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Home , Cocytus, Minos, Phlegyas, Statius

IN DANTE AND PETRARCH

J. A. Scott

THE ANNUAL LECTURE delivered to The Australian Academy of the Humanities at its Twentieth Annual General Meeting at Canberra on 23 September 1987

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 The sheer presence of classical - not to speak of Christian - in Dante's Comedy is overwhelming (as is his astonishing choice of the pagan to be his guide through both and ), especially when we remember that a contemporary bishop went to great lengths to apologize for simply reading some of Virgil's and that in his early poetry Dantc had not shown any predilection for classical myths. Suddenly, about the year 1307, in exile and after a few years of intense study, Dante began to write a unique work in which he set out to depict the entire universe as experienced by men and women. He called it his "comedy" as it was intended to describe both the sublime and the vulgar aspects of this experience, thus reflecting the whole gammut of human emotions and their language. And, by a miracle of genius. Dame decided to show us his moral message as illustrated in the lives of real men and women, most of whom were contemporaries or near contempor-aries. No critic has expressed this better than Etienne Gilson, who points out:'// n'y a pas un seal morf dans tome la Divine Co&e.' Even as he discarded the medieval reliance on allegory, so one would expect the Christian poet to have eschewed the figures and legends of classical mythology. On the contrary, however, one of the most striking things about Dante's other world is the role played by classical myth. In fact, it is not before the circles of fraud - and more especially, in cantos XXI-XXII, in the circle of barratry, the sin for which Dante was unjustly exiled from Florence - that the devils of popular imagination with their pitchforks and other accoutre-ments begin to play a leading in the action of the poem. Instead, the guardians of the various circles of incontinence are all figures taken from classical mythology. The first of these is , the mythical king of , renowned as a law-giver. In the sixth book of the (432-3). Virgil shows us Minos near the entrance to the , "presiding, he shakes the urn; he calls an assembly of the dead and examines their lives and their crimes".The classical Avernus, however, could only signify Hell in the medieval universe, so that Minos is demoted from the judge of dead souls to his role of judge of the damned in Dante's , thus taking over the role of his brother, , whom Virgil had described (566-9) as "holding iron sway' over : "he chastises and hears the tales of guilt, exacting confession of crimes, whenever in the world above any man, rejoicing in vain deceit, has put off atonement until death's late hour". Now, listen to Dante's synthesis:

Stavvi Minds orribilmente, e ringhia: There dreadful Minos stands, gnashing his teeh: essamim Ie colpe ne I'intrala; examining the sins of those who enter. giudica e manda secondo ch'avvinghia. he judges and assigns as his tail twines. Dico che quando I'anima ma1 mu I mean that when the spirit born to evil li vie" dinami, lulu si confessa; appears before him, it confesses all: e quel conoscilor de Ie peccala and he, the connoisseur of sin, can tell vede qua1 loco dinfirno 2 & essa; the dcpth in Hell appropriate lo it; cignesi con la coda tante volle is many limes as Minos wraps his tail

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 quan~unqugradi vwt che giG sia messa. around himself, that marks the sinner's level (lrf. V.4-12)

