Anglophone world through T. S. Eliot’s What Is a Classic? (London: Faber and Faber: 1945), expanded and developed in Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964; rpt. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), and P. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Recent trends in Virgilian scholarship are surveyed in S. J. Harrison, “Some Views of the Aeneid in the Twentieth Century,” in S. J. Harrison (ed.), Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1–20; and A. Wlosok, “Vergil in der neueren Forschung,” Gymnasium 80 (1973): 139–51. 24 The full label appears in Don Fowler’s survey of recent work in “Roman Literature,” Greece and Rome 36 (1989): 235; the term “Harvard school” seems to have been coined by W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 11 n. 10, who notes that pessimistic readings of the Aeneid “were written by critics who have been associated with classics at Harvard from the late forties to the present at some time or other.” The generally cited, seminal works associated with this approach are Robert A. Brooks, “Discolor Aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough,” American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 260–80; Adam Perry, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” Arion 2 (1963): 66–80, reprinted in The Language of Achilles and Other Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Wendell Clausen, “An Interpretation of the Aeneid,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 68 (1964): 139–47 (though written in 1949); and Michael C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative

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It has generally been assumed that the Harvard school is fundamentally ahistorical. Karl Galinsky, for example, has argued that ancient criticism totally lacks the kind of hesitation about Aeneas and his actions that some modern readers believe they see,25 with the assumption being that these readers are projecting their own concerns back into Virgil’s text. As S. J. Harrison puts it, “For an outside observer, it is difficult to separate such an interpretation from the characteristic concerns of U.S. (and other) intellectuals in these years: the doubt of the traditional view of the Aeneid has at least some connection with the 1960s’ questioning of all institutions, political, religious, and intellectual, and in particular with attitudes towards America’s own imperialism.”26 Recently, however, Richard Thomas has demonstrated that the ancient Aeneiskritik does contain a clearly “pessimistic” strain,27 and I have tried to show that a series of Renaissance humanists, beginning with Francesco Petrarca, extending through such Quattrocento scholars as Francesco Filelfo, Maffeo Vegio, and Giovanni Pontano, and concluding with Lionardo Salviati injected this viewpoint into the early modern interpretation of Virgil.28 Joseph Sitterson in turn has argued that the ending of the Orlando Furioso relies on a “pessimistic” reading of its Virgilian subtext.29 If Ariosto could have seen the Aeneid in this way, so, too, could Ercilla. This is a very important point, for now that scholarship from the last few years has shown that Ercilla indeed had open to him the full range of interpretive options that modern readers of Virgil’s poetry have, we are finally in a position to see how the Aeneid can guide us to a clearer understanding of La Araucana in all its ideological and structural complexity.

25 26 27 28 29

Unity and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Richard Thomas, however, notes that the Harvard connection is often tenuous at best, with the major works having been produced when their authors were not at Harvard, which suggests a more casual collaboration; see “Ideology, Influence, and Future Studies in the Georgics,” Vergilius 36 (1990): 64 n. 1. The general approach developed in the fifties and sixties was given considerable theoretical sophistication by Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. and ed. Charles Segal (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap. 5, “Virgil’s Aeneid: Toward an Interpretation,” which argues that Virgil’s signal achievement lay in opening the Latin epic norm up to multiple points of view, making the text itself polycentric and the values it expresses relative and contingent. The idea that “further voices” can be found in the Aeneid has been developed with particular persuasiveness by R. O. A. M. Lyne, who concludes that their presence “probes, questions, and occasionally subverts the simple Augustanism that it may appear to project” (Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 217 n. 1). Karl Galinsky, “The Anger of Aeneas,” American Journal of Philology 109 (1988): 322. Harrison, “Some Views,” 5. Richard Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Craig Kallendorf, “Historicizing the ‘Harvard School’: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99 (1999): 391–403. Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr., “Allusive and Elusive Meanings: Reading Ariosto’s Vergilian Ending,” Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 1–19.

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III La Araucana was originally published in three parts. Part I (1569) tells of the campaign in Chile led by Valdivia, the revolt of the indigenous Araucanians, and the treacherous murder of the Spanish leader. The formation of an expedition from Peru, the storm that hit them off the coast of Chile, their arrival in Concepciόn, the building of a fort at Penco, and the battles that followed with the Indians are described in Part II (1578). In Part III (1589), the reader learns of the arrival of the Spanish commander in Concepciόn; raids, battles, and the further exploration of Chile; and the defeat of Caupolicán, the Indian leader. Ercilla bases his account in history – he was personally involved in the events recounted in Parts II and III – but La Araucana is a poem in the epic tradition and therefore demands analysis in those terms. For a Spaniard of the late sixteenth century, the epic poem par excellence was the Aeneid, and Ercilla loses no time in anchoring his poem intertextually in his Latin model. A good example of how this works may be found in Canto VII, which depicts the sack of Concepciόn. Ercilla presents this account as a rewriting of the sack of Troy, which casts the defending Spaniards as new Trojans and the attacking Indians as reconstituted Greeks. All of this is made explicit in an epic simile: No con tanto rigor el pueblo griego entrό por el troyano alojamiento, sembrando frigia sangre y vivo fuego, talando hasta en el ultimo cimiento cuanto de ira, venganza y furor ciego, el bárbaro, del robo no contento, arruina, destruye, desperdicia y aun no puede cumplir con su malicia. (Grecian hosts with so much rigor Entered no abode of Trojan, Sowing fire and blood of Phrygian, Ravaging Troy’s last foundations, As the savage discontented With his vengeful theft and anger Ruined, destroyed, and wreaked mad havoc, Still his wicked ire unsated.) (La Araucana VII.48)30

30 References to Ercilla’s text are to Lerner’s edition, and translations are taken from The Araucaniad, trans. Lancaster and Manchester. References to the Aeneid are to the Oxford Classical Text of Sir Roger Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), and translations are taken from The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Toronto, New York, London, and Sydney: Bantam Books, 1971).

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Here we find not only an invitation to consider parallels between the events in Chile and Troy, but also to see in La Araucana a study of the same issues that emerge from a careful reading of the Aeneid. This makes Ercilla’s poem a study of civilization and barbarism and of the forces that can transform one into the other. In this passage those forces are “ira” and “furor,” presented just as they had been in Aeneid 2, as a fire that threatens to burn out of control and consume everything of value in its path. The associations between the two poems are found in larger structural units as well as smaller ones. A good example of such a larger unit is the storm that Ercilla uses to move from Part I to Part II. The situation in Chile has become desperate, and the Spanish ruler in Peru agrees to send reinforcements. Those coming by sea are drawing near their goal when they encounter a huge storm, which is immediately depicted in terms that every schoolboy would identify with Aeneid 1: Allí con libertad soplan los vientos de sus cavernas cόncavas saliendo y furiosos, indόmitos, violentos, todo aquel ancho mar van discurriendo, rompiendo la prisiόn y mandamientos de Eolo, su rey, el cual temiendo que el mundo no arruinen, los encierra echándoles encima una gran sierra. (There tempestuous blasts in freedom Whistle from their concave caverns, With indomitable violence Coursing o’er the expansive sea-waste, Breaking bonds, and flouting mandates Of King Aeolus, who fearful Lest they ruin the world, confines them In a mountain’s crag-roofed dungeon.) (La Araucana XV.58) The Spanish find themselves in the same position as Aeneas and his men in Aeneid 1, where Aeolus, having been bribed by Juno, releases the winds to wreak havoc on the Trojan fleet. The Virgilian flavor of the passage even extends to word choice: “indόmito,” as Lerner observes in his note on the third line, is a Latinism that echoes Aen. 1.52–53 and 1.61–62. Thus anyone who reads La Araucana in search of Virgilian parallels will have no trouble finding them, and once we have begun doing this, we quickly discover that the Indians are regularly associated with the enemies of Aeneas and his Trojans. The Indians, for example, tend to fight and die like Turnus. In Canto XIV Lautero’s death echoes that of Turnus at the end of the Aeneid:

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del rostro la color se le retrujo, los ojos tuerce y con rabiosa pena la alma, del mortal cuerpo desatada, bajò furiosa a la infernal morada. (From his face the color vanished; Eyes he rolled; from mortal body Rushed his soul in rabid anguish Downward to the abode infernal.) (La Araucana XIV.18) . . . ast illi solvuntur frigore membra Vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. (His limbs fell slack with chill; and with a moan his life, resentful, fled to Shades below.) (Aen. 12.941–52) Both souls descend to the depths below, and both are “furiosa,” bound to the wrath that always threatens to tear apart the fabric of civilization. Later Pinol dies the same way, and again his soul is “furiosa” in death as in life. If the Indian men resemble the Latins in how they fight, the Indian women resemble Dido in love. A good example is Tegualda, who resisted vigorously the allures of love until a foreigner, Mareguano, caught her eye. Then everything changes: as she explains, reason surrenders to passion, flames roar through her icy bosom (“ya me hallaba/ardiendo en vivo fuego el pecho frío”; La Araucana XX.61.5–6), and her eyes pursued him ardently, nurturing the wound and venom (“le seguí con la vista deseosa,/cebando más la llaga y el veneno”; La Araucana XX.62.3–4). The images used here certainly owe something to Petrarca and Gόngora as well, but Tegualda remains a Virgilian woman in love (“At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura/vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni”; Aen. 4.1–2), an example of how casting off restraint gives free rein to the natural forces like passion that constantly threaten civilization.31 As James Nicolopulos has recently shown, the Virgilian underpinnings of Part II of La Araucana are in many ways strongest in Cantos 23 and 24.32 Here Ercilla the soldier descends into a cave to receive a prophecy about the future power of his country, just as Aeneas had in Aeneid 6. Fitόn, the seer, invokes Cerberus, Charon, Styx, Tartarus, Cocytus, Phlegethon, the Furies – all the figures of the Virgilian underworld. The vision climaxes in the battle of Lepanto, which anchors La Araucana into Virgil’s world in two ways: the battle is explicitly compared to 31 On the role of the Indian women in La Araucana, see above, n. 9. 32 James Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in La Araucana and Os Lusíadas (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

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the Trojan War (La Araucana XXIV.42), and the battle of Lepanto itself, as Ercilla notes (La Araucana XXIII.77), took place very near the spot where Octavian won his decisive naval victory at Actium33 – a victory celebrated in the Aeneid. At this point, it appears that as the Aeneid has often been interpreted as a poem in praise of Augustus, so La Araucana can be interpreted as a poem written in praise of Philip II, with the Aeneid as intertext supporting Ercilla’s imperial project. The problem with this interpretation, however, is that “further voices” intrude, beginning almost immediately and growing more audible the further we proceed into the poem. On the one hand, these intrusions associate the Indians not with the enemies of Troy, as the initial scheme linking La Araucana to the Aeneid seemed to dictate, but with the Trojans themselves and their allies. For example, in La Araucana II.43.1–2 the Indian Lincoya is described as stripping his tunic from his massive shoulders in a way that recalls a similar passage in Aen. 5.421–23. The passage in the Aeneid describes Aeneas, however, not one of his adversaries, so that Ercilla’s reference ennobles Lincoya by associating him with Virgil’s hero. Another example may be found in the description of the sack of Concepciόn. After the city is captured, the Indians loot it, carrying away its goods like ants who store things away for the winter (La Araucana VII.53). Virgil had described the Trojans making preparations to leave Carthage with the same simile (Aen. 4.402–5), and while one might in the end wonder how much all this ennobles the Indians, it certainly links them again to the Trojans. Shortly afterward, the soothsayer Puchecalco is slain by a putative ally for making a prophecy the Indians did not want to hear (La Araucana VIII.39–44), reminding us of Laocoön (Aen. 2.40 ff.) and, again, calling into question the basic linkage between the Indians and the antagonists of Troy. The next canto in turn offers a crescendo of “further voices.” First a divinely instigated storm delays the Indians (stanza IX), then the Indian god Eponamon prophesies and disappears in a cloud of smoke (canto XI), and finally the narrator compares Lautaro to a Hircanian tiger (canto LXXII). The references – to the storm at the beginning of Aeneid 1, to Anchises’s prophecy in Aen. 5.740, and to Dido’s rebuke to Aeneas in Aen. 4.366–67 – invite the careful reader to associate the Indians three times in rapid succession with Virgil’s Trojans. In Canto X the Indians, like the Trojans in Aeneid 5, celebrate with athletic games, and in La Araucana XX.75.1–4 Tegualda pleas for the burial of her husband in exactly the same way as the mother of Euryalus pled for the burial of her son (Aen. 9.485–86). And finally, the Indian army is linked to Aeneas and his Trojans by a distinctive reference to nature: the earth trembles from the footsteps of marching soldiers (La Araucana XXI.50.1–4; Aen. 12.444–45). Other “further voices” serve to undercut the exemplary position of the Spanish by associating them with those forces that the Trojans struggled to control. At the 33 Quint, Epic and Empire, 158–59; and Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 44.

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end of Canto II, for example, the Spanish leader Valdivia turns aside from his mission to visit a gold mine, leading Ercilla the narrator to note at the beginning of the next canto that “Codicia fue ocasiόn de tanta guerra” (“Avarice was the war’s occasion!”; La Araucana III.3.7). This recalls Virgil’s outburst at Aen. 3.56–57, “Quid non mortalia pectora cogis/auri sacra fames?”, and links the Spaniards not to the Trojans, but to their perfidious ‘allies’ in Thrace who killed Polydorus to get the Trojan treasure that had been sent out of the city with him for safekeeping. In Canto VII, in turn, the Spaniards in the city of Concepciόn found themselves unnerved by “Fama” (“rumor”) and unable to brace themselves for the work they needed to do, just like the inhabitants of Carthage after Dido’s affair with Aeneas. Here the Spaniards are associated with Carthage; in La Araucana IX.74.7–8, by contrast, they are associated with the indigenous peoples of Italy as Ortiz dies with a faint but recognizable echo of Turnus (“. . . y la alma del corpόreo alojamiento/ hizo el duro y forzoso apartamiento”; “And the soul from corporal dwelling/Took its harsh, constrained departure”; see Aen. 12.952). Then a little later, the Spaniards building the fort at Penco are once again linked to the Carthaginians, the barbarian Other in Virgil’s world (La Araucana XVII.25.1–4).

IV Thus far, we have seen that Ercilla begins by setting up the expected pro-imperial reading of La Araucana through an association of the Spaniards with the Trojans and the Indians with their enemies. He then moves to call this reading into question by allowing further voices in the poem to scramble the associations, so that the Indians sometimes sound like the Trojans and the Spaniards sometimes take on the attributes of their enemies. The question, of course, is why – that is, what understanding of La Araucana do the Virgilian references bring us to in the final section of the poem?34 To answer this question, let us turn first to Ercilla’s attitude toward the Indians. In the prologue to Part I, Ercilla raises the possibility that he might appear biased toward the Indians, for they have defended their land with great consistency and firmness, redeemed and sustained their freedom with pure valor and obstinate determination, and in general are “worthy of greater praise than I shall be able to give with my verses” (“digno de mayor loor del que le podré dar con mis versos”). This is certainly a “further voice,” a suggestion that praiseworthy virtue is not confined to the Spaniards. As Ercilla proceeds through the first two parts of the poem, the virtue of the Indians emerges again through an occasional acknowledgement of the Indians’ valor (“Oh valientes soldados araucanos”; “Oh, courageous Araucanians”; La Araucana XIII.17.1) or an expression of sympathy for their cause.35 34 Nicolopulos finds the key Virgilian material in Part II (Poetics of Empire, 12), but I think it is not until Part III that the dialogue between Ercilla and Virgil becomes decisive. 35 John Van Horne, “The Attitude toward the Enemy in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Narrative Poetry,” Romanic Review 16 (1925): 341–61, notes that other epics of this period also treat the Indians

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This is not, however, the whole story. From the very beginning, Ercilla has insisted that these virtues are accompanied by a character flaw that any reader of Virgil cannot help but notice: En fin, si hado y clima desta tierra, si tu estrella y pronόsticos se miran, es contienda, furor, discordia, guerra y a solo esto los ánimos aspiran. Todo su bien y mal aquí se encierra, son hombres que de súbito se aíran, de condiciones feroces, impacientes, amigos de domar estrañas gentes. (This land’s watchword, as its climate, From the stars’ prognostication Is, in fine, contentious fury; Discord, strife, its sole ambition. Thence stem all their good and evil They are men of sudden anger, Fierce of temper, and impatient, Fond of quelling foreign varlets.) (La Araucana I.45) In the cantos that follow, this point comes up again and again: “De cόlera Lincoya y rabia insano/responde . . .” (“Wroth, insane with rage, Lincoya/Answered . . .”; La Araucana II.23.1–2), Lautero addresses his countrymen “ardiendo en furor” (“ablaze with ire”; La Araucana XI.73.2), Tucapel is “rabioso y vivo fuego” (“Singed and blazing, wroth and rabid”; La Araucana XX.11.3), and “ardiendo en ira y de furor insano” (“Glowed insane with ire-stirred embers”; La Araucana XX.39.2), and so forth. Indeed, at the beginning of Part II, Caupolicán identifies this uncontrollable wrath as the great weakness of his people (La Araucana XVI.67–68). The same problem thrusts its way to the fore again at the beginning of Part III, where Ercilla as narrator states clearly that the combat between Tucapel favorably, and even in representing Protestants and Moslems, Spanish poets recognized some ambiguity, assigning some virtues to their enemies and some shortcomings (especially cruelty) to their own countrymen. Nevertheless Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589, trans. Lydia Longstreth Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), reminds us that in the decades preceding Ercilla’s writing, the Indians were characterized as objects, ‘pieces,’ or serfs, first as merchandise, then as primitive beings without reason (Alvar Núñez), or as gentle savages (Las Casas), so that the way Ercilla has depicted them is noteworthy. In developing this point, David A. Lupher places La Araucana into the larger discussion about the virtues of the Indians among Spanish writers, who ultimately turned classical references toward a critique of Roman values. See Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 277–309.

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and Rengo arises from this overpowering defect of character in the Araucanians (La Araucana XXX.3, 7). When “ira” and “furor” get so out of control that soldiers battle one another rather than the enemy, any collective enterprise is doomed to failure. It is certainly true, as Michael Murrin has recently reminded us, that the Spanish army possessed an overwhelming technical superiority,36 but within the terms of Ercilla’s literary representation, the Araucanian army is defeated by its own character flaws, not by the guns and cannons of the invaders. And, I would argue, it is no accident that these character flaws are the same ones that characterize Dido, Turnus, and the other opponents of “pietas” in Virgil’s epic world. Let us turn now to the Spaniards with these same concerns in mind. It has become a critical commonplace to note that Ercilla freely censures his countrymen, and this is indeed true: they are characterized by “los intereses y malicia” (“self-interest, greed, and malice”; La Araucana I.68.1), then as “Gente vil, acobardada,/deshonra del honor y ser de España!” (“People vile and craven,/Shame of Spain, and Spain’s dishonor”; La Araucana VII.18.6–7), and Valdivia in particular comes under steady reproach: “Valdivia, perezoso y negligente,/incrédulo, remiso y descuidado . . .” (“Plodding, indolent Valdivia,/Dull, suspicious, ever careless . . .”; La Araucana II.90.1–2). It would be misleading, however, to see only this, for in spite of their shortcomings, Ercilla’s countrymen remain “nuestra gente Española” (“we Spaniards”; La Araucana V.2.2.). The Marquess of Cañete, who sent the decisive reinforcements from Peru to Chile, is praised for his evenhanded justice (La Araucana XII.78.5–8, 89), and Part II begins with a reminder of the religious motives of the conquerors and the mercy they were prepared to offer to those who agreed to submit (La Araucana XVI.29–30). Philip II is consistently presented as a model of virtue, especially at the battle of St. Quentin (La Araucana XVIII.24–25). Indeed, as the Spanish commander García instructs his troops, Ercilla distinguishes the Spaniards from the Indians on precisely the point of greatest weakness in the Araucanians: Lo que yo os pido de mi parte y digo es que en estas batallas y revueltas, aunque os haya ofendido el enemigo, jamás vos le ofendáis a espaldas vueltas; antes le defended como al amigo si, volviéndose a vos las armas sueltas, rehuyere el morir en la batalla, pues es más dar la vida que quitalla. Poned a todo en la razόn la mira, por quien las armas siempre habéis tomado, que pasando los términos la ira pierde fuerza el derecho ya violado. 36 Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 144–46.

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pues cuando la razόn no frena y tira el ímpetu y furor demasiado, el rigor excesivo en el castigo justifica la causa al enemigo. (I request you, and command you, In these skirmishes and conflicts, Though the enemy betray you, Never strike him with his back turned; Rather, as a friend, defend him. If he turns to you, arms loosened, And refuses death in battle, Rather spare his life than take it. Set your eagle’s gaze on reason, You who deal in war’s profession, For if wrath breaks through its limits, Right is weakened, violated; For when reason’s curb restrains not Maddened impulse, rage excessive, O’ermuch rigor in chastisement Justifies the foeman’s cruelty.) (La Araucana XXI.55–56) The need for reason to control passion, of course, is precisely Aeneas’s struggle in the Aeneid, and I hardly think it coincidental that García’s instructions here would function as an excellent description of at least part of what is involved in Virgilian “pietas.” The great lesson of the Aeneid, of course, is that understanding this point is one thing, but implementing it is quite another, and as we move toward the conclusion of La Araucana, Ercilla’s readers come to the same realization. Everything begins unravelling in Canto XXVI, where the Spanish lose control in battle and abandon the very guidelines for rational restraint that García had given a little while earlier (La Araucana XXVI.7). Shortly afterward the Spanish execute twelve captives as a lesson, a decision that Ercilla expresses his reservations about (La Araucana XXVI.23). A little later, near the end of the poem, Ercilla passes judgment on how the expedition in Araucania has resolved itself. This is the decisive passage, so I shall quote from it at some length: Excelente virtud, loable cosa de todos dignamente celebrada es la clemencia ilustre y generosa, jamás en bajo pecho aposentada; por ella Roma fue tan poderosa, y más gentes venciό que por la espada,

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domό y puso debajo de sus leyes la indόmita cerviz de grandes reyes. No consiste en vencer sόlo la gloria ni está allí la grandeza y excelencia sino en saber usar de la vitoria, ilustrándola más con la clemencia. El vencedor es digno de memoria que en la ira se hace resistencia y es mayor la vitoria del clemente, pues los ánimos vence juntamente. La mucha sangre derramada ha sido (si mi juicio y parecer no yerra) la que de todo en todo ha destruido el esperado fruto desta tierra; pues con modo inhumano han excedido de las leyes y términos de guerra, hacienda en las entradas y conquistas crueldades inormes nunca vistas. (Clemency, a noble virtue, Generosity’s transcendence, Banished from all hearts ignoble, Universally is lauded. Rome attained her world dominions More through kindness than through cruelty; Necks of kings untamed were humbled Chastened not by swords, but mercy. Conquest has no claim to glory. Grander and superior merit Rests in wisdom’s clement usage Of the rights of victors’ powers. Conquerors meriting memorials Match their ire with tempered mercy, Carry off a double victory, Banishing all vengeful passions. If my own opinion errs not Too much blood has here been lavished To destroy the total riches Of the fructifying region. Acts inhuman have exceeded War’s determined laws and limits. Brute, unparalleled malevolence Has polluted our invasion.) (La Araucana XXXII.1–2, 4)

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In this environment, it is inevitable that everything will go wrong in the final defeat of Caupolicán, and indeed it does: the captured Araucanian hero offers to convert to Christianity and submit to Spanish rule, yet as in the Aeneid there is no clemency and Caupolicán is tortured and killed. Ercilla can only condemn the act and exculpate himself by asserting that he was not present at the time (La Araucana XXXIV.31). In other words, La Araucana has ended in the same way as the Aeneid, with the forces of irrational passion overcoming reason in precisely those people who know what they should do but find that they simply cannot do it. Thus through the course of the poem, the narrator has become sadder but wiser along a Virgilian trajectory: initially ready to sing the deeds of Spanish heroism, in the last lines of the poem he can only confess his mistake and weep: “conociendo mi error, de aquí adelante/será razόn que llore y que no cante” (“Knowing now my fault, I must/weep, and sing no longer”; La Araucana XXXVII.76.7–8).37

V In the end, then, La Araucana is a profoundly Virgilian poem, one in which the echoes of the Aeneid go beyond mere epic decoration to the very ideological core of the poem. And just as Virgil’s attitude toward the imperial enterprise resists easy simplification, so does Ercilla’s. It is certainly true that he has profound reservations about his countrymen and their abilities to encounter the indigenous peoples of Araucania according to the standards they have set for themselves, but that does not mean that the truth of the poem “is the truth of a radical demythification of the process of conquest, which will lead the narrator to a complete rejection of it, and it is the truth of his realization of the superiority of pre-Columbian America.”38 For one thing, it is difficult to imagine why anyone who believed this would dedicate the poem to the Spanish king. But more importantly, the Indians are not superior to the Spaniards in this poem. Like Aeneas, the Spaniards failed to live up to their own standards, but within the value scheme of the poem, having these standards is better than not having them. And like the Aeneid, the epic voice in La Araucana remains the imperial voice of “nuestra gente española” (“we Spaniards”; La Araucana V.2.2). There are “further voices” as well, and we dare not suppress them, for they validate the Other in this poem and bring out the inevitable difficulties inherent in the imperial project. But as with the Aeneid itself, we also dare not listen to these voices alone, for La Araucana is no more Caupolicán’s poem than the Aeneid is Turnus’s.39 37 Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest, 271 notes perceptively that through the course of the poem, the narrator changes and grows into this final vision. Aeneas, too, grows into his understanding of “pietas,” and I suspect this resemblance is not accidental. 38 Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest, 272. 39 In other words, as Walter Cohen puts it, “an anti-imperialist subjectivity produces an imperialist objectivity of far greater plausibility and sophistication than any of the arguments previously presented by open apologists of empire” (“The Discourse of Empire in the Renaissance,” 277). Or in simpler terms, Ercilla “is clearly more sympathetic to the Araucanians than to the Spanish, even

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It is also at this point worth focusing on the voice of the Other in La Araucana and reflecting briefly on how clearly it comes through in the poem. The Virgilian model makes it impossible to suppress this voice, for it is necessary for Ercilla and his countrymen to understand themselves. This by itself, however, tells us more about the Spaniards than the Indians. Beatriz Pastor Bodmer is quite pessimistic on this point, claiming that key female traits in the Indians are assimilated to the Renaissance model of Dido and key male traits to the European warrior code, with anything that could not be assimilated being either rejected or transformed.40 Victor Raviola Molina offers what to my mind is a more thorough analysis, noting the indigenous elements in Ercilla’s treatment of theme and conflict, environment, customs, and characters. Yet he, too, acknowledges that the matter resists simplification: the love stories focus on the Indians, but they do so with features borrowed from the European Renaissance; many of the characters are drawn from history, but even the historical figures end up resembling epic characters; the vocabulary of the poem marks a pioneering effort to incorporate the voice of the colonized into the literature of the colonizer, but Ercilla made up some names in analogy with ones he actually heard; and finally, the descriptions of Chile come from first-hand observation, but epic conventions can be found there, too.41 Thus as Rolena Adorno suggests, reading La Araucana next to the Aeneid suggests that the formulaic prescriptions of the epic convention served to help contain and control the indigenous elements in the poem, providing a predictable set of registers from which the Indians found it very difficult indeed to escape.42 In one sense, then, Ercilla’s poem seems to confirm Todorov’s suggestion that trying to see the Indian as a human being with the same dignity and worth as the European tends to result in assimilation and the projection of European values onto indigenous ones.43 In the end, however, I would argue that Ercilla’s decision to view the colonization of the New World through the lens of the Trojan colonization of Italy builds into his poem a counter-movement as well, in which the

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though he considers the latter’s cause to be just and proper”; see Earl E. Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 58. Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest, 231–32; see also Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de la poesía chilena, 22. Victor Raviola Molina, “Elementos indígenas en ‘La Araucana’ de Ercilla,” in Don Alonso de Ercilla inventor de Chile, 81–136. For lexica of indigenous words in the poem, see König’s edition of the poem, XXXIX-LV, “Etimolojía de algunos nombres indíjenas”, and Medina’s edition, 4:425–99, both based ultimately on works like Arte de la lengua general del reyno de Chile, con un vocabulario hispano-chileno (Lima: En la Calle de la Encarnaciόn, 1765), 295–682. Rolena Adorno, “Literary Production and Suppression: Reading and Writing about Amerindians in Colonial Spanish America,” Dispositio 11.28–29 (1985): 6. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Collins, 1984), 17, 197. As Stephen Greenblatt put it, “We can be certain only that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation . . .” (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7).

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values and actions of the Spaniards are probed for their weaknesses as well as their strengths. As a result La Araucana, like the Aeneid, is polycentric, and while the Indian Other never truly succeeds in speaking in his or her own voice, the echoes and reechoes of that voice that ultimately reach us through Ercilla’s verse make it difficult, if not impossible, to see the encounter as nothing more than “the rebirth of the classical tradition as a justification of colonial expansion.”44 In other words, we can use the Aeneid to stimulate a reading of Ercilla’s poem that can, in Edward Said’s words, “draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” in La Araucana.45

44 The quotation is from Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), vii; see also idem, “The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition,” Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 808. 45 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1994), 66.

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4 EPIC AND TRAGEDY – VIRGIL, L A C E R D A , M I LTO N

I. Introduction At a conference held at Villa I Tatti in June, 1999, James Hankins raised the question of whether there is a specifically Renaissance commentary: are there in fact elements of content or method that might characterize a commentary as the product of Renaissance rather than medieval pedagogy or scholarship?1 One of the answers to Hankins’s question is that many Renaissance commentaries introduce classical works and concepts derived from them that were little known or discussed in the Middle Ages, along with references to works that were written in the Renaissance. An example of this sort of commentary is the one written by Juan Luis de la Cerda (1558–1643) to accompany his text of the works of the Roman poet Virgil.2 La Cerda’s “Elenchus Auctorum Veterum” lists more than 300 ancient authorities, a good number of which (e.g., Ennius, the scholia on Sophocles, Lycophron, and Theon) are not what we would expect to see in a medieval commentary (v–vii). This list is followed by a “Syllabus” of mostly post-medieval writers like Erasmus, Casaubon, and Julius Caesar Scaliger (vii–viii). For someone interested in Renaissance commentaries, this one offers promise. La Cerda’s commentary was highly regarded in its own day and is by no means unknown now, but it has not attracted the level of recent scholarly attention one might expect. This is probably due in part to its length: covering over two thousand pages in three substantial folio volumes, the commentary is almost three million words long.3 Those who are not put off by the length quickly run up against 1 On Renaissance Commentaries, ed. M. Pade (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), 5. 2 La Cerda’s commentary was first published from 1608 to 1617 in Frankfurt/Main, then republished in Lyon from 1612 to 1619, then in Cologne, first in 1628, then again from 1642 to 1647. References in this essay are to the last edition, accessible through the website of Joseph Farrell (University of Pennsylvania) at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~jfarrell/index.html, accessed 23 February 2021. 3 Heyne praised La Cerda’s commentary (P. Virgilius Maro varietate lectionis, ed. C. G. Heyne, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: Caspar Fritsch, 1798), 5.513), and Mackail was still making “constant use” of it in 1930 (The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. J. W. Mackail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), x). See Andrew Laird, “Juan Luis de la Cerda and the Predicament of Commentary,” in The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, eds. R. K. Gibson and C. S. Kraus (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 171–203 (175–76).

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-6

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several unexpected obstacles. One of the most substantial modern studies of La Cerda’s work on Virgil seems to be J. Stevens’s Le Père Juan de la Cerda S.J. (1558–1643),4 but there are no copies of this book in the U.S. and it is evidently unavailable in the U.K. as well. A group of scholars working on Spanish humanist commentaries on the classics at the University of Murcia has focused attention on La Cerda’s Virgilian commentary, but what has been published so far is, again, difficult for many scholars to find.5 Nevertheless La Cerda has recently attracted the attention of several established scholars outside of Spain, as important essays by Andrew Laird and Sergio Casali show.6 La Cerda’s work on Virgil contains a number of discussions that go beyond both the medieval exegetical tradition and the conventional observations of his own day. In this essay I shall focus on one of them, La Cerda’s treatment of the final scene of the Aeneid. To explain what is so remarkable about this passage, I shall begin by placing La Cerda’s commentary into the general framework of Renaissance 4 (Louvain: 1931–1932?). See, however, idem, “Un humaniste espagnol: le Père Juan Luis de la Cerda commentateur de Virgile (1558–1663),” Les études classiques, 13 (1945), 210–21. 5 F. Moya del Baño, “La sonrisa del puer en Virgilio (E. 4.62): apostillas a la interpretación de J. L. de la Cerda,” Helmantica, 44 (1993), 235–50; eadem, “Los humanistas españoles y los textos latinos: unos ejemplos,” in Gramática y comentario de autores en la tradición latina, ed. M. A. Sánchez Manzano (León: Universidad de León, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 2000), 95–117 (112–17); eadem, “Juan Luis de la Cerda y el Liber de Pallio de Tertuliano,” in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico III: homenaje al profesor Antonio Fontán, eds. J. M. Maestre, J. Pascual Barea, and L. Charlo Brea, 5 vols. (Cádiz: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2003), 2.929–42 (with F. Fortuny Previ); J. F. Ortega Castejón, “El comentario de J. L. de la Cerda a las Geórgicas de Virgilio: edición y estudio” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universidad de Murcia, 1990); idem, “Sobre el significado de línea en latín y las explicaciones de D: Juan de Fonseca y Juan Luis de la Cerda,” in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico: Actas del I Simposio sobre Humanismo y Pervivencia del Mundo Clásico, ed. J. M. Maestre and J. Pascual Barea, 2 vols. (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, Universidad de Cádiz, 1994), 2.687–98; M. Ruiz-Funes Torres, “El comentario de Juan Luis de la Cerda a los seis primeros libros de la Eneida de Virgilio” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universidad de Murcia, 1994); eadem, “Cuestiones gramaticales en el P. de la Cerda: el Brocense y Nebrija en el comentario a la Eneida,” Excerpta philologica: revista de filología griega y latina de la Universidad de Cádiz, 4–5 (1994–1995), 415–38; eadem, “Estudio sobra el léxico virgiliano en el comentario de Juan Luis de la Cerda a la Eneida, I-VI,” in IX Congreso Español de Estudios Clásicos: humanismo y tradición clásica, ed. F. Rodríguez Adrados and A. Martίnez Díez, 7 vols. (Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 1996), 7.345–50; eadem, “Algunas interpretaciones ‘innovadoras’ del P. de la Cerda sobra la Eneida,” in De Roma al siglo XX: Actas del I Congreso de la Sociedad de Estudios Latinos, ed. A. M. Aldama, 2 vols. (Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 1996), 2.903–11; eadem, “Juan Luis de la Cerda, editor de Virgilio: pasajes cuestionados y defendidos en la Eneida,” in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico II: homenaje al profesor Luis Gil, ed. J. M. Maestre Maestre, J. Pascual Barea, and L. Charlo Brea, 3 vols. (Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 1997), 2.545–54. 6 Laird, “Juan Luis de la Cerda”; idem, “Da Virgilio a Gόngora: istruzione e innovazione nel commentario de Juan Luis de la Cerda,” Studi Umanistici Piceni, 22 (2002), 219–25; Sergio Casali, “Agudezas virgiliane nel commento all’Eneide di Juan Luis de la Cerda,” in Esegesi dimenticate di autori classici, ed. Carlo Santini and Fabio Stok, Testi e studi di cultura classica, 41 (Pisa: ETS, 2008), 233–61. I am grateful to both of these scholars, to Laird for first bringing La Cerda’s remarks on the end of the Aeneid to my attention, and to Casali for bibliographical assistance.

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Virgilian scholarship. I shall then turn to the key passage itself, making some observations both about what it says and about what it does not say. Finally I shall consider the consequences of La Cerda’s remarks, first for our understanding of Paradise Lost, whose author is generally agreed to have known them, and then for modern Virgilian scholarship, which could be enriched by them.

II. Virgil in the Renaissance Francesco Petrarca believed that Virgil described in Aeneas “perfecti viri habitus moresque.”7 Maffeo Vegio, who wrote a supplement to the Aeneid, agreed that Virgil presented Aeneas as a man “omni virtute praeditus.”8 This attitude was prevalent enough in the middle of the fifteenth century that when the humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was elected Pope, he took the name Pius II and quoted from Virgil to explain his choice: “Sum pius Aeneas . . ./fama super aethera notus” (Aen. 1.378–79).9 As Piccolomini went on to explain, this approach to the Aeneid rested on a broader understanding of the general function of poetry: “Est igitur utilis poetica quae laudando virtutes in earum amorem allicit homines. . . . Est in iterum utilis quia vitia detestatur, arcetque ab his homines.”10 Boccaccio had said essentially the same thing a couple of generations earlier: “i poeti . . . furono gradissimi commendatori delle virtù e vituperatori de’ vizi.”11 As these quotations show, for Renaissance readers the language of literary criticism had become thoroughly enmeshed in the language of rhetoric. As O. B. Hardison, Jr. has shown, this fusion went all the way back to late antiquity, when the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice, which was originally the goal of epideictic rhetoric, also became the goal of literary writing.12 This association of poetry with the principles of praise and blame was so strong that it colored other ways of understanding literature as well. When Coluccio Salutati, for example, looked at Ars poetica 333–34, the famous dictum that poetry should offer the reader profit or delight, he quickly concluded that “principaliter igitur utilitati

7 Familiares 10.4, in Le familiari, ed. V. Rossi and U. Bosco, 4 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1933– 1942). For elaboration of the material in this section, see C. Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 1–18. 8 De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus, ed. M. W. Fanning and A. S. Sullivan, 2 vols. (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1933–1936), 1.87–88. 9 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 1300–1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 59–60. 10 Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: H. Petrus, 1551), 596 (Epistle 104). 11 Il comento di Giovanni Boccaccio sopra la Commedia, ed. G. Milanesi, 2 vols. (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1863), 1.126. 12 The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina, 1962), 24–42. See also B. Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” New Literary History, 14 (1982–1983), 497–537.

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vituperatio correspondet, delectationi laus.”13 Salutati found the same topos buried in Aristotle. He read Aristotle’s Poetics in the only version known in the west before the end of the fifteenth century, the translation into Latin by Hermannus Alemannus of Averroes’s garbled paraphrase-commentary.14 This version proved perfectly compatible with what Salutati wanted to see, for he wrote that Aristotle says “in ipsius libelli fronte omne poema esse orationem vituperationis aut laudis.”15 This approach could be traced back to the commentary on Virgil by Tiberius Claudius Donatus (late fourth century AD), which was regularly excerpted in Renaissance commentaries to Virgil. Donatus finds the Aeneid an “artem dicendi plenissimam” whose “materiae genus” is “laudativum” (i.e., epideictic). Thus Virgil’s goal is to show Aeneas as “vacuus omni culpa et magno praeconio praeferendus,”16 and Donatus tries to show that Virgil praises Aeneas’s virtues on every possible occasion: he is a good leader (on Aen. 1.159–79), pious toward the gods (on Aen. 1.379), chaste (on Aen. 1.310–20), handsome and brave (on Aen. 1.594–95), etc. Renaissance commentators, including La Cerda, also drew regularly on the Expositio Virgilianae continentiae secundum philosophos moralis of Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (ca. 467–532 AD). This work relies on allegory, but the allegory unfolds within the praise-and-blame tradition. Fulgentius agreed that Aeneas offered “laudis . . . materia”;17 indeed the first line of the poem shows that Aeneas is praiseworthy for both “virtus” and “sapientia” (87). Thus Fulgentius also produces what amounts to an encomium of Aeneas. In the end, then, these two Virgilian commentaries from late antiquity merged with the prevailing approach to literature in the early Renaissance to generate an Aeneid that was interpreted in stark, black-and-white terms. Aeneas offered a pattern of exemplary behavior, while those who opposed him offered examples of vices to be condemned.18 This approach regularly carried over to the final

13 De laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman, 2 vols. (Zürich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951), 1.68; cf. the letter to Giovanni Dominici in Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. F. Novati, 4 vols. (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1891–1911), 4.231. 14 On the rhetoricized version of Aristotle’s Poetics, see O. B. Hardison, Jr., “The Place of Averroes’ Commentary on the Poetics in the History of Medieval Criticism,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer, 1968, ed. J. Lievsay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970), 57–81. The text of Hermannus’s translation was edited by W. F. Boggess, “Averrois Cordubensis Commentarium medium in Aristotelis poetriam” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1965), and a translation from the Arabic version may be found in C. E. Butterworth, Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 15 De laboribus Herculis, 1.10; Salutati repeats the point in a letter to a certain unknown Giovanni, Epistolario, 3.225–26, and in his famous letter to Giovanni Dominici, Epistolario, 4.231. 16 These citations are taken from Interpretationes Vergilianae, ed. Henricus Georgii, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1905–1906), 1.2–5. 17 The Expositio appears in Opera, ed. Rudolfus Helm (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898), 81–107 (87). 18 On Dido, for example, see Vegio, 1.88.

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scene of the poem. In Seniles 4.5, for example, Petrarca identifies Aeneas and Turnus unequivocally with “bonorum et malorum exercitu.” Aeneas is allegorized as “virtus,” and Turnus is identified with carnal passion. When Turnus strikes Aeneas, this represents the spiritual blows of temptation which the good man must endure, but Aeneas overcomes the lure of evil pleasure and kills his wicked opponent. Thus the moral order of the universe is preserved, “virtutis ardore ad celum ascendente.”19

III. La Cerda’s commentary on the final scene of the Aeneid At first it appears that this approach will govern La Cerda’s commentary as well. The preface, for example, is devoted to praise of Virgil and his work, and this “Elogia” begins with commendation of the virtues associated with the poet, which are identified as “pudor,” “humanitas,” “prudentia,” “modestia,” and “pietas,” and with praise for the wisdom Virgil’s poetry contains (1.viii–xiii). When we go to the commentary on the final scene of the Aeneid, La Cerda’s initial remarks seem to echo Petrarca’s. He begins this key section by stating, “Aenean ubique pium proponit, etiam hoc loco, in quo mors Turni, nam iam cunctabundus ad caedem erat precibus victi hostis.” When Aeneas, “furiis accensus & ira” (Aen. 12.946), tells Turnus that Pallas is exacting the penalty “scelerato ex sanguine” (Aen. 12.949), La Cerda glosses this phrase “quasi scelus admiserit Turnus in puerum Pallantis caede. Iustissimum est ergo, ut ab scelerato homine poenas repetat etiam pius” (3.782). Aeneas, then, is still “pius,” and Turnus is “homo sceleratus.” Thus far La Cerda seems to be working within the rhetoricized interpretation of the poem that prevailed in his day, an interpretation that would seem to accord well with the goals of a Jesuit who taught grammar, poetry, rhetoric, and Greek in Murcia, Oropesa, and Madrid.20 La Cerda’s commentary on this scene, however, does not continue as we would expect it to. He observes that several commentators have queried whether Aeneas remains “pius” in giving in to his anger and killing a prostrate opponent who had sued for peace. La Cerda notes that a number of his predecessors, including

19 In Opera quae extant omnia, 786–89. 20 On La Cerda’s life and works, see J. Simón Díaz, “Notas y comentarios para la biografía del P. Juan de la Cerda,” Razón y fe, (1944), 424–34; M. A. Caro, “Comentadores,” in Estudios de crítica literaria y gramatical (Bogotá: Impr. Nacional, 1955), 2.270–78; J. Simón Díaz, Bibliografía de la literatura hispánica (Madrid: CSIC, 1967), 7.792–94; G. Mazzocchi, “Los comentarios virgilianos del Padre Juan Luis de la Cerda,” in Estado actual de los estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro: Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas del Siglo de Oro, ed. M. García Martín (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1993), 2.663–67; and J. Lawrence, “El comentario de textos, III: después de Nebrija,” in Antonio de Nebrija: Edad Media y Rinacimiento, ed. C. Condoñer and J. A. González (Salamanca: Acta Salamanticensia, 1994), 179–93. On the Jesuit educational system, see A. Scaglione, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986).

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Scaliger, had come to Virgil’s defense, but he is going to take an approach that differs from theirs. The key passage requires quotation in full: Epica omnis (quale est opus Virgilianum) ad Tragicam refertur, imo ipsa Epica mera est Tragoedia, auctore Aristotele. Inde est, ut è duabus principibus personis (in Homero sunt Achilles, atque Hector; in Virgilio Aeneas, ac Turnus) altera debeat cadere necessariò in acie ad explicandam perfectam Tragicam. Ita vero in re hac se gessit Virgilius, ut satis nequeam mirari. Tragica omnis destinatur ad affectus movendos, & excitanda πάθη. Hinc est, ut Turnum descripserit in toto opere nobilissimum, fortissimum, generosissimum, pulcherrimum, magna aggredientem, & maiora molientem, ut cum postea in acie cadat, permoveat qui legit, horreatque ad atrocem caedem, et indignam tanto Principe fortunam; nam nisi, qui cadit, abundet bonis animi, aut corporis, nullum excitabatur πάθος. Sed considerandum diligentissimè, ut ita affectus hic excitetur, ut qui cadit non dignior iudicetur victore ipso; hoc enim iam esset monstrum in Tragica, aut Epica. Hinc est, ut Aenean Virg[ilius] intulerit in toto opere non solùm nobilissimum, fortissimum, generosissimum, pulcherrimum, ut Turnum sed insuper dederit Aeneae pietatem, religionem, prudentiam, temperantiam, iustitiam, fidem, & virtutes reliquas, quae sparsae in tota Aeneide, ut ita interfectus Turnus animos commoveat, ut non tamen dignior iudicetur interfectore Aenea. Aliter non esset fabula bene morata, quod ratio praescribit, & astruit Aristoteles. Nam, si iustus et pius caderet, contra mores esset. Hinc est, ut quivis lecto Virgilio clamet. Dignus erat Turnus vita, sed Aeneas dignior; doleo pulcherrimum iuvenem Turnum interfectum, sed luat tamen poenas temeritatis suae, rivalitatis, intercepti Regni, fracti foederis. Summa est, in extremo actu movendum affectum alterius principis personae caede, aliter non esset Tragica; sed ita movendum, ut non putes interfectum digniorem esse vita interfectore. (3.783–84) La Cerda’s different hermeneutic path starts from Aristotle’s Poetics. It quickly becomes clear, however, that he is not relying on the rhetoricized version of the Poetics that had been appropriated in defence of the praise-and-blame theory of poetry, but on a considerably more sophisticated understanding of it that had evolved during the hundred years or so before he began his Virgil commentary. Hermannus Alemannus’s Latin translation of Averroes’s version of the Poetics was published in Venice in 1481 and continued to surface now and again during the following century. In 1498, however, Giorgio Valla published a Latin translation that made a reasonably accurate version of the text widely available, with the Greek text following ten years later. Initially scholars tried to make sense of the strange new concepts found there by comparing them to something familiar: the most important of the earlier commentaries, Francesco Robortello’s In librum 56

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Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (1548), for example, interpreted Aristotle through Horace but ended up making the former sound like the latter. Pietro Vettori’s Commentarii in primum librum Aristotelis de arte poetarum (1560) made progress in clarifying what was distinctly Aristotelian in the Poetics, as did Lodovico Castelvetro (Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta, 1570) and Alessandro Piccolomini (Annotationi nel libro della Poetica d’Aristotele, 1575). The dominant figure at the end of the sixteenth century was Antonio Riccoboni, whose several works on the Poetics elucidated questions of genre in particular. Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetice (1561), cited specifically by La Cerda, served as a bridge to connect avant-garde Italian work on the Poetics to scholars in the rest of Europe, so that by the time La Cerda realized that Aristotelian literary criticism could be relevant to understanding the end of the Aeneid, he was able to approach the Poetics in a way that was not fundamentally different from the way it is understood today.21 References to the close relationship between epic and tragedy run throughout the Poetics,22 culminating in a long passage in sections 23 and 24 (1459a17– 1460b5). Epic is longer than tragedy, written in a different meter, and more open to the marvelous than drama, but Aristotle takes pains to explain that the two genres are closely related, so that the more a given epic poem is like a tragedy, the better it is (e.g., 1460a5 ff.). It is this close relationship that La Cerda invokes to explain the peculiar power of the last scene of the Aeneid. Like tragedy, epic should arouse the passions of pity and fear. Aristotle explains at the beginning of section 13 that this is done by having the right kind of character undergo the right kind of reversal of fortune. First Aristotle eliminates the patterns that do not work. When worthy men pass from good fortune to bad and when wicked people pass from bad fortune to good, our sense of justice is shocked, keeping us from feeling pity and fear. When a thoroughly bad person falls from good fortune to bad, our sense of justice is satisfied but pity and fear are not aroused, since we only pity those who do not deserve their misfortune and we are only afraid when the person who is suffering is like us. Pity and fear are aroused, Aristotle concludes, when a person who is not preeminent in virtue or justice, but is clearly better rather than worse, falls into misfortune not through some moral evil (kakia or mochtheria) but through a miscalculation or error in judgment (hamartia) (1452b28–1453a17).

21 Primary sources may be found in Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, ed. B. Weinberg, 4 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1968–1974). The standard survey of this material is B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); see also B. Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); idem, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Random House, 1968); and C. B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 22 For example, in section 5, Aristotle notes that epic and tragedy are both metrical representations of heroic action, but they differ in which meters are used, their manner of presentation, their length, and the number of constituent elements they have (1449b9–20).

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What is striking here is La Cerda’s treatment of Turnus, whose character and fate are analyzed with a thoroughly Aristotelian sensitivity. Turnus is no longer the leader of the “malorum exercitus,” the representative of carnal passion, as he was for Petrarca, but a hero whose virtues, like those of Aeneas, require superlatives: “nobilissimus,” “fortissimus,” “generosissimus,” “pulcherrimus,” one who is “magna aggrediens, & maiora moliens.” That is, he is clearly better rather than worse in moral terms, but not perfect, since he must “luat tamen poenas temeritatis suae, rivalitatis, intercepti Regni, fracti foederis.” His death is the price he pays for his hamartia. Virgil has taken care not to offend our sense of justice by having a totally just man fall: “si iustus et pius caderet, contra mores esset.” Pity and fear are thus aroused, since Turnus is the kind of person with whom the reader can identify, but he still seems to suffer more than he deserves: “permoveat qui legit, horreatque ad atrocem caedem, et indignam tanto Principe fortunam.” Particularly interesting is the way La Cerda grounds the tragedy of Turnus in a comparison with Aeneas. This sort of comparison is not developed explicitly in the Poetics, but it unfolds in Aristotelian terms nevertheless. With an eye on the Iliad, La Cerda notes that epic often rests on the actions of two heroes rather than one, and that the epic poet must therefore be careful not to inflict disaster on the morally superior character, since this is offensive (“qui cadit non dignior iudicetur victore ipso; hoc enim iam esset monstrum in Tragica, aut Epica”). Virgil is exemplary in this, since Aeneas possesses all the virtues Turnus has, along with “pietas,” “religio,” “prudentia,” “temperantia,” “iustitia,” “fides,” and “virtutes reliquae, quae sparsae in tota Aeneide.” Therefore justice is preserved at the same time as the emotions of pity and fear are aroused, “ut interfectus Turnus animos commoveat, ut non tamen dignior iudicetur interfectore Aenea.” The better man wins, but over a worthy opponent who is like him in many ways, not over a thorough scoundrel like Mezentius. It is worth noting here that La Cerda has not succeeded in freeing himself completely from the rhetoricized Aeneid that was conventional in his day. This becomes clear when we pause at La Cerda’s depiction of the character of Aeneas. La Cerda’s Aeneas possesses all the positive character traits that Turnus has, along with a list of his own. Unlike Turnus, however, he does not have a hamartia – he is, in essence, perfect, just as he was for Petrarca, Vegio, Piccolomini, and countless other Renaissance readers. What La Cerda does do, however, is quite significant. In his interpretation, the Aeneid ends not with the righteous triumph of a morally perfect hero, but with the tragic loss of an opponent who is noble, courageous, and exemplary in many key areas. The reader identifies with Turnus because both are alike in so many ways and pities him because it seems somehow unfair that he must suffer as much as he does. In a way, this shifts the emphasis from Aeneas, the putative hero of the poem, to Turnus, with whom the reader sympathizes. La Cerda acknowledges the emotional power of the last scene – commentary is a notoriously impersonal genre, but the writer challenges its conventions here with his “doleo,” a confession of what he feels in the face of these lines. And the identification of desirable traits in Turnus, the argument that he, too, has a character that is better rather than 58

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worse, problematizes the ending of the poem in a way that highlights just how impoverished the conventional black-and-white interpretation really is.

IV. The end of the Aeneid and the beginning of Paradise Lost Renaissance commentaries often serve as a bridge that connects Neo-Latin scholarship to the vernacular cultures in which it is rooted. This is clearly the case with John Milton, an English poet whose command of Latin, both classical and postclassical, is not in question. The close relationship between Paradise Lost and the Aeneid has been assumed ever since Milton’s first commentator, Patrick Hume, linked passages in the two poems, but the logic underlying this relationship has proved surprisingly elusive. To take one obvious example, Davis Harding has claimed that Satan rewrites Turnus. C. M. Bowra and Francis Blessington, however, link Satan to Aeneas, but with different results: Bowra argues that Satan takes on Aeneas’s grandeur within the larger critique of the value system of ancient epic, while Blessington sees Satan as a parody of Aeneas and his values.23 Since it is probable, although not absolutely certain, that Milton knew La Cerda’s commentary on Virgil,24 I would like to use that commentary to clarify the link between Satan and Virgil’s epic characters, a clarification that suggests at least in part the source of Satan’s powerful attraction for the reader of Paradise Lost. Initially Satan seems to be associated with Aeneas. Satan’s first words to Beëlzebub, “If thou beest hee; But O how fall’n! how chang’d/From him . . .” (PL 1.84–85), echo Aeneas’s words when he first saw Hector’s ghost: “ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo/Hectore qui redit” (Aen. 2.274–75). Satan concludes this speech with another obvious gesture toward Aeneas: So spake th’ Apostate Angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair: (PL 1.125–26) 23 D. Harding, The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of Paradise Lost (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 44–51; C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1948), 229–230; F. Blessington, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic (Boston: Routledge and K. Paul, 1979), 1–8. See also W. Porter, Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), esp. 83–127, 171–78; and A. Verbart, Fellowship in Paradise Lost: Vergil, Milton, Wordsworth (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), which has a useful (although incomplete) list of parallel passages on 253–302. The discussion in this section is developed at greater length, but without reference to La Cerda, in my “Allusion as Reception: Virgil, Milton, and the Modern Reader,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. C. Martindale and R. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 67–79. 24 As Charles Martindale notes, La Cerda’s commentary was in regular use during Milton’s day, he was mentioned in a letter from Carlo Dati to Milton, and the commentary was consulted by the author of the annotations to the Harvard Pindar, who was probably (but not certainly) Milton; see John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, 2nd edn. (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2002), 108.

