Elissa As a New Dido: Greece, the East, and the Westward Movement of Culture in the Decameron

Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org Elissa as a New Dido: Greece, the East, and the Westward Movem ent of Culture in the Decam eron B occaccio’s age was one of two periods m arked by large-scale em igration of Greek intellectuals westward. The better-known period is that of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and its afterm ath, when Greek-speaking refugees brought their learning and their native language with them to Italy and other lands where m ost people belonged to the Rom an Catholic Church, or the “Latin Church” as Greeks of the tim e would have called it. Less widely discussed but equally im portant was the influx of Greeks to the West som e one hundred years earlier in the afterm ath of a theological controversy between the Monk Gregory Palam as and Barlaam of Calabria, best known to scholars of Italian literature as the m an who tried to teach Petrarch Greek and m ight have succeeded had he not died in 1348. Barlaam was a brilliant dialectician and a subtle philosopher, the type of m an Petrarch would have adm ired. He is regarded today by the Eastern Orthodox Church as a heresiarch. In 1351 he was anathem atized. His followers, whose ranks included m any if not m ost Byzantine intellectuals, had little choice but to convert to Rom an Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy and, under m ost circum stances, m ove to a region not under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The controversy between Barlaam an d Gregory Palam as originated when Barlaam m ade a disparaging rem ark about certain ascetic practices undertaken by Greek Orthodox m onks. 1 He was offended by the claim that m onks could behold the uncreated energy of God m anifested as a pure light. His theological views are difficult to reconstruct, as m ost of his polem ical writings against Palam as were destroyed, and we are often forced to rely on his opponents to tell us what his views were. The result of the controversy was that the Orthodox Church declared that God’s energies 1 The standard study of Palam as’s theology is J ohn Meyendorff, St. Grégoire Palam as et la m y stique orthodoxe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959). http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org are distinct from his essence. Hum an beings m ay participate in and perceive God’s energies, but his essence rem ains utterly transcendent, beyond hum an com prehension. The Rom an Catholic Church, in contrast, has rejected this view and m aintains that God’s essence and his en ergies are the sam e and that to separate them would be to deny the unity and sim plicity of God. This essay will be prim arily about the Greek settings of Boccaccio’s Decam eron, and the theological subtleties of the Palam ite controversy m ay seem distant from the environm ent of Boccaccio’s work. It was not until 1360 that Boccaccio had the Calabrian Greek Leo Pilatus, also known as Leonzio Pilato, installed as the first instructor of Greek at the University of Florence. 2 If Boccaccio did not yet have a deep fam iliarity with the Greek language while he wrote the Decam eron, several of the novelle reveal an interest in the Greek-speaking world. Students of the late Byzantine Em pire and, in particular, of Greek-Italian relations in the late Middle Ages, m ay find Boccaccio’s Greek tales valuable for their representation of Greeks by an Italian deeply curious about Greek culture. Boccaccio’s Greek teacher, Pilatus, was, like Petrarch, a student of Barlaam . Barlaam and Pilatus both cam e from Calabria an d identified them selves as Greeks, although Pilatus seem s to have felt a certain am bivalence about whether he was Greek or Italian. While in Constantinople, he identified him self as a Calabrian yet, according to Petrarch, claim ed to be a Thessalonian while in Italy. 