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E. The Late Middle Ages and Dante

Our goal thus far has been to trace the paths by which the hermeneutics of the later Neoplatonists, and more specifically their eclectic tradition of Homeric exegesis, were transmitted to the Latin West. At this point, near the end of our path, we have come too far from the central concerns of the present study to attempt to do justice to the complex of ideas and influences that shaped the Latin Middle Ages' conceptions of allegory,

[184] Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods , pp. 170-74. See ch. 6E, with n. 213, below on Dante's knowledge of the allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid developed in Fulgentius's Expositio virgilianae continentiae .

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both active and interpretive. Medieval allegory is in certain of its manifestations demonstrably an outgrowth of such authors as Prudentius, whose background in turn depended on the ancient interpretive traditions. But by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Dionysian Platonism, the tradition of allegorical interpretation of myth stretching back to Fulgentius, the traditions of Christian exegesis, and the ideas about meaning in literature transmitted through Macrobius, Boethius, and Martianus Capella had all interacted over such a long period that they had generated a complexity of attitudes and practice regarding text and meaning that lies beyond the scope of our inquiry. It is nevertheless important to establish that, even when Homer was little more than a name associated with such heroes as Achilles and Ulysses, the intellectuals of late medieval Europe had reason to see that dim figure, whose works they could not read, as a poet of visionary authority. We must establish as well that the interpretive tradition we have been tracing is the source—albeit remote—of the attitudes toward the poetry of Homer that enabled the poet of the Divina Commedia to attempt in his own powerfully original way to add yet one more masterpiece to a tradition he explicitly traced to Homer. Dante provides an appropriate terminus for this survey, because he stands just on the brink of the return of the text of Homer (which occurred within a generation of his death) and at the end of a period of some 900 years in which Homer had existed for the West only as fragments embedded in the literature of rhetoric and philosophy, a poetic reputation without a text.[185]

The ninth-century translations of the Dionysian corpus brought into the Latin West a tradition of exegesis, confined in its application to scriptural texts, that sprang from the milieu of Proclus. But the Latin Middle Ages already had a deep tradition of biblical exegesis stemming from a closely related ancient Platonist tradition and traceable at least as far as Origen. This exegetical method was based on the postulation of three or four levels of meaning in scripture, and its major modern historian, Henri de Lubac, takes the following thirteenth-century formulation as canonical:

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria ,
Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia .[186]



[185] On the mechanics of the return and the first perceptions of Homer in fourteenth-century Italy, see D. S. Carne-Ross, "The Means and the Moment."

[186] Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale , vol. 1, p. 23. "The letter indicates what was done, the allegory what you are to believe, / The moral sense, what you are to do, the anagogic what you are to strive for."

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Several important forms of the tripartite model (consisting of historic-mystical-moral meanings and historic-moral-anagogical/allegorical meanings) can be found in Origen, who anticipates the later Neoplatonists on the "literary microcosm" by associating it with a tripartite model of human psychology that he derives from Saint Paul.[187] For de Lubac, Origen and Clement stand at the very beginning of the tradition of Christian exegesis, and his masterful history stresses their originality and independence from their predecessor Philo. Many elements of their thought concerning the meaning of scriptural texts can nevertheless be found in Philo, and the great Philo scholar H. A. Wolfson insisted that the threefold model of scriptural meaning could be traced straight to him (and that Philo's own method in turn owed much to pagan exegesis of Homer).[188] If Origen's intellectual debts remain the subject of debate, his influence is nevertheless easy to trace. Condemned in the East by Justinian in 543, his writings had already been translated into Latin during the last years of the fourth century and the early fifth, and it was in the Latin West that his influence was greatest.[189]

Although the essentials of threefold and fourfold exegesis were frequently restated and constantly applied in the West from at least the sixth century on, the reunion of a complex model of meaning in literature with the impulse to generate new works incorporating such structures does not seem to have occurred before the twelfth (with the exception of the popular personification allegory on the model of Prudentius, whose origins have already been discussed). In the time of Bernard Silvestris and Alain de Lille, many of the threads of thought about the epic tradition and about structures of meaning in literature we have been discussing came together in the School of Chartres. Here we find the decisive influence of the Timaeus (by way of Calcidius), of Martianus Capella, and of Boethius, infused with the Neoplatonism of Proclus imported by way of the Dionysian corpus.[190] We find as well an ancient epic poem—the Aeneid —as the focus of an influential commentary that taps

[187] De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale , vol. 1, p. 198. Cf. Chadwick in CHLGEMP, p. 183.

