Classical Studies: Illinois

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ILLINOIS
CLASSICAL
STUDIES
VOLUME IX.2
FALL 1984
J. K. Newman, Editor
ISSN 0363-1923
i
1 2
ILLINOIS
CLASSICAL
STUDIES
VOLUME IX.
Fall 1984
J. K. Newman, Editor
Patet omnibus Veritas; nondum est occupata;

multum ex ilia etiam futuris relictum est.
Sen. Epp. 33. 1
THE LIBRARY OF THE
/^np in 1985
SCHOLARS PRESS
IbbJN UJb^-iy^J Aj UR8ANA-CHAMPAIGM
ILLINOIS CLASSICAL STUDIES
VOLUME IX.
LITERAE HUMANIORES
Classical Themes in Renaissance Guise
©1984
The Board of Trustees
University of Illinois
Printed in the U.S.A.

ADVISORY EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
John J. Bateman Howard Jacobson
Harold C. GotofF David Sansone
Responsible Editor: J. K. Newman
The Editor welcomes contributions, which should not normally exceed

twenty double-spaced typed pages, on any topic relevant to the
its transmission or influence. Con-
elucidation of classical antiquity,
sistent with the maintenance of scholarly rigor, contributions are
especially appropriate which deal with major questions of interpre-
tation, or which are likely to interest a wider academic audience.
Care should be taken in presentation to avoid technical jargon, and
the trans-rational use of acronyms. Homines cum hominibus loquimur.
Contributions should be addressed to:

The Editor,
Illinois Classical Studies,
Department of the Classics,
4072 Foreign Languages Building,
707 South Mathews Avenue,
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Each contributor receives twenty-five offprints.

Preface
Tutto mi transferisco in low

(Machiavelli)
In his Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia,
Missouri and London 1978), Paul Barolsky draws attention to a
painting by the Ferrarese artist Dosso Dossi in the Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna. He remarks:
The picture, which is presumed
have astrological significance,
to
conceivably alluding to the artist's and which is also perhaps
birthdate,
based on a dialogue of Lucian, reveals to us the improbable image of
the mighty, aW-powerful Jupiter tuonans [sic] so absorbed in his painting
of delicate butterflies that he is too busy to hear the pleas of the
virtuous virgin. Meanwhile, Mercury mediates between the two figures
by indicating to the virgin that she should maintain silence. The tone
of the painting, notwithstanding its pathos, is delicately mock-heroic,
like Ariosto's poetry which gently parodies the pomp and prowess of
chivalric heroes. In its mixture of pathos and comedy, Dosso's painting
seems almost to evoke the great comic mythologies later painted by
Velasquez.
The allusion to Lucian hereis not directly to a dialogue by the
Greek but to the brief Renaissance work Virtus Dea, inter-

satirist,
polated into the Latin translation of parts of Lucian by various hands

first published in Venice in 1494. Virtue complains there to Mercury
that although she has been assaulted in the Lower World by Fortune,
who has left her "prostrate in the mud," the gods have no leisure to
listen toher complaints, since they are either busy making sure that
the gourds bloom in time, or taking care that the butterflies have
beautiful painted wings {curare ut papilionibus alae perpulchrae pictae
adsint).
Mercury answers that even Jupiter fears to challenge Fortune.
vi Preface
Virtue despondently rejoins that she must go away "naked and

despised" {nuda et despecta abeo).
Dosso's imagination may or may not have been stimulated by this
short dialogue. If it beyond its supposed
was, his painting goes far
original. The student of the Classics
immediately observe that a
will
Jupiter painting butterflies is engaged in the task of creating souls,

into whom enter all the colors of the rainbow, Iris, the messenger of
the gods; according to one ancient poet, the mother of Eros. In the
picture the rainbow seems to blend into the artist's canvas. Mercury,
whose caduceus is prominently displayed, is in attendance in his capacity
as psychopompus, because it will be his duty to escort these souls to
the world of men. He bids Virtue fall silent, because "holy silence,"
a profoundly religious concept still surviving in Christian observance,
is appropriate to Jupiter's sacred task. It is this liturgical gesture, to
which the Virtus Dea makes no allusion, which becomes the center of
the composition, and on it W. B. Yeats' poem Long-legged Fly forms
the best commentary.
Virtue in the painting is not "naked and despised." She certainly
does not look as if she has just lost a tussle with Fortune and her
minions. Serious of expression, yet garlanded with flowers, she
represents the other end of the time-scale. She arrives with news of
victories won by heroic souls who have accepted her guidance. Yet
even her praeconia must remain unspoken in the presence of the
Demiurge. Past and future meet in the symbolic now of this still
eternity, in which the painter glorifies his own art as the model of
the Creator's.
What Dosso has done here is to offer the paradigm of Renaissance,
and indeed all creative, response to antiquity. On the surface, his
painting departs even further from whatever ancient content the
parody of Lucian, found in the Virtus Dea, may embody. In fact, he
has taken this ironic parable explaining the slights suffered by Virtue
at the hands of Fortune, and re-interpreted it at a level which brings
him into farprofounder contact with classical antiquity than his
scholarly, but essentially superficial, original.
Dosso could find this point d'appui for his imagination in classical
antiquity because he was a Renaissance man.
The degree of commitment which Renaissance artists and thinkers
felt to the Classics is for us moderns difficult to grasp. In the letter
to F. Vettori from which the epigraph above is taken Machiavelli
writes:
Venuta la sera, mi ritorno in casa, ed entro nel mio scrittoio; e in su
I'uscio mi spoglio quella vesta cotidiana, plena dl fango e di loto, e

Preface vii
mi metto panni reali e curiali; e rivestito condecentemente, entro

nelle antique corti delli antiqui uomini, dove, da loro ricevuto amo-
revolmente, mi pasco di quel cibo, che solum e mio, e che io nacqui
per lui; dove io non mi vergogno parlare con loro e domandarli della
ragione delle loro azioni; e quelli per loro umanita mi rispondono; e
non sento per quattro ore di tempo alcuna noia, sdimentico ogni
afFanno, non temo la poverta, non mi sbigottisce la morte; tutto mi
transferisco in loro.
When evening comes, I return home, and enter my writing-room. At

the door I take off these everyday clothes, full mud and filth, and
of
dress in royal, courtly garments. Clad fittingly,
I enter the ancient
courts of the men

of old, and there find a kindly welcome. There I
feed on that food which alone is mine, and for which I was born.
There I am not ashamed to converse with them and ask the reasons
for their actions. And they, in their humanity, give me answer, and
for four hours I do not feelany vexation, I forget every toil, I do
not fear poverty, I lose my dread of death. I transform myself entirely
into them.
Machiavelli uses the word umanita in this letter of December 10,

1513, with good reason. Ten years later, Ariosto, in his sixth Satira,
addressed to Bembo, offered one of the earliest examples of the noun
umanista, which in its original meaning was interchangeable with^
"poet." The Renaissance evidently believed in a human dialogue,

which is also, as the author puts on new clothes at the threshold of
his study, a religious dialogue, with the masters of the Greco-Roman
past. He asks for reasons, and they answer him. The fruits of this
courtesy are evident even today in our museums and libraries.
Machiavelli was not only a philosopher and historian, whose name
even now commands our attention, but a literary artist, whose comedy
La Mandragola is still holding the stage. It is the "humanist" and
artist therefore who, with his power of creative transformation, sets
the example for interpretation which Renaissance studies must learn
to follow if they are really to penetrate to the heart of their theme.
It is easy, in the first fit of enthusiasm, to see resemblances to classical
antiquity in some favorite Cinquecento masterpiece. But then schol-

arship rightly introduces its qualifications, its demurrals. In the
cauldron of that catalytic alchemy, the similarities evaporate, the two
worlds are felt as hermetically sealed against any but their own
peculiar values. Renaissance studies become a separate discipline, a
separate department. The classicist, safe once more in his nest,
breathes a sigh of relief at the departure of the intruding cuckoo.
And is not the cuckoo for her part glad to get away?
It is necessary to introduce at this point a salutary word of Mikhail
viii Preface
Bakhtin: "The author may not remember, but the genre remembers."
Obviously, the greater the artist the greater will be his power to draw
on the inherited and accumulated resources of his medium. At this
level, he becomes an interpreter of tradition whose testimony is even
more valuable than that of the scholar, since few scholars are geniuses
to this degree. This truth was appreciated in Alexandria, when the
foundations of scholarship in the modern sense were being laid. It
was, at least in the first and second generations of the history of the
Library, clear that poet and scholar were ideally one. It was appre-
ciated in the Renaissance, while umanista meant the same thing as
poeta. But even in the Greek world these related vocations were torn
asunder. The unfortunate imitation of this worst side of the ancient
legacy has had the present disastrous consequences for the study of
the Classics. Never in the history of our civilization can so few have
been able to read Latin and Greek with any degree of fluency and
enjoyment.
Although therefore a richer explanation of the iconography of
Dosso's painting is available, the ethos of Paul Barolsky's remarks is
one that, in his turn, the classical scholar will do well to note. In his
magnificent The Age of Humanism (London 1963) Andre Chastel has
emphasized that the prevailing tone of Renaissance literature is comic
or serio-comic, even in those engaged in the forefront of the contro-
versies of their time, and here we need look no further than Erasmus
and More. This has important implications for both its form and its
content. Its form will so often be that of the dialogue, and hence the
significance of Professor Barolsky's mention of Lucian in the passage
quoted. Its content will be fantasy; mock-heroic, ironically didactic,
witty, ruefully (and sometimes joyfully) conscious of the gap between
ideal and reality. It will juxtapose crudity and delicacy, secular and
religious. It will forever be aware that the king and the clown have
the same horoscope.
The prominence in the Renaissance tradition of symbols such as
laughter, festivity, love, the common meal in all its bounty, dislocations
of space and time away from the everyday, the three levels of heaven,
earth and hell, crowning and uncrowning, death from life and life
from death, the "grotesque body," masking and unmasking, meta-
morphosis, Utopia, the pastoral: these are tokens that the serio-comic,
far from depending on the random association of ideas, exploits quite
definite aspects of popular culture, sacred and profane in one.
Renaissance art evidently plumbs these deep wellsprings, whatever
the courtly refinements which may at times disguise its humble origins.
So does Dante's Comedy, which because of language, theme, style and
learning, should be regarded as the first major (and of course
Preface ix
unsurpassed) work of Renaissance poetry. Even Petrarch's Africa, the

epic of the heroic struggle against Hannibal,is peculiarly in debt to
Ovid, and comes alive only when it versifies a romantic episode in

Livy.
But the serio-comic is also a major feature of the Greco-Roman
imagination. If Lucian is relevant to Dosso's picture, so is Plato. The
Symposium ends with the argument that the truly scientific poet will
be just as good at comedy as he is at tragedy, which is a fairly broad
hint about the tone which that particular dialogue is meant to strike.
The mixed emotions of the myth of Er at the end of the Republic,
like those of Pindar's first Nemean, find an echo in Dosso's painting
in the Cini Collection Riso, Ira, Pianta e Paura where, as Professor
Barolsky notes, "various emotions are comically mixed."
In late fifth-century Athens, Euripides' Pentheus had already been
a figure of fun. Pentheus had laughed at the new god, and Dionysus
had laughed at Pentheus' efforts to contain his power. And laughter
is the ultimate reaction of Boccaccio's Penteo to all his sufferings in
the Teseida (1341?), as it is that of the executed More at the conclusion

of Ellis Heywood's dialogue // Moro (1556). The dying Mercutio's
punning self-mockery in Romeo and Juliet, like that of the dying John
of Gaunt in Richard II, is part of the same tradition, of which
Shakespeare is a supreme master. It is one of his closest links with
the spirit of classical antiquity.
The serio-comic style, as we see from its deployment by the
philosophers, does not surrender its claim to communicate some kind
of truth. But it is a larger truth than that of the academic's abstractions,
which is one reason why those undergraduate essays discovering that
Socrates does not refute Thrasymachus in the first book of the
Republic are so silly. Of course Socrates does not refute Thrasymachus
at the theoretical level. But life is lived authentically —
not by
theorists, but by people making decisions. The ultimate question is
one of character, ethical: would you want to be Thrasymachus or
Socrates? At this level, the answer is obvious. Plato's form is not
dispensable and even harmful sugar around some distasteful and
ineffective philosophical pill. It is part of what he is trying to say, one
of the reasons why he slept with the mimes of Sophron under his
pillow.
If classical literature therefore is to speak to students faced with
the ambiguities of the twenty-first century, it must be cultivated with
a broader range of response in mind than that of simple admiration,
or simple dislike. Its profound roots in the undifferentiated primitive
must be traced, in a soil where either / or does not make too much
sense. It must be re-assessed, not merely by the study of the great
X Preface
scholars, but also by a civilized awareness of the artistic and literary

tradition, particularly as that tradition was developed at the Renais-
sance.
The Renaissance had of course its pedants. Bernard Weinberg
twenty years ago traced the melancholy history of their incompre-
hension and dogmatism in the face of the masterpieces of their age.
But it had too a series of brilliant artists whose works constitute an
implied poetic. Ariosto, for example, evidently understood the ancient
epic tradition and its paradoxical debt to Callimachus far better than
his critics. His elegy De diversis amoribus and even his sixth Satira
already mentioned are the proof of that. So did Tasso. Racine, who
wrote Les Plaideurs as well as his great tragic masterpieces, knew
more by poetic instinct about ancient tragedy than the French
Academy. These names are excluded from histories of classical
scholarship. It is time they were there, or at least time that a broad
humane culture was regarded as more important to the budding
specialist than the dim preparation for settling hoti's —
or Vasari's —
business.
The Editor of this present collection of papers about different
facets of the Renaissance is a firm believer in the study of the Classics
as an aspect of literae humaniores. In this regard, he would even enter
a plea for the despised arts of Latin and Greek verse composition.
At least how to scan. At best, they
they taught their practitioners
inspired some sort of feeling for Latin and Greek as vehicles of poetic
thought. They were a last tribute to the original meaning of "uman-
ista," a last vestige of the Alexandrian sensibility.
But the chief lesson to be learned from such a collection is the
need to expand our horizons, whether we are classicists or Renaissance
scholars. The greatest commentator on Virgil is Dante, the greatest
commentator on Ovid —
Shakespeare. But these are matters of
mutual concern! It has been noted that Michelangelo in the Sistine
Creation of Eve made the figure of God so big that He would burst
the frame if He stood up. The art historian who tells us this seems
to regard it as a flaw. "Michelangelo must have found it difficult to
get a proper view of his work." Certainly she does not remind her
readers that exactly the same was true of Phidias' statue of the seated
Zeus at Olympia, who would have pierced the roof of the temple by
rising to his feet. Both artists were trying to express the majesty of
the Creator in physical terms by age-old methods. Did Michelangelo
consciously know this? Does it matter? The genre remembered, even
if he did not.
But the scholar must remember too! We need dialogue, between

classicists who understand better the achievements of Greco-Roman
Preface xi
civilization, and Renaissance specialists who are less ready to separate

the branch from the tree in the name of a scholarship too attentive
to leaves and twigs. Michelangelo's youthful Pietd in St. Peter's could
never have been sculpted in fifth-century Athens. But the student of
Attic white-ground funerary lecythoi feels the kinship of spirit all the
same.
When the author of Paradise Lost utters his prefatory strictures
against the use of rhyme, he is taking sides as a scholar and theorist
in a well-known Renaissance controversy. When, in spite of them, he
uses rhyming lines to describe Eve's plucking of the forbidden fruit,
he is paying homage as a poet to a primitive religious assonance as
old as, and older than, the Iguvine Tablets, or Bereshith bara. . . .
Once again the genre has remembered.

This kind of learning ought not to be left to the comparatists. All
study of literature is comparative literature. All study of literature
must be continually cross-fertilized by reference to the arts of painting,
sculpture, music. Every scholar must be able to say: "Tutto mi
transferisco in loro." The uomo universale remains a valid ideal even
in our age.
In an important passage of his The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy Jacob Burckhardt remarks of Pico della Mirandola:
He was the only man who loudly and vigorously defended the truth
and science of all ages against the one-sided worship of classical
antiquity. He knew how to value not only Averroes and the Jewish
investigators, but also the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages,
according to the matter of their writings. He seems to hear them say:
"We not in the schools of word-catchers, but in the
shall live for ever,
circleof the wise, where they talk not of the mother of Andromache
or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper causes of things human
and divine; he who looks closely will see that even the barbarians had
intelligence {mercurium), not on the tongue but in the breast.'
There is not much danger of a one-sided worship of classical

antiquity in our time. We are all barbarians, and so must hope that
Pico della Mirandola's words are true. It is to his ideal of learning
and his view of the dignity of man that this collection is dedicated.
An unsere deutschen Leser ergeht folgender besonderer Aufruf:
Es ist an der Zeit. Was noch immer an W.Jaegers Drittem Humanismus
lebensfahigund lebensbejahend bleibt, das soil jetzt iiberpriift, vertieft
and erneut werden.
xii Preface
Once again, I must thank Mrs. Mary Ellen Fryer for her labors in
putting on line our contributors' texts. Mr. Carl Kibler of the Printing
Services Office, University of Illinois, supervised the PENTA side of
our operations with his usual common sense and perseverance.
Frances Stickney Newman's unceasing toil made the whole thing
possible.
J. K. Newman
LITERAE HUMANIORES
Classical Themes in Renaissance Guise
Contents
Roman Jokes and the Renaissance Prince, 1455-

1528 137
BARBARA C. BOWEN, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Botticelli's Hypnerotomachia in the National Gallery,

London: A Problem of the Use of Classical Sources
in Renaissance Art 149
PAUL HOLBERTON, The Warburg Institute, University of London
Platonic and Pauline Ideals in Comic Dress: "Com-

ment on Vestit Gargantua" 183
FLORENCE M. WEINBERG, St. John Fisher College, Rochester
From History to Chronicle: Rabelais Rewriting
Herodotus 1 97
H. H. GLIDDEN, Tulane University, New Orleans
Medea and Imitation in the French Renaissance 215

DONALD STONE, Jr., Harvard University
Thomas Stanley's Aeschylus: Renaissance Practical

Criticism of Greek Tragedy 229
MARGARET ARNOLD, University of Kansas
Myrrha's Revenge: Ovid and Shakespeare's Reluc-

tantAdonis 251
KAREN NEWMAN, Brown' University
Ovidian Pictures and "The Rules and Compasses"

of Criticism 267
JUDITH DUNDAS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
xvi Contents
9. Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance 277