3 It is difficult to understand why. Perhaps he was lying. By m ost accounts, Pilatus was a difficult person to get along with, and his contradictory statem ents about his country of origin suggest that he felt an outsider. His background afforded him no easy answer to the question, “Are you Italian or Greek?” His teacher Barlaam cam e from the sam e region and spoke the sam e language. Barlaam was originally a Greek Orthodox Christian with evidently no interest in changing his religion, but, as the Palam ite controversy unfolded, it becam e apparent that he had little fam iliarity with the m ainstream of Orthodox spirituality. Greeks in the Byzantine Em pire would pejoratively call him a “Latinophrone,” or Latin-thinker, though 2 The only book-length study of Pilatus to date is Agostino Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio: le sue versioni om eriche negli autografi di Venezia e la cultura greca del prim o um anesim o (Ven ice and Rom e: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1964). As his title suggests, Pertusi concentrates on the Hom eric translations. Much work rem ains to be done on other aspects of Pilatus’s career. 3 Petrarch, Epistulae Seniles 3.6, quoted in Pertusi 10 1. http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 134 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org there is little doubt that Barlaam would have preferred for relations between the Eastern and Western Churches to im prove. In reference to m onks who practiced contem plating their own bodies as a way of realizing personal union with the divine, Barlaam coined the term om phalopsy choi, “m en with souls in their navels,” and spawned the still-proverbial references to navel-gazing, contem plating one’s navel, etc. The dialogue could hardly proceed in an irenic m anner after such a charge had been m ade. The Orthodox m onk Gregory Palam as took it upon him self to defend the m onastic practices of his church, particularly the practice known as hesychasm , in which m onks are believed to witness the uncreated energies of God in the form of light. Barlaam , from what we can gather in the works of his opponents and am biguous references in his own writings, apparently objected that hesychastic prayers denied the transcendence of God. It would be beyond the scope of our discussion to dwell at length on the nature of the hesychast controversy, but Barlaam of Calabria ultim ately joined the Rom an Catholic Church, which teaches in accordance with Thom as Aquinas, that the beatific vision of God in his true essence will take place in its fullness only after the death of the believer. Hesychasm teaches, in contrast, following Gregory Palam as, that vision of the divine is possible in this life, but that the vision, now and in the hereafter will only be of God’s energies, and that his essence will rem ain forever beyond hum an com prehension and perception. Thom ists claim that the Eastern Orthodox view denies the faithful participation in the divine. For our purposes in studying the Decam eron, its use of Greek settings and its portrayal of Greek people, we m ay point out that Western polem ics against Byzantine spiritual practices from the 1340 s depicted the Greeks as a people subm erged in superstition and scarcely worthy of their own classical heritage. Italian hum anists like Petrarch were happy to have genuine Greeks like Barlaam of Calabria from whom to study Greek antiquity, but Barlaam him self contributed to the im age of contem porary Greeks as debased and ignorant. 4 One of the constant criticism s he m akes against Palam as and other hesychasts is that they did not understand Aristotelian logic, since if they did they would surely agree with Thom as Aquinas’s interpretation of it. In 1348, the year Barlaam died and Florence suffered the plague that would serve as backdrop to the Decam eron, Greece was revered as the hom e of Aristotle and Hom er, but the Greeks were looked down on as a backward people, lapsed into heresy and schism , a select few 4 Pertusi (10 3) has dem onstrated that Petrarch, for all his objections that Calabria is in Italy rather than Greece, does in fact acknowledge Leo as a Greek. http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 135 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org of whom could be saved through religious conversion an d cultural assim ilation, and im ported to Western institutes of higher learning where they could repay the West by spreading knowledge of their country’s ancient past. Eight of the Decam eron’s novelle, by m y reckoning, have either Greek settings or significant Greek protagonists. Three of these are n arrated by Panfilo (2.7, 5.1, 7.9), so it is fair to say that one of Boccaccio’s narrators has a fascination with Greeks. Of the other n arrators, Elissa (1.9), Em ilia (3.7) and Filom ena (10 .8) tell one story each in which Greek lands or Greek people figure prom inently, while Lauretta tells