[188] Wolfson, Philo , vol. 1, pp. 17-33. Cf. de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale , vol. 1, p. 204.

[189] De Lubac, Exégése médiévale , vol. 1, p. 219.

[190] Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century , pp. 6-7. Ernst Robert Curtius (European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages , pp. 203-7) likewise emphasizes the continuity of the allegorical tradition from the Neopythagoreans to Alain de Lille, culminating in the latter's assertion of the presence of multiple meanings in his own Anticlaudianus .

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the tradition we have been examining (Servius, Macrobius, Fulgentius, and the other mythographers). The central subject of the Aeneid is said to be precisely the one Porphyry found central to the Odyssey : "As a philosopher, [Virgil] has described the nature of human life. He proceeds as follows: within the covering [integumentum , i.e., the story] he describes the acts and experiences of the human soul temporarily located in a human body."[191]

This commentary was formerly attributed with confidence to Bernard Silvestris, but that attribution has since been doubted.[192] It belongs in any case to the twelfth century, and to the milieu of Bernard, and, with his name attached to it, had sufficient authority to become a school text in Italy.[193] Following Fulgentius, the commentary makes the claim that Virgil was both poet (and maker of integumenta ) and philosopher (cryptically conveying human truths), but that the sequence of the two resultant Aeneids remains different. The fiction, beginning in medias res , follows the ordo artificialis , but the "philosopher's truth" lying beneath follows the ordo naturalis and proceeds sequentially. Thus the shipwreck of book 1 is a metaphor for birth (= Fulg. Expos. Virg. cont . 91.6-11), books 2 and 3 contain fables of childhood, and so forth. The cycle would seem to be complete with book 6, which takes up most of the commentator's time and energy, but he breaks off as Aeneas is about to enter Elysium, and his conclusions are lost to us.

Although his major sources knew Greek, the commentator clearly does not—the few words with which he sprinkles his text are badly garbled—and so he predictably makes little reference to Homer. His perspective on Homer is, in fact, remarkably close to Dante's. He considers Virgil the author of a poetic fiction about the Trojan War, "not following the historical truth, which Dares Phrygius described," but rather following the wishes of Augustus (p. 1). In creating his ficmenta , the Latinorum poetarum maximus followed the Graecorum poetarum maximus (p. 1), and it is impossible not to conclude that the "twin doctrines" (the poetic fiction and the philosophical truth) discussed at length in elucidating Virgil were present as well in the works of Homer. This, however, is the only point at which our commentator mentions Homer's name, and it is clear

[191] Scribit ergo in quantum est philosophus humane vite naturam. Modus agendi talis est: in integumento describit quid agat vel quid paciatur humanus spiritus in humano corpore temporaliter positus ([Bernardus Silvestris], Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii , p. 3).

[192] See the comments of J. W. Jones and E. F. Jones in their edition, pp. ix-xi.

[193] Jones and Jones (n. 192 above), p. xix.

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that the gap separating him from Virgil is very great, and that from Homer hopelessly greater.

The influence in the School of Chartres of Neoplatonism, and specifically of the interpretive ideas transmitted by the traditions under examination here, has been explored in a recent study by Winthrop Wetherbee. He argues for a development in the twelfth century closely analogous to the one we have found in the fifth: a wedding of ancient works (themselves with some allegorical content) and recent Platonizing allegorical commentary to produce a new kind of deliberately allegorical poetry. "In satires, didactic and cosmic 'visions', and a host of occasional lyrics, [Martianus, Boethius] and the insights of their commentators are assimilated to the uses of original creation."[194] The result is that "new kinds of literary expression become possible,"[195] and the kinds of meaning postulated by an interpretive tradition are incorporated in new works that themselves imitate ancient models conceived in ways that would have bewildered their authors and their first public.