You will have noticed that Minos has acquired a tail. This, together with his snarl, transforms him into a bestial figure as well as serving as an external indicator of the punishment - for, as you will have gathered, the number of times he twists his tail round his body signifies the number of the circle to which the evil soul is condemned for all eternity. His bestiality also serves to make him the guardian of the circle of lust. Now, you obviously do not want a detailed description of each figure. Cerbcrus, the three-headed dog howls over the gluttons (but without the serpents entwined round his necks as in Virgil, , and Seneca); , the of riches, guards the misers and spendthrifts, while , who burned down 's temple in revenge for the god's seduction of his daughter, is both the guardian of the fifth circle and a second , who takes the souls in his boat and then drops them into the muddy waters of the . In fact, Delacroix's celebrated painting of Dante et Virgile aux Enfers is commonly mistaken for a representation of Charon's role as ferryman across the in Canto IV - whereas it was the episode of Filippo Argenti among the wrathful that Dclacroix had read out to him, as the painter tells us in his diary: "The best head in my Dante picture was painted with extraordinary ease as I was listening to my friend reading the Canto; his accent electrified me. That head is that of the man who is facing the spectator, and whose arm is inside the boat." Inside the City of , the souls of the are tyranniscd by the , "the infamy of Crete", half-man and half-bull, while the , half-man and half-horse, similarly reflect the natures of those who gave in to bestial violence. torment those who had committed suicide; Gcryon, the killed by Hercules, becomes an image of fraud and thus the guardian of the eighth circle with its ten concentric subdivisions. Finally, Christian and classical mythology combine to give us the who guard the very pit of hell. Although you will, I am sure, have found it noteworthy that a Christian poet ascribed such preeminence to figures laken from classical mythology, you may be tempted to minimize their importance by accepting them as natural candidates for Christian Hell. That, however, is by no means the end of our story. Far more surprising is the fact that in the most original part of the poem, his Purgatory, Dante uses examples from classical myth-ology to illustrate both the sin and its corresponding virtue. The most complex example is found on the terrace of pride, where no less than twelve examples of pride alternate between Christian and classical myth: the fall of , the rebellion of the giants, Nimrod, , Saul, Arachne, Rehoboam, Alcmaeon, Senna- cherib, Cyrus, Holofernes, ending with the destruction of Troy, the whole series forming an acrostic reading "VOM" and signifying that pride is the root of all sin and he cause of mankind's Fall. On the next terrace, that of Envy, the examples of the opposite virtue, charity, celebrate the extraordinary

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 generosity of Pylades next to that of the Virgin Mary and of Christ Himself. just as 's chastity is recalled beside Mary's on the last terrace of lust At the very opening of the , where the poet should be concerned exclusively with Christian truth, we have the third invocation to the , this time preceded by a to the "good Apollo" in which the poet prays to the god of poetry to make him the chosen vessel capable of expressing the reality of Paradise. He beseeches the god:

Enira net petto mio, e spira Iue Enter into my breast; within me breathe e quando Marsh traesti the very power you made manifest de la vagina de ie membra sue. when you drew Marsyas out from his limb's sheath. The reference to the myth of Marsyas is a puzzling one. In the sixth book of Ovid's (382-400) Dante read of a flulc-player called Marsyas who took up the flute, discarded by Athene, and challenged Apollo to a contest to be judged by the Muses. Apollo won, and had Marsyas tied to a tree and flayed alive. As a commentator notes, 'This is perhaps the cruellest of the many instances of the intolerance of the Olympians towards anyone who challenged their superiority", and Ovid's description would be eagerly seized upon by some of our sadistic television producers (if they ever read Ovid): 'Why do you tear me from myself?", he cried .... As he screams, his skin is stripped off the surface of his body, and he is all one wound: blood flows down on every side, the sinews lie bare, his veins throb and quiver with no skin to cover them: you could count the entrails as they palpitate, and the vitals showing clearly in his breast.' Now, I believe that com-mentators have on the whole failed to see the significance of Dante's plea to Apollo to play as he had played when he defeated Marsyas. For early Christian moralists, the myth was merely another example of vain pride suitably punished, an exhortation to humility. But that is not its role here, whatever the commentators may say. Dante is addressing Apollo, not Marsyas; he is calling upon the Christian god of poetry to inspire him, to play the flute in his stead, to take over at this crucial stage in his journey: spira me. And Dante's description of what happened to Marsyas is unique, in that it implies that the god did not flay or strip Marsyas of his flesh but that he literally pulled Marsyas out of his bodily flesh - as though the god were raising up the mortal out of his earthly prison and limitations. Instead of a terrible punishment or an image of death, then, the myth of Marsyas here suggests what Dante hopes to experience, the transcending of his mortal state - what he encapsulated in the word he invented, trasumanar. At the centre of the Paradiso, his ancestor reveals to Dante that he will be exiled from Florcnce. Once again, an ancient myth is used to illustrate his experience. This is compared to that of Hippolytus driven out from by the unjust accusations of ; even so Dante will be persecuted by his stepmother, Florence. If we turn to the most obvious source, the fifteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (vv. 493-546). we find that Ovid also speaks of Hippolytus' rebirth as Virbius through Diana's intervention:

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 'You who were Hippolytus shall now be Virbius." Servius' commentary on the Aeneid (VII.761) claimed that Virbius meant "bis vir", "twice a man", while St Jerome - in his commentary on Ephesians IV.16 - uses the myth of Hippolytus' resurrection as Virbium to illustrate the way that the mystical body of the Church, though scattered and tom apart on earth, will be reunited in Christ. It therefore seems clear that Dante compared himself to Hippolytus not only to proclaim his innocence but also to highlight his rebirth as a poet during his years of exile - the role of the Christian poct-prophet announced at the beginning of Paradise XXV (vv, 7-9):

... then with other voice. with other fleece. 1 shall return as poet and put on, at my baplismal font, the laurel crown; * At the very end of the poem, when the poet is bent on the most difficult and climactic pan of his task, his need to describe in human terms the ineffable experience of the beatific vision, he tells us:

Un punto solo m'&maggior letargo One single moment brings more forgcifulncss to me che venticinque secoli a la 'mpresa lhan twenty-five centuries to the endeavour chefe'Nelluno ammirar I'ombra d'. hat startled Neptune wilh the Argo's shadow! (Par. XXXm. 94-96)

The reference to classical myth has struck many readers as incongruous at this point in this most Christian story. We must remember that Dante had used the myth of the at the very beginning of his Paradise, when in the second canto he had proclaimed the utter originality of his task - 'l'acqua ch' prendo aid minon si corse'- and told his readers:

Quo'glor?osiche passaro 01 Coico Those men of glory, those who crossed to Colchis, no'iron come voifarete, whcn they saw tum into a ploughman quando Ias6n viderfallo bifolco were less amazed than you will be amazed. (Par. II.16-18)

As Curtius has noted, "Nautical metaphors originally belong to poetry". Once again, Dante found his Ur-material in Ovid - and I may mention in passing that in 1965 C. A. Robson claimed that "Dante began as an Ovidian singer of a Celtic underworld. . . but that finally he lost interest in Ovid altogether". However, the point of Dante's comparison is twofold: like the Argonauts, whose name lives on in glory. Dante's ship is the first to attempt a poetic voyage across uncharted seas - and the precise chronological reference to twenty-five centuries adds yet another dimension to the parallel. Between the greatest exploit of the ancient world and the divinely inspired audacity of our poet we find an interval of 2,500 years, bisected by the central event of Christian history, the Incarnation. Moreover, the poet compares himself indirectly in the last canto of the poem to the sea-god, Neptune, who beheld to his amazement something never seen before; so, Dante the pilgrim is about to

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 see the godhead in his essence, a sight never before experienced by a living being -and that single moment of unique enterprise casts far greater oblivion on the poet's memory than twenty-five centuries have been able to do on the maiden voyage of the "Argos". It is high lime I turned to an essential element in any study of Dantc's use of classical myth: his belief that they were rooted in a Christian reality that was perceived "as through a glass darkly" by the of Ancient and . In the second book of the Convivio Dante sets up an original and surprising equation: pagan and goddesses = 's Ideas or Aristotle's Intelligence = the angelic movers of the various heavenly bodies. He continues: "The gentiles called them gods and goddesses, although they did not understand them in such a philosophical way as Plato did, and they adored their images and built great temples to them: as, for example, they did for Juno, whom they called the goddess of power; as they did for or Minerva, whom they called the goddess of wisdom; as they did for Vulcan, whom they called the god of fire. . . and you can see this evidenced in many ancient names of places and old buildings. . . "(Conv.,1I.i~. 6-7). So, too, the motive force behind the third heaven, "since the ancients agreed that that heaven was the cause of love on earth, they said that Love was the son of Venus, as Virgil bears witness in the first book of the Aeneid. . . and Ovid in the fifth book of his Metamorphoses". Not only does Dante accept the fundamental reality of the pagan pantheon but he carefully avoids any reference to scabrous aspects of mythology, even when evoking the myth of the rape of . And for his N.C.0.s in Hell, Dante uses and figures from mythology, but never transposes the gods or goddesses of ancient limes, despite the medieval custom of turning Apollo, Mercury, and Vulcan into Satan's henchmen. He goes so far as to claim that the ancient goddess Foruma, against whom mortals unjustly rail, is an angel and makes Virgil refer to her angelic companions as "the other gods" in Inf. VII.86-7 -an idea that smacked of heresy for some critics:

Vostro saver non ha contraslo a lei: Your knowledge cannot stand against her force: questa prove&, giudica, e persegue for she foreseesand judges and maintains suo regno come it loro U atrri dei. her kingdom as the other gods do theirs. (Inf. VII.85-87)

Even more surprising is the climactic moment in Purg. VI when the poet, wracked by the vision of mankind's fratricidal struggles, turns to Christ but addresses him by the name of Jupiter:

- E se licito m'2. o so- Giove And if I am allowed, o highest love, che fosli in terra per noi cru$iso, to ask: You who on eanh were crucified 01li giusti occhi tuoi rivolti altrove? forus- have You turned elsewhere Yourjust eyes? (Purg. VIJI8-120)

As far as I know, Dante's audacity is unique in speaking as a Christian poet in the context of Christian Purgatory and yet referring lo thc crucified Christ as

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 supreme Jupiter". There could be no clearer proof of his delcrmination to bring home to the reader his belief that God's reality had been glimpsed through the myths of pagan times, a belief reiterated at the end of , when Virgil, and Dank have reached Eden or the Earthly Paradise. Here, they are told:

..Those ancients who in poetry presented the , who sang its happy state, perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here. mankind's root was innocent; and here wcre every fruit and never-ending spring: these streams -the nectar of which poets sing.' Then [Dante tells us] I turned round completely, and I faced my poets; I could see that they had heard wilh smiles this final corollary spoken;

Far more astonishing is the fact that Cato, a pagan suicide and 's bitter opponent, is chosen to be the guardian of Christian Purgatory. Already in the Convivio Dante had claimed that no mortal man was worthier than Cato to signify God (IV.xxviii.15). In their search, the editors of the Convivio have missed the only source I can find for Dank's extraordinary myth of Cato as a symbol both of cod and true freedom. That source IS a passagefrom the second

book of Lucan's Phorsalia (312.318). where Cato declares~ his~ readiness~~ ~~~ to become a sacrificial victim for the sinsof ~omeAd thus to redeem the peoples of the world by the shedding of his blood. Pope Gelasius I (492-6) was the fust to point out the analogy with Christ's mission: "Let my blood redeem the nations, and my death pay the whole penalty incurred by the corruption of Rome ... Aim your swords at me alone, at me who fight a losing battle for despised law and justice. My blood, mine only, will bring peace to the people of Iialy and end their sufferings...". Now, if you find it difficult to accept that Dante could place a pagan in Purgatory largely because of some lines he had read in Lucan, then you will be even more surprised to learn that Dante places high up in the Christian heaven a Trojan mentioned in only a few lines of Virgil's Aeneid. There, in the second book, he is numbered among the last defenders of Troy: 'Rhipeus, too, falls, foremost in justice among the Trojans, and most zealous for the right' (vv. 426-7). "ustissimus unus Qui fuit in Teucris el servantissimus aequi". This otherwise unknown figure is raised up by Dante to the level of Christian myth in order lo illustrate the secret workings of God's grace: by an extraordinary privilege, Rhipeus was given baptism by desire and faith in Christ to come - and so, Dante tells us, he "no longer suffered the stench of and rebuked those who persisted in that perverse way. More than a thousand years before baptizing, to baptize him there were the same three women you saw along the chariot's right-hand side"(Paradiso XX. 118-129). But let me remind you: the only impulse for this idiosyncratic myth came from Virgil's description of Rhipeus as '"ustissimus unus ... in Teucris et servantissimus aequ".