two (2.4, 4.3). Elissa is especially im portant as her narrative begins in Cyprus and follows the course of Dido’s journey to Tunis, and then Aeneas’s journey to Rom e. (For reference, a list of Elissa’s ten tales is given at the end of this article.) The Greece of the Decam eron is usually the Greece of the islands, especially Crete or Cyprus but som etim es others. Two stories take place in Athens, while one is set in Argos, a city described by the narrator Panfilo as “piú fam osa che grande.”5 The Greek islands are the unfam iliar, fantastical terrain on which heroes prove their worth. The third story of Day Four and the first story of Day Five are both set partly in Crete, the legendary ancestral hom e of the Trojans which Aeneas m ust visit in Book 3 of the Aeneid before venturing on to found Rom e. 6 Days Four and Five of the Decam eron both contain retellings of the Aeneid. This becom es evident as we look at the place nam es m entioned in the rubrics to novelle 3– 5 of the Quarta Giornata and novelle 1– 3 of the Quinta Giornata. In each case, we see the trajectory of Aeneas’s journey, Crete to Tunis to Italy, being retraced as the different narrators tell their stories. It has been observed by Vittore Branca that the only North African story in the Decam eron, tale four of Day Four, is narrated by Elissa, who bears the nam e of the ancient Carthaginian queen m ore com m only known as Dido. 7 This is technically true, although Tunis is also an im portant presence in tale 2 of Day Five. This tim e however, Elissa does not narrate the Tunisian tale. It is narrated by Em ilia, and Elissa follows it with a story set in Rom e, the city for which her ancient nam esake’s life was ultim ately sacrificed. At least if Vergil can be believed. 5 Boccaccio, Decam eron , ed. Vittore Branca, 2 vols. (Torino: Einaudi, 1980 ) 8 62. Aeneid 3.10 4– 62. 7 Decam eron, ed. Branca 516 n. 4. See also Sim one Marchesi, Stratigrafie decam eroniane (Florence: Olschki, 20 0 4), esp. ch. 3 “Didone e Lisabetta da Messina: Fabula e historia nel reticolo delle fonti di Decam eron IV.5, pp. 67– 10 4. 6 http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 136 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org But can he? To exam ine what Boccaccio achieves through his retelling of the Aeneid in the Fourth and Fifth Days of the Decam eron, we m ust first consider how he deals with Vergilian m otifs elsewhere in his work. Before writing the Decam eron he had portrayed a Vergilian Dido in his Am orosa visione (canto 29.1– 30 ), in which the North African Queen succum bs to her sexual desire for Aen eas and dies as the consequence of her passion. 8 A decade after the Decam eron, however, he would underm ine Vergil’s authority in the De m ulieribus claris, where he not only n arrates an alternative version of the events, but explicitly tells us that Elissa had never even laid eyes on Aeneas. 9 The sequence of stories in the Decam eron suggests that, whatever m ight really have happened in history, Dido has now been relegated to the position of a tool for the glorification of Rom e. In Boccaccio’s elaborate system of interlocking narratives, the point where Rom e’s trium ph over Carthage becom es com plete is in Elissa’s final story, the second novella of Day Ten, which is set at Rom e in the papal court. Sym bolically, Dido is forced to tell the story of how the city founded by Aeneas has now becom e the eternal city and hom e to God’s chief representative on earth. Elissa’s n arrative ends with Ghino being m ade a m em ber of the Hospitalers, who at the tim e the story takes place were in volved in m ilitary cam paigns on the present-day site of Dido’s ancestral hom eland. If we seem to have gone far from the topic of Greek settings in the Decam eron, let us turn to Elissa’s first narrative, which is also the first story of the Decam eron with a Greek setting: Day One, story nine. This is the shortest story in the Decam eron, but it is significant in establishin g Boccaccio’s narrator Elissa unam biguously as a sym bol of the legendary Dido’s role in the shaping of literary tradition. Elissa’s first tale is set in Cyprus, where Dido spent her childhood, as Boccaccio narrates in the De m ulieribus claris. In barely two pages, Elissa’s narrative introduces the com plex system of power struggles that will characterize gender relations in the rest of her tales. A wom an who has been raped while on her way