GORDON BRADEN, University of Virginia
10. Altered States: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shake-

speare's Dramatic Genres 293
CYRUS HOY, University of Rochester
1 1 Small Latine and Lesse Greeke? Shakespeare and

the Classical Tradition 309
J. K. NEWMAN, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Roman Jokes
and the Renaissance Prince,
1455-1528
BARBARA C. BOWEN
Louis XIV, France's Roi Soleil, is reputed to have made only one
joke in his life, and a poor joke at that.' There seems, in more
modern times, to be no essential connection between absolute power
and a sense of humor, and yet as late as the early seventeenth century
in Europe we can trace a tradition of the laughing Ideal Prince which
originated in Imperial Rome. In this paper I propose to trace this
tradition in outline, and then to focus on four Renaissance works
belonging to it, which have much to tell us about Renaissance concepts
of the ideal ruler.
I. From Suetonius to the Fifteenth Century
Suetonius tells quite a few jokes made by and about Julius Caesar,
Augustus, Tiberius, Vespasian and Domitian, and of these he gives
most space to the humor of Augustus. He was not the first to do so;
Quintilian had already included, in his passage expanding Cicero's
rhetorical theory of jokes, ^ nine witty sayings by, or directed against,
Augustus. One of these, which seemed more memorable to the
Renaissance than it does to us, and which may be the first recorded
'
According to Stendhal's note in his Journal Litteraire ("Traite de I'art de faire
des comedies," cii. IV, p. 1 1 of vol. Ill of the J. L. in the Victor Del Litto edition,
Cercle du Bibliophile, 1970, Oeuvres completes vol. 35).
^ Institutio oratoria VI. 3.
138 Illinois Classical Studies, IX.
elephant joke, has Augustus saying to a timid man holding out a

petition to him: "noli, tanquam assem elephanto des" (59; Suetonius
has "quasi elephanto stipem," Aug. 53).
Suetonius tells only two such jokes made by Augustus, but em-
phasizes his wit and his fondness for proverbs, Old Comedy, and
jesting in general, especially at banquets: "nullo denique genere
hilaritatis abstinuit" (98). Late Antiquity seems to have embroidered
on we may judge by Macrobius, whose Saturnalia,
this tradition, if
well known and much imitated in the Renaissance, contain eight
chapters which constitute what we would call an anthology of jokes
(II. 1-7; VII. 3). Nearly all of these are attributed to real people, and
although Symmachus twice stresses the pre-eminence of Cicero as a

wit (II. 2 and 3), the anthology contains only 23 of Cicero's jokes
versus 29 by, or against, Augustus. The later editor who gave titles
to the chapters entitled II. 4 De jocis Augusti in alios, et aliorum rursus
in ipsum, and he is indeed portrayed as that rather unlikely ideal, the
absolute ruler who can take jokes at his own expense.
One of these is Ma-
particularly interesting, for several reasons.
crobius presumably found it Maximus, who reports (IX.
in Valerius
14 Ext. 3) that Antiochus, when in Sicily, noticed a young man who
looked remarkably like him. He was astonished at this resemblance,
"cum pater suus in eam prouinciam numquam accessisset, 'at meus,'
inquit'Romam accessit'. " Macrobius (II. 4. 19) transfers this joke to
Augustus, who asks the young man who resembles him: "Die mihi,
adulescens, fuit aliquando mater tua Romae?" and receives the answer
No, "sed pater meus saepe." The speaker here emphasizes Augustus's
good humor: "Soleo in Augusto magis mirari quos pertulit iocos
quam ipse quos protulit, quia maior est patientiae quam facundiae
laus, maxime cum aequanimiter aliqua etiam iocis mordaciora per-
tulerit." In the form given it by Macrobius, this joke has been the
most enduring of all Classical witticisms, recurring in every century
from the fourteenth to the twentieth and quoted by such diverse
authors as Erasmus, Beaumarchais and Freud, and Macrobius's at-
tribution of it to Augustus remains constant from Petrarch in 1345
to Guazzo in 1574.
The Middle Ages seem to have lost sight of this tradition of the
humorous ruler. There are no jokes in Einhard's Life of Charlemagne,
despite the fact that Einhard apparently knew Suetonius. Nor is there
any humor in Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis. The serious moral purpose
of the Christian King, defender of the Faith and scourge of the
pagans, apparently precluded any light relief. But the Renaissance,
which unearthed so much of Roman life and letters, naturally re-
surrected the Roman joke, and not surprisingly this must be credited,
Barbara C. Bowen 139
along with so much else, to Petrarch. In his Rerum memorandarum

libri of 1343-5, an obvious imitation of Valerius Maximus, he includes
two subjects which Valerius had not treated: "De facetiis ac salibus
illustrium,"and "De mordacibus iocis." This separate category of
mean or cutting witticisms he owes to Macrobius, who found it in
Plutarch {Quaest. conv. 11. 1 and VI 1. 8).
Petrarch follows Valerius's division of anecdotes into Romana and
Externa, and adds a third section: Moderna, referring not necessarily
to living persons but at least to those who lived fairly recently.
Although his two sections are essentially a joke anthology in the
symposium tradition exemplified by Plutarch and Macrobius, he is
also familiar with the rhetorical tradition which, beginning with
Cicero and much expanded by Quintilian, attempted to classify
rhetorically the humor suitable for the orator. In his very brief
introductory remarks he refers to Cicero's classification of the genus
2iS facetiae, sales, or apothemata (sic), to the separate category of scomma
(Plutarch's word) which contains hidden contumelia, and to the dis-
tinction in the De oratore between cavillatio and dicacitas. He then
launches directly into his first section, "De facetiis ac salibus illus-
trium."
Of the famous people included in Petrarch's two sections, Cicero
this time is made by him or against him, arid
credited with 21 jokes
Augustus with But Augustus far outweighs the other rulers
18.
quoted, who include Philip of Macedon, Antigonus, Vespasian, Ti-
berius, Domitian, Nero, Mithridates and Azzo d'Este. The rulers in
their turn outweigh the other famous people, among them Diogenes,
Virgil, several Romans, Pope Boniface VIll and Dante. None of the
romana or externa jokes is original; some of the moderna may be.
Renaissance humanists had, in Macrobius and Petrarch, two easily
accessible examples of joke collections which stressed the wit and
affability of the ideal ruler. In these collections the personality of the
joker is important, while in the rhetorical tradition deriving from
Cicero the rhetorical technique used in the joke is more significant
that the personality of the joker. In the fifteenth century Italy
produced two immensely popular and influential books of jokes,
belonging to these two separate traditions. Poggio's Facetiae, in Latin,
were composed about 1438 but not published until the 1470s, and
are brief witty anecdotes whose attribution is not usually essential.
The Motti e facezie del Piovano Arlotto, first published before 1478,
recount the witty and wise sayings, and sometimes the practical jokes,
of a real country priest.
II. Real laughing princes: Alfonso and Cosimo
We might expect to find a number of Renaissance kings and princes

portrayed as witty rulers, but this is not the case. Only a few princes
seem to have been so depicted, and one of them stands out above
the others very much as Augustus stands out above the other Roman
Emperors: Alfonso the Magnanimous (1396-1458), ruler of Aragon,
Catalonia and Valencia (1416) and of the Kingdom of Naples (1442).
His reputation, until long after the fifteenth century, as the ideal
rulerand modern equivalent of Augustus, probably owes less to his
actual character than to his humanist biographer Antonio Beccadelli,
usually known Panormita. His De dictis et factis Alphonsi regis
as
Aragonum, composed about 1455 and published in 1485, is an
unstructured collection of brief anecdotes portraying Alfonso as wise,
prudent, devout, merciful, generous, learned —
and witty. By no
means a biography in the modern sense, the book provides historical
and political information only in passing, so that its readers must
have been sufficiently familiar with the story of Alfonso's life to know
immediately what is meant by "bellum Neapolitanum," "Cum Cala-
cium obsideret Alphonsus," and scores of other such references.^
The emphasis is also more on things said than on things done,
although specific actions which redound to Alfonso's credit are
mentioned.
If this work can be assigned to a literary genre, it must be to the
collection of sententiae. Alfonso's dicta, if by no means always witty,
are usually pithy and sometimes memorable. He was, says the Prooe-
mium to Book II, "sermone admodum iucundus, breuis & elegans,
uenustus &: clarus," and some of his motti have the satisfying brevity
of proverbs: "Diem illam in qua nihil legeret se perdidisse dicebat"
(11.16, misnumbered 19); "Adulatores autem lupis baud absimiles
dicebat esse" (III. 17); "Foenus nihil aliud sibi uideri, quam animae
funus dicebat" (III. 34). The punning touch in this last is fairly
frequent.
Panormita's glorification of Alfonso clearly presents him as the
modern equivalent of Augustus, stressing his magnanimity, hatred of
treachery and of flatterers, and the association between giving and
taking jokes: "Alphonsus cum esset admodum facetus & urbanus,
^ I quote the Basel edition of 1538. I am puzzled to note that a recent historian
(Alan Ryder, The Kingdom of Naples under Alfonso the Magnificent [Oxford 1976])
apparently accepts the stories told by Panormita as factual (see esp. the notes on pp.
27-28). Vespasiano da Bisticci {Vita di Alfonso Re di Napoli) gives a picture similar to
Panormita's of Alfonso's Christian piety and nobility of character, but includes no
witty sayings,and in any case can Panormita's often punning Latin be a faithful
translation of Alfonso's Castilian or Catalan?
Barbara C. Bo wen 141
mirari tamen magis licuit, quo animo quaque moderatione ipse

aliorum sales pertulerit, quam quomodo ipse iocos protulerit" (IV.
27) —an obvious recollection of Macrobius's admiration for Augus-
tus. Not many of Alfonso's jokes are hilarious by modern standards,
though a few may cause a smile: when Jacopo Alamanni offered him
a gold statue of St. John for quingentorum aureorum precium, Alfonso
enquired how the disciple could be worth more than the master (I.
56); he feared that a knight constantly asking him for favors would
end by asking for his wife (II. 40); he stated that the quietest marriage
would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband (III. 7); or that
one definition of crazy men was those who went looking for a lost
wife (IV. 8). These are in a minority; most of the dicta are simply
sententiae in the Classical wisdom tradition.
Before the end of the fifteenth century, there is one more candidate
for the role of ideal witty ruler: Cosimo de' Medici. Unfortunately
we know nothing about the composition of the joke collection which
contains his best-known motti. This work, usually known as the Bel
libretto or the Detti piacevoli, has been attributed to Poliziano, on
insufficient grounds.^ Dated by Wesselski about 1478, the collection

is probably a mixture of anecdotes, proverbs and riddles from very
different sources. The real people to whom motti are attributed

include Piovano Arlotto, King Alfonso, and many characters in the
milieu of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Oddly, however, while 1 8 jokes
or pithy saying are attributed to or directed against Lorenzo, 37 are
attached to his grandfather Cosimo, founder of the Medici dynasty
and called by the Florentines Cosimo pater patriae.
Cosimo was not a ruler in the same sense as Alfonso of Aragon;
where Alfonso ruled over seven kingdoms, Cosimo remained a private
citizen who just happened to hold the reins of Florence in his hands.
But he was often glorified, in his lifetime and especially in Lorenzo's
lifetime, by poets and humanists in very "kingly" terms, and I wonder
if the author or compiler of this section of the Bel libretto was not
consciously presenting Cosimo as the rival of Alfonso. We see him
epigrammatically condemning gambling (2) and stupidity (4 and 16),
recommending to an archbishop that he live honorably (129), pre-
venting a brawl (135), exhorting a papal messenger by means of a
story (139), stating that, for the great, one enemy is too many, and
100 friends too few (140), threatening his enemies with a reversal of
the situation (162), demonstrating his scrupulous honesty as a banker
* There is only one edition: Angela Polizianos Tagebuch (1477-1479), edited by
Albert Wesselski (Jena 1929), who bases the attribution to Poliziano on very slender
evidence. The original manuscript has disappeared.
(173) and his ability to forgive injuries (178), and showing generosity
to a poor but wise man (264).
Most of these contain neatly-turned phrases which are not comic,
but some are genuinely witty. Cosimo prefers the family house at
Cafaggiolo to the one at Fiesole, because from the former everything
to be seen is Medici property (3); when a peasant eating with him
refuses wild pears with the remark "We feed them to the pigs"
Cosimo retorts: "We don't; take them away" (45); when an extravagant
friend asks to borrow money for a house he is building, Cosimo
agrees with the proviso "keep me for the plastering" {serbami
all'intonacare, 46); when told by some Sienese that on a certain
occasion the Florentines had lost their wits, Cosimo retorts that that
isn't possible (156); he claims that there is more point to crying out
before you are hurt, than afterwards (192), and that it's a good sign
if no one is aware that a man has been holding office (200).
Two of Cosimo's retorts were famous, and occur in many other

collections. Rinaldo degli Albizzi, in exile from Florence, sent a
message to Cosimo: "The hen is sitting on her eggs," to which Cosimo
replied that it's hard for her to do that outside the nest (137). And
when Cosimo himself was going into exile (in 1433) he said to Palla
Strozzi: Hodie mihi, eras tibi (a prophecy fulfilled a year later). Like
Alfonso, and Augustus before him, Cosimo is every inch the wise
general as well as the good governor. One of his pithy retorts implicitly
recalls Augustus, and another does so explicitly. When a Pistoian
soldier boasts that he didn't flee from a battle, showing as proof the
wounds on his face, Cosimo comments: "The man who wounded you
must not have been fleeing either." This recalls the man with a scar
on his forehead boasting to Augustus of his military prowess (Macro-
bius. Saturnalia II. 4.7); Augustus's comment is: "At tu cum fugies
numquam post te respexeris." And a propos of one remark of Cosimo's
the author explicitly recalls Augustus:"Cosmo di qualche huomo
pronto che egli haveva il cervello in danari
et accorto soleva dire
contanti. E motto di Augusto: Ingenium habet ut Seneca'" (268).
III. Alfonso from 1485 to 1646

Both Alfonso and Cosimo were seen, in their time and later, as
powerful rulers; Alfonso over many kingdoms, Cosimo over enormous
wealth and one of the most important city-states in Italy. There seems
to be no reason why Alfonso rather than Cosimo should have caught
the imagination of later fifteenth and sixteenth-century humanist
writers and readers, but he clearly did. Motti by Alfonso can be found
in the Arlotto collection already mentioned, in the roughly contem-
porary Facezie e motti attributed to Niccolo Angeli dal Bucine,^ in

Gioviano Pontano's De sermone of 1509,*^ in Cortesi's De cardinalatu
(of which more in a moment), in Adrian Barlandus's locorum veterum
ac recentium duae centuriae (Louvain, 1524), and in Castiglione's Libro
del Cortegiano (1528). The 1538 edition of Erasmus's Apophthegmata
contains 17 sayings by Alfonso towards the end of Book VIII (706-
09). The 1550 Tubingen edition (and others) of Heinrich Bebel's
Facetiae includes selected jokes from Poggio, and assorted sayings of
Alfonso, Bernard, Cardinal Giuliano, Bernardino of Siena, Iso-
St.
crates, and the Emperors Sigismund, Rudolph, Frederick and Albert.

But the title of this volume says only "his [Poggio's Facetiae] additae
sunt & Alphonsi regis arragonum," without naming the others.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of Alfonso's popularity is the
work published in Venice in 1557 by Lodovico Domenichi (compiler
of the century's most popular Italian joke collection), called Historia
di Messer Lodovico Domenichi, di detti, e fatti degni di memoria di diuersi
principi, e huomini priuati antichi, et moderni. Of the twelve books of
this work the first two are a careful translation of Panormita's De
dictis et factis. Domenichi's other ten books are a grab-bag of
. . .
anecdotes about famous people, often tragic or depressing, many of

which are taken from Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's commentary on
Panormita's work. There are more anecdotes about Alfonso, especially
in Book XI, which includes a number of jokes taken from Pontano,
some of which concern Alfonso. Well into the seventeenth century,
the De dictis was still being re-edited as a model of princely conduct,'
as it had already been for the scholiast Jacob Spiegel, whose com-
mentary (in the 1538 edition) on I. 9 includes the phrase: "Attende,

quisquis es 6 rex imitator Alphonsinae uirtutis ..." (p. 24).
Alfonso and Cosimo were not the only contemporary rulers to be
held up as examples, but Alfonso in particular does seem to have
been the model for idealized portraits of other rulers. The pattern
appears to have been set by Piccolomini's commentary on the De
dictis, easily accessible in the Basel edition of 1538.® This commentary
is entitled Aeneae Episcopi Senesis in libros Alphonsi Regis Commen- . . .
tarius, so that it can presumably be dated between 1450, when
^ Facezie e motti dei secoli XV e XVI, codice inedito Magliabechiano (G. Romagnoli,
Bologna 1874).
^ Ed. S. Lupi and A. Risicato (Thesaurus Mundi, Lugano 1954).
^ Speculum boni principis Alphonsus rex Aragoniae. Hoc est, dicta et facta Alphonsi regis
Aragoniae .Ex Aeneae Sylvii commentariis

. . (Elzevir, Amsterdam 1646).
. . .
^ do not know whether this commentary was already in the 1485 edition, which
I
is often mentioned but which I have never seen.

Piccolomini was named Bishop of Siena by Nicolas V, and 1458 when

he became Pope Pius II.
The most common kind of "commentary" used by Piccolomini is
the comparison between Alfonso's sententia as reported by Panormita,
and a similar one uttered by a well-known person. Of these people
quoted most are modern, and famous: the Emperors Sigismund,
Frederick and Rudolph, and assorted humanists and politicians. Thus
for instance Alfonso's comparison of flatterers to wolves (III. 17) is
matched by Sigismund saying that he hated flatterers like the plague.
In a few cases the matching sententia quoted by Piccolomini became
more famous than the original; Alfonso was once asked whether he
owed more to arms or to letters, and replied that from books he had
learned about arms (IV. 19). Piccolomini recounts (247-48) Emperor
Sigismund's comment that it is foolish to prefer arms to letters; he
can make a thousand knights in one day, but could not make one
doctor in a thousand years, an aphorism repeated in many sixteenth-
century joke collections.
Attempts were made to set up various kings and princes as rivals
to Alfonso in wisdom. Perhaps the most surprising candidate is Louis
XII of France; to the 1585 Wittenberg edition of the De dictis is
appended a brief Lvdoici XII. Galliae Regis scite etfacete dicta, ^ consisting
of 49 sententiae with marginal comments modelled on those of the
De dictis, some using Greek as well as Latin {Misericorditer & venear]TLK(bq).
Not one of these sententiae is likely to cause a smile; we are now much
closer in time to the Louis XIV who made one joke in his life. The
wisdom of Augustus lives on, but not, apparently, his humor.
IV. Imaginary laughing princes: the Cardinal and the Courtier
Alfonso and Cosimo, Emperor Sigismund and Louis XII were all real
people, even if we need not take too seriously the literary portraits
of them penned by their admirers. But the same Renaissance hu-
manists who loved to idealize real princes also enjoyed delineating
the imaginary Ideal Prince. Indeed, rather than regard Panormita's
"biography" of Alfonso and Guillaume Bude's Institution du Prince as
belonging to two separate genres, we should probably classify them
both as "Mirror-of-Princes" literature. 1 should like to discuss here
two sixteenth-century "mirrors-of-princes," one very well known, the
other virtually unknown.
The latter is a work by Paolo Cortesi, published once only in 1610,
^ My Harvard colleague Donald Stone very kindly obtained for me a photocopy
of this appended section, and of the Cortesi passage discussed below.
called De cardinalatu.'^^ Cortesi was a well-known Roman humanist,

and one of the most aggressive of the die-hard Ciceronians who
refused to write a Latin word unless it could be found in Cicero.
The De cardinalatu is a detailed manual in three books on how the
ideal cardinal should think, speak, act and furnish his house.'' Most
modern readers will be surprised to see that the chapter "De sermone"
(II. 9) contains a section on the Facetie et loci considered suitable for
this cardinal.
A Cardinal is a Prince of the Church, in some senses a ruler and
in others a courtier, and Cortesi, like Castiglione a few years later,
has Cicero's ideal orator firmly in mind. This is particularly clear in
the joke section, which consists of an anthology of 26 anecdotes told
by famous people, preceded by a very brief introduction. Here
(LXXXV^) he explains why jokes are relevant: "nihil est. n. tam
humanae naturae cognatum / quam aspersus dicendi urbanitati sal
/ nihilque tam proprium hominis / quam facetiarum dicacitate
delectari." Urbanitas and festivitas can dispel sadness, anger and hate,
he claims, and force even the unwilling to laugh.
Like Panormita's, Cortesi's anthology has comments in the margin,
possibly the contribution of Cortesi's friend Raffaele Maffei.'^ But
whereas the De dictis comments qualified Alfonso's state of mind while
saying or doing {Facete, luste, Prudenter), those in the De cardinalatu
note the speaker, and also the rhetorical category exemplified by the
joke, which is usually stressed in the text as well. Thus the first one,
a well-known anecdote about Dante taken from Petrarch, is labelled
Ex inopinato (the text uses Cicero's praeter expectationem); the second,
telling how Francesco Gonzaga, asked by a miserly wealthy man to
suggest an unusual subject for a painting in his house, replied:
"liberalitatem," and so on. A majority of these
is ex admonitione,
on denying, accusing or reproaching, so that
categories are variants
the modern reader receives some curious impressions about the
general tone of conversation in the Curia.
Jokes are told by one Emperor, three Popes (plus the secretary of
'"
As far as I know, the only copy of this work in the U.S. is in the Houghton
Library at Harvard.
" See Kathleen Weil-Garris and John D'Amico, "The Renaissance Cardinal's
F.
Ideal Palace: a Chapter from Cortesi's De and