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Talia voce refert; curisque ingentibus aeger Spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem. (Aen. 1.208–9) Book 2 of Paradise Lost rewrites Virgil’s descensus ad inferos, suggesting that Satan’s underworld experience is similar to Aeneas’s. Moloch, for example, argues for war, suggesting that there will be no problem leaving Hell because “Th’ascent is easy” (PL 2.81); this echoes the Sibyl’s advice to Aeneas, “facilis descensus Auerno” (Aen. 6.126). When Satan announces his plan to leave Hell in search of Adam, he again describes the challenges of the journey in reference to Aeneas’s descent to Hell, noting that “long is the way/and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light” (PL 2.432–33; cf. Aen. 6.128–29, “sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras,/hoc opus, hic labor est”). Thus far it appears that Blessington or Bowra might have been right, but then the reader encounters signs that something is wrong with these interpretations. When Satan enters Paradise, he is compared to a wolf entering a sheepfold (PL 4.183–92); this comparison echoes Aen. 9.59–60, but it links Satan to Turnus, not to Aeneas.25 Milton settles this matter definitively in the last twenty-five lines of Book 4, which concludes the first third of the poem, the part dominated by Satan. Armed for battle, Satan wears a helmet, “and on his Crest/Sat horror Plum’d” (PL 4.988–89), which recalls the Chimaera on the helmet of Turnus in Aen. 7.785. Then God hung “his golden Scales” (PL 4.997) in heaven, just as Jupiter had done before the final battle in the Aeneid, where Satan, who must lose in his confrontation with the angels who have come to Adam’s defense, is associated with Turnus, who must lose to Aeneas so that Italy can be established. The confrontation ends in a way that anyone who has ever read the Aeneid will recall instantly: The Fiend lookt up and knew His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled, Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night. (PL 4.1013–15) vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. (Aen. 12.952) Until almost the very end of Book 4, the clues suggested that Satan was the new Aeneas, the hero of Milton’s rewritten Aeneid. But the clues are there to deceive: Satan is not the new Aeneas, but the new Turnus. As long ago as Dryden, readers of Paradise Lost have been tempted to see Satan as the hero of the poem, even though they know that within the framework of Milton’s Christianity, this cannot be. Part of Satan’s appeal, I believe, is the strength of his association with Virgil’s epic world. Initially he is linked with Aeneas. As we 25 Blessington, 86–87.

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have seen, this association is deceptive, but it is a purposeful deception. Readers who find themselves accepting this association have been taken in by appearances and forgotten what they should know to be true, that the evils of Satan cannot really be associated with the virtues of Aeneas. In Stanley Fish’s now-famous phrase, they have been “surprised by sin.”26 Hopefully they have learned something from this experience and will be more discerning in the future. Satan is actually the new Turnus, not the new Aeneas, but which Turnus is he – Petrarca’s, the leader of the “malorum exercitus,” the standard-bearer of carnal passion, or La Cerda’s, a hero who is “nobilissimus” and “fortissimus,” one who is “magna aggrediens, & maiora moliens”? The temptation is to select the former option, since, after all, Satan is Satan, the source and symbol of all evil. But had Milton given in to this temptation, Paradise Lost would have taken a turn toward other Biblical epics like Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, whose stark division between good and evil makes for better theology than poetry.27 Milton’s Satan, however, resembles La Cerda’s Turnus, who, as we have seen, is like Aeneas in many fundamental ways. This is reasonable theologically: if Satan is a fallen angel, there is no reason why he should not retain many of the attributes that had previously defined him in Heaven. And it opens the door to great poetry, providing for Jesus, and Adam, a worthy opponent for the greatest epic contest of all time. This explains as well at least part of the hold that Satan establishes over the readers of Paradise Lost. Strictly speaking Satan’s punishment is just, but Milton’s readers are sinners, too, who can, and should, fear that they will suffer this same punishment, a punishment that somehow still seems unfair. As La Cerda had put it, “permoveat qui legit, horreatque ad atrocem caedam, et indignam tanto Principe fortunam.” As their emotions of pity and fear are engaged, Milton’s readers find themselves drawn to Satan, and even when they are forced to turn away, they do so reluctantly. Milton imitated Virgil, but as seen through the filter of La Cerda’s Aristotelianism. Once again, “epica omnis . . . ad tragicam refertur.”

V. La Cerda and modern scholarship That Virgilian epic has affinities with tragedy is hardly a new insight: as long ago as the first century AD, Martial described Virgil as “Maro cothurnatus,” and the game of collecting parallels between the Aeneid and various tragic dramas goes back to ancient times as well. The Cambridge Companion to Virgil has a nice

26 Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Macmillan, 1967), 1–56. 27 The Christiad, ed. and trans. G. C. Drake and C. A. Forbes (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); for discussion, see M. Di Cesare, Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). Milton knew the Christiad, commenting that “Loud O’er the rest Cremona’s trump doth sound” (Vida was born in Cremona) (The Christiad, vii).

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essay by Philip Hardie on “Virgil and Tragedy,” which reminds us that the modern history of this approach can be traced back to Richard Heinze.28 Much of this work is certainly in the spirit of what La Cerda is doing, but is either focused on earlier parts of the poem or lacks the precision that La Cerda brings to his analysis of the final scene. As Hardie indicates, Dido, Ajax, and Mezentius have all been felt to be tragic figures in some sense,29 but Turnus has not received an equal amount of attention. In the final chapter of The Poetry of the Aeneid, Michael C. J. Putnam does refer repeatedly to “the tragedy of Turnus,” but without saying exactly how “the slaying of Turnus is the ultimate, all-embracing tragedy of the Aeneid.”30 Kenneth Quinn goes a little further, noting that Turnus’s stripping the belt from Pallas’s body is an act of hybris and that he wins our sympathies because in the end, we see that there is more to his character than we had suspected.31 Heinze’s discussion of the action in the Aeneid includes such Aristotelian concepts as peripeteia (plot reversal), and his section on “Virgil’s Aims” begins with remarks on the marvelous, hamartia, pity, and fear.32 Yet here, there is no real discussion of the final scene and Turnus’s role in it. La Cerda’s contribution is to invoke the Poetics explicitly and to analyze the final scene with precision in these terms. The great merit of La Cerda’s remarks, as indicated above, is that they problematize the ending of the poem, turning it from the final scene of a morality play to a meditation on the complexity of human character and action. Modern scholarship has tended to develop this insight in reference to two competing perspectives in Virgilian criticism. The first stresses the obstacles that Aeneas overcomes in his journey and the success he has in articulating the values that would come to be associated with imperial Rome. By the end of the poem he has overcome the forces of “furor” and “ira,” both within himself and as represented by the people who oppose him, so that Aeneas serves as the ideal hero of ancient Rome, the Aeneid celebrates the achievements of Augustus and his age, and the poem endures as a monument to the values of order and civilization. This approach is often referred to as “optimistic.” Another group of critics, however, listens more sympathetically to what have come to be called “further voices” in the Aeneid – not the voice of Aeneas as the prototype of Roman imperialism, but the voices of those who stood in opposition to him. These scholars also point out that in the course of the poem, Aeneas himself is often inconsistent in attaining the values he is searching for, 28 The Cambridge Companion to Tragedy, ed. C. Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 312–26 (313). 29 Hardie, 325. On Dido, see also A. Engar, “Tragedy and Vergil’s Aeneid,” in Approaches to Teaching Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. W. S. Anderson and L. N. Quartarone (New York: MLA, 2002), 182–89. 30 “Tragic Victory,” in The Poetry of the Aeneid, 2nd edn. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 151–201 (162, 196). 31 “The Contribution of Tragedy,” in Virgil’s Aeneid: A Critical Description (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 323–49 (326–27, 330–32). 32 Virgil’s Epic Technique, trans. H. and D. Harvey and F. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 251–58, 370–73.

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especially in the last scene of the poem, which has been reinterpreted as a key failure in which Aeneas surrenders to the very voices of barbarism and fury within himself that he had struggled throughout the poem to suppress. This approach is sometimes called “pessimistic,” sometimes the “Harvard school,” since a number of late twentieth-century scholars who follow this approach had some association with Harvard University.33 One must be careful in trying to map seventeenth-century scholarship onto its twenty-first-century successor. For one thing, the division between the two modern perspectives is by no means as absolute as it might seem at first: no responsible “optimist” would deny that Aeneas makes some mistakes in the early part of the poem, and no responsible “pessimist” would argue that Aeneas should have stayed in Troy and left the Latins alone. What is more, as we have seen, there are limits to how far La Cerda was able to free himself from the predominant interpretive framework of his day. By assigning a good number of significant positive attributes to Turnus, La Cerda keeps him from being a simple evil foil to Aeneas. This complicates the end of the poem considerably and marks a crucial step toward the modern “pessimistic” reading of the poem. La Cerda was careful, however, not to acknowledge the rage to which Aeneas succumbs in the final scene as a hamartia. This closes off the possibility of a full-blown “pessimistic” reading, in which the ability of Aeneas, or anyone else for that matter, to achieve his personal and public goals is called into question. In the end, however, La Cerda’s interpretation of the final scene of the Aeneid is worth the attention we have paid to it. Drawing unexpectedly on Aristotle’s Poetics, it demonstrates a striking capacity to move beyond the critical commonplaces of La Cerda’s day. The perspective it opens up contributed in a significant way to the success of another great epic poem, and it offers potential as well to modern discussions of the Aeneid. I suspect that within the other three million words of La Cerda’s commentary, other insights of equal value lie hidden.

33 For further discussion of these two approaches with basic bibliography, see the preface to my The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), v–x. A good, even-handed analysis of the end of the Aeneid that takes into account the merits of both perspectives may be found in N. Horsfall, “Aeneid, Book 12: Justice and Judgment,” in A Companion to the Study of Virgil, ed. N. Horsfall (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 192–216.

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5 NICODEMUS FRISCHLIN’S DIDO Virgil on the German stage

I The author of the play I will be considering here, Nicodemus Frischlin (1547– 1590), is a major humanist whose life (unlike that of most academics today!) is as interesting as his work.1 At age thirteen he composed a translation of Psalm 23 in Greek distichs, which must have suggested even then the kind of career for which he was destined. Three years later he entered the University of Tübingen, where he received the Bachelor of Arts degree the following year and the Master of Arts a year after that. By 1568, at the age of twenty-one, he had been named Professor Poetices et Historiarum at Tübingen. Frischlin also found favor with Duke Ludwig of Württemberg, receiving the titles poeta laureatus in 1576 and comes palatinus (a member of the lower nobility) the next year. One would think that the future would be bright for a prodigiously talented young humanist with good political connections, but in fact the success that Frischlin seemed to merit continued to elude him. This may have been due in part to jealousy on the part of those who resented his early successes, but Frishlin was also his own worst enemy: vain and easily offended, plagued as well by fits of drunkenness and sexual indiscretion, he quickly alienated almost the entire faculty senate at Tübingen and never did attain the rank of ordinarius. Things began to spiral downward rapidly in 1580, when he tried to publish his Oratio de vita rustica, a speech about peasant life that had served as the introduction to his lectures on Virgil’s Georgics in the preceding academic year. Word got out that the speech contained criticism of corruption in the nobility, which caused such an uproar that Frischlin was forced to leave Tübingen.

1 Although the basic study of Frischlin’s life and works remains D. F. Strauss, Leben und Schriften des Dichters und Philologen Nicodemus Frischlin: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte in der zweiten Hälfte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt/M. 1856, a good overview with relevant bibliography can be found in W. Kühlmann, “Nicodemus Frischlin (1547–1590): Der unbequeme Dichter,” in P. G. Schmidt (ed.), Humanismus im deutschen Südwesten: Biographische Profile, Sigmaringen 1993, 265–88. See also D. Price, The Political Dramaturgy of Nicodemus Frischlin: Essays on Humanist Drama in Germany, Chapel Hill and London 1990, 1–6.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-7

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Less than two years later he was back, but he was banished again after a sexual escapade that Duke Ludwig could not ignore. From this point on, things went from bad to worse. Frischlin searched unsuccessfully for a suitable position throughout Germany, then hit upon the idea of setting up a printing press. He asked Duke Ludwig, who had remained remarkably patient with him over the years, to intercede with his wife’s relatives so that he could get access to the principal from a trust fund they controlled, but in doing so he also threatened to continue publishing pamphlets attacking his former colleague at Tübingen, Martin Crusius – something he had specifically promised not to do when he was banished. He then threatened to attack Ludwig’s advisors in print, at which point Ludwig had him arrested and imprisoned under conditions designed to teach Frischlin some humility. He died some time later, falling to his death in a vain attempt to escape from prison. Notwithstanding the questionable aspects of his character, there was no denying his talent. He translated works by Callimachus, Aristophanes, and Tryphiodorus into Latin and wrote paraphrases of works by Virgil, Horace, and Persius. He also wrote a dictionary, a Latin grammar, and an introduction to classical rhetoric, along with more than two dozen books of poetry and the Hebrais, a biblical epic in the manner of Virgil. But he is best known as a dramatist: indeed his plays were published collectively at least seventeen times within a fifty-year period and individually in some thirty additional editions.2 Much of the modern scholarship on Frischlin has been devoted to these plays. One of them (Julius Redivivus), however, has attracted most of the attention, and the prevailing approach has been to focus on the relationship between Frischlin’s life and work and to explore the social and political dimensions of his drama. The title page of one of the early editions of his works, however, reminds us that Frischlin had been Orator et Poeta Coronatus, and he had been a professor of poetics at the university. I therefore think a good deal can be gained by shifting our attention to an approach that focuses more narrowly on questions of literary interpretation and classroom practice. In the essay that follows, I shall take up these questions in reference to Dido, a work that David Price, who has written extensively and well on Frischlin’s drama, labels one of the “minor plays” and sets aside, in favor of the “major plays.”3 Dido is a paraphrase of Book 4 of the Aeneid, which makes it seem an unlikely object of study. As recent scholarship on other Virgilian centos has shown, however, works like these embody the values

2 Price, Political Dramaturgy, 4, with an extensive bibliographical survey on 133–40. 3 Price, Political Dramaturgy, 4–6, with the quotation on 5. Similarly F. Rädle, “Einige Bemerkungen zu Frischlins Dramatik,” in S. P. Revard, F. Rädle, and M. A. Di Cesare (eds.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Guelpherbytani, Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Wolfenbüttel 12 August to 16 August 1985, Binghamton 1988, 290–97 dismisses Dido and Venus (another paraphrase) “als Vergil-Centones das 1. bzw 4. Buch der Aeneis dramatisch wiedererzählen” (290). Far and away the best analysis of Frischlin’s plays is Price, Political Dramaturgy, which also provides a reliable orientation to pre-1990 scholarship.

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and aesthetic principles of their compilers as well as those of the original.4 In this case, we shall see that Dido has a good deal to tell us about genre theory, educational goals, and reading practices in early modern Germany.

II Let us begin with the question of genre. Frischlin begins the dedicatory epistle that serves as an introduction to the play by stating that “Omnes Virgilianae Aeneidis libros esse Tragicos, aut certe instar Tragoediarum, nemo ignorat.”5 He then explains why this is so. In each book, we find dialogue, individuals of noble character and status, and magnificent language and actions, all of which are necessary in tragedy as well as epic. Significantly, moreover, every book except the first has a catastrophe, the sad deaths of one or more great people: Creusa in Book 2, Anchises in Book 3, and so forth. So, just as Sophocles and Euripides composed tragedies from the epics of Homer, Frischlin fashioned a tragedy from the Aeneid of Virgil. Behind these brief, cryptic comments lies a theory of genre that was commonly accepted in the Renaissance and that tells us a good deal about what a play like Dido would have meant in its own day. One of the major advances in Renaissance literary criticism was the effective rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics. Here Aristotle asserted that epic and tragedy are closely related, containing four elements in common (plot, character, thought, and language) that would make it easy to convert a work written in one form into the other. More importantly, both epic and tragedy share the same object of imitation, people “better than” average (Poetics 1448b24–27, 1454a16–20). The referent here is both moral and social – that is, the hero is someone of noble character, to be sure, but also of noble birth, since the idea that someone like Jesus could be the son of a carpenter proved troubling both in antiquity and in the Renaissance.

4 This point becomes clear during the discussion in G. H. Tucker, “Mantua’s ‘Second Virgil’: Du Bellay, Montaigne and the Curious Fortune of Lelio Capilupi’s Centones ex Virgilio (Rome, 1555),” in G. Tournoy and D. Sacré (eds.), Ut Granum Sinapis: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Jozef IJsewijn, Leuven 1997, 264–91. Sibylla Capitolina, Publii Virgilii Maronis Poemation,‘Oxonii’ [i.e., Amsterdam] 1726, exemplifies the same point, using Virgilian hexameters to make Christ into a Jansenist and to recount a history of the Jansenist disputes. It is worth noting that as Kühlmann, “Nicodemus Frischlin,” 269–72, observes, Virgil remained a preoccupation of Frischlin’s for many years, so the decision to write this “minor play” was not a casual one. 5 For reasons that will become clear at the end of this essay, I am using the editio princeps, N. Frischlin, Dido, tragoedia nova, ex quarto libro Virgilianae Aeneidos . . ., Tübingen, Alexander Hockius 1581, f. A2r; further references to this edition will be placed in the text. A modern edition of the play also appeared recently in N. Frischlin, Hildegardis Magna; Dido; Venus; Helvetiogermani: Historisch-kritische Edition, Übersetzung, Kommentar, ed., trans., and com. by N. Kaminski, Bern and New York 1995, 1.243–301, 604–10. The commentary to the modern edition is useful, but it is almost as hard to find as the sixteenth-century one (OCLC lists twenty-seven libraries holding the former, compared to only ten for the latter).

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For Aristotle, epic was the inferior genre, since, lacking two of tragedy’s six elements (music and spectacle), it had to remain an incomplete form of drama in developmental terms. For Aristotle’s Renaissance commentators, however, the hierarchy was generally reversed. The epic hero’s behavior should be exemplary, but the tragic hero had to have a flaw, which was understood in Frischlin’s day as a moral failing that led to a catastrophe the character deserved and that could teach the audience about life. The character of the protagonist determined the ranking of the form: tragic heroes are inferior to epic heroes, so tragedy is inferior to epic. In practice, however, the boundary between the two forms was fluid. The Iliad, for example, is most difficult indeed to fit into this scheme, since it certainly seems that the poem is about the tragic effects of unbridled anger, with the poem depicting a punishment that the protagonist richly deserves. Occasionally critics in the Renaissance recognized a sort of intermediate form that we might call the “admonitory epic,” in which the hero exemplifies a vice rather than a virtue like we find in Ulysses and Aeneas.6 It does not require a great deal of imagination to see how Book 4 of the Aeneid could be interpreted from within this framework. Dido is both high-born and noble in character, except for the passionate love that consumes her, both figuratively and literally. The subject of an admonitory epic – or an admonitory section of a larger epic – can easily become a tragic protagonist, which in this case has the added advantage of deflecting criticism away from Aeneas. This point is important because, as O. B. Hardison, Jr. has shown, both epic and tragedy were generally envisioned in the Renaissance within the framework of epideictic rhetoric. This, the third branch of classical rhetoric (genus demonstrativum), embraces the celebratory oratory of special occasions in which communities affirm their shared values, with an emphasis on the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice as these moral categories are understood within a particular culture. In the Renaissance, rhetoric and poetics had become so intertwined that the consequences could simply be stated, without proof: “Homer composed the Iliad in praise of Achilles; and the Odyssey in praise of Ulysses,” as Minturno put it.7 By Frischlin’s day, Virgil’s Aeneid had been interpreted in this way for centuries. Donatus, for example, finds the Aeneid a fully developed rhetorical treatise, with Virgil’s genre being “laudativum” (that is, epideictic). Thus Virgil’s goal is to show that Aeneas is free from every shortcoming and exemplary in every way, and Donatus is convinced that Virgil praises Aeneas’s virtues on every possible occasion: he is a good leader, pious toward the gods, chaste (!), handsome and brave, and so forth. Fulgentius’s Expositio Virgilianae continentiae secundum philosophos moralis adopts the same approach, defining Aeneas as a subject for 6 O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice, Westport 1973 (first printed edition in 1962 in Chapel Hill), 68–95. These points can be followed in more detail in B. Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago 1961. 7 Qtd. in Hardison, Enduring Monument, 72.

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praise and rearranging the narrative structure of the Aeneid so that Virgil’s poem becomes a paradigm of personal growth toward moral maturity. As I have shown elsewhere, this same critical perspective guided the way that the first generations of Italian humanists interpreted the Aeneid,8 and from them it passed through Renaissance Europe as humanism spread in all directions. This is the tradition within which Frischlin was working. In his Oratio de imitatione, for example, he shows that rhetoric and poetics are interrelated in precisely the way I have been discussing, with genres like the ode, elegy, and satire deriving directly from oratoria demonstrativa. The situation is a little more complicated with tragedy and epic, since Frischlin’s efforts in this treatise to organize speech according to whether it is formal or informal, and whether it is directed toward events in the present or toward those in the past or future, obscure somewhat the direct relationship between these genres and epideictic rhetoric.9 But as David Price points out, “In all his plays, Frischlin lapses into rhetorical posturing along the lines of the genus demonstrativum,”10 and in the introduction to his Dido, Frischlin states clearly that he is zealous to take from Virgil “vitam & mores eorundem, propositis exemplis virtutum ex iisdem” (f. A3v). His rhetorical preoccupations are clear as well in his desire that the play be performed rather than merely read. In this way memory, pronunciation, and gesture – elements of speech-making as well – might be exercised, “ut aliquando viri facti, promtius & cordatius coram aliis, praesertim in coetibus & conventibus publicis loquantur” (f. A3r). The goal was that “animum accendi & excitari in tenera aetate” (f. A3r), so that the practice of virtue can be actively inculcated. This being the case, what moral lessons does Frischlin expect his Dido to offer? Since this is a play, not a treatise or even a work of criticism, we shall have to infer the answer, but it is not difficult to do so, given the subject matter of Aeneid 4 and Frischlin’s other work. The key issue in Aeneid 4, of course, is how sexual passion is handled, when it can legitimately be indulged, and what the consequences are for society and the individual if it is not controlled – a point that is emphasized on the title page of the editio princeps, which states that this is a play “in quo ardentissimus amor Didonis in Aeneam, & Tragicus eiusdem exitus, describitur.” In Virgil’s day, as in Frischlin’s, the principal means for channeling sexual desire was marriage, which is a recurrent theme in Frischlin’s drama. Indeed, as Fidel Rädle notes, two of Frischlin’s Biblical plays, Rebecca and Susanna, along with his Hildegardis Magna, function as explicit praise of marriage and the faithful wife within a Lutheran theological framework.11 In light of the connection between 8 C. Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance, Hanover and London 1989, with the discussion of Donatus and Fulgentius on 12–14. 9 Price, Political Dramaturgy, 48–49; Chapter 4, “Rhetoric and Political Drama,” 46–68, is a good general discussion of the role of rhetoric in Frischlin’s drama, but without specific reference to Dido. See also D. Price, “Nicodemus Frischlin’s Rhetoric,” in Revard et al., Acta Conventus NeoLatini Guelpherbytani, 531–39. 10 Price, “Nicodemus Frischlin’s Rhetoric,” 538. 11 Rädle, “Einige Bemerkungen,” 294; see also Price, Political Dramaturgy, 58.

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rhetoric and poetics that we have been discussing, David Price has also observed that in Frischlin’s Methodus declamandi, a handbook of demonstrative rhetoric, the discussion centers around how to write a laudatio muliebris.12 Is Dido married? Juno tells Venus (in Frischlin’s paraphrase) “At Dido & Aeneas eandem protinus/Speluncam subibunt. Adero tum: & si mihi tua/Certa hic voluntas, stabili eos connubio/Iungam: & tibi propriam dicabo istam nurum:/ Hymenaeus hic erit . . . ” (f. A8v; cf. Aen. 4.124–27). But immediately afterward the chorus recounts the rumor that followed the union: “Debita fama specieve Dido,/ Impotens mentis, neque nunc amorem/Ipsa furtivum meditatur, & iam/Coniugem Aeneam vocat: hac pudica/voce praetexit malesanam culpam./Sed nefas istuc odiosa nescit/Fama per magnam Libyam tacere” (f. A8v; cf. Aen. 4.170–73). The sexual union in this play is a “nefas.” For Frischlin, in other words, Aeneid 4 is an admonitory epic, a condemnation of unbridled libido and an object lesson on its destructive power. Dido converts epic into tragedy, using a paraphrase of Virgil’s own words to provide an argument e contrario that takes its place alongside Frischlin’s other rhetoricized dramas as an example of how thoroughly epideictic rhetoric had penetrated the genre theory of his day.

III As his introduction makes clear, Dido was written as a school exercise: “Volo enim iuventutem exercere in mea schola Poëtica, ut primo ediscant Virgilii phrasin, & genus illud dicendi grandiloquum ac numeris vinctum.”13 This being the case, the play should provide us with insight into Renaissance education, on both the theoretical and practical levels. And so it does. Frischlin’s first concern, as just noted, was with “Virgilii phrasin.” If the goal was for students really to learn Virgilian expressions – to commit them to memory so they could be recalled and reused – it might seem strange to ‘paraphrase’ the Aeneid: why not just use the real thing and, say, declaim the speeches in class? The answer in part is that as Frischlin’s Jesuit counterparts in particular knew, preparing and presenting an actual play both stimulated student excitement about the material and allowed the school to showcase its work to their parents and the community at large. What is more, Frischlin’s paraphrase is close to the original. Virgilian expressions like “varium et mutabile semper/femina” (Aen. 4.569–70; ff. B8v–C1r) are absorbed directly, and as comparison of the extracts above with the corresponding passages in the Aeneid shows, the language of Dido is consistently Virgilian. To be sure, some of the lines he creates to facilitate the transfer from epic to drama are not inspired; there is, for example, no great poetry in this line: 12 Price, Political Dramaturgy, 48. 13 As J. Parente, Jr., has noted, German humanist drama was often written by schoolmasters for performance by their pupils so that they could improve their command of Latin; see Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in Germany and the Netherlands 1500–1680, Leiden 1987, 6–7.

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“ANNA. Si quid iuvat, paro iussa. DIDO. facis, ut te decet” (f. B8r). But someone who has committed part of this play to memory and performed it would have a ready stock of Virgilian expressions to hand. This is important because throughout early modern Europe, Virgil occupied a central role in classroom instruction. In theory Virgil was simply primus inter pares, one classical author among many in a curriculum that humanist educational theory had broadened beyond what was taught in the medieval schoolroom. In De ordine docendi et studendi (1459), for example, Battista Guarino tells us which authors his father, the famous teacher Guarino da Verona, taught: Valerius Maximus and Justin in history; Virgil, then Lucan, Statius, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s tragedies, Plautus, and Terence among the poets; Cicero for rhetoric, with Quintilian as a supporting text; and Cicero, Aristotle’s Ethics, and Plato in moral philosophy.14 The reading list at St. Paul’s at the end of the seventeenth century included Erasmus, Ovid, and Justin, then Martial, Sallust, Virgil, Cicero’s speeches, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius in Latin, with more work in Greek than was customary on the continent, beginning with the New Testament and an anthology of poets, then moving to Apollodorus on myth, Homer, Aratus, and ‘Dionysius.’15 The problem is that only the best teachers, with the best students, in the best schools, attempted anything this ambitious. In sixteenth-century Brunswick, Cicero, Terence, and Virgil dominated,16 and the same was true in sixteenthcentury Venice, where most of the students learned rhetoric from Cicero’s letters and poetry from Virgil.17 It is worth noting that the emphasis on Virgil’s language is important. Virgil had played a central role in the medieval classroom as well, but it was humanism that stressed the importance of the vocabulary and structure of classical Latin as the best way to absorb and imitate the values of the ancients.18 When Frischlin writes that he wants his students to learn “Virgilii phrasin . . . ut aliquando viri facti, promtius & cordatius coram aliis, praesertim in coetibus & conventibus publicis loquantur” (f. A3r), this is exactly what he means. They will be called upon to speak and write in their professional careers, and to do so successfully, they will need to sound like Cicero and Virgil. But how you say it is not the only important thing; what you say also matters. As Battista Guarino puts it, “Grammaticae autem duae partes, quarum alteram ‘methodicen,’ quae breves omnium orationis partium formulas, id est μεθόδους declarat; alteram ‘hystoricen,’ quae historias et res gestas pertractat, appellant.”19 14 Battista Guarino, A Program of Teaching and Learning, in C. Kallendorf (ed.), Humanist Educational Treatises, Cambridge, MA 2002, 260–309, at 284–93. 15 M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900, Cambridge 1959, 41–42. 16 F. Waquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, trans. John Howe, London and New York 2001, 20. 17 P. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore and London 1989, 205–6. 18 E. Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. P. Munz, New York 1965, xix–xxi. 19 Battista Guarino, A Program, 268.

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Here res gestae should be construed broadly: the distinction is between style and content, as the following list of recommended authors, which includes poets, confirms. Similarly Frischlin wants his students to be informed about “non modo illorum linguas eleganti oratione, ex Caesaris & Virgilii libris, sed etiam vitam & mores eorundem, propositis exemplis virtutum ex iisdem” (f. A3v). As Frischlin stated in his introduction, he wanted his students to have more than just a passive knowledge of the Aeneid: they should know its language and its values, but they should also be prepared to use these words and ideas in speeches of their own. How, exactly, did the Renaissance student make this transition? Frischlin does not address this question directly, but the educational theorists of his day did. And, as we shall see, Dido – or more specifically, the copy of Dido I happened to read in preparing this essay – provides an example of how this works. In De ordine docendi et studendi, Battista Guarino explains how a volume of classical literature would have been read in his day: Sed omnino illud teneant, ut semper ex iis quae legunt conentur excerpere. . . . Ea vero potissimum excerpent, quae et memoratu digna et paucis in locis inveniri videbuntur. Erit hoc etiam ad orationis tum copiam tum promptitudinem valde idoneum, si inter legendum ex variis libris sententias quae ad eandem materiam pertinent adnotabunt, et in unum quendam locum colligent, Pythagoreorumque more quicquid excellens interdiu legerint vel audierint vesperi commemorabunt. Imprimuntur enim ea confirmatione adeo ut non nisi difficillime ex memoria aboleri queant. . . .20 Reading, in other words, is tied to excerpting, selecting passages that are exemplary for their diction or content and recording them in a notebook. This practice was generally called “commonplacing,” and the notebook, a “commonplace book.” The heading for each page was a topic, and the page was filled with extracts from different authors that illustrate the given topic. Students began making their notebooks in school, but they were designed to be kept, augmented, and referred to throughout their lives. When it came time to draft a letter or compose a speech, appropriate phrases and insightful maxims were readily to hand, if not in the writers’ memories, then in their commonplace books.21 Just a little while ago I purchased a book that illustrates very nicely how this works. The book is entitled Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, in locos communes digesta . . . – that is, it is a published commonplace book, with all the passages taken from the poetry of Virgil. As the title page indicates, it was published In gratiam Turnoniae iuventutis, & omnium poëtices studiosorum by the university 20 Battista Guarino, A Program, 294–96. 21 A. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford 1996; and E. Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, New Haven 2001.

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printer in Tournon, in 1597, just sixteen years after Frischlin’s Dido.22 It was clearly aimed at a student market, to help university students handle a major curriculum author in accordance with the expectations of the educational system of the day. The headings (the “loci communes”) for “A” are representative: “Achilles,” “admirari,” “Aeneas,” “aestas,” “aetas aurea,” “aetas ferrea,” “ager,” “agni,” “agricola,” “amare,” “amicus,” “amica,” “amicitia,” and “amor.” Ranged under these headings are passages taken from the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid that illustrate the heading in a stylistically memorable way. Under “amicitia et amor,” for example, we have “Me tamen urit amor, quis enim modus adsit amori?” (Ecl. 1.68; p. 19), and from Ecl. 10.69, “Omnia vincit amor, & nos cedamus amori” (p. 20). There is a premium placed on aphorisms, short, pithy sayings that make a point expeditiously, but longer passages are quoted as well. Here is one that is especially relevant to Frischlin’s dramatic project: “At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura./Vulnus alit venis, & caeco carpitur igni./Multa viri virtus animo, multisque recursat/Gentis honos: haerent infixi pectore vultus,/Verbaque: nec placidam membris dat cura quietem” (Aen. 4.1–5; p. 22). It is easy to see how these passages could be quoted any time a writer needed to describe someone in love. If he wanted to stress the irresistible force of love, the line from Eclogue 10 was to hand; if he wanted a reference to how the lover feels, there was the passage from Eclogue 1; and so forth. This book contains almost eight hundred pages, so there was something for almost any situation. And the 1597 Tournon volume was not the only published Virgilian commonplace book: I also have a copy of the Osservationi d’Oratio Toscanella . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio (Venice, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari 1567), which functions in exactly the same way. To summarize thus far: Frischlin’s Dido is inextricably bound to an educational practice in which classical texts were approached as repositories of stylistic examples and moral wisdom, with relevant passages rearranged under topical headings that would facilitate their recall and reuse in the original compositions and speeches of the students. Now as we all know, it is very difficult to prove anything in the area of literary history. At times, however, the stars line up properly and one gets incontrovertible proof of the point he is trying to make. This is one of those times. In preparing this essay, I used a microfilm of the 1581 editio princeps of Dido that had been printed in Tübingen and made its way eventually to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. This copy had an early reader, who went through the book underlining passages and writing a few words in the margin. The educational practice of the day encouraged students to write glosses in their books, especially, as Battista Guarino put it, if they intended to publish them someday.23 The marginalia in this book, however, are far too few to make up a commentary. 22 [P. M. Coysardus,] Publii Virgilii Maronis opera in locos communes digesta, recognita, et abunde locupletata . . ., Tournon, Claudius Michael 1597. References to this book will appear in the text. 23 Battista Guarino, A Program, 294.

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In fact, they are striking in their banality – ”Nox,” “Aurora,” and so forth – until we realize what the reader is doing. Next to “Nox,” for example, this early reader underlines “nigrave nox palum caligine/Involuit” (f. A5v), and next to “Aurora” he underlined “humentemve amictum roscidis/Aurora bigis coelitus dimoverit” (f. A5v). Given what we have seen, it is clear what is going on here: this reader is preparing his text for commonplacing, underlining passages that strike him and putting the heading in the margin, so that the passages can be transferred into the right spots in his commonplace book. The reader stopped writing in the margin after the first couple of pages, but he continued underlining, at least sporadically, throughout the volume. Among the passages he underlined is this one: “DIDO. Pudor innocentem proteget: tutissimum/Adversus hostium arma propugnaculum./ ANNA. Saepe pudor armis vincitur: saepe improbus/Mortalium furor probans laedit fidem” (f. A6v). The missing heading is obviously “pudor,” and it is worth noting that these stichomythic aphorisms are perfect for a rhetorical environment in which different circumstances demand that one be prepared to take either position in an argument. To defend the power of “pudor,” use the first two lines; to show its limitations, use the next two. In the end, then, the reading practices of Frischlin’s day were quite unlike ours, for we could hardly imagine a young Silvio Berlusconi, for example, heading into Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid in pursuit of felicitous expressions and quotable adages in Latin with which to adorn his future speeches. But in an environment where this is what the students who were destined to rule regularly did, a play like Dido makes sense, as a way to focus attention on key passages and facilitate their use, first in commonplace books, then in letters, speeches, and other ‘original’ compositions.

IV I am not, in the end, prepared to argue that Dido should take its place alongside Julius Redivivus as one of Frischlin’s major plays. But neither would I argue that it deserves the oblivion into which it has sunk. It is one of a dozen Neo-Latin plays derived from the Aeneid that were written between 1550 and 1650, but Frischlin is the only author of any note among the writers of these dramas.24 To be sure, Dido is a paraphrase, which binds it more closely than most other types of imitation to the work on which it is modeled. But in moving his material from epic to tragedy, Frischlin shows us how he understood those two genres, in their relationship to demonstrative rhetoric. And the early reader of the Folger copy of the play shows

24 L. Bradner, “The Latin Drama of the Renaissance (1340–1640),” Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957), 31–54, at 47–48. A list of these plays may be found in C. Kallendorf, “Inclyta Aeneis: A Sixteenth-Century Neo-Latin Tragicomedy,” in R. Schnur et al. (eds.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis, Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Copenhagen 12 August to 17 August 1991, Binghamton 1994, 529–36, at 529 n. 1; this article studies another one of the Neo-Latin plays derived from the Aeneid, the Inclyta Aeneis of Joannes Lucienbergius.

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us how the classics were read in his day, as shards of stylistic elegance and moral wisdom that needed to be reorganized under topical headings, commonplaces, that would facilitate their reuse in a culture that demanded at least the veneer of classical learning as the ticket to success. Frischlin’s Dido therefore offers us a window into the literary theory, educational environment, and reading practices of its day, which more than merits, I believe, the time I have spent looking at it.

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I. Introduction The Neo-Latin epic presents an unusual series of challenges to the modern reader. In their own day the poems written in this genre, of which there are more than a hundred, were understood to occupy the pinnacle of literary achievement, since they dealt with subjects of the greatest importance and were written in the language of educated people everywhere, giving them a wider potential audience than anything written in the vernacular. Few Neo-Latin epics exist in modern editions, however, and at a time when the easy command of Latin declines with each new generation, their very length works against them, inhibiting access to the original and discouraging the production of translations. What is more, readers whose expectations have been formed by modern, even postmodern critical norms have sometimes found these poems boring. Not all of these problems can be easily solved, but it is possible to chart a path by means of which a group of poems that were esteemed in their own day can at least be understood and respected on their own terms. In the analysis that follows, I shall begin in the same place that early modern readers began, with their understanding of epic as a genre and of the ancient poems on which the Neo-Latin epics were based. These generic expectations in turn generate a classification system in which the dozens of surviving Neo-Latin epics can be placed into categories according to their subject matter. I shall take up each of these categories in turn, explaining key features, listing important poems, and providing a detailed analysis of one or two representative examples along with references to several other significant poems in each category. I shall conclude with some comments on how this approach can help us appreciate the Neo-Latin epic, both historically and aesthetically.

II. The epic in early modern criticism and theory Like most other genres, the Neo-Latin epic was understood to be a continuation of the genre as it was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome. This continuity was

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emphasized by the constant reference to ancient epic in Neo-Latin examples of the genre, either through imitation of key scenes or quotation of memorable lines. In early modern criticism the poems of Homer were regularly held up alongside Virgil’s Aeneid as the model ancient epics, but in practice the Iliad and the Odyssey were much less influential than their Latin successor.1 In part this is due to linguistic accident – pride of place in the humanist schools almost always went to Latin – but it is also due to the fact that the Aeneid fit better into the theory of what epic should be than the Homeric poems. This theory can already be found in fully developed form in the commentary of Tiberius Claudius Donatus (fourth cent. AD) to the Aeneid. Donatus argued that Virgil’s goal was to show Aeneas as “vacuus omni culpa et magno praeconio preaferendus” (“free of all guilt and one most worthy to be publicly presented with great commendation”), with the detailed observations suggesting that Aeneas was a good leader (on Aen. 1.159–79), pious toward the gods (on Aen. 1.379), handsome and brave (on Aen. 1.594–95), and so forth. Donatus’s basic approach continued through the Expositio Virgilianae continentia secundum philosophos moralis of Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (ca. 467–532) into the Renaissance, where we find it again in the influential commentary to the Aeneid published in 1488 by Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), who argues that Virgil “vitia insectatur” (“rails at vices”) and follows the various virtues in the poem with praises, so that “universum huius scriptoris poesim laudem esse virtutis” (“this writer’s entire poem praises virtue”).2 Behind these comments lay the belief that poetry was designed to praise virtue and condemn vice. Strictly speaking praise and blame are the distinguishing attributes not of poetry but of epideictic, one of the three branches of rhetoric. But by the fourth century AD poetics had become so thoroughly rhetoricized that Donatus could describe the Aeneid as “artem dicendi plenissimam” (“a most thorough rhetorical treatise”) and the genus of the poem as “laudativum” (“encomiastic”), that is, epideictic.3 The object of epideictic, what it was designed to focus on, was virtue and vice. This approach, whereby the poet praised virtue and condemned vice, provided the foundation for literary criticism of the epic in the early modern period. There were certainly other approaches to poetry at this time, but the rhetorical one was seen to be compatible with them. Plato, for example, had famously expelled the poets from his ideal republic for luring men to vice, but he made an exception for “hymns to the gods and praises of famous men” (Republic 10, 607), which sounded like another version of epideictic. In De oratore 1.15 Cicero had

1 In The Faerie Queene, for example, Edmund Spenser wrote that he “followed all the antique Poets historically, first Homere, . . . then Virgil . . .”; see O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973; rpt. of 1962 edn.), 81. 2 Ibid., 3–42; and Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: The University Press of New England, 1989), 1–18. 3 Ibid., 12.

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used epideictic to link poetry to moral philosophy, arguing that it allowed the orator to help the philosopher by praising virtue and condemning vice in a way that appealed to a broader audience than the philosopher could reach. Horace’s Ars poetica, which remained influential through the middle of the fifteenth century, was also swept into the same general approach. Lines 333–34 offer the famous prescription that poetry should offer the reader either profit or delight; Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the leading Florentine scholar in the generation after Petrarca, glossed these lines rhetorically, so that condemnation corresponded to profit and praise to delight. In the end Aristotle dominated the critical climate in early modern Europe, but Aristotelian criticism was permeated by praise and blame as well. The corrupt version that emerged in the translation made by Hermannus Alemannus (fl. mid-13th cent.) of the paraphrase-commentary on the Poetics of Averroes (1126–1198) made poetry a branch of logic that utilized praise and blame. The placement into logic gradually disappeared as Italian critics became increasingly sophisticated in their approach to Aristotle in the sixteenth century, but the epideictic flavor remained, sometimes overtly, sometimes less so. The commentary of Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–1578), for example, places poetry within practical philosophy along with ethics, arguing that it imitates and praises virtuous men in order to excite the reader to become like its heroes. This approach seemed justified by Aristotle’s famous history of generic evolution, in which one group of poems represented the noble actions of noble characters and the other imitated the actions of the ignoble. Epic was part of the first group, sometimes second to tragedy as Aristotle seems to have intended, but sometimes postulated as superior on the argument that the epic hero lacks the flaw possessed by his counterpart in tragedy.4 Much depends on the recognition that for the writer of Neo-Latin epic, the hero of the poem had to embody praiseworthy virtue. Not every poet believed that the hero had to be morally perfect, but even for those who did not, he had to be close. This belief was the foundation on which Neo-Latin epic was built, for it determines what kind of main character the poem should have and how he (or occasionally she) was supposed to act. Such a character could come from the distant classical past, the more recent medieval past, or the contemporary present. Or, if Aristotle’s scheme was carried to its logical conclusion, the hero could come from the Bible or some other source from religious history. A final possibility, also with Aristotelian roots, was the burlesque epic, a parody along the lines of the Batrachomyomachia. These – classical, medieval, contemporary, religious, and burlesque – are the main types of Neo-Latin epic.

4 Hardison, 24–36. See also the fundamental work in the area, Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974; rpt. of 1961 edn.).

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III. Types of Neo-Latin epic A. Hero from the classical past The first Neo-Latin epic, the Africa of Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), remains the best known poem of its kind, one whose ambivalent reception can help us understand both the promise and the perils of the genre. The poem celebrates Scipio Africanus the Elder and his victory over Hannibal in the Second Punic War. The historical basis of the poem rests in Livy, and other sources, like Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, are important as well, but as critics have noted for decades, the Africa is an intensely Virgilian poem. Accordingly in this section I shall read three key passages from the Africa against their Virgilian intertexts to show how Petrarca’s rhetoricized poetics shapes his poem and its fortunes. Following an epic invocation, the Africa opens with a dream in which Scipio Africanus talks with his father and uncle. This discussion, which extends through the end of the second book, is obviously based on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and the commentary written to it by Macrobius, but it draws from Book 6 of the Aeneid as well, where Aeneas also talks to his father in a vision, which is presumably some sort of dream. Scipio is told that while he is on earth, he should cultivate trustworthiness and justice, that pietas should be his constant companion and virtue should be focused on parents, country, and God (1.481–86). Those who do this will attain Heaven, just as Anchises explains in the Aeneid (6.739–44). Anchises’s speech is followed by a parade of heroes from Roman history, just as the explanation of Scipio’s father is in the Africa. Some of Virgil’s heroes (cf. Aen. 6.817 and 823 on Brutus) occupy a position that is morally ambiguous, but this is not the case for Petrarca, who presents heroes who are consistently “vere virtutis amicos” (“friends of true virtue all”; 1.548). His vision ends with the battle between Rome and Carthage, where the moral battle lines are clearly drawn: on the side of Scipio we find Virtue, Honor, Decorum, Faith, Piety, and Justice, while Hannibal’s support rests in Fury, Frenzy, Fraud, Contempt for God, Lust, and Crime in all its forms (2.62–69). Unlike Virgil, Petrarca put his otherworldly vision at the beginning of his poem, to serve as a blueprint for what would follow. It is difficult to imagine a Virgilian epic without a Dido story; Petrarca’s has one, but not exactly as we might expect to see it. Dido herself appears in the Africa, at 3.418–27 and again at 4.2–6, but in both places Petrarca is at pains to distance himself from Virgil by stressing Dido’s chastity. He is drawing on an alternative account that rests in a series of late antique and early Christian authors who argued that the historical Dido lived three hundred years after Aeneas and therefore could not have gotten involved romantically with him. Instead Petrarca tells a version of the Dido and Aeneas story, but with different characters. At the beginning of Book 5, Scipio’s ally Massinissa occupies the city of Syphax, who lost his kingdom because he allied himself with Hannibal. Massinissa finds there Syphax’s wife, with whom he falls madly in love, eventually cohabiting with her as Aeneas did with Dido. Like Aeneas, Massinissa needs to be reminded

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of where his proper priorities lie, but his reminder comes not from a god, but from a mortal hero whose self-control is godlike (5.555–56): Scipio. This change is important. Petrarca acknowledges in Seniles 4.5 that even a hero of Aeneas’s moral strength was ensnared momentarily by sexual indiscretion. But his Aeneas figure, Scipio, is already above all this: Massinissa is the one who goes astray, while Scipio serves as the godlike voice of reason and self-control who censures vice and praises virtue in others. In this way he uses an obvious Virgilian intertext to magnify the praises of his own epic hero. Given this background, it should not surprise us to find that when the battle is joined in Book 6, the moral lines remain clear. The Carthaginians are a “perfida gens” (“treacherous race,” 6.120), and Hannibal, like Virgil’s arch-villain Mezentius, is called “dux ferus et celi contemptor maximus alti” (“this scorner of the heavens, this savage chief”; 6.485). Scipio, his eyes fixed firmly on heaven and virtue’s beauty (8.630–31), rebukes the perfidy of Carthage and grants terms to the enemy (8.642–49). Hasdrubal goes to Rome and sues for peace, acknowledging his people’s guilt and thanking the victors for their generosity (8.700–826). He is then given a tour of Rome that reminds us of Evander’s in Aeneid 8.314ff., with Hasdrubal’s tour serving to highlight the virtues of a people who could produce a Horatius and a Lucretia just as Aeneas’s celebrated the primitive pastoral virtues on which Augustus’s Rome was built. The Africa ends with Scipio’s return to Italy and triumph in Book 9, where the poet Ennius moves to immortalize him as one “qui carminibus cumulare decorum/Virtutis queat egregie monimentaque laudum” (“skilled in use of lofty verse/to sing their virtues and proclaim their praise”; 9.56–57). A careful reading of the Africa next to its Virgilian intertext shows clearly what Petrarca was trying to do. What is less clear is how successful he was at it. Petrarca himself seems to have felt that something was wrong, for he continued revising the poem until his death and jealously guarded it from the sight of those who had heard about it and were pressing to see it. Several modern scholars have complained that the characters are too extreme in their moral stances, so that they have become lifeless abstractions: Bergin and Wilson, who translated the poem into English, complain, for example, that “the Africa has a fatal flaw: it presents us with a flawless hero, . . . [one who] is simply too good to be true.”5 This may well be correct, but it is the almost inevitable result of a poetics in which the epic exists to praise the virtue of the protagonist and condemn the vices of his adversary. At any rate it appears that other poets felt Petrarca’s failure acutely, for of all the many surviving Neo-Latin epics, only a handful of fairly late efforts (e.g., the Constantinus of Alexander Donatus (1584–1640)

5 Kallendorf, 31–57, with the quotation on 55. Quotations from the Africa are taken from Nicola Festa’s edition (Florence: Sansoni, 1926), with English translations from Petrarch’s Africa, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

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and the Alexandrias of Francisco Javier Alegre (1729–1788)) focused on a hero from antiquity.6 B. Hero from the medieval past Notwithstanding the humanists’ fulminations against all things medieval, another small group of Neo-Latin epics sing the praises of heroes from the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most interesting of this group is a fifteen-book poem about Charlemagne, the Carlias, by Ugolino Verino (1438–1516). The poem begins with a storm at sea, which drives Charlemagne, returning from his time in the east, off course to Epirus. In Books 2–4 he describes to the king of Epirus his crusade, first in Jerusalem, then in Babylon, in a section with obvious links to other NeoLatin epics about the crusades (e.g., the lost Solymis of Johannes Maria Cataneus (fl. Rome 1500–1520) and the Syrias of Petrus Angelius Bargaeus (1517–1596)). Book 5 recounts a hunt and tournament in Epirus, followed by Charlemagne’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in Books 6–8. In the ninth book Charlemagne leaves Epirus to besiege the Langobard Desiderius. The battle expands to suitably epic proportions, with the Tuscan and Umbrian city-states coming to Charlemagne’s aid and the African and Spanish troops reinforcing Desiderius. In the end Desiderius is taken prisoner and the heathens are defeated; Florence is rebuilt (Verino was a Florentine), Charlemagne is crowned emperor in Rome, and a triumph is celebrated in Aachen. The structural model for this poem, again, is Virgil’s Aeneid, beginning with the opening storm at sea, extending through the descent to the underworld, and ending with the military victory in Italy. Charlemagne is the new Aeneas, as he was understood through the filter of early modern epic theory, the hero who never loses a battle and is never at a loss for counsel – he is the embodiment of virtue, and the poem is written in praise of him. It is worth noting, however, that this poem occupies a sort of liminal position between the Neo-Latin culture in which it was written and the medieval culture of its subject. The passage through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven has obvious parallels to Book 6 of the Aeneid, but Verino also draws heavily on the Divine Comedy, paying homage to Dante but also offering a subtle critique of his poem. Nikolaus Thurn has shown that Verino is also heavily indebted to the vernacular chivalric literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mixing in material about Orlando and Rinaldo from writers such as Andrea 6 Jozef IJsewijn, with Dirk Sacré, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, Part 2: Literary, Linguistic, Philological and Editorial Questions, 2nd edn. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1998), 26; and Heinz Hofmann, “Von Africa über Bethlehem nach America. Das Epos in der neu-lateinischen Literatur,” in Von Göttern und Menschen erzählen. Formkonstanzen und Funktionswandel vormoderner Epik, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001), 137–39. As IJsewijn and Sacré noted a decade or so ago, “[n]o systematic survey of Neo-Latin epic poetry seems to exist . . .” (24). Hofmann’s essay, which appeared three years later, is an admirable first effort, but much more remains to be done in this area. Many poems are still unavailable in modern editions, although new titles enter the scholarly literature regularly.

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da Barberino and Luigi Pulci. The fanciful features of this world extend to the very core of the poem – the historical Charlemagne never visited Babylon – producing a poem that looks backward to the medieval past at the same time as it adopts features from the revival of classical epic in the Renaissance.7 Neo-Latin epics set in the medieval past, however, can also look forward to the contemporary present, as the Margaretica of Erasmus Laetus (1526–1582) shows. This poem deals with a great military victory in 1389 in which the Danish Queen Margaret triumphed over the Swedish King Albert, which led to the Union of Kalmar, in which Denmark and Sweden were united under the Danish crown. This poem, too, is modeled on the Aeneid, with Queen Margaret being presented, like Aeneas, as the perfect ruler (Laetus was Danish) and King Albrecht being the epitome of tyranny. In one key scene Queen Margaret is lying awake at night, uncertain what to do, as Aeneas was in Book 2 of the Aeneid. Her answer comes in a dream, not through Hector but through her dead husband, who gives her a vision of the glorious future that will follow the Union of Kalmar if she goes to war against King Albrecht to secure that future. This vision was modeled on Anchises’s parade of heroes in Book 6 of the Aeneid, but it also looks forward to Laetus’s day, much as Anchises’s prophecy spoke to Augustus. The Margaretica was written in 1573, at the conclusion of the Seven Years War between Denmark and Sweden. The prophecy links Denmark to ancient Rome and joins a series of other allusions in the poem to this war, which is made to look like more of a victory for Denmark than it actually was. The Swedish king during the Seven Years War, Erik 14, had the same goal as King Albrecht, to conquer the group of provinces that today comprise the southernmost part of Sweden but that were then Danish. Albrecht failed to accomplish this, which also functions as a reminder that Erik 14 had just failed again at the same task. In other words, a poem set in the medieval past, as Karen Skovgaard-Petersen has shown, could serve as antiSwedish propaganda two hundred years later.8 C. Hero from the contemporary present The most common subject of the Neo-Latin epic was a contemporary figure, usually a ruler but sometimes another famous person, who is praised for a series of virtues in accordance with the prevailing theory of the day. The Este court at Ferrara, for example, stimulated two such epics. The first, by Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (1425?-1505), was the Borsias, a panegyric to Borso d’Este and his son Ercole I. In this epic, Virgilian devices are transferred to Ferrara: instead of the temple of Juno at Carthage, for example, Strozzi’s ecphrasis describes the cathedral of 7 Nikolaus Thurn, “Die Carlias des Ugolino Verino und ihre volkssprachliche Vorbilder,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis, ed. Rhoda Schnur et al. (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1994), 947–55. 8 Karen Skovgaard-Petersen, “Danish Neo-Latin Epic as Anti-Swedish Propaganda,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontoniensis, ed. Alexander Dalzell et al. (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1991), 721–27. See also IJswijn and Sacré, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, 26–27.

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Ferrara, and Mercury is replaced as heavenly messenger by a secretary named Bartolomeo Prospero, who brings Ercole greetings from the Pope. Several generations later Giambattista Giraldi (1504–1573) decided to use the same vehicle, the epic of praise and blame, as a means to seek the same position, court poet, that Strozzi had held. So he composed his De obitu Divi Alfonsi Estensis epicedion, drawing from Strozzi’s unpublished poem to praise the recently deceased Alfonso I and his son Ercole II. An epic device like the catalogue, for example, is used in both poems to present a list of the leading families of Ferrara; Giraldi begins with the list in the Borsias but updates it, drawing these families, indeed the entire city, into the circle of praise.9 A curious extension of this last technique is offered by another Neo-Latin epic set in the same region of Italy, the Mutineis of Francesco Rococciolo (d. 1528). The events described in the poem took place between 1510 and 1517, when Modena served as a political football for the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, the French king, and the local Italian nobles. The Mutineis, however, does not have a single hero: its various books are dominated in turn by Pope Julius II, Duke Alfonso d’Este, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, and Francesco Guicciardini. One could attribute this curious situation to literary incompetence – the Mutineis remained unpublished until just a few years ago – but a close reading of the poem confirms that the lack of a dominating individual is intentional. The real hero of the poem is the people of the city of Modena, who survive misfortune after misfortune by their collective strength of character. This strength of character rests in a commitment to peace, which also sets this poem at odds with the martial nature of ancient epic and poems written in imitation of it. Thus all the key Virgilian devices are present, but adapted to this new perspective. “Ira” (“anger”), for example, remains important, but as a general threat to peace, not as the emotion that one goddess feels toward the protagonist. Indeed there is divine protection, but for all the people of Modena, not one hero alone. There is no love story because that would create an individual focus that is foreign to Rococciolo’s goals. And while the Aeneid ends in a bloody duel, the Mutineis ends with a description of a period of peace.10 More typical are the epics focused on a political ruler. The hero of the Austrias of Riccardo Bartolini (1493–1519), for example, is Emperor Maximilian I, who battles Rupert of Pfalz through the twelve books of this Virgilian epic for control of Bavaria. Bartolini’s epic presents the full range of supernatural activity: Pallas protects Rupert (called Robert in the poem) and Diana stands beside Maximilian, and the poem also contains a descent to the underworld that competes fully with

9 Walther Ludwig, “Strozzi und Giraldi – Panegyrik am Hof der Este [und die Sprachenfrage],” in Miscella Neolatina, ed. Astrid Steiner-Weber, 3 vols. (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2004), 1.486–507. 10 Die Mutineis der Francesco Rococciolo, ed. Thomas Haye (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2006); and Thomas Haye, Francesco Rococciolo’s Mutineis (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2009).

