Lucan and Virgil: From Dante to Petrarch (and Boccaccio)
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ARTICLE
Lucan and Virgil: From Dante to Petrarch (and Boccaccio) Bianca Facchini1 The Author(s) 2018
Many recent works on ‘Dante’s Lucan’ emphasize the opposition between Lucan and Virgil in the Divine Comedy.1 To different extents, these studies appear informed by 20th-century views of the Bellum Civile as an anti-Aeneid, meant as a parodic subversion of Virgil’s poem and characterized by a turn from mythology to history, an anti-imperial agenda and an anti-providential, ‘nihilistic’ stance. Building on an argument put forth by Ettore Paratore, this article contends that rather than reading Virgil and Lucan in conflict with one another, Dante regards and reuses the figures and works of the two Latin poets as fundamentally consonant with each other.2 In keeping with high-medieval Latin commentaries on Lucan, Dante interweaves Lucan’s and Virgil’s texts in his Comedy to evoke the same world of ancient history and magic. In the Monarchia and Epistles, Dante combines the Bellum Civile and the Aeneid to support his philo-monarchic agenda, effacing the contrast between Roman Republican and Imperial values. Furthermore, Dante cites Lucan as a reliable moral–philosophical authority: in the Convivio he appropriates 1
See W. Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets, Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 2008, pp. 61–95; Id., ‘‘‘Poeta che mi guidi’’: Dante, Lucan, Virgil’, in Dante: The Critical Complex, ed. R. Lansing, vol. II, New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 303–20, at p. 308; D. Quint, ‘Epic Tradition and Inferno IX’, ibid., pp. 71–8; M. Picone, ‘Dante and the Classics’, ibid., pp. 321–44, at p. 337; G. F. Butler, ‘Statius, Lucan, and Dante’s Giants. Virgil’s Loss of Authority in Inferno XXXI’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 24, 2003, pp. 5–21; A. Montefusco, ‘La presenza di Lucano nella Comedı`a: il fantasma della storia’, Linguistica e Letteratura 35 (2010), pp. 83–108, at pp. 94–6. See also R. Hollander, ‘L’Anteo dantesco (Inferno 31.97-132)’, Annali della Facolta` di lettere e filosofia dell’Universita` degli studi di Milano, 55, 2002, pp. 3–11; S. Marchesi, ‘Lucan at Last: History, Epic, and Dante’s Commedia’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. P. Asso, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2011, pp. 481-90, at p. 486. See the sections ‘Dante’s Mentions of Lucan’ and ‘Erichtho and Antaeus’ in this article. 2
For Paratore’s observations on the affinity between Lucan and Virgil in Dante’s works (especially in the Comedy), see E. Paratore, ‘Lucano’, Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. III, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971, pp. 697–702, at pp. 700–02; Id., Tradizione e struttura in Dante, Florence, Sansoni, 1968, pp. 38–9, 42–4, 70, 82–5; Id., ‘Il canto VI del Paradiso’, Studi Danteschi, 49, 1972, pp. 49–77, at pp. 62–8.
& Bianca Facchini [email protected] 1
Department of Classics, King’s College London, North Wing, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
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B. Facchini
Lucan’s voice and applies to the Bellum Civile the same allegorizing reading he adopts for the Aeneid. The article demonstrates the difference
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