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 I have spent quite a few years of my life studying the myth of Ulysses in Dante's Comedy. As you are perhaps aware, the Italian poet knew no Greek and could not read . Ulysses in Dante does not return to Ithaca but sets sail beyond the Suaits of Gibraltar into the deserted ocean, journeys for months on end until he and his few companions sight a mountain of immense altitude, whereupon they are sent to their death by a whirlwind. The mountain is the Mount of Purgatory (reckoned by some to be 27 miles high), with the Earthly Paradise at its summit. Legends recounting attempts to storm the Earthly Paradise after man's Fall were common in the Middle Ages and many chose Alexander the Great as the protagonist. It is therefore illuminating to realize that the poet here made the one great exception to his rule of taking his examples from recent history in his choice of protagonist, since only Ulysses could truly offer the full complexity of myth and serve to highlight the contrasts with Dante the pilgrim's own voyage, ' fateful search for Ilaly, Cab's acceptance of geographical limitations to the inhabitable world as well as Solomon's display of kingly prudence. There is no time to mention possible sources for Dante's version. What must, however, be pointed out is that Dante's myth has often been misunderstood, so that his Ulysses has been seen as a forerunner of intrepid explorers like Christopher Columbus or of scientists breaking down the taboos of medieval superstition. Instead, we must take into account the absurdity of Ulysses*call to his companions to follow virtue and knowledge - in a desert. The poet of the Comedy was utterly convinced that man is a political animal - that men and women must work together for the good of the community. Ulysses was King of Ithaca and his first duty lay towards his subjects; secondary duties were those towards his father, wife and son, whom he abandoned. Far from being a pioneer of modem science, he is condemned for his guile (astutia) and his misplaced eloquence, which tricks his companions into undertaking a useless journey doomed to end in destruction. After the Pandora's box opened by the discovery of nuclear fission, it is perhaps easier for us lo understand Dante's belief lhdt humanity must accept certain limits lo its curiosity -easier than it was for Tennyson, for example, for whom Dante's myth of Ulysses reflected the great epic of Victorian imperialism in Ulysses' decision "Tofollow knowledge like a sinking star. Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." The last myth we shall examine in the Comedy is that of the Old Man of Crete, described by Virgil in Inf. XIV.94-120. This canto is a superb example of the poet's syncretism, his resolve to reconcile and fuse together classical and Christian myth. In the first part of the canto, blasphemy is surprisingly illustrated by the figure of , damned for his impious rebellion against God, who had been revealed to him under the mask of Jove. Then, in eighteen lines (103-120) Dante tells us that a tail old man is to be found inside Mount in Crete. He has his back turned on Damietta, situated on the Nile's delta, and looks towards Rome. The king of Crete mentioned in line 96 is of course Saturn whose reign was synonymous with the golden age of classical myth celebrated especially by Ovid. The reference to Saturn's wife, Rhca, and her ruse