back from pilgrim age in the Holy Land dem ands justice of the King of Cyprus. In a speech that sparkles with anguished sarcastic wit, she sham es him into taking action and, ultim ately, into transform ing him self into a strong ruler. Knowing the king’s reputation for weakness, the wom an realizes it 8 9 Boccaccio, Am orosa visione, ed. Robert Hollander, Tim othy Ham pton and Margherita Frankel (Hanover and Lon don: University Press of New En gland, 1986) 119. Boccaccio, Fam ous W om en, ed. Virgin ia Brown (Cam bridge, MA: Harvard Un iversity Press, 20 0 1) 174. http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 137 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org would be futile to ask him directly to take action against the m en who wronged her. Instead, she says that since the king is so good at taking abuse, she would like som e advice from him on how best to bear the wrong she has suffered. The indignant ruler punishes the rapists and never takes another insult from anyone ever again. It takes a wom an to m ake a real m an, Elissa seem s to be telling us. Cyprus functions in the story the way Greek islands function throughout the Decam eron. It is not a destination, but a place where one stops on the way hom e. Its inhabitants are obstacles one m ust overcom e, like the sorceresses and m onsters overcom e by heroes of legend. It is the land where you can rem ake yourself, provided you pass all the tests that the island puts in your way. Cyprus was a transitional point for the Phoenicians between their ancestral hom eland and Carthage, and it is a transitional point for Boccaccio’s protagonist not only between the Holy Land and France, but between different states of being. How she responds to what happen s on the island determ ines whether she will return hom e fallen and disgraced or renewed, a pilgrim as well as a kingm aker. When we consider the overall structure of the Decam eron and realize that it is no accident that a story set in the ancient Elissa’s childhood hom e is also the first story told by Boccaccio’s Elissa, we are led to ask how Boccaccio com m ents on the legend of Dido. I believe his Elissa, the fourteenth-century wom en who tells stories with her nine friends while escaping the Black Death that is ravaging Florence, can be read as an allegory of the tellings and retellings of the Dido legend that have helped shape the history of literature. The heroine of Elissa’s story is, like the Dido of Rom an m ythology, a trickster. Both wom en are adept at verbal m anipulation. Dido is fam ous for the ruse whereby she had the African natives agree to grant her as m uch land as one oxhide could cover, and then cut the oxhide into an enorm ous strip to encircle what would becom e the entire colony of Carthage. She then succum bs to trickery herself. A decade after writing the Decam eron, Boccaccio is careful to tell us that, having been persuaded to present herself before the African king who will try to force her into m arriage, “Non sensit regina dolos,” “The queen did not detect the trick.” While recognizing the danger of reading the De m ulieribus claris backwards into the Decam eron, we still ought to watch out for signs that, once a wom an has trium phed through trickery, another wom an in a linked narrative m ight be tricked. Let us look now at Elissa’s other stories. After setting her tale in the Prim a Giornata in Cyprus, she m akes a passing reference to Rom e in the Seconda Giornata. She takes care to inform her audience that the story takes place “essen do l’im perio di Rom a http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 138 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org da’ franceschi ne’ tedeschi transportato.” This initially m ight seem an insignificant detail, but Elissa m entions Rom e in m ore different tales than any other narrator. She nam es the city a total of twelve tim es in three stories. Only Filom en a m entions the city by n am e m ore frequently, and all of her references to it are in the eighth novella of the Tenth Day. The next story in which Elissa m entions Rom e is tale 3 of Day Five, where she says that the city, “com e è oggi coda così già fu capo del m ondo.”10 Placing this quip, as well as Day Two’s observation that Rom an power is no longer Rom an, in the m outh of Elissa is, I believe, Boccaccio’s way of giving Dido her revenge. It is particularly noteworthy that Elissa directs that insult at contem porary Rom e im m ediately after hearing the Fifth Day’s second story, in which a wom an travels by boat to North Africa. It is probably no accident either that the day’s second story is narrated by Em ilia, who bears the nam e of Tertia Aem ilia, the wife of the general who defeated Hannibal. Usually in the Decam eron, the nam e Em ilia is m eant to invoke the heroine of Boccaccio’s own Teseida, but in Day Five, I believe we also ought to be m indful of Scipio’s wife. Like the ancient Elissa, the ancient Em ilia is the subject of one of the biographies in the De m ulieribus claris. 