This pattern of influence by way of a transforming interpretive tradition may well be very widespread indeed. In the cases of antiquity and the Middle Ages, the process is very slow and in some instances recoverable. Some surviving interpretive texts allow us to examine the complete equation:

The text generates a literature of commentary that stands in greater and greater opposition to the text's apparent meaning until at last a new text emerges, able to replace both. To put it rather differently, the author conceives his relationship to a tradition as one of imitation, or at least of participation, but his own historicity (given concrete form in the traditions under discussion by the commentaries that mediate between him and the text) has transformed that text and imposed on the imitation a radically new structure of meaning.

Wetherbee is concerned principally to explore the influence of Platonizing allegorism in the poetry of Bernard Silvestris and Alain de Lille, both working in genres removed from epic as usually conceived. But he goes on to explore the influence of these poets in vernacular poetry and

[194] Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry , p. 126.

[195] Ibid., p. 143.

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in the narratives of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes. A passage from the prologue to the Lais of Marie de France calls up the familiar idea that there is a deliberately maintained distance between the poetic fictions of the ancients and their intention:

Es livres ke jadis feseient
Assez oscurement diseient . . .[196]

Her idea of their motivation in "speaking obscurely" is more original. The early poets, she claims, anticipated the subtler understanding of later readers and wrote not for their limited and boorish contemporaries but for the ideally sensitive audience they anticipated. Wetherbee finds only slight traces of Chartrian influence here, but the Erec et Enide of Chrétien de Troyes displays "an elaborate pattern of allusions to the 'philosophical' Aeneid. "[197] Thus, over a century before Dante, vernacular poetry in an epic mode had begun to show the influence of a renewed interest in ancient epic seen through the eyes of an allegorizing Platonist interpretive tradition. In an intellectual world virtually without Greek, the commentators and poets of the twelfth century looked no further than Virgil. But Homer stood there beyond Virgil as his master and model, who had doubtless taught him the basic procedures of his poetry and the relationship between integumentum and philosophical truth. Neither poet, certainly, had been satisfied with the mere historical facts of the Trojan War. As the commentary attributed to Bernard Silvestris indicates, the twelfth century held that Dares Phrygius constituted the reliable historical source. The goals of the epic poets were far more elevated and complex.

Looking further among the Chartrians and beyond, we find the influence of Platonist exegesis in a form manifestly derivative from the Dionysiac corpus in Guillaume de Conches (himself a student of Bernard of Chartres) and in his contemporary Abelard. Peter Dronke, the most recent scholar to examine the critical theories of these thinkers, calls attention to the adoption by Richard of St.-Victor and by Guillaume de Conches and Abelard of the Dionysian term

in the transliteration (symbolum ) used by John Scotus Eriugena in his translation.[198] It would appear from Dronke's study of a number of still unpublished twelfth-

[196] Ibid., p. 228.

[197] Ibid., p. 236.

[198]

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century interpretive texts that the distinction between

and

, already complicated in Proclus by the postulation of non-mimetic

of eternal

, was further blurred in the late Middle Ages. The idea, however, of a non-mimetic, symbolic art, directing the mind toward the divine through "dissimilar" symbols, and the claim that this is the theological mode of myth, are an important part of the legacy of late Athenian Neoplatonism brought to fruition in the twelfth century.

In his glosses on Macrobius, moreover, Guillaume de Conches shows a particular interest in the Porphyrian allegory of the cave of the nymphs. As Jean Pépin has pointed out, Guillaume's language makes it clear that he had another source beyond Macrobius for Porphyry's essay.[199] The Chartrians were clearly fascinated by Neoplatonic mystical allegory and had access to sources beyond the most obvious ones surveyed above.

Dante never leaves us in doubt concerning the tradition in which he is working. Indeed, one is inclined to say that he is too clear about that tradition, and that that clarity can be misleading. The Virgil who breaks his long silence in the dark wood of the first canto of the Inferno will constitute Dante's liberation from error, his mentor and guide. Why Virgil? In the personification allegory that is the prevalent mode of that opening canto, Virgil is usually said to represent Reason, the highest aspiration of man short of the revelation of true religion. Though there is doubtless much truth in this reading, he represents something more as well for Dante. He stands for the poetic imagination that can (as in Eclogue 4) clothe itself in the language of prophecy and so reveal more than it can know.