cardinalatu',' in Studies in Italian Art
Architecture, Fifteenth through Eighteeyith Centuries, ed. Henry A. Millon (Cambridge,
Mass. 1980 [Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 35]), pp. 45-119. This
article contains an excellent general introduction to the De cardinalatu, and exhaustive
bibliography on Cortesi. I am most grateful to John D'Amico for initially drawing
my attention to Cortesi.
'^ Weil-Garris and D'Amico, p. 68, note 75.
JuliusII), two kings, one of whom is Alfonso, and Cosimo and
Lorenzo de' Medici. About half of the jokes are known from other
sources, but quite a number may well be personal recollections of
Cortesi's. As be the case with Castiglione, there is nothing
will
especially "courtly" about this humor; Cortesi re-tells, for instance,
the very popular story of the obese traveller arriving at the city gate.
When asked why "ante manticam gestaret / ita in ea urbe fieri
oportere dixit / in qua tanta esset hominum multitudo furax." Ex
recriminatione ex corporis uitio ad animi uitium, says the marginal note.
There is no indication here that the ideal cardinal should specifically
imitate Augustus, who is not mentioned, or Alfonso or Cosimo, who
are. Cortesi is thinking rather of the ideal orator portrayed by Cicero,
whose skill in humor, and especially in the cut-and-thrust exchanges
of the courtroom, seem to be better adapted to the sixteenth-century
cardinal than Alfonso's measured sententiae. Perhaps because of this
imitation of Cicero, Cortesi's jokes are much more humorous than
most of those in the De dictis and the Bel libretto. They are all, in fact,
recognizably comic, owing little or nothing to the wisdom tradition
which partially inspired the two earlier authors.
Specialists have long known that the passage on joking in Castig-
lione's Libro del Cortegiano (II. 42-93) is very closely based on Cicero's
De oratore (II. 54-71). Most readers, however, are certainly not aware
of this, and are still less aware of the tradition of the laughing ruler
outlined in this article. The Cicero-Augustus-Alfonso-Cosimo filiation
helps to explain the size and importance of the joke section in the
Cortegiayio, and allows us to further evaluate both its links with the
past and its originality.
Cicero's rhetorical classification of the jokes necessary for the
orator was based on a bipartite division between cavillatio (humor
infused throughout a speech) and dicacitas (one-liners), and between
humor in re and in verbo. Castiglione, like others before him, conflates
these divisions, as though cavillatio were identical to humor in re, and
dicacitas to humor in verbo. His two categories 3.re festivita or urbanita
(comic narration), and detti or arguzie (one-liners). He added a third
category, burle (practical jokes), which Cicero would not have ap-
proved.
Under in verbo Cicero had nine categories (as against 25 in re):
ambiguity, the unexpected, puns {Trapovoixaaia), quoting poetry, taking
figurative expressions literally, allegory, one-word metaphors, anti-
phrasis, and a certain kind of antithesis. Castiglione will use all these,
as well as Cicero's in re categories, in his second and largest section,
on humor in un detto solo. Under narrazione, the first section, he has
only three categories, which I have seen nowhere else, and which
Barbara C. Bo wen 147
are all illustrated by non-Ciceronian jokes. The first is "il recitar con
bona grazia alcuni diffetti d'altri" — that is, mocking the stupidity
of others; the second is "certe afFetazioni estreme," illustrated by the
lady who wept every time she thought of the Last Judgment, because
on that day everyone would see her naked; and "una grande e ben
composta bugia," a well-developed lie, exemplified by the story of
the frozen words.
Comic anecdotes are obviously less important to Castiglione than
one-liners. In the longest passage of his joke section, he follows
Cicero's categories, often word for word
same order, but uses
in the
to illustrate them a mixture of Ciceronianand contemporary jokes.
For instance, under "taking someone's words in the same sense and
throwing them back at him" (II. 60; Cicero's "ex eo in eum . . .
ipsum aliquid, qui lacessivit, infligitur," II. 63) he first re-tells Cicero's
example, of Catulus (= "little dog") asked by Philippus "What are
you barking at?" and replying "Because I see a thief." Castiglione
omits the names, so that the joke is not as comic as it was in Cicero
(II. 54). He then gives a modern example we have seen in Cortesi:
the obese traveller asked why he's carrying his luggage in front of
him.
Some of Castiglione's jokes have not been found elsewhere, which
is certainly interesting —
and unusual; but both by his rhetorical
categorization of humor and by the illustrations he gives, he dem-
onstrates his debt to the humorous-prince tradition. Like Cortesi he
places each joke carefully into a rhetorical category, and like Panormita
and the author of the Bel libretto he is concerned to portray an ideal
courtier (who could equally well be a prince) who is both wise and
witty.
V. Conclusion
From our point of view the four main works discussed here stand in
chronological order of interest. Panormita's De dictis borders on
hagiography; real wit is rare, and so much concentrated wisdom is
indigestible. The Bel more genuine jokes, but still too

libretto contains
many sententiae for modern taste. The De cardinalatu is already
astonishingly "modern": its jokes are nearly all witty, even if some
of them must have seemed funnier to readers who knew the people
mentioned than they do to us. And Castiglione's jokes are all witty,
by our standards; the ones taken from Cicero, the ones about Alfonso
and Cosimo, and the ones Castiglione discovered for himself. Not
surprisingly, the two imaginary princes are more genuinely humorous
than the two real ones.
All four of these works are members of the same literary family,
but they belong to two different branches of it. Alfonso and Cosimo
are the descendants of Suetonius's emperors, whose humor is an
integral part of the image of humanitas they wish to project. The
enormous popularity of Alfonso's jokes demonstrates that the Ren-
aissance put, if anything, more stress on the necessity of humor than
Antiquity had done. The cardinal and the courtier, while telling many
of the same jokes, are descendants of the rhetorical tradition, and
for them as for Cicero's orator humor is an important persuasive
technique. Cortesi's statement that the cardinal's humor will dispel
sadness and anger (in his colleagues? in the Pope?) is not essentially
different from Cicero's description of the effects of the orator's
humor on the judge {De or. II. 58).
The subject of Renaissance urbanitas has been seldom discussed in
detail, and would well repay further study. By the time we get to
Louis XIV, the urbanus {honnete homme) no longer laughs; but he did
laugh, from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, and he
liked to read about, and write about, real or ideal princes who also
had a sense of humor.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Botticelli's Hypnerotomachia in
The National Gallery, London:
A Problem of the Use of Classical Sources
in Renaissance Art
PAUL HOLBERTON
In one sense Botticelli's Mars and Venus [Figure 1] in the National

Gallery, London, is perfectly intelligible.' The elegant young beauty
is at ease and awake: her elegant young beau is asleep, and funny
little satyrs are playing tricks on him. He is, to use late twentieth-
century terms, "knocked out loaded"; she is "in control." There is

a statement about love.
The problems begin when one asks why this painting should have
been made in fifteenth-century Florence, and what more exactly the
painting was about then. These problems are both general: what kind
of object is it? —
and particular: what are the satyrs doing? In what
kind of slumber does the young man recline? Why the insects round
the tree? Why the conch blown into his ear? And so on. These
problems are the greater because nothing is known of the history or
context of the picture before the nineteenth century.
The picture bearsno more than an attribution to Botticelli, though
the attribution has long been accepted.^ There is a general consensus
that the picture belongs to the early 1480s, which, purely on grounds
'
This been improved after discussion with Michael Baxandall, Charles
article has
Hope, Jill Kraye, Amanda
Lillie, Elizabeth McGrath and Letizia Panizza. This does
not mean that they endorse its ideas; but that I thank them.
^ M. Davies, The Early Italian Schools (National Gallery, London 1961),
pp. 99 fF.
of style, remains possible, if not likely.^ However, the evidence by

which this assessment is supported I intend to show to be false. There
are hints in the linear mannerisms of the woman's dress of the style
of the 1489 Cestello Annunciation in the Uffizi, though the rhythms
are here less rapid, less contrived. Home found the "quality and
accent" of the draughtsmanship close to that of the Bardi altarpiece
of 1485."* The modelling of the young man also seems much like the
modelling of Botticelli's St. Sebastian in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin,
which has been identified with a 5^. Sebastian installed in Santa Maria
Maggiore, Florence, in 1474. But the identification is supposition
and I would prefer to suppose rather that the 5^ Sebastian was a
quite different commission than that the National Gallery picture was
painted before Botticelli's visit to Rome in 1481-82. The picture first
re-appeared in Florence, and so was presumably painted there.
Gombrich suggested further that the patron might have been the
prominent Florentine family of the Vespucci, for whom Botticelli
painted his fresco of St. Jerome in Ognissanti in 1480, and that the
picture might have been a marriage gift.^ His logic was that Piero di
Cosimo painted a pair of pictures for the Vespucci illustrating Ovid,
725 ff., featuring therefore bees and hornets and also satyrs.
Fasti III.
He argued that Botticelli's picture was "clearly an offspring" ofcassoni
or trousseau chests given on the occasion of a marriage, and often
featuring coats of arms. The Vespucci coat of arms featured wasps
(vespe). Botticelli's and the picture probably
picture featured wasps;
had something do with marriage because the games the little satyrs
to
play are largely based on the games played by the erotes in Lucian's
description (in the work often called Herodotus) of Action's picture
of the marriage of Alexander and Roxana, which picture, Lucian
goes on to say, earned Aetion himself a good marriage. The suggestion
is plausible, though it is only a suggestion, and everything in this
article should serve to support it. The kind of pun involved can be
paralleled, for instance, in the Porcari of Rome having deliberately
collected antique sculpture featuring pigs;*' or in the little stones
' R. Lightbown, Botticelli (London 1978), I, pp. 90 ff.; II, pp. 56 ff.
•
H. Home, Alessandro Filipepi . . . Botticelli (London 1908), p. 140.
^ E. H. Gombrich, "Botticelli's Mythologies," /owrna/ of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 8 (1945), pp. 7-60; reprinted in Symbolic Images (Oxford 1972), pp. 31-81,
201-19; in particular pp. 66-69.
^ Bober, paper given at the Colloquium on the Study and Use of Ancient
P. P.
Art and Architecture in the Renaissance held at the Warburg Institute, London, 29-
30 November 1983.
Paul Holberton 151
{sassetti) for David's sling on the wall outside the Sassetti chapel
painted by Ghirlandaio in Santa Trinita in Florence.'

I intend in the course of this article first to establish the genre to
which Botticelli's picture belongs; secondly to discuss the classical
sources used in it; thirdly to point out its relationship to contemporary
vernacular literature (in particular Dante's Vita Nuova) and the way
in which the classical sources have been used.
An interpretation of Botticelli's picture should be aided by a very
similar painting attributed to Piero di Cosimo [Figure 2] in the
Museen, Berlin: the
Staatliche similarity is not only of composition —
two opposed figures reclining in a landscape, the male asleep, nude,
with amori playing with his armor — but also of format and size.^
Unfortunately Piero's picture is not documented before the nine-
teenth century, either, except that it almost perfectly accords with a
description by Vasari of a picture by Piero:^
Dipinse ancora un quadro, dov' e una Venere ignuda con un Marte

parimente, che spogliato nudo dorme sopra un prato pien di fiori; ed
attorno son diversi amori, che chi in qua chi in la traportano la celata,
i bracciali e I'altre arme di Marte. Evvi un bosco di mirto, ed un

Cupido che ha paura d'un coniglio; cosi vi sono le colombe di Venere
e I'altre cose di amore. Questo quadro e in Fiorenza in casa Giorgio
Vasari, tenuto in memoria sua di lui, perche sempre gli piacquer i
capricci di questo maestro.
He where there is a nude Venus with a Mars

also painted a picture
likewise, who naked in a meadow full of flowers; and
sleeps stripped
about them are several loves, who —
one here, one there carry —
about Mars's helmet, arm-guards and other armor. There is a grove
of myrtle, and a Cupid who is frightened of a rabbit; in the same vein
the doves of Venus and the other appurtenances of love are there.
This picture is in Florence in the house of Giorgio Vasari, who has it
as a keepsake of Piero, because he has always been fond of the fancies
of this artist.
The only discrepancy appears to be Cupid's fear of the rabbit, which

is is pointing beyond
hardly possible in the Berlin picture, since he
it.However, he could appear to be drawing back from it, and I
presume this caused misreading.
Vasari's description is not much more than that, and where it is
' Cf. E. Borsook, J. OfFerhaus, Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita,
Florence (London 1979), p. 32.
^ The Botticelli is 69 x 173 cm; the Piero 72 x 182 cm {Gemdldegalerie . . . Katalog
der ausgestelllen Gemdlde des 13. - 18. Jahrhunderts [Berlin-Dahlem 1975], p. 318).
^ Ed. Milanesi (Florence 1906, repr. 1973), vol. IV, p. 140 (Life of Piero).
more it may depend on inference: for instance that the protagonists

are Mars and Venus (from which it has been supposed that Botticelli's
protagonists are Mars and Venus), or that Piero's picture is a "caprice."
Is Botticelli's also a caprice? What did Vasari mean by "capriccio"?
The answer to this latter question at least is clear enough from the
context: he means one of those inventions typical of Piero in Vasari's
characterization of him —
charming, bizarre, original, not to be taken
too seriously. Piero's picture was therefore according to Vasari neither
an ecphrasis or a relation of a classical event, nor an invenzione of a
grand, high order.
Further, it is implicit in Vasari's description that he thought the
picture was about love. Two indications are his rather exaggerated
"meadow full of flowers," which surely derives less from what he saw
than from the tradition with which he associated what he saw, and
his relation of the various objects he describes myrtle, rabbit, —
doves, etc. —
to Venus and to love ("the other things of love"). It
follows that this is an allegory: which is also virtually a corollary of
its not being a story or an illustration. Hence these appurtenances
are there not so much to identify the woman as Venus, as to make

her a venereal personification. Some of her attributes the butterfly, —
the rabbit —
are not classical, and therefore all the more clearly
moralize about love. It is something pretty, fluttery, insubstantial;'"
something sexually frequentative and cuddly (for the rabbit does
seem to be nudging Cupid with his nose).'' In the same way, though
they have classical precedent, the turtle-doves may stand for love's
fervor and lovers' inseparability (they were meant to pine to death
if separated);'^ and Cupid, as he is shown here, represents not only
the fondness (in his relationship to his mother)'^ and fondling of love
'"
This is conjectural, but consistent both with what is said about love and with
the role of butterflies in the Renaissance dialogue Virtus Dea interpolated into the
selected Latin Lucian of Venice 1494 and Milan 1497; the gods paint their wings
while keeping Virtue waiting for Justice. Cf. the flowers in the Raphael mentioned
below. There may be an allusion to the amatory topos of the butterfly / moth which
prefers to die in love's flame. This was at least as old as the troubadours (e.g. Folquet
de Marseilles), and is taken up by Petrarch {RS xix and cxli). Dante had made a
characteristic adaptation: Purg. x, 121 ff".
" G. de Tervarent, Attributs et Symboles dans I'Art Profane 1450-1600 (Geneva 1959),
s.v. Lapin / Lievre.
'^
Colombe.
Ibid., s.v.
'^
Leonardo Giustinian's "Per gran forza d'amor commosso e spinto," Cancionete
Cf.
(Venice c. 1472 etc.); this includes a sexual fantasy, in which from "Li dove il primo
liquor il fantin piglia" he moves "alia dolcezza che avanza / tutti piacer d'ogni i
triumpho e regno." Cf. also on the one hand the image of Charity, on the other
suckling satyr mothers.
Paul Holberton 153
(in his relationship to the rabbit) but also a certain double-edged

jocularity. He grins and points, "mostra a dito," which is how
Renaissance Italian society behaved towards lovers, at least some-
times.'* He refers then to the lover's individualization, a source not
only of pride and joy but also of shame (cf. Petrarch, Rime Sparse i).
The myrtle may be a specifically venereal qualification of the shrub-
bery that might anyway belong to a love garden.
What about the amori who play with Mars's armor? In one sense
they continue and expand on Cupid's gesture. They hardly suggest
the dignity of the young man's knightly calling, rather its abandon-
ment or even defeat. Childishly they introduce disorder, scattering
their toys "chi in qua chi in la." They fancifully elaborate the poetic
metaphor of love overcoming the spiritual defenses (protecting armor)
of the lover, who then, disarmed, despoiled, becomes the vassal and
victim of the god (cf. Petrarch, RS ii, iii). The classical references of
the amori amount to the same theme. In classical art they had appeared,
for instance, heaving at the club of Hercules, or playing in one way
or another round Bacchic sarcophagi.'^ They had similarly manifested
the sweet power of an ecstatic god, even over stalwart heroes.
In classical literature such amori had appeared in particular as the
agents of Venus in epithalamia, busy or having been busy about the
bridegroom (or also bride) in this same sort of way. With little doubt'
this is the convention which Piero has revived, or rather in the revival
of which he has followed others. For he (or his purchaser) does not
seem to have used a particular classical text. Nor need he have done
so, since Botticelli's or other images might have been accessible to
him, and the convention had already been revived in vernacular
literature. Politian's Stanze for the Giostra of 1475 are a prime
example. At one particular point (I, cxxii) Politian seems to have
used Lucretius I. 31 ff., where Mars lies in Venus's arms, a passage
that Panofsky suggested had a bearing on Piero's picture (Gombrich
then suggested it had been used by Politian).'^ Politian used the
Lucretius, however, I submit, only in passing. A much more important
source was Statius's epithalamium for Stella and Violentilla {Silvae, I.
2). The basis for the excursus on the realm of love (I, Ixviii ff.) was
"• Cf. Batdsta Stabellino writing to Isabella d'Este 28. 5. 1512 and 1. 6. 1512
describing the enamorment of Fabrizio Colonna for Nicola de Trotta, published by
A. Luzio and R. Renier, Giornale Storico delta Letteratura Italiana 39 (1902), i, pp. 236-
37.
'^
Cf. W. H. Roscher, Ausfuhrliches Lexikon der gr. und rom. Mythologie (Leipzig 1884-
90), columns 2248-50; F. Matz, Die dionysischen Sarkophage (Berlin 1968-75), passim.
'^ E.
Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Oxford 1939), p. 63, note 77; Gombrich, op.
cit. (above, note 5), p. 215, note 133.
of course Petrarch's Trionfi. Politian used other sources again, but

from the Silvae (on which his commentary survives) he could have
taken at one and the same time Mars and Venus in the bliss of the
morning after, and the amori v^ho play such a fervid part in both
poems. There seems in fact to be no visual or other reason to make
a connectionbetween Lucretius and Piero di Cosimo.
Politian's poem, for all its epithalamial imagery, celebrates not a
marriage but chivalric love: developing the idea that love enhances
prowess, the Stanze are a eulogy of Giuliano de' Medici's nobility.
Piero di Cosimo's picture need not either perhaps be connubial,
though it surely celebrates the sweets of achieved love. In calling it
a caprice, Vasari seems to have responded accurately enough to its
mood.
Home also classed with Botticelli's picture two pictures of similar
period and origin, called now "school of Botticelli," in the Louvre
(M. I. 546) and in the National Gallery, London (no. 916), in which
a woman, draped or semi-draped (Venus de Milo fashion), reclines
similarly in a landscape with again amori festive about her." One
could add the picture in the Ca'd'Oro in Venice (Fototeca O. Bohm
no. 668) attributed to Bugiardini or (formerly) to Franciabigio, in
which the nymph is entirely nude, sleeps, and is accompanied by a
single amor who takes her by her right-hand index-finger and also
points —
like Piero di Cosimo's Cupid. Giorgione's sleeping Venus in
Dresden, in which there was originally a Cupid, since painted out,
presumably also belongs to this class, along with the later pictures
which are related to the Giorgione, including Titian's Venus ofUrbino
in the Uffizi.'^ All these images, including Botticelli's, are with little
doubt about carnal love.'^
Both men and women reclining like this are also found in other
kinds of object produced in late fifteenth-century Florence. First may
be mentioned the inner lids of marriage cassoni: two pairs, each with
a woman painted in one and a man painted in the other, survive
(Schubring nos. 156, 157; 289, 290), and two isolated examples, one
of a woman (Schubring 185), one of a man, inscribed Paris (Schubring
'^
Home, op. cit. (above, note 4), p. 141.
'^
On Titian's figure not as Venus but as a generic nude, see C. Hope, "Problems
of Interpretation in Titian's Erotic Paintings," in Tiziano e Venezia (Venice 1980), pp.
Ill fF., especially pp. 118-19; idem, "A
Neglected Document about Titian's Danae
in Naples," Arte Veneta 31 (1977), pp. 188 fF.; for epithalamial parallels (but with
conclusions 1 find unacceptable) J. Anderson, "Giorgione, Titian and the Sleeping
Venus," Tiziano e Venezia, pp. 337 ff.
'^
Several drawings of this theme are also cited by A. Novak, La Nymphe Couchee
(diss., Paris 1969).
Paul Holberton 155
184).^° All these recline, leaning on one elbow; some are awake, some
are asleep; some are nude, some are clothed. Secondly, there is the
series of early Florentine engravings mostly of circular format known
loosely as the Otto prints (Hind A. IV).^' One print (Hind A. IV. 13)
[Figure 3] shows a couple reclining in the same way opposite each
other with their legs overlapping, rather closer together than in
he holds out to her a flower (the mark of so many
Botticelli's picture:
northern marriage portraits); another print (Hind A. IV. 20) shows
a nude woman reclining similarly with three amori about her, one of
whom blows a horn.^^ Both these are subsidiary images, accompanying,
in themain field, lovers plighting their troth on some object symbolic
of their faith: they occur among other subsidiary images which
emblematically or suggestively accompany the main image, and the
other subsidiary images in the print with a couple consist of music-
making amori. In the center of these prints was often left a blank
space in which an individual coat of arms might be colored in, and
it has been presumed that they were intended to be stuck onto
circular boxes, such as might be or might contain lovers' tokens. In
several of the prints the motto "Amor vuol fe" ("Love needs faith")
occurs, sometimes continued "e dove fe nonne Amor non puo" ("and
where there is no faith Love has no power"). On one print (Hind
A. IV. 6) the lovers are identified as Jason and Medea; another couple
(Hind A. IV. 11) was believed by Warburg to represent Lorenzo de'
Medici and his courtly-beloved Lucrezia Donati,^^ but the emblem
on the coat of the man, a ring enclosing feathers, has been shown
by Ames-Lewis to have been adopted by the Medici rather than to
have belonged to them.^'* This emblem presumably signifies hard
faith binding the soft, the light, the luxurious —
a variant on "Amor
vuol fe." Another variant is the "Ame droit" on the sleeve of the
young man in the print with the reclining couple.
It is therefore obviously possible that Botticelli's picture is not only
sexual but also epithalamial, in the exact sense of celebrating a
prospective marriage. Given the evidence formulated by Gombrich,
we might say that it is certainly about "Amor" but may very well
also involve "Fe," or troth. Home adduced a gesso
also relief in the
Victoria and Albert Museum (no. 5887-1859) [Figure 4] in which
^^ P. Schubring, Cassoni (Leipzig 1915).