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Virgil’s in both length and complexity. But like Rococciolo, Bartolini makes some of his points through contrast with the Aeneid. It is not Maximilian, the Aeneas figure of the Austrias, who descends to the underworld, but Rupert, his mortal enemy, so the vision leads not to the Elysian Fields but to a river Rhine colored red with blood. Like Turnus, Rupert is driven by “rabies” (“madness”), as a result of which he leaves chaos wherever he goes. Maximilian is the force of order, making this poem a paean of praise for him.11 Another interesting group of poems in this category praises a famous person rather than a ruler. A prime candidate for the most earthshattering event to intrude into Neo-Latin culture was the encounter with the ‘new’ world, so it should not surprise us to find five Neo-Latin poems whose subject in one way or another is Columbus and his voyages: Lorenzo Gambara (ca. 1495–1585), De navigatione Christophori Columbi libri IV; Giulio Cesare Stella (1564–ca. 1624), Columbeidos libri priores duo; Vincentius Placcius (1642–1699), Atlantis retecta sive De navigatione prima Christophori Columbi in Americam; Ubertino Carrara (1642– 1716), Columbus. Carmen epicum; and Johann Christian Alois Mickl (d. 1769), Plus ultra.12 Stella’s is perhaps the most interesting, so I shall look at it in some detail. The Columbeis tells the story of Columbus’s first voyage, and there is no question that this poem was designed as a close imitation of the Aeneid. On the most basic level, both works are about the founding of an empire, with Columbus serving as an alter Aeneas (other Aeneas) and the Spaniards as Virgil’s Trojans; the Indians function like the Latins in the Aeneid. Jupiter is transformed into God, and Juno’s oppositional role is taken over by Satan. Columbus’s trip across the Atlantic corresponds to the wanderings of Aeneas in Books 3 through 6, with the Columbeis also rewriting a number of key scenes from the Aeneid. The proems in both poems correspond very closely on the thematic and verbal levels, and after the proem Stella launches directly into a storm that is obviously modeled on Aeneid 1. The landing on Haiti combines features from the Trojan landings in Libya (Aen. 1.157 ff.) and Italy (Aen. 7.107 ff.), and Stella describes a special helmet in Col. 2.182–269 in a manner similar to Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield in Aen. 8.626ff. As Richard Waswo has shown, Aeneas’s wanderings westward to Italy were continued by the explorers of the early modern age, who envisioned the ‘new’ world they found in the only way they could, through the filter of the ‘old’ world they knew, with its roots in the classical past. In this way the

11 Gerhild Scholz Williams, “Vergil in Wien: Bartholinis Austriados Libri XII und Jakob Spiegels Kommentar,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Guelpherbytani, ed. Stella P. Revard et al. (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1988), 171–80. 12 Heinz Hofmann, “‘Adveniat tandem Typhis qui detegat orbes’: Columbus in Neo-Latin Epic Poetry (16th–18th Centuries),” in The Classical Tradition and the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1994), pt. 1, 420–656.

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virtues of Columbus are praised in the same way as the virtues of Aeneas, through the rhetoricized epic.13 The largest number of Neo-Latin epics focus on a hero drawn from the contemporary present, so that it is not possible to name them all, but even a representative sampling shows both the breadth and depth of Neo-Latin culture in the early modern period. In Italy, Federico da Montefeltro was the subject of two epics, the Martias of Giovanni Maria Filelfo (1426–1480) and the Feltria of Giannantonio Porcellio de’ Pandoni (ca. 1405–1485). Matteo Zuppardo (15th cent.) praised Alfonso I of Aragon, ruler of Naples, in his Alfonseis, while his son and successor Alfonso II of Naples was the hero of the Alphonsus pro rege Hispaniae de Victoria Granatae of Giovanni Battista Spagnoli, called Baptista Mantuanus (1447–1516). Johannes Bocerus (1516–1565) praised the kings of Denmark and the counts of Holstein in Carminum de origine et rebus gestis regum Daniae et ducum Holsatiae libri V, while Clemens Venceslaus (Klement Václav, ca. 1589– before 1640) focused on the Polish King Ladislaus IV in his Lechias, Jonas Radvanas (d. after 1592) celebrated Nicholas VI Radvila, the defender of Lithuania, in his Radivilias, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary was praised by Thomas Cortesius (ca. 1465–1490) in his De laudibus Matthiae Corvini poemation, Etienne Dolet (1509–1546) praised King Francis I in Francisci Valesii Gallorum regis fata, and William of Orange was the subject of the De rebus gestis Guilielmi comitis Nassovii of Georg Benedicti Wertelo (1563?–1588). Female rulers were praised as well, with Christopher Ocland (d. 1590?) focusing on Elizabeth I of England in his Εἰρηναρχία sive Elizabetha, de pacatissimo Angliae statu, Michael Capellarius (1630–1717) on Queen Christina of Sweden, and an anonymous poet on Maria Theresa in the Theresias. A group of scholars at the University of Vienna are studying the considerable body of Neo-Latin epics focused on the Habsburgs, such as the Encomiastica of Helius Quinctus Aemilianus (Giovanni Stefano Emiliano, ca. 1449–ca. 1496)) on the final years of the fifteenth century and several epics entitled the Austrias, one by Joachim Münsinger (1517–1588) on Charles V and Ferdinand I, one by Rocco Boni (b. 1524) on Ferdinand I, and another by Andreas Gravinus (fl. 1594–1602) on Rudolf II. Research in this area is ongoing; with the Mutineis of Rococciolo being first published in 2006 and the Habsburg project still underway, more poems in this category will undoubtedly be found and analyzed in the coming years.14 D. Hero from the Christian religion Given that the goal of the Neo-Latin epic was to praise its hero, the logical conclusion of this approach was to focus on a hero from the Christian religion, which 13 Craig Kallendorf, “Enea nel ‘Nuovo Mondo’: la Columbeis di Stella e il pessimismo virgiliano,” Studi Umanistici Piceni, 23 (2003), 241–52, with quotations from Julius Caesar Stella, Columbeis, ed. Heinz Hofmann (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1993). 14 Hofmann, “Von Africa über Bethlehem nach America,” 146–60; and IJsewijn and Sacré, 27–29.

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presented virtue at its highest levels. In several cases the religious figure was more or less contemporary, which blurs the lines between this category and the preceding one; examples include the Quinque martyres of Franciscus Bencius (1542–1594), on the death of the fifth Jesuit general and four of his companions in India; the Californiados carmen of José Mariano de Iturriaga (1717–1787), on the missionary activity of the Jesuits in Mexico; and from the Protestant perspective, the Locustae vel pietas Iesuitica of Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650), celebrating Guy Fawkes’s failed Gunpowder Plot. Another group of poems focuses on earlier figures from church history: the Antonias of Maffeo Vegio (1406/7–1458), the Georgius of Giovanni Battista Spagnoli (Baptista Mantuanus, 1446–1516), the Divi Sebastiani Encomion of Macarius Mutius (fl. late 15th cent.), and so forth. More common was the selection of a hero from the Bible. Ulrich Bollinger (fl. 1609), for example, wrote a Moseis and Johannes Mellius (fl. 1615) an In librum Iob paraphrasis poetica, while several Neo-Latin epics were written about Joseph, including Martin Turnau’s Historia Josephi a fratribus in Aegyptum venditi and two Josephais poems by Elias Corvinus (1537–1602) and Paulus Didymus. David was the subject of a series of Neo-Latin epics, including the Davidias of the Croatian Marcus Marulus (1450–1524), a poem of the same name by Bartholomaeus Botta (fl. ca. 1570–1580), and the David necdum Hebraeorum rex of the Dutch poet Petrus Bom. The New Testament drew its share of versifiers as well. A group of poems, for example, was written on Mary: Mantuanus’s Parthenice Mariana, the Theotokon seu de vita et obitu beatae Virginis Mariae of Domenico di Giovanni da Corella (1403–1483), the Poema epicum de conceptione B. Mariae of Manuel de Oliveira Ferreira (1711–1782), and the In B. Mariam Virginem . . . libri VII of Innocentius Polcari (1818–1908).15 The best known poem in this group is the De partu virginis of Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530). This poem focuses on one of the central mysteries of Christianity, the virgin birth, recounting the Annunciation and Visitation beforehand and the rejoicing of the angels and shepherds afterwards. Michael Putnam is undoubtedly right to stress the importance of the Georgics to this poem, but De partu virginis receives its epic grandeur from the Aeneid. There is a vertical dimension to the action, with David and God the Father paralleling the Olympian deities, and Virgil’s Tiber is duly replaced by the Jordan in Sannazaro’s poem. Both poets delight in similes and ecphrases, and Sannazaro also takes over the epic catalogue, listing, for example, the daughters of Jordan and the miracles of Christ. And as one might expect in an example of rhetoricized epic, the speeches are important, expanding noticeably beyond their Virgilian proportions in the poem as a whole.16 If Mary was a good subject for an epic of praise, Christ would be an even better one, as another group of Neo-Latin poets concluded. A partial list would 15 Ibid., 29–31; and Hofmann, “Von Africa über Bethlehem nach America,” 162–73. 16 Jacopo Sannazaro, Latin Poetry, ed. and trans. Michael C. J. Putnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), vii–xxv.

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include the Christias of Humbertus Monsmoretanus (d. ca. 1525), the De vita et gestis Christi of Jacobus Bonus (1469–1534), the Historia Iesu Christi of Georgius Nicolasius (1590–1621), and the Christias of Robertus Clarke (d. 1675).17 In this group should also be placed a Virgilian cento, the Christias of Alexander Ross (1591–1654), which told the life of Christ in lines taken directly from Virgil. These poems are only read by specialists today, but there is one poem in this group that remains among the best known of the Neo-Latin epics, the Christias of Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566). The poem opens with Christ about to enter Jerusalem. In the first book he performs several miracles; in the second, he prophesies his betrayal and capture, which happen as he foretold. Ostensibly the third and fourth books represent the pleas for leniency made by Joseph and John to Pontius Pilate, but this provides the excuse for recounting Christ’s life up to that point. Book 5 depicts Christ’s passion and death, while the sixth book describes his resurrection. The poem concludes with a triumphal vision of the expansion of the Church and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. A closer look at Book 1 will give an idea of how deeply the Christias is permeated by Virgil. The poem begins with an invocation, not to the Muses but to the Holy Spirit, although it should be noted that unlike the more squeamish Neo-Latin poets, Vida regularly refers to God and Heaven in pagan terms, as when a shooting star is described as something “pater superum quam misit Olympo” (“which the Father of angels has sent from heaven,” 1.458) and God is described as “clari . . . rector Olympi” (“the ruler of the bright heavens,” 1.252). As he is about to enter Jerusalem, Christ offers a speech of encouragement that recalls the one Aeneas gave at Aen. 1.198ff., after he and his men have been shipwrecked on the Carthaginian shore. Here Christ takes on the attributes of pious Aeneas, an association that continues throughout the poem. Other epic devices are found, like the assembly of devils at 1.163ff. and the simile comparing Jethro to a snake at 1.505–10. There are also verbal echoes that would be immediately obvious to anyone who had read Virgil, as when Jesus expels the money changers from the temple and charges them to “Discite iustitiam . . .” (“learn justice . . .”; cf. Aen. 6.620). While he is praying there, his disciples study the artistic scenes at the temple in a passage that recalls the Trojans marveling at the temple of Juno in Aen. 1.450ff. As Christ prays to his father at the end of Book 1, he receives an answer that contains a vision of those who will come after him, spreading the Gospel throughout the world and receiving their reward in Christianity’s version of the Elysian Fields, a climactic passage that recalls the vision that Anchises shows Aeneas in Aeneid 6. In this way the heavenly city is presented as the logical extension of the earthly one, with Rome and its master epic providing the foundation for the Christian message and Christ becoming the fullest manifestation of pious Aeneas. Vida’s most recent editor and translator, James Gardner, argues that the main character of the poem is not a complete success in literary terms. He argues that

17 IJsewijn and Sacré, 29–30.

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there is a certain complexity in him, as Jesus becomes by turns angry, inscrutable, kind, and impulsive. He complains, however, that Vida’s hero, as he is often called in the poem, “is not entirely fleshed out.”18 This is true, in the sense that he is often presented more as a symbol of perfection than a man with the kind of human foibles that make a character interesting. Part of the problem here is undoubtedly theological, for while orthodox Christianity has taken pains to repeat that Christ is human, it has also insisted that he is without sin – perfect, in other words. This accords well with the literary theory of the day, in which the epic hero was supposed to present virtues to praise. But as Bergin and Wilson had pointed out in discussing the Africa, a flawless hero is too good to be true; indeed, he quickly becomes boring. This was a problem with the first Neo-Latin epic, and it remains one here: ironically, the more perfectly the genre evolves, the less aesthetically satisfying the results. E. Burlesques Occasionally a lighter tone prevails. Several shorter Neo-Latin epics were written in imitation of the Batrachomyomachia, the battle between the frogs and mice that was once attributed to Homer. Andreas Dactius (Dazzi, 1473–1548) imitated this poem in his Aeluromyomachia, while Jacob Balde (1604–1668) produced his own Batrachomyomachia.19 The most interesting poem of this kind is the Melissomachia, a work produced by the students of the Jesuit college in Brussels under the supervision of Ferdinandus Verbiest (1623–1688). This poem recounts a battle between two groups of bees, the peaceful, prosperous Anthochares (bees rejoicing in flowers) under their beneficent ruler Melissomedon (bee king) and the evil Meloclepti (honey thieves) under the imperialistic Macrogastor (greedy guts). As in the Homeric model, the humor comes from the contrast between describing an altercation between two groups of insignificant little animals as if it were an epic battle between Homeric warriors. All the epic devices are there, from an invocation to the Muses and a council of the gods to a series of hand-to-hand (or wing-to-wing) battles; the main source is the Homeric poems, but the Aeneid is present too, as the opening invocation suggests. Virgil’s “mihi causas memora” (Aen. 1.8) becomes “causam mihi dicite, Musae” in the Melissomachia (5), while “Tantumne irarum in corpora parvo” from the new poem comments ironically on “Tantaene animis caelestibus irae” from the old (Aen. 1.11); for good measure the young poets toss in one of Virgil’s most famous phrases, “bella horrida bella” from Aen. 6.86 as the end of line 2 in their poem. Dirk Sacré, who has written about the Melissomachia, suggests that it has an allegorical overlay as well, with the Anthochares standing for the Spaniards, the Meloclepti representing the French, and the battle referring to Archduke Leopold William’s naval successes on the southern 18 Marco Girolamo Vida, Christiad, trans. James Gardner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), vii–xxviii, with the quotation on xiii. 19 IJsewijn and Sacré, 32–33.

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frontier of the Netherlands.20 Other poems in this group seem harmless on first reading as well, e.g., the Carnivalia of Fridericus Taubmannus (1565–1613), but the Georgontarchontomachia of P. J. Beronicius (d. 1673) also presents political overtones, with the heroes being a group of peasants in their fight against the authorities of Middleburg.21

IV. Conclusion To be sure an occasional Neo-Latin epic does not fit into the classificatory scheme developed here: in De raptu Ganymedis, for example, Melchior Barlaeus (ca. 1540–1584) wrote a kind of mythological epic which was not unknown during the period but whose subject does not really lend itself to the praise-and-blame poetics typical of the genre.22 Most Neo-Latin epics, however, fit into one of the groups described above, with the reading of the Aeneid through the filter of epideictic rhetoric providing a guide to understanding and evaluating them. Their heroes may strike us as boring, but this is only because Aeneas as he was commonly understood at this time was boring, too. There is, however, a theoretical undercurrent that at least in some cases offers us the potential for a richer, more nuanced reading of Neo-Latin epic. Most early modern readers saw Aeneas as a perfect hero, but a few at least did not. For them, Aeneas remained the worthy founder of Rome, but they saw his failures as well as his successes, as he gave in to his anger and fought back during the fall of Troy, then succumbed to lust and stayed with Dido, and finally slaughtered the defeated Turnus as he begged for mercy. From this perspective, reading the Aeneid becomes a dynamic process, as the reader oscillates between an Aeneas who is doing what he should and one who is not.23 It would stand to reason that at least some Neo-Latin epic poets would have built their imitation of the Aeneid on this reading of the poem, and there is some evidence that this is indeed the case. The Sphortias of Francesco Filelfo (1398– 1481) is one poem that benefits from this critical perspective. The hero of the poem is Francesco Sforza, who, like Aeneas, came as a foreigner to a new land, married the sovereign’s daughter, conquered the people who were already there, and established a new dynasty. He is clearly being presented as a new Aeneas, receiving from Jupiter a guarantee of his future glory (ff. 2r–3v) just as Aeneas had (Aen. 1.223ff.), being visited by his father-in-law at the end of Book 2 with an encouragement that recalls that of Virgil’s hero in Aeneid 6, and so forth. Yet

20 Dirk Sacré, “Melissomachia: An Unpublished Epic from the Brussels Jesuit College (1652),” in Myricae: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Memory of Jozef IJsewijn, ed. Dirk Sacré and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 523–36. 21 IJsewijn and Sacré, 33. 22 Ibid., 31; and Hofmann, “Von Africa über Bethlehem nach America,” 143–46. 23 Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil. Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), v–ix.

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while Sforza is obviously a new Aeneas, he is clearly flawed. As he leads his men into battle, he is compared to a wolf driven insane by lust for booty (f. 14v; cf. Aen. 9.59ff., 339ff.). When the omniscient narrator describes Sforza’s destruction of Piacenza, he bursts out, “superi facinus prohibete nefandum” (“the gods forbid such an unspeakable crime”; f. 41v). Juno refers to Sforza as an “atram . . . pestem” (“a black plague”; f. 117r), and one of his Venetian enemies, Francesco Barbaro, exclaims scornfully that he is hated by his own men because “mitius omni illius ingenium caera solet esse sicana” (“his mind was generally softer than all the beeswax in Sicily”; f. 119v). It is no surprise that Sforza did not grant Filelfo the patronage he was seeking: both parties knew the rules of the game, and in depicting his new Aeneas with all the moral complexity of his Virgilian model, Filelfo was refusing to play. For us, however, the Sphortias takes on an unexpected excitement as it breaks free of the black-and-white moral world of rhetoricized poetry and presents a hero who must be analyzed carefully in a dynamic, unpredictable reading process.24 Stella’s Columbeis, mentioned above, can be read in the same way, so that Columbus becomes a flawed Aeneas and the reader’s sympathies pass at least now and again to the indigenous peoples of the ‘new’ world.25 As more work is done on the dozens of surviving Neo-Latin epics, I suspect that this interpretive undercurrent will be found to be stronger than we have imagined.

24 Ibid., 50–66. The poem remains unpublished; references are to the copy of the poem in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, H97 sup. 25 Kallendorf, “Enea nel ‘Nuovo Mondo.’”

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Part 2 EARLY BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS, MOSTLY VIRGILIAN

7 THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE From manuscript to the hand press to the computer age

I One of the great things about the Bibliographical Society of America is that it includes librarians, antiquarian book sellers, book collectors, and academics, all in the same group. All of us are united by our passion for books, but I am well aware that our interests are not identical. I have never been a librarian, but I have bought a lot of books, shaped some of them into a collection, and written both bibliographies and broader studies in book history about them. I intend to draw on each of these experiences, so that if things go as I hope they will, at least something in what I have to say will interest each of these constituencies. The author I am most passionate about is Virgil, the prince of poets in ancient Rome. I have been unusually fortunate in this choice, in that my object of study happens to have stood at the center of the western cultural tradition at least through the middle of the last century.1 At first glance, this continued popularity might seem strange. For centuries education in the west began with “Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi” (“Beneath the Shade which Beechen Boughs diffuse,/ You Tity’rus entertain your Silvan Muse”),2 the first line of the Eclogues, ten short pastoral poems in hexameter verse. However with subjects ranging from land confiscations to frustrated love, focused around shepherds who engage in rural singing contests while simultaneously participating in the urban literary culture of 1 Unfortunately there is no single source for modern scholarship on the reception of Virgil’s poetry. The best starting place is the annual bibliography in Vergilius, prepared first by Alexander McKay and currently by Shirley Werner, but the postclassical sections are by no means complete. A good entry point for material through about 1500 is Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam, eds., The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). For Virgil in the Renaissance, see Craig Kallendorf, “Virgil in Renaissance Thought,” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/bro wse?jumpTo=V&letter=V&module_0=obo-9780195399301&page=12&pageSize=20&sort=titles ort, accessed 25 February 2021. 2 The translation is that of John Dryden, taken from the editio princeps of his Virgilian translation, The Works of Virgil (London: Jacob Tonson, 1697), 43. This edition, famous for its engravings designed by Franz Cleyn as well as its translation, will be used throughout this essay, with references incorporated into the text.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-10

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Rome, it is by no means obvious why these poems retained their appeal. The Georgics, a didactic poem on farming in four books, seems even less promising: while it is clear that the discussion of crops, trees and shrubs, livestock, and bees opens up somehow into a consideration of how human beings position themselves successfully in the world, the ostensible subjects seem to offer little poetic promise and the connections between those subjects and the more elevated themes are far from obvious. The Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem on the founding of Rome, seems to offer more to work with, but in the last couple of generations the poem has become less and less accessible, both because of the increasing remoteness of its cultural references and because its polished style requires a high level of expertise in a language that fewer and fewer people control well. Nevertheless the poems did remain popular, so that anyone who is interested in the book as a physical object has a full run of media to work with, from papyri through manuscripts and printed books to digitized versions of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. I have been indulging my passion in one form or another for almost forty years now, so I have encountered there the full range of bibliographical experiences, from certain failure to a measure of success with everything in between. I would like to look back on these experiences now and try to draw some conclusions from them that might be useful and interesting. I shall begin with my bibliographical work proper and move from there to a broader analysis in book history that will, I hope, guide us in thinking more deeply about the relationship between physical object and text in the various forms that the ‘book’ has occupied over the centuries. As is often the case, the hero that runs through my tale is the same as its villain: the computer. I cannot live without mine, but as we shall see, for bibliographers, the computer is a decidedly mixed blessing.

II Since my particular interest is centered on early printed books, I would like to start here. Let us begin at the beginning and ask ourselves the most basic question of all: how many editions of Virgil were published between 1469 and 1850? (I have selected these dates, by the way, with care: the first edition of Virgil was printed in 1469, and the second date was chosen because books printed after the middle of the nineteenth century are usually stored in the general stacks of a library, not in special collections.) It would seem that this would not be a particularly difficult question to answer, given the amount of work that has been done over the last sixty years in Virgilian bibliography: Giuliano Mambelli’s Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane, which appeared in 1954, purports to have answered the basic question, with occasional updates like Werner Suerbaum’s Handbuch der illustrierten Vergil-Ausgaben 1502–1840 providing useful supplementary information.3 3 Giuliano Mambelli, Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane, Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, 27 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1954); and Werner Suerbaum, Handbuch der illustrierten VergilAusgaben 1502–1840: Geschichte, Typologie, Zyklen und kommentierter Katalog der Holzschnitte

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But when I first began working in this field, I noticed that Mambelli’s descriptions were often corrected by other scholars and that many booksellers offered items that were labelled “not in Mambelli.”4 In the early nineties I therefore began investigating the area that Mambelli knew best, the Italian editions, and the results were not encouraging: of the 131 pre-1600 imprints from the Veneto that I described in my A Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil, 1470–1599,5 thirty were not in Gli annali. Eighteen of the ninety-two books in my A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil also escaped Mambelli’s net;6 in addition, more than twenty doubtful and spurious Venetian Latin editions were identified in the first bibliography and cast out. The problems were obviously much greater elsewhere – not a single one of the more than 100 pre-1851 American editions is registered in Mambelli – but at the time I could not see a way to continue. In preparing these two bibliographies, I had done the only thing one could do at the time, which was to travel from library to library and look at everything I had not seen before. Even within northern and central Italy, I was only able to get to the larger libraries; it would have taken a good-sized team to get to every institution in Italy with a collection of older books, and the number of people required to cover the rest of Europe thoroughly was unimaginable. At this point I could see a problem but no solution, so I turned my attention to other problems that I thought I could solve and learned to live with failure, at least for a while. The major challenge here is the relatively low survival rate of early printed books. There are exceptions, certain editions that survive in large quantities and therefore appear in all the Virgilian bibliographies: one thinks, for example, of the 1502 Brant-Grüninger edition, which was valued for its stunning woodcuts and therefore preserved, or the 1636 and 1676 Elzeviers, which were printed in huge press runs and collected in their own day. In general, folios tend to survive in greater quantities than octavos; more copies of illustrated books survive than of unillustrated ones; and books that were intended more for show than for reading (i.e., deluxe editions) are more common today than school texts, which were often used by generation after generation of students until they fell apart. Obviously books have enemies, from fire and water to bookworms and boorish readers, but we should remember that the disasters of our common history often produced especially dire consequences for books. Losses have been particularly acute in Germany, where the ravages of war during the last century have destroyed an

und Kupferstiche zur Aeneis in Alten Drucken . . ., Bibliographien zur klassischen Philologie, 3 (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Olms, 2008). 4 See, for example, Bernd Schneider, Vergil: Handschriften und Drucke der Herzog August Bibliothek, Ausstellungskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek, 37 (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1982), 61. 5 Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil, 1470–1599, Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, 123 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1991). 6 Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil, Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, 136 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994).

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estimated ten million books, one-fourth to one-third of the country’s total.7 Some work with numbers in the Universal Short Title Catalogue suggests that an average survival rate for an early printed edition is in the area of five copies, which squares with my impressionistic experiences over the past years. Nevertheless it is not at all unusual for an entire press run to have been reduced to one surviving copy:8 indeed, of the nine hundred pre-1800 Virgilian editions in a private collection I have been working in, seventy-two can be found only there, while another fifty-seven can be consulted in only one institutional library that is open to the public. This is the situation that caused me to throw up my hands in despair twenty years ago. As we all know, the computer changed everything in the world of enumerative bibliography. First individual libraries began putting their card catalogues online; then we began to see union catalogues that combine the holdings of many libraries into the Catalogue collectif de France, the Catálogo colectivo de patrimonio bibliográfico español, and so forth. Several databases, like the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, Edit 16, and the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD 16), have appeared specifically to help scholars like us. And projects like Early English Books Online (EEBO) and the massive digitalization work at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which has produced electronically accessible copies of more than a million books to date, have made it possible to examine many early editions without leaving one’s office.9 Given this situation, I returned to the early printed editions of Virgil in 2006. Six years later, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469–1850 appeared.10 A quick tally of the entries in this book indicates that 5,062 editions of Virgil, in Latin and in the vernacular languages, appeared in Europe within the years I had set out for this project. I would like to be able to say at this point that we now know how many early printed editions of Virgil there are, and that we have a solid base of evidence on which to proceed. But ironically, the same computer revolution that gave so much to enumerative bibliography in the last generation has caused problems for me as well. In the summer of 2011, when I was finishing my bibliography, the internet 7 Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History, trans. Jon E. Graham (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007), 176. 8 Jonathan Green, Frank McIntyre, and Paul Needham, “The Shape of Incunable Survival and Statistical Estimation of Lost Editions,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 105.2 (2011): 141–75, concludes that the most common number of surviving copies of a fifteenth-century book is one, with the same problem continuing, albeit to a lesser extent, for generations afterward. 9 The websites for the sources mentioned in this paragraph, in order, are: http://ccfr.bnf.fr/ portailccfr/jsp/index.jsp, http://catalogos.mecd.es/CCPB/cgi-ccpb/abnetopac/O12474/ID8fed592b? ACC=101, www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/index.html, http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/web_iccu/eimain.htm, https://opacplus.bib-bvb.de/TouchPoint_touchpoint/start.do?SearchProfile=Altbestand&Searc hType=2, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home, and www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de/ index.html?c=digitale_sammlungen&l=en, all accessed 25 February 2021. 10 Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469–1850 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2012).

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brought me news of six previously unrecorded Virgilian editions, via electronically circulated booksellers’ announcements. Databases like the ones I mentioned above are constantly being updated, with that one surviving copy of something new being buried within data that are useful to other scholars but not to me. So we have that situation I mentioned when I began, that the same device serves as both the hero and the villain of my story. As bibliographers, we know more than we did before – much more – and our work is more accurate. This is good. However in a certain sense, our work is less definitive than it was before. Then, when we published a book, that was it – our work was enshrined in a monument of ink and paper, with the register closed and the work completed. Now, as more material is discovered and information about it spreads instantaneously across the internet, a monument like my Virgil bibliography becomes outdated even before it comes back from the binders. Thanks once again to the Bibliographical Society of America, there is salvation: BibSite, where I am able to update my printed bibliography each year.11 Closure will forever elude me, which is frustrating to bibliographers like us who are driven to create order in our little corner of the universe, but it is a fact of life in the digitized age in which we live.

III I would like to turn now from bibliography strictly defined to the broader inquiry in book history that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. At the point when I began my career, the relationship between the physical form of a book and the content it carried was clearly articulated. Bibliography, especially descriptive and analytical bibliography, served to help the reader understand how the book was produced. This knowledge was worthwhile in itself, but it also served as an aid to the study of literature as literature. If we understood how a given compositor in Renaissance England customarily spelled words, we could identify the changes he introduced and restore the text as Shakespeare wrote it; similarly an understanding of which versions of a play were carried in the various formats available at that time could help us recover what the author intended to have disseminated. A stable text could serve as the foundation for an almost-scientific criticism, in the sense that the philological method allowed a work to be placed within the culture in which it was produced, which was supposed to have helped stabilize interpretation.12

11 Craig Kallendorf, “Additions and Corrections to Craig Kallendorf’s A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469–1850,” at Bibsite, https://bibsocamer.org/wp-content/uploads/ Kallendorf_2018.pdf, accessed 25 February 2021. 12 Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 15 (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1986; rpt. of Princeton, 1949 edn.); and Phillip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, and Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 2009; rpt. of Oxford, 1972 edn.)

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A lot has changed since then: indeed, almost every part of this paradigm has been challenged in one or more ways over the last generation or two. I would like to return to the relationship between the physical form of a book and the content it carries, but to do so in a different way from what most book historians, even the most textually based ones, are doing. Again Virgil will be my example, in part because I know the relevant data well, but also because the extent of Virgil’s cultural prominence gives us a longue durée that is not paralleled very often in western culture. Logically, I suppose that any discussion of material form in the reception of Virgil’s poetry should begin with the papyrus rolls, especially since Maria Chiara Scappaticcio’s recently published Papyri Vergilianae has drawn our attention to them again.13 But I have found it difficult, impossible really, to say much about how the papyrus roll has affected Virgilian reception when so much has failed to survive. I have therefore chosen to focus on the three material forms that allow us to see Virgil’s text whole: the medieval manuscript, the early modern printed book, and the postmodern computer file. As we all know, the papyrus roll was replaced by the parchment manuscript in codex format as antiquity passed into the Middle Ages. This transformation is connected to the rise of Christianity. Books in codex form were known in antiquity (remember Martial’s epigram (1.2) about the little gift book), but they did not replace the papyrus roll as the normative form for the dissemination of classical literature until shortly after 300 AD. The Christians, however, had adopted it earlier, and by the sixth century the format identified with Christianity had taken over as the normal medium for the dissemination of pagan literature as well.14 This change forced a series of decisions about what merited the time, trouble, and expense of recopying in the new format. Virgil’s works were recopied in striking numbers: of the earliest substantial group of manuscripts containing classical authors, some twenty codices written in rustic capitals, five – more than any other author – contain Virgil’s poetry. Thirty years ago, Thomas Stevenson drew what seems to be the obvious conclusion, that Christian readers of this transitional period must have found Virgil’s works to be more congenial to their values than, say, the pederasty of Petronius’s Satyricon or the atomism of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, which were recopied in much lower numbers.15 When we look at the earliest group of illustrated manuscripts to survive, we are nudged in a similar direction. The two largest subgroups here are Bibles and Virgilian texts, and there 13 Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, Papyri Vergilianae: l’apporto della papirologia alla storia della tradizione virgiliana (I – VI d.C.) (Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2013). 14 Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1983), 35–37, 45–61, and 67–74; William Harris, “Why Did the Codex Supplant the Book Roll?” in Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr., ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica Press, 1991), 81–85; and Horst Blanck, Das Buch in der Antike (Munich: Beck, 1992), 95–97. 15 Thomas B. Stevenson, Miniature Decoration in the Vatican Virgil: A Study in Late Antique Iconography (Tübingen: Verlag Ernst Wasmith, 1983), 11.

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are striking physical similarities between the two subgroups: Virgil in the Codex Romanus, for example, resembles Matthew and John in the Rabbula Gospels (586 AD), and Aeneas and Achates in the Vatican Virgil were recast as two Jews listening to St. Paul in the synagogue in the great illustrated Bible commissioned by Count Vivian and finished in 846.16 In short, the material evidence strongly encourages us to explore the complexities of Virgil’s relationship to Christianity during the Middle Ages. The obvious beginning place here is the fourth Eclogue, which tells of a savior child who will bring peace and harmony to the world. Subjecting this poem to a Christian reading has been generally discredited since the eighteenth century because Virgil died before Christ was born. But beginning with Lactantius and Eusebius, medieval readers regularly claimed that a Christianized reading was true even though Virgil had not intended it, or that the poet had somehow obtained a partial understanding of what was to come. To be sure, Jerome and Augustine had their doubts, and as late as the fourteenth century Giovanni Dominici could object that pagan poets were not appropriate reading matter for Christians. But these were the exceptions, and we must remember as well that the Eclogues were not the only Virgilian poetry that was given an explicitly Christian interpretation in the Middle Ages. The student speaker in Fulgentius’s commentary, for example, moves consistently to place his interpretation of the Aeneid into a Christian context, and Bernard Silvestris sprinkles references to Christianity throughout his interpretation of this same poem as an allegory of what happens to the soul when it is placed into the body. And we should not forget the centos like that of Proba, in which Virgil’s poetry is broken apart and rearranged to offer Christian truth in a more explicit way.17 One might object that the typical medieval commentary did not rely on allegory to this extent or break apart the text into a cento, and that objection would be fair. However after the Carolingian period the typical Virgilian manuscript adopted a long, narrow shape that marks it as a school text, and its physical make-up clearly reflects its design for school use, beginning with a life of the author, moving to arguments before each book of the Georgics and Aeneid that would summarize

16 Thomas Stevenson, Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 11, 13–15, and 20–23; and David Wright, The Vatican Vergil: A Masterpiece of Late Antique Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 106. 17 S. Benko, “Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, 2/31.1 (1980): 646–705, offers a masterful survey of the Christian interpretation of Virgil’s fourth eclogue. Relevant primary texts are most accessible in Ziolkowski and Putnam, eds., The Vergilian Tradition. See also Pierre Courcelle, “Les exégèses chrétiennes de la quatrième Eclogue,” Revue des études anciennes 59 (1957): 294–319. Interest in a possible connection between Virgil and Judeo-Christian culture has not died out completely; see Thomas Fletcher Royds, Virgil and Isaiah: A Study of the Pollio, with Translation, Notes, and Appendices (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1918). Nicholas Horsfall, “Virgil and the Jews,” Vergilius 58 (2012): 67–80, concludes that “it seems overwhelmingly likely, if not completely certain, that there is indeed substantial Jewish influence on Bucolic 4” (68).

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the text for the student reader, and culminating in a growing number of marginalia that would aid in the comprehension of a language that was growing increasingly alien.18 If we then ask ourselves who dominated the medieval educational scene, we are back where our focus on the materiality of medieval transmission keeps taking us: the church. The explicit of Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1570 (10th or 11th century) reads in part, “I dedicate to the Lord and to Saint Peter this book [of Virgil’s poetry] that will endure forever through many laps around the circuit of the times, for the training of living children and the praise of the Lord and the apostles of Peter, their leader.”19 In the Roman empire Virgil had been one of the quadriga, the four authors (along with Terence, Sallust, and Cicero) who formed the foundation of the Roman educational system.20 This remained true in the Middle Ages, but now Virgil’s poetry was read as a means of learning Latin, the language of the church that bound together all the far corners of Christendom. As medieval culture moved further and further away from its classical roots, more and more commentary was required to make a classical text comprehensible. Some readers like Chaucer certainly responded to Virgil’s text in a predominantly secular way, but the general justification for continuing to study Virgil century after century was that his language was the language of the Bible (at least as it was generally disseminated in the Middle Ages) and his ideas were compatible with Christianity.21 And we are pushed in this direction by the physical form, the manuscripts, in which those ideas were embodied during this period. Modern scholarship has emphasized – correctly, I think – that the transition from manuscript to print was a gradual one. Nevertheless an early printed book is something quite different from a hand-copied manuscript, so the interpretive cues are quite different. For one thing, we are talking about reception on a much grander scale. There are over a thousand surviving manuscripts of Virgil, which is a very respectable number indeed.22 But when we turn to the early printed editions, my A Bibliography contains information on 1,481 editions printed between 18 Louis Holtz, “La redécouverte de Virgile aux VIIIe et IXe siècles, d’après les manuscrits conservés,” in Lectures médièvales de Virgile (Rome: École française, 1985), 16–22. 19 Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, intro. Jan M. Ziolkowski, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; originally published in Italian in 1885), 95 n. 60. 20 H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb, 2nd edn., Wisconsin Studies in Classics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956, originally published in French in 1948), passim. 21 To follow how Virgil was read in the Middle Ages, see Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 22 Giancarlo Alessio, “Tradizione manoscritta,” in Francesco della Corte, gen. ed., Enciclopedia Virgiliana, 5 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1984–1991), 3.432–43 lists all the known Virgilian manuscripts through the end of the sixteenth century, with the exception of the late antique witnesses, which are described in L. D. Reynolds, “Virgil,” in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 433–36.

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1469 and 1600 and another 894 that appeared during the seventeenth century. As mentioned above, statistics generated by the Universal Short Title Catalogue suggest an average of five surviving copies for each early edition from this period, so that would give us a little under 12,000 copies of Virgil printed in or before 1700 that have survived into modern times. But the original total must have been much higher. It is difficult to generalize about the size of early press runs, but 300 seems to have been common for books printed through the end of the fifteenth century. Numbers rose to 1,000–1,500 during the sixteenth century, with some famous printers like the Plantins doing press runs of as many as 2,500 copies. A reasonable average would be, say, 750 copies per edition.23 If we multiply this number times the number of editions, we get 1,781,250 copies of Virgil available for sale in Renaissance Europe. Since manuscripts of Virgil are counted in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands, this is an enormous change. More interesting, and more important as well, is how these early editions were used, and here again, format provides a prism through which the text may be viewed. At this point I mean not materiality in general, but format as it is used by bibliographers: folio, quarto, and octavo, the common book structures that are determined by what size paper was used and how that paper was folded. I want to use this fact to show that, while physical attributes provide cues for interpretation, the process of establishing this interpretation is difficult. Printing history handbooks tell us that the different formats were used for different purposes. Large folios contained texts from fields like law and theology that required extensive commentary to surround the text; they were sold to professionals in these fields. Literary texts often came out in quarto format: we have all heard of Shakespeare’s first folio, but in fact his plays were first issued in quartos, so that reprinting them in folio meant that they shifted status, entering the canon of literary works that merited serious study. Octavos were pocket books, literally – prayer books that could be taken to church, or literary texts that could be carried about in one’s pocket and consulted in free moments.24 Renaissance editions of Virgil come in all three formats. There are comparatively few quartos, and a disproportionate number of them are translations, often of a book or two rather than an entire work. This suggests that sometimes at least, Virgil was read for pleasure, like Ariosto or Cervantes. There are a good many folio editions, in which a few lines of Virgil’s text are surrounded by an entire large page containing as many as a dozen commentaries to that text. This confirms that Virgil’s poetry was the object of serious study, like a law or theology book, with these texts, we are told, being marketed to the teachers who used them as the basis for their line-by-line explication in the classroom. Interestingly, the first 23 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450– 1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1990), 216–22, “Some Basic Data: Size of Editions.” 24 A good description of the three formats may be found in Bowers, Principles, 193–96, with basic information on how books in each format were used in the early days of printing to be found in Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 88–90.

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non-religious book to be printed in octavo format was the famous 1501 Aldine Virgil, and this format had become standard for school texts by 1540. If we look at a large number of early printed editions of Virgil, however, we see that the format boundaries discussed in the handbooks break down. For one thing, Aldine octavos, even though they are small, prove to have been popular not only with students and men of leisure, but also with teachers who wanted a good text into which they could enter their own notes, as two copies in Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana show.25 It is true in turn that “the scholar was expected to deploy a large folio on his study lectern,”26 but it is also true that Venetian schoolboys used these same books as classroom texts. A copy of the first edition of Virgil, for example, contains an extensive handwritten commentary with an ownership note in somewhat tentative Latin that reads “this book belongs to me, Bartolomaeus Ghellinus de Nolilisbus of Vicenza, [who] remains or dwells in Vicenza as a student of Lodovicus Roneonus, the public teacher,” and a copy of the 1476 Antonio Miscomini edition contains marginal and interlinear notes interspersed with “non audivi” (“I did not hear [this lesson]”), markers indicating that a section of commentary is missing because the student was absent from class.27 The prefaces and dedications of folios and octavos alike confirm that they were targeted at “youthful students,” “good youth,” and “distinguished candidates in the humanities.”28 In other words, Virgil’s poetry was published in all three formats, and all three are anchored firmly into the environment of the schools. This appears to mark a continuity with the medieval Virgil, and so it does, to the extent that seeing the world through a consciously non- or anti-Christian filter was barely possible in the early modern period. But an increasing number of teachers during this time worked outside the direct control of the church, and even those who were still in a religious environment processed the text in a different way. Let me explain. Both the printed marginal cues and the handwritten marginal notes in early printed editions tell us precisely what readers from this later period, the Renaissance, were looking for, as an annotated book from a private collection of early printed editions of Virgil in which I have been working shows. The 25 These two books are copies of the corrected ‘1514’ edition, actually published several years later, LW1518/19–1524.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 10, Marciana shelf mark: Aldine 628; and the 1505 edition, LW1505.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 7, Marciana shelf mark: Aldine 687, respectively. 26 Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 43. 27 The two books are a copy of the 1470 edition printed by Wendelin of Speyer, LW1470.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 1, now in the Biblioteca Bertoliana in Vicenza, shelf mark: RN 1.V.144; and a copy of the 1476 edition printed by Antonio Miscomini, LW1476.3 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 2, now in the Biblioteca Civica in Verona, shelf mark: Incunaboli 856, with the notes indicating absences on ff. m7v, m8r, and m8v. 28 For examples, see the edition printed by Aldo Manuzio the Younger, LW1576.2 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 25, with the first phrase found on f. +3v; LW1512.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 8, with the second phrase repeated at Pt. 1, f. 168r and Pt. 2, f. AA1r; and LW1522.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 10, with the third phrase at Pt. 3, f. 43v.

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volume in question is a 1567 Frankfurt octavo edition that contains brief comments in the margin along with handwritten notes alongside them.29 The first thing we notice is that the anonymous early reader has underlined a good number of passages. At the beginning of Aeneid 5, for example, he has marked off “superat quoniam fortuna, sequamur/Quoque vocat, vertamus iter” (“’Tis Fate diverts our Course; and Fate we must obey”; 5.22–23; f. 114v, p. 378), and a little farther on he has underlined “Tum vero exarsit iuveni dolor ossibus ingens” (“Cry’d out for Anger, and his Hair he tore”; 5.172; f. 117r, p. 384), then a little later, “Extremos pudeat rediisse, hoc vincite cives,/Et prohibete nefas” (“But to be last, the Lags of all the Race,/redeem your selves and me from that Disgrace”; 5.196–97; f. 117v, p. 385). The obvious question is, why is this reader underlining these passages and not others? The printed marginal notes suggest an answer. Next to the first passage, the note reads “Non esse pugnandum cum fortuna” (“one must not fight with fortune”), while the note after the second underlined passage reads “Ardor iuvenilis & ira” (“youthful ardor and anger”) and the one after a later underlined passage reads “Proverbialis versus” (“a proverbial verse”). In other words, one category of passages underlined by this reader includes those that offer advice on which actions to take and which ones to avoid, expressed in an aphoristic way. Many of the remaining underlined passages fall into a second category. A little later in Book 5, Mnestheus’s ship is described at the ship race in the games following Anchises’s death, where the captain prona petit maria, & pelago decurrit aperto. Qualis spelunca subito commota columba, cui domus, & dulces latebrosa in pumice nidi, fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennis dat tecto ingentem: mox aere lapsa quieto radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas. (5.212–17; f. 217v) ([has them] ply their Oars, and cut their liquid way; in larger Compass on the roomy Sea. As when the Dove her Rocky Hold forsakes, rowz’d in a Fright, her sounding Wings she shakes the Cavern rings with clatt’ring; out she flies, and leaves her Callow Cave, and cleaves the Skies; at first she flutters; but at length she springs, to smoother flight, and shoots upon her Wings.) (p. 385) 29 The book, which is LW1567.3 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 23, was published by Georg Rab the Elder, the heirs of W. Han, and S. Feyerabend and is very rare, with one copy in institutional hands, unfortunately damaged by a fire in 1959, at the Ratsbücherei in Lüneburg and another at the Bibliothèque humaniste de Sélestat. References to the copy in the private collection will be placed in the text.

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Next to the passage is the reason why it was underlined: “comparatio” (“simile”), which is also written next to the comparison of Sergestus’s ship to a wounded snake in Aen. 5.273–80 (f. 118v). The anonymous early reader continues the process, underlining figures of speech and adding their names in the margin in ink. One of his favorites was “hypallage,” in which a description is transferred from the word it should describe to another one. The reader underlined “multa grandine nymbi/culminibus crepitant” (“A ratling Tempest, and a Hail of Blows”; 5.458–59; f. 122r, p. 395), then “Tum validis flexos incurvant viribus arcus,/pro se quisque viri” (“Soon, all with Vigour bend their trusty Bows,/and from the Quiver each his Arrow chose”; 5.500–1; f. 122v, p. 397), marking “hypallage” next to each. Here this reader, like others of his day, is selecting passages not for their moral content, but for their stylistic distinction. This Virgil was the provider of commonplaces, lines that encapsulated a profound thought in a memorable way.30 In some cases the thought was prominent, but in others it was more how it was said than what was said, which led to the relentless identifications of figures of speech as well as the more thoughtful marking of passages that were simply well phrased. As Battista Guarino, an early schoolmaster, put it, students “should hold fast to the practice of always making excerpts of what they read.”31 These excerpts were systematically recorded into commonplace books, where the entries were the Virgilian lines and the headings were moral virtues, principles, or stylistic labels. In the frequently reprinted commonplace book of F. Petit and Michel Coyssard, for example, we see the heading “amicitia et amor” (“friendship and love”) followed by a number of passages, including “Me tamen urit amor, quis enim modus adsit amori?” (“Ah, cruel Heaven! that made no Cure for Love!/I wish for balmy Sleep, but wish in vain:/ love has no bounds in Pleasure, or in Pain”; Ecl. 1.68).32 These commonplace books in turn served as sources for writers in need of material to fill out a speech, a poem, or any other kind of composition. 30 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 43–44. Commonplace books are starting to attract significant attention from modern scholars: see also Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period, vol. 1: Counter-Reformation and Revolt, ed. David Cowling and Mette B. Brown; vol. 2, Consolidation of God-Given Power, ed. Kathryn Banks and Philiep G. Bossier; and vol. 3, Legitimation of Authority, ed. Joop W. Koopmans and Nils Holger Petersen, Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, 39–41 (Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2011). 31 Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. Craig Kallendorf, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 5 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 268–69. 32 Virgilii . . . opera in locos communes digesta (Tournon: Claude Michel, 1597), 19. This book, Co1597.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 322, is discussed at length in my “Commentaries, Commonplaces, and Neo-Latin Studies,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Upsaliensis: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Uppsala 2009), ed. Astrid Steiner-Weber, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 1.535–46.

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This way of reading Virgil, the one that breaks the text apart into brief passages that are easily remembered and reused, is lost unless we look at the early printed books that provide access to how Virgil was envisioned in the early modern period. Once we know what we are looking for, however, certain other physical attributes of these books begin to make sense. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, for example, printers in Paris, the Low Countries, and the area of Germany around Cologne produced a series of Virgilian editions with wide margins and spaces between the lines of text. These editions offer extra room for notetaking because the printers knew that this is what the purchasers of their books wanted.33 I should also note that an eye on physical form can sensitize us to what was not read and why that matters. Let me give two examples. It is harder than one might imagine to build a collection of early printed editions of Virgil, in part because so many editions survive in just a couple of copies. To a certain extent this is true with many early printed books, but my experience tells me that it is more true with Virgil than with many other classical authors that were printed during this period. I believe this is so because Virgil occupied a place at the center of the school curriculum throughout this time, so editions of his poetry were simply passed from father to son until they fell apart and were discarded.34 In this case I am the person who is not reading the early printed book, because so many copies do not survive, but the evidence shows us that beginning in the eighteenth century, there appeared another kind of edition that was seldom, if ever, read even at the time when it was produced. This is the large folio with wide margins, like those that came from the presses of John Baskerville in Birmingham, then of Giambattista Bodoni in Parma, Andrew Foulis in Glasgow, and Pierre Didot in Paris.35 There is plenty of room for notetaking, but I have hardly ever seen an annotated copy of one of these editions. This is because these books were produced not to guide the education and writing of their owners, but to adorn their bookshelves in an English country house or a French chateau. They were expensive in their own day, and therefore – unlike the octavo school editions of the sixteenth century – preserved in quantity from the time they were printed. But they were not read, and this change in Virgil’s role, from schoolmaster to interior decorator, can only be tracked by looking at the physical evidence. As Alain Mercier, the curator of a fine exhibition several years ago at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris, reminds us, there has also been a third revolution in the history of printing.36 Those of us of a certain age tend to find ourselves still residing in a print world that in many ways is not very different from the one inhabited

33 Descriptions of a number of these books, which were often in quarto format, can be found in Kallendorf, A Catalogue, 46–66. 34 I owe this observation to an antiquarian book dealer in Padua, Pierangelo Stella, with whom I discussed this point several years ago. 35 The books involved are entered in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 60 (LW1754.2), 70 (LW1793.3), 65 (LW1778.1), and 72 (LW1798.4), respectively. 36 Alain Mercier, ed., Les trois revolutions du livre (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 2002).

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by Virgil’s early modern commentators. As our younger colleagues frequently remind us, however, everything, even the classics, is in the process of going digital. So this leads us to our next question: how precisely has the change in format, from printed book to computer, affected the way in which Virgil’s poetry is being read today? Here I must offer a brief excursus into how Virgil’s main work, the Aeneid, has been interpreted. The poem recounts the travels of a Trojan prince, Aeneas, as he leaves home and founds a new civilization that will become Rome. The traditional approach to the Aeneid is the direct descendant of the reading that began with Servius and Donatus in late antiquity and prevailed through the Middle Ages and the early modern period. According to this reading, Virgil’s intention was to hold up Aeneas as a model of praiseworthy virtue and to link him to Augustus, whose favor Virgil was seeking.37 As Brooks Otis, whose work on the Aeneid was extremely influential at the end of the twentieth century, put it, “it seems quite plain that Virgil was himself a convinced Augustan.”38 He lived through tumultuous times, and it was Augustus who brought order, peace, and stable values. For Otis, the Aeneid celebrates the creation of Roman civilization out of Homeric barbarism, a process by which Augustus brought to fruition what Aeneas had begun. Aeneas represents the “elucidation of an ideal which represented Rome’s best and true reason for being” (p. 390), and as such, his victory marks the triumph of good over evil. Aeneas is the embodiment of “pietas” (“piety”) and “humanitas” (“humanity”), having learned from experience and ceased to be the raging warrior and foolhardy lover he once was, while Turnus, his antagonist, represents “furor” (“rage”) and Dido, his lover, represents “indignus amor” (“unworthy love”). This dualism persists through criticism at the end of the last century: Francis Cairns sees Aeneas as the good king, while Turnus displays more attributes of the bad king than the good one and Dido degenerates from the latter to the former.39 Nicholas Horsfall summarizes this issue in his characteristically no-nonsense way: “Aeneas remains right, as he always was.”40 Within the Anglophone world, however, another reading has appeared that contrasts a sort of Virgilian “pessimism” to the “optimism” of the traditional interpretation. This interpretation emerges from something that has struck many readers of the poem, that the narrator shows a striking capacity to identify not only with Aeneas and the establishment of the new Roman state, but also with those who fall victim to him – Dido, whose sacrifice seems to represent the triumph of the public over the private; Turnus, who stands for the old heroic values that pietas evolves 37 Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1989). 38 Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture, 20 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995; rpt. of Oxford, 1963 edn.), 383–94, with the quotation on 389. Further references to this book will be placed in the text. 39 Francis Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 40 Nicholas Horsfall, A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2000), 216.

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out of and for the rights of indigenous peoples to defend themselves against invaders; and a host of other minor characters like Marcellus and Camilla who are written out of the poem with an acute sense of pain and loss. Identification with both the protagonist and with those who oppose him complicates our understanding of the poem. As Gian Biagio Conte puts it, the world reveals an unavoidable complexity when it appears that the truth is no longer just one truth – that it is no longer simple and direct but caught up in contradiction, when what is ‘wrong’ leaves its place of exile to blend with what is ‘right,’ blurring the boundaries that had held them apart, and when what seemed to make up the whole of reality is recognized, painfully, to be part of it. We need only suspect that each object has its own version of the truth to set against another. . . . [Virgil] had only to refuse the fixity of its [the epic norm’s] vision and its language and to admit a structure of multiple relations, relative points of view, and varying perspectives. The text became polycentric.41 These relative points of view, what R. O. A. M. Lyne has called the “further voices” in the poem, challenge the dominant univocal reading that stresses the virtues of Aeneas: from his perspective, leaving Carthage represents a sacrifice of personal desire to higher collective duty, but from Dido’s position, it is an act of cowardice and betrayal, and in this reading her voice demands to be heard as well.42 In this second approach, everything depends on the ending, where Turnus’s final plea for mercy is denied and he is killed by a triumphant Aeneas. Aeneas is clearly angry at the moment when he decides to kill Turnus. In the traditional reading this anger is justified by the evil Turnus has done and by the need to remove him as the major impediment to the establishment of Rome. As Michael C. J. Putnam reminds us, however, Aeneas had been told by his father to spare the proud once they have been reduced to suppliants (Aen. 6.851–53), something that he repeatedly failed to do. At the crucial moment he is dominated by his “furor” (“rage”), an emotion that has stood against everything Aeneas has been working for throughout the poem. This Aeneas is not one who consistently represents

41 Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. Charles Segal, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 44 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 153. This approach also has roots that go all the way back to late antiquity; see Craig Kallendorf, “Historicizing the ‘Harvard School’: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99 (1999): 391–403, which also contains useful bibliography on the subject. 42 R. O. A. M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 4–56, 145– 206. A similar technique is what Don Fowler calls “deviant focalization,” in which the text shows the speaker seeing the world through the eyes of others as well as his or her own; see “Deviant Focalization in Vergil’s Aeneid,” in Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40–63, reprinted from Papers of the Cambridge Philological Society 216 (1990): 42–63.