By 1300 Virgil was seen as a poet whose fictive integumenta cloaked a philosophical core, and when he takes Dante by the hand to lead him as far on the spiritual journey as his own limitations permit, he is accepting Dante into the company of such poets, those who aspire to the grand challenge of epic. As the two descend together past the forbidding gates, the first sight that greets them is the school of poets, gathered around its founder, Homer. Now the equation is complete. Dante aspires to speak as Virgil's mouthpiece—that is, to give voice again to the epic tradition Virgil had taken up from Homer. I would suggest that, without the interpretive tradition that has been the subject of this study, Dante could not have conceived of his own poem as the heir of the Aeneid and ultimately of the mysterious and forgotten Iliad and Odyssey .[200]

[199] Pépin, "La Fortune du de antro nympharum de Porphyre en occident," pp. 532-33.

[200] This position is taken by David Thompson in Dante's Epic Journeys . Developing an idea he traces to H. T. Silverstein ("Dante and Virgil the Mystic"), Thompson attempts to "relate Dante's major allegorical mode to classical and medieval interpretations of epic poetry rather than to patristic Biblical exegesis" (Dante's Epic Journeys , p. ix; cf. pp. 4-11), and relies heavily on the commentary on the Aeneid attributed to Bernard Silvestris.

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The problem of Dante's use of this tradition, and of his debts to it, can be broken down into several smaller problems. First, there is Dante's own allegory in the Commedia ; second, there is the theoretical statement on allegory contained in the letter to Can Grande; and finally—particularly interesting from our point of view—there are the references to Homer and to Homeric stories in Dante's works. Before starting, however, it should be stated clearly that we are dealing here with intangibles. There is no proof that Dante knew the Aeneid commentary attributed to Bernard Silvestris.[201] There is no irrefutable proof that he knew even so widely influential an author as Macrobius, though several passages in his works would appear to echo the Saturnalia and the Commentary on Scipio's Dream .[202] By the end of the twelfth century, the influence of these Platonizing authors was pervasive, and even Aristotle, Dante's "maestro di color che sanno," could become a spokesman for Neoplatonic ideas in such pseudepigrapha as the Liber de causis .[203] For all the influence of Aquinas on Dante's intellectual development, it remains plausible that this popular and pervasive Platonizing tradition, inclined as it was to give a special position of authority to early epic, lies behind Dante's choice of genre and his definition of the tradition that, by his own declaration, he set out to extend.

The French Dante scholar André Pézard has suggested that the influence of the Platonic tradition on Dante was indeed very great, and that in the period 1290-92 Dante actually read not only such authors as Macrobius but the philosophers themselves. Pézard even expresses the belief that the late thirteenth century had Latin translations of Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry, since lost.[204] We may not want to follow Pézard to the extent of postulating lost translations, but we may take seriously

[201] Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys , p. 28 with note.

[202] See Georg Rabuse, "Saturne et l'échelle de Jacob," and for a summary, his article "Macrobio" in the Enciclopedia Dantesca (vol. 3, pp. 757-59).

[203] See ch. 6B above. Dante mentions the Liber de causis seven times without naming its author. He may well not have been deceived by the prevalent attribution of the work to Aristotle.

[204] A. Pézard, "La rotta gonna, " vol. 3, p. 258. Another possibility, raised by P. Renucci, is that allegorical reading of the Latin epic was introduced to Dante in Bologna, around 1304-6. See Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l'allégorie , p. 101, n. 1. Pépin surveys the instances of allegorized classical myth in Dante, pp. 101-18.

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his exposition of the pervasive Platonist themes not only in the Commedia but in the earlier works as well, and also his suggestion that Dante's conversion to philosophy after the death of Beatrice must (given the intellectual climate of his time) have exposed the poet to Platonism. There is even considerable evidence that Dante was influenced by Porphyry's essay on the cave of the nymphs. No medieval translation is known, but a series of echoes of the essay in the Commedia suggests that his knowledge of it went beyond what he could have learned from Macrobius.[205] If Dante does not mention such sources by name, we must remember that the Commedia is in a sense an antidote to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy . Dante's conversion to philosophy was short-lived, and the shaping ideology of the Commedia repeatedly reminds us of philosophy's inadequacy. The actual content of Dante's intellectual adventure of 1290-92—the books read and discussed—remains clothed in silence. But Pézard's proposal is a plausible one, which might explain not only scattered Platonic themes in Dante but even the eventual choice of epic as the vehicle for his most ambitious undertaking.

