Benci and Virgil

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Benci and Virgil

Throughout the period that Benci was composing the Quinque martyres he was also lecturing on Virgil at the Collegium Romanum. A set of student’s notes from his lectures on Aeneid book 11 survive.1 This may account for the prepon- derance and high frequency of reference to that particular book of the Aeneid throughout Benci’s epic. Be that as it may, the entire Virgilian canon is refer- enced, including all the so-called juvenilia (Ciris, Culex, Aetna, etc). The Aeneid was read in an edition with Maffeo Vegio’s (1407–58) thirteenth-book supple- ment (editio princeps, Venice 1471) in which the Rutilians surrender, Turnus is buried, Aeneas marries Lavinia, founds a city named after her, and upon his death is rewarded with heavenly apotheosis.2 Yet it is a reading of the Aeneid mitigated both through Christian exegesis and the Stoic philosophy of Seneca’s moral essays, Muret’s edition of which Benci had seen through the press in 1585. The opening lines of the proem resonate with references to the Aeneid while at the same time contrasting the classical world with the Christian:

Felices sociorum obitus, qui littore in Indo, Finitimam qua Goa uetus Salsethida tangit, Christum animis pulchroque olim per vulnera fuso Sanguine testati, laetis meruere piorum 5 Adscribi ordinibus, sit fas mihi munere uestro Dicere caelicolae; vos o memorate canenti, Quae mens, qui sensus fuerit morientibus, et quae Gloria tanti operis sublimes aethere tollat. Benci, Quinque martyres, 1.1–8

The blessed martyrdom of those companions who once bore witness to Christ by their courage upon the shores of India where ancient Goa borders upon neighboring Salcete, and by the shedding of their noble blood through wounds, deserve to be enrolled among the happy ranks of the saints, if I may be permitted to sing with your gift, you who dwell in heaven. Recall for the poet their resolution, their emotions as they were dying, and how the glory of their great enterprise now raises this exalted band to heaven.

1 Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano, Vat. lat. 7756. 2 See Anna Cox Brinton, Maphaeus Vegius and His Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1930; reprint London: Bristol Classical Press, 2002).

In line 1, Socius is the regular word used by Aeneas when addressing his companions (for example, Aen. 1.198), and littore in Indo (the shores of India) recalls Aeneas’s arrival on “the shores of Lavinium” (Lavinia litora, Aen. 1.3). However, the felices obitus (blessed martyrdoms) of the Jesuit brothers contrasts with the difficilis obitus (difficult death) of Dido (Aen. 4.694); the word obitus is used uniquely of Dido; while the adjective felices only occurs twice throughout the Aeneid. Aeneas addresses Andromache and Helenus as felices as their voyaging is now done: “Live on and enjoy the blessing of heaven. Your destiny has been accomplished. But we are called from fate to fate. Your rest is won” (Aen. 3.493– 95; trans. David West, 62); more pertinently perhaps, Benci recalls the felices animae (blessed spirits) sought by the Sibyl and Aeneas in the Underworld (Aen. 6.669). These are relatively small points, but they are not minor. They confirm that Benci was consciously using his Virgilian model, and that we ought to expect more evidence in the rest of the poem. Although the invo- cation employs all the devices of classical epic, Benci does not appeal to the Muses of antiquity for inspiration but rather to “those who dwell in heaven” (caelicolae), thus subsuming a Christian message within the epic structure. It must be remembered that Benci’s poem is intended not merely to narrate the martyrs’ story in heroic episodes and images but also to provide inspiration for the burgeoning group of Jesuit seminarians being trained to pursue equally dangerous enterprises. The address to the readership, and more specifically to students at the Collegium Romanum, which follows (QM. 1.20–37) equates the Jesuit missionaries with the wandering heroes of epic and, like Aeneas’s fre- quent addresses to his companions, is intended to bolster their fortitude and resolve (see below). Written as part of the campaign for the canonization of the five main pro- tagonists, prompt reaction to the news of the massacre and speed of composi- tion was of the essence. The order’s fifth superior general, Claudio Acquaviva, was the uncle of the central hero; he had supported his nephew in his voca- tion and was a keen advocate and promoter of his beatification. Benci man- aged to compose and publish his six-book epic of over 5,600 hexameters in less than seven years; that is, from the time that the news reached Rome (late 1583/ early 1584) to the first edition of the Quinque martyres, published in Venice in mid-1591.3 An average of around sixteen hexameters per week may not seem

3 As Benedetto Zorzi states in the dedicatory epistle addressed to Rodolfo’s younger brother, cardinal Ottavio, the first Venetian edition of the Quinque martyres was printed to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the martyrdom (see below, appendix 1). Although news of the massacre had reached Rome by August 1583, Valignano’s official report is dated Goa, December 28, 1583 (Documenta Indica, 12:917–32). The dedicatory epistle in the first printed edition is