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praiseworthy virtue, and Virgil’s final words do not look toward the glorious future to come, but to a very human hero who is no more able than anyone else to live up to the ideals he has for himself.43 Much has been written within the last generation, by its adherents and by its opponents, about this “pessimistic” interpretation of the Aeneid. What has not been noticed, however, at least to my knowledge, is that at approximately the same time as these ideas took hold, an alternative to the printed book emerged, one that offers “a web of linked lexias,” a “network of alternative routes (as opposed to print’s fixed, unidirectional page turning),” and “presents a radically different technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author.”44 Where print is centripetal, this new technology is centrifugal, inviting the reader not to follow a single line of logic established by an author but to move associatively through a succession of links of his or her choice.45 There is no single dominant voice, no controlling point of view; the medium is by nature polyvocal, encouraging the pursuit of different perspectives instead of moving them aside.46 For this reason the alternative technology is inherently subversive, suspicious of grand narratives that are difficult to impose in a world where texts lead naturally to their own contradictions and where a given position can be taken and rejected simultaneously.47 This is the world of hypertext, where print gives way to the electronic impulses of the computer. And this is the world in which the “pessimistic” interpretation of Virgil’s poetry has recently matured. I want to stress right away that I am not arguing causality here: the “pessimistic” approach to the Aeneid did not arise as the direct result of the computer. The timing, however, is uncanny: the first programmable digital computer was built in the 1940s, early text processing dates from the 1960s, and the development of graphic interface in the 1980s allowed computers to offer a serious alternative

43 Michael C. J. Putnam, The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid, The Amsterdam Vergil Lectures, 1 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 106. Putnam has written often and elegantly on the problems posed by the ending of the Aeneid, going back to The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), chap. 4, “Book XII: Tragic Victory.” 44 Robert Coover, “The End of Books,” New York Times Book Review, 21 June 1992, qtd. in Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 153. For further reflections on the differences between print and electronic media, see Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 16. 45 Peter L. Schillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 49. 46 Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), ix. 47 Bolter, Writing Space, 152–53; and Adriaan van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 131, 134–35.

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to the distribution of text in printed form by the 1990s.48 And the scholars who advanced the ideas we have been considering were aware of the connection: Jerome McGann, for example, acknowledged that he wrote his A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism in the same year (1983) as he was introduced to the UNIX computer system and that he knew then that he would build a hypermedia model, which became The Rossetti Archive, to implement his theory of textual editing.49 What I am suggesting is that the traditional concept of authorship in the print medium was under attack as early as the 1970s by critics like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida; that the digital world came into existence at just the right time to support what they had claimed on a philosophical and theoretical level; and that the computer provides a suitable medium for a world in which the center is gone, stability is an illusion, and all ideals are subject to reevaluation from multiple perspectives.50 The world described here, of course, is the postmodern one. Jean-François Lyotard notes in particular that postmodernism is marked by “incredulity toward metanarratives” and that in place of these grand narratives, the postmodern searches for instabilities, what he calls “paralogisms,” not to reach consensus but to undermine from within the framework in which normal knowledge has been created. The postmodern, he continues, is tied to computerization, which is bound in turn to a certain logic and legitimation of knowledge.51 This is what we have seen with Virgilian scholarship, in which the traditional interpretive framework and guidelines for textual production have been undermined from within. The medium, in other words, is the message. This ‘virtual Virgil,’ the one that inhabits the emerging computer world, has not yet been fully born. Existing websites offer great potential, but so far, the potential has only been partially actualized. Project Gutenberg, for example, and the Perseus Digital Library offer the possibility in theory of linking texts to other texts and to visual complements, but so far there is little under Virgil that is actually useful to the reader. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich has digitized a good number of early printed editions of Virgil, but they are not machine readable, as is also the case with the Virgilian editions found in sites like Early English Books Online (EEBO). EEBO has initiated the Text Creation Partnership to create

48 The chronology is clarified by Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 110; and Van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds, 104. 49 Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 12, 24, 70–71. McGann notes that a consistent complaint about his A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) is that what he advocates in theory is unrealizable in practice, but in fact this is not true if electronic media are taken into account. 50 Bolter, Writing Space, 156; and Van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds, 161. 51 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, History and Theory of Literature, 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv–xxv, 3–4, 15, 37, 60–61, and 81. Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 123–24 also stresses the connection between computers and postmodernism.

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SGML coding for the works in its archive, which will allow searches of the ASCII text with simultaneous viewing of both text and original page images, but the first results are only now becoming available. Web portals like TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and DiRT (Digital Research Tools, at Project Bamboo) will allow users to analyze texts, to brainstorm, to build and share collections of data, to manage bibliographical information, to network with other researchers, to search visually, and to annotate texts, but Virgilian scholarship so far has taken little advantage of these possibilities.52 It is difficult even to speculate at this point what might happen when full advantage is taken of opportunities like this, but two tentative conclusions seem obvious. First, the computer gives the reader greater control over a text and its interpretation than a printed book does. One can collate from another edition into a printed book and enter interpretive notes into the margin, but these activities are much easier with a computer. As Peter Schillingsburg puts it, “what readers should be able to do is second guess the editor, make local notes and changes in the emendations or new emendations, and create links, extract quotations, and trace themes using electronic tools associated with the edition.”53 To disseminate the results of this activity, one does not need print publication, with all its costly, timeconsuming apparatus; instead, with one key stroke, every reader can become a textual or literary critic. One can also imagine that the “pessimistic” interpretation of Virgil’s poetry will continue to gain ground, simply because it is so compatible with the online worldview. The society in which print culture matured was hierarchical, but as Jay David Bolter has noted, the online world is characterized instead by a network of shifting voluntary associations that move horizontally rather than vertically. As “people are beginning to function as elements in a hypertextual network of affiliations”54 that tend to be suspicious of big government, authoritarian control, and dominance by elites, it is reasonable to imagine that they will respond to the same attitudes in what they are reading, to the “further voices” in the Aeneid rather than to a traditional univocal alignment of the text with power and privilege.

IV As I mentioned at the outset, my argument is that content is related to form, and that this relationship can work on a deeper level than that which generally informs the work of book historians today. With Virgil, manuscripts direct us firmly toward a Christian reading of his poetry. The early printed texts retain their base in the schools but point toward a different way of reading. The computerization of our 52 The websites mentioned in this paragraph are www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/, www.perseus.tufts. edu/hopper/, www.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=sammlungen_kategorien&l=de, http:// eebo.chadwyck.com/home, www.tapor.ca/, and https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/projects/ dirt-digital-research-tools, respectively, all accessed 25 February 2021. 53 Schillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, 83. 54 Bolter, Writing Space, 232–33.

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world in turn parallels another change in how Virgil’s poetry was read, from a text that supports the power structures of early modern culture to one that challenges those power structures from their margins. As part of an academic culture that regards most grands récits with suspicion, I am not going to argue that the relationship between physical form and intellectual content will work itself out in exactly the same way for other texts. But I am arguing that interrogating this relationship will often lead to insights that will otherwise escape us. Hardly anyone reads Virgil’s poetry today as a source of Christian truth or as a repository of moral and stylistic maxims, but people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance did, and unless we read that poetry in the same format in which they read it, we risk projecting our contemporary interpretations that are bound to contemporary formats back onto the past. Second, I have tried to show that good criticism indeed rests in good bibliography, even if the justification for this conclusion is not precisely what Bowers and Gaskell had in mind. For example, let us pause for a minute at an area we have not looked at before, the translations of Virgil into the vernacular languages. Of the 5,062 pre-1850 Virgilian editions described in my bibliography, 2,099, or 41%, contain a translation. Virgil’s poetry, at least in part, was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and German 188 times. There are 75 Spanish translations and 55 Dutch ones, with the other European languages being represented 35 or fewer times. What do these numbers mean? Well, for one thing, it is clear that Virgilian translation is going to play a relatively minor role in those cultures where the classics came late to the educational system or where Latin was not a natural base for the vernacular culture. We would expect this to be the case in the Slavic language areas, and in fact it is, for we see only a handful of translations into Polish and Russian and virtually none into the other Slavic languages. This is also true of the Scandinavian countries, where Greek and Latin always remained a somewhat artificial addition to the basic educational curriculum. Given this generalization, there is rather more translation into German than one might expect, especially given the relative popularity of Homer, and rather less than we might anticipate into Spanish and Portuguese, which are Romance cultures like France and Italy. This is probably due to the peculiarly restrictive publishing environment in the Iberian peninsula, which resulted in a disproportionate number of Latin texts being imported from abroad, especially France. I continue to believe that a good bibliography is worthwhile in and of itself, but as these data show, bibliography can also stimulate the questions from which bracing criticism results. As I said at the beginning, woven throughout my story is the computer, which I have grown to love and to hate at the same time. I love it because, as a bibliographer, I can gather more data faster than anyone could have anticipated a generation or two ago. Indeed, I suspect that anyone who is working on an enumerative bibliography right now may well be working in a way that is different even from what I did six or seven years ago. At that point there were lots of bibliographical records on line but not so many digitized copies of the books I was interested in. I 111

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have had cause over the last few months, however, to return to the pre-1600 Latin editions in my Virgil bibliography, and I have discovered that something like one out of three can now be found in digitized form, with the numbers rising every day. We are not there yet, but soon I suspect it might be possible to do most of the work on an enumerative bibliography, with a greater degree of accuracy than I was able to manage, without ever leaving one’s study. But as with all good things, this one comes at a price. I at least find it discouraging to know from the outset that any research like that conducted for my Virgilian bibliography will be obsolete before I can disseminate it in any format, for among the ever-growing number of digitized library records, bookseller’s advertisements, and union catalogues will be things I should have known about but did not. Part of me likes completeness and stability, but the computer works against both. This is perhaps more immediately clear with enumerative bibliography than with book history, but I hope my Virgilian examples have shown that the computer destabilizes both what a text means as well as how the text is constructed. The Edward Snowdens and the North Korean hackers who beat Sony into the ground are only the most extreme versions of something that is built into the computer world, a subversiveness that gives everyone a voice and works against the hierarchical power structures that kept the Ozzie and Harriet world of the sixties safe and secure for some, if not all, Americans. This is the natural environment in which a “pessimistic” reading of a major work of literature can mature – in other words, physical form and textual meaning are inextricably related. It is indeed a brave new world out there, for librarians, book dealers, collectors, and academics alike. Like all uncharted territory, there are hidden dangers here, but in the end, I would encourage us to embrace these changes rather than to run from them, no matter how uncomfortable they sometimes make us feel.

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I. Introduction In many respects Neo-Latin literature can be viewed as the natural chronological extension of the Latin literature of antiquity, whose language and literary conventions it largely shares. All books, however, have a material as well as a textual component, and here it is dangerous to posit a seamless continuity from Virgil to Petrarca to Erasmus. Only a few papyrus fragments and a handful of manuscripts from late antiquity that contain works of classical literature survive, so that modern scholars have to reconstruct the original texts. Since generally accepted procedures have been developed to account for the missing textual states, however, and since the corpus of classical Latin literature is relatively small, there is widespread agreement that all the surviving works should be made available in modern critical editions. This has largely been done, so that the reader often has a choice between an Oxford Classical Text, a volume from the Loeb Classical Library, a Budé text, and a Teubner edition of the same work of classical Latin literature. From the material perspective, the situation is quite different for Neo-Latin. Many Neo-Latin works of literature survive in contemporary manuscripts, some in autograph versions, some in presentation copies, and some in multiple states of revision. It is therefore not necessarily a good idea simply to transfer the same editorial procedures from classical to postclassical texts without thinking carefully about method and practice. And there is by no means a consensus that NeoLatinists should be working toward a modern critical edition of every text in an enormous corpus that has so far resisted complete bibliographical control. In this essay I shall try to provide some answers, by necessity partial and at times provisional, to three questions that arise from this state of affairs: first, what are the advantages of approaching Neo-Latin texts through the manuscripts and early printed books in which they are generally found rather than through modern critical editions? Second, what resources exist to allow the Neo-Latinist access 1 For reasons that will become clear in the discussion that follows, a good many references in this chapter will be to digital resources. In order to avoid overburdening the notes, these references will be placed in the text. All URL’s were accurate as of February 2021.

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to the world of manuscripts and early printed books? And finally, what kinds of evidence are lost if the material aspects of Neo-Latin literature are not taken into account?

II. Manuscript, early printed book, or modern edition? For some Neo-Latin authors, the rationale for a modern printed edition initially seems clear and compelling. One thinks immediately, for example, of Petrarca, who is considered the founding father of Neo-Latin literature but also a major figure in intellectual history and Italian studies. Progress here has been sporadic, but after a long hiatus, the Commissione per l’Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca (www.franciscus.isti.cnr.it/Commissione/index.htm), which published seven volumes between 1926 and 1964, has resumed its activity. Erasmus initially seems to be another obvious candidate for a traditional critical edition, which is being provided in this case by Brill, with an international advisory board supervising the series (https://brill.com/search?q2=erasmus+opera+omnia). In both cases early printed editions exist of the Opera omnia: for Petrarca, a Henricpetrine edition (Basel, 1554), and for Erasmus, editions printed by Froben (Basel, 1538–1540) and Van der Aa (Leiden, 1703–1706). But since Neo-Latin writers of this stature continue to attract at least as many readers as most classical authors, many scholars today feel the need to replace these early printed books with editions prepared according to modern standards. This is not the case, however, for most Neo-Latin writers. With this essay in mind, I turned to Katalog 51, Alte Drucke vor 1700 by an antiquarian book dealer from Salzburg, Austria, Johannes Müller. Among his offerings, we find the following: Niccolò Avancini, Leopoldi Guilielmi archiducis Austriae . . . virtutes (Antwerp: PlantinMoretus, 1665); J. Aventinus, Annalium Boiorum libri VII (Basel: P. Perna, 1580); Daniel Beckher, Medicus microcosmus (Leiden: J. Marcus, 1633); Giovanni Bona, Via compendii ad Deum, per motus anagogicos, et orationes jaculatorias (Munich: S. Rauch for J. Wagner, 1674); Antonius van Dale, Dissertationes de origine et progressu idololatriae et superstitionum (Amsterdam: H. & V. T. Boom, 1696); and Thomas Draxe, Extremi iudicii tuba monitoria (Hanau: Hulsian, 1617). For those interested in the flattery of Renaissance princes, historiography in sixteenth-century Germany, the theory and practice of early modern medicine, witchcraft and exorcism, and astronomical foreshadowings of the Last Judgment, these books are well worth reading. But before we set up a Commission for the National Edition of the Works of Thomas Draxe, some hard thinking should take place. In printing, as in other areas of life, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, so that most scholarly editions today have the same press run as they did during the incunabular period (i.e., before 1501): 300–700 copies.2 The question, then, 2 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard (New York and London: Verso, 1976), 216–22, “Some Basic Data: Size of Editions.”

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is whether books like those in the paragraph above can attract enough readers to justify a critical edition disseminated in traditional print form. In many cases the answer has to be ‘no,’ but the question becomes even more acute in relation to books like the Mutineis of Francesco Rococciolo. His work, which is a perfectly competent Neo-Latin epic focused on a series of political and military events that unfolded around Modena at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was not published until 2006, with the carefully edited text being accompanied three years later by a lengthy commentary that was prepared with equal skill and effort.3 A great deal of time, effort, and expense was lavished on these books, but one has to wonder whether it was all worth it: if Rococciolo could not find enough readers to justify publication among his fellow citizens who lived through these events, where will readers come from today? Until the middle of the last century, publication options had not changed substantially in five hundred years. New technologies for reproducing manuscripts and early printed books, however, offer other options today. Both manuscripts and early printed books have been reproduced on microfilm, then on microfiche, for a couple of generations now. This is an especially appealing option for a NeoLatinist, since it makes possible a press run, as it were, of one, but the technology is a bit off-putting and prices have remained stubbornly high. Another possibility is offered through projects that offer digitized versions of manuscripts and early printed books. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, for example, is systematically digitizing all its early printed books (www.digital-collections.de/index. html?c=startseite&l=en). Special mention should be made here of two large projects: An Analytical Bibliography of On-Line Neo-Latin Texts (www.philological. bham.ac.uk/bibliography/), maintained by Dana Sutton, which offered access to almost 43,000 different works in mid-September, 2012; and Early English Books Online (EEBO: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), which will contain digital facsimiles of 125,000 titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue (1475–1640), Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1641–1700), the Thomason Tracts (1640–1661), and the Early English Tract Supplement. The Neo-Latin section of the Digital Library (http://thelatinlibrary.com/neo.html) in turn offers texts of works by such canonical authors as Melanchthon and Newton along with those of writers like Gislenus Bultelius and Laurentius Corvinus. Many of these texts are not critical editions and mechanisms to ensure scholarly quality are still being developed, but access is free and available to anyone with an internet connection. Digital reproductions of manuscripts and early printed books are a powerful new resource which all Neo-Latinists should embrace eagerly. In the end, however, the decision as to whether a modern critical edition should be prepared must be made on a case-by-case basis. A work like Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses, for example, is of significant interest to historians of Florentine humanism in general and to specialists in the reception of Plato and Virgil in 3 Thomas Haye (ed.), Die Mutineis des Francesco Rococciolo: Ein lateinisches Epos der Renaissance, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2006, 2009).

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particular. There are only five textual authorities, all of which can be dated to within a decade of the composition of the work. One of the four manuscripts, Vat. Urb. lat. 508, is the dedication copy presented by Landino to Federico da Montefeltro, the other three come from contemporary Florence, and the fifth witness is the editio princeps which contains corrections and changes supplied by Landino himself. In this case the work is important, the number of textual witnesses is manageable, and the path through them is clear, so Peter Lohe’s decision to prepare a traditional critical edition was reasonable. The result is a text that was prepared according to a rational, widely accepted process, accompanied by an apparatus criticus (a collection of variant readings at the bottom of each page) and a list of references to other authors, primarily classical, that Landino makes but does not identify explicitly.4 Lohe’s edition is in a series sponsored by the Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento (www.insr.it/index.php?id=38), which suggests that other works of Neo-Latin literature merit similar treatment. The Renaissance Society of America has a similar series (www.brill.com/publications/renaissancesociety-america), as does Leuven University Press (Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae, https://lup.be/collections/series-bibliotheca-latinitatis-novae), but the most extensive collection of Neo-Latin texts, offered in scholarly but not critical editions along with English translations, is The I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL, www. hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1145,), which reached its fiftieth volume in less than a decade of existence. While projects like ITRL confirm that there is a place for the modern critical edition even in today’s challenging publishing environment, modern textual theory has offered a new rationale for relying on manuscripts and early printed editions instead. The traditional model that Lohe used was developed by Karl Lachmann in the nineteenth century, and it is admirably suited for classical literature, where almost all the surviving textual evidence dates from centuries after the work was composed and the circumstances of initial publication have to be recreated.5 But as Jerome McGann has noted, the circumstances of textual production and dissemination, along with the surviving evidence, are quite different in the early modern period. Lachmann’s model treats the text as a sort of Platonic form, unchanging as an expression of its author’s final intention and approachable only through the rigors of abstract thought. McGann argues, however, that texts are fluid, changeable both by the author and by a series of other people like editors, printers, and critics in a process that is more akin to the Aristotelian discussion of probabilities than to Platonic dialectic. In other words, texts do not exist in solemn ontological splendor, but are embedded in society, and each textual instantiation is the result of one moment in which a series of relationships (proofreading, censorship, revision)

4 Cristoforo Landino, Disputationes Camaldulenses, ed. Peter Lohe, Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, studi e testi, 6 (Florence: Sansoni, 1980). 5 E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book, Sather Classical Lectures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

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is temporarily frozen.6 Sometimes these forces prevented publication altogether: Petrarca, for example, released only a few lines of his Africa during his lifetime through a sort of self-censorship, in which his fear of critical judgment sent him back again and again to revise the work.7 Indeed Petrarca was a sort of incurable reviser, so that works like the Secretum, as Hans Baron has shown, contain layers of changes and reworkings.8 A modern critical edition obscures all this at the same time as it removes what it has become fashionable to call the ‘paratext,’ things like prefaces, dedications, introductory poems by the author’s friends in praise of the work at hand, and so forth.9 Stripping the text of this context in a modern critical edition obscures the relationships through which it was produced. This loss is greater in the cases of some authors than of others: Erasmus, for example, regularly broke his longer works apart so he could dedicate each section to someone else, then rededicated works as they went into new editions.10 In many cases, then, there are significant advantages to relying on manuscripts and early printed books instead of modern critical editions. In any event, anyone who decides to prepare an edition should not forget the famous dictum of Paul Oskar Kristeller, that for postclassical works, two editions are worse than none. What he meant by this is that if circumstances justify a modern critical edition, go ahead and prepare it, but be sure no one else is working on the same project, for if two editions of the same obscure work are published, no one will know which one to cite and half the collective effort will have been wasted.

III. Resources for the study of manuscripts and early printed books A good many resources exist to facilitate work with manuscripts and early printed books. With manuscripts, the first problem is simply being able to read them, since a good number of medieval scripts, especially those written rapidly in informal contexts, are quite different from what the modern eye is used to and therefore difficult for us to read, at least initially. Fortunately most of what the Neo-Latinist is likely to encounter in the study of literary texts does not fall into this class. As part of their effort to revive the past, Renaissance humanists effected a handwriting reform at the beginning of the fifteenth century that banished the ‘Gothic’ script 6 Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 7 This process, with its effect on the manuscript transmission of the text, is described in the introduction to Nicola Festa’s edition of the Africa, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1926), esp. XXXV–XXXVI. 8 Hans Baron, Petrarch’s Secretum: Its Making and Its Meaning, Medieval Academy Books, 94 (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1985). 9 The term was popularized by Gérard Genette in “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History, 22 (1991), 261, picking up on a term used in Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 93. 10 Craig Kallendorf, “In Search of a Patron: Anguillara’s Vernacular Virgil and the Print Culture of Renaissance Italy,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 91 (1997), 294–325.

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that they associated with the barbarism of the Middle Ages. They made a big mistake here, in that the script they replaced it with because they thought it was used in antiquity in fact was Carolingian, but for us this is a felix culpa, in the sense that the bookhands from the time of Charlemagne are quite easy to read. Some manuscripts were also written in humanist cursive, but this is also comparatively easy to read, with the letters clearly divided and spaced out reasonably well. What is more, after the invention of printing, these two scripts served as the foundation for the fonts in which Latin books have been printed throughout most of Europe for five hundred years. The revived Carolingian bookhand is what we know as ‘roman,’ and the humanist cursive is what we call ‘italic.’11 When it comes to finding manuscripts containing works of Neo-Latin literature, the problems become more serious. The basic difficulty is that there is no single reference work that contains everything one might want to know. One should start with series like the Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche d’Italia, begun by Giuseppe Mazzatinti at the end of the nineteenth century, which contains references to a good many works of Neo-Latin literature found in Italian libraries. Large national libraries like the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library have issued catalogues of their holdings that contain information on thousands of relevant manuscripts, and a good number of libraries, both large and small, offer online inventories of at least part of their manuscript collections. In some cases, like that of Politian, we have books like Ida Maier’s Les manuscrits d’Ange Politien that identify all the manuscripts containing the works of a particular author and provide detailed descriptions of them.12 In the end one is still left wishing for something more systematic. The best solution at this point is to begin with Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Latin Manuscript Books before 1600,13 which proceeds library by library and lists the resources available for finding the manuscripts in each place. Getting access to all these resources is an issue, even for someone working at the best of research libraries, but F. Edward Cranz’s “Microfilm Corpus of the Indexes to Printed Catalogues of Latin Manuscripts before 1600 AD” offers thirty-eight reels of microfilm containing the indexes to the printed inventories in Kristeller’s guide, allowing one to search for a particular author and narrow down the number of manuscript catalogues that have to be consulted. Many manuscript inventories remain unpublished, but here again, there is a solution, with the 340 11 The classic account of this handwriting revolution, B. L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script, Storia e letteratura, raccolta di studi e testi, 79 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960), should be supplemented by A. C. de la Mare, The Handwriting of Italian Humanists, vol. I, fascicle 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, 1973). 12 Ida Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange Politien: catalogue descriptif, avec dix-neuf documents inedits en appendice, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance, 70 (Geneva: Droz, 1965). 13 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Latin Manuscript Books before 1600: A List of the Printed Catalogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections, 3rd edn. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1965).

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reels of Cranz’s “Microfilm Corpus of Unpublished Inventories of Latin Manuscripts through 1600 AD” making this material accessible. And finally there is one of the crowning achievements of late twentieth-century scholarship, Paul Oskar Kristeller’s monumental Iter Italicum, whose subtitle explains that it provides “a finding list of uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued humanistic manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and other libraries.”14 This resource can be consulted through the six print volumes, a CD-ROM, or electronically. Early printed books are easier to work with, since access can be obtained through a good number of large-scale projects, many of which are available online. The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/) offers information about books printed before 1501, while the Universal Short Title Catalogue (www.ustc.ac.uk/) incorporates this material and entries from various national bibliographical projects into information on over 740,000 separate editions published through 1650. Important national databases exist for France (Catalogue collectif de France, http://ccfr.bnf.fr/portailccfr/jsp/ index.jsp), Italy (OPAC SBN, www.sbn.it/opacsbn/opac/iccu/free.jsp), Spain (Catálogo colectivo del patrimonio bibliográfico español, http://catalogos.mecd. es/CCPB/cgi-ccpb/abnetopac/O12293/ID9aeac9c0?ACC=101), the British Isles (English Short Title Catalogue, http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=loginbl-estc), the Netherlands (Short Title Catalogue Netherlands, www.kb.nl/stcn/ index-en.html), and Flemish-speaking Belgium (Short Title Catalogue Flanders, www.vlaamse-erfgoedbibliotheek.be/en/oude-drukken). Seventeenth-century German Books are most easily accessed through VD-17, Das Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (www.vd17.de/). Books in eastern and central European libraries are more difficult to find, but more and more individual libraries from the area are putting their catalogues of early printed editions online. Neo-Latinists should not forget that antiquarian booksellers also provide an important source of information about early printed books. While most incunables (books printed before 1501), for example, had a press run of several hundred copies, the most frequently recurring number of surviving copies is one.15 Statistics generated from the Universal Short Title Catalogue suggest that for the sixteenth century, the number rises to four or five, but again, there are hundreds of editions whose existence can be confirmed through only one surviving copy. Many times that one copy comes on the market through an antiquarian bookseller, so that the Neo-Latinist would be well advised to look regularly through the

14 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, 6 vols. (London: The Warburg Institute, and Leiden: Brill, 1963–1992). 15 Jonathan Green, Frank McIntyre, and Paul Needham, “The Shape of Incunable Survival and Statistical Estimation of Lost Editions,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 105.2 (2011), 141–75.

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catalogues of dealers like Maggs and Quaritch in London, Antiquariaat Forum in the Netherlands, and Erasmushaus in Switzerland for new finds. Dealers like those at Libreria Philobiblon in Milan and Rome and Bruce McKittrick Rare Books in Philadelphia are also first-rate scholars whose catalogue descriptions provide valuable information about the books they sell. Unfortunately prices for early printed books have risen considerably in the last couple of decades, but it is still possible to get an interesting volume of Neo-Latin literature that was published shortly after it was written for three or four hundred pounds, sometimes less, from a dealer, and often for considerably less at auction. Christie’s and Sotheby’s have traditionally dominated the high-end market, but Swann Galleries and Bloomsbury Auctions regularly offer attractive items at appealing prices and there are other galleries throughout Europe and the United States that deal in books that are less expensive yet.

IV. How to use an early printed book: a case study As an example of how manuscripts and early printed books can be used in NeoLatin scholarship, I would like to look at the first seven lines of a poem, Maffeo Vegio’s thirteenth book to the Aeneid (see Appendix 1). This work was written in 1428 as a supplement to Virgil’s epic, in an effort to tie up what the twentyone-year-old poet saw as the loose ends left dangling in the original. Trying to complete a poem that Virgil left finished at his death, except for some final stylistic polishing, may initially seem like a curious thing to do, but in fact Vegio’s Book 13 is typical in many ways of Neo-Latin literature in general, for it is bound closely to the Latin literature of antiquity, which it seeks to reproduce and extend in terms of both style and content. The poem can be read in a modern critical edition prepared by Bernd Schneider in the mid-eighties. Schneider is a fine scholar, but what has happened here depicts well the challenges faced by modern scholars who must use manuscripts and early printed editions. Schneider’s work with the manuscripts shows that the editio princeps (first printed edition) comes from a particularly corrupt part of the tradition, which confirms that Anna Cox Brinton’s edition, which was published in 1930 and based on it but is still in print, should not be used any longer. Schneider lists twenty-one manuscripts in the preface to his edition, but unfortunately the full number is more than twice that. What is more, how the manuscripts should be handled is far less clear than it was with the Disputationes Camaldulenses. There has been a general consensus for over a hundred years that two Vatican manuscripts, Vat. Lat. 1668 and 1669, are particularly good witnesses for Book 13, but neither is an autograph and both show signs of contamination, so it is difficult both to construct a stemma that shows the relationship of all the surviving manuscripts with one another and to assign relative weights to their variant readings. As a result, the text is more fluid than the stemma and apparatus criticus (the list of variant readings, the first block below the text in Appendix 1) would lead us to

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believe.16 This is a common problem in traditionally prepared critical editions of Neo-Latin texts. Schneider’s second apparatus, his list of textual parallels, is a masterpiece, and it is this list at which I wish to look more closely. As the second block below the text in Appendix 1 shows, Vegio has constructed his poem with his gaze fixed constantly on classical Latin poetry. This is an aspect of Neo-Latin literature that can be off-putting to modern readers, swept up as we are by Romantic notions of individuality and creativity that put a premium on doing something different from what past poets have done, not something that is bound inextricably to their work. Yet Vegio has done his job well, and so has his editor, who has provided the tools by which the modern reader can appreciate the Neo-Latin poem on its own terms. Schneider’s second apparatus is valuable for a second reason as well, for it suggests not only that standards for judging poetry have changed through time, but also that how poetry was read has changed as well. What is going on here is a little less straightforward and requires that we step aside for a moment and look at a couple of carefully chosen early printed books. Since for obvious reasons, most of Vegio’s references are to Virgil, I would like to look briefly at a copy of Virgil published in Leipzig in 1581 by Joannes Steinman, now in a private collection. An early reader has gone through this book and underlined selected passages. In Aeneid 6, for example, this reader underlined “Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito/Quam tua te fortuna sinet” (“Do not relent before distress, but be/far bolder than your fortune would permit”; Aen. 6.95–6, 292–3),17 then a longer passage: . . . facilis descensus Averni: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis: Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est. pauci, quos aequs amavit Iuppiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus, Dis geniti, potuere . . . (easy – the way that leads into Avernus: day and night the door of darkest Dis is open.

16 Bernd Schneider (ed.), Das Aeneissupplement des Maffeo Vegio: Eingeleitet, nach den Handschriften herausgegeben, übersetxt und mit einem Index versehen (Weinheim: VCH, 1985), with the discussion of the manuscripts on 24–39. See also my review of this edition in Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 95–96. Schneider’s edition replaces Anna Cox Brinton (ed.), Maphaeus Vegius and His Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1930; rpt. London: Duckworth, 2002). A translation into modern English can be found in Maffeo Vegio, Short Epics, ed. and trans. Michael C. J. Putnam and James Hankins, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 15 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3–31. 17 Translations of passages from the Aeneid are from The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1972) and will be placed in the text.

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But to recall your steps, to rise again into the upper air: that is the labor; that is the task. A few, whom Jupiter has loved in kindness or whom blazing worth has raised to the heaven as gods’ sons, returned) (Aen. 6.126–31; p. 294) Then later, he underlined “Discite iustitiam moniti, et non temnere divos” (“Be warned, learn justice, do not scorn the gods”; Aen. 6.620, p. 312). Precisely the same lines are underlined in another book in the same private collection, a copy of the 1567 Frankfurt edition. This reader has added what are called ‘indexing notes’ next to the underlined passages, where we see key words like “avarus” (“greedy”) next to line 610, “tyrannus” (“tyrant”) next to line 623, “incestuosi” (“the incestuous”) next to 624, and so forth (f. 140v). Both of these readers are doing the same thing, searching for easily remembered expressions of moral wisdom, underlining them for future reference, and adding a key word to remind them why they had marked the passage. These examples were chosen for their moral content, but the early reader of the Frankfurt edition also marked passages whose style he admired, tagging the similes at Aen. 5.273–80 (f. 118v) and 5.588–91 (f. 124v) and the hypallages (the transfer of a description from the word it should describe to another one) in Aen. 5.458–59 (f. 122r) and 5.500–1 (f. 122v) and putting the names of the figures in the margin as ‘indexing notes.’ Other early printed books show us that there is a second step to this reading practice. If we turn, for example, to Jean Petit’s P. Virgilii Maronis opera in locos communes . . . digesta, published in Lyons by Jean Pillehotte in 1587, we find what might initially strike us as a curious thing, a book with lines from Virgil ranged out below headings like “aetas aurea” (“golden age”), “aetas ferrea” (“iron age”), “amare” (“to love”), “amicus” (“friend”), “arma” (“arms”), and so forth. But if we think about the markings in the early printed editions of Virgil mentioned above, what Petit has done begins to make sense. Under “avaritia” (“greed”), for example, we find Aen. 6.610, “Aut qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis” (“And here are those who . . . had brooded all alone on new-won treasure”; p. 95), which was accompanied by the ‘indexing note’ “avarus” (“greedy”) in the Frankfurt edition of Virgil. The line with the warning to learn justice and not to scorn the gods (Aen. 6.620), which was underlined in the Leipzig edition, is listed under the heading “iustitia” (“justice”) in Petit’s commonplace book (p. 568), while the lines promising apotheosis for those possessing “virtus” (“virtue”; Aen. 6.129–31) are listed under that heading (p. 1005). In other words, in commonplace books like these – and there are a great many examples just like this one – the ‘indexing notes’ that have been added in the margins of classical texts have become the headings and the underlined passages from Virgil have been listed out below them. Marking passages in classical texts, and then rearranging them in commonplace books, are not the end of Renaissance reading practices, but a means. The end is the production of a new work of literature, like Maffeo Vegio’s Book 13. 122

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To produce a poem like this, writers like Vegio took what they found valuable in ancient literature, the passages that were memorable for their moral sentiments or their stylistic grace, and wove them into the works they created, using the headings of their commonplace books to find the right line for the right place in the new poem.18 Underline, reorganize, and reuse – this is the process that produced poems like Vegio’s Book 13, and hundreds of other Neo-Latin works as well.

V. Conclusion As the example of Vegio’s Book 13 has shown, works of Neo-Latin literature require some understanding of manuscripts and early printed books to be appreciated. Even when a modern critical edition exists, it is important to know something about the manuscripts and early printed books on which it is based to be able to work with it successfully. What is more, parts of such an edition, like the apparatus containing parallel passages from classical literature, take on an added richness and texture when we understand how Neo-Latin writers worked. This process, in turn, only makes sense when we observe how manuscripts and early printed books were read by the Neo-Latin writers who broke them apart, reorganized them, and reused the pieces in original compositions of their own. As the study of Neo-Latin literature enters the twenty-first century, it is worth thinking about how scholarship in the field is generally conducted and what might be done differently. Research has only begun to exploit the possibilities offered by new technologies, especially those based on the internet, both to find books and to reproduce them more widely than before. New theories of textual editing have challenged the long dominance of the traditional model used by classicists, but scholars have just begun to think through the consequences of this challenge. Paradoxically, at the center of the opportunities offered by new technologies are old objects, the manuscripts and early printed editions that have brought the works of Neo-Latin literature down to us. It is now possible to find this material far more easily than it was a generation or two ago, and to explore how it might be used for a new sort of edition in which multiple versions in early modern documents can be placed side by side on a computer screen and consulted with a click of a mouse, by far more people than ever had access to the originals. Much remains to be done, and manuscripts and early printed books are at the top of this agenda.

18 This process is also described in the educational treatises of the day; see, for example, Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning,” in Craig Kallendorf (ed.), Humanist Educational Treaties, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 5 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 295. For a discussion of how this played out in the classroom, see “Virgil in the Renaissance Classroom: From Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae,” in J. F. Ruys, J. Ward and M. Heyworth (eds.), The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, Disputatio, 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 309–28.

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APPENDIX 1

The block of text presented here, the first seven lines of Maffeo Vegio’s Book 13, along with the textual apparatus and the list of parallel passages, is from Schneider’s edition. I have replaced his German translation with that of Thomas Twyne, which was first published in 1584 and gives a period flavor to the Latin text, as printed in Brinton’s edition. Text 1

6

Turnus ut extremo devictus Marte profudit effugientem animam medioque sub agmine victor magnanimus stetit Aeneas, Mavortius heros, obstupuere omnes gemitumque dedere Latini, et durum ex alto revomentes corde dolorem concussis cecidere animis, ceu frondibus ingens silva solet lapsis boreali impulsa tumultu. (When Turnus in this finall fight downethrowne, his flittring ghost Had yeelded up unto the aire, in middest of all the host Aeneas valient victour stands, god Mavors champion bold. The Latines stoynisht standing, from their hartes great groanes unfold, And deepely from their inward thoughts revolving cause of care, Their daunted minds they do let fall; Like as thick woods that are Of bignesse huge, lament their losse when first their leaves do fall Through furious force of northren blastes, of greene that spoiles them all.)

Textual variants 1 devictus] confectus ε (devictus L2 s. l.) 2 sub] ex ε (sub H2 s. l.) 5 removentes] N 7 solet] dolet Fθe: sonat HL et v. l. M Parallel passages 1 Aen. 9,47 ‘Turnus ut’ ante volans tardum praecesserat agmen; 12,1 sq. ‘Turnus ut’ infractos adverso ‘Marte’ Latinos/deficisse videt; 12,324 124

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Turnus ut Aenean cedentem ex agmine vidit 1–2 Aen. 1,98 tuaque animam hanc effundere dextra; Lucan. 3,623 ‘effugientem animam’ lassos collegit in artus 2 Aen. 9,28 ‘medio’ dux ‘agmine’ Turnus; 9,728 sq. qui Rutulum in ‘medio’ non ‘agmine’ regem/viderit; 11,762 qua se cumque furens ‘medio’ tulit ‘agmine’ virgo; Lucan. 1,245 celsus medio conspectus in ‘agmine’ Caesar 3 Aen. 1,260. 9,204 ‘magnanimum’ Aenean; 5,17 ‘magnanime’ Aenea; cf. 5,407. 10,771 4 Ov. met. 8,616. 765. 12,18 ‘obstipuere omnes’; georg. 4,350sq. omnes/‘obstipuere’; Aen. 2,120. 5,404 ‘obstipuere’ animi; 8,530; 9,123 ‘obstipuere’ animis; – Aen. 2,53 ‘gemitumque dedere’; Ov. met. 15, 612 demisere oculos omnes gemitumque dedere 5 Aen. 1, 209 premit altum ‘corde dolorem’; Ov. met. 2,621–23 tum vero gemitus . . ./alto de corde petitos/edidit; – Aen. 5,182 salsos rident ‘revomentem’ pectore fluctus; cf. Sil. 10, 325 6 Aen. 3,260 ‘cecidere animi’; 9,498 hoc fletu concussi ‘animi’; Ov. pont. 2,3,50 animi non cecidere tui 6 sq. Aen. 7,676 ‘ingens/silva’; Ov. ars 3, 161 sq. raptique aetate capilli/ut Borea frondes excutiente cadunt

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9 A H U M A N I S T A N N O TATO R OF VIRGIL Coluccio Salutati

An older manuscript witness that remains to be explored by editors and students of Virgil’s poems is Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität F II 23 (described only recently in a printed catalogue by B. Munk Olsen, L’étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles (Paris, 1985), 2:702). The codex, which is of moderate size (259 x165 mm., with 33–34 long lines in a written space of 200 x 98 mm.), was copied (teste B. Bischoff) in the first half of the eleventh century, probably in northern Italy, by several scribes who wrote a more or less similar Caroline hand. It consists of 201 numbered folios now arranged in a fifteenth-century binding according to the schema 1 + 18 + 19 + 16 + 1, and contains the following: ff. 1r-14v Eclogues, ff. 14v-48r Georgics, and ff. 48r–200v Aeneid. Apart from its antiquity (and this must be relative in any case since other witnesses, even excluding papyrus fragments, survive from as early as the fourth or fifth century AD), MS F II 23 is notable for the number and variety of interlinear glosses entered by contemporary and later hands. Every page exhibits at least some annotation, and there are many instances where the text is surrounded on all four sides by notes so closely packed that it is difficult to discern where a verse begins or ends. Two of the later glossators were particularly assiduous and have thus left more than enough examples of their activity to enable us to distinguish with ease (usually) their respective interventions. Paleographical and codicological evidence establishes that these zealous annotators are Coluccio Salutati (1331– 1406) and Giovanni Tortelli (ca. 1400–1466). In the present essay, the nature and extent of Salutati’s interest in Virgil will be explored. For Coluccio Salutati, Chancellor of Florence from 1375 to 1406 and the acknowledged leader of Italian humanism after the deaths of Petrarca and Boccaccio, Virgil occupied a special place as “princeps poetarum.”1 Salutati quoted

1 B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati, Medioevo e Umanesimo, 4 (Padua, 1963), 254 lists some of the flattering epithets Salutati gave to Virgil; this one is found in Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. F. Novati, Fonti per la storia d’Italia pubblicate dall’Istituto storico italiano, 15–18bis (Rome, 1891–1911), 3:491. Though inclined to consider Virgil the best of all poets, Salutati vacillated in his judgment and spent much of his life trying to reconcile his admiration for Virgil

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-12

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extensively from Virgil’s poetry throughout his scholarly career and made that poetry a focal point of his critical theory, but a thorough analysis of these points has been hampered by the difficulties modern scholars have had in finding his personal copy of his favorite Roman poet. In 1977, A. C. de la Mare attributed Paris Bibl. nat. lat. 7942 (containing the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid) to Salutati, but because the manuscript was copied very late (ca. 1400) and contains virtually no notes, it offers little beyond a confirmation of Salutati’s continued interest in Virgil. Now, however, with the recent discovery in the Universitätsbibliothek at Basel of MS F II 23 (hereafter called ‘B’), a manuscript of Virgil owned by Salutati and so extensively annotated by him as to constitute a real commentary, a thorough analysis of Salutati’s Virgil studies is possible.2 Accordingly, I shall begin by examining the Basel manuscript to determine as precisely as possible when Salutati scholiated it and which aspects of Virgil’s poetry interested him at that time; in presenting this analysis, I have transcribed and edited a number of representative marginalia. Then, after discussing Virgil’s place in Salutati’s later works, I shall show how his careful study of the Basel manuscript provided an essential foundation for the critical treatment of Salutati’s “optimus poetarum.”3 The Basel manuscript has a number of features characteristic of Salutati’s ownership, among the most obvious being his pressmark in the upper right corner of f. 1r, an Arabic numeral (here “248”), followed by “carte” (written out), followed by the number of leaves in Roman numerals (here “clxxxxviii”).4 It is a little harder to say when Salutati bought this manuscript. In 1378, he wrote to Giuliano Zonarini in Bologna and asked his correspondent to buy a copy of Virgil for him there. We do not know for sure what came of this, but since we learn of the request in the same letter in which we discover that Zonarini considered Virgil a “vates mentificus,” it seems unlikely that the Basel manuscript came to Salutati

among the ancients with Petrarca among the moderns; see Ullman, Humanism, 240–41, and R. P. Oliver, “Coluccio Salutati’s Criticism of Petrarch,” Italica, 16 (1939): 49–57. 2 There has been as yet no fullscale study of Salutati’s treatment of Virgil. V. Zabughin, Vergilio nel Rinascimento italiano da Dante a Torquato Tasso, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1921–1923) touches on a few of the most basic points (1:117–19), but R. Sabbadini’s study of Renaissance allegorizations of Virgil, “Sull’allegoria dei poeti, specialmente di Vergilio,” in Storia del Ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell’età della Rinascenza (Turin, 1885), 103–11 does not mention Salutati at all. Virgil comes up in the longer discussion of Salutati’s views on poetry, of course, but the interest here has up to now been focused elsewhere; see note 21, below. Twenty years ago Ullman wrote that “no manuscript of his [Virgil’s] has survived” among codices known to have been in Salutati’s library” (Humanism, 254). The attribution of Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 7942 to Salutati was made by A. C. de la Mare in “Humanistic Script: The First Ten Years,” in Das Verhältnis der Humanisten zum Buch, ed. Fritz Krafft and Dieter Wuttke, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Kommission für Humanismusforschung, Mitteilung, 4 (Boppard, 1977), 89–90, note 3. The identification of the Basel manuscript was announced by M. Steinmann, “Die humanistische Schrift und die Anfänge des Humanismus in Basel,” Archiv für Diplomatik 22 (1976): 389 and notes 24a, 24b. 3 De laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman, 2 vols. (Zurich, 1951), 1:329. 4 Ullman, Humanism, 129–30, and A. C. de la Mare, The Handwriting of Italian Humanists (Oxford, 1973), 32.

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from this source.5 The other obvious possibility focuses on a note found near the end of Florence, Bibl. Laur. MS Fies. 176, a Priscian once owned by Salutati and extensively annotated by him. The note has been erased, but Ullman read under ultraviolet light: Iste liber prisciani est s(er) Coluccii c(on)d(am) pieri coluccii de Stignano not(ar)ii que(m) ip(s)e emit i(n) t(er)ra S(ancte) Marie in mo(n)tis a d(omina) (?) p(er)uccia c(on)dam (?) s(er) Landi p(er)ucci de d(i)c(t)o loco cu(m) sc(ri)ptis V(ir)gilii lucani (et) poete oratii p(ro) fl(o)r(enis) IIII sp(ecie) MCCCLV Ind(ictione) VIIII die XXIII Octubr(is).6 (italics mine) If the Basel manuscript was part of this purchase, it would join the Priscian as one of Salutati’s oldest books, obtained well before he left the Valdinievole for greener pastures.7 But is this possible? One way to approach the question is to examine the marginalia themselves to determine whether the kinds of information they contain and the handwriting in which they are written can be dated; the earlier the marginalia, the more probable the 1355 purchase date becomes. Examination of other manuscripts owned and annotated by Salutati shows that longer notes with philological and textual observations tend to be early, while the “indexing notes” frequently associated with Salutati are comparatively late, not before the 1380s.8 The notes in the Basel manuscript are of the former type. Salutati’s hand also changed over the course of time. The indexing notes are generally written in a large, firm hand that gives way in some manuscripts to a thin, shaky script like one a very old man might have used. The hand in the Virgil manuscript does not bear close comparison with these indexing notes. In fact, we might say that, rather than the lighter, better spaced appearance and slender, elegant ascenders and descenders often found in Salutati’s late hand, the marginalia of the Basel manuscript preserve a clearer semi-Gothic appearance typical of Salutati’s earlier writing.9 The letters are small and rather closely spaced, ascenders and descenders are fairly short, the ascender 5 Ullman, Humanism, 254; the criticism of Virgil is found near the beginning of the letter to Zonarini, Epistolario, 1:300. 6 F. 217r, transcribed in Humanism, 167. 7 The importance of this early purchase for the intellectual development of the young Salutati has been described elsewhere: ibid., 44–45, and in the standard biographical treatment, R. G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (Durham, NC, 1983), 54. We also know that Salutati was interested enough in Virgil to attend the lectures delivered by Zanobi da Strada, a friend and admirer of Petrarca, and that these lectures were given in 1351 or 1352, just before Salutati bought a text of this poetry; ibid., 53, and De laboribus Herculis, 2:483–86. 8 De la Mare, Handwriting, 33. 9 Ibid., 34–35, 38; Il protocollo notarile di Coluccio Salutati (1372–1373), ed. A. Petrucci (Milan, 1963), 33–34, 36–37; and B. L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script, Storia e letteratura, 79 (Rome, 1960), 11–15.

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on the uncial d leans toward the horizontal, and fusion of letters is pronounced. Everything so far suggests that these marginalia were entered before 1380. In fact, a comparison of this manuscript with the Priscian is instructive. Both manuscripts contain two markers that de la Mare finds typical of Salutati’s earliest annotations, those tending to predate 1370: a small, neat pointing hand, inclined a bit at the wrist and with only four fingers showing, and a bracket formed by two wavy lines that precedes many of the notes.10 What is more, a number of the notes in the Basel manuscript contain features typical of Salutati’s chancery cursive, with looped ascenders – especially on the d – being prominent. These features tend to disappear in Salutati’s later marginalia; in fact, as Petrucci points out, Salutati even purged the looped ascenders from the chancery documents written in his last years. These cursive features are also found scattered among the notes to the Priscian.11 Although material such as this is often difficult to evaluate, the evidence here clearly suggests that Salutati had read this manuscript and made notes in it before, say, becoming Chancellor of Florence in 1375, and a careful examination of these notes produces no reason to rule out a 1355 purchase date. When we turn to the marginalia themselves, we quickly discover that a great many of them are extracts from Servius, whom Salutati later called one of the “commentatores antiquitate et autoritate nobilissimi,” the “commentatorum optimus.”12 This should not necessarily surprise us given the popularity of Servius in fourteenth-century Italy – the text of Virgil in the famous Ambrosian codex of Petrarca, we recall, is surrounded by Servius’s commentary13 – but it may at first prove a little disappointing for the reader who approaches the Basel manuscript in hopes of finding observations as original and imaginative as those of Petrarca. However, when we recall that the range of Servius’s commentary runs from grammatical and stylistic observations to allegorical interpretations and information on ancient life and customs, it seems reasonable to assume that what Salutati chose to extract from Servius should tell us a great deal about which aspects of Virgilian poetry interested him at this comparatively early stage of his scholarly career. 10 Handwriting, 33–34. 11 Il protocollo, 27, 43–45. All of these features may be found on f. 53r of the Priscian manuscript. 12 De laboribus Herculis, 1:191 and 1:153. To my knowledge, a complete text of Servius has not survived among Salutati’s books. While his hopes for obtaining a Servius from Carlo Malatesta in 1401 were dashed (Epistolario, 3:533, 539; cf. Ullman, Humanism, 251), Salutati must have also had access to a more complete version than the extracts in the Basel manuscript, since the extensive quotations from Servius in De laboribus Herculis are not restricted to what is quoted in the Basel manuscript. 13 On Petrarca’s Ambrosian codex, see M. L. Lord, “Petrarch and Vergil’s First Eclogue: The Codex Ambrosianus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 86 (1982): 253–76; P. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (Paris, 1907), 1:140–61; and A. Ratti, “Ancora del celebre codice manoscritto delle opere di Virgilio già di Francesco Petrarca ed ora della Biblioteca Ambrosiana,” in Francesco Petrarca e la Lombardia (Milan, 1904), 217–42. Servius maintained his popularity into the next century as well; G. Mambelli’s census in Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane (Florence, 1954) indicates an editio princeps of 1470, with almost half of the editions of Virgil published before 1500 being accompanied by Servius’s commentary.

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These trends should be confirmed by those marginalia that do not come directly from Servius. For purposes of analysis, it will be easiest to separate Salutati’s notes into categories. One group draws from Greek and Roman mythology to identify people and explain peculiarities of phrasing in Virgil’s text. Thus Salutati reminds himself that Tithonus, the brother of Laomedon and lover of Aurora, was changed into a cicada (on Georg. 1.447, f. 21v; the note is taken from Serv. on Aen. 4.585 and also appears on f. 93r),14 and that the god of the woodlands whom the Romans called Silvanus was called Pan by the Greeks (on Aen. 8.600, f. 144v). Often the mythological material goes beyond mere identification to help explicate the text of the poem. Why did Virgil describe Lycia as “hiberna” and Delos as “materna”? Salutati observes that Constat Apolinem VII. mensibus hyemalibus apud Pat[a]ram Licie civitatem dare responsa, unde ‘Patareus’ Apollo dicitur, et VI estivis apud Delum, ubi nutritus fuit et ob hoc dicit ‘maternam.’ (Serv. on Aen. 4.143–44, f. 85v) The annotator’s interest in mythological detail also leads him now and again to confuse issues that Virgil had left clear; for example, he glosses Virgil’s reference to the fifty heads of the Hydra with “quam quidam volunt quinquaginta habere capita, alii tria, alii vero novem” (Serv. on Aen. 6.575, f. 117r). When Salutati glosses Cyllene as a mountain in Arcadia where Maia gave birth to Mercury (Serv. on Aen. 7.139, f. 137r), his interest in mythology has led him to another category in his note taking: geographical identification. Salutati’s wellknown antiquarian interests are already evident when he writes, “Butroti urbem, id est Butrotium, ut fontem Timavi. Haec civitas est in Epiro, cuius pars est Caonia, que ante ‘Molosia’ dicta est” (Serv. on Aen. 3.293, f. 76v). These antiquarian interests in geography were reinforced by feelings of patriotism when he read about Italy, feelings drawn from his training in Roman law and his belief in the authority of a Roman Emperor ruling over the same Italy through which Aeneas had once travelled.15 Thus it seemed worthwhile for Salutati to annotate very carefully sections of the catalogue of Latin troops in Aeneid 7, to identify the city Nursia, the mountain Massico and the river Volturnus, and the Auruncan and Oscan peoples (Serv. on Aen. 7.715–30, f. 133v).

14 Actually, Tithonus was Laomedon’s son. In order to avoid overburdening the notes, the folio citations for Salutati’s notes from the Basel manuscript, the line references for Virgil’s poetry (keyed to the 1969 Oxford Classical Text edition of R. A. B. Mynors), and references to Servius (when applicable) will be incorporated into the text. I have, of course, supplied punctuation and capitalization for Salutati’s marginalia. 15 The ideas on patriotism that appear in Salutati’s early letters are discussed in Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, 73–77.