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 to prevent her husband from devouring their children is inspired by the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics (VV. 149-152; cf. Aeneid. 111.111-113). However, the marriage of classical and Christian elements is well illustrated by the fact that the legend of a giant discovered inside a mountain after an earthquake in Crete was available to Dante both through Pliny's Natural History (VII.xvi) and St Augustine's City of God (XV.9). The description of the statue's limbs is moreover taken largely from the Book of Daniel (11.32-3). where the prophet explains Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Dante tells us that each section of the statue has a crack that weeps, so that the mass of tears produced by these fissures perforates the rock of , situated at the world's centre, and works its way down to and through Hell, forming the infernal rivers and finally , a frozen lakc which is the home and prison of Satan. The names of the rivers of Dante's Hell are all found in Virgil: Acheron, Styx, , Cocytus (while will be found at the end of Purgatory). The fact that the metals that make up the statue's various sections are listed in the same order in both the Bible and Ovid has led a majority of commentators to suppose that the statue of the Old Man represents the progressive corruption of mankind as described in the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (11.89-150). Against this must be set the fact that in Dante's Christian view of world history humanity's fall was immediate and terrible in its effects. Instead, the basic allegory surely illustrates St Paul's concept of the Old Man (I Corinthians XV.22). The head of gold represents man's free will, immune from 's sinful heritage. It would be tedious to enumerate the other details. Suffice it to say that the tears that flow from all the parts, except the head of the statue. signify the sufferings produced by the effects of Original Sin. By a dramatic stroke of genius, Dante gives us in this myth strikingly concrete, visual expression to the theological idea that links Hell with man's sinful nature and its acts, in the form of the infernal waters nourished by the statue's tears - a detail which may just possibly have been suggested by Statius' description of Cocytus and Phlegcthon as "swollen with tears and fire" ( VII1.29-30). It is, however, far more important for us to appreciate the fact that Dame's mythical vision is far removed from the tendency to blame the devil as the root cause of the sins and sufferings of fallen humanity. Here, the greatest poet of the Christian Middle Ages asserts humanity's ultimate responsibility for its acts. When interpreted diachronically. the statue graphically illustates the way Hell is nourished through sin and its effects; synchronically, it represents mankind in 1300 suffering the effects of Original Sin in this world and the next. The statue's orientation combines both religious and political elements. At one level, it reflects the Comedy's underlying message of the Exodus that must take place from the land of sin (Damietta thus standing for Egypt, the biblical land of sin and bondage), via Rome, the spiritual and political centre of the world. And Rome's providential mission lies at the heart of Dante's poem and of his admiration for Virgil. At another level, the statue's gaze reinforces the borrowing from Daniel, where 01.44) the prophet declares "another empire the God of heaven will bring into being, which will never be dismembered and

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 its sovereignty never transferred to any other people", a belief dear to the poet's heart, in defiance of the medieval theory of translaiio imperil. In the web of internal correspondences found in Dante's poem the Old Man, a large mass of mailer imprisoned in a mountainside, is afigura diaboli prefiguring both the giants and then Satan himself held fast in the ice of Cocytus (itself originating in the Old Man's tears). Similarly, Hell - in a graphic illustration of the line describing it as the pit "where all the evil in the universe is stored" (I@ VII.18: che 'I ma1 de l'universo tufto insacca) - is irrigated and delimited by the waters that flow from those same tears. In this grandiose vision of humanity's life on earth, conditioned by Original Sin and feeding the rivers of punishment in the after-life, Dante created perhaps the greatest myth of his poem. 1 wish I had time to mention the myth of the Emperor in Dante's works, especially the Messianic role attributed to him in the epistles written in 1311. It would take too long to place the Biblical quotations within their general context - a context brilliantly studied by Emst Kantorowicx in The King's Two Bodies - and then within the specific area of Dante's political thought. *

To turn to Petrarch, you will recall that, for most of his life (which spanned the seventy years from 1304 to 1374), Petrarch attempted to write an epic in Latin hexameters on the life of Scipio Africanus. As the foremost classical scholar of his age, he possessed all the ingredients; however, as Gilbert Highct points out: "he made the mistake which Dante did not, thc mistake of so many Renaissance authors, not excluding Milton. He believed that the more closely he followed the formal outlines of the classical poet he admired ... the better his poem must be. This is an easy mistake to make, but it is disastrous." Petrarch, who was bilingual in Italian and Latin (his notes on his Italian manuscripts are all in Latin, since Latin prose was more congenial to him than Italian), Franccsco Petrarca assimilated classical culture into the very fibre of his being. As a result, his Italian poems are shot through with references to classical myth - a tolally spontaneous association of ideas, as in the lines quoted from the great poem "Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte"'(CXXIX), where the poet declared that Laura's beauty eclipsed that of 'the face that launched a thousand ships' - but where the reference to Helen of Troy is made through her mother, Leda:

/'rho pi6 volte, or chi fm che m' it credo? Men. than once - now who will believe me? I ne I'acqtu chiara e sopra I'erba verde have seen her alive in the dear water and on vedulo viva, e net Ironcon dtwfaggio, the green grass, and in the tnmk of a e 'n blanca nube, sifatla ckLeda beech-tree, and in a while could, such that avria ben dello cksufigliaperde Leda would surely have said that her come stella ck 7 sol copre cot raggio.... daughter was eclipsed like a star covered by the sun's ligh L...