11 The verbal exchange between the two wom en thus am ounts to a re-fighting of the Punic Wars while the sequence of stories retraces the voyage of Aeneas as told by Vergil. Before Em ilia’s Tunisian story in Day Five, Panfilo begins the day’s storytelling with a tale set partly in Cyprus, partly in Rhodes, an d partly in Crete. Several tim es in the tale the narrator goes to the trouble of telling us that all the protagonists have old fam ily connections in Crete, where they are warm ly greeted toward the end of the story by their Cretan relatives before going on to their respective destinations. Crete thus functions in the first novella of the Quinta Giornata as it does in Book 3 of Vergil’s Aeneid. In both cases, it is the ancestral hom eland the hero m ust visit before proceeding to the journey’s end. The first three stories of Day Five contain in their m eticulous narrative sequencing a com ic retelling of the Aeneid. Like all stories of the Quinta Giornata, they have happy endings. And the com ic effect is heighten ed at the beginning of the third novella by Elissa’s caustic rem ark about contem porary Rom e. She lam poons Aeneas’s achievem ents, and she rem arks that the glory of Rom e has n ot endured. The sam e trajectory, from Crete to Tunis to Italy is m apped out as well in Day Four, but, naturally, in the Quarta Giornata, the outcom e is tragic 10 Decam eron 619, see also n. 5 for Branca’s com m ents on the them e of Rom e’s decline. W om en LXXIV, pp. 310 – 14. 11 Fam ous http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 139 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org rather than com ic. The second story of the day, which recounts the fam ous exploits of the duplicitous Frate Alberto, is tragic only for him , but its Venetian setting introduces the tragic retellin g of the Aeneid contained in tales four, five, and six. I m ention the detail of the Frate Alberto tale’s Venetian setting here to highlight the exquisite care with which Boccaccio chose his geographic settings. We m ove from Venice in the second novella to the Venetian colony of Crete in the third. Next Elissa narrates a tale set in Tunis. The fifth tale takes us to Messina, where the journey com es to its tragic end after Elisabetta and Lorenzo fail to navigate the perilous journey between Scylla an d Charybdis. Near Messina, at the straits where Scylla and Charybdis traditionally abide, 12 Lorenzo is m urdered, and in the sam e city Elisabetta dies of a broken heart. In a curious rem ark at the story’s end, the narrator tells us that Elisabetta’s brothers left Messina for Naples, which seem s to serve little narrative purpose unless we look to Vergilian parallels. It was near Naples, at the cave of Avernus that Aeneas descended into the Underworld. The next story, tale six is a dream narrative, at the beginning of which Panfilo gives a speech on the veracity of som e dream s and the m endacity of others sim ilar to that found at the end of Book 6 of the Aeneid. Indeed, sim ilarities to Aeneid Book 6 are already eviden t in the fifth tale, when Elisabetta is visited in a dream by her m urdered lover. Unlike Day Five, which hides a com ic Aeneid within its narrative structure, Day Four’s Aeneid is tragic, failing to reach Rom e and running aground in a netherworld of dream s and shades. Elissa is probably happy to see Aeneas fail. She has her trium ph in Day Six. Here she is Queen, and she takes her revenge on Vergil by telling a story of the trium phant wit of Guido Cavalcanti, who, if Dante is to be believed, held Vergil in scorn. It has puzzled scholars that Dante tells Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in Inferno 10 that his son had a low opinion of Vergil, but Dante m ust have known som ething about his friend’s tastes that has otherwise been lost to posterity. Boccaccio wrote in his Esposizioni that Cavalcanti held not only Vergil but poets in general in scorn because, though a poet him self, Cavalcanti believed poetry was fundam entally inferior to philosophy. 