^'
A. Hind, Early Italian Engraving (London 1948).
^^ This connection also in Novak, op. cit. (above, note 19).
^^ A. Warburg, "Delle 'Imprese Amorose' nelle piu antiche Incisioni Fiorentine,"
Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig — Berlin 1932), I, pp. 81 fF.
^* F.Ames-Lewis, "Early Medicean Devices," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld

Institutes 42 (1979), p. 131.
there are again reclining figures, again amori, and the man leans back
asleep just like Botticelli's figure. '"^^
On the other hand the circular
format, in particular with a blank center, and the motif of the ring
repeat these features in the Otto prints; the coat of arms and the
encircling ring again suggest the occasion of a marriage. This object
surely confirms a connection between the Otto prints and Botticelli's
picture.
Given this much, the supposition by Tietze-Conrat that two re-
clining figures on the lid of a Bacchic sarcophagus not otherwise
related to the picture constituted the specific source for Botticelli's
picture should be rejected.^'' There is also no evidence that the
sarcophagus to which she pointed was known to the Renaissance.^'
Doubt may also be raised whether Botticelli's figures are necessarily
Mars and Venus. When the picture first came to light in the nineteenth
century they were assumed to be Mars and Venus because all secular
Renaissance pictures were assumed to be mythological. Later the
assumption was buttressed by comparison with the Piero di Cosimo,
which Vasari said to be Mars and Venus. But it is not certain to me
even that Vasari was correct about the Piero di Cosimo. If Piero had
intended no more than a generic knight —
as it were a figure on
the stage whose type is clear but whose name is never given Vasari —
even so would still very likely have called the knight Mars, because
Vasari did not expect in Italian paintings genre figures of the kind
painted in the north. ^® He expected literary or historical represen-
tatives or personifications.^^ Not that the line between personifications
and generic figures need be hard and fast: Marcantonio Michiel, for
instance, described a picture by Palma Vecchio when he first saw it
as "la Nympha," when he saw it next as "la Cerere."^° Despite Vasari,
^^ Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of the Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert

J.
Museum (London 1964), catalogue no. 129. The center is presumed to have held a
mirror. The object is dated to the third quarter of the fifteenth century to the —
same period as the Otto prints.
^^ E. Tietze-Conrat, "BotticelH and the Antique," Burlington Magazine 47 (Sept.
1925), p. 124.
" F. op. cit. (above, note 15), catalogue no. 218. Not known before 1828.
Matz,
^* Cf. Bartolomeo Fazio's report of genre nudes by Jan van Eyck, edited M.
Baxandall, "Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting," yourna/ of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 27 (1964), pp. 102-03.
^^ Cf. Vasari's criticism in his neighboring
Life of Giorgione's frescoes on the
Fondaco de' Tedeschi in Venice, ed. cit. (above, note 9), IV, p. 96: "che nel vero non
si ritrova storie che abbino ordine o che rappresentino fatti di nessuna persona
i
segnalata antica o moderna."

'° Ed. P Barocchi, Scritti dell' Arte del Cinquecento (Milan — Naples 1977), III, pp.
2879 (collection of Andrea Oddoni) and 2881 (collection of Francesco Zio). Cf. also
Hope, op. cit. (above, note 18).
Figure 3
Figure 4
Paul Holberton 157
and despite the fact that many Renaissance representations of classical

mythology exist, it may very well not have been necessary for
Botticelli's picture to have had named protagonists/' It does not
follow either that, because the woman is Venus, the knight in Piero's
picture need be Mars. He might be a sleeping knight like the one in
Raphael's Dream of the Knight in the National Gallery, London,'^ who
sleepsbetween the figures of Gravitas(?) and Voluptas, except that
Piero's knight has chosen Voluptas, figured in his picture as Venus.
Piero's knight looks too adolescent to be Mars. Further, rather than
being a product of it, would run counter to the
Piero's picture
epithalamial convention knight were Mars, since Mars when he
if his
appears is half awake in Venus's arms rather than fast asleep, and
the amori strip not Mars of his armor but the husband.
Piero's picture is therefore not sufficient argument that Botticelli's
earlier couple are Mars and Venus; and here not only is the knight
not particularly martial, but also the woman is not like Venus: her
white robes would bear rather an association with virtue. In the still
earlier Victoria and Albert
onto which the argument should
relief,
logically impose these once again, the sleeping man has no
identities
armor whatsoever. It is anyway the more normal practice to follow
developments forward. Therefore, I suggest, we see in the relief a
representation of the joy of a wedding night. (The man's pose has
been supposed to have been taken from that of Endymion on
sarcophagi, ^^ but why should one suppose their influence here? Surely
a contemporary image of the Creation of Eve has been adapted.) In
the Botticelli, the mocking games played with the young man's armor
by little satyrs indicate, I submit, more specifically the nature of that
joy and of the young man's feelings. This is the idea I intend to
develop. In the Piero, the indications of the young man's joy are less
allusive, and there is no need here to elaborate on the explanation
already given above.
Again, even if the protagonists of Botticelli's picture were Mars
and Venus, they would surely be so by mere antonomasia, in the
same way that one of the Otto-print couples was dubbed Jason and
Medea and one of the cassoneAxd lovers was called Paris. These names
are not going to explain what is happening to them. Whoever heard
of little satyrs playing about Mars?
Why the httle satyrs? Not this question, but the question, what
^'
I argue this again in an article, "Of Antique and Other Figures: Metaphor in
Early Renaissance Art," forthcoming in Word and Image, 1.
^^ Proposals that the knight is Scipio or Hercules fail: see C. Gould, The Sixteenth-
Century Italian Schools (National Gallery, London 1975), pp. 212 fF.
^^ So Pope-Hennessy, op. cit. (above, note 25).

158 Illinois Classical Studies, IX.2
they may be doing, can be answered partially by the passage from

Lucian already referred to:
eTepiodi 8e rriq hkovoc, aXXoi "^pcoreq izotiôvaiv tv Tolq mXoic, tov 'AXeâvSpov,
8vo niP TTjp Xoyxw ocvTOV (f>ipovTeq, ixinovnevoi Tovq ax0o(p6povq diroTe boKOv
<t>€pouT€c, âpolvTO- ocWoL 8( 8vo eva riva eirl tt}c, aa-wiboc, KaTaKUfitvov, fiaaiKka
br]6ev Koi ocvrbv, avpovaiv rCbv oxocvwv rriq a<nriboq iireLXrjunepor eCc, be brj ic, tov
duipaKa e<T(\dcbp vittiov Keiixevov XoxwfTt eoiKiv, Uic, 4>o^r]aa(.v avTOvq, OTrbre kut'
OCVTOV yevoivTO avpovTeq. Ov iraibia be aXXajg TavTO. eoTiv ovbe KepidpyaaTai

ev avTolq b 'Aertajj/, aXXa brikol tov ' AXeâvbpov kol tov ic, to. KoXep.iKa epoiTa,
Kot OTt, ocfia Koi "Puôvqq fjpa Kot tCov oirXwv ovk eireXeXrjaTO.
And on the other side of the picture other loves are playing in
Alexander's armor, two of them carrying his spear, aping bearers
when they take the weight of the pole; another two drag a single one
reclining on his shield —
he too must be a king then having taken —
hold of the straps of the shield; and one has gone inside the breastplate,
which is lying upside down, and looks as if he is hiding so as to
frighten them when they come up to him dragging the shield. Yet
this is not empty playfulness, and Aetion has not expended his art on
them to no purpose, for in fact they underline Alexander's equal love
for war, and tell us that at one and the same time he loved Roxana
and had not forgotten arms.
Some of the details in the picture are so close to the Lucian that
scholars generally have been persuaded that the artist must have had
some sort of access to Lucian's text. But that cannot be the whole
story. There is nothing to do with the Lucian in the transformation
of the erotes into satirelli, the conch being blown into the young man's
ear, the wasps, the tree, the laurel grove, the cushion on which she
sits, her appearance, the cloak in which he is wrapped, the fruit or
vegetable held by the satyr in the breastplate, the helmet over the
head of one of the satyrs, the ululating tongues of two of the satyrs.
Other details not in the Lucian seem rather to be divergent from it
than extraneous to it, and may be explained as contingencies of its
translation into contemporary terms —
into contemporary armor,
into the format of a contemporary lovers' idyll. Even the way the
satyrs carry the lance can be explained similarly. The two who drag
a third on a shield —
âaiXea drjdev Kal avrov: this one, too, a king
in little —
might have recalled the amori who pull the shaft of the
chariot (on which another amor is "king") on the helmet of Goliath
in Donatello's bronze David in the Bargello, Florence. The lance-
bearers may amalgamate and syncopate Lucian's spear-carriers and
shield-draggers.
The satyr blowing the conch may be in one sense part of the
amorous convention, in so far as he repeats the amor blowing a horn
Paul Holberton 159
in the Otto prints, although blowing horns belongs of course to a

broader tradition of pageantry, carnival and festival celebration in
general. However, it is widely believed, following Duren, that the
satyr and his conch reflect a report by a scholiast to Aratus that Pan
during the Gigantomachy induced panic among the opposing host
by blowing a conch-shell.'* The report was mentioned by Politian in
his Miscellanea (Centuria Prima), no. 28, on panic terror;'^ and it
became known to him from a manuscript he purchased in 1483, thus
providing a circumstantial date or at least a probable terminus post
quern for Botticelli's picture. Duren's thesis was accepted for several
reasons, primarily because such a direct connection between Politian
and Botticelli seemed very attractive. Duren argues that virtually no
one else could have known this text in 1483 except Politian. Secondly,
however, it built on Panofsky's proof that Correggio used this source
in providing his figure of Pan in the Camera di San Paolo in Parma
with a conch. '^ Thirdly, in the absence of other evidence, it seemed
quite possible that the young man was having a nightmare. Indeed
recently Dempsey in a public lecture connected this panic with
Lucian's o)q (l)o^f}aeuv, "in order to frighten."^' I wondered then if
the wasps might not represent the "bombus," or buzzing, of Pan's

whip to which Politian went on to refer in Miscellanea no. 28. Even
source were to be rejected, it seems to be a property of the
if this
conch, when blown, to induce terror, as in Aeneid X. 209-10:
hunc vehit immanis Triton et caerula concha

exterrens freta . . .
A Triton carries him, enormous, and terrifying the blue straits with
his conch. . . .
This might look as if it supported the thesis. However, the idea of

nightmare seems irreconcilably to conflict both with an amorous
context and with the soundness of the young man's sleep in Botticelli's
picture, and the whole construction can be dismantled as follows.
Panofsky was incorrect in supposing Correggio to have used the
scholiast to Aratus as a source for his conch-blowing Pan in the
Camera di San Paolo. It is difficult to conceive any motive for resort
to this text, except for "an almost compulsive propensity to cryptic
^* V. Duren, " 'Pan Terrificus' de Politien," Bibliotheque d' Humanisme et Renaissance,
33 (1971), pp. 641 ff.

'^ First printed Florence 1489.
*^ E. Panofsky,
The Iconography of Correggio' s Camera di San Paolo (London 1961),
pp. 39 fF. Correggio's work has been dated c. 1518-20.
^'
C. Dempsey, "Botticelli's Mars and Venus," paper given at the Warburg Institute,
London, 2 June 1982.
allusion," a supposition to which Panofsky was forced by his own

interpretation.^^ On the other hand it is not difficult to see why
Panofsky should have been led to think Correggio was using this
source.
First, as he says, he knew of no parallel. Secondly, he assumed a
fundamental Renaissance movement towards the "re-integration of
classical form and classical subject matter."^^ Thirdly, Cartari's Imagini
de i Dei de published in an illustrated edition in Venice in
gli Antichi,
1571, has an image of Pan with a conch, as the attribute with which
he causes terror. "^^ Fourthly, the Aratus account is both unique and
was demonstrably used by Cartari.
Let us be clear that references to panic terror abound in antique
literature. Politian collected several, and Gyraldus, De Deis Gentium
XV, added more.^' Alciati, Emhlemata, no. cxxii, "in subitum terro-
rem," is proof of the diffusion of the idea.^^ Most of these references
are to panic in battle, and Alciati's Emblem, though it is improvised
and does not depend on a specific source, reflects this fact:
EfFuso cernens fugientes agmine turmas

Quis mea nunc inflat cornua? Faunas ait
Seeing the platoons flee with broken ranks

Says Faunas: Who is blowing my horns this time?
Accordingly the image above shows the god with a large serpentine
military-looking trumpet. Panofsky suggested that Pan had been
changed to Faunus for no more than a metrical reason. In fact it
seems to me clear that the Renaissance did not distinguish between
the bestial gods.^^
Then came Cartari's Imagini, and Cartari here as elsewhere followed
Gyraldus. He translated some of Gyraldus's sources, and also, follow-
ing Gyraldus's precise reference, looked up Politian. Gyraldus first
38 op. cit., p. 98.

3^ Cf. E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm 1960), p.
100 and passim.
'"'
In this edition pp. 132 ff. Cartari was first published, without illustrations, in
1556.
""
Lilius Gregorius Gyraldus, Opera Omnia (Lyons 1696), column 454; the De Deis
Gentium had been previously published in full at Basle in 1548.
*^ Not one of the emblems, "in subitum terrorem" first
original collection of
appeared in the 1534 edition of Alciati. It is the 1534 woodcut, on which subsequent
woodcuts in the period in question all seem to have been based, that I describe. See
H. Green, ed., Alciati's Emhlemata (Manchester 1870-71).
"•*
Cf. E. McGrath, "Pan and the Wool," The Ringling Museum of Art Journal (1983),
pp. 52 ff., for a sketch of Pan and satyrs in Renaissance art.
Paul Holberton 161
reports that Politian has an entire chapter on the subject, then he

says:
Sed et Theon in Arati comment, rixov id est sonitum hunc cochlea

factum scribit . . .
But Theon in his commentary to Aratus also writes that this echo,
that is sound, was made by a conch.
Cartari certainly then looked up Politian, because his words follow

Politian, not Gyraldus. Cartari writes:
overo perche Pan fu creduto il primo, che trovasse di sonare quella

gran conchiglia che portano Tritoni, con la quale ei fece si gran
i
romore nella guerra contra Titani (ed. 1571, p. 132)

i . . .
or because Pan was believed to be the first to have discovered how
to sound that great conch which Tritons carry, with which he made
a great noise in the war against the Titans . . .
Politian 's note reads:
. . . militasse ait Pana deum adversus Titanas, primumque eum videri

concham illam tortilem et turbinatam qua pro tuba utuntur invenisse,
quae Graece cochlos appellatur.
... He says that the god Pan fought against the Titans, and that he»
seems to have been the first to have discovered that twisted, spiral
conch which they use for a trumpet, which is called cochlos in Greek.
According to Panofsky, however, "Cartari, a mere compiler, ap-

parently owed his information to the more scholarly Natale Conti,"
whose Mythologiae was published 1551.'*'* But Conti's words (VI,
in
xxi) are quite different. Panofsky never refers to Politian.
I submit therefore that the idea that Pan induced terror by blowing
a conch had been registered, like a word in a dictionary, but had not
circulated, had not as it were entered parlance, before Cartari. I
think it significant that the connection to the conch blown by a triton
is Cartari's, not Gyraldus's and not Politian's. It would have helped
the illustrator pick the reference up. If the notion were unknown to
Correggio, the transmission Politian-Gyraldus-Cartari is clear; but if
it were known to him, I do not see how one can explain Alciati,
except by denying transmission to be linear. Others may. I think it is

worth pointing out that in neither case is the process a "re-integration"
of classical form and classical subject matter. There never had been
known before the Renaissance an image of Pan blowing a conch.
The Renaissance term invenzione is accurate.
*''
Panofsky, op. cit. (above, note 36), p. 42.
What alternative explanation then available for Correggio's Pan?

is
Duren has already found one Panofsky overlooked. It seems

parallel
to me it is one of very many. I submit that shells referred, if to
anything at all, then to Venus. ''^ A shell was the object on which she
was carried to the island of Cyprus after her birth from the genitals
of Saturn. Although always such a meaning is corroborated by the
context, the shell seems to have been a venereal symbol much as a
vase was a symbol of the Bacchic. This will be so even for tritons
when they appear in art.**^ Transmission was undoubtedly through
Fulgentius II, i. Thence it passes to Bernardus Sylvester's allegorizing
commentary to the first six books of the Aeneid. Explaining Aeolus's
storm and the calming of it by Neptune, Bernardus says:
Mare corpus humanum intelligitur quia ebrietates et libidines que per

aquas intelliguntur ab eo defluunt et in eo sunt commotiones vitiorum
et per ipsum ciborum et potus meatus fit. Secundum hoc legimus
Venerem ex virilibus Saturni natam fuisse in mari. Virilia enim Saturni
qualitates temporis quibus creatur: calor et humor. Hec virilia in mare
deiciuntur quoniam ciborum et potus superfluitates in corpore aguntur.
Hec autem in corpore per cibos acta libidinem movent. Ideo dictum
est: sine Cerere et Bacco friget Venus.*'
The sea stands for the human body because drunkenness and lust,
which are to be understood by its from the body and

waters, issue
the disturbances of the vices are located in it and through it there is
passage of food and drink. Accordingly we read that Venus was born
in the sea from the genitals of Saturn. For the genitals of Saturn are
the qualities of the season which give rise to Venus: heat and moisture.
These genitals are thrown into the sea in reflection of the fact that
the products of food and drink circulate in the body. These movements,
however, produced in the body by food, stir lust. Therefore the saying:
without Ceres or Bacchus Venus is cold.
Shells and vases, I suggest, are emblems of "libido" and "ebrietas"

equivalent to their ossified personifications. Urged to find one for
Ceres, I would suggest it was a bowl of natural produce, or a
cornucopia; the personification Copia was more usual.
In the later development of the mythographical tradition, Venus
emerges with the scallop or conch as her prime attribute: in Mytho-
graphus III; in Petrarch's Africa, where she is so described (III. 212-
13):
•^
Except of course when the shell is the pilgrim shell of St. James.
*^ This would be consistent with Raphael's Galatea, for instance. The first deviation
from the Bernardus Sylvester tradition (on which he depends) might be Cristoforo
Landino's in his Camaldulensian Disputations (ed. Lohe, Florence 1980), p. 170.
*'
J. W. and E. E Jones, edd. (Lincoln, Nebr. 1977), p. 10, lines 15-22.
Paul Holberton 163
nuda Venus pelagoque natans, ubi prima refertur

turpis origo dee, concam lasciva gerebat
Venus naked, swimming in the sea (whence, we are told, in base

circumstances she originated) bore, lascivious, her conch;
in Boccaccio's Genealogia, III. xxiii (Venus secunda); in the Ferrarese

Tarocchi prints (Hind E. I. 43); in Botticelli's Birth of Venus in the
Uffizi.
By the second half of the fifteenth century these easily compre-
hensible and familiar attributes have started to appear as it were
adjectivally in other contexts, so that in Mantegna's engraving. Battle
of the Sea-Gods, the figure of Neptune is accompanied on his plinth

by a vase and a shell. (The whole print is evidently founded on the
idea in Bernardus Sylvester that the sea may stand for the "com-
motions" or passions.) Two other instances are Giovanni Bellini's
Allegories in the Accademia, Venice, in one of which Bacchus appears,
in another (I submit, its pair) porters carrying a conch, that is,
laboring basely under the burden of lust; and a statuette by Riccio
in the Bargello, Florence, of a naked woman holding in one hand a
shell, in the other a drinking horn, while a child invites from her
breast. I suppose her to be an image of Luxuria.^^ In other images,
for instance in Lotto's Allegory in the National Gallery, Washington,
a vase occurs without Bacchus —
here beside a satyr, and, clearly, by
the context, meant to indicate his intemperance. So in the Botticelli
I presume the shell to occur without Venus, in the hand of a satyr,
and to be clearly shown by the context to indicate his concupiscence;

and in the Correggio I presume it to occur similarly again, in the
hand of an arch-satyr, although I cannot go into the details now.
Linear transmission through Botticelli to Correggio is perfectly pos-
sible. Perhaps I may also reward the argument by the observation
that the nymph in the lunette beside Correggio's Pan, whom Panofsky
believed to be related to him and to be Hope against his terror, holds
a dove.^^ So all this also agrees with the Piero di Cosimo.
In fact it seems clear to me that semi-animal creatures were naturally
interpreted in the Renaissance as base, as embodiments of the passions.
This was either because they were all varieties of incubus or devil (if
you believed in their existence)^" or (if you did not) because they
"•^
Cf. Royal Academy of Arts, The Genius of Venice (London 1983), catalogue no.
S25.
*^ For doubts about Panofsky's interpretation, see E. H. Gombrich, Topos and
Topicality in Renaissance Art (London 1975), pp. 1 1 fF.
^« Cf. R. Bernheimer, Wildmen in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1952), pp. 96 ff.
were products of the lower imagination^' —

"velut aegri somnia,"
like the dreams of a sick man, to recall the opening lines of Horace's
Ars Poetica with its description of a painting of a centaur, of a chimaera,
and of a satyr, if a satyr may stand described as a creature whose
head and foot do not make one form ("ut nee pes nee caput uni /
reddatur formae"). Similarly laughter, like the laughter Horace
supposed such a painting would occasion, was a normal response to
ungoverned lechery and infatuation;^^ one also laughed at monkeys. ^^
Is not the satyr with the helmet over his head both comic and
indicative of the kind of blindness which earned Cupid his blindfold?