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These feelings of patriotism led in turn to an interest in ancient history, which appears primarily in a small group of notes on the parade of Roman heroes at the end of Aeneid 6. Thus Salutati uses Servius to distinguish Cato the Censor, the warrior and historian mentioned in Aen. 6.841, from Cato Uticensis, and he draws on Servius again to explain the reference to Cossus in the same line by noting that he won the spolia opima against “Laertes Gallicus Columnus” (i.e., Lars Tolumnius of Veii, f. 121v). The note on Aen. 6.842 clarifies both family relationships and key elements of Roman history: quis Gracci. Gracos seditiosos constat fuisse, nobiles tamen genere, namque per Corneliam nepotes Africani Scipionis fuerunt. Ergo Scipiones dicit ‘Grachi genus.’ Duo autem fuerunt, maior Africanus, Emilianus minor, qui obsidione Cartaginis ab Italia revocavit Anibalem. (Serv., f. 121v) In the same way, “tertiaque arma” at line 859 draws forth a note distinguishing the three kinds of spolia opima and explaining that Marcellus’s spolia opima had been preceded by similar honors given to Romulus and Cossus (Serv., f. 121v). Another category of marginalia uses information about ancient life and customs to explicate Virgil’s text. For instance, some of the men in this same parade of Roman heroes wear oak crowns; Salutati explains that these are the soldiers “qui in bello civem liberassent,” then names and explains the “corone murales” and “corone agonales” (Serv. on Aen. 6.772, f. 120r). When Virgil described Amata’s frenzied wanderings in Aeneid 7, he compared her movements to those of a “turbo,” which Salutati glosses as “lignum rotundum ludi puerilis quod agitatur flagella, scilicet trochus” (on Aen. 7.378, f. 128r). Shortly afterwards, Amata tells the Latin matrons to join her revels, to loosen their headbands and follow her; these “victe crinales,” writes Salutati, “erant solarum matronarum, nam meretricibus non dabantur” (Serv. on Aen. 7.403, f. 128v). Many of these notes, such as the references to how oracles predict the future (Serv. on Aen. 3.444, f. 79r) and to feasting on festival days (Serv. on Aen. 7.135–36, f. 124v), center on ancient religious rites and festivals. While each of these categories contains an important group of notes, the vast majority of Salutati’s marginalia fall into one of three other groups. Quite a number of notes define and explain individual words from Virgil’s text. Some of these definitions function as simple dictionary entries: thus we learn that “exorsa” means “incepta” (on Aen. 10.111, f. 160v), “fulvum” is “rubeum vel rufum vel splendidum” (on Aen. 10.562, f. 167r), and “flere est cum voce lacrimari” (Serv. on Aen. 11.59, f. 173v). Sometimes the note rejects one possible meaning as inappropriate to the context; thus Sabinus in Aeneid 7 is described as “vitisator,” that is, “non inventor vitis, sed qui genus Italis populis demonstravit” (Serv. on Aen. 7.179, f. 125r). At other times Salutati is attracted to an unusual derivation, as when he notes that Carthage “lingua Penorum ‘nova civitas’ dicitur” (Serv. on Aen. 1.366, f. 53v), while elsewhere he glosses rare words with primarily technical 131

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applications: the “caetra” to which Virgil refers in Aen. 7.732, for example, appears as “scetra” in Salutati’s marginalia and is defined as a “scutum de corio, quo utuntur Afri et Spani” (Serv. on Aen. 7.732, f. 133v). Other notes address the problem of common words used in somewhat uncommon ways. At the funeral games for Anchises, Aeneas can be called “pater” in the sense “paternum habens iudicium vel equale” (on Aen. 5.424, f. 101v); Camilla’s love of spoils is “feminine” because it is “impatienti et (in)rationabili” (Serv. on Aen. 11.782, f. 184v). The second of these large groups of notes consists of paraphrases, rewordings of difficult passages designed to simplify and clarify their content. In its simplest form, one of these notes recasts Virgil’s poetic word order into something more like ordinary prose; such notes are introduced by “ordo est.” As an example, let us consider Aen. 2.604–6 as it stands in the Basel manuscript. Salutati recasts it like this: . . . omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti Mortales hebetat visus tibi, et humida circum Caligat, nubem eripiam. Ordo est: ‘omnem tibi nubem eripiam, que humida Circum caligat et mortales hebetat visus tuenti.’ (Serv., f. 69r) More commonly, these notes change Virgil’s wording slightly, expanding a bit and explaining the literal sense of what stands in the text. A variety of introductory tags appear. For instance, “scilicet planetas in quibus fatorum ratio continetur . . .” explains why Dido prays to the “conscia fati sidera” (Serv. on Aen. 4.519, f. 91v, although Servius introduces the passage with “id est”). “Id est” is perhaps the most obvious sign of a paraphrase and occurs often in Salutati’s notes; an example appears where the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus is shown carved on Aeneas’s new armor and is said to “procubuisse, id est, prima parte se inclinasse, ut inclinatione corporis ubera preberet infantibus” (Serv. on Aen. 8.631, f. 145r). “Sensus est” introduces Salutati’s effort to bring the two terms of an epic simile closer together: “Sensus est, ille Mezentius est actus velut aper qui est actus de altis montibus morsu canum . . .” (on Aen. 10.707ff., f. 169r). This kind of note takes another form at Aen. 10.233 in a speech by one of the sea goddesses whom Cybele created when she changed Aeneas’s ships to nymphs. Cymodoce says that they left Aeneas “invite, quasi dicat ‘malueramus tibi servire quam in numero nimpharum conputari’” (Serv., f. 162v); this introductory tag sometimes appears in the form “ac si diceret” (cf. Serv. on Aen. 1.241, f. 51v). A third large group of notes also concentrates on explicating Virgil’s text, but moves beyond paraphrase to answer questions that might be raised by a careful reading of the poem. For example, one might wonder why a hero like Aeneas is described as “pulcherrimus” at the beginning of the famous hunting scene in Aeneid 4; Salutati explains that Virgil, “quia amat, ideo ei dat pulcritudinem, licet Ascanio magis conveniat” (Serv. on Aen. 4.141, f. 85v). Later in the same book, 132

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Dido regrets her involvement with Aeneas and wishes that she had remained a chaste widow “more fere”; since the point of this reference is not immediately obvious, Salutati turns to Servius and finds that “Plinius in Naturali Ystoria dicit lincas post amissos coniuges aliis non iungi” (Serv. on Aen. 4.551, f. 92r). Lest one wonder how Beroe persuades the Trojan women to burn their ships in Aen. 5.62ff., Salutati explains that “Troiane matrone cognoscebant illam Beroem nobilem esse et dignam audiri” (f. 104v). Why does the Sibyl announce the god’s presence twice at Aen. 6.46? “Bis dixit ‘deus’ ad ostendendum quod deus erat presens” (f. 109r). A modern reader may not find all these explanations convincing, but they do show an honest effort to grapple with the meaning of an admittedly difficult text. If we search for a common focus to Salutati’s observations, we discover that those notes that define individual words, paraphrase difficult passages, and answer questions raised by the text – most of what Salutati wrote, in other words – all function to clarify the literal meaning of the text, to make the difficulties of Virgil’s Latin less perplexing. On occasion the smaller group of notes, those dealing with mythological references, geographical identifications, historical background, and ancient life and customs might drift a little farther from the text, but the raison d’être for each note remains the same: to clarify what Virgil wrote. This may at first seem to belabor the obvious – after all, what else is a commentary supposed to do? Nevertheless, comparison to Petrarca’s Ambrosian codex of Virgil brings out an interesting contrast. Many of Petrarca’s notes would fit just as easily into the Basel manuscript, but quite a number of others move away from the literal meaning of the text into allegory.16 Indeed, as J. IJsewijn has observed, such allegorical interpretations occur frequently in humanist commentaries until the early fifteenth century, and allegorical notes still appear in the commentaries of Cristoforo Landino, one of Virgil’s most important critics in late Quattrocento Italy.17 What is more, the commentary of Servius on which many of Salutati’s notes are based has many allegorical observations that would have been easy to adapt.18 Thus we must ask ourselves the next logical question: contrary to what we might expect, is Salutati in fact not interested in allegorizing Virgil?

16 A good discussion of this point may be found in Lord, “Petrarch and Vergil’s First Eclogue,” 260–61; as J. Brink, “Simone Martini, Francesco Petrarca, and the Humanistic Program of the Virgil Frontispiece,” Mediaevalia 3 (1977): 83–91 points out, the famous miniatures at the beginning of the Ambrosian codex reflect this same tendency to allegorize the Virgilian corpus. Petrarca’s allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid is presented at some length in Seniles 4.5. 17 “Laurentius Vallas ‘Sprachliche Kommentare,’” in Der Kommentar in der Renaissance, ed. A. Buck and O. Herding (Boppard am Rhein, 1975), 97, and my “Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,” Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983): 520–21. 18 J. W. Jones, Jr. has studied this matter and found 183 allegorical notes in Servius’s commentary; see his “An Analysis of the Allegorical Interpretations in the Servian Commentary on the Aeneid” (Diss., University of North Carolina, 1959), with findings summarized in his “Allegorical Interpretation in Servius,” Classical Journal 56 (1961): 220–21.

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Our analysis of Salutati’s notes in the Basel manuscript also leads to one other question. While almost all of the marginalia focus on explicating the literal meaning of Virgil’s text, there is one small group of notes that we have not yet considered: those in which Salutati identifies the figures of speech Virgil uses. On Aen. 1.412, f. 54r, for example, Salutati draws from Servius and writes, “temesis [sic] est, et hoc fit quandocumque secto sermone aliquid interponitur, et hoc fit in conpositis.” Similarly, Salutati points out examples of hypallage (Serv. on Aen. 5.480, f. 102v), sarcasm (Serv. on Aen. 10.557, f. 167r and Serv. on Aen. 12.359, f. 192r), periphrasis (Serv. on Aen. 4.254, f. 87v), and so forth. There are quite a number of “comparatio” tags spread throughout the manuscript that are probably in Salutati’s hand as well (e.g., ff. 84r, 90v, 129v, 192r); it is worth noting that the same figure is isolated repeatedly in the manuscript of Seneca copied and annotated by Salutati shortly afterward (London, British Library, MS Add. 11987).19 What is it about the figures of speech that draws Salutati’s interest to them and away from the literal sense of the text? To put questions like these into perspective, we must leave the Basel manuscript for a while and examine Virgil’s place in Salutati’s later scholarly writings. Here our attention is drawn to the letter collection, which cites Virgil more than any other ancient writer except Cicero, and to the De laboribus Herculis, which ostensibly focuses on Seneca but actually treats Virgil just as extensively. However, I have also surveyed Salutati’s other scholarly writings and shall cite them when appropriate.20 Fortunately in these later works, Salutati’s remarks about Virgil appear in the context of a broader consideration of poetry in general, which allows us to organize and interpret a host of scattered observations on the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. The De laboribus Herculis, which presents a long moral allegory based on Seneca’s Hercules, contains Salutati’s clearest definition of the poet.21 Beginning with 19 Salutati’s interest in this figure is noted by Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, 56. The manuscript is described by Ullman, Humanism, 197 and dated by Petrucci, Il protocollo, 33–34. 20 A good, brief description of Salutati’s works may be found in Ullman, Humanism, 19–36; discussion of these works is integrated into Salutati’s political and intellectual development in Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads. A thorough bibliography on Salutati has been prepared by D. De Rosa, “Cenni bibliografici relativi a Coluccio Salutati,” in Atti del Convegno su Coluccio Salutati (Buggiano, 1981), 47–62. 21 Much of the discussion of Salutati’s literary criticism has focused on a famous series of letters spanning the last thirty years of his life, in which he defended poetry against various attacks by Giuliano Zonarini, Giovanni da San Miniato, Giovanni Dominici, and Pellegrino Zambeccari. These letters are published in the Epistolario, 1:298–307, 321–29; 3:285–308; and 4:170–240; additional commentary is supplied by B. L. Ullman, “Observations on Novati’s Edition of Salutati’s Letters,” in his Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome, 1955), 215–16, 232, 237. Ullman, Humanism, 53–58 presents a clear summary of the correspondence and of the issues involved, as does J. Cinquino, “Coluccio Salutati, Defender of Poetry,” Italica 26 (1949): 131–35. The following discussion takes due account of these letters, but by starting with the definition of poetry in De laboribus Herculis, I have reached a somewhat different set of conclusions; cf. C. C. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250–1500 (Lewisburg, PA, 1981), 129–63, and D. AguzziBarbagli, “Dante e la poetica di Coluccio Salutati,” Italica 42 (1965): 108–31.

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Cato’s famous description of the orator, Salutati fashions the following definition: “Est igitur poeta vir optimus laudandi vituperandique peritus, metrico figurativoque sermone sub alicuius narrationis misterio vera recondens.”22 This deceptively simple statement, which as Ullman notes succeeds in uniting the classical rhetor, Averroes’s paraphrase of Aristotle’s Poetics, and the Christianized notion of literary allegory,23 can be divided into three parts, which involve the character of the poet, the content of his poetry, and the nature of literary language. Each of these parts in turn leads us to Virgil. The first phrase in the definition, which requires the poet to be a man of the highest moral character, presents the fewest obstacles to interpretation. The Ciceronian rhetorical tradition requires the perfect orator to possess soundness of character as well as technical skill,24 and Salutati is simply transferring the association from rhetoric to poetry. The emphasis on the character of the poet is in fact required by the general failure of fourteenth-century criticism to distinguish between the ethical soundness of a poem and its author’s soundness of character.25 Only a virtuous man, in other words, can write a virtuous poem. In the De laboribus Herculis, Salutati claims that Virgil was exemplary in character, lifestyle, and speech. Unfortunately the ancient lives of Virgil allude to certain libidinous tendencies that Salutati had to consider.26 Of the two explanations he offers, one involves a recognition that ethical standards change along with the 22 De laboribus Herculis, 1:63; cf. Quintilian, Inst. 12.1.1. The De laboribus Herculis exists in two forms, the first of which is a long letter to Giovanni da Siena that was presumably abandoned at Giovanni’s death in 1383 to allow a more comprehensive, less personal analysis. This second edition, however, was also not finished; see Ullman, Humanism, 21–26. 23 Ibid., 26. 24 See J. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, 1968), 3–30, and H. H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 498. 25 There are occasional suggestions of an aesthetic stance in early humanist literature. In his De studiis et litteris, for example, Bruni’s description of the encounter between Dido and Aeneas takes the first step toward distinguishing the poem qua poem from the ethical standards of reality: “Equidem, si quanto Didonis Aeneaeque amores apud Virgilium lego, ingenium poetae admirari soleo, rem autem ipsam quia fictam esse scio, nequaquam attendere. Quod idem mihi accidit in aliis fictionibus poetarum, animum certe non movent, quia fabuolosas et aliud pro alio significantes intelligo” (Leonardo Bruni Aretino. Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften, ed. H. Baron (Leipzig, 1928; repr. Wiesbaden, 1969), 18). Spingarn focuses on this distinction between the “res ipsa” and its fictional presentation as “a distinct attempt at the aesthetic appreciation of literature” (A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1899), 7). The recognition of a fiction that can be simultaneously condemned in the ethics of everyday life and praised on artistic grounds could also sever the tie between the character of the poet and the ethical content of the poem, but the reference to allegory at the end of Bruni’s statement (“aliud pro alio significantes”) might just as well suggest a purification of Aeneid, Book 4, through moral allegory. And in any event, Spingarn is forced to admit that this passage contains “isolated sentiments” (ibid.). 26 As the preface to Servius’s commentary puts it, Virgil was upright in character but labored under only one shortcoming, that he was “impatiens libidinis” (Servianorum in Vergilii carmina commentariorum, ed. E. K. Rand et al. (Lancaster, PA, 1946), 1).

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times, and that any sexual failings on Virgil’s part are the fault of his age, which accepted activities that no Christian can countenance. However, Virgil was known to the writers of the past as “Parthenias.” From this Salutati concludes that his sexual conduct was probably above reproach, so that one can simply reject the charges against him. Of the two possible explanations, Salutati vastly prefers the latter.27 The second part of Salutati’s definition emphasizes the poet’s “skill in praise and blame.” This statement rests on a longstanding association between poetry and epideictic rhetoric, which presents guidelines for the praise or rebuke of men, events, and institutions.28 As the orator praises virtue and rebukes vice in his speeches, so the poet builds the same moral foundation for his writing. For Salutati, this association is authorized by the great critics of antiquity; Aristotle, for example, Inquit enim in ipsius libelli [the Poetics] fronte omne poema esse orationem vituperationis aut laudis. Carpunt equidem nostri poete vitiosos et vitia, celebrant autem cum virtuosis honesta laudatione virtutes; ut ab illis deterreant genus omne mortalium, ad has autem splendore commendationis alliciant et invitent.29 This interpretation of Aristotle, which is based on Averroes’s paraphrase and is standard for the Middle Ages,30 builds on the notion of the poet as vir optimus: as

27 De laboribus Herculis, 1.64–65. Interest in Virgil’s life continued with the later humanists; see, for example, L. Valmaggi, “La biografia di Virgilio attribuita al grammatico Elio Donato,” Rivista di filologia e d’istruzione classica 14 (1886): 1–106. Salutati had access to the lives of Donatus and Servius, but the early Renaissance also saw the discovery of Probus’s life and a fourteenth-century compilation by Sicco Polenton, which appears in Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri XVIII, ed. B. L. Ullman (Rome, 1928), 73–90. See R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici Latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV, 2 vols. (Florence, 1905; repr. Florence, 1967), 1.132–33. 28 The role of epideictic rhetoric in literary theory and practice is explored in detail by O. B. Hardison, Jr. in The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979). For an interesting extension of this approach, see A. P. McCormick, “Freedom of Speech in Early Renaissance Florence: Salutati’s ‘Questio est coram Decemviris,’” Rinascimento n.s. 19 (1979): 235–40, where the question of what to do with those who compose or recite a famous poem against someone else turns in part on the use of praise and blame in a civic setting. 29 De laboribus Herculis, 1:10; cf. Aristotle, Poetics 4; 1448b. Salutati also considers Aristotle and the praise and blame topic in his letter to Giovanni da San Miniato, Epistolario, 4:196–97. 30 The Poetics was widely used in Italian literary criticism of the sixteenth century, when it was translated into Latin (1498) and Italian (1549) and furnished with a commentary in Latin (1548); see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and C. Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1969), 156. The text was known to earlier humanists but was not much used. Poliziano, for example, owned a Greek text (now Florence, Bibl. Laur., MS LX, 14) but he seems to have acquired it late in life, and it certainly failed to have any decisive effect on his critical thinking; see R. Sabbadini, Il metodo degli umanisti (Florence, 1922), 71–74, and A. Buck, Italienische Dichtungslehren vom Mittelalter bis zum Ausgang der Renaissance (Tübingen, 1952), 144. Some knowledge of

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a virtuous man himself, the poet distinguishes good from evil in order to stimulate ethical progress in others. For Salutati, Horace said essentially the same thing in the Ars poetica: Nam et Flaccus inquit: ‘Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poete.’ Prodest quidem reprehensor vitiis obvians sed non immediate delectat. Delectat vero commendans sed non statim et immediate prodest. Principaliter igitur utilitati vituperatio correspondet, delectationi laus, licet secundario prosit hec, et illa delectet.31 This is Horace filtered through epideictic rhetoric, so that profit and delight become enmeshed with praise and blame in an effort to make poetry a tool for ethical instruction. Salutati turns to Virgil with this premise in mind. Using the figure of the explorer scout, he scrutinizes Virgil’s poetry to see what he could find there that pertains to virtuous living.32 He discovers that Aeneas embodies the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, and that Virgil wrote the poem to praise these things.33 We may wonder whether the incident with Dido redounds to Aeneas’s credit, and Salutati admits that the liaison itself is not commendable. But when Aeneas leaves Dido behind, he prevails over carnal temptation and his own passion, which must be present for virtue to exist. Thus Virgil even arranged this scene so that Aeneas could be praised for continence.34 In this way Virgil’s praise of virtue presents lessons that are applicable to the life of the reader. As Salutati wrote to Iodoco Marchese di Moravia, the Aeneid can teach a prince enough about

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the Poetics also appears in the writings of Guarino da Verona (Epistolario, 1:404 and 2:461) and Lorenzo Valla (Historiarum Ferdinandi Regis Aragoniae libri tres, in Opera omnia, ed. E. Garin, 2 vols. (Turin, 1962), 2:5). That Salutati took such an interest in Aristotle is thus a matter of some importance. His understanding of the Poetics, of course, is not that of modern scholars. William of Moerbeke had translated the Poetics ca. 1278, but his translation enjoyed little circulation, surviving in only two manuscripts. Rather the Middle Ages knew the work primarily from Averroes’s paraphrase, which Hermannus Alemannus translated into Latin in 1256. Salutati used this translation (Epistolario, 3:225–26), which had been heavily moralized and thus harmonized well with his theories about poetry. This moralized Aristotle remained popular even after the Greek text was printed in 1508, and it was in fact the first version of the Poetics to be published in the Renaissance (1481); see Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism, ed. A. Preminger, O. B. Hardison, Jr. and K. Kerrane (New York, 1974), 341–48, and W. F. Boggess, “Averrois Cordubensis Commentarium Medium in Aristotelis Poetriam” (Diss., University of North Carolina, 1965), iv–lii. De laboribus Herculis, 1:68; Salutati also treats this rhetoricized Horace in his letters to Pellegrino Zambeccari, Epistolario, 2:289 and to Giovanni Dominici, Epistolario, 4:231. Epistolario, 1:304. Ibid., 3:233. Ibid., 3:233, 235.

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virtuous ruling that he will outshine all other governors.35 Thus Virgil makes Aeneas a model for us to imitate in our own lives.36 Making Aeneas a repository of praiseworthy virtues does not, however, exhaust the moralizing zeal that Salutati turns toward Virgil. Long sections of the poem, such as the opening storm scene or the encounter with the Harpies, seem largely irrelevant to Salutati’s overriding moral and rhetorical preoccupation. On the literal level this may be true, but the third part of Salutati’s definition shows that almost any scene can offer ethical insights. The final section of this definition turns to the way in which the virtuous poet praises virtue and condemns vice. Up to this point, as Salutati himself admits, poetry is indistinguishable from rhetoric.37 But the uniqueness of poetry lies in the language it uses. Salutati describes the poet as one “metrico figurativoque sermone sub alicuius narrationis misterio vera recondens.”38 A poem must be written in meter, Salutati explains, but meter by itself will not make a composition into a poem. Turning to Aristotle once again, he insists that the poet’s language must also be “figurative.” What he means here is best explained in his own words: Alterum autem quod summe iocundum reperias in poetis est illa mirabilis tum verborum, tum rerum, tum etiam gestorum concinna mutatio, quod quidem ad poetam videmus peculiariter pertinere. Omnes enim translationes atque metaphore, comparationes et similitudines, et quicquid verborum aut rerum, orationum et negociorum videmus in aliud commutari poeticum est.39 Poetic language, that is, relies heavily on the figures of speech to attain its own special stylistic elegance, which sets it apart from rhetoric and from all other forms of communication. For Salutati, Virgil’s stylistic achievements are unequalled by any other poet.40 When he defends poets against the charges lodged against them by Carlo 35 Ibid., 2:430–31. In arguing that hereditary kingship is better than elective as part of a short piece on monarchy, Salutati cites Aen. 12.435 (“Disce, puer, virtutem ex me . . .”) to show how a king can rouse his offspring to virtue (B. L. Ullman, “Coluccio Salutati on Monarchy,” in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, 7 vols. (Vatican City, 1964), 5:402). 36 For example, in his copy of Seneca’s De beneficiis, now Florence, Bibl. Laur. MS LXXVI, 36, Salutati wrote, “Vicit Eneas patrem ipse” (f. 13v) as an example of pietas toward a parent, an example that the reader can in turn apply to his own affairs. 37 De laboribus Herculis, 1.14–15; cf. Epistolario, 3:493. In his review of Ullman, Humanism, and Petrucci, Il protocollo, R. Fubini notes that in Salutati’s thought, poetry and oratory alternate as an all-embracing discipline that encompasses knowledge of all things (Rivista storica italiana 77 (1965): 965–75). 38 See also the letter to Giovanni de’ Pierleoni, Epistolario, 3:494: “Sermocinalis scientie pars est poetica, cuius proprium est metrico dicendi genere figuratoque sermone in cortice verborum unum ostendere et aliud sumendo res aut verba pro rebus aliis atque verbis medullitus importare.” 39 De laboribus Herculis, 1:10; cf. Aristotle, Poetics 4; 1448b. 40 Epistolario, 1:301–2. Admiration for Virgil’s style was, of course, a commonplace among the humanists. Petrarca, for example, recognized two princes of Latin eloquence, Cicero in prose

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Malatesta, who had pulled down a statue of Mantua’s favorite son, Salutati praises Virgil for his embellishment (“ornatus”), maxims (“sententiae”), loftiness of speech (“verborum altitudo”), variation (“varietas”), and melodiousness (“musica melodia”).41 In fact, Virgil demonstrates his skill as a poet in the very first line of the Aeneid, for “arma virumque” replaces “virum armatum” by metonymy.42 What is more, Salutati transfers his appreciation of Virgilian style to his own writing by quoting well-turned phrases as opportunity allows: Aen. 1.335 (“Haud equidem tali me dignor honore”), for instance, graces eight different passages in the Epistolario.43 The presence of meter and figurative language, however, is not the sole distinguishing feature of poetic language. According to Salutati, the poet uses this rhetorically heightened verse to “conceal true things under the secrecy of another narrative.” Poetic language moves the imagination by means of allegory, through which what is understood differs from what is said.44 Salutati’s explanation of poetic allegory rests on the traditional fourfold distinction, which he explains in a letter to a certain unknown Giovanni: Eleva mentem igitur, mi Iohannes, et poesim quasi de quadam altissima dicendi sublimitate mirare, que modum omnem elocutionis ornatumque transcendens, litterali quadam iocunditate sensibus humanis alludens, figmentum aliquod pro inclusa veritate pretendit aut tropologice narrationis mysterio mores edocet vel quasi sursum ducens anagogice dictionis oraculo statum eterne felicitates, dum aliud videtur innuere, prefigurat.45 Salutati then illustrates the various levels of allegory through reference to the Aeneid. Aeneas’s encounter with Turnus at Aen. 10.636–60, for example, conflicts with a more reliable account of the battles in Latium, but Virgil uses the discrepancy to present a hidden meaning on the first allegorical level. The scene where Aeneas takes control of his ship from the drowned steersman Palinurus can be

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and Virgil in verse (Fam. 12.3.104), and this judgment can be traced back to Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.85–86, 105). See also Fam. 22.10.31–33 and 24.11.1, and Rerum memorandarum 2.16. Epistolario, 3:291. This incident, which aroused considerable commentary in humanist circles, is described by Novati in his introductory note to the letter (ibid., 3.285ff.); see also Vergerio’s reaction to the incident in the Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. L. Smith (Rome, 1934), 123ff. De laboribus Herculis, 1.10–11. Epistolario, 1:64, 157, 228; 3:457, 481; 4:13, 46, 161. De laboribus Herculis, 1:69–70. Salutati’s definitions and descriptions of poetry are not always so complete as the one from De laboribus Herculis that we have been looking at. It is worth noting that his abbreviated analyses tend to focus on allegory and the nature of poetic language, as in the letter to Giovanni Dominici (Epistolario, 4:233–34): “Est igitur poetica sermocinalis quedam ars atque facultas, et, ut supra dixi, bilinguis; exterius unum exhibens, aliud autem intrinseca ratione significans; semper in figura loquens ac sepenumero versibus alligans, si quid refert.” Epistolario, 3:230. This scheme, which appears in Dante’s epistle to Can Grande, remained popular with early humanists such as Boccaccio (Genealogie deorum gentilium, ed. V. Romano, 2 vols. (Bari, 1951), 1:19, and Il comento di Giovanni Boccaccio sopra la Commedia, ed. G. Milanesi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1863), 1:153–54).

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interpreted morally, so that we learn how reason guides the will to proper ethical action. Finally Virgil uses the Elysian fields and Aeneas’s journey to Latium as anagogical prefigurations of our heavenly felicity.46 Each type of allegory, as it pertains to Virgil’s poetry, calls for some additional comment. Salutati is less interested in the first level of allegory than in the other two, but he does consider instances in which the literal sense of the passage hides something that is not applicable to ethics or to Christian salvation. Not only Virgil, but Juvenal, Cicero, Ovid, Statius, Lucan, and Homer all use the god Jupiter to represent a star, air, fire, celestial influence, and both natural and supernatural agents.47 The same passage, of course, can be interpreted on more than one level, so that Salutati includes a traditional association of Charon and time along with a moral allegory of the same passage.48 Allegory is especially useful in salvaging poetic passages that conflict with “historical truth.” In this way Virgil is exonerated for associating Dido and Aeneas, whom Salutati’s historical sources placed in different generations.49 Through anagogy, literature can supplement the Bible as a source for Christian teaching. According to Salutati, Scripture is a more certain guide to salvation than secular letters, but even the pagan poets present useful religious sentiments: Nec negaverim, cum in harum rerum fluxarum societatem venerimus, satius esse recta via ad eterna per sacrarum litterarum studia pergere, quam per poetarum flexus et devia pervenire. Sed quoniam utroque calle, si quis recte graditur, ad illum finem quem appetimus devenitur, quanvis ille sit preeligendus, non tamen, iste negligendus est. . . . In quibus [poetarum carminibus] plerumque videtur aut sub allegoriarum mysterio aut in ipso verborum propatulo certissime veritatis divinus spiritus resonare.50

46 Epistolario, 3:230–31. 47 De laboribus Herculis, 1.87–106. 48 Ibid., 2:536–38. Boccaccio also associates Charon with time (Comento, 1.93), as had Fulgentius (Expositio Vergilianae continentiae, in Opera, ed. R. Helm (Leipzig, 1898), 98) and Bernardus Silvestris (The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, ed. J. W. Jones and E. F. Jones (Lincoln, NE, 1977), 77). 49 De laboribus Herculis, 1:86. A marginal note to Florence, Bibl. Laur., San Marco MS 328, Salutati’s copy of Macrobius’s Saturnalia, protests that the story of Dido’s lasciviousness is false: “continentissima fuit Dido” (f. 76v; cf. Sat. 5.17.4). The matter of the “historical Dido” was of some concern to the early humanists. Boccaccio, for example, presents the “true” version of Justinus (Epitoma 18.6.9) in his Genealogie (2.60), De casibus illustrium virorum (facsimile reproduction of the Paris 1520 edition, with an introduction by L. B. Hall (Gainesville, FL, 1962), 58), and De claris mulieribus (in Forty-Six Lives Translated . . . by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, ed. H. G. Wright, Early English Text Society Edition (London, 1943), 6). 50 Epistolario, 1:323–24. This was a favorite theme with Salutati, who repeated it in several places: Epistolario, 1:302–3; 3:539–41; 4:200, and De laboribus Herculis, 1.82–83; see A. von Martin, Mittelalterliche Welt- und Lebensanschauung im Spiegel der Schriften Coluccio Salutatis (Munich, 1913), 142–52.

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In his letters to Giuliano Zonarini, Salutati emphasizes Virgil’s value for the Christian. Not only is the reference to the return of the ages in Ecl. 4.6–7 compatible with Christianity, but Aen. 1.664 shows the unity of Father and Son, and Book 6 of the Aeneid provides invaluable insight into the fate of the soul after death.51 Salutati wavers as to whether or not Virgil and the other pagan poets perceived these truths by divine inspiration,52 but the importance of his anagogical interpretation remains undiminished in either case. Salutati’s interest in the allegory of the Aeneid, however, centers on the moral level. He cites Fulgentius’s Expositio Virgilianae continentiae and explains that the mystical sense of the poem teaches us about the Platonic descent of the spirit into the body and about the six ages of man.53 When Aeneas and his men delight in the empty scenes (“pictura inanis”) of Troy (Aen. 1.464), they stand for the state of infancy, in which we take pleasure in pictures and images rather than the thing itself. The second book in turn represents childhood, the third adolescence, the fourth young manhood, the fifth maturity, and the sixth old age.54 Though this scheme serves to focus critical attention onto the poem as a vehicle for discussing ethical philosophy, Salutati does not rely on it directly in most of his moral allegory.55 He was a moralist par excellence, however, and he overlooks nothing from the Aeneid that could possibly offer edifying instruction. In the De laboribus Herculis, for example, Troy under Priam presents a model of luxurious living and the fate that overtakes men who choose this lifestyle. The Harpies stand for avarice, and Misenus should be understood as the act and habit of irascibility, which must be left behind and buried by anyone striving for a proper understanding of virtue and vice. The affair with Dido, when interpreted morally, shows what 51 Epistolario, 1:303, 325–26. In this way, even Aeneas’s graceful compliment to Dido in Aen. 1.603–5 (“Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid/Usquam iustitiae est et mens sibi conscia recti,/Praemia digna ferant”) can direct Salutati to God as the source of justice and glory (Epistolario, 2:427). On the letter to Zonarini, see A. von Martin, Coluccio Salutati und das humanistische Lebensideal: Ein Kapitel aus der Genesis der Renaissance (Leipzig, 1916; rpt. Hildesheim, 1973), 223–26. 52 In considering how closely the underworld of the pagan poets parallels that described by Scripture, Salutati attributed passages like Aeneid 6 to divine inspiration in his De laboribus Herculis (2:461), and he took the same position in the letters to Zonarini. However, in the letters to Giovanni da San Miniato and Giovanni Dominici, Salutati drew closer to a position held by Petrarca and Boccaccio, that such religious truths as the pagan poets attained were accessible to natural reason without direct inspiration. This is the position developed by R. G. Witt in “Coluccio Salutati and the Conception of the Poeta Theologus in the Fourteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly 30 (1977): 538–39; see also Martin, Coluccio Salutati, 64–66. On the poet as theologian in early Italian humanism, see Buck, Italienische Dichtungslehren, 67–87, and K. Vossler, Poetische Theorien in der italienischen Frührenaissance (Berlin, 1900), 29, 56. 53 De laboribus Herculis, 1:12. Salutati’s manuscript of the Expositio survives as BAV, MS Vat. lat. 3110; see Ullman, Humanism, 228–29. 54 Epistolario, 3:232–38. 55 He does return to Fulgentius’s scheme now and again; in De laboribus Herculis, 1:351–52, for example, the seven stags that Aeneas kills after landing at Carthage (Aen. 1.180ff.) represent the seven years of infancy.

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happens when the will is temporarily seduced by the sensual appetite and rebels against the rule of reason.56 For Salutati, however, the allegorical content of the first five books is only a prologue to the ethical treasure contained in Book 6, the account of Aeneas’s descent to the underworld. Citing Zanobi da Strada, the De laboribus Herculis interprets the descensus ad inferos in four ways: the descent of the rational soul into the body, the use of magic in sacrifices and the invocation of spirits, the rejection of spiritual values in favor of earthly desires (the “descensus vitiosus”), and a contemplative study of the frailties of temporal life in order to attain a better understanding of virtue (the “descensus moralis et virtuosus”).57 Salutati associates Aeneas with the “descensus virtuosus.” The good, he explains, can be approached through pleasure (the Epicureans), virtue (the Stoics), or expediency (the masses), and the poets have selected different underworld descents to represent each philosophical approach. Orpheus’s descent hides the teachings of the Epicureans, Theseus and Pirithous are associated with the followers of expediency, and Hercules and Aeneas represent the Stoic quest for uprightness and virtue.58 What is more, the virtuous descent can be made by actually fighting with vice, as Hercules did, or by contemplating temporal affairs, the path that Aeneas chose.59 Each stage of Aeneas’s trip through the underworld thus prefigures some treasure of moral allegory that can be referred to this interpretation of the descensus ad inferos.60 The personified labors and afflictions in the vestibule of hell are the inevitable attendants at the union of spirit and body.61 The rivers of hell can also be referred to this union, so that Lethe represents forgetfulness of the spirit’s 56 On Troy, 1:252; on the Harpies, 1:237–38; on Misenus, 2:578–82; and on Aeneid 4, 1:103–6. We should not assume that Salutati’s moral allegory is all original. The association of the Harpies with avarice, for example, is found in Fulgentius (Mythologiae, in Opera, ed. R. Helm (Leipzig, 1898), 124), the third Vatican mythographer (in Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti, ed. G. Bode (Celle, 1834), 1:173), Bernardus Silvestris (Commentary, 74–75), and Boccaccio (Genealogie, 2:529–30). Salutati was familiar with each of these authors, so that his discussion of the Harpies should be seen as traditional. See Ullman, Humanism, 219–20, 228–29, and 237–38; the introduction to the Joneses’s edition of Bernardus Silvestris’s Commentary, xviii–xix; and G. Padoan, “Tradizione e fortuna del commento all’’Eneide’ di Bernardo Silvestre,” IMU 3 (1960): 234–36. Salutati’s moral allegory as a whole depends on a tradition like this, although the work of tracing the history of each allegorical association would lead us far astray from Salutati’s Virgil criticism. 57 2:483–86. Salutati’s first treatment of the descensus included a fifth category, “qui fit per anime damnationem, sicut nostra sanctissima fide instruimur et tenemus”; see Ullman’s edition, 2:600. This explanation of the descensus ad inferos parallels that of Bernardus Silvestris (Commentary, 30). 58 De laboribus Herculis, 2:487–89. 59 Ibid., 2:622–23. The De laboribus Herculis ostensibly focuses on how Hercules, a perfect and virtuous man (“homo quidem perfectus et virtuosus,” 1:336), fights with and overcomes vice; see, for example, 1:336–42, on the Cacus episode. 60 Ibid., 1:11; 2:573–77. 61 Ibid., 1:181.

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former life, Phlegethon the ardors of passion, Acheron the sins for which we repent, Cocytus whatever drives us to tears and grief, and Styx that which arouses hatred.62 At the same time, the rivers stand for our bodily humors,63 or for the process by which we long for something, decide to do it, and then repent and grieve for what we have done.64 Charon the boatman represents freedom of the will,65 and Cerberus stands for the bodily needs of food, drink, and sleep, through which pleasure sometimes seduces the will to rebel against reason.66 When Aeneas’s path forks, with one branch going to Elysium and the other to Tartarus, Salutati sees a graphic depiction of the choice that every man must make between virtue and vice.67 The punishments assigned to the Great Sinners, he feels, make that choice easier for us to make.68 When we consider Salutati’s definition of the poet and the application of his poetic principles to the works of Virgil, we see that there is a dominant emphasis in his criticism. The first part of the definition requires the poet to be of sound character, a test that Virgil as Salutati knew him could be made to pass. This requirement is linked to the second part of the definition, in which the poem is said to praise virtue and condemn vice, because Salutati could not separate the moral content of a poem from the character of the man who wrote it. By this standard as well, Virgil is an excellent poet, since the Aeneid in particular describes a hero who served Salutati as the very model of virtuous living. The third part of the definition focuses on poetic language, which draws freely on the figures of speech and relies on allegory, especially at the moral level, to carry through the goals of the rhetoric of praise and blame. In other words, the scholarly works written by Salutati after he placed his marginalia in B approach the Virgilian corpus with the expectation that poetry should praise virtue and condemn vice, an expectation which, as I have shown elsewhere, was a dominant trend in the literary criticism of the early Italian Renaissance.69

62 Ibid., 2:529–30. Salutati is quoting Macrobius, Somn. Scip. 1.10.9–15 here; his copy of the text is now Florence, Bibl. Laur., MS LXXVII, 6. 63 De laboribus Herculis, 2:535–36. 64 Ibid., 2:554–55. 65 Ibid., 2:556–57, 563–69. 66 Ibid., 2:539–40, 606. 67 Ibid., 1:182, 213–14; cf. De seculo et religione, ed. B. L. Ullman (Florence, 1957), 63–64. 68 De laboribus Herculis, 2:530. Salutati relies here again on Macrobius, Somn. Scip. 1.10.9–15. 69 “The Rhetorical Criticism of Literature in Early Italian Humanism from Boccaccio to Landino,” Rhetorica 1 (1983): 33–52. On the rhetorical aspect of humanist literary criticism in general, see Buck, Italienische Dichtungslehren, 54–67, 143–44; C. Trabalza, La critica letteraria dai primordi dell’Umanesimo all’ età nostra (Milan, 1913–15), 3–6, 19–20; and Vossler, Poetische Theorien, 78–80. It is important to note that, although Salutati’s ideas about the relationship between wisdom and eloquence in general were somewhat unstable, his conception of rhetoricized poetry as it focused around praise and blame goes beyond the simplistic equation of rhetoric and style that still appears in some discussions of humanist poetics; see J. Lindhardt, Rhetor, Poeta, Historicus: Studien über rhetorische Erkenntnis und Lebensanschauung im italienischen Renaissancehumanismus (Leiden, 1979), 117–39, and Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, 63–98.

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Thus Salutati’s special interest in Virgil began when as a relatively young man he entered his marginal notes in B, and this interest continued in one form or another to his death in 1406. As we might expect, there are a number of places where Salutati’s analysis remained more or less constant throughout his scholarly career. For example, his discussion of the nature of poetry in De laboribus Herculis emphasizes the importance of the figures of speech, which he illustrates from Virgil’s poetry at some length70 in much the same way as he had identified some examples of the figures in his Virgil manuscript. In several other places we can see Salutati return years, even decades, later to a line whose meaning he had first struggled with in the Basel manuscript. Thus a letter to Leonardo Bruni on the formation of names quotes Aen. 6.842–43,71 for which Salutati had prepared a long note in the Basel manuscript (Serv., f. 121v) giving historical information on the Scipiades and providing the erudition necessary to construct his later argument on patronymics. In a discussion of Theseus and Pirithous’s descent to Hades, Salutati quotes Aen. 4.698–99 and explains the customs at religious sacrifices,72 an interest that also appears in the marginal note to the same line in the Basel manuscript (Serv., f. 94v). Perhaps the best example here focuses on Aen. 4.436, a line that Conington considers “the most difficult in Virgil.”73 In Salutati’s text it reads “Quam mihi cum dederis cumulatam morte remittam,” and the Basel manuscript has a long note designed to settle on precisely what the line means (Serv., f. 90v). Once he feels comfortable with this, Salutati is ready to quote and paraphrase the line, which appears in six different letters written over a twenty-eight year period.74 Despite a number of instances like these, however, there is a basic and fundamental difference between Salutati’s approach to Virgil in the Basel manuscript and that taken in his later criticism: the marginalia for the most part focus on the literal meaning of the text, while Salutati’s later interest centers on allegory and the rhetorical figures as a means to praise virtue and condemn vice. For example, at Aen. 8.431 in the Basel manuscript, Salutati glosses a passage on thunder and lightning as “per ‘sonitum’ tonitrua ostendit, per ‘metum’ fulgora” (f. 142r). In a passage about the battle of the gods and giants in De laboribus Herculis, Salutati writes that the poets speak about thunderbolts on three levels. The first is “secundum propriam naturam fulminum,” in support of which Salutati quotes the same verse from the Aeneid followed by the same explanation, identical in wording except that now he follows Servius precisely, so that “fulgetras” replaces “fulgora.” However, thunderbolts also allow for interpretation “secundum speculationem

70 71 72 73 74

1:10–12. Epistolario, 4:151. De laboribus Herculis, 2:518. Quoted by R. G. Austin, P. Vergilii Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Oxford, 1966), 131. The letters in which this line is used appear in Epistolario, 1:49, 320; 3:162, 220, 388; 4:265.

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seu vitam contemplativam” and “secundum vitam moralem,”75 leading Salutati to continue this discussion in terms of moral allegory. There is no shortage of similar examples from which to draw. If we turn to the story of Hercules and Cacus in the Basel manuscript, at Aen. 8.205 Salutati writes that Cacus “pro ingenti scelere furis nomen posuit” (Serv., f. 138v); in De laboribus Herculis, he writes “fur autem dicitur Cacus et furtim rapuisse tauros.”76 However, the latter passage continues by associating Cacus’s furtive manner with “mala complexio,” which he represents in the allegorical interpretation of the myth being developed here. Thus the marginalia in the Basel manuscript explicate the literal level of Virgil’s story, which Salutati considers a “hystoria . . . dimissa, que et varia et obscura est,” while the same material serves in the De laboribus Herculis to develop an allegory involving Hercules as “homo . . . perfectus et virtuosus” and Cacus as his moral enemy.77 Similarly the note on the Hydra in B is concerned with how many heads the creature had (Serv. on Aen. 6.575–76, f. 117r), while discussion of the same lines in De laboribus Herculis functions to allegorize the Hydra as a “calidissima sophysta.”78 We must be careful not to draw the lines of demarcation too sharply here. In part because Salutati’s later discussions of Virgil cannot neglect the literal meaning of the text as the beginning place for allegory, and in part because an interest in the figures of speech stayed with him through most of his life, we can find some passages from Virgil whose treatment in De laboribus Herculis or the Epistolario is very similar to what Salutati had said in the marginalia to the Basel manuscript. Nevertheless, these similarities – and they are relatively few – should not blind us to the more fundamental point, that we look to the Basel manuscript in vain for that interest in praise of virtue and condemnation of vice that gives Salutati’s scholarly writings on Virgil their distinctive cast. While we might begin to explain this difference by noting that the probing freedom of a letter or a discursive interpretation of the Hercules myth might be more suitable to a treatment of moral philosophy, allegory, and epideictic rhetoric than marginalia to a classical text, this does not by itself explain why Salutati passed over the allegorical notes in Servius’s commentary to Virgil or why his notes are free of the allegory found in other humanist commentaries. The explanation for this discrepancy is also in part chronological. As a relatively young man, Salutati was content to work out the meaning of a difficult Latin text, proceeding slowly and thoroughly in an effort to digest the literal content of the poetry. With the basic points under control and a growing scholarly reputation, Salutati was able to develop his ideas about poetry at greater length. As he did so, it is no surprise to find him returning to a favorite

75 2:433. 76 1:338. 77 The comment on the literal level of the story is found at 1:336; the allegorization of Hercules is found ibid. 78 1:197–98.

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text of his youth and building onto what he had done before. The interpretation of Virgil as a guide to virtuous living and master of allegory could not have developed without the careful study reflected in the margins of Basel MS F II 23, so that this manuscript provides us with a rare glimpse of some very important scholarly activity of the fourteenth century in its early, formative state.79

79 This essay was originally published as part of “Two Humanist Annotators of Virgil: Coluccio Salutati and Giovanni Tortelli,” with the second part of the essay being authored by Virginia Brown. Both of us would like to express our indebtedness and gratitude to the following: Professor Paul Oskar Kristeller, from whose unpublished volume of the Iter Italicum we obtained the shelf mark of the manuscript which is the subject of this article: Dr. Martin Steinmann, who informed us of the manuscript’s connection with Salutati and Tortelli and gave much assistance in various ways; and Dr. A. C. de la Mare, who shared with us her paleographical knowledge of humanistic hands. I would like to thank the Newberry Library and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for supporting the initial research on which this study is based, and Texas A&M University’s College of Liberal Arts for making it possible for me to examine the Salutati manuscripts in Florence during the summer of 1984. I am also grateful to Professor Ronald G. Witt of Duke University, who was kind enough to read an earlier draft of this essay.

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I No one knows exactly, or even approximately, how many times the works of Virgil were printed in the early modern period. Giuliano Mambelli (1954) listed 1,637 editions published between 1469 and 1850, but the real total may well be double Mambelli’s, perhaps even more. Yet even if we cannot determine how many editions of Virgil were printed between 1500 and 1800, the ones that are known and accessible merit closer attention than they often receive today, for they provide unique insight into the succession of postclassical cultures in which they were produced. Reading Virgil’s poetry in the enormous, three-volume edition of Juan Luis de la Cerda (1608), in which the text often disappears almost completely into the mass of notes, is a completely different experience from reading it in the modern Oxford Classical text of Sir Roger Mynors, and anyone with a serious interest in unraveling the intertextual relationship between the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, for example, should use the edition that Milton (probably) used, La Cerda’s (Martindale (2002) 3, 108–109), and not its modern successor. What is more, these early editions retain their value because the roots of our modern understanding of Virgil are found there. As Charles Martindale ((1993) 7) put it, “our current interpretations of ancient texts, whether or not we are aware of it, are, in complex ways, constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected” – in other words, how we read Virgil’s poetry now cannot be extricated from how it was read in the past. The most direct access to these past readings comes via the books that earlier readers used. Accordingly in this essay, I shall examine a series of older Virgilian editions from this double perspective, with one eye on what they show us about how Virgil’s poetry was read in the past and the other on how these past readings can help to clarify issues of importance in Virgilian criticism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

II At the end of the twentieth century, interpretations of Virgil’s Aeneid tended to begin from one of two basic perspectives. In the first, Aeneas is seen to articulate

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more and more successfully the values that would come to be associated with imperial Rome, until in the final scene of the poem he slays Turnus, the enemy leader, and removes the last obstacle to Roman power and glory. By this point he has overcome the forces of “furor” (“rage”) and “ira” (“anger”), both within himself and as represented by the people who oppose him, so that he successfully embodies “pietas,” that particularly Roman virtue that embraces one’s duties to God, country, and family. This approach is fundamentally optimistic, with Aeneas serving as the ideal hero of ancient Rome, the Aeneid celebrating the achievements of Augustus and his age, and the poem enduring as a monument to the values of order and civilization. After World War II, however, a group of English-speaking scholars began listening more carefully to what have come to be called the “other voices” in the Aeneid – not the voice of Aeneas as the prototype of Roman imperialism, but the voices of those who stood in opposition to him: Dido, the Carthaginian queen whose love is sacrificed to Aeneas’s higher mission; Turnus, the Italian prince who falls before Aeneas while trying to defend his country against the Trojan invaders; and so forth. Within the narrative structure of the poem, these “other voices” also project worthy values, and this new school of criticism has helped us see what was sacrificed in pursuit of Rome and the civilization it engendered. This group of scholars has also pointed out that Aeneas himself is often inconsistent in the set of values he articulates, especially in the last scene of the poem, which has been reinterpreted as a key failure in which Aeneas surrenders to the very voices of barbarism and fury within himself that he had struggled throughout the poem to suppress. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the adherents of this first approach came to be called “optimists” and those of the second approach “pessimists.” Scholars have been pointing out for some time now that there are dangers to dichotomies like this, which can easily become reductionist if applied insensitively, but in the end there is a difference in emphasis between the two approaches, even if the difference is more a matter of shades of grey than black versus white (Kallendorf (2007) v–viii). The “optimistic” reading of the Aeneid was the one adopted by a succession of established political and cultural powers throughout the early modern period who simply traced the roots of their kingdoms and empires back to Augustan Rome and presented themselves as the successors of Aeneas and the values they felt he represented (Tanner (1993)). This becomes clear in the dedication of Pierre Perrin’s seventeenth-century translation to Cardinal Mazarin, the influential cleric and diplomat who played an important role in shaping the foreign policy of several French monarchs: In effect, sir, the famous century of this grand author, does it not seem to have come around again in the present? Is Paris not now a Rome triumphant, like her enormous in population and territory, like her queen of cities, mistress of nations, capital of the world? And your eminence, 148

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sir, are you not a faithful Maecenas, like him a Roman, like him the most grand and the most cherished minister, and the sacred depository of his secrets and his power? To complete these illustrious connections, does not Heaven require for France a French Virgil? (Perrin (1664) f. 31r–v; Schneider (1982) 180–81) Perrin, of course, is presenting himself as the French Virgil, but in doing so he transfers the entire ideological framework of Virgil’s Rome to seventeenth-century France. This transferral is straightforward and unproblematic: as Virgil had served and supported Augustus, so the new Virgil will also serve and support his ideological successor. This “optimistic” Virgil provided the model for the imperial expansion that projected the power of Europe onto every continent of the newly expanded world (Waswo (1997)). Thus the first Brazilian edition of the Aeneid, for example, contains the translation of Josè de Lima Leitão, which was presented to King João VI as a “monument to the elevation of the colony of Brazil to a kingdom, and the establishment of the triple Portuguese empire.” As the dedicatory letter notes, “your majesty will point out a never-before-seen number of moral and political points of contact with the hero of this story, who has laid the foundations of the most perfect nation on the globe, and who in filial piety and in royal virtues will always be held as a model” (de Lima Leitão (1818–1819) ff. A2r, A3r). The Portuguese empire, in other words, is connected to the Roman one, and the Portuguese king should model his behavior, both public and private, on that of Aeneas. This story has been told many times before, since the “optimistic” interpretation of the poem has dominated among most, if not all, its generations of readers (Thomas (2001)). Less well known is the fact that the “pessimistic” interpretation of the Aeneid also has a history, and that this history can also be traced through the early editions of the poem. As an example, let us turn to a little-known work of Victor Alexandre Chrétien Le Plat du Temple, Virgile en France, a parody of the first six books of the Aeneid that makes the events of the poem into an allegory of the French Revolution. Although Virgil’s Augustus traced his roots to Aeneas, Le Plat’s Aeneas is not an imperialist, but a republican, for throughout the poem Aeneas aligns himself with “the good republicans” of revolutionary France (Le Plat (1807–1808) 1.123, 1.128). Unfortunately for Le Plat, at the time Virgile en France was published, France was no longer a republic, but an empire under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte. In describing how he came to be emperor, however, Le Plat presents him as the winner of an election, which suggests that authority rests in the will of the people, who could, one would think, also remove Napoleon at will. This suggestion is amplified in a note to Book 5, in which Le Plat explains that an emperor who abuses “common law” must be replaced, the idea seeming to be that the citizens of a republic can choose temporarily to transfer some of their power to an executive, but that they can also take it back again when they want it. Le Plat’s Aeneid thus remains a pro-republican poem, not the support for the establishment 149

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of the new Roman Empire on the Seine that Napoleon would undoubtedly have preferred. This makes it a thoroughly subversive document, one that challenges the traditional association of Virgil’s poem with the new Augustuses of the early modern era. Napoleon responded by seizing and destroying all the copies he could find and by trying to prevent the author from finishing the poem. Only a few copies escaped the hands of the censors, making Virgile en France a rare book indeed today. Like other “pessimistic” readers of the Aeneid, Le Plat linked his challenge to Virgil’s imperial ideology with a pronounced sympathy for those who suffer at the hands of Virgil’s hero. His retelling of the love story between Dido and Aeneas, for example, contains some significant changes that seem to have been designed to exculpate Dido and make Aeneas’s behavior look even worse than in the Aeneid. Dido’s sister Anna, for example, is replaced by her confessor (2.1 ff.), so that when she tries to decide how to handle the passions rising up inside her, she does so not with the aid and support of a sympathetic sister but with the guidance of the church. Juno in turn proposes that a priest be present at the scene in the cave where Dido and Aeneas are joined together, thereby giving the union greater legitimacy than it had in Virgil’s poem (2.11). Le Plat’s sympathy for Dido is part of a broader sympathy for women in general that appears elsewhere in his poem. In his retelling of the revolt of the Trojan women in Book 5 of the Aeneid, for example, Le Plat adds a note that explains that religion and politics have conspired throughout history to oppress women (2.244–45). Here, and elsewhere, Le Plat responds to and strengthens the “other voices” in the poem (Kallendorf (2007) 196–212). As one would expect, modern “optimists” and “pessimists” part company in their analysis of the character of Aeneas, and as the early printed editions show, their early modern counterparts did as well. Beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, many of the earliest editions of Virgil’s poetry carried the commentary of Tiberius Claudius Donatus (1905–1906), a fourth-century AD writer who exercised considerable ingenuity in making Aeneas the morally perfect model for monarchs like Portugal’s King João VI. Thus Virgil’s goal is to show Aeneas as “free of all guilt and one most worthy to be presented publicly with great commendation” (1.2–5), and Donatus is convinced that Virgil praises Aeneas’s virtues on every possible occasion: he is a good leader (on Aen. 1.159–79), pious toward the gods (on Aen. 1.379), handsome and brave (on Aen. 1.594–95), and so on. It might appear that Aeneas is culpable now and again, but Donatus takes pains to show that this is not so. Abandoning Dido, for example, might look like a fault, but to Donatus, Aeneas emerges from his stay at Carthage with his reputation intact: Dido, after all, was deceived by Cupid, “so that even in this respect the poet might preserve the good name not only of Dido herself but even of Aeneas” (on Aen. 1.720). Then as now, however, not everyone read the Aeneid in this way. In 1741, for example, Thomas Cooke published a commentary to the Aeneid that would fully satisfy a twenty-first century “pessimist” but which has not been reprinted since the middle of the eighteenth century. The first indication of this comes at Aen. 150

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3.10, where Aeneas’s tears as he sets out on his journey lead to this scholarly outburst: “Our hero is wimpering and sighing so often that our compassion is worn out for him: I really believe, if Virgil had lived to have corrected his Aeneis more than he did, he would have wiped away some of Aeneas’s tears.” Aeneas’s behavior in Aen. 4.318 is also roundly criticized: “Unhappy Dido uses sufficient arguments in this speech for the exercise of her hero’s humanity, if his love is fled: he ought, from the consideration of the dangers which surrounded her, to have made her more the object of his care than he did.” Along with the objections to Aeneas’s character goes a reevaluation of Turnus’s. At Aen. 10.825 we get the first explicit praise of Turnus: “Turnus appears in the unexceptionable character of an intrepid gallant soldier . . . he is not a savage fighter void of reflection, but appears in the true dignity of a hero.” This is not an isolated observation, with Turnus being praised at Aen. 10.261 for appearing “with an air of heroic gallantry, not only void of fear, but pleased with the opportunity of entering into action and acquiring glory.” Cooke’s comments on the last scene of the poem (Aen. 12.952) mark his final assault on the “optimistic” reading of the poem: We have been thro’ a poem that is one of the noblest monuments of the genius of the antients: it is a diamond, but not without flaws. . . . Aeneas asserted his claim to the Italian dominions as promised him by the gods, and fixed by fate: Turnus disputed his title very justly, for the other is a claim that any man might make. Turnus was guilty of no disobedience to the divine will; for unless Jupiter, or some other good-natured god, had acquainted Turnus with the will of heaven in regard to Aeneas, how could Turnus distinguish Aeneas from any other invader? . . . [T]hey who read the Aeneis with taste and reason send their wishes along with Turnus, because he was right in his opposition, and because Aeneas’s title from heaven was not half so good as Turnus’s right of inheritance from his father Daunus. This is a remarkable passage. Most “pessimistic” critics of the early twenty-first century acknowledge that characters like Dido and Turnus represent worthwhile values that must be sacrificed on the altar of Aeneas’s greater achievement. Cooke goes even farther than this, declaring Turnus to be morally superior to Aeneas, making the end of the poem even more tragic than modern readings of it.

