myth in dante and petrarch

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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~unqug radi 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
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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. 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 Cacciaguida 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 Athens by the unjust accusations of Phaedra; 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:
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'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'Argo. 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 Argonauts at the very beginning of his Paradise, when in the
second canto he had proclaimed the utter originality of his task - 'l'acqua ch'io
prendo aid m in on si corse'- and told his readers:
Quo'glor?osic he passaro 01 Coico Those men of glory, those who crossed to Colchis,
n o' i r o nco me voifarete, whcn they saw Jason 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 poets of Ancient Greece and
Rome.
In the second book of the Convivio Dante sets up an original and
surprising equation: pagan gods and goddesses = Plato'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 Pallas 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.,1 I.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 Ganymede. And for his N.C.0.s in Hell,
Dante uses monsters 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
01l i 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
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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 Purgatorio, when Virgil,
Statius and Dank have reached Eden or the Earthly Paradise. Here, they are
told:
..T hose ancients who in poetry presented
the golden age, 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 Caesar'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 ~ o mAed thus to re~ dee~m th~~e peo~p~le~s
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 paganism 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 Homer. 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, Aeneas' 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*c all 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 "Tof ollow 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 Capaneus, 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
Ida 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
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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 Mount Ida, situated at the world's centre, and works its
way down to and through Hell, forming the infernal rivers and finally Cocytus,
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, Phlegethon, Cocytus
(while Lethe 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 Adam'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"
(Thebaid 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
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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 Latin 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 c kL eda beech-tree, and in a while could, such that
avria ben dello c ks ufigliaperde Leda would surely have said that her
come stella c k 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