Dante's practice of allegory cannot be summed up simply, because it takes on multiple forms.[206] No one will deny the presence in Dante of personification allegory of a type easily traceable to Martianus Capella and to Prudentius, and far beyond them to Homer himself. We can class together here the personifications of abstractions whether named (For-tuna, Amor) or left nameless. Of the first sort there are few examples in Dante, and those are purely conventional. Dante's Fortuna has a wheel (Inf . 15.95), and of the eighteen instances of the noun, Vandelli's edition capitalizes six. This example is characteristic of a small class of personified abstractions, which have a role in the Commedia roughly comparable to that of such figures as Eris in the Iliad . More striking, but still not characteristic of Dante's style in general, are such figures as the three beasts of Inferno 1, variously interpreted as luxury, pride, and avarice, or as incontinence, violence, and fraud. This passage, along with the allegorical procession of Purgatorio 19, stands out as profoundly different in esthetic impact from the greater part of the poem. Here there exists little

[205] Pézard points to the influence of the essay in numerous passages including Par . 4.52-54 and 58-60; Par . 30.61-69, 90, 109; Par . 31.7-9 and 106, and Purg . 25.88-208. See the comments of Pépin ("La Fortune du de antro nympharum de Porphyre en occident," pp. 533-36), who concludes that Dante must have had some access to the essay other than Macrobius.

[206] There is a long bibliography on this subject, but the recent synthesis in Robert Hollander's Allegory in Dante's Commedia includes a useful survey of theories (pp. 3-14). Hollander's conclusions are discussed in n. 218 below.

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doubt that the surface of the fable is meant to be seen through , populated as it is by purely symbolic creatures with none of the immediacy and specificity of detail that characterize the greater part of the poem. Here, indeed, Dante evokes the "plaisir délicat de l'allégorisme"[207] central to the esthetics of much medieval art, and these passages were enough to set Dante's early commentators to work finding and explicating such symbolism throughout the poem. Nevertheless, these passages do stand out as uncharacteristic of the poem as a whole—personification allegory of this sort is within the range of Dante's styles, but it is by no means a major mode of expression in the Commedia .

What other modes of allegory characterize the Commedia ? Beyond this most familiar type, we encounter major problems of definition, and the most useful procedure will be to look to the poet's own statements on allegory. Given the extent of Dante's recorded statements on interpretation, the difficulty of relating those statements to his practice (at least in the Commedia ) is an indication of the richness and freedom from system of the poem. The most obviously relevant passages are in the Convivio , where a fourfold model of interpretation is developed, clearly dependent on the widespread medieval tradition of Christian exegesis. Dante distinguishes the literal, allegorical,[208] moral, and anagogical[209] meanings. This model from scriptural exegesis is here applied to three of Dante's own canzoni . The Convivio was abandoned before the beginning of work on the Commedia , but was originally intended to explicate fourteen poems in all. The obsession with explanation—the sense that the complete work consists not simply of poems but of poems accompanied by texts that instruct the reader and mediate between him and the poem—goes back still further, to the Vita Nuova , where poems and prose text are separated in time by the death of Beatrice (1290) and complement each other to create a complete narrative. Aside from the explanation of a few figures that hardly seem to us to require justification (e.g., VN 25), the interpretive texts of the Vita Nuova are descriptive and unambitious. And even in the Convivio , where the model from scriptural exegesis is evoked and applied, the emphasis remains on the literal meaning: "sic-come quello nella cui sentenza gli altri sono inchiusi" (2.1.67-68). This emphasis is borne out in the explanations themselves, and has made it

[207] See ch. 5, with n. 80, above.

[208] Dante characterizes the allegorical meaning as "quello che si nasconde sotto il manto di queste favole,. . una verità ascosa sotto bella menzogna" (Conv . 2.1.22-25).

[209] "cioè sovra senso" (Conv . 2.1.53).