III Modern scholarship has been insisting with greater and greater force that reading has a history, and that we should not simply assume that past readers processed texts in the same way that we do. For example, the prologue to Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (printed in the 1507 Saragossa edition) offers a remarkably clear and self-conscious description of the ways in which a book could be read in the 151

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early modern period. There were three possibilities. First, a reader could focus not on the story as a whole, but on certain detached episodes. Second, the text could be used as a source for easily memorized formulas, proverbs, maxims, and ready-made expressions. And finally, a reader could work to grasp a text in its totality without reducing it to episodes or maxims, to develop a plural reading that recognizes diversity of interpretation and adapts whatever lessons the book contains to individual needs (Kallendorf (1999) 68; see also Cavallo and Chartier (1999) and Baron (2001)). As we shall see, it is the books themselves that provide the best evidence for the reading practices of the past. Let us take up each of these three possibilities in turn, with a focus on the second one, which is most alien to contemporary reading practices. Then as now, certain parts of the Aeneid received greater attention than others. A quick survey of the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books and the National Union Catalogue, both of which separate out and record editions of individual books of the Aeneid, shows that as we might expect, Books 1, 2, 4, and 6 were most often printed (and presumably read) separately. Even here, however, there are some surprises. Book 4, for example, is often given special attention by modern readers, but it was seldom printed alone in Latin until late in the nineteenth century, although separate editions in the vernacular languages are common. Another way to see what was being read, and how, is to look at the handwritten marginalia in early printed books, many of which come from a school environment. Even a cursory examination of the records of teaching activity left in the margins of student texts shows that it was unusual for a teacher to read a long poem like the Aeneid straight through from beginning to end (Kallendorf (1999) 68–71). More common by far was to dip in at certain key episodes, with the descent to the underworld in Book 6, for example, being a favorite. Finally, one can look at the imitations and travesties of the Aeneid that were produced during this period, on the assumption that material was recast more or less in proportion to the attention given to it in the original. Here, again, as Vladimiro Zabughin pointed out almost a hundred years ago, Book 6 is the source of the most interesting and courageous imitative work in this period, with the Dido story being used only rarely ((1921–23) 1.302). It would thus appear that schoolmasters in the early modern period found themselves more uncomfortable with Aeneas’s behavior at Carthage than their modern counterparts. Handwritten notes left in the margins of early printed books can also shed light on the second style of reading in the early modern period. A copy of Virgil’s works printed by Nicolaus Hoffmannus in Frankfurt in 1616 (Meyen (1616)) and now in a private collection records the marginal annotations of one Rector Hesse, a German schoolmaster. Herr Hesse marked parallel passages from a variety of ancient authors along with variant readings and cross-references to other Virgilian commentators. But what interests us is his habit of underlining passages he wanted to be able to find again. In some cases his comments have a decidedly moral cast. Two underlined passages in Book 2, which recounts the fall of Troy, provide advice on what to do in hopeless situations: “The lost have only/this one 152

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deliverance: to hope for none” (Aen. 2.354), and “at times/new courage comes to beaten hearts” (Aen. 2.367). Another passage reminds the reader of the lesson to be drawn from seeing the Great Sinners in the underworld – “Be warned, learn justice, do not scorn the gods” (Aen. 6.624) – signalled in the margin with an “NB” (“nota bene,” “note well”). Other passages, however, are obviously underlined because they are phrased in a memorable way: Aen. 2.255, “beneath/the friendly silence of the tranquil moon,” carries the marginal reminder “Nox quieta” (“a peaceful night”), and the marginal note “Simile de subito pavore” (“simile concerning sudden fear”) directs the reader back to the simile in Aen. 2.379–82. The passages underlined in Hesse’s Virgil, in other words, illustrate moral topics (what to do in hopeless situations) or stylistic flourishes (a memorable simile), often with marginal annotations that serve as ‘indexing notes’ to allow the reader to find them again and remember what they illustrate. Sometimes these marginal annotations themselves were published. As an example, let us turn to another early printed edition, the text and commentary of Juan Luis de la Cerda (1608) that was mentioned earlier. La Cerda’s commentary to Eclogue 3.14, for example, bears the marginal note “Dolor in affectu invidiae,” with the accompanying commentary directing the reader to note that grief is found within the passion of envy (“Nota in affectu invidiae dolorem”) and listing parallel passages from elsewhere in Virgil on the same topic. La Cerda’s marginal notes to this same eclogue draw attention again and again to an adage, a pithy saying that encapsulates one of life’s lessons: Ecl. 3.91, “mulgeat hircos,” is identified as an adage, “Hircos mulgere” (“to milk a he goat,” that is, to do something impossible). The phrase “amores . . . dulces . . . amaros” at the end of the eclogue (ll. 109–10) gets La Cerda to note that Erasmus discusses this proverb as a reference to something that is at the same time both happy and sad. Stylistic features are noted, too, as we saw in Hesse’s marginal notes: on Ecl. 5.30, for example, La Cerda notes that to indicate that a man is great, one describes the scattering of flowers in his path, and at 5.56, we are reminded that if one wants to describe a god, “candidus” (“white”) is the appropriate color. In other contexts these proverbs were sometimes illustrated, either in the emblem books that were so popular during this period, or on the title pages of books like Perrin’s French translation, discussed above. Then, in a third step, books like the Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio by Orazio Toscanella (1567) made their way into print. Toscanella’s book consists of headings like “rebuke” and “love,” “nation” and “nature of things,” “amplification” and “comparison,” with passages from Virgil’s poetry copied out underneath the relevant heading. In “Ammonitione” (“rebuke” or “warning”), for example, Toscanella considers how to rebuke a young man who has done something good but also made a mistake. Toscanella instructs his reader first to praise the young man for the good he has done, because praising virtue makes it grow and because praise makes one more disposed to accept correction. Doing it the other way around (that is, beginning with the rebuke) hardens the heart and alienates it from the good, or at least makes the heart grow cold, he explains. Then comes the 153

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example, from Aeneid 9, where Apollo warns Ascanius not to put himself at such great risk in battle. First comes the praise: continue as you have been and you will become immortal (Aen. 9.641–44). Then comes the rebuke: “but after this, my boy, enough of war” (Aen. 9.656) (16–17). For a modern reader, this is a puzzling book, but it would not have been so for her early modern predecessor: Toscanella has simply taken the handwritten indexing notes left in the margin of an early printed book, or their printed counterparts in editions like that of La Cerda, and made them the headings. He then shattered Virgil’s poetry into shards of several lines each and rearranged the shards under the appropriate headings. So, to recapitulate: we have here a three-step process. Teachers like Hesse would buy an early printed edition of a poet like Virgil and read it with an eye on the moral wisdom it contains and on passages that were expressed well, often signaling key phrases with ‘indexing notes’ in the margin. In the next step, the marginal signals themselves could be printed, as La Cerda did, as a guide to other readers who would not in turn have to do all the thinking themselves. Then, finally, the whole business could be reformated, as Toscanella did in step three, with the marginal notes becoming the headings and with Virgil’s text broken up and rearranged under those headings, some focused on content and some on style. The result is a way of reading in which Virgil’s poetry is seen as a repository of maxims and proverbs, of moralizing sayings and stylistic ornaments. This procedure, which was the dominant way of reading Virgil’s poetry in the early modern period, has largely receded into the background today, although a quick look at the passages listed under “Virgil” in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations suggests that it has not disappeared completely. The third possibility is for a reader to work to grasp a text in its totality without reducing it to episodes or maxims, to develop a plural reading that recognizes diversity of interpretation and adapts whatever lessons the book contains to individual needs. This is the most common way of approaching the text today, but as we have seen, it was hardly unknown during the early modern period. Cooke’s commentary, for instance, offers the basis for a “pessimistic” reading of the text into which the key episodes were incorporated in turn, while Donatus presents an “optimistic” approach to the text that embraces literally every relevant detail.

IV As Charles Martindale has shrewdly observed, period labels have no greater claim to universal validity than do the interpretations of art and literature fashioned within them; both are cultural constructs, created at a particular point in time and subject to recreation at any time in the future ((1993) 9). Nevertheless, I believe that there is at present a certain basic agreement among art historians about how early modern Europe might be divided into periods and about how successive responses to the artifacts of Greek and Rome might provide a rhythm to that periodization. Medieval painters and sculptors tended to see everything in terms of their own culture, to appropriate the “other” and make it their own – hence the late 154

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Gothic statues of Jupiter as a monk and Mars as a knight from the bell tower next to the Florentine cathedral. Under the influence of humanist historians, Renaissance artists sought to envision antiquity on its own terms, to preserve its “otherness,” so that artists of the period attempted to remove themselves and their values from their works. Baroque artists in turn sought to focus attention on themselves, using classical subject matter as a means to show off their ability to solve technical challenges in a flurry of motion and activity; we might think, for example, of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne or his Rape of Persephone. It seems that in art, as in physics, actions provoke reactions, so that neoclassical artists responded by shifting attention away from themselves to their subject matter, again attempting to let the grandeur and nobility of the classical past shine forth in the pure vision of, say, David’s Oath of the Horatii. The romantic vision shifted from public to private, from the mind to the heart – another version of action and reaction – so that classical subject matter now served as a source for pathos, which must be felt by the artist and communicated to the viewer. In other words, the way in which classical subject matter is appropriated provides a sort of rhythm to this periodization. First the emphasis is on the artist and on how he or she might manipulate the past to meet the needs of the present in a way that might be labeled “mannerist.” Then the emphasis is on the subject matter, as the artist attempts to suppress the present to see the past on its own terms, which we might label “neoclassical.” Next the artist returns to center stage, then the classical subject matter, then the artist. The illustrated editions of Virgil show how this works (Suerbaum (1992)). The most famous of the early illustrated editions is the one edited by Sebastian Brant and printed by Johannes Grüninger in Strasbourg in 1502 (Schneider (1982) 66–67; Schneider (1983); Leach (1982) 175–210). In the scene illustrating the final battle between Turnus and Aeneas (Brant (1502) fol. 407v), for example, the characters are dressed in costumes from the late Middle Ages, not from ancient Rome, and the wooden ring in the foreground, along with the helmets and pikes stacked behind it, suggest that Aeneas and Turnus have just finished fighting according to late medieval conventions. The cities in the background look like the northern European ones that Brant and Grüninger knew, and the perspective (or rather, lack of perspective) is typically medieval as well (Kallendorf (2001) 124–25). The blocks from the 1502 Strasbourg edition were copied in Italy and France and remained very popular for several decades, but after mid-century several other series of woodcuts began to compete successfully with them. One of these competing series appeared in an Italian translation published in Venice near the end of the century. The battle scene depicted here (Virgil (1586) f. 221v) clearly reflects the norms of Italian Renaissance art: it represents one and only one point of action within Book 11, and it is rendered in reasonable perspective and a pleasingly balanced composition. The towers of the town in the background still look like what a Renaissance reader would have seen in an Italian city of his day, but the effect is totally different from that of the Strasbourg edition (Kallendorf (2001) 124–27). At the end of the following century, John Dryden’s monumental English translation appeared, first with the baroque engravings of Franz Cleyn (Leach (1982) 155

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211–30), then with another series published by the same printer in 1716. The scene depicting the moment of Dido’s death (Dryden (1716), vol. 2, following p. 454), was obviously selected to allow the flurry of movement so favored by baroque artists. It is dominated not by Dido, but by Iris, who is depicted at the very moment of descent, which requires the greatest technical skill to render, encouraging the viewer to admire the artist’s skill in controlling a difficult composition. The building behind the pyre is typically baroque as well, showing the dissociation of form from function that characterizes, for example, Il Gesù in Rome. In this case, the artist clearly sees the Aeneid through the filter of the baroque aesthetic that dominated his culture (Kallendorf (2001) 127–28). In the history of Virgilian illustration, the reaction to this engraving may be found in the Picturae antiquissimi Virgiliani codicis Bibliothecae Vaticanae . . ., which reproduces scenes from two very old manuscripts, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Romanus, along with other scenes from gems, monuments, mosaics, and other artifacts of ancient Rome (Odermann (1931) 18). The depiction of Laocoön (Santi Bartoli (1780–1782) nr. 37) comes from the Codex Vaticanus, but it ends up suiting a neoclassical temperament quite well. The composition, for example, shows signs of symmetricality, with one child on either side of Laocoön, who has his arms upraised in perfect balance and the two snakes draped across his body in perfect parallelism. What is more, the figures maintain their dignity and restraint, even in an agonizing death. It is impossible not to think of this scene as a contrast to the famous Hellenistic statue of Laocoön, which was widely known at this time and which represents a mannerist aesthetic completely foreign to what we see here (Kallendorf (2001) 129–30). Dryden’s translation remained popular for several generations, eventually picking up another set of illustrations that was published right at the turn of the nineteenth century. These illustrations show signs of an emerging romantic sensibility. For example, in the depiction of Dido giving her dying speech (Dryden (1803) vol. 1, following p. 160), the artist is trying primarily to convey the emotion of the moment. The woman in the foreground rushes toward the collapsed queen, while the one in the background throws up her arms in grief. This is the point in the story with the greatest emotional force, and the illustrator was clearly drawn to it as a vehicle for communicating the emotional content he valued in the story (Kallendorf (2001) 130–33). These woodcuts and engravings are obviously valuable for the insight they offer into how Virgil’s poetry was envisioned during the successive periods of early modern culture. But they can also serve to enrich our current understanding of this poetry. For centuries Virgil has stood as the incarnation of classical restraint and order. Yet there is another Virgil as well. Donatus quoted a contemporary of the poet as saying that he had developed a new cacozelia, “a mannerism that was elusive, neither swollen, nor thin, but made up of ordinary words” (Thomas (2001) 12). And in one of the most influential of all works of literary criticism in the period immediately after World War II, Ernst Robert Curtius anchors his discussion of mannerism in Virgil as well. If, as he explains, classicism (and by 156

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extension neoclassicism in its various manifestations) can be defined as “Nature raised to the Ideal” and mannerism as whatever runs counter to it, then Virgil’s poetry is certainly suffused with much that is classical. But Roman classicism falls between two mannerist periods, the Alexandrian and the late imperial, and as Curtius develops his discussion of mannerism as the indiscriminate piling on of rhetorical embellishment, he turns to Virgil’s poetry again and again for examples (Curtius (1967) 273–301; Clausen (1987); Thomas (2001) 15–19). In other words, the Renaissance artist and his baroque successor were dealing with the same poem; they were simply responding to different aspects of it, just as we do today.

V There are, then, two reasons to spend time with the earlier editions of Virgil’s poetry. The first is so that we can better understand the central place of this poetry in the development of early modern culture. The prefaces and commentaries in the early printed editions capture the complexities of power in this period, with those at the center (like Perrin) and those on the margins (like Le Plat) focalizing their attitudes through the Aeneid. The early printed editions also carry the evidence of reading practices during this period, some of which, like the tendency to see Virgil’s poetry as a series of stylistic examples or moralizing proverbs, are quite different from ours. And the succession of illustrations offers clear evidence of how the Aeneid was envisioned from one period to the next. Yet if “our current interpretations of ancient texts, whether or not we are aware of it, are, in complex ways, constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected,” then what we do with Virgil’s text today has its roots in what our predecessors did with it. The roots of both the “optimistic” and the “pessimistic” interpretations of the poem that remain influential today extend deeply into the commentaries and prefatory matter of the early printed editions. Modern readers, like those who went before them, focus on some parts of the Aeneid at the expense of others, and they develop readings of the poem as a whole that are not so different from those of the past. And the oscillation between mannerist and neoclassical aesthetics that is seen in the early illustrated editions provides the foundation for a modern discussion of similar elements in Virgil’s poetry. Past meets present, then, in the pages of these books, which offer considerably more than antiquarian interest for those who are willing to invest time and effort in understanding them.

Works cited Baron, S. A. (2001), The Reader Revealed, Washington. Brant, S., ed. (1502), Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, Strasbourg. Cavallo, G. and R. Chartier, eds. (1999), A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane, Amherst. Clausen, W. V. (1987), Virgil’s Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London.

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Cooke, T., ed. (1741), Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis, London. Curtius, E. R. (1967), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask, 2nd edn., Princeton. Donatus, T. C. (1905–1906), Interpretationes Vergilianae, ed. H. Georgii, Leipzig. Dryden, J. (1716), The Works of Vergil . . . Translated into English Verse, London. Dryden, J. (1803), The Works of Vergil, Translated into English Verse . . ., London. Fagiolo, M., ed. (1981), Virgilio nell’arte e nella cultura europea, Rome. Hindman, S., ed. (1982), The Early Illustrated Book, Washington. Jackson, H. J. (2001), Marginalia, New Haven and London. Kallendorf, C. (1999), Virgil and the Myth of Venice, Oxford. Kallendorf, C. (2001), “The Aeneid Transformed: Illustration as Interpretation from the Renaissance to the Present,” in Spence, ed., 121–48. Kallendorf, C. (2002), “The Virgilian Title Page as Interpretive Frame; or, Through the Looking Glass,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 64: 15–50. Kallendorf, C. (2007), The Other Virgil, Oxford. Kallendorf, C. (2008a), A Catalogue of the Junius Spencer Morgan Virgil Collection at Princeton University, New Castle. Kallendorf, C. (2008b), “The Early Modern Roots of the ‘Harvard’ School of Virgilian Interpretation,” in Santini and Stok, eds. La Cerda, J. L. de (1608), P. Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, Aeneis . . ., Madrid (?). Le Plat du Temple, V.-A.-C (1807–1808), Virgile en France . . ., Brussels. Leach, E. W. (1982), “Illustration as Interpretation in Brant’s and Dryden’s Editions of Vergil,” in Hindman, ed., 211–30. Lima Leitão, A. J. de, trans. (1818–1819), . . . as obras de Pùblio Virgìlio Maro . . ., Rio de Janeiro. Mambelli, G. (1954), Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane, Florence. Mandelbaum, A., trans. (1971), The Aeneid of Virgil, New York. Martindale, C. (1993), Redeeming the Text, Cambridge. Martindale, C. (2002), John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, 2nd edn., Bristol. Meyen, J. a, ed. (1616), Publii Virgilii Maronis Mantuani opera omnia . . ., Frankfurt. Mortimer, R. (1982), “Vergil in the Rosenwald Collection,” in Hindman, ed., 175–210. Odermann, E. (1931), “Vergil und der Kupferstich,” Buch und Schrift 5: 13–25. Pasquier, B. (1992), Virgile illustré de la Renaissance à nos jours en France et en Italie, Paris. Perrin, P. (1664), Leneide de Virgile fidellement traduitte . . ., Paris. Rosenthal, B. M. (1997), The Rosenthal Collection of Printed Books with Manuscript Annotations, New Haven. Santi Bartoli, P., illus. (1780–1782), Picturae antiquissimi Virgiliani codicis Bibliothecae Vaticanae . . ., Rome. Santini, C. and F. Stok, eds. (2008), Esegesi dimenticate di autori classici, Rome. Schneider, B. (1982), Vergil: Handschriften und Drucke der Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Schneider, B. (1983), “‘Virgilius pictus’ – Sebastian Brants illustrierte Vergilausgabe und ihre Nachwirkung: Ein Beitrag zur Vergilrezeption im deutschen Humanismus,” Wolfenbütteler Beiträge 6: 202–62.

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Spence, S., ed. (2001), Poets and Critics Read Vergil, New Haven and London. Suerbaum, W. (1992), “Aeneis picturis narrata – Aeneis versibus picta: Semiotische Überlegung zu Vergil-Illustrationen oder Visuelles Erzählen: Buchillustrationen zu Vergils Aeneis,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, ser. 3, vol. 10: 271–334. Tanner, M. (1993), The Last Descendant of Aeneas, New Haven. Thomas, R. (2001), Virgil and the Augustan Reception, Cambridge. Toscanella, O. (1567), Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio, Venice. Virgil, P. M. (1586), L’opere di Vergilio, Venice. Waswo, R. (1997), The Founding Legend of Western Civilization, Hanover and London. Zabughin, V. (1921–1923), Vergilio nel Rinascimento italiano da Dante a Torquato Tasso, Bologna.

Further reading There is no reliable bibliographical guide to the early printed editions of Virgil: Mambelli (1954) is seriously deficient, although a replacement by Kallendorf is in progress. One of the largest discrete Virgil collections in the world is the one at Princeton University; the catalogue of Kallendorf (2008a) is nearing completion. Much useful information is available in the exhibition catalogues that appeared to mark the bimillennium of Virgil’s death in 1981–1982; especially good are Fagiolo (1981) and Schneider (1982). On the “optimistic” and “pessimistic” interpretive schools, see Kallendorf (2007) v–viii, with bibliography; on the historical roots of this division, see Tanner (1993), Thomas (2001), and Kallendorf (2007). From the growing literature on reading and its history, Cavallo and Chartier (1999) and Baron (2001) provide a useful orientation. The standard work on marginalia is Jackson (2001), with Rosenthal (1997) providing a roadmap for what remains to be done. Of the topics treated in this chapter, the illustrated editions of Virgil have received the most discussion; see Odermann (1931), Mortimer (1982), Suerbaum (1992), and Pasquier (1992) for an overview. Suerbaum has recently completed an extensive catalogue of the illustrated editions in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. The other topics treated here have been touched on in several works of Kallendorf (1999, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008b).

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11 VIRGIL AND THE ETHICAL C O M M E N TA RY Philosophy, commonplaces, and the structure of Renaissance knowledge

I. Introduction Humanist schoolmasters, who were responsible for writing and disseminating many of the commentaries to classical texts produced during the Renaissance, were quite clear on the theoretical level about what they believed that reading the classics should do. The student should attain control over the Latin language, to be sure, but he should also become a morally better person through the study of ancient literature. In his De liberorum educatione, for example, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini explains that “ad virtutem autem capessendam litterarum studia plurimum adiumenti praebent.”1 Philosophy is “omnium mater artium,” but “absque litteris haud facile percipi potest” (160). It is true that pagan poetry contains things that young students in particular should not be exposed to, but we should read the poets in the same way as the bee selects among the flowers, taking only what is suitable. So, whenever the poets “excellentium virorum dicta aut facta commemorant, tunc tota mente moveri atque inflammari lector debet maximeque conari ut talis ipse sit, quales illi fuerunt. Cum vero improborum hominum mentionem incident, fugienda est illorum imitatio” (216). Battista Guarino, the son of the famous schoolmaster Guarino da Verona, emphasizes the same thing. Grammar involves the study of language and speech (“methodos”) and of historical knowledge and past achievements (“historia”) – that is, style and content (268–70).2 Guarino is not arguing for a program of study that is restricted to history, but includes under this broader term all five of the humanist disciplines (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy as well as history). So in poetry, “quid utilitatis sub commento afferat rimandum est.” The reader should select out and commit to memory

1 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione, in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig Kallendorf, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 5 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 126–259 (128). Further references to this treatise will be placed in the text. 2 Battista Guarino, De ordine docendi et studendi, in Kallendorf, 260–309 (269–71). Further references to this treatise will be placed in the text.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-14

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“quae . . . ad virtutis rationem pertinentia reperiuntur” (300). Reading Greek and Latin, in other words, should teach us virtue. Twenty-five years ago, however, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine asserted vigorously that there was a disconnect between this theory and what actually went on in many Renaissance classrooms. In a chapter about Guarino’s school that was tellingly subtitled “Ideals and Practice,” they argued that one glance at the mass of surviving classroom material from the humanist schools of the fifteenth century must make it obvious that, whatever the principles on which it was based, the literary training it provided was a far cry from this sort of generalized grooming for life. . . . [Course work involved] explanation of interesting words and constructions, very brief and sketchy discussions of historical points, bits of general information of the sort that a cultivated person should know and formal analysis of the rhetorical loci used by Cicero himself. There is little attention to Cicero’s train of thought or line of argument – that is entirely lost in the scramble for detail. . . . Naturally Guarino did include some moral comment in the course of his lectures; it would have been hard to avoid doing so when his subject text was De senectute or Persius’s Satires. But these observations inevitably became absorbed into the pedagogical routine – something to be recorded between etymologies and paraphrases, rather than a coherent contribution to a fully articulated moral philosophy.3 As anyone who has looked at a lot of recordationes, the handwritten commentaries that serve as records of what actually went on in the Renaissance classroom, can attest, there is a great deal of truth in what Grafton and Jardine wrote.4 These commentaries regularly go line by line, even word by word, providing synonyms for difficult words, explaining syntactical problems, identifying obscure places or details from mythology, offering parallel passages from the same author or other ones, and so forth. Someone looking for lofty principles and great ideas will, in general, not find what she is looking for here. 3 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 3, 20, 22. 4 On the teaching of the classics in the Renaissance classroom, see Ann Blair, “Student Manuscripts and the Textbook,” in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Emidio Campi et al., Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 447 (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 39–73, and Jürgen Leonhardt, “Classics as Textbooks: A Study of the Humanist Lectures on Cicero at the University of Leipzig, ca. 1515,” 89–112 of the same volume; Marjorie C. Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010); and Craig Kallendorf, “Virgil in the Renaissance Classroom: From Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae,” in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, ed. J. F. Ruys, J. Ward, and M. Heyworth (Turnhout: Brepols, in press). See also On Renaissance Commentaries, ed. Marianne Pade, Noctes Neolatinae/Neo-Latin Texts and Studies, 4 (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005).

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But there are some interesting exceptions. The commentary of Cristoforo Landino, for example, offers the usual stylistic observations, but it also presents a moral interpretation of the Aeneid that not only comments regularly on ethical issues but also places these comments into an overarching Neoplatonic framework. And Sebastianus Regulus’s commentary on the beginning of Book 1 of the Aeneid develops an interpretation that is grounded in Aristotelian ethics. There are, however, other ways to organize knowledge about right and wrong in the early modern period, besides grounding it in ancient philosophy. I shall therefore also look at a commonplace book that restructures Virgilian material in a distinctly Renaissance way within Renaissance categories, many of them ethically oriented. I shall conclude by returning to the generalization of Grafton and Jardine to suggest that the material discussed here shows at least some of Virgil’s early modern readers organizing what they learned in a systematic effort to bring out the ethical framework of the poem.

II. Landino and Plato Cristoforo Landino, who held the chair of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Florence for forty years, was the most important Virgilian critic of the second half of the fifteenth century. He lectured on the Aeneid several times, published a commentary in 1488 that was printed in nineteen of the thirty-five Virgil editions published before the end of the century, and refined his interpretation in the last two books of his Disputationes Camaldulenses (1472).5 Thus what he had to say about the Aeneid was both carefully thought out and influential. Landino was active in the circle of philosophers, poets, and scholars loosely associated with Lorenzo de’ Medici and often referred to now as the “Platonic Academy,” which provided him with the essential beginning point for his Virgilian interpretation.6 His hermeneutic path leads directly from Plato to an interest in the poem’s ethical content. In his Disputationes Camaldulenses, he condemns 5 On Landino’s Virgilian criticism, see Craig Kallendorf, “‘You Are My Master’: Dante and the Virgil Criticism of Cristoforo Landino,” in In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 129–65, with bibliography, along with Frank La Brasca, “Cristoforo Landino et la culture Florentine de la Renaissance” (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université de Paris III, 1989). Publication statistics for Landino’s commentary are derived from Vergil: A Census of Printed Editions 1469–1500, ed. Martin Davies and John Goldfinch, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society, 7 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1992). An introduction to Landino’s life and works, with bibliography, can be found in Craig Kallendorf, “Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498),” in Centuriae latinae. Cent une figures humanistes de la Renaissance aux Lumières offertes à Jacques Chomarat, ed. Colette Nativel, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 314 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1997), 477–83. 6 On Landino’s relations with the Platonic Academy, see Arthur Field, “Cristoforo Landino and Platonic Poetry,” in The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 231–68, which also contains good information on Landino’s teaching notes and a somewhat different analysis of his larger interpretive scheme. Recent scholarship has called into question the nature of the Platonic Academy; see James Hankins, “Cosimo de’ Medici and the

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those readers who hope to find truths about natural philosophy in Virgil, for the Aeneid was actually concerned with ethics. Specifically, he writes Qua obsecro ille acrimonia, quo verborum fulmine metum, ignaviam, luxuriam, incontinentiam, impietatem, perfidiam ac omnia iniustitiae genera reliquaque vitia insectatur vexatque? Quibus contra laudibus, quibus praemiis invictam animi magnitudinem, et pro patria, pro parentibus, pro cognatis amicisque consideratam periculorum susceptionem, religionem in Deum, pietatem in maiores, caritatem in omnes prosequitur! . . . Verum, ut paucis infinita expediam, ita locum concludam, ut universam huius scriptoris poesim laudem esse virtutis atque omnia ad illam referri sine dubitatione affirmem.7 In theory he distinguished between the grammatical-rhetorical approach to literature found in his 1488 commentary and the allegorical-philosophical one developed in the Disputationes Camaldulenses, but in practice the distinction blurred: the commentary, for example, also presents the main features of Landino’s allegory. Landino’s commentary, in other words, shows how a poem teaches the reader how to be virtuous and morally upright. Landino was an unusually systematic thinker whose analysis of the Aeneid begins with an overarching interpretive scheme: Divinus enim Plato, cum virtutes de vita et moribus easdem quas ceteri posuisset, ita ad postremum illas diversis sive ordinibus sive generibus distinguit, ut alia quadam ratione ab iis illas coli ostendat, qui coetus ac civitates adamant, alia ab iis, qui omnem mortalitatem dediscere cupientes et humanarum rerum odio moti ad sola divina cognoscenda eriguntur, alia postremo ab iis, qui ab omni iam contagione expiati in solis divinis versantur. Primas igitur civiles dixit, secundas purgatorias ac tertias animi iam purgati.8 In this scheme, all three grades of virtue are good, so there is a place for both the active and the contemplative lives. But the three grades are arranged in a hierarchy, so that Aeneas is praiseworthy for having passed through all three of them in order to leave the political life and reach the knowledge of heavenly affairs. Landino’s interpretation of the Aeneid begins with this heuristic scheme and places each major event in the poem into the moral development of the hero, who

Platonic Academy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 53 (1990), 144–62, and “The Myth of the Platonic Academy in Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991), 429–75. 7 Cristoforo Landino, “In P. Vergilii interpretationes prohemium,” in Scritti critici e teorici, ed. Roberto Cardini, I critici italiani, 1, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 1.211–25 (1.215–16). 8 Cristoforo Landino, Disputationes Camaldulenses, ed. Peter Lohe, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Studi e testi, 6 (Florence: Sansoni, 1980), 153.

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encounters a series of impediments to his ethical progress. In Book 2, he struggles against “voluptas,” the unrestrained sensuality represented by the city of Troy. As he takes the journey away from sensuality to the contemplation of the divine, he follows his mother Venus – not the earthly one, but the heavenly one, according to the Platonic notion of the two Venuses. In Book 3 he continues to meet examples of “voluptas” (Scylla, Anchises), along with “avaritia” (Thrace, the Harpies, Charybdis) and “ambitio” (Polyphemus). This last vice, the yearning for political office, proves especially interesting, because in Landino’s interpretation this is the realm of Juno. Carthage, her city, therefore represents the active life, so that in his time there Aeneas exercises political virtues that distract him from his higher calling. Those who function in the active life possess virtues that are not perfected but merely inchoate, leaving them open to the assaults of vice, so that for Landino, sexual indiscretion becomes bound up with the exercise of political power.9 But as he sets sail resolutely for Italy, he prepares himself for the descent to the underworld, the contemplation of vices in order that he might understand and therefore abstain from them. By the time he passes through the gate of ivory at the end of Book 6, he has gained the understanding of right and wrong through which one can live a good life and reach, finally, the “summum bonum.” Landino’s commentary was well known in its own day. It is less well known in ours, but anyone who has looked at the Virgilian commentary tradition in the early modern period has run into it to some extent. Accordingly I shall leave Landino at this point, stressing merely that it is his commentary that launched Renaissance readers into an approach to the Aeneid that stressed an analysis of the hero within a systematic moral framework.

III. Regulus and Aristotle Sebastianus Regulus, who held the chair in humanities at the University of Bologna, published his commentary to Book 1 of the Aeneid – or rather, to the first 200 lines of Book 1 – in 1563, some seventy-five years after Landino’s commentary first appeared.10 Regulus knew Landino and quotes from his commentary. In his preface, he does not mention him by name but supplies an allegorical reading of

9 This is one of the places where Landino’s allegorical interpretation departs from the previous Virgilian exegetical tradition; see Craig Kallendorf, “Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,” Renaissance Quarterly, 36 (1983), 519–46 (541–43). 10 Sebastiani Reguli Brasichellensis in primum Aeneidos Virgilii librum ex Aristotelis De arte poetica et Rhetorica praeceptis explicationes (Bologna: Ioannes Rubeus, 1563). References to Regulus’s commentary will be placed in the text. I am not aware of a comprehensive study of Regulus or his works. Occasionally reference to his Aeneid commentary is made by modern scholars: see R. Cummings, “Two Sixteenth-Century Notices of Numerological Composition in the Aeneid,” Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 26–27; Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 6; and David Mikics, The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1994), 27.

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the poem that is immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever read his predecessor: Aeneas is a man worthy of praise who set aside many pleasures, completed many labors, and finally reached his goal, which was “foelicitas.” Troy is the first age of man, in which there is no reason but only those things that lead to pleasure; Juno is ambition, which retains its focus in the active, civic life; the third stage of life is the “vita contemplativa,” which leads to happiness (24). Later, when he explains that Aeolus represents prudence, the lower order of reason, and Juno the desire to rule, he cites Landino by name as his source (111). Regulus, however, is an Aristotelian, not a Platonist, so his analysis works differently for the most part. His commentary begins with the kind of introduction we would expect to see from an Aristotelian working in an educational context, similar to the medieval accessus ad auctores and covering the “finis auctoris,” “consilium,” “methodus,” “utilitas,” “librorum numerus,” “operis inscriptio,” and “quo in genere actionum poema versatur” (9).11 But while these categories are traditional, the discussion they introduce is based solidly in Aristotle’s Poetics, a text that was known only in garbled form during the Middle Ages in the west and had little influence on literary criticism during this period. Regulus notes immediately that poetry functions by imitating human actions, either good or bad (9), which is a fundamental principle in the Poetics (chap. 2). When he moves to the second category, Regulus notes that Virgil does not describe what sort of a man Aeneas was, but what sort of a hero verisimilitude would require (13), which is another key Aristotelian principle (chap. 9). Virgil’s method, Regulus continues, is division, which is first applied to the plot, in which the various strands are gathered together as the climax is approached, then released (chap. 18), with the change in fortune taking place when Turnus sees the Latins broken in battle and can foresee the outcome of the war. Division is again applied to plot, which has a beginning, middle, and end (chap. 7); then to character, which is good or bad (chap. 2); then to words (chaps. 20–22), which show character; and finally to thought (chap. 19), which proves or disproves, showing what is true or false (14–15). These four elements – plot, character, words, and thought – are the four parts of a tragedy that are shared with epic, according to Aristotle (chap. 5). After explaining that there are twelve books in the Aeneid because this is a number favored by the Pythagoreans, Regulus returns to his Aristotelian roots, noting that the poets begin with historical truth as a way to increase verisimilitude (chap. 9) (21). Finally, in discussing the last category, Regulus notes that Aristotle rebukes those poets who simply recount all the deeds of their hero, thereby naming their poem after the main character. The Aeneid, he argues, is not open to this criticism because Virgil did not write a loose account of all the things Aeneas did, but a poem focused on a single, unified action, as Aristotle prescribed (chap. 8) (80–88). These comments show a solid, basic understanding of Aristotle’s Poetics, but this is not something we should take for granted, since Regulus was working at the time when Italian

11 R. B. C. Huygens, Accessus ad auctores, Collection Latomus, 15 (Brussels: Latomus, 1954).

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scholars were still trying to make sense of a text that is notoriously difficult to understand even now, but had re-entered circulation just recently then.12 Although he cites Minturno once (93), his own analysis does not proceed on that sophisticated a level; nevertheless it is more than competent and would have seemed at least au courant, if not cutting edge, in its own day. Like Landino, Regulus maintains a steady focus on the moral content of the poem in his commentary. Returning again to the categories that structure the introduction, we see that the goal of the author is focused around showing an image of a perfect man, a generous, brave leader who hopes for better things in adversity and maintains a judicious fear that good things can turn to bad; Virgil fashions Aeneas doing everything in reference to the standard of virtue, which leads “ad summam foelicitatem,” the goal of every good poet (9–10). The poem, as centuries of criticism confirmed, was written to celebrate the origin of Rome and the line of Augustus; Regulus adds that the virtues of Augustus are known from the virtues of Aeneas (13). The utility of poetry, he continues, derives from its status as a sort of primer in philosophy that teaches us how to live well. This instruction is developed in two areas, understanding and action, with Aeneas serving as a model for both, first by descending to the underworld and learning the nature of the universe, then by waging war, taking a wife, founding a city, and preparing a kingdom for his people (15–16). The first reference to Landino mentioned earlier, the one in which Aeneas is proposed as the praiseworthy man who passes through the three lifestyles, leaving behind pleasure and the passion to rule for the “foelicitas” that is bound to virtue, appears in Regulus’s lengthy introduction as well (24). This reference to Landino, however, should not delude us into thinking that Regulus’s moral criticism rests in Plato; his goal, as his title clearly states, is to explicate the poem from the precepts of Aristotle. What this means, however, is not immediately obvious. The fundamental issue is where poetry is to be placed in Aristotle’s division of knowledge. Modern philosophers explain that Aristotle divided the arts and sciences into three areas: theoretical, whose goal is knowing; practical, whose goal is doing; and productive, whose goal is making something. There is also another small category, the organon, which is focused on method.13 The limited acquaintance that the medieval west had with the Poetics relied on an indirect transmission from the Arab world that placed the treatise into the organon. Serious distortion resulted: if poetry is a way of reasoning, as its position in the organon would demand, it must have a characteristic logical base, which was defined as the “imaginative syllogism.”14 As a good scholar at a major university 12 On the reintegration of Aristotle’s Poetics into Italian Renaissance literary criticism, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 13 Richard McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1947), xvii–xxv. 14 O. B. Hardison, Jr., “The Place of Averroes’ Commentary on the Poetics in the History of Medieval Criticism,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer 1968, ed. John Lievsay (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970), 57–81.

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in the country in which the best work on the Poetics was being done in the sixteenth century, Regulus could do much better than Arab commentators who had never seen a Greek tragedy, and he did, joining most (but not all) of his contemporaries in removing the Poetics from the organon. The question was where to put it instead. Thinking in accordance with Aristotle, one could consider poetry to be a productive art whose goal was to make a poem, or one could consider it a practical art whose goal was to stimulate proper action. Most modern scholars put it in the former category, which stresses poetry’s affinities with what we would call the fine arts (music, dance, etc.) and favors formalist criticism like that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians during the last century.15 Regulus, however, followed the other line of reasoning. This placement has important consequences, so I would like to quote what he says at some length: Poetica enim, ut Rhetorica, inseruit politicae, quae ut regina caeteris artibus imperat, cuius finis est efficere homines beatos, nec id assequi potest, . . . nisi persuadeantur, ut velint bonis legibus, & moribus parere, quibus boni efficiuntur homines: ad persuadendum vero adhibetur Rhetorica, et Poetica, quae suavi, ornata, & sensibus hominum demulcendis apta oratione in animis hominum summa cum voluptate, quae sunt recta, & honesta inserunt, & bonos efficiunt, ut medici sanant corpora aegrotantium, amara quidem pharmaca, sed melle illita praebentes, ut aegrotantes dulcedine allecti, quod est amarum: sed salubre pharmacum libenter sumant, sic Poetae cum dulcedine orationis, & imitationis iucunditate quod rectum, & bonum quidem est, sed durum, & difficile hominibus videtur, miscentes in illorum animos inducunt. (10–11) The two arts that are indubitably practical are ethics and politics. Regulus places poetry among them, along with rhetoric. This means that when he says in his title that he is going to explicate the Aeneid according to the precepts of poetry and rhetoric, he will do so by viewing it within the practical arts, designed to guide the reader to understanding virtue and acting upon that understanding. A little further on, in remarks made after Aen. 1.33, “Tantae molis erat, Romanam condere gentem,” Regulus goes into more detail about where poetry should be placed within the Aristotelian system of the arts and sciences. History, poetry, and philosophy, he begins, all have the same end, but they reach it by different means. The philosopher predicates “foelicitas” as the goal, explaining what it is and teaching how it might be attained, setting forth each virtue as a mean between vices, showing that the passions must be shunned, and establishing that nothing is to be praised unless it is joined with virtue. The poet does this same thing by

15 McKeon, xvii–xxv; and R. S. Crane, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

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means of his imitations, as Virgil did with Aeneas and Homer with Odysseus and Achilles. The historian in turn uses examples to show what is honorable and what is base, what is useful and what is not. Then Regulus turns to how the various disciplines reach their ends. Rhetoric uses enthymemes and history uses examples, but poetry uses both, which makes it superior to either. Both in turn serve politics and ethics, that is, the part of philosophy that concerns character and the administration of the state (88–89). The essence of poetry, in other words, lies in its placement within the arts that guide correct behavior and action, both individual and collective. As he continues through his commentary on specific lines of the Aeneid, Regulus maintains this focus on the poem as a guide to proper action in an Aristotelian context. For example, in his commentary on Aen. 1.37, “Me ne incepto desistere victam,” Regulus begins by noting that in the Poetics, Aristotle explains that epic poets tell part of their story in their own voice and part through their characters (chap. 24); this is what Virgil is doing here, as he shifts from third-person narration to Juno’s words. Juno is angry in this passage, so Regulus turns to Book 7, chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Ethics for an explanation of what happens: first she exclaims in passion, then she reasons things through with herself, then her emotional state turns to contempt, and finally she moves to destroy the Trojans. As Regulus concludes, “ubi videre unicuique licet, qua ratione, a philosophis sumpta, ad poemata efficienda convertant poetae” (94). It is important to note that a good number of Regulus’s specific comments are like the ones that we would find in more standard grammatical-rhetorical commentaries like those of Melanchthon. For example, as he continues his analysis of Juno’s speech, Regulus turns to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Rudolf Agricola’s De inventione dialectica to explain in a fairly technical way how the speech works rhetorically. The speech is an example of the “genus deliberativum,” whose goal is utility joined with what is honorable; its thesis is argued “ex materia turpitudinis,” that Juno should avenge herself on the Trojans since it is base not to finish what one has begun. When Juno argues that if Athena can avenge herself successfully on her enemies, then surely she, the queen of the gods, should also be able to do so, this argument derives “ab exemplo” and “a comparatione a minore ad maius.” This kind of speech, according to the rhetoricians, is “pathetic.” It also contains a good number of figures of speech, among them interrogatio and irony. Finally Regulus turns to Book 5 of George of Trebizond’s Rhetoric for an analysis of the syntax and rhythm of the speech (93–104). In part Regulus is flexing his scholarly muscles here, showing his reader that he knows the fashionable humanist sources on how to do a rhetorical analysis. But it is important to remember that for him, the rhetorical analysis is not an end in itself, or even merely a model for how his students should prepare their own speeches, but an explanation of how poetry works as a way to guide the reader to the kind of behavior that leads to the “summum bonum” of philosophical felicity. Like Landino, Regulus believes that poetry can teach the reader ethics and that this teaching rests on a philosophical foundation, but for him the structure is Aristotelian, not Platonic. 168

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Few people today would try to maintain the old distinction that the Middle Ages were fundamentally Aristotelian and the Renaissance fundamentally Platonic, but there is still a tendency for many of us to consider Landino’s commentary more typical of the early modern period than Regulus’s. Recent scholarship has stressed, however, both the vitality of the Aristotelian tradition in the Renaissance and its ability to co-exist with the new humanism.16 Regulus’s commentary confirms both these principles. What is more, as Charles Schmitt has shown, the later Aristotelian tradition has proved more adaptable to new scholarly trends than was once believed. The consequences of this are undoubtedly more profound in the area of the natural sciences, but Regulus’s commentary shows what happened when new discoveries about a key Aristotelian text, the Poetics, had to be integrated into older scholarly traditions in other areas. Schmitt has also reminded us that there is not one Renaissance Aristotelianism, but several; Regulus represents what he would call an eclectic Aristotelianism, one open to other thinkers like Plato (through Landino) as well as purer Aristotelian commentators.17 As one might expect, Regulus is not the only Renaissance reader to have thought of Aristotle while reading Virgil. On the back pastedown of a copy of Virgil printed in 1584, there is a note in a contemporary hand that begins “Definitio virtutis authore Aristotele: Estin ara he arete hexis . . .,” which shows very clearly that someone who owned this book was thinking about what Aeneas did in terms of Aristotelian ethics.18 What distinguished Regulus’s commentary is its length and consistency: for him, Aristotle provided a way to structure moral knowledge throughout the section of the Aeneid on which he wrote his commentary.

IV. Coyssard and the alphabetical organization of knowledge Another piece of early modern Virgilian scholarship that is little read today is a thick book entitled Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, in locos communes digesta . . ., printed in 1597. The author is not named, but a little research reveals that the material published here was originally collected by F. Petit, then expanded into the form printed in 1597 by Jean Coyssard, then expanded again by Coyssard under another title (Thesaurus Publii Virgilii Maronis . . .) that was reprinted through the end of the seventeenth century.19 In other words, this edition of Virgil’s works 16 Paul Oskar Kristeller, La tradizione aristotelica nel Rinascimento (Padua: Antenore, 1962); see also David A. Lines, Aristotle’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 17 Charles Schmitt, Aristotle in the Renaissance, Martin Classical Lectures, 27 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), esp. 89–109. 18 This note is found in a copy of Virgil’s Opera omnia (Leipzig: Iohannes Steinman, 1584), now in a private collection. 19 [Jean Coyssard], Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, in locos communes digesta, recognita et abunde locupleta (Tournon: Claude Michel, 1597). References to this book will be placed in the text. Publication of the various versions of this text can be followed in the Catalogue général des livres

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“in locos communes digesta” clearly met the needs of early modern readers well enough to merit revision and republication for more than a hundred years. Initially it is difficult to see why. As we might expect from the title, Coyssard has gone through Virgil’s poetry and pulled out memorable lines, organizing them under a variety of headings that are arranged in alphabetical order. The headings serve as the commonplaces mentioned in the title, making this an example of a popular genre in the Renaissance, the commonplace book. As Ann Moss explains, the commonplace book has its roots in earlier times but is really a phenomenon of the Renaissance, which is the period during which it was perfected and popularized.20 Anyone who has looked at a large number of early books has seen evidence of the reading practices on which the commonplace book is based. As an example, let us turn to a copy (now in a private collection) of an edition of the works of Virgil that was published in Frankfurt in 1616, in which we find the marginal annotations of one Rector Hesse, a German schoolmaster.21 Hesse marked parallel passages from a variety of ancient authors, some common like Seneca and Cicero, but others less so, like Diodorus Siculus, Tibullus, Catullus, and Lucretius. He also provided variant readings and cross-references to other Virgilian commentators, from Servius to Scaliger to Farnaby. But what interests us is his habit of underlining passages he wanted to be able to find again. In many cases his comments have a decidedly moral cast. Two underlined passages in Book 2, which recounts the fall of Troy, provide advice on what to do in hopeless situations: “una salus victis nullam sperare salutem” (Aen. 2.354; 159), and “quondam etiam victis redit in praecordia virtus” (Aen. 2.367; 160). Another passage reminds the reader of what the reward for virtue should be: “persolvant grates dignas et praemia reddant/ debita” (Aen. 2.537–38; 168). And there is the lesson to be drawn from seeing the Great Sinners in the underworld – “discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere divos” (Aen. 6.620; 383) – signalled in the margin with an “NB” (“nota bene”). Other passages, however, are obviously underlined because they are phrased in a memorable way. Aen. 2.255, “tacitae per amica silentia lunae” (153), carries the marginal reminder “Nox quieta,” and the marginal note “Simile de subito pavore” appears next to the comparison in Aen. 2.379–82 (161). The passages underlined in Hesse’s Virgil, in other words, illustrate moral topics (what to do in hopeless situations) or stylistic flourishes (a memorable simile), often with marginal annotations that serve as ‘indexing notes’ to allow the reader to find them again and remember what they say. imprimés de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1924–), s.v. “Petit, F.” and “Coyssard, J.” I am grateful to Lodi Nauta for suggesting that I extend the original essay to include commonplace books. 20 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 21 Virgil, Opera omnia, ed. Joannes a Meyen (Frankfurt: N. Hoffmann and J. Fischer, 1616). I have not been able to identify Rector Hesse, whose comments appear in the margins of this copy of the text, as referenced in this paragraph.

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Coyssard’s commonplace book simply takes raw material like that found in Rector Hesse’s marginalia and reorganizes it, so that indexing notes like “Nox quieta” become the section headings and lines like Aen. 2.255, “tacitae per amica silentia lunae,” join similar passages on the same theme listed out below the heading. Some of these headings, like “Nox quieta,” are morally neutral, but a good many others are not. Under “Amicitia et Amor” in Coyssard’s commonplace book, for example, we find listed Aen. 4.412, “Improbe amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis?” (23). Under “Avaritia” we find a collection of lines like Aen. 3.46–47, “Quid non mortalia pectora cogis/Auri sacra fames?” (53), designed to persuade the reader to fight against greed. Under “Constantia” we see a list of passages like Aen. 5.446, “Illa manent immota locis, neque ab ordine cedunt” (128), which explore the merits of remaining unmoved in the midst of various adversities. Like Landino and Regulus, in other words, Coyssard was reading the Aeneid with an eye on its moral content. And like the works of Landino and Regulus, Coyssard’s commonplace book can also be seen as a kind of commentary, with the textual passages serving as lemmata of sorts and the section headings as an elliptical interpretation of them. Coyssard, however, organized what he understood to be the moral content of Virgil’s poetry differently from the first two commentators we have looked at. Landino and Regulus saw the Aeneid through the lens of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle who placed literature within a general system of knowledge, so that Aeneas’s actions in Carthage, for example, assume meaning in relation to the broader ethical development of the hero as understood by Plato and his Neoplatonic followers. For Coyssard, Aeneas’s actions in Carthage are read against a grid of individual values like avarice, constancy, and so forth. These values are the ones brought to the text by a Renaissance reader. And they are not organized in accordance with a comprehensive ancient philosophical system per se, but a simple alphabetical system that Renaissance readers found increasingly necessary to manage the tidal wave of knowledge unleashed by the printing press. The earliest printed editions of Virgil contained text and commentary alone, but by the end of the sixteenth century, printed editions contained a variety of indices designed to help readers find their way through the material. Coyssard’s commonplace book is organized like these indices, alphabetically, in accordance with one of the key principles for the management of knowledge in the early modern period.22

22 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 88–107; and Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129–31. This is not to say that indices and similar techniques for organizing knowledge never appeared before the Renaissance; they had earlier roots, but they were not commonly used before the early modern period.

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V. Conclusion I am not prepared to argue on the basis of these three examples, important as I think they are, that everyone who read a Renaissance commentary to a classical text got the sort of guidance toward moral maturity that has been discussed here. The commentaries of Landino and Regulus, and the Virgilian commonplace book as well, seem to me rather to be the exceptions that prove the rule: most commentaries were more likely to numb the mind with a mass of philological detail than to give the reader “a coherent contribution to a fully articulated moral philosophy,” as Grafton and Jardine put it. As is always the case, however, the exceptions are important, too. I would therefore like to conclude by mentioning a couple of other ways in which some early modern readers attempted to organize the ethical content of Virgil’s poetry. First, I should note that even outside the commonplace book context, the handwritten commentaries left in early printed editions of the classics sometimes show signs of the same systematic concern with the moral content of Greek and Latin poetry. Interesting in this regard is the set of notes entered into a copy of the 1514 Aldine Virgil now in the Marciana Library in Venice. The moralizing notes entered in the hand of an unknown teacher at the beginning of the seventeenth century often highlight the contrast between good and bad choices with unusual clarity: at Aen. 8.668–69, the “nota tu peccator” is followed immediately by “nota tu pie” at Aen. 8.670. Bound into the back of the book are four pages containing two lists, each keyed to the text of this edition. The first, headed “loca lectorem pium commoventia,” identifies the passages most likely to arouse in the reader the virtues associated with pietas, such as Aeneas’s famous exhortation to his weary troops in Aen. 1.198ff., the epic simile containing the description of the chaste widow in Aen. 6.601–25, etc. The second list sets out the kinds of relationships within which people can help one another, like Orpheus’s assistance to Eurydice in Georgics 4. We can only speculate from these notes how the fuller discussion in class might have gone, but when the notes about the Great Sinners at Aen. 6.601–25 categorize the sinners being punished (“golosi,” “avari,” “luxoriosi,” etc.), we can guess that a discussion of individual vices with Virgilian examples might have taken place.23 In any event, there is considerably more here than a random moral observation that was in danger of getting lost amid philological observations. Another interesting set of data emerges in a sort of scholarly contaminatio, in which one of the processes we have been describing, where Aristotle’s Ethics is used to illuminate Virgil’s poetry, is reversed. The Ethics, of course, received commentaries just like the Aeneid, with Aristotelian commentators facing the same demands for ways to explain and clarify the meaning of their text as Virgilian ones did. Among the better known of the Renaissance commentators on Aristotle 23 This book is discussed at greater length in Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 58–61, with the pages containing the lists of moralizing passages found at 222–24.

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is Jacques d’Étaples Le Fèvre, a French humanist connected to the circle of Florentine scholars that included Ficino, Poliziano, and Landino. His commentary to the Ethics shows just how closely a humanist philosopher associated moral philosophy and poetry, for he annotates Aristotle by citing Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, and the other great poets of antiquity.24 On “magnificentia,” for example, Le Fèvre considers what kinds of expenditures are desirable in civil and religious affairs. In civil affairs, banquets and games, palaces and fortifications should all show “magnificentia”; an example of this is found in Dido’s banquet, as presented by Virgil in Aen. 1.730ff. (f. e6v). Similarly Virgil’s description of the Harpies (Aen. 3.214–18) serves to reinforce Aristotle’s condemnation of intemperance (f. d7r). More should be done with early modern commentaries to philosophical texts, as a way of using the commentary tradition to link the association of poetry and moral philosophy during this period. In the end, then, some Renaissance commentaries did develop a consistent moral reading of classical literature. In doing so, they tell us something about how literary knowledge was managed in this period, either within a philosophical system based in antiquity or within a commonplace book arranged alphabetically that is more properly a creation of early modern culture. That, I think, more than justifies the attention we have given to texts like Regulus’s commentary and Coyssard’s commonplace book, even if they are not well known today.