13 By celebrating Cavalcanti so highly during her day as queen, Elissa takes her revenge on poets, 12 13 De gen ealogia deorum gentilium 4.14.4. Vittorio Zaccaria, ed. In Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Vittore Branca, ed. Vol. 7 (Milan: Mondadori, 1998) 40 2. Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Com edia 10 .62– 63, Giorgio Padoan, ed. In Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Vittore Branca, ed. Vol. 6 (Milan: Mondadori, 1965) 526. http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 140 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org including Boccaccio, who had repeated Vergil’s slanders in the Am orosa visione and continued to m ake her a pawn furthering the goals of Rom e. In several ways, Elissa’s narrative in the ninth novella of Day Six m akes us keep Canto 10 of the Inferno in m ind. Elissa’s story takes place in a graveyard, and the furnaces in Hell’s sixth circle are described by Dante as “sepulchers.” Elissa’s em phasis on the Cavalcanti fam ily’s heterodox religious views m akes us recall how they earned their place in Dante’s Hell to begin with. 14 She is not telling a story of just any Guido Cavalcanti, but of Dante’s Guido Cavalcanti, who did not like Vergil. Boccaccio essentially tells us in the De m ulieribus claris that Vergil slandered Dido, aka Elissa. Far from losing her m ind in passionate desire for Aeneas, she never even saw him . She en ded up dying in order to rem ain faithful to the m em ory of her husband Sichaeus. Vergil drastically alters her character to m ake her a tool used and discarded for the good of Rom e, and the Boccaccian narrator who bears her nam e holds an anti-Rom an bias openly in her stories of Days Two and Five, which then becom es an anti-Vergilian bias in Day Six, over which she reigns as Queen, after the Aeneid has been retold in different ways during the two previous days. After being crowned, Elissa is briefly liberated from the task of retelling the history of Dido and Aeneas. On the Seventh Day, she tells of the fem ale trickster who successfully conceals an affair with Rinaldo, her husband’s godfather. Dido the trickster is back, it would seem . Elissa’s tale in Day Eight is the hum orous story of Calandrino’s ill-fated quest for the heliotrope. This story ends on a disturbing note, however, as the duped Calandrino takes out his frustrations by beating his wife. When his friends Buffalm acco an d Bruno see that he is about to beat his wife a second tim e, they say that it was in fact his fault not hers, that the stone lost its “m agical” power. “Le fem ine,” they explained, “facevano perdere la vertù alle cose.”15 “Wom en m ake things lose their power/ virtue.” At the end of Elissa’s tale in Day Eight, one m an brutalizes his wife, after which his two friends, to m ake it up to wom en, attem pt to disem power them and take away their voice. 14 For m ore on Dantean references in VI.9, see Robert M Durlin g, “Boccaccio on Interpretation: Guido’s Escape (Decam eron VI.9),” in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton , ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Bin gham ton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983) 273– 30 4. 15 Decam eron, ed. Branca, 919. The explanation continues: “e non le aveva ditto che ella si guardasse d’apparirgli innanzi quel giorno” [and he hadn’t warned her beforehan d not to show her face that day in his presence]. http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 141 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org In Day Nine, Elissa tells the story of the nun who tricked her abbess into leaving her cell with a pair of m en’s trousers over her head in order to reveal the abbess’s hypocrisy. Elissa and her listeners celebrate the tale as a trium ph of youthful ingenuity, but under the surface Elissa’s narrative is also a story of the underm ining of fem ale authority. The abbess is tricked and sham ed. Her defeat foreshadows Elissa’s own defeat as a voice that has sought throughout the Decam eron to underm ine the authority of Vergil and has directed subversive barbs against the authority of Rom e. In Day Ten, Elissa tells a Rom an story and ends it with a referen ce to Rom e’s backing of the Hospitalers