His companion blows venereal dreams with his conch into the young
man's ear, venereal dreams that after Horace one might characterize
as "vanae species"; and does he not recall quite strongly the devil
blowing the hot of lust into other dreamers' ears
air for instance —
in Diirer's print. The Dream of the Doctor}^'^ There, too, the amor is
ridiculous on stilts. If one should wish to show a man inveigled by a
sensual dream, to show satyrs leaping round him might seem a good
way to do it. Certainly there are pictures in which Pan looms behind
a ripe sleeping nude.^^
Of remains possible that Politian might have provided
course it
the Aratus scholion. But is it at all likely that if terror had been
meant by the satyr's conch, its proper possessor, a devilish adult Pan,
should have been transformed into a childish satyrlet? And why
should Politian recommend the conch as an indication of nightmare
when it is clear from his discussion and citations in Miscellanea no.
28 that he understood it as a waking fear —

something indeed from
which philosophy may protect, as Cicero writes to Tiro {Ad Fam.
XVI. 23), in the passage that the entry sets out to explain? Philosophy
cannot protect against sleep. Nor is there reason to suppose he would
think panic relevant to an amorous context, since there is no hint of
it in the Stanze.
The connection between "bombus" and conch will also then fail,
given that there is no association between Latin "bombus" and the
^' This is expounded by Synesius, De Somniis, pubhshed

consistent with the theory
in Florence in 1497 and with Ficino's dedication (dated 1489)
in Ficino's translation;
to the collection, in which he includes Proclus's De Daemonibus.
^^ Cf. Petrarch, De Remediis Fortunae, I, xxxvii, ad
finem, on ungoverned luxuria
for precious stones, and the letter by Stabellino, mentioned above, note 14.
" Cf. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape-Lore (London 1952), p. 202.
^* The imagery was not new: cf. Petrarch, RS cxxxvi, 9-11.
Bartsch 76.
" Gibbons, Dosso and Battista Dossi (Princeton 1968), catalogue nos. 1 1, 92;
Cf. F.
also M. Meiss, "Sleep in Venice," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110
(1966), pp. 348 ff.
Paul Holberton 165
noise made by a conch except in Miscellanea no. 28, where "bombus"

translates Greek ô/xfioq in fact not quite accurately (the Greek word,
meaning in Homer always a crash or bang, is by no means parallel);
and even Greek ônôq, meaning then more than a blast on the conch,
is associated with a conch only in Nonnus.^^
However, there are associations of Latin "bombus" with satyrs and

with knighthood. The hypothesis that the wasps might also be there
for the sake of the noise they make seems worth testing beside the
venereal reading I have put forward. The association of Latin
"bombus" is firmly and equally to bees and to horns. ^' The passage
in Pliny (Natural History XL 10. 20 ff.) inwhich a hive is compared
to a camp and bees' buzzing to bugling was presumably well known
in the Renaissance, given the circulation of Pliny. A horn was part
of the equipment of a knight: its use recurs in Boiardo's Orlando
Innamorato, and the echo of that most moving tragedy of Roncisvalle
had not yet The
other satyrs play laughably and lasciviously
died.
with the rest of his armor. May not the one with the conch underline
the knight's condition by the implicit contrast between the lustful,
nacreous dreams he blows and the mighty summons of a clarion? An
association between satyrs and "bombus" can be found in at least
three texts, provided that the satyrs are understood as followers of
Bacchus. This, however, does not seem unreasonable, in view of the
resemblance of both them and their antics to the satyrs who play on
Bacchic sarcophagi. The motif of a snake underfoot in Donatello's
Atys-Amorino in the Bargello, which is surely kin to Botticelli's "satyr-
amorini," proves such sarcophagi to have been observed. ^^
The texts are first Ovid's Fasti III. 725 ff., in which the followers
of Bacchus discover honey and Silenus, thinking to do the same,
rouses a hornet's nest: these two episodes were of course illustrated
for the Vespucci by Piero di Cosimo.^^ The second, which was
illustrated by Titian in his Bacchus and Ariadne now in the National
Gallery, London, is Catullus 64. 263:
multis raucisonos efflabant cornua bombos

The horns of many blew hoarse-sounding buzzes . . .
*^
LSf, s.v. fionôq; ôti^tlv, iiriônûv; Nonnus XL. 503.
" OLD, s.v. bombus.
^^ Matz, op. at. (above, note 15), nos. 45, 90, 1 15 etc.; H. W. Janson, The Sculpture
of Donatella (Princeton 1957), II, p. 145; M. Greenhalgh, Donatello and his Sources
(London 1982), says its source is "clear" without further reference.
*^ The pictures are Art Museum, Worcester, Mass., and in the Fogg
now in the
Art Museum, Cambridge, respectively. Cf. Panofsky, op. cit. (above, note 16), pp. 58
ff.
It is part of the description of the train of the god as he comes upon
Ariadne. I see no reason to suppose that either of these is in any

way involved in Botticelli's picture, although the recurrence of Bacchic
allusions in two supposedly punning Vespucci commissions may be
significant.
The third text is Persius I. 99 ff.:
Torva Mimalloneis implerunt cornua bombis
They filled their rasping horns with Mimallonean buzz . . .
This is again a Bacchic description, inserted as an exercise in a

particular style. The Persius might very well have been more to hand
than the Catullus. Persius was more widely read, a favorite medieval
author, frequently printed from the early 1470s;^'' furthermore, this
passage (unlike the Catullus) was often cited to illustrate Bacchic texts
by Renaissance commentators, for instance by Landino to Horace,
Carmina III. 18, and by Bernardino da Verona to Tibullus I. 7.^' All
commentators of the period cite Persius to Catullus 64;^^ on the other
hand Catullus 64. 251 ff. was not cited to the Persius by anyone
before Casaubon.
Further evidence of the circulation of the Persius is provided by
sonnet no. cxxviii in the Milanese poet Gasparo Visconti's Canzoniere
of the mid- 1490s, which includes the lines:'^^
poi che'l tuo stil cosi suave bomba

che nectare et ambrosia par che versa
Since your tenor hums so suavely

that it seems to pour nectar and ambrosia
to which Visconti, explaining his use of the word (forced by the

difficult "-omba" rhyme), glosses:
bomba: apum sonus dicitur teste Plynio libro XI, et est vocabulum
factitium, unde plerumque etiam pro alio sonitus genere usurpatur.
Persius de Bachis:
Torva Mimalloneis implerunt cornua bombis
bomba: be the sound made by bees, according to Pliny, Book

said to
XI. an onomatopoeic word; hence it is also commonly used for
It is
other kinds of sound. Persius on Maenads:
^^ Cf. F. E. Crantz and others, edd., Calalogus Translationum et Commentariorum

(Washington, D.C. 1976), III, pp. 201 ff. (Persius).
^' First published Florence
1482; Brescia 1486.
^2 Antonio Parthenio, Brescia 1485, etc.: Palladio Fosco, Venice 1496; Battista
Guarino, Venice 1521 (but made before 1492).

«^ P. Bongrani, ed. (Milan 1979).
Paul Holberton 167
They filled their rasping horns with Mimallonean hums. . . .
Visconti appears to have overlooked the fact that "torva" means

"harsh, rough, fierce"; but Botticelli's patron, he was using this if
text, did not, for he has replaced the "torva cornua" with a much
more nectarous conch.
Visconti's was necessary, not because "bombare" was a
gloss
neologism, but because otherwise it would have meant "drink avidly,
copiously and merrily," though "bombare" is apparently obsolete or

dialect in modern Italian.*''* This further sense of "bombing" accords
with both the Bacchic and the venereal connotations of satyrs, with
the drunkenness of epithalamia in general (a figure Lucian thinks
might be Hymen lolls on Hephaestion's shoulder in Aetion's picture)
and with the appearance of the young man himself. Confirmation
that his general demeanor and situation would have been read as an
intoxication like that of wine is available in an anonymous contem-
porary print representing the pedlar Pieterlin, drunk (so an inscription
in one of the two versions) and set about by monkeys, two of whom
play with his clothing (Hind A. I. 76, 77) [Figure 5].^^
This line from Persius could provide with the Lucian the ingredients
that are unique to this picture. With the Lucian would come the
satyrs with the lance and the one in the breastplate; with the Persius
the satyr blowing and the wasps to make a "bombus." In both allusions
the satyrs ape or mimic, fxcixetadaL. This is the word used by Lucian
for their games, and this is the etymological gloss put upon "Mim-
allonean" both by the scholiast and by Renaissance commentators to
the Persius.'^*' Besides this, Bartolomeo Fonzio in his commentary (first
published Florence 1477) says that the Mimalloneans imitated "father
Liber"; so there would be logic from this in their being children. A
spectator might even have been referred to the Persius by their being
satyr-children. The possibility can be corroborated to some extent
by the recurrence of a child-satyr in the foreground of Titian's
Bacchus and Ariadne mentioned earlier, who is dragging the head of
a bullock. It seems plausible that he is present in the Titian not
because Catullus mentions such creatures, but because, to CatuUus's
"divolso iuvenco" of 64. 257, Persius's "raptum vitulo caput ablatura
superbo" was cited. Whether there was between the Botticelli and
®''
Grande Dizionario Delia Lingua Italiana, S. Battaglia, ed. (Turin 1961-); Novissimo
Dizionario, G. Folena, ed. (Milan 1980, etc.); s.v. bombare.
®^ The story discussed by Janson, op. (above, note 53), pp. 216 ff.
cit.
®^That is, Fonzio and Giovanni Britannico (1486); the fifteenth-century Italian
MS commentary, British Library Harleian 3989, folio 19', has "Mimallones" only as
"ministri Bacchi," and shows no knowledge of the scholiast.
i
the Titian some visual transmission, or whether the word "Mimal-

lonean," understood as "imitating father Liber," evoked child-satyrs,
or both, it may be the same image connoting the same entity in both
places.
It may be worth investigating the passage in which the Persius line
occurs. Persius is arguing what kind of poetry he should be writing:
'sed numeris decor est et iunctura addita crudis.

cludere sic versum didicit "Berecyntius Attis"
et "qui caeruleum dirimebat Nerea delphin,"

sic "costam longo subduximus Appennino."
"Arma virum", nonne hoc spumosum et cortice pingui

ut ramale vetus vegrandi subere coctum?'
quidnam igitur tenerum et laxa cervice legendum?
'torva Mimalloneis inplerunt cornua bombis,
et raptum vitulo caput ablatura superbo
Bassaris et lyncem Maenas flexura corymbis
euhion ingeminat, reparabilis adsonat echo.'
haec fierent si testiculi vena ulla paterni
viveret in nobis? summa delumbe saliva
hoc natat in labris et in udo est Maenas et Attis
nee pluteum caedit nee demorsos sapit unguis.
'sed quid opus teneras mordaci radere vero
auriculas? . . .'(I. 92-108, Clausen)
'But grace and counterpoint have been laid over raw meter. [The
modern poet] has learned to round off a line with "Berecynthian
Atys," and with "the dolphin Nerean blue," likewise
that cleft the
"we have sloped a chine down tall Appennine." Anna virum isn't —
this full of foam and with a thick bark like old branches from an
enormous cork-tree cooked up?' So what about something tender and
to be read with a lolling neck? 'They filled their rasping horns with
Mimallonean buzz, and the Bassarid with a bellicose bullock's ripped
head and the Maenad in the act of entwining a lynx in ivy-clusters
redouble euhion, euhion: there sounds back the boomeranging echo.'
Would this be going on if there were one drop of our fathers' spunk
alive in us? This eunuch stuff floats on the lips, on the surface of the
spittle, and the Maenads and Atys are wet. This stuff" makes no mark
on the couch-back; it has no taste of the quick of nails.
'But what need is there to score tender lobes with the bite of
truth?'
Botticelli's young man is certainly not bitten with the truth: he

dreams vain delusions, if it was reasonable to cite the Ars Poetica. He
lies back with a lolling neck somewhat enervately. Perhaps the satyrs
who play about him may not only indicate that he is rapt in lustful
dreams, but also serve to characterize the tenderness and luxuriance
Figure 5
Paul Holberton 169
of those dreams? Could the fruit or vegetable is it a squash or a —

citrus?^' —
that the satyr holds at bottom right be a further hint of
their quality? Itmight well stand for things excessively soft, squashy,
The contrast in the Persius between an excessively
pulpy, empty, vain.*'^
lush style and the true, heroic, epic style might have been used to
inform a contrast between the young man's venereal rapture and the
proper use of the arms with which the satyrs play.
Such a reading of the picture would be consistent with the way
the Persius was read in late fifteenth-century Florence. The scholiast
had remarked on Persius's spoof lines, which are often attributed to
Nero:
Dicitur a'pcoj/iicajq, carmina poetarum illius temporis plena graecis-

sationibus nullum habere intellectum, quae tamen nescio qua modu-
latione resonant.
He dissimulates, meaning that the poetry of that time is full of

grecisms and has no matter, even though it sounds with an attractive
musicality.
Bartolomeo Fonzio remarks in his commentary:
Hos autem maxime versus poeta posuit in eorum reprehensionem

qui grandiorem sonum captantes rerum sensus nequaquam advertunt. •
These lines in particular Persius intended as a jibe against poets

who in striving after a finer sound to observe any real sense.
fail
There is also some evidence that this particular passage excited

interest at this period in the manuscript notes that erupt around
these lines amid the otherwise clean pages of a Venice 1480 edition
of Fonzio's Persius in the British Library (IB 26730).*^^ The notator
writes beside the text:
Carmina poetarum sui temporis mordit propter molitiem quam

habebant in se . . .
He criticizes the poets of his time for their essential voluptuousness.
He then cites Quintilian XI ad finem (sc. Institutiones IX. 4. 142):
^' It may be a Florentine "cedro"; or alternatively a "zucca"; or a fig.

^* In the dialogue Virtus Dea (see above, note gods not only paint butterflies
1 0) the
but also grow gourds ("cucurbitae") while keeping Virtue waiting. The medieval
sense of "cucurbita" as "adulterer" given by DuCange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae
Latinitatis (Niort 1883-87), might also be relevant both to the pseudo-Lucian and to
the Botticelli.
®^ I have assumed these to have been written shortly after the publication of the
book; evidently a Renaissance hand.
it is
... in universum autem, si sit necesse, duram potius atque asperam

compositionem malim esse quam efFeminatam et enervem, qualis apud
multos, et cotidie magis, lascivissimis syntonorum modis saltat . . .
. . . but in general, need be, I would prefer the development

if
rather to be harsh and rough than effeminate and flaccid, of the kind
found in many authors, and increasingly today, writhing to the most
luxurious zither rhythms.
Fonzio in his commentary had glossed Persius's "delumbe" to

similar effect:
Haec moUia et enervia saepe legimus crebroque in ore habemus.

Genitalisautem seminis sedes in lumbis est. Unde in sacris libris lumbos
ut praecingamus admonemur. Delumbem vero hominem effoeminatum
et mollem ob nimiam venerem dicimus. Hinc delumbe carmen pro
lascivo minimeque virili transfertur . . .
Such soft and flabby things we often read and have on our lips,
he means. Now the seat of the generative seed is in the loins. Hence
we are told in the Bible to gird our loins. But "delumbe" describes
an eff"eminate man and one who has grown soft from too much Venus.
Hence a poem is said by extension to be "delumbe," meaning lascivious
and not at all virile.
Surely such a combination of unsexedness and oversexedness is
what we find in the Botticelli's ungirt youth.

precisely
The notator of IB 26730 goes on to quote Diomedes the Gram-
marian, indeed writes out at some length passages from Diomedes's
discussion of the various kinds of hexameter line, beginning at the
chapter "De pulchritudine heroici versus" (Keil, I, p. 494).'''
Versus heroicus is dignitate primus est et plenae rationis perfectione

firmatus ac totius gravitatis honore sublimis . . .
The heroic line is that which is foremost in dignity and solid in the
perfection of the fullness of its structure and lofty in respect of all its
weight. . .
The same passage was quoted by Cristoforo Landino in his commen-

tary to Ars Poetica 73-74 (on epic). In fact Diomedes was Landino's
principal reference for the explanation of Horace's technical terms
(for instance "tragedia"). He was a useful and popular source for
commentators of the time;" Politian, discussing satyrs in his Centuria
Secunda, no. 28, remarks that contrary to the general belief "following
">
H. Keil, ed., Grammatici Latini (Hildesheim 1961).
''
Printed with several other grammarians at Florence c. 1475.
Paul Holberton 171
'^
Diomedes and others," there were three different kinds of satyr.
The notator of IB 26730, continuing to quote from Diomedes, passes
to the chapter "De pedibus metricis," in which hexameters are
according to the disposition of the syntax through the feet
classified
(something perhaps subsumed in Persius's "iunctura" at I. 92). One
of them is the "smooth" line ("teres") (Keil, I, p. 499, line 21):
. . . teretes sunt qui volubilem et cohaerentem continuant dictionem,

ut torva Mimalloneis inflatur tibia bombis . . .
... in the "smooth" type the sentence runs through the Hne fluently
and without interruption, for example:
The fierce flute is puff"ed with Mimallonean buzzes.
It does not seem unlikely that a purchaser who knew Lucian should
also have known Diomedes. Visconti's "factitium" is a grammarian's
term.
At the risk of repetition, it might be as well to summarize the

argument so far. Botticelli's picture belongs to a general class of love
pictures, some of which may refer to the bliss of the first night of
marriage. It shares with other members of the group its setting, the
disposition of its protagonists and the presence of love-creatures. It
is individual in that its love-creatures are not straight amori, but are
amori-satiri, introducing therefore Bacchic connotations. As a satyr,
the one who blows has a precedent in Persius I. 99. As amori, those
who carry the lance and the one in the breastplate have a precedent
in Lucian's Aetion. In both there is precedent for their being imitative,
or apish. Either Botticelli evolved these child satyrs and their activities
freely from the convention to which the picture belongs, or their
activities were suggested to him, and an allusion was intended to the
Lucian and to the Persius. If an allusion was intended to the Lucian,
then the picture must have celebrated a marriage. If an allusion was
intended to the Persius, then its point must have been the voluptuous
feeling with which the young man is seized. Whether or not these
classical texts were in play, the conch blown by the satyr definitely
indicates his voluptuous feeling. The hypothesis first that the wasps
pun on the coat of arms of the Vespucci, secondly that the allusion
to Persius puns on the noise made by wasps, awaits documentary
corroboration or dismissal.
An important difference between the Persius line and the Lucian
excerpt is that the Lucian is part of a description of a picture; the
^^ V. Branca and M. P. Stocchi, edd. (Florence 1972): "quamquam multa ex

Diomede afferant aliisque."
Persius But they are both vignettes. The Lucian excerpt is an

is not.
example of an example
lovely ancient painting, the Persius excerpt
of lovely ancient poetry. If there is an aural dimension to the picture —
the buzzing of the wasps, the noise of the blown conch the —
principle behind its incorporation seems to be identical with the
principle behind the visual incorporation of the Lucian.
It is also significant that the Persius line — witness Visconti's
citation — might have been would have a much
a current tag. A tag
wider circulation than the text from which it came. A telling example
of this is close to hand. Twice I have found commentators to Bacchic
texts including, among the lines they adduce from various sources,
the pentameter:
Accedant capiti cornua: Bacchus eris . . .
Let horns grow on your head: you will be Bacchus . . .
This celebratum" or it is given to Sappho. ^^ The reason why

is "illud
it is cited is to show Bacchus had horns, this being typical of his
libidinous nature, indicative of his "violentia cerebri."^"* Another place

where Bacchus is said to have horns is in Bartolomeo Fonzio's comment
to Persius I. 99:
Mimallones dictas aiunt quod Liberum patrem imitarentur, et ad eius

imitationem cornua ferunt. Unde etiam Cassandram Lycophron "Clari
Mimallonem" appellat . . .
They were called "Mimallonean" because they imitated

say that they
father Bacchus, and they bear horns in imitation of him. Hence also
Lycophron calls Cassandra "the Mimallon of Clarus" (sc. because she
imitates the prophesying of Apollo's oracle there).
Fonzio says "aiunt" and his informant was presumably at first or

second hand some Byzantine, who, having been asked what "Mim-
allonean" might mean, looked up Tzetzes's twelfth-century commen-
tary on Lycophron where the word occurs twice. In the second place
(to Lycophron 1464) Tzetzes gives the information about Clarus; in
the first (Lycophron 1237) he has the information:'^
. . . ai iv MaKedovia BaKxocL at kol îifiaXoveq eKoXovvTO dia to ûneladai

avTOic, TOP Alovvctou. Ktparocpopomai yap koi avrai Kara ixip,r)aiv Alovv<jov
ravp'oKpoLvoc, yap (f>avTaîTai koo. û}ypa(f)etTaL. Kot EvpLiridrfq [Bacchae 921]
" So Beroaldo to Propertius III. 17. 19 (Bologna 1487); Landino to Horace,