24 Le Fèvre’s commentary may be found in Aristotle, Ethica ad Nicomachum (Paris: Higman and Hopyl, 1497); references will be placed in the text. See also Eugene F. Rice, Jr. “Humanist Aristotelianism in France: Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and His Circle,” in Humanism in France at the End of the Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), 132–49.

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12 VIRGIL IN THE RENAISSANCE CLASSROOM From Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae

I To see how the classics were treated in the Renaissance classroom, I would like to begin with the Osservationi d’Oratio Toscanella della famiglia di Maestro Luca Fiorentino, sopra l’opere di Virgilio, per discoprire, e insegnare à porre in prattica gli artifici importantissimi dell’arte poetica con gli essempi di Virgilio stesso (Observations of Orazio Toscanella, of the family of Master Luca the Florentine, on the works of Virgil, to discover and teach the placing in practice of the most important artifices of the art of poetry with examples from Virgil himself). The title suggests that this book was designed as a teaching aid. Basic background research confirms this suggestion, for the author devoted his life to teaching the classics in the Veneto. He was probably born around 1520, and when he was in his mid-thirties he was teaching in Castelbaldo, a small village not far from Padua, moving from there to nearby Lendinara, then to Venice around 1566. His primary job was teaching, but he supplemented his income by working as a poligrafo, someone who wrote, translated, and edited for the Venetian press. As we might expect, he specialized in pedagogical works, publishing an average of two books a year for the last twenty years of his life. The principal subject was rhetoric (five of these books were devoted to Cicero, and he also translated Quintilian and Rudolf Agricola), but he published two elementary grammar books, two books on other parts of the school curriculum, a dictionary, and a treatise on metrics as well. Toscanella achieved a modest amount of recognition in his lifetime, but financial success eluded him. He died in 1579.1 1 Toscanella has begun to attract a fair amount of scholarly attention. Following BONGI (Salvatore), Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Rome, Presso i principali librai, 1890–1897, rpt. Rome, Bibliopola Vivarelli e Gulla, 1963, and Mansfield, Conn., Martino, 2000, 2.220–25, modern treatments of Toscanella’s life and works include QUONDAM (Amedeo), “Dal ‘formulario’ al ‘formulario’: cento anni di libri di lettere,” in Le ‘carte messaggere’: retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare, ed. A. Quondam, Rome, Bulzoni, 1981, 71ff.; ARTESE (Luciano), “Orazio Toscanella. Un maestro

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-15

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Why Toscanella wrote the books he did becomes clear once we look at the curriculum of the Venetian schools during the time when Toscanella lived and worked there. After the student had learned to read and mastered basic Latin grammar, he turned to works on rhetoric, poetry, and history, written primarily, but not exclusively, by authors from antiquity.2 When we look at the educational treatises of the day, we are struck initially by how extensive the recommended reading lists are. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II), for example, recommends Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Claudian, Apollonius of Rhodes, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca among the poets; Cicero, Ambrose, Augustine, Lactantius, Gregory, and several of his contemporaries among the orators; and Livy, Sallust, Justin, Quintus Curtius, Arrian, Valerius Maximus, selected books of the Old Testament, and the Acts of the Apostles for history.3 This looks like a reading list for a Ph.D. exam in the classics today, but as a number of scholars have pointed out, the surviving evidence suggests that there was a substantial gap between theory and practice in humanist education.4 This becomes clear when we look at precisely what was done in Venetian classrooms in the last half of the sixteenth century. In 1567 the Venetian Senate ordered the humanists who were teaching in the publicly supported sestiere schools to teach Cicero in the morning, then Virgil, Terence, or Horace in the afternoon. In 1578 the Senate issued another set of instructions, this time mandating Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares in the morning and Terence, or a similar del XVI secolo,” in Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia dell’Università di Firenze, 5 (1983), 61–95; idem, “Orazio Toscanella. Corrispondenza con il Granduca di Toscana e documenti inediti,” in Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere, ‘La Colombaria’, 48 (1983), 27–68; BOLZONI (Lina), “Le ‘parole depinte’ di Orazio Toscanella,” in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 1 (1983), 155–86; DI FILIPPO BAREGGI (Claudia), Il mestiere di scrivere. Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento, Rome, Bulzoni, 1988, passim; GRENDLER (Paul F.), Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, 223–29; and BOLZONI (Lina), The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen, Toronto, Buffalo, and London, University of Toronto Press, 2001, esp. 52–82. My thanks to Manfred Kraus for bibliographical assistance here. 2 GRENDLER (P. F.), op. cit., 111–271. 3 AENEAS SYLVIUS PICCOLOMINI, “De liberorum educatione,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. Craig Kallendorf, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2002, 220–25. A similar list, with slightly different content, may be found in BAPTISTA GUARINUS, “De ordine docendi et studendi,” in KALLENDORF (C.) ed., op. cit., 284–93. 4 WAQUET (Françoise), Latin or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, trans. John Howe, London and New York, Verso, 2001, notes that in practice instruction was often limited to a handful of authors and that students regularly received extracts rather than complete works, so that “[w]hile a small elite may have been successful, even brilliantly so, the mass seems to have dragged itself painfully along, eventually arriving after huge effort at a depressingly mediocre level” (132). On the role of the classics in Renaissance education, see also CLARKE (M. L.), Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959; GRENDLER (P. F.), op. cit.; and BLACK (Robert), Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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text, in the afternoon. In theory these instructions applied only to the teachers in the prestigious, publicly supported humanist schools. We might suspect that the many private masters would take their cue from these teachers, and Paul Grendler has found an important piece of evidence that in fact, they did. Concern that there might be some Protestants teaching in Venice provoked the government to order all the masters teaching there to profess their faith. Precisely 258 of them did, indicating at the same time which authors they were teaching. Of the 258, 162 were teaching Cicero, 94 Virgil, 46 Terence, and 36 Horace; a handful of other authors appear on the list, but none of them ever reaches 5% of the total.5 In other words, Toscanella’s Osservationi was born in the Venetian classroom and reflects how the second-most-popular school text of the day was taught by one of the more important educators of Renaissance Italy. My goal in this essay is, first, to isolate and describe the pedagogical practice reflected in the Osservationi and several other related early printed books, and then to consider whether that practice seems to confirm or challenge some of the general conclusions that have been reached recently about how the classics were actually taught in the Renaissance classroom.

II Toscanella’s Osservationi was initially published in 1566, but it was reprinted the following year by an important Venetian printer, Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari.6 The rapid reprinting suggests that the book had proved useful, and that Giolito believed the market would justify a second printing of several hundred more copies. For a modern reader, it is difficult, at least initially, to see why. The book begins with a dedication to one Lorenzo Galupo, a noted Venetian physician. In this dedication, before launching into the fulsome flattery that the genre requires, Toscanella explains why he has written the book. Drawing on a topos that was common in early modern literary theory, Toscanella observes that poetry is divinely inspired and contains within it the wisdom of the world.7 Homer and Virgil, he writes, “insegnano il modo di edificar le città, et di conservarle, et di reggerle. Insegnano i 5 GRENDLER (P. F.), op. cit., 204–6. WAQUET (F.), op. cit., 33–34 stresses the high degree of curricular uniformity in humanistic schools throughout Europe; Venetian practice, in fact, was indistinguishable from what was going on in France and Germany. 6 The reprint, according to EDIT 16, Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del XVI secolo (http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/web_iccu/ihome.htm, consulted 4 March 2021), is rarer than the editio princeps (nine copies of the former, CNCE 26510, can be found in the Italian libraries that have so far reported their holdings, versus nineteen copies of the latter, CNCE 26553), but it appears that the only difference between the two editions is in the number of pages of front matter. References are to my copy of the 1567 edition and will be placed in the text. 7 BUCK (August), Italienische Dichtungslehre vom Mittelalter bis zum Ausgang der Renaissance, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1952, 72; WITT (Ronald), “Coluccio Salutati and the Conception of the Poeta Theologus in the Fourteenth Century,” in Renaissance Quarterly, 30 (1977), 539–42; and KALLENDORF (Craig), “From Virgil to Vida: The Poeta Theologus in Italian Renaissance Commentary,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), 41–62.

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costumi convenienti à ciascuna età; perche ottimamente il decoro di ciascuna persona osservano. Cantano delle leggi, delle fabriche, de gli instrumenti da guerra, delle parti del mondo, delle stelle; et di tutte l’altre cose, et scienze” (“teach how to build, preserve, and order cities. They teach the customs appropriate to each age of life, because they are the best observers of what is seemly for each person. They write of the laws, tools, and instruments of war, and of the parts of the world, of the stars, and of all other matters and disciplines”; f. *iiiv). Beginning, then, with the premise that everything one might want to know can be found in Virgil, Toscanella wrote his Osservationi to assist in finding it. The book is organized alphabetically, under headings like “ammonitio” (“rebuke”) and “amore” (“love”), “natione” (“nation”) and “natura delle cose” (“nature of things”), “amplificatione” (“amplification”) and “comparatione” (“comparison”). Let me use the first two of these headings to show what Toscanella is doing. “Ammonitione” (“rebuke” or “warning”) is limited to one example: how to rebuke a young man who has done something good but also made a mistake. Toscanella instructs his reader first to praise the young man for the good he has done, because praising virtue makes it grow and because praise makes one more disposed to accept correction. Doing it the other way around (that is, beginning with the rebuke) hardens the heart and alienates it from the good, or at least makes the heart grow cold, he explains. Then comes the example, from Aeneid 9, where Apollo warns Ascanius not to put himself at such great risk in battle. First comes the praise: Macte nova virtute puer, sic itur ad astra, dis genite et geniture deos. iure omnia bella gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident, nec te Troia capit. (Aen. 9.641–44) (Grow in your new courage, child; o son of gods and ancestor of gods, this is the way to scale the stars. All fated, future wars shall end in peace beneath Assaracus’ house; for the walls of Troy cannot contain you.) Then comes the rebuke: “cetera parce, puer, bello” (“but after this, my boy, enough of war”; Aen. 9.656; 16–17).8 8 Praise and blame, the key elements of epideictic rhetoric, are especially important in epic, since epic and epideictic were thoroughly intertwined from antiquity through the Renaissance. On the Renaissance in general, see HARDISON (O. B.), Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice, Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 1962, rpt. Westport, Conn., Greenwood, 1973; and VICKERS (Brian), “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” New Literary History, 14 (1982–3), 497–537; on Virgil in particular, see KALLENDORF (Craig), In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance,

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The second example, “amore” (“love”), shows how the longer entries work. Toscanella divides the topic into three subdivisions: how to get a person to love someone new, how to express the force of love, and how to show passionate love. For an example of passionate love, we might have expected Dido, but this seems to have struck Toscanella as too risky: instead we find Vulcan, sweet-talking Venus as he leaves her bed in the middle of the night to start working on Aeneas’s armor in Book 8. What examples did Virgil use to express the force of love, the force that makes us spurn life itself? Again we might expect Dido, but again we do not get what we expect. Instead Toscanella gives us Aeneas, turning back to the burning city of Troy in pursuit of his lost wife Creusa, then Nisus, going to a certain death even though his lover Euryalus has already been killed – apparently the homoerotic undertones to this scene were considered less risky than dealing with Dido in a roomful of adolescents9 – and finally Coroebus, the Trojan in Book 2 who hurled himself into his enemies out of his love for Cassandra. Finally let us look briefly at the first subdivision, how to get a person to love someone or something new. Toscanella subdivides the first subdivision again, showing how Virgil made this happen through appeals to natural instinct, oracles, genealogy, reputation, or astrology (17–19). At first glance the procedure seems scholastic, and given that Toscanella lived and worked in Venice, whose humanism maintained a stronger Aristotelian flavor than some of the other Italian varieties, this may well be right. But Ciceronian rhetoric, which Toscanella also taught and wrote about, leads in the same direction.10 But who would buy a book like the Osservationi? Why would anyone break a great epic poem into shards of banal aphorisms and stylistic examples? It did sell – the second printing came out only a year after the first – but why? The answer leads us toward the differences between the reading practices of the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries11 – one area in which early modern practices are more

Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 1989. References to Virgil’s poetry are to P. VERGILI MARONIS, Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969; translations are from The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, New York, Bantam Books, 1971. 9 It is worth noting that the homoerotic overtones in this scene were potentially threatening, given the intimate relationship between master and pupil. The authorities in the Veneto, for example, were concerned that homosexual advances were often made to young boys in school settings, so that in 1477 a law directed that all instruction had to take place in groups gathered in public halls, not individually in private rooms (see RUGGIERO (Guido), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985, 138). The intimacy between master and pupil was especially vulnerable to accusations of sodomy when education took place as private tutoring in a nobleman’s household; see STEWART (Alan), Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997. 10 On Toscanella’s teaching of Cicero, see GRENDLER (P. F.), op. cit., 223–29. 11 It has become increasingly clear in recent years that reading indeed has a history. A good general orientation may be found in CAVALLO (Guglielmo) and CHARTIER (Roger) eds., A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. On the Renaissance in particular, see GRAFTON (Anthony), “The Humanist as Reader,” in CAVALLO (G.) and CHARTIER (R.) eds., op. cit., 179–212; GRAFTON (Anthony), Commerce with the Classics: Ancient

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early than modern – and to a better understanding in turn of what Renaissance schoolmasters and their students were reading for. An edition of the works of Virgil that was published in Frankfurt in 1616, exactly fifty years after the first edition of Toscanella’s Osservationi, records evidence of precisely the same reading practices, in the marginal annotations of one Rector Hesse, a German schoolmaster.12 Herr Hesse marked parallel passages from a variety of ancient authors, some common like Seneca and Cicero, but others less so, like Diodorus Siculus, Tibullus, Catullus, and Lucretius. He also provided variant readings and cross-references to other Virgilian commentators, from Servius to Scaliger to Farnaby. But what interests us is his habit of underlining passages he wanted to be able to find again. In some cases his comments have a decidedly moral cast. Two underlined passages in Book 2, which recounts the fall of Troy, provide advice on what to do in hopeless situations: “una salus victis nullam sperare salutem” (“the lost have only/this one deliverance: to hope for none”; Aen. 2.354), and “quondam etiam victis redit in praecordia virtus” (“at times/new courage comes to beaten hearts”; Aen. 2.367). Another passage reminds the reader of what the reward for virtue should be: “persolvant grates dignas et praemia reddant/debita” (“may you find your fitting thanks/and proper payment from the gods”; Aen. 2.537–38). And there is the lesson to be drawn from seeing the Great Sinners in the underworld – “discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere divos” (“be warned, learn justice, do not scorn the gods”; Aen. 6.620) – signalled in the margin with an “NB” (“nota bene,” “note well”). Other passages, however, are obviously underlined because they are phrased in a memorable way. Aen. 2.255, “tacitae per amica silentia lunae” (“beneath/the friendly silence of the tranquil moon”), carries the marginal reminder “Nox quieta” (“a peaceful night”), and the marginal note “Simile de subito pavore” (“simile concerning sudden fear”) appears next to the comparison in Aen. 2.379–82. The passages underlined in Hesse’s Virgil, in other words, illustrate moral topics (what to do in hopeless situations) or stylistic flourishes (a memorable simile), often with marginal annotations that serve as ‘indexing notes’ to allow the reader to find them again and remember what they illustrate.13

Books and Renaissance Readers, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1997; and the essays collected in BARON (Sabrina Alcorn), The Reader Revealed, Washington, D.C., The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001. 12 Opera omnia, ed. Joannes a Meyen, Frankfurt, N. Hoffmann and J. Fischer, 1616. This edition is surprisingly rare, with the copies at the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France being the only ones in institutional hands. I have not been able to identify Rector Hesse, whose comments appear in the margins of my copy of the text, as referenced in this paragraph. 13 On marginalia in general, see JACKSON (H. J.), Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001; and Libri a stampa postillati, ed. Edoardo Barbieri and Giuseppe Frasso, Milan, Edizioni C.U.S.L., 2003. For an exemplary study of how marginalia left by a Renaissance reader can provide insight into the life and works of that reader, see SCREECH (M. A.), Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript, Notes and Pen-Marks, Geneva, Droz, 1998.

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Sometimes these marginal annotations themselves were published. As an example, let us turn to another early edition of the works of Virgil, published in 1534 by the Lyonnaise printer Sebastian Gryphius.14 Gryphius’s edition contains the marginal scholia of Philip Melanchthon, the praeceptor Germaniae whose work as ‘Germany’s teacher’ extended to Rome’s greatest epic poet.15 At the beginning of Book 4, Melanchthon notes that “[i]n hoc libro plus est elegantiae, quam eruditionis” (“there is more elegance than learning in this book”), alluding to the two main areas in which annotation was required. Melanchthon therefore draws attention to passages that are worth noting for style: at lines 151ff., he writes “[d]escriptio venationis” (197), and at lines 522ff., he writes “[d]escriptio temporis” and “[n]ox silens” (210), indicating that the descriptions of hunting and of the time and stillness of night, respectively, were worth remembering. He is more interested in content, however. Like Toscanella, whose rhetorical works drew from the teaching of Melanchthon, Agricola, and Sturm,16 Melanchthon observes that “[v]im enim amoris in persona Didonis graphice depingit, et ratio variorum affectuum in hoc libro docetur” (“for he graphically depicts the force of love in the person of Dido, and the explanation for various emotions is taught in this book”; 192). And again like Toscanella’s, some of Melanchthon’s comments are simple moralizing: next to Aen. 4.86–89, which describes how the work on the defences of Carthage is suspended when Dido falls in love with Aeneas, Melanchthon writes, “[n]egligentes reddit amor” (“love renders people negligent”; 14 The references in the following paragraph, which will appear in the text, are to my copy of this edition, which is unattested in secondary literature and apparently unique, predating by a decade the first of a series of reprintings by Gryphius extending through 1560; cf. MAMBELLI (Giuliano), Gli annali delle edizioni vergiliane, Florence, Olschki, 1954, 69 (nr. 194). 15 Orientation to the voluminous scholarship on Melanchthon may be found in SCHEIBLE (Heinz), “Philippus Melanchthon,” in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Toronto, Buffalo, and London, University of Toronto Press, 2003, rpt. of 1985–1987 edn., 2.424–29, updated by MEERHOFF (Kees), “Philippe Melanchthon,” in Centuriae latinae: cent une figures humanistes de la Renaissance aux Lumières offertes à Jacques Chomarat, ed. Colette Nativel, Geneva, Droz, 1997, 537–49. The copy of VIRGIL, Opera, Paris, Robert Estienne, 1532 in the Princeton University Library (shelf mark: VRG 2945 1532q) was once thought to contain Melanchthon’s annotations on the first three books of the Aeneid. The book was sold in 1835 as part of the collection of Dr. G. F. B. Kloss of Frankfurt (284, lot nr. 3977), with the Melanchthon connection apparently put forth by Samuel Leigh Sotheby himself in the auction catalogue and defended in his Unpublished Documents, Marginal Notes and Memoranda in the Autograph of Philip Melanchthon and of Martin Luther, London, J. Davy, 1840 (copies of both items in the New York Public Library). Dr. Kloss, however, objected to this attribution in a brief article in Serapeum, 24 (1841), 369–77; Kloss appears to have been correct, since several other items from the 1835 sale have since been reexamined and found to contain annotations in several different hands. 16 On the reception of Melanchthon’s work in the Italian Renaissance, see RHEIN (S.), “Appunti sul rapporto fra Filippo Melanchthon e l’Umanesimo italiano,” in Memores tui: studi di letteratura classica ed umanistica in onore di Marcello Vitaletti, ed. Sesto Prete, Sassoferrato, Istituto Internazionale di Studi Piceni, 1990, 155–63; on Toscanella’s use of Melanchthon and other northern humanists in his rhetorical work, see ARTESE (L.), “Orazio Toscanella. Un maestro . . .,” 80–95.

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195). But Melanchthon also taught rhetoric, and he was particularly interested in how Virgil’s argumentation worked. The opening lines of Anna’s speech to Dido at the beginning of Book 4 show how his notes draw attention to the rhetorical aspects of what Virgil is saying: Anna refert: ‘o luce magis dilecta sorori, solane perpetua maerens carpere iuventa? nec dulcis natos Veneris nec praemia noris? id cinerem aut manis credis curare sepultos? esto: aegram nulli quondam flexere mariti, non Libyae, non ante Tyro; despectus Iarbas ductoresque alii, quos Africa terra triumphis dives alit: placitone etiam pugnabis amori? nec venit in mentem quorum consederis arvis?’ (Aen. 4.31–39) (And Anna answers: ‘Sister, you more dear to me than light itself, are you to lose all of your youth in dreary loneliness, and never know sweet children or the soft rewards of Venus? Do you think that ashes or buried Shades will care about such matters? Until Aeneas came, there was no suitor who moved your sad heart – not in Libya nor, before, in Tyre: you always scorned Iarbas and all the other chiefs that Africa, a region rich in triumphs, had to offer. how can you struggle now against a love that is so acceptable? Have you forgotten the land you settled, those who hem you in?’) Next to line 31, Melanchthon writes “[p]eroratio,” indicating that this is the introduction to the speech. The marginal note next to the following line is “[o]biurgatio vice propositionis,” indicating that this is a complaint in place of a proposition, which follows up on Melanchthon’s opening observation that Book 4 is about emotions. When Anna asks Dido whether she thinks that the shades care about matters like this (l. 34), Melanchthon writes that this argument rests in one of the rhetorical commonplaces, the “[c]onfutatio ab inutile” (“refutation from the lack of utility”). The last argument, that Dido should think of whose land she is in (l. 39), is derived from another rhetorical commonplace, “[a] necessario” (“from what is necessary”; 193). Where this went in the classroom becomes clear when we examine a supplement that sometimes appeared along with the often-reprinted Delphin commentary of Carolus Ruaeus. This Exercitationes rhetoricae in praecipuas ejus orationes

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(Rhetorical exercises on its principal speeches),17 as the title suggests, offers rhetorical analyses of the main speeches from the Aeneid. The first of the speeches in Book 4 to be considered in the Exercitationes rhetoricae, for example, is the one in which Dido tells Anna of her new passion for Aeneas (ll. 9–29). The analysis begins with the identification of which passion is involved (love), which rhetorical commonplaces the arguments are derived from (from effects and from contraries), and which parts the speech can be divided into (introduction, narration, and conclusion). Then comes the detailed analysis. In lines 9–11, the introduction, Dido praises Aeneas in order to make her sister positively disposed toward him. In lines 12–14 Dido proves that Aeneas is of divine origin by arguing from effects: Viri fortes a Diis habent originem; Sed Aeneas in tot bellis, ac periculis se fortiter semper gessit; Ergo revera a Diis habet originem. (Brave men have their origin from the gods. But Aeneas always comported himself bravely in so many wars and dangers. Therefore in truth he has his origin from the gods.) The beginning of verse 13, “degeneres animos timor arguit” (“[f]or in the face of fear/the mean must fall”), is the argument from contraries, and the end of verse 13 and the beginning of verse 14, “heu, quibus ille/iactatus fatis!” (“What fates have driven him”), is an example of assumptio, the introduction of an extraneous point necessary for understanding an issue. The narration, in which Dido explains that only Aeneas has made her rethink her determination not to remarry, is in verses 15–23, and the conclusion, in which she tries to strengthen this determination, is in verses 24–29 (3.962–63). Here we have a textbook designed to guide classroom practice. Each speech was broken down into its constituent parts, with an emphasis on rhetorical structure and argumentation, and it is worth noting that the Exercitationes rhetoricae is accompanied by indices of descriptions, similes, and memorable proverbs, which opens up the Aeneid to the stylistic and content analysis we have been analyzing. So, to recapitulate: in moving through a series of early printed editions, we have found enough evidence to recover with considerable precision how students 17 The commentary of Ruaeus (Charles de la Rue), written as part of a series prepared for the crown prince of France, was first published in 1675 and was still being reprinted in the middle of the nineteenth century (see MAMBELLI (G.), op. cit., passim). The publishing history of the Exercitationes rhetoricae, like many other parts of the Virgilian tradition, still needs to be worked out. Two different editions appeared in 1760, one published in Trnava, Slovakia at the Jesuit academy and the other in Munich and Ingolstadt by J. F. X. Crätz; the citations that follow are to my copy of the former edition and will appear in the text. The Exercitationes rhetoricae was popular in Jesuit schools and reflects an educational practice that retained many of its key features from the formulation of the Ratio studiorum in 1599 until the Jesuits ran into trouble with the civil authorities in several countries shortly after the 1760 editions were published; see SCAGLIONE (Aldo), The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 1986.

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and teachers read Virgil in the classroom. Teachers like Hesse would buy an early printed edition of a poet like Virgil and read it with an eye on the moral wisdom it contains, especially when it was expressed well, and on the right way to say something, particularly as exemplified in figures of speech like similes. While they read, they underlined. Often they also signalled the phrases that had caught their attention in the margin with a word or two (‘indexing notes’) that could remind them why the phrase was important. In the next step, the marginal signals themselves could be printed, as Melanchthon did, as a guide to other readers who would not in turn have to do all the thinking themselves. Sometimes the marginal cues led to a fullblown analysis of key parts of the text, as in the Exercitationes rhetoricae. At other times the whole business could be reformatted, as Toscanella did, with the marginal notes becoming the headings and with Virgil’s text broken up and rearranged under those headings, some focused on content and some on style.

III Let me now try to gloss what I have said so far and begin to explore its consequences for those of us concerned with the teaching of the classics in the Renaissance. I would like to begin by considering what the volumes cited so far can tell us about early printed books as physical objects and about the way books were read in the Renaissance classroom. First, with all due respect to Elizabeth Eisenstein,18 the boundary between handwritten manuscripts and early printed books is more permeable than is often claimed. A good many copies of early printed editions of Virgil, as is the case with other editions of other authors, contain handwritten marginalia, so that it is simply not right to claim, as the authors of an otherwise exemplary study of the medieval book do, that “[w]ith the growth of print as the normal medium of the page, the main medieval vehicle for relating new thought to inherited tradition disappears – namely, the gloss and the practice of glossing . . . . the printed book is not itself an object in which one writes long glosses.”19 On the contrary: Renaissance schoolmasters regularly glossed their printed texts by hand,

18 EISENSTEIN (Elizabeth L.), The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, esp. 3–42, argued that the invention of the printing press introduced a decisive break between manuscript and print culture, but twenty years earlier Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin had warned that “[t]he earliest incunabula looked exactly like manuscripts. The first printers, far from being innovators, took extreme care to produce exact imitations” (The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London, Verso, 1990, 77, orig. pub. in French as L’Apparition du livre, Paris, Éditions Albin Michel, 1958). Since then Margaret J. M. Ezell, among others, has also argued that for several groups, manuscripts remained the preferred way to disseminate their work long after the invention of printing (The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family, Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 19 ROUSE (Richard and Mary), Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, 465.

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and their students copied down what they said into the margins of their printed texts. To stay with Virgil in the Veneto, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana still preserves an Aldine edition that had been owned by a teacher, containing three dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century but no name, that is filled with his marginal notes. And there is no shortage of Renaissance books in the libraries of the Veneto that contain notes by student owners. A copy of the first Venetian edition of Virgil, for example, contains an extensive set of lecture notes copied into the margins along with an ownership note in somewhat tentative Latin: “Hic liber est mei Bartolamei Ghellini de Nolilisbus Vicentinae, manet sive habitat Vicentia descipulus Lodovici Roneoni magister publicus” (“This book belongs to me, Bartolameus Ghellinus de Nolilisbus of Vicenza, [who] remains or dwells in Vicenza as a student of Lodovicus Roneonus, the public teacher”), and a copy of a 1476 edition contains marginal and interlinear notes interspersed with “non audivi” (“I did not hear [this lesson]”), indicating that a section of commentary is missing because the student was absent from class. And the Biblioteca Comunale, Treviso owns a 1578 Virgil whose student owner, again, provided precise details about his study of the Georgics: “Lo incominciaremo alli 19 di Aprile 1610 dichiarato da D. Camillo Setti à me Novello Rosen in Ferrara” (“We shall begin on 19 April 1610, [with the text] explained by Master Camillo Setti to me, Novello Rosen[o], in Ferrara”).20 Equally permeable, I would like to argue, is the boundary between what it has become fashionable to call ‘text’ and ‘paratext.’ In terms of the process discussed above, an early reader might write “avarice” by hand into the empty margin of the early printed edition of Virgil he just bought. If the reader is a scholar-printer like Aldus Manutius, Jr. or Henri Estienne, he might then set the text – properly emended, of course – in print along with “avarice” and the other marginal notes he had jotted down to guide the understanding of the next teacher or student in this chain of consumers.21 Here “avarice” is clearly part of the paratext, the dedications, introductions, and indices that accompany the text and guide our interpretation of it.22 But as soon as it gets moved from the margins of the page to the center, as it does when someone like Toscanella makes it a heading in a book like the Osservationi, then the paratext has become the text. And not just part of the text, but the guiding force that structures how what was originally the text – Virgil’s Aeneid – is broken apart and reconstructed. And by this point, Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again: we have what amounts to a new work of literature, in Virgil’s words but structured within the mental apparatus of a later reader. Ah, the power of an ‘indexing note’!

20 KALLENDORF (Craig), Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999, 48–49. 21 For editions with the marginal notes of these scholars, see MAMBELLI (G.), op. cit., passim. 22 GENETTE (Gérard), “Introduction to the Paratext,” in New Literary History, 22 (1991), 261, and Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1982, 93.

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The third point to arise from all this is that early modern teachers and students simply did not read in the same way as we do – or, to avoid the risky overgeneralization, I should say that most of them, most of the time, did not read books like the Aeneid in the same way as most of us do.23 Ann Moss has described beautifully and at length what is going on here. Early readers approached classical texts like the Aeneid in search of moral wisdom, especially as it was expressed in memorable phrases and aphorisms, and of examples of stylistic felicity, both well-turned phrases and figures of speech. When they found them, they marked them for later retrieval, by underlining them, by putting an “NB” or pointing hand in the margin, or by jotting down a key word or two to remind them of why the passage was important.24 As Guarino da Verona explains, the marked passages were then collected, generally in two sets of notebooks, one focused on content (“historice”), the other on style (“methodice”).25 The notebooks were generally organized under headings, like “avarice” or “simile,” to facilitate easy retrieval. And this was the point: the reader could use the notebooks in his own writing, as a source for pithy sayings and well-turned phrases. It is rare for all the steps in the process – a marked text, the commonplace book, and the original work of the early modern writer – to survive, but occasionally this happens. For example, the published notes to the 1656 translation of the first book of Lucretius’s De rerum natura by John Evelyn, the great English diarist, contain observations that we can trace through Evelyn’s commonplace books, which survive in three large volumes, to the Latin text from his library, which was underlined and marked in the margins in the usual way.26 Now we can see what Toscanella’s Osservationi is: it is, quite simply, a printed commonplace book. And it is not the only book like this to emerge from the Renaissance classroom. As the title of Opera, in locos communes digesta . . . (Works, divided into commonplaces . . .) suggests, this book, too, gives us a Virgil whose poetry is presented as a tissue of phrases memorable for their style or content.27 There is also a whole series of books like the Sententiae et proverbia 23 CHARTIER (Roger), “Texts, Printings, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989, 155, draws attention to a passage in the prologue of the 1507 Saragossa edition of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina that describes three different ways to read: our ‘normal’ effort to grasp a text in its totality, along with the focus on certain detached episodes and the effort to mine a text for easily memorized maxims and ready-made formulas. 24 MOSS (Ann), Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. 25 BAPTISTA GUARINUS, op. cit., 268–69, a point to which BOLGAR (R. R.), The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1954, 270 drew attention. On collecting excerpts in notebooks, see CEVOLINI (Alberto), De arte excerpendi. Imparare a dimenticare nella modernità, Florence, Olschki, 2006. 26 HUNTER (Michael), “The British Library and the Library of John Evelyn,” in John Evelyn in the British Library, London, The British Library, 1995, 84–85. 27 Editions were published in Douai, Balthasar Bellerus, 1595; Tournon, Claudius Michael, 1597; and Cologne, B. Gualtherius, 1601, with a version under a different title (Thesaurus P. Virgilii

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ex poetis Latinis (Sentences and proverbs from the Latin poets), published anonymously in Venice in 1547,28 in which the words of Virgilian wisdom take their place among the extracts that Henri Estienne extracted from other Roman poets. Within the system I have just described, we can see several uses for books like these. A teacher could use them to locate passages worth highlighting and discussing in his lectures. And a student could use them as labor-saving devices, sources of the moral and stylistic gems that had to stud the compositions he had to write – sources, in this case, that rested on someone else’s work. But in either instance, the value of the Osservationi, and of books like the Exercitationes rhetoricae that are related to it, remains hidden until we recognize them for what they are and can begin to integrate our understanding of them as an indexing system with an appreciation of the structures of thought (to paraphrase Moss) upon which they rest. It is these deeper structures that, in the end, open up a window into how books were actually read in the Renaissance classroom.

IV I would like to close by suggesting how these humble, unduly neglected volumes can be used to offer a commentary on some of the basic generalizations about Renaissance education that other scholars have proposed over the last couple of decades. Let me begin with Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s From Humanism to the Humanities, a book that has been widely cited since its appearance twenty years ago. Grafton and Jardine begin from the premise that “the practical classroom activity which went to support the ideology of humanism was frankly inadequate to match the fervour of the ideal.”29 They begin by examining the pedagogical practice of Guarino da Verona, the educational theorist and schoolmaster who did a great deal to popularize the commonplacing procedures we have been examining. As Guarino explained, Explanationes quoque in libros scribere vehementer conducet. . . . Hoc exercitationis genus mirifice acuit ingenium, linguam expolit, scribendi promptitudinem gignit, profectam rerum noticiam inducit, memoriam Maronis . . .) being reprinted through the seventeenth century. On the Thesaurus, see MOSS (A.), op. cit., 221 n. 6. 28 This book, along with a series of books with similar titles, has been studied at length in KALLENDORF (Craig), “Proverbs, Censors, and Schools: Neo-Latin Studies and Book History,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Abulensis, ed. R. Schnur et al., Tempe, Ariz., Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000, 371–80, rpt. in The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, Hamp. and Burlington, Vt., Ashgate, 2007. 29 GRAFTON (Anthony) and JARDINE (Lisa), From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986, xiv; see also BLACK (Robert), “Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspectives and Continuing Controversies,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 52 (1991), 315–34.

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confirmat, postremo studiosis quasi quandam expositionum cellam promptuariam et memoriae subsidium praestat. . . . Ea vero potissimum excerpent, quae et memoratu digna et paucis in locis inveniri videbuntur. Erit hoc etiam ad orationis tum copiam tum promptitudinem valde idoneum, si inter legendum ex variis libris sententias quae ad eandem materiam pertinent adnotabunt, et in unum quendam locum colligent. . . . (Writing glosses in books is also extremely profitable. . . . Writing of this kind wonderfully sharpens the wit, polishes the tongue, produces fluency in writing, leads to precise factual knowledge, strengthens the memory, and, finally, affords students a storeroom, as it were, of commentary and memory aids. . . . Let them excerpt in particular those things that seem worth remembering and are rarely found. This practice will also serve greatly to develop a rich and ready diction if students, in the course of their miscellaneous reading, will note down maxims pertinent to a given topic and collect them in one particular place. . . .)30 But the result of this procedure, Grafton and Jardine argue, was that the general train of thought in a text was invariably sacrificed to an ever-increasing mass of detail, from explanations of uncommon words and unusual constructions to brief discussions of historical points and fragments of general information. Some of this detail would have touched on moral issues, but “these observations inevitably became absorbed into the pedagogical routine – something to be recorded between etymologies and paraphrases, rather than a coherent contribution to a fully articulated moral philosophy.”31 In other words, humanist education failed to extract a self-conscious training in character formation and citizenship from the parsing, drilling, and antiquarianism of classroom practice. Perhaps. Or, more precisely, I am sure that in the hands of a poor teacher, the classics were sometimes taught in such a stultifying way that only the best students could get a glimpse of why the texts were worth reading in the first place. But if one looks at any quantity of early printed books that were marked up either by students in the classroom or by older owners who continued reading as they had been taught in the humanist schools, it is clear that there was a keen interest in the moral content of the text. Bartolameus Ghellinus, the Vicentine student to whom I referred earlier, marked off passages like these for transfer to his commonplace book: “labor omnia vicit/improbus” (“toil conquers everything, unrelenting toil”; Georg. 1.145–46), “improbe Amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!” (“voracious love, to what do you not drive the hearts of men?”; Aen. 4.412), and “discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere divos” (“be warned, learn justice, do not scorn the gods”; Aen. 6.620). And the unnamed schoolmaster who worked all the way through the Marciana Aldine that I mentioned before actually adds an index 30 BAPTISTA GUARINUS, op. cit., 294–97. 31 GRAFTON (A.) and JARDINE (L.), op. cit., 22.

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of passages in Virgil’s poetry headed “loca lectorem pium commoventia” (“passages moving a pious reader”), suggesting systematic attention to moral content.32 The students of this schoolmaster may well have been unusually fortunate, but as Toscanella’s Osservationi suggests, students like Bartolameus Ghellinus would probably have gotten more in the way of training in character and citizenship than Grafton and Jardine would lead us to believe. In Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Robert Black begins where Grafton and Jardine left off, focusing on the medieval background to humanist philological teaching. After examining several hundred manuscripts of school texts located in Florentine libraries, Black observes (and I quote here the last sentence of his conclusion) that the humanists “had no serious intention of replacing the medieval heritage; instead, their aim was to secure a privileged position within the grammatical hierarchy as inherited from the middle ages.”33 Black stresses the continuities between medieval teachers and their early Renaissance successors, who, he argues, did not effect significant changes until the end of the fifteenth century. Anyone who has looked at lots of school commentaries has to admit that there is much to commend in Black’s argument. As Marjorie Woods has shown, it is not always easy to tell from what is said and how it is said, whether one is looking at a twelfth-century commentary to Virgil or one from the sixteenth century.34 Toscanella’s Osservationi, however, points to one area in which humanist practice marked a pronounced shift of emphasis from medieval pedagogy. Ann Moss has pointed out that many if not all the organizational features of the Renaissance commonplace book can be traced back to techniques developed in the environment of thirteenth-century preaching rhetoric.35 The commonplace book, however, was really a Renaissance phenomenon, reaching its zenith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The notebooks containing examples of elegant Latin style flourished in the classroom environment in which emphasis was placed on writing good Ciceronian Latin, and the moral extracts complement Erasmus’s Adagia. Notwithstanding its suitability for organizing and retaining the fruits of wide reading, however, the commonplace book was only as rich as the reading that lay behind it. Here classroom practice indeed lagged far behind humanist educational 32 KALLENDORF (C.), Virgil and the Myth of Venice, 32, 222–24. 33 BLACK (Robert), Humanism and Education, 368. 34 At a conference held at Villa I Tatti in June, 1999, James Hankins stimulated a lively discussion over which elements of content or method allow one to distinguish a Renaissance commentary from its medieval predecessors. See PADE (Marianne) ed., On Renaissance Commentaries, Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York, Olms, 2005, 5; and WOODS (Marjorie Curry), “What Were the Real Differences between Medieval and Renaissance Commentaries?” in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. Juanita Feros Ruys, John O. Ward, and Melanie Heyworth, Disputatio, 20, Turnhout, Brepols, 2013, 329–41. 35 MOSS (A.), op. cit., 24–50.

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theory. In contrast to the lengthy reading lists we find in the manuals of humanist educational theory, throughout Renaissance Europe, Cicero and Virgil reigned supreme in educational practice. While a good number of students were also exposed to some Terence, Ovid, and Horace as well, in the end many Renaissance students did not end up being familiar with many more Latin authors than our own students today (although I hasten to add that they spent many more hours, over many more years, studying them). In this sense, then, books like Toscanella’s Osservationi and the Exercitationes rhetoricae take on somewhat greater importance than they might otherwise have, since the object of their analysis occupied a central place in the educational edifice of their day. As a result, we can only recover how the classics were really studied in the Renaissance classroom from books like these.

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I Of all the classical Latin poets, Virgil is the one whose place in the canon of great authors has been the most secure. His corpus became a school text in ancient Rome, joining Cicero, Terence, and Sallust in the so-called quadriga on which the syllabus rested,1 and his perceived affinity with Christianity meant that his poetry was read widely in the Middle Ages as well (Kallendorf 2015: 42–79). As Francoise Waquet has shown, the early modern curriculum for the Latin schools was surprisingly uniform, with Virgil’s central position, again, questioned only rarely (Waquet 2001: passim). Throughout this longue durée, ‘Virgil’ meant the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, the major works that were universally agreed to have been written by him. Yet as the title page to the 1507 Paris edition of the collected works published by Ioannis Parvus (Jean Petit, LW1507.1) indicates,2 Virgil’s Opera, the three major works, were accompanied here by his Opuscula, a collection of shorter poems whose inclusion was perceived as necessary to complete the edition. The term opuscula initially suggests to the modern reader that this volume must also contain the Appendix Virgiliana, a group of poems that had at a certain point become associated with Virgil but is generally understood now to have been written by other authors. Parvus’s Opuscula includes these poems, but it includes a good number of others as well. This raises a couple of interesting questions. How precisely does the early modern Opuscula compare to the modern Appendix Virgiliana in terms of content? What cultural forces brought this material into the early modern Virgilian canon, and how successful were they in keeping it there? I intend 1 Marrou (1956: 278). I would like to thank Sheldon Brammall and Fabian Zogg for stimulating this project by inviting me to participate in “The Appendix Vergiliana and Its Reception,” a conference held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford on 10 June 2017. I am grateful to all the other participants for their feedback on the conference presentation, but especially to Glenn Most, who read an earlier draft of this essay and improved it considerably. I have preferred Latin versions of the names of authors and printers, but when a vernacular form is in common use, I have retained that form. 2 References to the early printed books discussed in this essay will contain in the text the catalogue number taken from Kallendorf (2012).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003149057-16

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to approach these questions by focusing on the early printed editions that contain the minor works that were then associated with Virgil and ask how these books, viewed both as physical objects and as bearers of text, can help us understand what readers of the day made of the poems. As we shall see, in the early modern period, status within a canon is determined in part by print, and the broader cultural forces that influence canon formation play out on the pages of early printed books as well as in society at large.

II The Appendix Virgiliana as it was constituted during the Carolingian period contains the following poems: Dirae, Culex, Aetna, Copa, Elegiae in Maecenatem, Ciris, Catalepton, Priapea,3 and Moretum. The title page of the Parvus edition indicates that it contains these works, except for the Catalepton and the three Priapic poems associated with it, but it also includes a number of other poems under the heading Epigrammata: Vir bonus, De ludo, De livore, De Venere et vino, De littera Pythagorae, Rosae, Est et non, Aetates animalium, Aerumnae, Labores Herculis, De Musarum inventis, De cantu Syrenarum, De die festo, De fortuna, De Orpheo, De seipso, De speculo, De experientia, De glacie et plaustro, De arcu coelesti quam Irim vocat, De quattuor temporibus anni, De ortu solis, De figuris coelestibus, and Quaedam idyllia. As its list of contents indicates, the 1543 Nicolaus Bryling edition published in Basel (LW1543.3) contains essentially the same group of poems, also under the general title Epigrammata, along with the Catalepton and Priapea (here including the larger collection), the Hortulus, and a group of short testimonia entitled Epitaphia Vergilii per illustres viros. This core group in fact is found in many of the sixteenth-century editions that contain the Opuscula, and the 1519 Venetian edition published by Lucas Antonius Junta and Augustinus de Zannis de Portesio (LW1519.1) adds several more poems: Alcimus, Versus de Virgilio; Cornelius Gallus, Versus de Aeneide; Versus de libris Virgilii; Ovid, In laudem Aeneidos; Propertius, De Virgilio; Propertius, De bucolico carmine; Praefatio in libris Virgilii; Summa Virgilianae narrationis in tribus operibus; and a pastiche entitled Virgilius. In addition to the extra poems, this group confounds the question of authorship by including in Virgil’s Opuscula several poems that are attributed to other writers. In other words, the canon of shorter poems that were associated with Virgil appears to be quite unstable, at least through the middle of the sixteenth century. 3 Most of the works in this list are found in Suetonius, De poetis: Virg.17, but the reference there to the Priapea has caused some confusion, with most scholars now taking it to refer to the three Priapic poems that are associated with the Catalepton. The eighty Priapic poems in the larger collection are also relevant to the present inquiry, as will become clear shortly, but they need to be distinguished from these three and discussed separately. Unless indicated otherwise, Priapea will refer to the larger collection in the discussion that follows. See Parker (1988: 32–36) and Peirano (2014: 1:104–11). Very little has been written on the Appendix Virgiliana in the Renaissance, but see Burrow (2008).

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To confirm what seems to be going on here, we need a larger sample. Unfortunately this will not be easy, since Virgil’s standing as a fundamental school text means that complete bibliographical control of the early printed editions will probably never be achieved. A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469–1850 contains over 5,000 entries, but the online supplement, which now records another 150 editions, continues to grow at the rate of an entry each week (Kallendorf 2018). A further obstacle is posed by the fact that the survival rate for these editions is low – for the Renaissance, it averages about five copies per book, but with a shocking number of instances in which only one copy is recorded.4 This means that even the libraries with the largest collections of Virgilian editions, like the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Bibliothèque nationale, and the British Library, do not contain more than 15–20% of the total.5 Therefore many of the entries in this bibliography rest on descriptions made by others that do not indicate reliably whether the Opuscula is present or not, and when they do, they hardly ever list which poems are included. Nevertheless there is a solution that produces a sample that is large enough and sufficiently accurate to allow generalizations to emerge. A Bibliography of the Venetian Editions of Virgil, 1470–1599 contains a detailed, page-by-page list of the contents of 124 editions of Virgil that were published in Venice during the Renaissance (Kallendorf 1991). This constitutes less than 10% of the 1,500 or so pre-1600 Virgilian editions, but Venice was the undisputed center of the European printing trade at the beginning of the period in question and remained of crucial importance to the end, so that any conclusions that emerge from examining the Venetian editions should be of considerable help as we try to delimit what the Opuscula might include during this time. Of the 124 editions published in Venice before 1600, eighty-six, or slightly over two-thirds, contain one or more poems from the Opuscula. The complete list of poems that appear in one or more editions is recorded in the Appendix. No single edition contains all sixty-five of these poems, but this list serves as a sort of archive from which editors could choose at will. The early editions of Vindelinus de Spira (1471) (LW1471.3), Leonardus Achates de Basilea (1472, LW1472.1, and 1473, LW1473.2), and Florentius de Argentina or Adam de Ambergau (ca. 1472, LAV>1500.1.) focus on the poems in the Appendix Virgiliana, but as early as 1472 the ‘Printer of Ausonius’ (LW1472.5) had expanded the selections to thirty and Bartholomaeus de Cremona (LW1472.2) had included most of the poems in the archive. Thirty-three of the forty-eight editions published by 1510 contain a group of thirty-eight poems that is essentially the same as the group published in the 1543 Bryling edition. The addition of commentaries by Iodocus Badius 4 These conclusions rest on consultation of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, www.ustc.ac.uk, accessed 4 March 2021, a collective database of all the books published in Europe between the invention of printing and 1650. 5 This point was made two centuries ago by the great scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne, who observed that no library in the world holds more than a sixth of all the published Virgil editions; see Virgil (1800: 429–30).

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Ascensius (Josse Bade) and Domitius Calderinus (1546 Cominus de Tridino edition, LW1546.1), however, led to some adjustments in the corpus, with the number sometimes dipping down a bit (to thirty-one, in the 1512 Georgius Arrivabenus Mantuanus, LW1512.1, and 1515 Alexander de Paganinis Brixianus, LW1515.2, editions) and at other times rising (to forty-two, in the 1519 Lucas Antonius Junta Florentinus and Augustinus de Zannis de Portesio edition, LW1519.1, followed by nineteen other editions). A collection that totals fifty-one to fifty-three poems appears for the first time in the 1517 edition of the Opuscula published by Aldus Manutius and his father-in-law Andreas de Toresanis de Asula (LAV1517.1). The situation, however, remained extremely fluid: in 1574–1575 the heirs of Joannes Maria Bonellus (LW1574–1575.1) added poems to the group that had been published several times earlier by Bonellus, and in 1573 Altobellus Salicatius and the heirs of Ludovicus Valvassorus (LW1573.2) produced a new and completely idiosyncratic group that included only Copa, Moretum, Hortulus, De vino et Venere, De ludo, De littera Y, De aerumnis Herculis, Versus inc. Almo Theon Thyrsis, and Versus inc. Ut belli sonuere tubae, while two late sixteenth-century editions (1585, Aldus Manutius Minor, and Dominicus and Ioannes Baptista Guerraeus, LW1585.6; and 1588, Ioannes Gryphius Minor, LW1588.2) printed the Copa only. In short, there was little agreement through the end of the sixteenth century about which works precisely should be included in Virgil’s Opuscula, with the range of options beginning with what we call today the Appendix Virgiliana and extending to a group more than five times the size of that one.

III Given that hardly anyone considers any of these poems to be Virgilian today, it is worth trying to figure out how consistently the attribution of authorship was made by early modern readers before speculating about why the attribution was made. The bibliographical situation regarding the early printed editions requires that we once again work with a sample, which can be found in the Junius Spencer Morgan Virgil Collection in the Princeton University Library (Kallendorf 2009). The catalogue of this collection contains detailed descriptions that indicate whether poems from the Opuscula are present in each book or not. I have also been able to work in a large, thousand-book private collection and have again been able to make a similarly detailed description of each Virgilian edition found there. Together there are 336 editions of Virgil’s poetry in these two groups, beginning with the first printed edition in 1469 and extending through 1750, which is a substantial sample, distributed well geographically and with only a slight concentration in the later periods. I have gone this late because I want to establish a couple of basic trends over a long arc of time. The first conclusion that emerges from this material is how closely connected the poems in the Opuscula were to Virgil when an early reader sat down to work through them. If we break things down by fifty-year increments, we see that 88% of the editions of Virgil’s works that were published by 1500 contain the 193

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Opuscula. For the next fifty years, the figure is 70%; it rises to 80% again from 1550–1599, then drops a bit to 63% from 1600 to 1650. The real drop-off comes as we approach the end of the seventeenth century, when only 31% of the Virgil editions contain the minor works; in the first half of the eighteenth century, the number drops further to 20%. If we ask more precisely when the change occurred, we find that the first significant falling off begins in the 1530s. The vast majority of editions published over the next several generations still contain the Opuscula, although it is worth noting that this is due to a certain extent to conservatism among publishers, with a good number of later examples being reprints of earlier editions. Before going any further, we should also look very briefly at the editions in which one or more of the minor works were published separately. If we take the hint provided by the sample I have just discussed and stop at 1650, we find forty-nine separate editions of one or more poems from the Opuscula. This material is especially hard to work with because the majority of items were quarto school editions published in a band of cities beginning in Leipzig, going through Cologne, and ending in Paris and Strasbourg; these books were generally printed in small press runs, used in local schools until they fell apart, and are now almost impossible to find (Kallendorf 2009: 137–39). My observations here will depend on what I could get access to and will therefore be more impressionistic than they were with the larger sample, but they lead in the same direction. The title pages of the 1501 Henricus Quentel (LAV1501.1), ca. 1505 Jacobus Thanner (LAVca1505.1), and 1514 Wolfgangus Stöckel (LAV1514.2) editions of five of the minor poems clearly attribute them to Virgil, as do the title pages of the 1504 Jacobus Thanner edition (LAV1504.1) of the Moretum, and the 1509 Johannes Knobloch (LAV1509.1) and 1512 (LAV1512.1) Melchior Lotterus editions of several poems from the collection. The title page of the first edition of Joseph Justus Scaliger’s influential commentary (Guilielmus Rovillius, 1572, LAV1572.1, reprinted the next year, LAV1573.1) reads Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix, and Jodocus Willichius similarly presented his commentary In . . . Publii Virgilii opuscula in the 1548 Joannes Oporinus (Johann Herbst) edition (LAV1548.1), where it accompanied his notes on the Eclogues; both works were reprinted frequently. In other words, whether an early reader approached the Opuscula in a separate edition or as part of the collected works of Virgil, the basic conclusion is inescapable: up to 1650 these poems were associated firmly with Virgil through the physical form in which they were encountered. Therefore if we want to understand these poems as Renaissance readers did and see why they were so often attributed to Virgil, we have to place them within the context offered by the early editions to see them as Virgilian.

IV If the last generation’s work in reception studies has taught us anything, it should be that we dare not assume that our reading of a text now is the same as, or even 194

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similar to, the interpretations generated by past readers. Virgil is no exception, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Renaissance Virgil, in all its various manifestations, is very different from ours. The most fundamental of these differences appears in the letter that Philipp Melanchthon wrote to the reader who was about to encounter his marginal comments on the Aeneid. Here he wrote As when Virgil describes Aeneas, he constructs a certain image of a prudent man who overcomes every sort of adversity in various dangers by reason and planning. For the poets have seen that the ends of robbers and tyrants had always been bloody. But since Aeneas is fashioned to be a prince, so it is to be seen that the arts of governing, the knowledge of war, and justice have been granted to him. And so he said, ‘Should I admire first your striving for justice or your efforts in war?’ [Aen. 11.126]. Likewise clemency: ‘I would also indeed like to grant this to the living’ [Aen. 11.111]. And the authority to suppress sedition: ‘a man so great in piety,’ etc. [Aen. 1.151]6 (Virgil 1534: 2–3) In short, as Francesco Petrarca put it, one reads the Aeneid to see in Aeneas the “habits and character of a perfect man” and to see the nature of human failings in Dido and a succession of other antagonists (Familiares 10.4). This approach to Virgil’s poetry prevailed in the early modern period because literary criticism had become thoroughly entangled in epideictic rhetoric, the third kind of oratory whose end is the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice: as Giovanni Boccaccio put it, “the poets were the greatest in praising virtues and condemning vices” (Boccaccio 1863: 1:126). To be sure, some Renaissance readers saw other things in Virgil’s poetry, but the epideictic reading was the foundation presented in the schools and disseminated from there into other aspects of early modern culture. In his Book 13 to the Aeneid, which was published regularly with the Aeneid in the Renaissance and was still being printed in the eighteenth century, Maphaeus Vegius followed up from a hint in the ancient biographies that the poem was unfinished and set out to complete it by reconstructing the missing end of the poem through a supplement that showed Aeneas acting perfectly and drove home the ethical failings of Turnus.7 At times the prevailing epideictic framework required the removal or recasting of Virgilian material that made early modern readers morally uncomfortable. A good example 6 This book is LW1534.1 in Kallendorf (2012). Melanchthon’s letter, along with his notes, was reprinted regularly throughout the sixteenth century but often anonymously, in an act of selfcensorship by which his publishers in Catholic countries tried to avoid the increasing difficulties they encountered in printing the works of Protestant authors; in fact by 1546 (LW1546.3) Gryphius had removed Melanchthon’s letter and replaced it with one of his own. Peter Mack also draws attention to this letter (2004: 21–22). 7 See Kallendorf (1989: 100–28) and Vegius (2004: vii–xxiii (introduction) and 2–41 (text and translation of Book 13)).