Petrarch criticized Dante for having written for the vulgar crowd. As we have seen, Dante uses myths to express a deeper, Christian reality. Here with

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 Pctrarch, on the other hand, we discover that the ancient myths have entered the marrow of his poetic being. This fusion is accompanied by a supremely confident, aristocratic assumption that he shares this cultural heritage with an elite. his readers, an attitude that made possible some of the finest achievements of the Renaissance. A good example of this symbiosis is the canzone or ode, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade (XXIII). The famous manuscript of Petrarch's poems in the Vatican Library bears the annotation 'Est de primis inventionibus nostris' and this poem appears in the first cycle of poems gathered together by the poet in 1336-8. It illustrates various stages in his youthful passion for Laura by a series of transformations. The first (38-40) is into a laurel tree, following Ovid's account - in the first book of the Metamorphoses (1.452ff.) - of the way Cupid had avenged himself on Apollo by making him fall in love with Daphnc, who had fled from the god until her father, the river god , had her changed into a laurel tree. The fact that the poet's hair had turned prematurely white sparks off a reference to the myth of , turned into a swan, followed by the poel's becoming a "living stone" for having told Laura the truth about his passion (even as Battus had been turned by Mercury "into a flinty slone, which even to this day is called touch-sione": Metamorphoses 11.676-707). When the poet claims that, like Byblis, he had been changed into a fountain (Metamorphoses IX.663-665), he forestalls the reader's disbelief by asking "Who ever heard of a fountain being born of real man? And yet I speak of things obvious and known to all." Like , he is reduced to a mere voice, "calling upon death and her alone by name"; like , Petrarch is turned into a stag for having espied Laura bathing naked in a stream. In the envoi, the poet tells us that he was never the cloud of gold whereby Jove seduced Dhnae (never rich, nor would Laura have been moved by riches), but he was truly a flame kindled by Laura's beauty: images inspired by a single line in Ovid (Metamorphoses V1.113):"aureus ut Danaen, Asopida luserit ignis". He was also an eagle - the shape assumed by Jove when in love with Ganymede - but only in so far as he soared to the highest heaven in his celebration of Laura. Nevertheless, the poet concludes, despite all other transformations, he never abandoned the "first laurcl","niper novafigura ilprimo allorol seppi lassar". At this late stage, let me make two points. The first is that Pctrarch was far loo accomplished an artist ever to repeat this classical arabesque: I have singled it out as an extreme example of the way he assimilated and appropriated classical mythology, using it to reflect his own experience of life and, more particularly, of lovc. The second point concerns the significance of the myth for the Italian poet. The play on words between Laura's name and the Italian for the laurel-tree, it lauro, had a far deeper sig-nificance for the poet than the associations invented by Renaissance Pclrarchists. Even Ronsard's Cassandre or Sir Philip Sidney's Stella cannot vie with Laura's role, so aptly illustrated by the myth of Daphne and Apollo. As I have already mentioned, Apollo was thwarted in his lovc for the by her transformation into a laurel. In his frustrated passion, the god of poetry chose the laurel as the symbol of his art: "Since thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt at least be my