Carmina I. 18. 14 (Florence 1482).
^^ So Beroaldo, ultimately from Porphyrio to Horace, Carmina III. 21. 18.
^* Lycophron, Alexandra (Oxford

1697), p. 127; Roscher, op. cit. (above, note 15),
s.v. Mimallones.
Paul Holberton 173
Kou (TO) Kepara Kparl irpo(nre(l)VKepaL. KepaTO<f)opoq {6) ocvrbc, icrrip, eireLdr} b
oivo<i inubixevoc, woXvq tovc, avdpaq tKixaiva irpbq Tocq erepcov yvvaiKaq aa'ipx'tadai.
. the Bacchants in Macedonia who were also called Mimallons

. .
because they imitated Dionysus. For they also had horns in imitation
of Bacchus. For he is represented and shown in pictures as bull-
headed: Euripides [Bacchae 921], And horns have grown upon your
head. He bears horns because when a great deal of wine is drunk it
sends men into a frenzy to make advances towards the women of
other men.
Bartolomeo Fonzio clearly enough repeats Tzetzes on horns, too: so

is not possible that "accedant capiti cornua: Bacchus eris" is a
it
translation of Bacchae 921 and is another hearsay snippet of the same

,
origin? To cite Bacchae 921 to a Florentine print featuring satyrs

quite similar to Botticelli's (Hind A. II. 26) in order to explain the
horns Bacchus bears there would be absurd, but this tag seems just
as likely a source as Ars Amatoria I. 232 or III. 348, Diodorus IV. 4
or Philostratus, Imagines I. 15. In fact its association with cuckoldry
and libidinousness tallies better with the embrace in which Bacchus
clasps Ariadne.
In adducing the Persius to the Botticelli I presuppose some factor
of hearsay, which is not measurable but which cannot be discounted.
I resort to this first because I cannot see another explanation; secondly
because even though the argument may be circumstantial it does at

least explain. My position is just like Panofsky's before Pan and the
conch. He knew only one parallel and therefore used it as an
explanation despite its difficulties. I see only one satisfactory expla-
nation of Botticelli's picture within the range of sources about Bacchus
and satyrs I have found cited. Welcome to another who can find
again a simpler, more substantial tradition!
Much remains unexplained. I would like to know very much more
about what might have been appropriate on the occasion of a marriage.
One point worth making is perhaps that, if this were an epithalamial
picture, it would not necessarily have to be a gift from family to
family, but could have been a gift from a friend, cousin or political
ally. As such it would be more exactly an epithalamium in paint.
Secondly, it may not be appropriate to look for its imagery in classical

sources at all, even if the epithalamium was a classical genre. It seems
reasonable on the basis of its imagery to identify the following sonnet
by Politian {Rime Varie, iv: to an unknown addressee) as epithalamial:'*^
Spera, signor mio car, e ormai t'affida
''^
B. Maier, ed. (Novara 1968), p. 234.
a I'alta impresa tua: el core nero

spogliato s' e, ne piu I'abito fero
a suspirar il tristo cor diffida.
La Fede a la tua donna per te crida
e vuol mercede al tu' servir sincero,
crida per te I'Amor tuo puro e vero,
e I'uno e I'altro a bon porto te guida.
Ecco ver te la vista tua divina
che in candido vestir si mostra lieta
e par che dica ormai: "Fede vol fede."
Dunque la pena turbulenta acqueta:
vedo la tua salute esser vicina;
dopo la nube il sol chiaro si vede.
Take hope, dear sire, and now commit yourself

To your great adventure: your black heart
Has been stripped bare; fierce cladding no longer
Makes your sad heart hesitate to sigh.
Faith cries to your lady for you
And calls for favor on your guileless service;
Your own true, pure Love cries for you;
Together the one and the other lead you to haven.
Look, towards you comes your own divine vision.
Dressed in white, she reveals herself joyful
And she seems now to say: Faith will have faith.
So then, the pain and the storm quieten:
I see your salvation is close at hand;
After the cloud the sun shines brighter.
The sonnet may be Politian's, but not the vocabulary. Correspond-

ences to the imagery already discussed are the sun image, which
recurs not only in the Otto prints but also all round the man and
the woman in one of the cassone-Md pairs (Schubring 156, 157). The
ship image is a standard image of Fortune or destiny, but also recurs
in another Florentine epithalamial print of the period (Hind A. I.
6).^'"Fede vol fe" recalls "Amor vuol fe." This sonnet therefore
seems some evidence that the white dress of the woman in Botticelli's
picture stands not only for nubile purity but also for faithfulness.
She watches over the young knight's fortune just as the woman in
the ship print sits at the tiller.
Particularly striking is the parallel between Politian's metaphor

"spogliato" and the condition of the knight in Botticelli's picture.
^^ Cf. A. Warburg, "Francesco Sassettis Letzwillige Verfugung," op. cit. (above,

note 23), pp. 149-50. The Cupid shows the print is about love, whether it refers to
a Rucellai marriage or not.
Paul Holberton 175
The opening lines of the sonnet seem to refer to a period of endurance

or discretion in the early phase of courtship, in which the lover has
already fallen in love but not yet communicated the fact to anyone
(except by signs he cannot control) materially at least not even to —
the beloved herself. This then would be the period of "black" or
miserable, "triste," heart (the metaphor is fairly common in French
poetry),'^ in which the lover feels himself unworthy or is unwilling
to profess himself. Dante, Vita Nuova v, 3, talks of the "schermo de
la veritade," the "shield screening the truth." With the abandonment
of dissimulation, when the committal has become frank, the lover

enters on to his "alta impresa," a recurrent Petrarchan term that
comes first at RS v: "Quando io movo sospiri a chiamar voi." In i
both Petrarch and Dante the attempt at poetry follows immediately

after spoliation {RS ii, iii; RS iv is about destiny; Vita Nuova xii, 3:
"Fili mi, tempus est ut pretermictantur simulacra nostra"). Suppose
that in Botticelli's picture the lover is meant to be utterly despoiled
of discretion, inebriately and voluptuously poetic over the beloved's
utterly seductive beauty. Is this a way in which it could be shown?'^
Quite possibly both Botticelli's picture and Politian's sonnet were
epithalamial, and drew upon a common stock of imagery. More
specifically, all the metaphors of Botticelli's picture except the buzzing
can be found in the opening section of Dante's Vita Nuova, that is,
in chapters ii, iii, v, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv and xvi, after which there is
a clear break; these chapters intimate the immediate effect of the
revelation of the beloved. Buzzing is an alternative metaphor to the
same effect, as can be shown from Petrarch's "Aura che quelle chiome
bionde e crespe" {RS ccxxvii).
The Vita Nuova has been recapitulated as follows:^^
When I fell in love,

Apparve vestita di nobilissimo colore umile e onesto, sanguigno —
She appeared dressed in most noble color, humble and honest,
purple (ii, 3). . . .
When she spoke (iii, 1)

. . . come inebriato mi partio della gente
presi tanta dolcezza che —
took so great sweetness that like one drunk I left the crowd (iii,
I
2) ... mi sopragiunse uno soave sonno, ne lo quale m'apparve una

maravigliosa visione —
there overcame me a suave sleep in which
appeared a marvelous vision (iii, 3) ... mi parea vedere una persona
^* Cf. H. Heger, Die

Melancholie bei den Franzbsischen Lyrikern des Spdtmittelalters
(Bonn 1967), p. 220.
^^ For Politian's "salute" see not only Dante (below)
but also Cavalcanti, iv, 13
and Contini ad locum (G. Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento [Milan Naples 1960], ii). —
*" Annotated edition by D. De Robertis (Milan Naples 1980). —
dormire nuda, salvo che involta mi parea in uno drappo sanguigno

leggeramente —
I seemed to see a person sleep naked, except that
she seemed to be wrapped in a purple drape lightly (iii, 4) She . . .
was woken, and made to eat his heart, which she did doubtfully
("dubitosamente," iii, 6).
So he dreams poetically how he will taste to

in Botticelli's picture
her: she regards him
and doubtfully. He, not she, is wrapped
lightly
naked in a purple cloak, but then he, not she, is asleep. (The way in
which the cloak comes round his left foot marks him as wrapped in
it, "involto".)
The is by contrast. One day she happened
reference to chapter v
and he happened to be sitting looking at her; and a
to be sitting,
second woman happened to be sitting in the direct line of his gaze
between them. Thence began the "schermo de la veritade" (v, 3; vi,
1); the "bella difesa" (vii, 1; ix, 1; ix, 5); "la difensione" (ix, 5), "lo
simulato amore" (ix, 6). This has all gone in Botticelli's picture. He
is uncovered, his heart is revealed.
After the loss of Beatrice's "salute / saluto" (x), Dante turns to
its effect (xi), its overwhelming enlightenment ("redundava la mia
capacitade" —
"overflowed my capacity," xi, 3). In another dream
he hears it is time to lay aside pretences ("simulacra," xii, 3), and
that he is to send her a ballad, in which "tu non parli a lei
immediatamente, che non e degno" —
"you should not speak to her
directly, which is not worthy" (xii, 8) ". ma falle adornare di suave
. .
armonia" —
"but make your words be adorned with suave harmony"
(xii, 8). Then follows the ballad, "Ballata, i' voi che tu ritrovi Amore."
After the ballad and an explanation of its "suave harmony," which

consists in the use of figures of speech, Dante continues (xiii, 1):
Appresso di questa soprascritta visione, avendo gia dette le parole che

Amore m'avea imposte di dire, mi cominciaro molti e diversi pensa-
menti a combattere e a tentare, ciascuno quasi indefensibilemente: tra
li quali pensamenti quattro mi parea che ingombrassero piu lo riposo
de la vita.
Next after this above mentioned vision, after I had said the words
that Love had charged me to say, there began many and various
emotions to assail me and try me, each one almost irresistibly: among
which emotions four seemed to me to embarrass the quiet of my life
the most.
The emotions are, love is good because . . .; love is not good because
. . .; then (xiii, 4):
lo nome d'Amore e si dolce a udire, che impossibile mi pare che la

Paul Holberton 177
sua propria operazione sia ne le piu cose altro che dolce, con cio sia
cosa che nomi seguitono
li lenominate cose, si come e scritto: Nomina
sunt consequentia rerum . . .
the is so sweet to hear, that it seems impossible to me

name of Love
that his proper working should be in most things other than sweet,
in reflection of the fact that names follow from the things named,
just as it is written: Names are consequent upon things. . . .
In the conch of Botticelli's picture and in the "Mimallonean buzz,"

if it is present, there is a corresponding suavity or sweetness, and a
^'
sweetness not only in fact but also in style.
The fourth emotion, however, is that Love is not sweet because it
is so strong, because "Amore ti stringe cosi" — "Love binds you so"

(xiii, 5). Between these emotions there is a battle (xiv, 1; xvi, 4), a
battle that seems to recur in the activity of the satyrs in Botticelli's
picture. These satyrs also reproduce Beatrice's "gabbare" (xiv, 7; xiv,
9; xiv, 1 1, line 1; xv, 7, line 12; xv, 8), her untouched teasing mockery
of his "dischernevole vista" (xv, 1), his ridiculous figure.
Most particularly the games Botticelli's satyrs play relate closely to
the sonnet "Tutti li miei penser" (xiii, 8):
Tutti li miei penser parlan d' Amore,

e hanno in lor si gran varietate,
ch'altro mi fa voler sua potestate,
altro folle ragionail suo valore,
altro sperando m'apporta dolzore,

altro pianger mi fa spesse fiate;
e sol s'accordano in cherer pietate,
tremando di paura che e nel core.
Ond' io non so da qual matera prenda;
e vorrei dire, e non so ch'io mi dica:
cosi mi trovo in amorosa erranza!
E se con tutti voi fare accordanza
convenemi chiamar la mia nemica,
Madonna la Pieta, che mi difenda.
Allmy emotions speak of Love,

And have in them such great variety
That one makes me want his power,
^'
The "dubitosamente" of also picked up: the issue of "doubtful" words,
iii, 6 is
that is figures of speech both the problem of poetry and the problem of
(xii; xxv) is
declaring his heart; or so I believe. The "tasting" of the heart amounts then to the
fundamental poetic question, is it "utile" as well as "dolce"? This formulation
(Horace, AP 334-35, 343) became virtually a slogan of members of Florence University
such as Cristoforo Landino or Bartolomeo Fonzio. The Persius would have been
understood in these terms.
Another proves that Love's power is foolish;

Another, hopeful, brings me sweetness;
Another makes me weep frequently,
And they agree with themselves only in begging kindness.
Trembling with the fear that is in my heart.
Hence I do not know from which to make my poem;
And 1 would like to speak, and I do not know what to say;
This is the amorous maze in which I find myselfl
And if with all I would make a harmony
I would have to call on my enemy,
My lady Kindness, to protect me.
The combination of defenselessness and combat, of intoxication and

of ridicule, recurs in Botticelli's picture. But also Dante's "dolzore"
offers a suitable reading for the conch-blower, and the line from
Persius; and the fear in his heart for the satyr in the breastplate,
though only via the allusion o^c, (l)o^r]aetev ("in order to frighten") in
Lucian. This fear is also drunk ("e per la ebrieta del gran tremore";
XV, 5, line 7). I hazard that the blabbering tongues of the satyrs are
again a sign of drunkenness.
Into such a context the idea of wasps and buzzing would have
fitted perfectly. Wasps are used as a metaphor of mental confusion
by Petrarch at RS ccxxvii: there is also acorrespondence between
the wisp of the woman's hair in Botticelli's picture and the opening
lines of this poem:
Aura che quelle chiome bionde e crespe
cercondi e movi, e se' mossa da loro
soavemente, e spargi quel dolce oro

e po '1 raccoglie e 'n bei nodi il rincrespe,
tu stai nelli occhi ond' amorose vespe
mi pungon si che 'n fin qua il sento e ploro
e vacillando cerco il mio tesoro
come animal che spesso adombre e 'ncespe;
ch' or me'l par ritrovar, ed or m'accorgo
ch' i' ne son lunge; or mi sollievo, or caggio,
ch' or quel ch' i' bramo or quel ch' e vero scorgo.
Aer felice, co'l bel vivo raggio
Rimanti. E tu corrente e chiaro gorgo,
Che non poss'io cangiar teco viaggio?
Oh breeze, by whom that rippling blond hair

Is and stirred, and who are stirred yourself by it
circled
Balmily, and scatter that sweet gold,
And then again gather it and tether it again in tresses.
You stick in my eyes, causing love's wasps
to sting me, so that deep inside I feel it and lament.
Paul Holberton 179
and unable to fix on it I hunt for my precious

like a frightened beast that shies and stalls;
For then I seem to have it, and then I come to the fact
That I am far from it; now I am uplifted, now I fall,
For now I see what I desire, and now I catch the truth.
Blest air, with your fair ray of life
Stay! And you, fluent and limpid stream.

Why cannot I change my course for yours?
At this point it will be useful to summarize the vernacular metaphors

I suppose to be present in Botticelli's picture. First and foremost it
takes its cue from the metaphor of spoliation, of being laid bare
before and by the beauty of the beloved. This metaphor is alive both
in Dante and in Petrarch, and continues to be used in the fifteenth
century, for instance by Boiardo at Gli Amorum Libri I, Ixxxii, or by
Politian in the sonnet quoted. More specifically Dante's idea of being
"indefensibly" in "battle" has been developed, and her purple cushion
and his purple cloak, his sleep, his nudity, the obsession with suavity,
the sense of being ridiculous and the drunkenness also recur in
Botticelli's picture. The same ridicule and the idea of a struggle to
find sweet words (which could be found far and wide elsewhere) are
associated with metaphorical wasps in the Petrarch sonnet.
In conclusion, I may state it as my belief that both the Persius and
the Lucian are present in the picture, though both have been curtailed
or altered in order to fit into a prior vernacular convention. For,
secondly, even if they were used, they were only flourishes: the
essential script of the painting is the representation of the sensual
eff"ects of beholding the beloved.
Can one really have such powerful sensual effects merely from
beholding the beloved? In the Renaissance, undoubtedly one could;
in this its poetry is unanimous. Can one represent these powerful
sensual effects in the kind of figuration we find in Botticelli's picture?
It seems in fact to share its figuration with other images that refer
by one means or another to these sensual effects. In particular, there

exist two earlier works of art, one literary, the other a painted relief,
that might have served directly as models for the picture: the painted
relief in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Dante's Vita Nuova.
Taken over from the relief (or the convention to which it belongs)
are the form and disposition especially of the man, who is shown
asleep. Taken over from Dante (or the imagery which he also uses)
is the content of the man's dream, which is "keyed" in the picture
by metaphors visualized either directly (the purple cloak, the unde-

fending armor) or in classical cipher like this: satyrs = Bacchic =
180 Illinois Classical Studies, IX. 2
ecstatic, libidinous drunkenness; or, conch = Venus = voluptuousness;

or, amori playing with armor = the joy of Alexander's wedding night
= the delightful mental confusion of the lover bare to his beloved;
or, the noise of wasps plus the blowing of a wind instrument by a
child satyr = Mimallonean buzzings = exquisite poetry.
have tried to map out the classical and the vernacular coding of
I
the picture with such materials as I could find to have been available.
It is difficult to judge how available they were, but some of them
were clearly in wide circulation. The last thing I propose is an "almost

compulsive propensity to cryptic allusion." It is therefore incumbent
to explain why a classical motif has been adopted, why an allusion
has been made. To assume pure antiquarianism, pure love of the
classical ideal, is in effect to assume precisely a propensity to cryptic
allusion. My intention in the first place is to establish a correct reading
of the picture, as if I were footnoting a poem.
In the second place I wish to challenge earlier assumptions about
the ways in which classical imagery was employed by the early
Renaissance. The previous explanation of Botticelli's picture had been
that the couple represented Mars and Venus, and the point was
essentially that love overcame ferocity. To associate this idea with
Mars and Venus an astrological passage was cited from Marsilio
Ficino.®^ My objection to this mode of interpretation is not that the
notion is impossible, but that it puts the cart before the horse. If the
essential point of the picture overcomes ferocity, then
is that love
this is its not Mars and Venus. For
starting point. Its starting point is
the extremely widespread idea that love overcomes aggressive valor,

one might find innumerable representations: Hercules and Omphale,
or the loves of Jupiter or something else in the Metamorphoses, or a
wildman and his wife, or a centaur and his family, or an amor riding
a lion. Or Alexander and Roxana, conceivably. Or Mars and Venus.
But whatever the terms used, they are used as embodiments of the
qualities concerned: strength or savagery, tenderness or beauty. It is
these that emerge through the figures. What one has to do therefore
with the Botticelli is not first discover the figures represented, but
first discover what the figures represent. Working from the action I
see in the picture, controlled as far as possible by contemporary

parallels, do not see the logic that leads
I to the identification of
these figures as Mars and Venus.
Until some better source is discovered, I propose instead that
neither the man nor the woman should be taken as classical figures
^^ Nesca N. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London 1935), p. 218,

followed by Gombrich, op. cit. (above, note 5), less tentatively.
Paul Holberton 181
at all. I propose that not every Renaissance secular picture is a
mythological narrative or an adaptation from one. Classical sources

may be used as it were not only as nouns and verbs, but also adjectivally
or adverbially. So I believe them to have been used here, in a painting
about sensual effects.
What then is the status of these figures? They are in a landscape;
a wind must have lifted the stray wisp of the woman's hair. In a
development that stems from Petrarch, the beloved has been envisaged
as a nymph. He is therefore a "giovanetto." For this there are
parallels. Not too distant perhaps may be a farsa written by the
Neapolitan Antonio Ricco and performed in Venice in February 1508
in the house of the Magnifico Marino Malipiero "per la nobile
Compagnia de' Fausti" —
for one of the Venetian "compagnie della
calza" who seem to have staged their festivals either on the occasion
of a visit to Venice of an honored personage or as here on the — —
occasion of the marriage of one of their members. ^^ Here "lo Amante"
and "la Donna," as they appear in the dramatis personae, are called
in the dialogue "la ninfa" and "lo giovanetto." Closer to Botticelli's
picture is the relief in the cortile of the palazzo of the Florentine
Chancellor Bartolomeo Scala attributed to Bertoldo (around 1479),

figuring a scene adapted from one of Bartolomeo's Apologues or
Fables. Here, the lover (anonymous) pleads against Cupid before -a
tribunal over the harm done him by his infatuation. The lover wears
armor, and also is shown led in chains by a figure whose only attribute
is a helmet covering his head —
just like Botticelli's little satyr.^*
There no question of Mars and Venus here. And yet does not the
is
identification with Mars and Venus in Botticelli's picture ultimately

depend on no more than the fact that the man has armor?
As a title for the picture I propose "Hypnerotomachia," describing
not the figures but what is going on —
a kind of battle in a dream
occasioned by love. The picture seems also to share with the famous
book of that name (published in 1499) the use of classical sources
and even perhaps its interest in polysyllables.
It seems to me likely that the picture had an association with the
Vespucci, since that remains the best explanation for the otherwise
out-of-the-way motif of the wasps so far advanced. It is surely possible
that was a wedding-gift, given its precedents. Its successors were,
it
I believe, not the ecphrastic mythologies of the sixteenth-century, but
*' Cf. G. Padoan, La Commedia Rinascimentale Veneta (Vicenza 1982), p. 35; L.