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easy for those who would underline the modernity of Dante and the methodological acceptability of his mode of reading to minimize these matters.[210] Yet the fact remains that for Dante reading was a complex act of intellectual searching. It is doubtless true that he starts with the surface and treats that surface with great respect. When he is explicating his own poems, we may even say that he "respects the intention" of the poet. But in doing so, he is constantly aware that the goal lies beyond the surface. When the "litterale sentenza" is explained, then it is time to go on to the "allegorical and true exposition."[211]

When we look at Dante on poems remote from his own time, we find him reading epic in the framework provided by earlier allegorical commentators. Thus the Aeneid as an allegory of the ages of man reaches him from Fulgentius (Conv . 4.26).[212] We will certainly agree that Dante's view of antiquity is vastly richer and more complex than that of Fulgentius, whose naiveté and absurd etymologies represent one of the most extreme and least credible manifestations of the interpretive tradition.[213] Nevertheless, it was the tradition that insisted on the polysemous quality of poetry (and particularly of epic) that shaped Dante's conception of the poetic text, and that is the source to which we must go in order to understand the Commedia in the context of its tradition.

The letter to Can Grande (Ep . 10 in Toynbee's edition), whatever doubts may have been expressed regarding its authenticity,[214] is the logical outgrowth of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio . It is the interpretive complement to the Paradiso , and if its implications and its authenticity could be fully accepted, it should probably appear as preface to the final section of the Commedia .[215] The part of the letter that concerns us (sections 7-11) opens with the claim that there is no simple meaning of the text at hand (i.e., the Paradiso ), but rather that it is "polysemos ," (a word Dante apparently found in the lexicon of Uguccione da Pisa, likewise the source of the

[210] See, for example, R. S. Haller's comments on Dante's interpretive efforts in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri , pp. 122-23.

[211] ". . . è da procedere alla esposizione allegorica e vera" (Conv . 2.13.1-3).

[212] The commentary attributed to Bernard Silvestris is a likely intermediary. See Giorgio Padoan (s.v. "Bernardo Silvestre" in the Enciclopedia Dantesca , vol. 1, p. 607), who asserts that the interpretation is "quasi sicuramente" derived from the commentary, whether directly or indirectly.

[213] On Fulgentius and Dante, see Ubaldo Pizzani in the Enciclopedia Dantesca vol. 3, p. 72 s.v. "Fulgenzio."

[214] See Paget Toynbee, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae , p. 163.

[215] Itaque, formula consummata epistolae, ad introductionem oblati operis aliquid sub lectoris officio compendiose aggrediar (Ep . 10.4).

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etymologies of comoedia and tragoedia in the same passage).[216] The distinction among the levels of meaning that follows is familiar, and is based on an initial separation of the literalis sensus , which the text has per literam , and the allegoricus sive mysticus sensus , which it possesses per significata per literam . These levels are illustrated in an analysis of Psalm 114.1-2, where in fact four levels are distinguished by subdividing the allegoricus sensus into three. The illustration makes it clear that the "literal sense" may be taken to be equivalent to the historic and the "allegorical" (sensu stricto ) is the typological (by which the Hebrew scriptures are taken to prefigure the Gospels). There remain the "moral sense" and the "anagogical sense," this last the heir of Neoplatonic mystical allegory that found in diverse texts the encoded message that souls temporarily trapped in bodies will escape to their true home.

After blocking out this model exegesis, Dante turns to his own poem and applies the model there as well. It, too, can be taken literaliter , in which case its subject is the status animarum post mortem ; it can also be taken allegorice , and viewed thus its subject is "man, in that according to what he has deserved or failed to deserve in the exercise of his freedom of will he is subject to the reward or punishment of justice."[217] This constitutes a curious structural inversion. The sensus literalis of the Paradiso is similar in content to the sensus anagogicus of scripture, and Dante's poem read per significata per literam becomes a statement about this world, dominated by what must be considered a sensus moralis . Thus through the literal description of what scripture treats allegorically (in its anagogical aspect), Dante claims to have built a moral allegory, a statement to the reader centering on quid agas . None of this is terribly surprising or audacious, and if we read the letter to Can Grande in this way, it hardly seems to demand that we read the Paradiso differently than we might otherwise do. We are concerned here, though, with the background of Dante's conception of his art and the relationship of that conception to his understanding of the epic tradition. It is in this sense that the multiple levels of meaning claimed for the poem indicate a significant continuity of tradition.