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 tree. My hair, my , my quiver shall always be entwined with thee, 0 laurel" (Metamorphoses 1.557ff.). In the fascinating Latin work usually known as his Secrelum, Petrarch is psychoanalysed by St Augustine. In the third book, the Saint accuses the poet of being the slave of both love and glory: they prevent him from truly seeking salvation and both are symbolized by his obsession with the laurel. In a climactic passage, Augustine, the voice of Petrarch's innermost fears, tells the pocu "That is why you have loved the laurel of both emperors and poets with such intensity, because she was known by that name: and from your first meeting, hardly any lyric was penned by you without your mentioning the laurel, as though you lived on the banks of the River Peneus or were a priest on Parnassus." Pemh's coronation as poet laureate on the steps of the Capitol in 1341 served lo reinforce the link between poetry and glory, in that the laurel represented the fame he longed to achieve through his writings. Far more significant, however, is the parallel we can see between the classical myth and the poet's frustrated love for Laura; for, just as Daphne, by escaping from Apollo's advances, had been turned into the lauro, the very symbol of poetry, so Laura, by remaining chaste and unattainable, had inspired Petrarch to write his greatest love poctry.If he had analyscd Petrarch's fascination with this mvth. Freud would have had a field dav exem~lifvinchis views on sublimation inart, while Byron had already expressed much [he &me idea in his Don Juan, when he asked the rhetorical question "Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife. He would have written sonnets all his life?" One of the sonnets he did write is "Apollo, s'ancor vive il be1 desio", which will be known to some through Schubert's setting of Schlegel's translation "Apollo, lebet noch". This poem was in fact chosen by Petrarch to open the first version of the Canzoniere in 1342. Addressing the pagan god of poetry, the poet creates a unique superposition between Daphne and Laura, so that in the penultimate line they become a single unit, "a Donna mstra"', "our lady". Daphne, transformed in a lauro, is now indisinguishable from Laura. The classical myth is essential for an understanding of the last line, where we arc told that the god and the poet will watch their lady "shading herself with her own arms". This surprising statement creates an incongruous image, if taken literally to mean that Laura used her arms as some kind of parasol. On the other hand its connotations are clear if we remember - as we must - the myth of Daphne changed into a laurel. Laura's arms are thus evocative of the tree's branches and yet another pointer to her essential role, for - even as the sun's power is tempered by the shade, so the poet's ardour is literally kept at arm's length so that Laura's beauty may inspire his poetry. Like two figures in a Poussin landscape, then, Apollo and Petrarch observe from a distance the spectacle of the beloved seated on the grass. The sun-god chases away the clouds, but Laura herself shades and thus protects her preternatural beauty. *

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89 As Claude Lcvi-Strauss has written, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions towards their resolution". In Dante, the fusion of pagan and Christian myth was utterly successful in overcoming the opposing claims of two apparently irreconcilable systems of belief. Petrarch's Christian humanism was not so successful. In the first Eclogue, written in 1347, aficr a visit to Montricux, whither his brother Gherardo had retired as a Carthusian monk, Pewarch expressed thc conflict which tore at his heart- strings. On the one hand, his sincere aspirations as a Christian; on the other, his unbounded admiration for the pagan world of classical culture. Gherardo tells his brother: "How much sweeter will you hear a shepherd [] sing in the middle of the night! Gradually, he will make you forget all other things; and you will be forced to deny the vanity of that song which at present excites you and fills you with admiration." Pctrarch, who was the rust modem writer to compose a series of pictorial descriptions of some fourteen pagan divinities for pure adornment (Africa 111. 138-264). was also the first modem author to express the incongruity of a Christian culture based on Pagan mythology. The fine balance achieved for one rlorious moment in Danic's Christian masterpiece was already seen to be unique- and the field lay open for a cynic to claim that myths are stories that everyone accepts but no one believes. Nevertheless, from this brief survey of the role of myth in Dante and Petrarch, we can see how the basis was laid for European culture of the Renaissance and even down to our own iconoclastic times. We may also recognize the fact that myth is born of man's need to structure and reinterpret existence, to make it to some degree intelligible. It is not a scientific explanation but the outline of a pattern pointing to a truth, hidden in mystery, which reflects an important aspect of the human condition. As Levi-Strauss has claimed, "the same logical processes operate in myth as in science ... man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man's mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers."

This paper was delivered in conjunction with the Symposium on 'Myth and Mythology in Arts. Sciences and Humanities'. The translations of the passages from Dante are taken from Alien Mandelbaum's verse translation of the , published by the University of California Press (3 vols. 1980-82). The translations of Petrarch are my own. I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr Marguerite Mills Chiarenza's studies of the myths of Marsyas and Hippolytus in her articles (Y~lippolytys'Exile: Paradiso XVII, vv. 46-8'. Dante Studies, LXXXIV 119661, 65-8; 'Pagan Images in the Prologue of the Paradiso', Proceedings of the Pacific North West Conference on Foreign Languages. XXVI:l, 133-6).

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 14, 1987-89