Venturi, "Le Campagnie della Calza," Nuovo Archivio Veneto 16 (1908), pp. 161 fF.; 17
(1909), pp. 140 ff.
^* Cf. A. Parronchi, "The Language of Humanism and the Language of Sculpture,"

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), pp. 108 ff.
its nymphs in landscapes and its Arcadian idylls — works such as

Titian's Three Ages of Man on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland,
or the Concert Champetre in the Louvre, as well as Piero di Cosimo's
Venus and the Knight. In fact I venture the idea that this is the earliest
surviving y?i^ champetre.
The Warburg Institute, University of London

Platonic and Pauline Ideals in Comic Dress:
"Comment on Vestit Gargantua"
FLORENCE M. WEINBERG
It seems ironic that Rabelais, with his humanistic reverence for ancient
wisdom, should deviate constantly from the classical ideal, "moder-

ation in all things." He combines one extreme: the grotesquely comic,
with the other: the deeply religious. These opposite poles, frequently
to be found in the same text, are nowhere more apparent than irf
his chapter on Gargantua's clothing and ornament, "comment on
vestit Gargantua." This chapter, often taken merely as an illustration
of the author's delight in description, does offer a coherent message
beyond the mere amusement of grotesque exaggeration. In modern
critical terms, it might be said that Rabelais' semiotics, though obscure
to today's reader, point in directions decipherable by one familiar
with certain ancient authorities, especially Plato, who provide much
material for Rabelais' play and elaboration. The interpreter must
also be aware of the vast importance of the Pauline tradition,
interwoven at various levels of the author's writing. Any reader with
only a casual acquaintance with Rabelais will readily recall how he
uses Alcibiades' praise of Socrates / Silenus in Plato's Symposium in
the Prologue to Gargantua; any reader familiar with the work of M.
A. Screech is aware of Rabelais' extensive exploitation of St. Paul in,
for instance, his Tiers Livre.
After a few lines of introduction in which we are told that
Gargantua's livery is white and blue (explained in the following
chapter as signifying "joye celeste"), and that the records of Mont-
soreau retain a description of how the young giant was dressed, the
author devotes a short paragraph each to the shirt, jacket and trousers.
He has now arrived at the codpiece, an object of some fascination
since he composes two paragraphs about it, one of them lengthy.
Characteristically, he is poking fun at hallowed tradition; here at
elaborate descriptions of a hero's clothing or arms (Achilles' or
Aeneas' shield, or Jason's cloak) by choosing the most grotesque
object on which to concentrate. There is a serious side to Rabelais'
bawdiness, however. To use Bakhtin's term: if he "carnivalizes" serious
texts or institutions by ridiculing them and turning them bottoms
up, he likewise has a serious intent as he does so. It is the critic's
task to turn his text upside down again, in order to make clear just
what the serious starting point may have been.
The main features of Rabelais' description of the codpiece run as
follows: The buckles that attach the codpiece to the trousers are
adorned with two emeralds as large as oranges because (here Rabelais
playfully cites Orpheus and Pliny) this stone has erective and com-
forting power. The decoration is gold embroidery
lavish. Its spiralling
is garnished with diamonds, rubies, turquoises, emeralds and pearls;
it is further compared to a cornucopia, since it is "tousjours gualante,
succulente, resudante, tousjours verdoyante, tousjours fleurissante,

tousjours fructifiante, plene d'humeurs, plene de fleurs, plene de
fruictz, plene de toutes delices. Je advoue Dieu s'il ne la faisoit bon
veoir!'"
However bizarre this enthusiasm may appear to us, one aspect of
the description is clear: Rabelais is celebrating the superabundance,
the plenitude of material nature, a nature that, in all its crudity, is
God's creation. He therefore fondly portrays it in all its aspects.

still
Material nature is the ape of heaven: it is raw and imperfect,

perhaps —
but it resembles the exalted sphere after which it is
patterned. The ape is in a sense a travesty, and therefore can be
ridiculed as grotesque and comic, but Rabelais never forgets what it
resembles.
The emblematic gem for the codpiece is the emerald, sacred,
according to near-contemporary authority, to Venus and symbolizing
earth among the four elements, since earth (= material nature) is
green and flowering, "tousjours verdoyante."^ From within this
'
Francois Rabelais, Oeuvres completes, ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Scheler
(Paris 1962), p. 28: "always gallant, succulent, oozing, always green, forever flourish-
ing, always fruitful, full of humors, full of fruits, full of all delights. I swear to God
if it did not do one good to see it!"
^ Valeriano, one such near-contemporary, holds that the emerald is characteristic
of virginity and the pure and heavenly Venus. If Rabelais knew the tradition from
which Valeriano draws his information, his choice of the emerald as emblematic stone
Florence M. Weinberg 185
codpiece will come the seed for the future giants who are to be the
continuing rulers of Rabelais' "utopia" (the name he had given to
their kingdom in Pantagruel). This Utopia is heavily inspired by Plato's
Republic, in which Socrates expresses his deep concern that there be
a succession of superior Philosopher Kings who could maintain the
integrity of the Republic. The penis is the "emerald," as source of
the material being of the future giants: upon this rock will be founded
the ideal state. Simultaneously, the shape and decoration of the
codpiece resemble the horn of plenty: the very one Rhea gave to the
baby Jupiter's nurses Adrastea and Ida. On the grotesquely comic
level, it contains delights aplenty for the ladies; on the serious level,
a plenitude of seed for future generations. We are directed back in
an ever-turning cycle to an identification of man's reproductive power,
his seed, with the greening, flowering, fruiting capacity of the earth,
our home and universal source.
The enthusiastic account ends on a note of self-restraint; perhaps
Rabelais pretends to realize that he has gone on too long. He promises
more information in a book he has written: De la dignite des braguettes.
On the surface a comic topic, on second thought, it contains a lesson
that can be inferred once one has peeled away the multiple layers of
reference. Here is a passage that mentions a book. The book celebrates
codpieces. Codpieces were part of a dress-code, semata, to draw"
attention to the penis, which can itself be seen as a symbol of the
capacity of mankind (in this case, giantkind) to reproduce.^ Beyond
this multi-leveled play with a bawdy topic,
can also be affirmed it
that reproduction is a serious matter, and one

that greatly preoccupied
Rabelais. Nothing is more important than continuation of the species
and, in particular, the finest exemplars of the species. What more
worthy topic could be imagined? Hence: de la dignite des braguettes.
The clothing description continues. The shoes and belt are de-
scribed, then Gargantua's sword and poignard, neither of which is
real: the sword is of wood rather than of Valentian steel, and the
for the codpiece may tiiat he considered chastity and purity to be the true
indicate
ideal for the young "Sunt qui perpetuo claroque Smaragdi virore considerato,
giant:
signum id esse virginitatis velint: idque insuper argumento addunt, in patranda re
venerea, quod experimento compertum est, si quis lapidem attingat eum sponte
frangi. Caeterum Astronomi Smaragdum Veneri coelesti dedicarunt, et ad impetran-
dum eius numinis afflatum perquam idoneum esse profitentur. Nihil autem coelitus
non undecunque purum, honestum, et candidum, mortalium animis, si Platoni et
veritati credimus, inspiratur." J. P. Valeriano Bolzanii, Hieroglyphica, sive de Sacris
Aegyptiorum Uteris Commentarii (Basel 1556), p. 307 A.
^ One can add to these layers. This is a remark in an article about Rabelais'
chapter, "Comment on vestit Gargantua," and you are a reader reading this remark.
dagger of "cuir bouilly" (boiled leather), a detail that underscores

the peaceloving nature of the giants. After the purse, robe and hat,
Rabelais arrives at the hat-feather, a blue pelican plume, with a hat-
medallion of enamel portraying an androgyne with the motto AFAIIH
OT ZHTEI TA EATTH2, "Charity seeks not its own advantage," I.
Cor. 13:5. If it were not for the obvious symbolism of the medallion-
plus-motto (about whichmuch has been, and continues to be, written),*
no one would pause over the pelican feather. Normally, however, one
would think that a more appropriate decoration would be an ostrich
plume, a pheasant or peacock feather; the oddity of a pelican plume,
a blue pelican plume, gives the reader pause. It is used here because
of the ancient belief that the mother pelican pierces her breast to
feed her young on her own substance. This self-sacrifice was used in
medieval Church symbolism to portray Christ's redemptive sacrifice.
The pelican signifies Christian charity. The feather is blue, whereas
pelicans are white, brown, or grey. Since Gargantua's livery is blue
and white, we are reminded that blue signifies "choses celestes," an
appropriate color to accompany a symbol of Christian charity.
Rabelais' androgyne-figure, which actually depicts the "beste a
deux dos" ("un corps humain ayant deux testes, I'une viree vers
I'aultre, quatre bras, quatre piedz et deux culz" "a human body —
having two heads, one turned toward the other, four arms, four feet
and two bottoms"), has long been recognized as comically different
from the source that Rabelais claims to draw on, Plato's description
in the Symposium of the nature of man at its mystical beginning. The
androgyne, according to Plato's Aristophanes, had two heads turned
away from each other:
The androgyne . . . partook of man and woman both. But the name
is used now only as a reproach. Then also people were shaped like
complete spheres. Their backs and sides made a circle. They had four
hands, with the same number of legs and two faces — completely the
same — on top of a circular neck. These two faces were set on
opposite sides on one head, with four ears. And there were two sets
of sexual parts, and whatever else one imagines goes along with this
arrangement.^
A number of critics have noticed the difference between Aristophanes'

androgyne and Rabelais', among them, Lazare Sainean, Jean Plattard
and Nan Carpenter. In the most recent study on this anomaly, Jerome
"•
See Jerome Schwartz, "Scatology and Eschatology in Gargantua's Androgyne j
Device," Etudes Rabelaisiennes 14 (1979), 265-75.
^ Plato, Symposium, tr. Suzy Q. Groden, ed. John A. Brentlinger (Amherst 1970),
p. 61.
Schwartz argues that Rabelais may have been adapting Ficino's

interpretation of the androgyne myth as the soul's desire for re-
demption and renewed wholeness through love, a mystical union
described in St. Paul's first Letter to the Corinthians (13:12): "For
now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. "^ Schwartz's idea
appears to be most likely, particularly since the motto "charity seeks
not its own advantage," drawn from 1 Cor. 13:5, follows directly
upon St. Paul's lengthy development:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members
of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by
one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. ... (I Cor. 12:12-13)
As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to
the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet,
"I have no need of you." On the contrary, the parts of the body
which seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the
body which we think are less honorable we invest with the greater
honor. God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor
. . .
to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body. (I Cor.
12:20-25)
It isstriking that the motto for Rabelais' androgyne should be drawn

from a Pauline context that stresses the unifying of many bodies into
one. The second quotation, on the dignity of the "less honorable
parts" of the body (which is the Christian congregation), could be
profitably applied as well to the celebrated codpiece; it all the more
Justifies Rabelais' enthusiastic description, and his promise to write
"De la dignite des braguettes."
Marriage rhetoric in Rabelais' time dwells upon the unity between
man and wife: "Marriage charnel (fait) non seullement de deux
. . .
corps ung, mais qu'il n'y ait aussi entre eux que ung coeur, vouloir,
desir et affection."^ Schwartz' presentation does not deny the presence
of the "beste a deux dos," but underscores Rabelais' apparent wish
to show that love is a continuum: the self-love of the androgyne is
akin to the selfless agape of the motto. "The whole device is emblem-
atic of the undifferentiated complex wholeness of experience, both
physical and spiritual, which Renaissance man sought to achieve."^
Schwartz, in emphasizing serious meaning, necessarily somewhat
neglects the comically grotesque side of the device, an aspect per-
® Schwartz, pp. 271-72.

' Quoted in Schwartz, p. 274: "Carnal marriage . . . not only makes one of two
bodies, but there also is only one heart between them, one will, one desire and
affection."
^ Schwartz, p. 275.
ennially present in Rabelais, who always tests man's gravest and most
exalted ideas by linking them to the grossly physical, as he had done
with the codpiece. They are "carnivalized" in order constantly to
remind us that our feet are of clay; our greatest inventions are owing
to "Messer Caster" ("Sir Belly"); the greatest philosopher was pro-
duced by the "vivificque union" of the "beste a deux dos" ("the life-
giving union of the two-backed beast"). Rabelais here, as elsewhere,
maintains balance by ambiguity: the deep and spiritually symbolic on
one side, the grossly, earthily comic on the other. These are his polar
deviations from his professed ideal: the golden mean.
Johann whose translation-adaptation of Gargantua, the
Fischart,
Geschichtklitterung, was first published in 1575, has made a number
of contributions to this passage that can —
as near-contemporary
reception —
enlighten and inform our own reading of Rabelais.^
Fischart, who often interpolates huge additions into the text he is
"translating," renders this passage with only minor changes. He
apparently understood Rabelais' androgyne-figure, which had become
a commonplace by his time, to be a symbol of the perfect marriage
that he had celebrated in an earlier chapter (five) of the Geschicht-
klitterung, especially since he emphasizes the physically loving union
by translating "deux testes, I'une viree vers I'aultre" as "die Tau-
benschnebel stracks gegen einander kehrt" ("the dove-bills directly
turned towards each other"),"* a description which employs the dove,
once sacred to Venus and still favored to portray gentle, faithful (but
physical) love. It is precisely this androgyne that figures in Holtzwart's
Emblematum Tyrocinia as the image of perfect conjugal love. Holtz-
wart's little volume appeared first from Bernhard Jobin's press, with
a foreword by Johann Fischart on the history and uses of emblems.
Fischart must have seen the engravings for the volume before the
publication date; at any rate, he shares the vibrant enthusiasm for
the bond of matrimony expressed in emblem 35. The engraving
depicts man and wife with one torso in a close but somehow chaste
embrace, like the tree in the background being embraced by a
grapevine. Tree and clinging vine traditionally signify male and
female, respectively; here, the vine is a grape, which further symbolizes
life (wine was thought to become blood immediately when drunk).
The sun appears to be rising on the right: a good omen for the
future of the loving couple, indicating the dawning of real Knowledge,
if interpreted in Platonic terms [see Figure 1]."
^ See Johann Fischart, Geschichtklitterung (Gargantua): Text der Ausgabe letzter Hand
von 1590, ed. Ute Nyssen and Hugo Sommerhalder (Dusseldorf 1963).
'0 Fischart, p. 171.
" Mathias Holtzwart, Emblematum Tyrocinia (1581; repr. Stuttgart 1968).
Amor coniugalis.
Vxor laetitiae censors simul atque dolorls,

Teslneme feriant tela cruenta uellm.
Tesineme rapiant optem crudelia fata,
Et mea mors soluat membra repente necans.
amor communi foedere lecti,
Vt, quae iunxit
Vrna etiam iungat corpora bina leuis,
Ossaque tumba olim uenerandi testis amoris
luncta eadem simili conditione tegat.
Figure 1
A very likely source for this emblem, as well as for the androgyne
on Gargantua's hat-medallion, is the "second-stage" androgyne in
Aristophanes' speech, where he speaks of loving couples:
Whenever the pederast, or any other sexual type, meets a half that
is the same sort, they are overwhelmed with wonder by the affection,
the joy of intimacy, and the love. They don't ever want, one might
say, to be separated from one another, not even for a second. . . .
Imagine Hephaestus standing over them as they were lying together

in this embrace, with his tools ready, and he says: ."Do you want
. .
to be melded together as much as possible, and not have to leave one

another, night or day? If this is what you want, I am willing to join
you and weld you into one and the same being. You'll become one
self out of two, and you can live as one, with the two of you sharing
a life in common as a single being. And when you die, there in Hades,
too, instead of two there will be one and you will share death. But
look — is this what you want? Will you be satisfied if this should
happen?" We know that not a single one of them would refuse such
an offer. '^
For some reason, this second androgyne has been neglected by critics
of Rabelais. It would appear probable that Rabelais and his contem-
poraries used this passage extensively, although their Christian bias
caused them to ignore Aristophanes' homosexual zeal, and to cbn-
centrate on the heterosexual union mentioned by him, which was
the only one sanctioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Fischart may not merely have been thinking of physical matrimony;
he may have known of and approved the more spiritual implications
that accompany the device, since he translates literally what Rabelais
had to say regarding Plato in his "Sammenpausen oder Symposi."
He cleverly parallels the Greek title with Germanic syllables that
unfold the meaning of the original language: Sammen = together;
pausen = pause (to drink and to converse). He also incorporates in
his "Sammen" the idea of unity expressed by the androgyne. Samen
= semen, seed; a "Samen-pause" is not only the joy of the marriage-
bed, but also that moment where the seed for everything human was
first sown, as Aristophanes' tale tells us: "im geheimnussamen Anfang
die menschlich Natur einlebig gewesen sey": in its initial secret
togetherness (or, equally possible, in its initial secret seeds [and -nuss
(= nut) -I- -samen doubles the connotation in nuce]), human nature
was single-lived; it existed in a single life. Infolded in Fischart's
affirmationis the wholeness and unity of Adam before Eve was
separated from him (from it), as the Fathers of the Church also
'2
Plato, p. 65.
interpreted Aristophanes' meaning. Among the Fathers, Clement of

Alexandria believed that in Christ's new kingdom man and woman
would be reunited (cf. Gal. 3:28). Johannes Scotus Eriugena {De divis
nat. II. 4) goes so far as to call the risen Christ the Androgyne, an
idea that the gnostics had employed; the androgyne was a symbol
for the One, the supreme God.'^ Rabelais and Fischart both may
have known some of these ideas; Fischart at any rate beautifully
embodies the mystical origin of human nature in one word: his
coinage "Geheimnussamen."
Gargantua wears a golden chain around his neck "faicte en forme
de grosses bacces (bales), entre lesquelles estoient en oeuvre gros
jaspes verds, engravez et tallies en dracons tous environnez de rayes
et estincelles, comme les portoit jadis le roy Necepsos; et descendoit
jusques a la boucque du hault ventre: dont toute sa vie en eut
I'emolument tel que sgavent les medecins gregoys.'"^ The Pharaoh
Necepsos, a great astrologer and magician, wore such a necklace,
attributing his advanced age to the beneficent influence of the jasper.'^
Rabelais' text forges the link, especially important to the earlier
humanists, between the new lore of emblems and devices and ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphics and culture. The mention of King Necepsos
brings up automatic associations with the superior lore of antiquity,
its knowledge of one-to-one correspondences between signs (hiero-
glyphics, for example) and natural forces, its supposed ability to

manipulate these forces through the use of such signs. Gargantua's
"dracons" are not the diabolical serpents of the Judeo-Christian
tradition, but the more beneficent dragons of Egypt, Greece and
Rome. Rabelais' spelling, which transliterates Greek dpoiKoov (= serpent
or dragon), makes the classical context even clearer. In Egypt, the
dragon was the symbol of fertility that decorated Pharaoh's throne.
In Greece it was a guardian spirit, a spirit of prophecy, and a sign
for rebirth and immortality. As Ouroboros, the serpent / dragon
biting its own tail, it signified eternity. In Roman iconography, the
serpent accompanied Juno and Minerva when they went to war.'® For
'^
Engelbert Kirschbaum, Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie (Freiburg 1968- ), I:
118.
Rabelais, pp. 29-30:
'''
made in the form of great berries, among which were
". . .
worked huge jaspers, engraved and cut with dragons surrounded by rays and sparks,
as King Necepsos used to wear them, and it hung down to the upper opening of the
stomach, from which he enjoyed the benefit all his life long, as the Greek physicians
know."
Ute Nyssen, Geschichtklitterung, Glossar: Worterlduterungen zum Text der Ausgabe
'^
Hand von 1590 nach der Neuausgabe 1963 (Dusseldorf 1963).

letzter
On the dragon / serpent, see E. S. Whittlesey, Symbols and Legends in Western

'®
Ar/(New York 1972), p. 313.