It is surprising, first of all, that Dante moves so easily from scripture to his own poem. Must this not have seemed culpably pretentious to the devout apologist of faith over reason? What right had Dante to imitate (and to invert) the structure of meaning of scripture? His right, I would

[216] Toynbee ad loc . (Dantis Alagherii Epistolae , p. 173, n. 2).

[217] Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitiae praemiandi et puniendi obnoxius est (Ep . 10.8).

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suggest, lay in the genre he practiced and in the epic tradition itself, which was the one body of literature aside from the Hebrew and Greek scriptures that deserved to be designated scriptura or scrittura .[218] Only by way of the allegorists had scriptura come to encompass this entire body of literature, and it is thanks to the allegorists that Dante can find a place to stand in the epic tradition. His conception of the nature of the Aeneid may in some ways be closer to our own than to that of "Bernard Silvestris" or Fulgentius, but his conception of the scope of intention and the complexity of meaning of the epic tradition belonged securely to his own historical moment, and it was this conception that made the Commedia possible.

But what of the forerunner of Virgil and founder of the tradition, Homer? Dante mentions him by name only seven times, always drawing his references from later authors, usually Aristotle.[219] The association with Aristotle (whose citations Dante may have taken, more seriously than can a modern reader, as appeals to poetic authority) reminds us of the persistent association of Homer with Philosophy in the Consolation of Philosophy . Macrobius, for his part, must have conveyed to Dante, directly or indirectly, the notion that Homer was Virgil's model, for that is surely the conception of the epic tradition conveyed by the portrayal of the poets of the "nobile castello." And these remain the central elements of Dante's evocation of Homer—he is the "poeta sovrano," the one who soars like an eagle over the others (Inf . 4.88), the one whom the Muses nourished more than any other (Purg . 22.101), the master of Dante's master in song, and an authoritative voice quoted by the "maestro di color che sanno" (e.g., Conv . 4.20). But Homer was unavailable: "non si mutò di Greco in Latino" (Conv . 1.7). Not only did Dante lack a knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey , but not even the Ilias Latina was available to him, and he shows no evidence of having read his period's "historical" sources for the Trojan War,

[218] Hollander, Allegory in Dante's Commedia , p. 32. In the letter under discussion Dante refers to a passage from Lucan as scriptura paganorum (Ep . 10.22). Hollander further argues that of the three modes of allegory known to Dante, it was the fourfold scriptural allegory that he strove to imitate (pp. 23-24 and passim). Hollander plays down the importance of the commentators on Virgil in Dante's conception of the Aeneid (pp. 96-103), insisting on the primacy of the historic sense in Virgil and the reflection of that priority in the realistic and historical immediacy of the Commedia . Hollander's analysis is a sensitive one, and I agree with most of his conclusions, but I would still argue that it was the existence of the allegorizing tradition and the prevalent conception of the surface of the epic narrative as an ahistorical integumentum that allowed Dante to situate his own work in the tradition of Homer and Virgil.

[219] Summary in G. Martelotti's article "Omero" in the Enciclopedia Dantesca (vol. 4, pp. 145-48).

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Dares and Dictys.[220] The connection is indeed remote, and when in the De monarchia (1.10) the phrase "let there be one ruler" is echoed from the Iliad by way of Aristotle, one is reminded of its echoes in the Arabic tradition, likewise no doubt traceable to the last words of Metaphysics A .[221]