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of this can be found in Desiderius Erasmus’s reading of Eclogue 2. Today this poem is widely considered to describe a homosexual relationship, but Erasmus argued that it offered a picture of friendship, where gifts were given and sentiments exchanged between men without any sexual overtones, thereby keeping Virgil from being a proponent of relationships that were forbidden by Renaissance Christianity.8 We see another example of the same epideictic approach to Virgil’s poetry if we look at the marginal notes printed in the Renaissance editions of Virgil and at those added by hand by readers from this period. In these notes we can see early readers searching for brief passages that were memorable for their moral content. These proverbs or well-turned expressions, called commonplaces, were copied into notebooks, called commonplace books, where Virgil’s observations on love or courage were listed under the appropriate headings.9 These notebooks then served as sources when Renaissance readers became writers, so that much of what we read from this period is in fact a tissue of rhetorical commonplaces, rewoven from works like the Eclogues or Georgics. Sometimes these marginal notes rose to the level of a full commentary, as in the case of Christophorus Landinus, whose Virgilian commentary was printed 38 times from the 1487 through 1544. Landinus was a Neoplatonist, and he thought that Virgil must have been one too, so that for him, Aeneas’s journey took him from the sensual pleasures of Troy through the active life, represented by Carthage, to the contemplative life in Italy. On this journey he begins with the civic virtues, then purges himself from everything human, and finally contemplates and practices divine things only (Kallendorf 1989: 129–65). The Virgil that emerges from the early printed editions has been transformed: the classical material remains present, but it is fused into a later culture that includes it in different realms of discourse than it originally appeared in, excludes aspects that made the later readers uncomfortable, and recombines Virgilian material into something that was simultaneously both ancient and Renaissance. In this process Virgil’s poetry was rhetoricized – read through an epideictic filter that made it into the praise of virtue and condemnation of vice.

V So when Renaissance readers approached the Opuscula as Virgilian, this is the lens through which they were trying to read it. To show how they did so, I would like to go to the group of poems in the Renaissance editions that followed the ones 8 Erasmus’s effort to neutralize the homosexual overtones of this poems are placed into a broader context by Wilson-Okamura (2010: 113–15). Steven Orgel, however, offers a fascinating account of a teacher who appears to have been more open-minded in his interpretation than Erasmus and whose remarks were recorded by one of his students in a copy of the 1507 Cologne edition of the Bucolics (LE1507.1), in Orgel (2015: 30–35). 9 This procedure is described in detail in Kallendorf (2013: 309–28). This way of reading has made a curious re-emergence today via Twitter, where the 140-character limit invites people to pass on bits of received wisdom in proverbial form.

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that have been traditionally collected in the Appendix Virgiliana, in order to suggest why readers of this period were so ready to see them as Virgilian. Beginning in 1500 and continuing in sixty-one other editions that were published through the end of the sixteenth century, these poems were accompanied by the commentary of Iodocus Badius Ascensius.10 Since this was the most common filter through which Renaissance readers saw these poems, I shall turn to Badius’s commentary to draw out the key themes that were being discussed there. The titles alone of the first five poems, as we see them set out in the 1507 Paris edition published by Parvus, show the direction in which this will go: Publii Vergilii Maronis Epigrammatum opus. Et primo opusculum de viro bono. Publii Vergilii Maronis de ludo contra avaritiam & iram Lepidum epigramma. Publii Vergilii de Livore seu Invidia carmen Endecasylabum. Publii Vergilii Carmen de Venere & vino contra luxuriam & ebrietatem. Publii Vergilii Maronis de littera y Carmen. The first four poems, all clearly attributed to Virgil, set the moral tone for the group, first by praising the good man, then by condemning greed and anger, followed by envy, dissipation, and drunkenness. The fifth poem, on the Pythagorean letter Y, offers a concise general paradigm for moral choice that was often discussed in the Renaissance, so it makes sense to look at it first.11 As we head down the path of life, the road forks, with the way of virtue being arduous at first but offering rest and praise at the end, while the path of sloth and dissipation is initially broad and easy but ultimately thrusts those who take it into destruction. Badius’s commentary on this twelve-line poem covers four large folio pages, in which he lines up as many ancient authorities as possible – here Cicero, Aulus Gellius, Sallust, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Ovid, Propertius, and Xenophon – to show that Greek and Latin writers present a unified call to virtue. Virgil’s major works, as we would expect, join in this call. The good man must fight continually against virtue, Badius notes, and even if he does not always receive the praise he deserves in this life, he will always be rewarded in the end: “Virgil seems to put forth different times, when he speaks concerning the good in words directed toward the future and prepares praise and glory, for the good man 10 As Paul White has shown, Badius’s engagement with Virgil’s Opuscula was long and intense, beginning with his Silvae morales and continuing into his commentary on Virgil’s collected works (see esp. White 2013: 234–71). White suggests that Badius’s moralizing explication was based in the satirical tradition of Horace. This is undoubtedly correct, but I believe that Badius arrived there primarily via the epideictic interpretation of epic that shaped his understanding of Virgil; see Kallendorf (1999: 111–13). 11 A longer discussion of this poem, with bibliography on the Pythagorean Y and the Choice of Hercules in Renaissance scholarship, can be found in White (2013: 187–93). Two other poems on the labors of Hercules appear in the Opuscula as well.

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is not praised continuously, and yet he is able to rejoice silently to himself, for often after what has been fated, that is, after the death of the body, glory is first given” (f. 195r). This is the message of the Aeneid, where Elysium awaits those who do good during their time on earth. This good man is the subject of the first poem in the group. It takes Badius seven and a half folio pages to explicate the twenty-six lines of this poem, in which he defines the argument of the poem like this: “Nor nevertheless does the most inventive poet describe pride alone in this little work, but also the kind of modesty that is now called humility and every other method for living well” (f. 187r). One would guess from the titles of the three poems that lie between Vir bonus and De littera Y that they would condemn various vices, and this is exactly what Badius understood them to do, as he refers to them by quoting their opening words and summarizes their contents: ‘Nor of Venus’ etc. If you should look with greater acumen at the Virgilian way of speaking, there would be no need for an inquiry by which vices are more to be shunned. For when he condemned pride, you have seen with how much diligence he has called us to remember the misery of human life. When he was judging avarice, that pernicious monster, to be a vile practice in vehement language, he is saying, ‘Scorn riches’ etc. And concerning anger that produces strife, he says concisely, ‘Let anger cease.’ In truth when he calls envy a monster that cannot be atoned for by any virtue, even in stages, as if on fire he says, ‘Envy a destructive poison to the wicked’ etc. Now in truth he will speak about sexual love and wine, of which the abuse, not the use, is evil. (f. 193r–v) Pride, greed, anger, envy, dissipation, and drunkenness – these are the subjects of this section of the Opuscula, and each is roundly condemned, once by ‘Virgil,’ and then again by Badius. Not every poem in the Opuscula is so overtly moralizing; one thinks, for example, of the Rosae, which seems to begin innocuously enough as a description of a spring day. Yet a poem that seems to draw the reader into a world of pleasure does not, according to Badius, do anything like that at all: “It was spring. In this poem he seems to draw us to pleasure, but rather he deters the prudent from its snares” (196).12 For the wise reader, even this poem has a moralizing message: “Let him remember that he is thus hurtling to your age; he is encouraged not to pleasure, but to do praiseworthy works” (f. 196r). This is the message of the Opuscula as a whole, and it is also the message of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, which allows Badius and his Renaissance readers to see all of these poems as part of a unified corpus: the collected works of Virgil. 12 White also draws attention to this passage (2013: 245–46).

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VI Making the poems in the Opuscula say what their Renaissance readers wanted them to say was easier in some cases than others. As we have seen, some poems like the Rosae had to be twisted around so that they were said to mean the opposite of what they seemed to be saying, and poems from what is now called the Appendix Virgiliana presented other problems. Some of them, like the Culex, rest in parody, and shorter ones like the Copa are difficult to reconcile with the image of Virgil as a serious poet – indeed the Catalepton, as the title suggests, involves something finely crafted, a trifle. And then there is the problem of the Priapea, which cannot be wrenched into a praise of virtue and condemnation of vice through any amount of verbal and logical gymnastics. This brings us back to the question of authorship, but from a different perspective: if Virgil’s poetry praised virtue and condemned vice, but not all the poems in the Opuscula did this (at least directly), could it be that some of them were not by Virgil? While the early printed editions regularly presented the Opuscula as part of the Virgilian canon, sometimes they also contain paratextual material that simultaneously calls that presentation into question. The 1591 Michael Lantzenberger edition of Virgil’s works (LW1591.3), for example, contains a discussion by Mariangelus Accursius that begins by acknowledging that everyone agrees that the minor works are Virgilian, but that fragments of an old manuscript “in Langobard script” attribute De aetatibus animalium, Vir bonus, and Est et non to Ausonius; the authorship of Rosae is questioned on paleographical grounds as well (Virgil 1591: f. A6r–v). More interesting, and influential, are the hesitations expressed by Joseph Justus Scaliger, whose 1572 commentary was reprinted a number of times and to a noticeable extent set the direction for scholarship on the Opuscula at the turn of the seventeenth century. The title page of the 1572 edition (LAV1572.1) suggests how things will go: “The Appendix of Publius Virgilius Maro, with the supplement of many poems by ancient poets that have never been printed before, with the commentary and corrections to the same Appendix by Joseph Scaliger.” The text of each poem is preceded by Scaliger’s judgment about who wrote it – Culex and Ciris are Virgilian, Aetna is attributed to Cornelius Severus, Moretum is anonymous, Dirae is by Valerius Cato, the Priapea are by various poets, the Catalecta are Virgilian, and so forth – and the commentary provides the rationale for each attribution, which ranges from stylistic analysis to quotations from a variety of authors, mostly ancient (Virgil 1572: passim). In both examples, scholarly techniques that extend from the Renaissance to modern times are used to question Virgilian authorship of parts of the Opuscula, but they do so while remaining within a Virgilian framework. A particularly interesting case involves the series of early sixteenth-century Virgilian editions published by Aldus Manutius, the great scholar-printer of Venice. The famous 1501 Virgil (LW1501.1), the first octavo edition of a secular work published in italic font, excludes these poems because some of them are “obscene, which we do not consider worthy of a handbook.” Some readers must

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have objected, because Aldus included the Opuscula at the back of his 1505 edition (LW1505.1), but in the back of the book, “in order that they might be removed by anyone at will.” In the 1517 (LAV1517.1) and 1534 (LAV1534.1) editions, the poems were published separately and attributed to “various poets” (Kallendorf 1999: 86). This was an extreme solution, one that was not adopted, as we have seen, by most other editors and printers. What was more common in the large folio editions of Virgil’s works was to include the Opuscula, but to put it at the end, to set it in smaller type than the three major poems, and to leave it without the commentaries that accompanied the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. The Priapea posed a special problem for readers who were trying to view the Opuscula through a Virgilian lens, since their manifest obscenity conflicted with the dominant Renaissance image of Virgil as a poet whose works praised virtue and condemned vice. Perhaps the most interesting effort to resolve this problem is found in the commentary by Ludovicus Pretinus de Puppio, which was published in Venice around 1500.13 His title (Commentarius in Priapeam Virgilii Maronis) suggests that he will be presenting strategies for fitting the Priapea into the Procrustean bed of Renaissance Virgilianism, and this is precisely what he does. First he argues that the poems offer so much verbal power and intellectual wisdom that the reader can derive both utility and pleasure from them. After bringing the Priapea into line with Horatian dicta, Pretinus lists other poets who also wrote lascivious works, the implication being that if it is all right to read Pindar, Ovid, and Catullus, it is all right to read these poems as well. Three more arguments follow in rapid succession: obscene words are necessary when describing obscene things, one can remain pure in mind while writing lascivious verse, and the mind cannot be occupied in serious activities all the time. The idea seems to be that if all the available arguments are set out, something will prove persuasive. Only one copy of this edition, however, seems to have survived in Italy, which suggests that these arguments did not succeed in neutralizing a text that defined “irrumare” as “that is, you will take my penis in your mouth.”14 Other early printed editions found other ways to deal with the obscenity problem. A note to the reader in the 1546 Bartholomaeus Westheimerus edition of Virgil’s works (LW1546.4) concludes that the “the Priapea are not sufficiently worthy to be ascribed to any good poet” (Virgil 1546: 661), and Iodocus Badius Ascensius wriggled out of the problem by attributing the poems to Ovid, as was done in the 1512 Georgius Arrivabenus (LW1512.1) and 1515 Alexander de Paganinis Brixianus (LW1515.2) editions as well. In the 1519 Augustinus de Zannis de Portesio and Lucas Antonius Junta (LW1519.1) and the 1522 Guilielmus de Fontaneto Montisferrati (LW1522.2) editions of Virgil’s works, the Priapea were 13 Information on these commentaries can be found in Hausmann (1980: 4:423–50), with information on Pretinus at 439–42. Pretinus’s commentary was the only one of any extent to have been printed in the Renaissance. 14 Kallendorf (1999: 85–87); Pretinus de Puppio (ca. 1500: ff. A1r–3r). The surviving copy is now Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, shelf mark Inc. 466.

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attributed to “various poets,” which once again challenges Virgilian authorship from within the confines of a Virgilian edition.15 The early printed editions provide further evidence that many Renaissance readers ultimately went to a process of active and explicit exclusion where the poems are rejected but remain present through a negative relationship. Let me explain how this works. Beginning in 1558, for example, the Venetian publishers Joannes Maria Bonellus, Petrus Dusinellus, and Joannes Gryphius Minor and their heirs produced a series of eleven folio editions of the works of Virgil.16 I have looked at a couple dozen copies of these editions over the years, and at least half of them are similarly mutilated – they are missing the final folios. Comparison of the mutilated to the unmutilated copies confirms what we might have expected, that the missing folios contain the Priapea. One of them, a copy of the 1566 Bonellus edition (LW1566.1) now in Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, explains why these books have been treated in this way: the jottings on the title page indicate that this copy has been censored. In 1559 the Index of Paul IV banned books that were immoral, lascivious, or obscene, and this prohibition was carried over into Rule VII of the Tridentine Index of Pius IV (1564) and Rule XVI of the Index of Sixtus V (1590). This general ban provided the grounds for condemning the Priapea, and in the Antwerp appendix to the Tridentine Index (1570), we find a specific prohibition against reading the Priapeia false adscripta Virgilio. This prohibition carried over into the Index of the Spanish Inquisitor General Quiroga (1583) and the Index of Clement VIII (1596), and this resulted in the removal of the Priapea from the Marciana copy of Bonellus’s edition, using a technique that offered an alternative to inking out offending passages when there was too much material to be obliterated with a pen. The early printed editions confirm that expurgation was haphazard – a copy of the 1562 Bonellus edition (LW1562.1) now in the Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile in Treviso, for example, was in clerical hands at least by the middle of the seventeenth century if not earlier, yet the pages containing the Priapea are intact. It is also worth noting that some readers who ended up with expurgated editions became curious about what had been removed and went to considerable lengths to have it restored: a copy of the 1558 Bonellus edition (LW1558.3) now in the Biblioteca Civica in Verona, for example, had the folios containing the Priapea removed, then replaced with folios from the 1574–1575 edition by the same printer (LW1574–1575.1), which solved the early reader’s problem nicely but made a bibliographical mess for modern scholars (Kallendorf 1991: 88–90). This, however, is the exception that proves the rule: in the eyes of the Catholic church, the Priapea got caught up in the flood of books that threatened the true religion and became subject to the same surveillance and control that were applied to Protestant authors and other obscene material. When 15 Kallendorf (1999: 88). Information on the printing history of Badius’s commentary has been gathered during my research for the section on printed commentaries to Virgil for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. 16 Detailed descriptions of each of these editions can be found in Kallendorf (2012: 121–57).

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the offending pages were removed, the poems simply disappeared from the Virgilian canon, at least as it was presented by the expurgated copy. Yet they actually did not – there was a gap at the end of the book, and the careful reader could see that something had been removed, both because the last page left in had the first word of the next page printed at the bottom as a catchword, and because the register and colophon regularly found at the end of sixteenth-century books had been sliced away along with the Priapea. A copy of the 1546 Sebastianus Gryphius edition (LW1546.3) entitled Publii Vergilii Maronis opera now in the private collection in which I have been working has been similarly mutilated. In both cases, part of the book has been removed, yet it remains present in its absence. My final example shows once more what happens when the Priapea is pulled into the larger nexus of problems that the Protestant Reformation caused for the Catholic church. Entitled simply Vergilius, it was printed in 1556 in Mainz (LW1556.3), the birthplace of printing with movable type. In this edition the works of Virgil are accompanied by commentaries, and the names of the commentators are given. First is Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), the ally of Luther who is well known both as a systematic theologian of the Reformation and as the praeceptor Germaniae. The second, Christophorus Hegendorffinus (d. 1541), is less well known but was also an associate of Luther who helped establish the intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation. The third commentator is Étienne Dolet (1509–1546), the French scholar, printer, and translator who was condemned for not adhering to official Catholic doctrine and burned. In the copy of the book I examined in the private collection in which I have been working, most of the Opuscula, including the Priapea, has been removed, along with the commentaries of Hegendorffinus and Dolet, but the index and colophon that are supposed to follow the missing commentaries at the end of the book are still there, which makes it clear that the missing pages were removed deliberately. As we observe Renaissance readers struggling to fit the Opuscula into their framework of expectations about Virgil, it is important to acknowledge that other factors sometimes came into play along with the idea that a truly Virgilian poem should praise virtue and condemn vice. A brief introductory statement in the 1543 Nicolaus Bryling edition published in Basel (LW1543.3) provides an unusually nuanced insight (520). The Opuscula, as the editor notes, is less weighty than the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, but even though the works are youthful, they are, he believes, Virgilian, so he was urged to print them. They were placed at the end so that they could be removed without deforming the book, but they were printed nonetheless in order to provide a polished entertainment to accompany and counterbalance the more serious works (p. 520). The editor of the Bryling edition invokes the idea that the Opuscula offers pleasure along with profit. This idea was originally Horatian but also occupied a prominent place in Renaissance literary theory as Horace’s Ars poetica made its way more widely into learned circles.17 17 Moss (1999: 66–76) offers a concise introduction to Horace’s role in Renaissance literary criticism, with the details available in Weinberg (1961).

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As we have seen, Ludovicus Pretinus de Puppio invoked this same principle to defend the Priapea, and if it worked for these poems, it would certainly work for the rest of the Opuscula. The common practices of print culture offer another explanation for the widespread dissemination of the Opuscula in early modern editions of Virgil. There was no copyright during this period, so there was nothing to keep a printer from buying a copy of a book, taking it back to his shop, and running off several hundred copies of someone else’s work. The editio princeps (first printed edition, LW1469.1) of Virgil’s works contained the Opuscula, so we might suspect that in at least some cases, the inclusion of these shorter poems within the collected works of Virgil reflected not a carefully reasoned decision by a scholarly editor, but merely the fact that they had been printed in the copy that was being mindlessly reproduced by a typographical pirate. This is exactly what happened with several incunables (books printed before 1501) in the Junius Spencer Morgan Virgil Collection at Princeton University, where the 1499 Jacobus Sacon edition printed in Lyon (LW1499.1), for example, is a page-by-page reprint of a series of identical Venetian editions, beginning with the 1493 edition of Bartholomaeus de Zannis de Portesio, Octavianus Scotus, and Lucas Antonius Junta (LW1493.2), extending through the 1494 (LW1494.4) and 1495 (LW1495.2) printings that de Zannis oversaw himself, and concluding with the 1497 edition printed by Simon Bevilaqua (LW1497/1). A similar pattern links several books published in the next century, beginning with the 1556 Joannes Frellonius edition from Lyon (LW1556.5), including the 1571 (LW1571.2) and 1581 (LW1581.4) Lyonnaise editions of Bartholomaeus Vincentius, and ending with 1582 Dominicus Nicolinus edition printed in Venice (LW1586.2). The growing number of digital copies of early printed books should make such filiations easier to trace in the future, but it is already clear that the Opuscula was sometimes printed during this period with little or no thought about how compatible it was with the other works of Virgil. Yet once this complexity has been acknowledged, the central issue played out on the pages of the early printed editions is tied to whether the Opuscula could be seen as Virgilian, given what early modern readers saw the major works of Virgil to be.

VII As we have seen, then, the early printed editions of the Opuscula show us that early Renaissance readers by and large considered these poems to be by Virgil, although the authorship of a growing number of poems came increasingly into question over time. The same editions give us a picture of Virgil in the Renaissance, as an author whose poems were generally understood to praise virtue and condemn vice, with an emphasis on those sections that were compatible with Christianity and a propensity to set aside the ones that were not. As Renaissance readers sought to understand the Opuscula through this filter, tensions arose, especially around the Priapea, which proved particularly resistant to integration within 203

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the epideictic versions of the canonical works. These tensions played out in the pages of the books of the day, in which incompatible elements jostled against one another and offending material ultimately lost out to censorship, especially toward the end of the early modern period. These same books demonstrate how the modern techniques that brought the attribution to Virgil into greater peril began to be refined, as Scaliger’s commentary shows. In this way canon formation is shown to be inextricable from printing history and the reception of texts, and the so-called ‘minor’ works of Virgil turn out to be not so minor after all.

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APPENDIX The Opuscula in Renaissance editions of Virgil printed in Venice

What follows below is a list of the shorter poems that appear in one or more editions of the collected works of Virgil that were published in Venice before 1600, arranged in alphabetical order for convenience. No single early printed editions contains all these works: the early editors made a selection from among them. Those poems that are mentioned by title only were frequently reprinted in the early editions. References to the more obscure poems are to Emil Baehrens, Poetae Latini minores, 4 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1879–1882), abbreviated PLM, and to Emil Baehrens, Fragmenta poetarum Latinorum epicorum et lyricorum, praeter Ennium et Lucilium, ed. Willy Morel, 2nd edn. (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1963), abbreviated FPL, with an incipit occasionally added for clarity’s sake. If an author other than Virgil is suggested in the early editions, that is indicated after the title. Aetna Catalecta Ciris Copa Culex De aerumnis Herculis De aetatibus animalium De bucolica carmina, inc. Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galesi (Propertius) De cantu Sirenarum De die natali De fortuna De Herculis laboribus De littera Y De livore De Lucretia (PLM, 4.443) De ludo De Musarum inventis De Musis, inc. Clio historias invenit, Melpomene tragoedias

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De Orpheo De ortu solis De puero glacie perempto (Germanicus) (PLM, 4.103) De quattuor temporibus anni De se ipso De signis caelestibus De speculo De venatore (PLM, 4.148) De vino et Venere De Virgilio (Propertius) (PLM, 4.158) Dirae Distichon (PLM, 4.161) Elegia in Maecenatis obitu Epitaphia virorum illustrium (PLM, 4.120–22 + PLM, 4.310, De imagine) Est et non Hortulus In Balistam latronem In laudem Aeneidos, inc. Et profugum Aenean altae primordia Romae (Ovid) Mira Virgilii experientia Mira Virgilii versus experientia Moretum Praefatio in libris Virgilii (PLM, 4.173) Priapea Rosae Summae Virgilianae narrationis in tribus libris (PLM, 4.177–78) Versus de Aeneide (Cornelius Gallus) Versus de libris Virgilii (PLM, 4.179–82) Versus de Virgilio (Alcimus) Versus inc. Almo, Theon, Thyrsis (PLM, 4.112) Versus inc. Aufugit mi animus (Q. Catulus) (FPL, 43) Versus inc. Constiteram exorientem (Q. Catulus) (FPL, 43) Versus inc. Custodes ovium (Porcius Licinus) (FPL, 46) Versus inc. Dicere cum conor (V. Aedituus) (FPL, 42) Versus inc. Dum Venus armatum complectitur obvia Martem Versus inc. Hic est ille (PLM, 4.358) Versus inc. Hos ego versiculos (PLM, 4.156) Versus inc. Iusserat haec rapidis (PLM, 4.182) Versus inc. Maeonium quisque Romanus (PLM, 4.188) Versus inc. Mantua me genuit (PLM, 4.121) Versus inc. Nocte pluit tota (PLM, 4.156) Versus inc. Pastor, arator, eques (PLM, 4.188) Versus inc. Quid faculam praefers (V. Aedituus) (FPL, 43) Versus inc. Tractabat clypeum Marti placitura Dione (Actius Syncerus)

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Versus inc. Tristia fata tui (PLM, 4.187) Versus inc. Ut belli sonuere tubae (PLM, 4.111–12) Vir bonus Virgilius (a pastiche)

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Works cited G. Boccaccio, Il comento di Giovanni Boccaccio sopra la Commedia, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1863). C. Burrow, “English Renaissance Readers and the Appendix Vergiliana,” Proceedings of the Virgil Society, 26 (2008), 1–16. F.-R. Hausmann, “Carmina Priapea,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum/ Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, ed. F. Edward Cranz and Paul Oskar Kristeller, 11 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1980), 4:423–50. C. Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989). ———, A Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil, 1470–1599 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1991). ———, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). ———, A Catalogue of the Junius Spencer Morgan Collection of Virgil in the Princeton University Library (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009). ———, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469–1850 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2012). ———, “Virgil in the Renaissance Classroom: From Toscanella’s Osservationi . . . sopra l’opere di Virgilio to the Exercitationes rhetoricae,” in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. J. F. Ruys, J. Ward, and M. Heyworth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 309–28. ———, The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ———, “Additions and Corrections to A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil,” hosted by the Bibliographical Society of America at BibSite, https://bibsocamer. org/wp-content/uploads/Kallendorf_2018.pdf, first posted March, 2014, last updated March, 2018, accessed 4 March 2021. ———, “Commentaries, Censorship, and Printed Books: Neo-Latin in a Transnational World,’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Vindobonensis, ed. A. Steiner-Weber and F. Schaffenrath (Leiden: Brill, 2015). P. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956). A. Moss, “Horace in the Sixteenth Century: Commentators into Critics,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66–76. S. Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). H. Parker (ed. and trans.), Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988). I. Peirano, “Appendix Vergiliana,” in The Virgil Encyclopedia, ed. Richard F. Thomas and Jan M. Ziolkowski, 3 vols. (Walden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 1:104–11.

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Pretinus de Puppio, L., Commentarius in Priapum Virgilii Maronis (Venice: Giovanni Tacuino, ca. 1500). Universal Short Title Catalogue, Hosted by the University of St. Andrews, www.ustc.ac.uk, accessed 4 March 2021. M. Vegius Short Epics, ed. and trans. Michael C. J. Putnam and James Hankins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). P. Virgilius Maro, Appendix (Lyon: G. Rovilius, 1572). ———, Opera (Lyon: Sebastianus Gryphius, 1534). ———, Opera (Basel: Bartholomaeus Westheimer, 1546). ———, Opera (Mainz: Ivo Schöffer, 1550). ———, Opera, ed. Georg Fabricius (Leipzig: Michael Lantzenberger, 1591). ———, P. Virgilius Maro varietate lectionis et perpetua adnotatione illustratus, vol. 5: Carmina minora, ed. C. G. Heyne, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: Caspar Fritsch, 1800). F. Wacquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso. 2001). B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). White, P., Iodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce, and Print in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wilson-Okamura, D., Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate a note on the corresponding page. Accursius, M. 199 Adam, and Eve 11–12, 14–15, 17 Addison, J. 13, 16 Adorno, R. 49 Aeluromyomachia (Dactius) 87 Aeneas: Addison on 16; allegory 55, 142–3; anger 107; as Augustus 36–7, 106; criticism of 28, 62–3; and Dido 14, 17, 37, 78–9, 137, 141–2, 150–1, 182; flight from Troy 36; as Hell 11; as ideal man 106–7; journey to Latium 140; killing of Turnus 36–7, 107; new armor 132; Pontano on 27; as praiseworthy 165; Satan and 10–11, 15, 59–60; Virgil’s praise 54, 67–8, 77, 137–8; as wolf 11–12; see also Turnus Aeneid (Virgil) 10n18; Aeolus (character) 165; allegorical interpretation of 30, 54–5, 133n16, 133n18, 164–5; Anchises (character) 15, 42, 66, 78, 81, 86, 103, 132; Apollo (character) 177; Ascanius (character) 177; Augustan era 29–30, 36–7, 149; Book 1 164–5; Book 2 178–9; Book 3 11, 13, 66, 164; Book 4 144, 180–2; Book 5 103; Book 6 54, 78, 80–1, 121, 131, 144, 152; Book 7 131; Book 8 174; Book 9 154, 177; Book 13 195; Dido (character) 78, 151; episodes 151, 155–6, 178; “further voices” in 37, 107; Hector (character) 81; interpretation 106–7; Juno (character) 69, 165, 168; Milton’s reading of 16; optimistic interpretation of 1n1, 29–30, 54–5, 148–9, 151; sexual desires, handling 68; Spanish translation of 36n22; Troy (place) 36, 39–40, 42, 63,

141, 152, 164–5, 170, 178–9, 196; virtue and vice 76; see also commentary; Salutati, C., annotations of Virgil’s text Aeneid, pessimistic readings of 1n1; and a dynamic allusive system 18–19, 22n6, 37n24, 108, 149; Filelfo, F. 25; pessimistic critics of 150–1; Petrarca, F. 24–5; Pontano, G. 27; Salviati, L. 27–31; Vegio, M. 26 Aeneid of Virgil, The (Mandelbaum) 178n8 Aeneiskritik 38; Aeneissupplement des Maffeo Vegio, Das (Schneider) 26n21 Africa (Petrarca) 78–9, 117 Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy, The (Hathaway) 57n21 Agricola, R. 168 Alegre, F. J. 80 Alegría, F. 34 Alexandrias (Alegre) 80 Alfonseis (Zuppardo) 84 allegory 87; Aeneas 55, 142–3; Landino’s 163; literary 135; moral 30, 134–5, 140–2, 145; poetic 139–42, 145 Allen, D. C. 24n15 allusions: interpreting 8–11; Milton’s 18; in Neo-Latin epics 81; Virgilian 18–19 analytical bibliography 115 “Anger of Aeneas, The” (Galinsky) 2n4, 22n7, 38n25 annali delle edizioni virgiliane, Gli (Mambelli) 94 Antiquariaat Forum (dealer) 120 Antonias (Vegio) 85 aphorisms 73 Apollo and Daphne (Bernini) 155 Appendix Virgiliana 190–2, 197, 199

210

INDEX

Araucana, La (Ercilla) 18, 33–50; attitude toward the Indians 43–5; book structure 39; characters and episodes 40–50; conclusion 48; epic source for 35–6; intertextual relationship with Aeneid 40–50; the Other in 49; simile 39 Ariosto, L. 27–8, 27n26, 28n27 Aristotle 25, 66–7, 136; criticism 77; Poetics (Aristotle) 54, 56–7, 62, 77, 136n29, 136n30, 165, 166n12, 166n14; and Regulus 164–9 Aristotle and the Renaissance (Schmitt) 57n21 Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589, The (Bodmer) 44n35 Arnold, M. 23, 23n12 Ars poetica (Horace) 53–4, 77, 137, 202–3 Atlantis retecta sive De navigatione prima Christophori Columbi in Americam (Placcius) 83 Augustan culture 24–5, 29–30 Austrias (Bartolini) 82–4 Avancini, N. 114 Aventinus, J. 114 Badius Ascensius, I. 197–8, 200 Balde, J. 87 Barberino, A. da 80–1 Bardi, G. de’ 27n26 Barlaeus, M. 88 Baron, H. 29n32, 117 baroque artists 155–6 Bartolini, R. 82–3 Basel manuscript, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität F II 23: Salutati’s notes 127–32, 144 Batrachomyomachia (Balde) 87 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 96, 109, 115 Beckher, D. 114 Bello, A. 35–6 Bencius, F. 85 Bennington, G. 109n51 Bentley, R. 17 Bergin, T. G. 79n5, 87 Bernardo, A. S. 30n33 Bernini, G. 155 Beronicius, P. J. 88 Bevilaqua, S. 203 Bible and Virgil’s language 98–100 Bibliographical Society of America 97 Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil, A 95–6, 100–1

Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil (1469–1850), A 102n27, 102n28, 103n29, 104n32, 105n35, 192 Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil (1470–1599), A 95, 192 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana 102 Bibliothèque nationale de France 118 BibSite 97 Billanovich, G. 24n15 Black, R. 188 Blessington, F. 7, 10, 59 Boccaccio, G. 53 Bocerus, J. 84 Bollinger, U. 85 Bolter, J. D. 110 Bom, P. 85 Bona, G. 114 Boni, R. 84 Bonus, J. 86 Borsias (Strozzi) 81–2 Botta, B. 85 Bowra, C. M. 7, 23n11, 59 Brant, S. 155 Brinton, A. C. 26n22, 120 British Library 118 Brooks, R. A. 37n24 Brown, P. 27n26, 28n27 Brown, V. 26n21, 146n79 Bruce McKittrick Rare Books (dealer) 120 Bruni, L. 29n32, 135n25, 144 Bryling, N. 202 Buchheit, V. 22n4 Büchner, K. 21n4 Buck, A. 26n21 Bultelius, G. 115 Cairns, F. 106 Californiados carmen (Mariano de Iturriaga) 85 Cambridge Companion to Virgil, The 61–2 Capellarius, M. 84 Carlias (Verino) 80–1 Carminum de origine et rebus gestis regum Daniae et ducum Holsatiae libri V (Bocerus) 84 Carnivalia (Taubmannus) 88 Carolingian period 99 Carrara, U. 83 Casali, S. 52 Casaubon, I. 51 Castelvetro, L. 57 Catalepton 191n3, 199

211

INDEX

Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum 201n15 Celestina (Rojas) 185n23 Cevallos, F. J. 32n2 Chevalier, M. 35 Christiad, The (Vida) 61, 61n27, 86 Christianity, Virgil’s relationship to 98–100 Christias (Clarke) 86 Christias (Monsmoretanus) 86 Christias (Ross) 86 church and medieval education 100 Cicero 76–8, 134–5, 161 Ciriaco d’Ancona 30n34 Clarke, R. 86 Clausen, W. 37n24 Cleyn, F. 93n2, 155–6 Codex Romanus of Virgil 156 Codex Vaticanus of Virgil 156 Cohen, W. 48n39 Columbeidos libri priores duo (Stella) 83 Columbus. Carmen epicum (Carrara) 83 Coming of the Book, The (Febvre and Martin) 86, 101n23, 101n24, 114n2 commentary: of Ascensius 197; of Cooke 150–1; of Donatus 29, 54, 67, 76; of Fulgentius 99; handwritten 161, 183; of Landino 76, 163–4, 196; of Piccolomini 77; of Pretinus de Puppio 200; of Regulus 164–9; of Ruaeus 181–2; school 188; see also la Cerda’s commentary Companion to the Study of Virgil, A (Horsfall) 63n33 Constantinus (Donatus) 79 Conte, G. B. 8, 38n24, 107 Cooke, T. 150–1 Cortesius, T. 84 Corvinus, E. 85 Corvinus, L. 115 Coyssard, J. 169–71 Coyssard, M. 104 Cranz, F. E. 118–19 Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, A (McGann) 109 Curtius, E. R. 156–7 Dactius, A. 87 Dale, A. van 114 Dante 80 Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Johnson) 22n6, 37n24 David, J.-L. 155 Davidias (Marulus) 85

David necdum Hebraeorum rex (Bom) 85 Davis, E. 34 De beneficiis (Seneca) 138n36 De fortitudine (Pontano) 27, 27n23 De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus studiis adulescentiae (Vergerio) 29n32 De inventione dialectica (Agricola) 168 De laboribus Herculis (Salutati) 54n15, 129n12, 134, 135n22, 136n27, 136n29, 137n31, 138n37, 138n39, 139n42, 139n44, 140n49, 141, 141n52, 141n53, 141n55, 142n58, 142n59, 143n63, 143n68 de la Mare, A. C. 146n79 De laudibus Matthiae Corvini poemation (Cortesius) 84 De liberorum educatione (Piccolomini) 29n32, 160 de Lima Leitão, J. 149 De morali disciplina (Filelfo) 25 De navigatione Christophori Columbi libri IV (Gambara) 83 De obitu Divi Alfonsi Estensis epicedion (Giraldi) 82 De ordine docendi et studendi (Guarino) 29n32 De otio religioso (Petrarca) 25 De partu virginis (Sannazaro) 85 De rebus gestis Guilielmi comitis Nassovii (Wertelo) 84 De rerum natura (Lucretius) 98 De studiis et litteris (Bruni) 29n32, 135n25 deviant focalization 107n42 De vita et gestis Christi (Bonus) 86 Díaz, J. S. 55n20 Dido 14–15, 17, 37, 78–9, 106, 132–3, 141–2, 150–1, 156, 182; see also Aeneas; Frischlin, N. digitization of manuscripts 114–17 DiRT (Digital Research Tools, at Project Bamboo) 110 Disputationes Camaldulenses (Landino) 115, 162–3 Divine Comedy (Dante) 80 Divi Sebastiani Encomion (Mutius) 85 Dolet, É. 84, 202 Dominici, G. 99, 134n21, 139n44, 141n52 Donatus, A. 79, 156 Donatus, T. C.: commentary to Aeneid 29, 54, 67, 76; optimistic interpretation by 54–5, 150 Drake, G. C. 61n27 Draxe, T. 114

212

INDEX

Dream of Scipio (Cicero) 78 Dryden, J. 93n2, 155–6 Early English Books Online (EEBO) 96, 109–10 early printed books: case study 120–3; digitization of 114–17; handwritten notes in 152–3; resources for study of 117–20; see also Virgil/Virgilian texts, early printed editions of Eclogues (Virgil) 99, 196, 202 Εἰρηναρχία sive Elizabetha, de pacatissimo Angliae statu (Ocland) 84 Elenchus Auctorum Veterum 51 Encomiastica 84 Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice, The (Hardison) 29n29, 67n6, 67n7, 76n1, 136n28 enumerative bibliography 96–7, 111–12 Epic and Empire (Quint) 35n19, 42n33 epic and tragedy in the Renaissance 66–7 epideictic rhetoric 30, 53, 67–9, 76–7, 136–7, 145, 177n8, 195–6, 197n10; see also praise-and-blame poetics Epistolario (Dominici) 54n13, 138n38, 138n40, 139n41, 139n43, 139n45, 140n50, 141n51, 141n54 Epistolarum Francisci Philelphi libri sedecim (Ciriaco d’Ancona) 30n34 Erasmus, D. 51, 114, 196, 196n8 Erasmushaus (dealer) 120 Ercilla, A. see Araucana, La (Ercilla) Estienne, H. 186 Ethics (Aristotle) 168 Eve, Adam and 11–12, 14–15, 17 Evelyn, J. 185 Expositio Virgilianae continentiae (Fulgentius) 54n17, 140n48, 141 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) 76n1 familiari, Le (Petrarca) 53n7 Febvre, L. 101n23, 101n24, 114n2, 183n18 Fellowship in Paradise Lost (Verbart) 10n18 Feltria (Pandoni) 84 Festa, N. 30n33, 117n7 Field, A. 162n6 Filelfo, F. 1n2, 25, 25n20, 30, 38 Filelfo, G. M. 84 Filelfo in Milan (Robin) 25n17 Fletcher, P. 85

folio format 101 Forbes, C. A. 61n27 Fowler, D. 22n5, 37n24, 107n42 Francisci Valesii Gallorum regis fata (Dolet) 84 Frellonius, J. 203 Frischlin, N. 66n5; biography 64–5; Dido 65–6; Julius Redivivus 65; rhetoric and poetics 68–9; theory of genre 66–7; Virgil’s language and 70–1 Froben, J. 114 From Humanism to the Humanities (Grafton and Jardine) 3n5, 186 Fubini, R. 138n37 Fulgentius, F. P. 54, 67–8, 99, 141 furor (rage) 26, 36, 40, 45, 62, 106–7, 148 Galbiati, J. 24n15 Galinsky, K. 2n4, 22, 22n7, 38, 38n25 Gambara, L. 83 Gardner, J. 86–7 Garrison, J. D. 28n28 Genette, G. 117n9 Georgics (Virgil) 85, 94, 196, 202 Georgii, H. 54n16 Georgius (Spagnoli) 85 Georgontarchontomachia (Beronicius) 88 Gerard, D. 183n18 Ghellinus, B. 187 Giovanni da Corella, D. di 85 Giovanni da San Miniato 134n21, 141n52 Giovanna da Siena 134n22 Giraldi, G. 82 Gnesotto, A. 29n32 Gothic script 117–18 Grafton, A. 3n5, 161, 186–7 Gravinus, A. 84 Grendler, P. 176 Grüninger, J. 155 Gryphius, S. 180, 202 Guarino, B. 29n32, 70–3, 104, 160–1 Guarino da Verona 137n30, 185–7 Hahn, E. A. 23n11 Handbuch der illustrierten VergilAusgaben 1502–1840 (Suerbaum) 94 handwriting reform, humanistic 117–18 handwritten commentaries 161, 183 Hankins, J. 51, 162n6 Hardie, P. 22n4, 37n23, 62 Harding, D. 7, 16, 59 Hardison, O. B., Jr. 29n29, 53, 67, 76n1, 136n28

213

INDEX

Harrison, S. J. 22, 38 Harvard School see Aeneid, pessimistic readings Hathaway, B. 57n21 Hausmann, F.-R. 200n13 Hegendorffinus, C. 202 Heinze, R. 62 Helm, R. 54n17, 140n48 Hercules (Seneca) 134–5 Hermannus Alemannus 54, 77 Hesse, Rector 152–3, 170–1, 178n12, 179 Heyne, C. G. 192n5 Hildegardis Magna (Frischlin) 68 Hildegardis Magna; Dido; Venus; Helvetiogermani: Historisch-kritische Edition, Übersetzung, Kommentar (Frischlin) 66n5 Historia Iesu Christi (Nicolasius) 86 Historia Josephi a fratribus in Aegyptum venditi (Turnau) 85 History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, A (Weinberg) 27n26, 57n21, 67n6, 77n4 Hoffmannus, N. 152 Hofmann, H. 80n6 Homer 67, 87 homosexual advances 178n9, 196n8 Horace 57, 77, 137, 202–3 Horsfall, N. M. 23, 63n33, 106 Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Black) 188 Hume, P. 7, 59 Hunt, L. L. 44n35 IJsewijn, J. 80n6 Iliad (Homer) 67 imaginative syllogism 165–6 In B. Mariam Virginem . . . libri VII (Polcari) 85 Incunabula Short Title Catalogue 119 Íñigo Madrigal, L. 32n3 In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Kallendorf) 24n15, 53n7, 76n2; Interpretationes Vergilianae (Georgii) 54n16 Interpretationes Virgiliane di Tiberio Claudio Donato, Le (Squillante Saccone) 29n29 intertextuality 8–19, 81; see also Araucana, La (Ercilla) ira (anger) 25–8, 36, 40, 45, 62, 82, 103, 148

I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL) 116 Iter Italicum (Kristeller) 119n14, 146n79 Jardine, L. 3n5, 161, 186–7 John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Martindale) 59n24 Johnson, W. R. 22n6, 37n24 Jones, J. W., Jr. 133n18 Josephais (Corvinus) 85 Julius Caesar Scaliger Poetices libri septem (Buck) 26n21 Julius Redivivus (Frischlin) 65 Junta, L. A. 191, 203 Kahn, V. 30 Kallendorf, C. 24n15, 25n16, 26n21, 29n29, 30n33, 30n35, 53n7, 76n2, 93n1, 102n27, 102n28, 103n29, 104n32, 160n1, 160n2, 161n4, 162n5, 164n9, 195n6, 196n9, 200n14, 201n15, 201n16 Klingner, F. 21n4 Kloss, G. F. B., Dr. 180n15 Knight, W. F. J. 23n11 Kristeller, P. O. 117–19, 146n79 Kristeva, J. 7 la Cerda’s commentary: on final scene of Aeneid 55–9, 62; introduction 51–3; marginal notes in 147, 153; and modern scholarship 61–3 Lachmann, K. 116 Laetus, E. 81 Laird, A. 52 Landino, C. 196; commentary to Aeneid 76; Disputationes Camaldulenses 115–16, 162–3; and Plato 162–4 Lantzenberger, M. 199 Laocoön 156 Latin Manuscript Books before 1600 (Kristeller) 118 Lautero 44 Leal, L. 34 Lechias (Venceslaus) 84 Leonardo Bruni Aretino. Humanistischphilosophische Schriften (Baron) 29n32 Le Plat du Temple, V. A. C. 149–50 Lerner, I. 35 letters: Cicero’s 70; Filelfo’s 30; Melanchthon’s 195; Salutati’s 134–45 Libreria Philobiblon (dealer) 120 Locustae vel pietas Iesuitica (Fletcher) 85 Lohe, P. 116 Lucretius 98

214

INDEX

Interpretation in the Renaissance (Allen) 24n15

Ludwig, Duke 65 Lupher, D. A. 44n35 Lyne, R. O. A. M. 38n24, 107 Lyotard, J.-F. 109 Maggs (dealer) 120 Maier, I. 118 Mambelli, G. 26n21, 94–5, 147 Mandelbaum, A. 178n8 Mantuanus, B. 85 manuscrits d’Ange Politien, Les (Maier) 118 Manutius, A. 199–200 Maphaeus Vegius and His Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid: A Chapter on Vergil in the Renaissance (Brinton) 26n22 Margaretica (Laetus), intertextuality with Aeneid 81 Mariano de Iturriaga, J. de 85 Martial 61 Martias (Filelfo) 84 Martin, H.-J. 101n23, 101n24, 114n2, 183n18 Martindale, C. 8, 59n24, 147 Marulus, M. 85 Massumi, B. 109n51 Mazarin, J. 148 Mazzatinti, G. 118 McGann, J. 109, 109n49, 116 McKay, A. 93n1 Melanchthon, P. 180–1, 195, 202 Melczer, W. 34 Melissomachia 87 Mellius, J. 85 Menéndez y Pelayo, M. 33 Mercier, A. 105, 105n36 Methodus declamandi (Frischlin) 69 Meyen, J. a 170n21, 179n12 Mickl, J. C. A. 83 Mignolo, W. 50n44 Minturno 67 Miscomini, A. 102 Molina, V. R. 49 Moloch 11 Monsmoretanus, H. 86 Morgan, J. S. 203 Moss, A. 104n30, 170, 185, 188, 202n17 Müller, J. 114 Münsinger, J. 84 Murrin, M. 45 Mutineis (Rococciolo) 82 Mutius, M. 85 Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical

Nelson, J. S. 29n32 neo-Latin epics/texts 114, 116, 118–21; Burlesques 87–9; critical editions of 113–17, 121; epic in early modern criticism and theory 75–7; hero from the Christian religion 84–7; hero from the classical past 78–80; hero from the contemporary present 81–4; hero from the medieval past 80–1; modern critical editions 115–17 Nicolasius, G. 86 Nicolinus, D. 203 Nicolopulos, J. 41 Oath of the Horatii (David) 155 Ocland, C. 84 octavo format 101–2 Odyssey (Homer) 67 Oliveira, Manuel de 85 Opera omnia (Meyen) 169n18, 170n21, 179n12 Opere latine (Petrarca) 24n15 Opuscula (Virgil) 190–3, 197n10, 197n11 Orgel, S. 196n8 Orlando furioso (Ariosto) 18, 27–8, 27n26, 38 Osservationi (Toscanella) 176–9, 185, 187 Otis, B. 106 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 154 pagan literature 86, 98 Palimpsestes (Genette) 117n9 Pandoni, G. P. de’ 84 Papyri Vergilianae (Scappaticcio) 98 Paradise Lost (Milton): Adam and Eve 14–15; as an optimistic reader 16–18; Satan, association with Turnus 13–14; Satan as new Aeneas 10–13, 59–61 Parente, J., Jr. 69n13 Parry, M. 21 Parthenice Mariana (Mantuanus) 85 Parvus, I. 190 Pastor Bodmer, B. 44n35, 49 Peña, M. 34 Père Juan de la Cerda S.J., Le (Stevens) 51 Perrin, P. 148–9 Perry, A. 37n24 Perseus Digital Library 109 Petit, F. 104

215

INDEX

Petit, J. 122 Petrarca, F.: Africa 30, 78–9, 117; Ambrosian codex 129n13, 133; analyzing Aeneas 24, 24n15, 29–30, 38, 53, 55, 78–9, 114, 117, 195; death of 126; and Neo-Latin literature 114; treatment of Turnus 58, 61 Petrarch, Scipio, and the “Africa”: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream (Bernardo) 30n33 Petronius 98 Pharsalia (Lucan) 35n19 Piccolomini, A. S. 29n32, 57, 77, 160, 175; see also Pius II, Pope Pierleoni, G. de’ 138n38 Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (Garrison) 28n28 Pindar 59n24 Pius II, Pope 29, 53 Placcius,V. 83 Plantin family 101 Plato 25, 76, 162–4 Plus ultra (Mickl) 83 Poema epicum de conceptione B. Mariae (Oliveira) 85 Poetice (Scaliger) 57 Poetics (Aristotle) 54, 56–7, 62, 66, 77, 136n29, 136n30, 165, 166n12, 166n14 Poetry of the Aeneid, The (Putnam) 62 Polcari, I. 85 Poliziano, A. 25n18 Pontano, G. 27, 30, 38 Portesio, A. de Zannis de 191 Portesio, B. de Zannis d 203 Pöschl, V. 23n13 praise-and-blame poetics 53–4, 56, 76–7, 82, 133, 137, 143, 177; see also epideictic rhetoric Pretinus de Puppio, L. 200 Priapea 199, 200–3 Price, D. 68n9–68n11, 69, 69n12 Project Gutenberg 109 Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, in locos communes digesta . . . 71–2, 122, 169–70 Pucci, P. 8 Pulci, L. 81 Putnam, M. C. J. 37n24, 62, 85, 107 Quaritch, B. (dealer) 120 quarto format 101 Quinn, K. 62

Quinque martyres (Bencius) 85 Quint, D. 35, 42n33 Radivilias (Radvanas) 84 Rädle, F. 68 Radvanas, J. 84 Rape of Persephone (Bernini) 155 Rebecca and Susanna (Frischlin) 68 Regulus, S. and Aristotle 164–9 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 168 Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Kahn) 30n38 Riccoboni, A. 57 Richardson, J. 13 Robin, D. 25, 25n17 Robortello, F. 56–7 Rococciolo, F. 82, 115 Rojas, F. de 151–2, 185n23 Roman Vergil (Knight) 23n11 Römische Geisteswelt (Klingner) 22n4 Rosae 198, 199 Ross, A. 86 Rossetti Archive, The 109 Ruaeus, C. 181–2 Rüpke, J. 80n6 Sacon, J. 203 Sacré, D. 66n4, 80n6, 87 Said, E. 50 Salutati, C., annotations of Virgil’s text 53–4, 77; ancient life and customs 131; application of his poetic principles 139–43; definition of poet 134–8; De laboribus Herculis 54n15, 129n12, 134–6, 137n31, 138n37, 138n39, 139n42, 139n44, 140n49, 141, 142n58, 142n59, 143n63, 143n68, 144; explanations of obvious questions 132–3; figures of speech 134; geographical identification notes 130; indexing notes 128–9; individual words from Virgil’s text 131–2; letters 134–45; paraphrases 132; poetic allegory 139–42, 145; poetic language 138–9; purchase of Basel manuscript 127; reference to Servius 129, 131, 133–4, 145 Salviati, L. 27–8, 27n26, 38 Sannazaro, J. 85 Satyricon (Petronius) 98 Scaliger, J. C. 26, 51, 56–7 Scaliger, J. J. 199 Scappaticcio, M. C. 98

216

INDEX

Schillingsburg, P. 110 Schmitt, C. B. 57n21, 169 Schneider, B. 26n21, 120–1 Scotus, O. 203 Sebastiani Reguli Brasichellensis in primum Aeneidos Virgilii librum ex Aristotelis De arte poetica et Rhetorica praeceptis explicationes (Regulus) 164n10 Secretum (Baron) 117 Segal, C. 38n24 Seneca 134–5 Serpa, F. 22 Servius 129 Sforza, F. 25 Silvestris, B. 99, 140n48, 142n56, 142n57 similes 39, 42, 86, 104, 132, 153, 170, 179, 185 Sims, J. 16–17 Sitterson, J. C., Jr 18, 28n27, 38 Smith, L. 139n41 sodomy 178n9 Sotheby, S. L. 180n15 Spagnoli, G. B. see Mantuanus, B. Spenser, E. 76n1 Sphortias (Filelfo) 25, 25n20, 88–9 Squillante Saccone, M. 29n29 Steinman, J. 121 Steinmann, M. 146n79 Stella, G. C. 83 Stevens, J. 52 Stevenson, T. 98 Strozzi, T. V. 81–2 Suerbaum, W. 94 Supplement to the Aeneid (Vegio) 26 Sutton, D. 115 TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) 110 Taubmannus, F. 88 Tegualda 41–2 theory of genre 66–7 Theotokon seu de vita et obitu beatae Virginis Mariae (Corella) 85 Theresias 84 Thomas, R. 7, 18, 22n5, 22n6, 26n22, 38, 38n24 Thurn, N. 80 Toscanella, O. 153–4, 174–9, 185, 187 Tournoy, G. 66n4 Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento (Weinberg) 57n21

Tucker, G. H. 66n4 Turnau, M. 85 Turnus 83, 106–7, 151; La Cerda’s treatment of 55, 58; and Satan 12–13; slaying of 62 Universal Short Title Catalogue 96, 101, 119, 192n4 Ut Granum Sinapis: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Jozef IJsewijn (Tournoy and Sacré) 66n4 Valla, G. 54 Valla, L. 137n30 Van der Aa, P. 114 Vegio, M. 26, 30, 38, 53, 85, 120, 121–2, 195 Velasco, H. de 36n22 Venceslaus, C. 84 Venetian publishers 201 Venetian schools, curriculum of 175–6 Verbart, A. 10n18, 14, 17 Vergerio, P. P. 29n32 Vergilio nel Rinascimento italiano da Dante a Torquato Tasso (Zabughin) 24n15 Vergil über die Sendung Roms. Untersuchungen zum Bellum Poenicum und zur Aeneis (Buchheit) 22n4 Verino, U. 80 Vettori, P. 57 Vickers, B. 29n29 Vida, M. G. 61, 86–7 Vincentius, B. 203 Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Otis) 22n4 Virgil: Georgics (Thomas) 22n5 Virgile en France (Le Plat) 149 Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, The (Ziolkowski and Putnam) 93n1 Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Hardie) 22n4, 37n23 Virgil/Virgilian texts: Bible and Virgil’s language 98–100; bibliography 94–7, 112; and Christianity 98–100; as convinced Augustan 106; criticism 21–3, 62–3; illustrated editions 155; marginal annotations 179–80; moral reading of 169–71; and principles of praise and blame 53–5; and printed books (1500–1800) 147–57; Renaissance

217

INDEX

editions of 101–2; in school curriculum 70–1, 101–2, 105, 174–89; translations into vernacular languages 111; woodcuts and engravings 155–6; see also neo-Latin epics/texts; Salutati, C., annotations of Virgil’s text Virgil/Virgilian texts, early printed editions of 102; canon of shorter poems 191–3; digitization of 109–10; marginal cues and notes in 102–5, 183–4; Opuscula 193–4, 196–8; Renaissance readers and 199–203; survival of 95–6; transformation in later culture 194–6 Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Woodward) 29n32 Wasserman, E. 8 Waswo, R. 83

Weinberg, B. 27n26, 57n21, 67n6, 77n4, 202n17 Werner, S. 93n1 Wertelo, G. B. 84 Westheimerus, B. 200 White, P. 197n10, 197n11, 198n12 William, A. L. 87–8 Wilson, A. S. 79n5, 87 Witt, R. G. 24n16, 141n52 Wlosok, A. 22, 23n13 Woods, M. C. 188 Woodward, W. H. 29n32 Works of Milton (Columbia) 10n18 Works of Virgil, The (Dryden) 93n2 Zabughin, V. 24n15 Zambeccari, P. 134n21 Zonarini, G. 134n21, 141, 141n51, 141n52 Zuppardo, M. 84

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