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Myth in Dante and Petrarch

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Myth in Dante and Petrarch MYTH 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 - myths in Dante's Comedy is overwhelming (as is his astonishing choice of the pagan poet Virgil to be his guide through both Hell and Purgatory), especially when we remember that a contemporary bishop went to great lengths to apologize for simply reading some of Virgil's poetry 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 pan 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 Minos, the mythical king of Crete, renowned as a law-giver. In the sixth book of the Aeneid (432-3). Virgil shows us Minos near the entrance to the underworld, "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 Inferno, thus taking over the role of his brother, Rhadamanthus, whom Virgil had described (566-9) as "holding iron sway' over Tartarus: "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, Ovid, Lucan and Seneca); Pluto, the god of riches, guards the misers and spendthrifts, while Phlegyas, who burned down Apollo's temple in revenge for the god's seduction of his daughter, is both the guardian of the fifth circle and a second Charon, who takes the souls in his boat and then drops them into the muddy waters of the Styx. 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 Acheron 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 Dis, the souls of the tyrants are tyranniscd by the Minotaur, "the infamy of Crete", half-man and half-bull, while the Centaurs, half-man and half-horse, similarly reflect the natures of those who gave in to bestial violence. Harpies torment those who had committed suicide; Gcryon, the monster 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 giants 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 Lucifer, the rebellion of the giants, Nimrod, Niobe, 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 Diana's chastity is recalled beside Mary's on the last terrace of lust At the very opening of the Paradiso, where the poet should be concerned exclusively with Christian truth, we have the third invocation to the Muses, this time preceded by a prayer 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 Metamorphoses (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.
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