Dante clearly did know a few Odyssey stories, but these were easily available in Virgil, and in Dante's mind can at best belong to Homer at second hand. Most of this material is simply absorbed as metaphor into the fabric of Dante's language. This is the case with the Sirens, specifically an image for cupiditas in the fifth letter (Ep . 5.4), dramatically elaborated as such in the symbolism of the dream that opens Purgatorio 19. There Dante is confronted by a hideous hag who, as he looks at her, is transformed into a seductive Siren and then claims to have drawn Ulysses from his course. The apparent deviation from the Odyssey story is not surprising and can easily be ascribed either to Dante's ignorance or to a conflation of Circe and the Sirens, but it may equally be understood as creative distortion of the original situation for dramatic effect. What Dante hears in his dream is prefigured in the Sirens' song of Odyssey 12, and neither Homer's Sirens nor Dante's can be expected either to advertise their failures or to tell the truth. Indeed, both on the level of imagery and on that of the Siren's motivation, this is the one point in the Commedia at which Dante the epic voyager—in dream—stands in the tracks, even in the persona, of his predecessor Odysseus. He hears the same voice sing the same seductive song, adapted to a new listener; for the Siren clearly takes Dante for a traveler on the path of Odysseus, and when she brags of having lured the prototype astray, it is to assert her power over her present listener.

Aeneas had followed in Odysseus's footsteps, and now, however distantly, the voyage of Dante repeats that epic quest. Aeneas often expresses his hate for Odysseus, most strikingly when he narrates the voyage past Ithaca:

We fled past the rocks of Ithaca, Laertes' kingdom,
and cursed the land that nourished fierce Ulysses

effugimus scopulos Ithacae, Laertia regna,
et terram altricem saevi exsecramur Ulixi.
(Aen . 3.272-73)

[220] Martelotti, "Omero," p. 146.

[221]

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The Ulysses of the Aeneid becomes a focus of the Roman poet's ambivalent attitude toward Greek ingenuity.[222] The characteristic Virgilian epithets for Ulysses consistently emphasize his deceitfulness, his seductiveness, his gift for manipulation through language: he is pellax (Aen . 2.90), scelerum inventor (2.164), and (albeit in a denigrating taunt) fandi fictor (9.602). It is this Odysseus, not Homer's, whom Dante encounters in the eighth circle of Hell among the evil counselors, and that encounter is the occasion of a curious and disorienting resolution of the ambiguities of the relationship of the three poems and their protagonists. Dante's apparently original reworking of the conclusion of Odysseus's story (Inf . 26.90-142) is well known. The disastrous last voyage of this voracious and restless intellect has been read as a metaphor for the "misguided philosophical Odyssey" of Dante's own experience just after the death of Beatrice.[223] Odysseus's mistaken and intellectually pretentious journey, then, has finally taken him no further than this eternal post near the bottom of Hell, with no hope of passing through with Dante to redemption (or even, with Virgil, to the brink of redemption). It is with Aeneas, not Odysseus, that Dante has (though with self-deprecating humility) identified his fictional persona (Inf . 2.32), and Aeneas himself is with Homer and the other virtuous but unbaptized souls (Inf . 4.122), where Virgil must eventually return. The mere fact of the existence of the "nobile castello" of Inferno 4, where the virtuous pagans may enjoy the pleasure of one another's company and the measure of eternal reward implied therein, is the major structural intrusion of the classical tradition into the otherwise symmetrically Christian world-system of the poem, and it provides an abode for Virgil and his protagonist, as well as for Homer. But Odysseus, the prototype of that protagonist, has become the scapegoat whose seductive intellectual pretension stands for the failure of a tradition, a shortcoming translated into a vice by the addition of willful deception.

These, then, are the strata of the tradition into which the Commedia fits. Not even Virgil can stay with Dante beyond the beatific vision of Purgatorio 30, and his disappearance is one of the most poignant moments in the poem. Homer, for his part, was never more than the sovereign spirit of the "bella scola," a fleeting and ill-defined figure, and his most memorable creation, Odysseus, lies condemned by a verdict that is

[222] The seminal study of Odysseus from the Iliad to the Commedia and beyond is, of course, W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme . On Virgil's Ulysses, see esp. pp. 128-37.

[223] Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys , p. 72.

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one of the harshest reminders of the distance separating Dante's value system from our own. But it is doubtless true that the condemnation of Odysseus is a self-condemnation on Dante's part, a self-castigation for past error, and so its harshness need not surprise us. If the intellectual pretension of the pagan tradition is condemned to eternal pain, its epic poets are consigned to what bliss they might themselves have wished, and it is clear that it was as the allegorical

of their respective cultures that they succeeded one another, and that it is in this same role that Dante has stepped into their company.

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