in their attem pt to conquer the lands from which the Carthagin ians originally cam e. Like the legendary Dido, Elissa begins in Cyprus, goes to Tunisia, and reigns as queen. After her reign, her tales then see wom en beaten, m aligned and disem powered. Both wom en end up, through the m anipulation of Boccaccio and Vergil, serving the glory of Rom e. Boccaccio’s narrative structure brings the wisdom and civilization of the East to Italy. From the easternm ost parts of the Mediterranean, Elissa’s stories follow the path of Dido and then of Aeneas to Rom e. Even her tales with non-Vergilian settings tend to have odd quips and asides that keep the Vergilian allusions in the audience’s m ind. Tales told by other narrators, particularly in Days Four and Five, lend an additional level of engagem ent with Vergil to Boccaccio’s text. In particular, references to Crete, Tunis, and Rom e, in that order in the rubrics, strongly suggest that Boccaccio had Aeneas’s journey in m ind. Not all of the Greek settings in the Decam eron are island settings. One story takes place in Argos and two are set partly in Athens. In Day Seven, tale nine, Panfilo uses the grandeur of Argos as hum orous contrast to the ridiculousness of his characters, the deceitful Pirro and the gullible Nicostrato. Structurally, the exotic locale of Panfilo’s Argos functions as a segue into the still m ore exotic subject of the afterlife dealt with in tale ten. In the Decam eron, the Greek world is always a place of journeying, whether Boccaccio is re-narrating the journeys of classical heroes, giving a pilgrim a set of obstacles to overcom e before her hom ecom ing, or crossing the threshold between the natural and supernatural worlds. Greece is often a transitional space, but at tim es it is an origin. When showing the westward progress of civilization, Greece is often as far east as the narrative needs to begin. Twice Boccaccio takes us from Crete to Tunis to Italy, but not once does he begin the voyage in Troy. Elissa’s ten-story narrative journey begins in Dido’s childhood hom e of Cyprus rather than her Phoenician ancestral hom eland. We know that the pilgrim wom an has com e from the Holy Land, but the action begins in Cyprus. When a story begins http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 142 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org in the far East, it tends to end in the far East, or at least not to end up in the Christian West. In story seven of Day Two, as m any lan ds, Greek Latin and other, as the Babylonian prin cess Alatiel visits while being passed from one m an to another, she ultim ately m akes a journey from Babylonia to Algeria and rem ains intact. In other tales, as Boccaccio places references to the travels of Dido and Aen eas in his n arrative structure, om issions of the easternm ost origin s of Rom an and Carthaginian culture reveal the fascination with Greece that would lead Boccaccio later in life to study the Greek language, facilitating the westward m ovem ent of civilization, as he saw it, by bringing Greek scholars into Italy. CHRISTOPHER LIVANOS U NIVERSITY OF W ISCONSIN M ADISON http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 143 Heliotropia 7.1-2 (20 10 ) http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org APPENDIX  Trajectories taken from the Aeneid in Days Four and Five: Day 4: The Tragic Aeneid Day 5: The Com ic Aeneid 4.3: Crete 4.4: Tunis 4.5: Messina, Naples 4.6: Realm of dream s 5.1: Crete 5.2: Tunis 5.3: Rom e  The ten stories told by Elissa: 1.9: Cyprus, childhood hom e of Dido, aka Elissa. Fem ale authority established. 2.8: Various locales, with a seem ingly gratuitous dig at Rom e. 3.5: Wom an who has been silenced ultim ately trium phs. 4.4: Tunisian story. 5.3: Responds to Em ilia’s Tunisian story with yet an other dig at Rom e. Em ilia = Scipio’s wife. 6.9: Trium ph of Guido Cavalcanti, who despised Vergil accordin g to Dante and held poets in generally low regard according to Boccaccio’s com m entary on the Com edy . Queen Dido’s revenge on the poets who have slandered her. 7.3: The fem ale trickster continues to rule. 8.3: Wom an vindicated at the cost of bein g beaten . 9.2: Fem ale authority figure underm ined. 10 .2: Rom e’s authority reestablished. Dido is forced to praise Rom e, specifically the Rom e that is fightin g the crusades to conquer Dido’s ancestral hom eland. http:/ / w w w .heliotropia.org/ 0 7/ livanos.pdf 144