Rabelais the physician, this necklace of gold and jasper with its
dragon-devices is a talisman that protects the neck, chest and upper

stomach of his prince, guaranteeing the healthy functioning of the
most vital organs.
The giant's gloves are made of monster-hides: of "lutin" (= evil
sprite) — bordered with werewolf pelts. They seem to signify
skins
that the wearer has triumphed over evil.
Gargantua wears three rings. The first is worn in order to renew
the ancient sign of nobility (like the Roman equites). Johann Fischart's
translation adds the authority of Pliny 33.1 and of "de jure aureorum
Annulorum" from the Codex Justiniani 6. 8 (Mommsen, p. 247). He
knew that only the equites had the right to wear rings,
apparently
hence the term "jus annulorum" that expresses the dignity of the
knight.'^ This ring, worn on the left pointer finger, is also, from its
is briefly described as a carbuncle the
position, a sign of authority. It
size of an ostrich egg, set in "seraphic" gold. This is not only the
most noble metal and the worthiest stone; it immediately arouses
thoughts of the throne of God surrounded by Seraphim. The car-
buncle, considered to be its own source of light, was a medieval and
Renaissance symbol for the love of God or for the word of God that
enlightens the darkness.'^ The nobility implied here is not merely
that of the Roman knight, but one even more antique: of man before
the fall, pure within himself and secure in the word of God and in
his charity, a security and power that radiates outward from the
pointer finger of the prince to his subjects.
The second ring is to be worn on the left ring finger {le doigt
medical for Rabelais; the "Artztfinger oder Hertzfinger" — "the
medical or heart finger" — for Fischart). This ring, rather than
affecting the prince's subjects, touches the medical well-being of its
wearer. As makes clear, it was believed to be

Fischart's translation
the finger leading to the heart and hence influencing "heart-felt"
convictions, courage, and consequent behavior. This ring is made up
of four metals: gold, silver, copper (or brass) and steel (iron), in such
a magical way that the metals do not touch each other. These metals
evoke multiple associations, first with Hesiod's Works and Days. They
are, in descending order of virtue, the metals that characterize the
ages of man: the Golden Age, first and best, where men knew no
pain; the Silver, where men were more foolish, but still lived long
" Cf. M. A. Screech's note 116 to this passage, p. 62 in Francois Rabelais,

Gargantua: premiere ed. crit. faite sur I'Editio Princeps, ed. Ruth Calder and M. A.
Screech (Geneva 1970).
'*
Rabanus Maurus, Patrologia Latina 111, 470s, cited in Kirschbaum, 1. 579.
and largely untroubled lives; the Copper, a heroic age; and the Iron,
our own miserable age of wars, pestilence and family discord. Plato
in his Republic uses these metals to symbolize the four types of citizens
of the ideal state: the rulers, guardians, artisans and worker-farmers
(414a ff.), none of whom is to mingle with any other class. These
metals are also linked by Plato with the four greatest virtues of
wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. Plato's most striking passage
dealing with the four metals occurs in his description of the collapse
of the ideal state. The rulers' heirs, less cultivated than themselves,
"will be unable to assay either the races of Hesiod or those born
among you of gold, of silver, of brass and of iron; and the iron
mingling with the silver, the brass with the gold will result in a
mixture that lacks equality, justice and harmony. Wherever this
happens, it engenders war and hatred" {Republic VIII. 546d-547a).
This ring that is most intimately to influence the giant's behavior
reminds him constantly as ruler of his ideal kingdom to keep the
four metals apart; in other words, to prevent intermingling between
the diff"erent social levels within the state, since Plato equated these
levels with difference in quality. Any mixing would mean adulteration
to him. The
four metals also remind him to cultivate the virtues of
wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. As already noted, the
giant's kingdom had been named Utopia in Pantagruel, after Thomas
More's idealized state; in Gargantua, the epitome of a perfect republic
will be Theleme.'^ Rabelais' skepticism that such a harmonious
republic could be possibleis manifested in the problem of the ring's
manufacture: it requires a powerful captain and a great alchemist,

Alcofribas, who has already done the impossible by extracting the
Quintessence, to forge such a ring; it would require a much greater
perhaps by the Creator himself, to forge such a state!
eff"ort,
There are still other meanings present in the four metals. In

alchemical terms. Mars = steel, Venus = copper, the sun = gold, the
moon = These analogies were doubtless implicit in Rabelais'
silver.
text, since he calls himself Alcofribas the alchemist to remind the

reader of them; certainly Fischart understands, and makes them
explicit. In his version, Gargantua is to possess the strengths conveyed
by the masculine sun, the feminine moon (the genders are reversed
in German), warlike Mars and loving Venus —
two masculine, two
feminine forces —
without any confusion among them. The citizens
'^
For a recent study of Utopian echoes in Rabelais, especially as they apply to
Theleme, see Michael Baraz, "Rabelais et I'Utopie" Etudes rabelaisiennes 15 (1980),
pp. 1-29.
of his state, 50 percent men, 50 percent women, are to work in

harmony without any bastardizing alloy.
The third ring, on the right "doigt medical," also exerts power
over the giant's physical well-being. This ring, in the form of a spiral
set with precious stones, combines the symbolism of the circle the —
perfect or divine figure often used as a metaphor for God with —
upward movement, clearly denoting aspiration toward the highest
things. Since this is the medical finger, the spiral may represent a
coiled serpent, symbol and avatar of the healing god of Greece and
Rome, Asclepius. The finger about which the "serpent" twines
resembles Asclepius' magical staff. Three stones are set within the
spiral: "un balay en perfection, un diamant en poincte et une esmerault
de Physon" (p. 30, "a perfect ruby, an exquisite diamond and an
emerald of Physon"). The colors of the three stones signify several
things at once. Red has traditionally meant divine love or charity,
white means the purity of faith, green signifies hope; in other words,
they symbolize faith, hope, charity, the three theological virtues, the
greatest of which is charity (in yet another covert allusion to I Cor.
13, used in the androgyne device and its inscription). The colors also
correspond to the colors of three of the four elements: red = fire
(also the celestial spheres), diamond = air, green = earth. In choosing
these elements, Rabelais implies the union of the highest and the
lowest; the creation reflects God's love (the Divine Fire) through the
medium of the air. Since the emerald comes from Physon, one of
the four rivers of Paradise, the "earth" meant here is not the sad
and sinful world we know, but the earth perfect and uncorrupted
before the Fall, as God originally created it. Hence, the ring signifies
the perfect union between Creator and creation a Utopian union — —
and a promise of salus, health, salvation, in a restoration of prelap-
sarian wholeness. ^^
^^ One of the finest passages on precious stones and their significance is in Goethe,
Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprdche, ed. E. Beutler (Zurich 1953): "Die
aristotelische Lehre beherrschte zu damaUger Zeit (Cellinis) alles, was einigermassen
theoretisch heissen wollte. Sie kannte nur vier Elemente, und so wollte man auch
nur vier Edelsteine haben. Der Rubin stellte das Feuer, der Smaragd die Erde, der
Saphir das Wasser und der Diamant die Luft vor. Rubinen von einiger Grosse waren
damals selten und galten achtfach den Wert des Diamanten. So stand auch der
Smaragd in hohem Preise. Dass einige Steine im Dunkeln leuchteten, hatte man
. . .
bemerkt. Man schrieb es nicht dem SonnenHcht zu, sondern einer eigenen
. . .
inwohnenden Kraft, und nannte sie Karfunkel ." p. 873. ("At Cellini's time,
. .
Aristotle's teaching dominated everything that could roughly be called theoretical.

This teaching recognized only four elements, and so the ancients also wanted only
four precious stones. The ruby was the image of fire, the emerald of earth, the
sapphire of water, and the diamond of air. Rubies of considerable size were rare at
By choosing three stones, Rabelais has picked the traditionally

divine number (for Christians, the Trinity) for the medical finger of
Gargantua's right hand. On his left ring-finger he wears the earth
number, four (earth has four seasons, four directions; in antiquity,
four main rivers, four main winds, four elements, etc.); while on the
right "medical" finger the three divine virtues have a vertical (upward-
spiralling) movement relating creation to Creator, the medical asso-
ciations underscoring healing and saving power. The earthly virtues
on the left "heart" finger express the ideal "horizontal" relation
among peoples. Thus the Socratic excellences and the theological
and healing virtues are united in the giant who will become Rabelais'
next philosopher-king: not merely a Platonic figure, but a perfect
Pauline-Christian Prince. His kingdom will unite its members in the
one body of the state (cf. St. Paul on the Christian community, I Cor.
12), but without intermingling and thus bastardizing their functions.
It is also significant that in all Gargantua wears three (not four or
more) rings, doubly underscoring the essentially spiritual rather than

bodily or earthy significance of this giant.
Fischart does not change the essence of these symbols, and both
authors lighten their gravity by carnivalesque joking. Rabelais intro-
duces Hans Carvel, who estimates the third ring's extravagant worth.
The name Carvel immediately diverts the mind to the bawdy story
of his ring, told by Rabelais in his Tiers Livre. Fischart had already
anticipated the actual naming of Carvel by calling the right "doigt
medical" the "arsfinger der rechten hand."
Through his carefree syncretism, drawing equally on Pauline and

Platonic sources, Rabelais has outfitted his young giant in clothing
that has serious significance. The

codpiece celebrates his reproductive
power, its dignity and necessity, in order to maintain the line of
philosopher-kings in Utopia. The hat-feather, revealed to be yet
another symbol for Christian charity, underscores the explicitly Pau-
line message on the hat-medallion: "Charity seeks not its own advan-
tage," and the androgynous figure, which echoes the same idea in
pictorial terms, incorporates the idea of divine love (caritas) and
perfect physical love: the marital union. As it was intended to be,
the time, and were valued at eight times the worth of diamonds. The emerald was
also highly priced. The ancients had noticed that some stones shone in the dark.
. . .
They did not ascribe but to their own indwelling power, and named
it to sunlight . . .
them carbuncles. . See also Kirschbaum, under FarbensymboUk, Ad. de Vries,

. .")
Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam 1976), under specific colors. For
information on Asclepius' staff, see Der kleine Pauly, ed. K. Ziegler, et al. (Munich
1979), 5, col. 335, in S. Oppermann's article, "Stab."
the medallion is emblematic of the giant's ideals and moral principles.

He has chosen charity as his emblematic virtue, since "the greatest
of these is (I Cor. 13:13). With the necklace, Rabelais returns
charity"
to antiquity, borrowing the idea from the Egyptians that jasper is a
semi-precious stone with protective powers over life and fertility, as
its green color would indicate. From Egypt, Greece and Rome comes
the idea that serpents or dragons have protective functions. As

guardians they symbolize fertility, rebirth and immortality, and are
prophetic (like Python at Delphi). The stones of the necklace and
the design in which they are worked reinforce each other to form a
potent device for the health and protection of its wearer. While the
necklace, like the codpiece, seems to function in relation to the body,
the rings, like the hat-medallion, are spiritual; they have moral (and
some political) meaning. The ring on the pointer finger indicates
that its wearer will rule with authority and with charity. Its power
radiates from the wearer outward. The second ring on the "heart
finger," made of gold, silver, copper and iron, refers to Hesiod's ages
of man, to Plato's discussion of the four virtues (wisdom, courage,
temperance and justice) and to his ideas on the class system in the
ideal republic. It also refers to the balance among marital, creative
and venereal forces, the "masculine" powers versus the "feminine."
This ring's power works inwardly. It also reminds its wearer that
constant vigilance is necessary to maintain harmony within the state.
The third ring, with its three stones whose colors signify faith, hope
and charity, links the wearer with his divine source.
Rabelais has clothed and ornamented his future philosopher-king
with all the artistry at his command, in the finest and rarest of
materials. The key to the chapter lies not in the grotesque exagger-
ation of size and the on the quantity of materials needed
insistence
to make up the items of clothing —
an aspect that has caught and
held the attention of most readers —
but in the details of ornament.
Rings and pins are still thought to indicate much about the wearer's
personality and judgment; sometimes they are overtly symbolic. For
Rabelais, they amount to a semiotic system of "body language" that
provides a key to the character, ideals and intentions of his paradigm
for a perfect ruler, the young Gargantua.
5^. John Fisher College, Rochester

From History to Chronicle:
Rabelais Rewriting Herodotus*
H. H. GLIDDEN
"Qu'il n'y ait hystoire que tu ne tienne en memoire presente. . .

."
Pantagruel, viii
Renaissance writers of many sorts picked old chestnuts on favorite

topics out of Herodotus' Histories. Philologists repeated the story of
Psammetichus' experimental method for discovering the original race
of mankind; physicians invoked the example of Croesus' son, who
was cured of his muteness when he saw his father under attack and
shouted a warning; moralists approved the wisdom of the Egyptian
king Amasis, who claimed that a man must have leisure time for
talking with friends as a bow must have time unstrung too much —
tautness is not a good thing. There was a passage in Herodotus for
every reader; and, of course, each passage looked different to different
readers, for, as Montaigne noted, invoking Herodotus' insight, every-
thing the Egyptians do looks backwards to non-Egyptians. Some
readers found Herodotus a reliable guide, others found him a strain
upon their credulity. When a French translation of the Histories
became available in the 1550s, the ranks of the disbelievers were
greatly extended. The Hellenist Henri Estienne felt compelled to
offer a vigorous defense of the great antique observer of cultural
* This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the meeting of the

South Central Modern Language Association held in San Antonio (October 1982).
I wish to thank the Committee on Research of Tulane University for supporting
research towards completion of the final draft.

diversity.His Traite preparatif a VApologie pour Herodote (1555) was

one of many works that used Herodotean evidence to argue for
appreciation of the relativity of customs.
For his treatise on this topic, De Legibus Connubialibus, the jurist
Andre Tiraqueau used a translation, now lost, of Herodotus prepared
by Francois Rabelais. The Rabelais translation also provided Tira-
queau with many snippets of Herodotus that were useful for the
support of the polemical thesis of De Legibus namely, that women —
are innately inferior to men no matter what the evidence of customs.
Whether Rabelais supported Tiraqueau's side of the querelle desfemmes
or not is unknown.' About his translation of Herodotus, little is
known except that it was regarded as an advance over the Latin
translation by Lorenzo Valla. The distinguished biographer of Ra-
belais, Jean Plattard, even seems uncertain about which book of the
Histories was translated by "le plus erudit des Franciscains," the learned
monk Rabelais. In his Adolescence de Rabelais, Plattard indicates that
Tiraqueau cited Rabelais as the translator of Book One, and added
that the translation was undoubtedly made from Greek into Latin
"puisqu'il se proposait de combler une lacune de la translation latine
enterprise et laissee inachevee par I'humaniste italien Laurent Valla."^
If we turn to Rabelais' own work, there is scant evidence to indicate
either which he translated or how well he knew
book of the Histories
the entire text. Plattard notes a mere seven instances of borrowings
from Herodotus in Rabelais' Gargantua, Pantagruel, Tiers Livre and
Quart Livre; these borrowings, taken from various books of the
Histories, are scattered throughout the oeuvre. Some of the borrowings
appear to be indirect, that is, quoted from texts by Rabelais' contem-
poraries or by Roman anthologists. In only three of the borrowings
is Herodotus mentioned by name.^
'
A discussion of Rabelais' contact with Tiraqueau is found in Roland Antonioli,
Rabelais medecine (Geneva 1976), pp. 10-12. Antonioli also speculates on how
et la
the issues raised in the querelle des femmes may have shaped Rabelais' comic art, p.
12.
^
Jean Plattard, L Adolescence de Rabelais en Poitou (Paris 1923), p. 13. Rabelais was
called "le plus erudit des Franciscains" by his fellow monk and humanist Pierre Amy
{LAdolescence, p. 21). Plattard later amended his statement to say that Rabelais
translated Book Two of Herodotus. See his Vie de Rabelais (Paris and Brussels 1928),
p. 24.
' Plattard, LOeuvre de Rabelais (Sources, Invention, Composition), (Paris 1910), pp.
197-98. The passages Plattard attributes to acquaintance with Herodotus are the
following: Pantagruel, xxiv, in which Panurge proposes to shave the head of the
messenger to see if a secret message is written on his scalp (Herodotus, V, 35); ibid.,
in which Panurge boasts that he belongs to the race of Zopyrus, keeper of the gates
of Babylon (Herodotus, 111, 153); Tiers Livre, xxiv, on the Argives who swore to shave
H. H. Glidden 199
Because the textual evidence for Rabelais' encounter with Hero-

dotus' Histories is so slender, scholars have either steered clear of the
topic or settled for comparison of the two writers in very general

terms (thus, for example, M. A. Screech suggests, without elaboration,
that Herodotus' work "strangely prefigures" Rabelais' own'*). But
this situation means that one of the most intriguing possibilities for
a "case study" of a Renaissance writer using classical material has
not been made. Most of the Renaissance writers who sprinkled their
works with classical borrowings were not, unlike Rabelais, fluent in
both Greek and Latin, and most did not translate their sources from
originals — they borrowed from others' translations and from com-
pendia and anthologies.^ Our evidence for Rabelais' reading of
Herodotus is not great, but it is enough to assert that this reading,
unlike most made by Renaissance writers, was not piecemeal, eclectic,
mediated.
There are, of course, many ways for a writer's encounter with
another writer's text to be reflected in his text. Everything from an
overall design —
say, a journey or quest design —
to a detail can be
taken over more or less directly. The intertextual process can also
be much more reactive or polemical: the read text can be parodied,
inverted, distorted, deconstructed. The read text can be alluded to
or emblemized, woven through the second text or encoded in S
portion of it. The possibilities are legion. In this paper, I will try to
argue that Rabelais did not use Herodotus' text directly (thus the
scant references) but that he did, frequently and with his characteristic
cleverness, use the Greek's text much as Freud says dreamers use
the events and activities of their childhoods and their waking lives.
their heads until Tyrea was captured from the Spartans (Herodotus, I, 82); Tiers
Livre, xix,concerning King Psammetichus and his search for the original race of
mankind (Herodotus, II, 2); Tiers Livre, xxxiv, in which Rabelais cites the women of
Mendes island as proof of female promiscuity (Herodotus, II, 46); Quart Livre, xx,
where the Cabiri are mentioned (Herodotus, II, 52); and Quart Livre, xxviii, where
Rabelais cites Herodotus on the origin of Pan (Herodotus, II, 145). My text of
reference is The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt (Baltimore 1966).
Further quotations from Herodotus are designated by book and page numbers in
this edition.
*
Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca 1979), p. 7. Screech speculates further: "it may be with
an eye on Herodotus that Rabelais chose to call his comic tales by the name of
Chronicles." Lucian is cited as the other Greek author whom Rabelais translated
from Greek into Latin.
^ Among the compendia that served as a conduit for classical commonplaces were
the Adages of Erasmus; the Officina of Ravisius Textor; the De honesta disciplina of
Critinus; and the Moralia of Plutarch. Erasmus' Adages and his Apophthegmata were
read widely by humanists of Rabelais' generation.
That by processes that resemble condensation, displacement and

is,
distortion, Rabelais drew heavily upon Herodotus' Histories. I will try

to show that the precondition for this textual play was an affinity of
mentalite between the two writers. To illuminate the mentalite, I will
indicate three basic topoi —
reflections of this mentalite that both —
the writers employed in their works.
What follows, then, is frankly speculative, speculatively interpretive.
From a bare list of borrowings like the one Plattard drew up, nothing
about Rabelais' reading of Herodotus could be conjectured. A spec-
ulative account must look into the items on this list and then go
forward guided by a sense of how these writers' imaginations worked
and how their texts were made. So, let me begin by examining in
detail the two significant items on Plattard's list and then using this
examination to point to the topoi which will, I think, illuminate the
imaginative encounter Rabelais made with the Greek text.
I. Rabelais' citations of Herodotus

Among the episodes in which Rabelais cites Herodotus by name is
the celebrated death of Pan story (IV, xxviii). The Pantagruelists

have alighted on the island of the Macreons ("long-lived ones") after
a tempest had blown them off course. The landscape suggests antiq-
uity: monuments and tombs, pyramids, obelisks and crumbling temples
lie amidst the dense and shady trees. The vestiges are inscribed with
lettering in hieroglyphic, Ionic and other venerable scripts. The

silence of the forest and its noble markers recalls a graveyard in
which the souls of great men dwell; in fact, the chief Macrobe tells
of Demons and Heroes who live in this stately preserve, and of the
greeting that such souls offer great men about to join them. He states
the belief, attributed to the ancients, that nature conspires to alert
the living that a great man
is about to die: "Au trespas d'un chascun
d'iceulx, ordinairement oyons nous par la forest grandes et pitoyables

lamentations, et voyons en terre pestes, vimeres et afflictions, en I'air,
troublemens et tenebres, en mer, tempeste et fortunal" ("At the
Death of every one of them we commonly hear in the Forest loud
and mourneful Groans, and the whole Land is infested with Pestilence,
Earthquakes, Inundations and other Calamities; the Air with Fogs
and Obscurity, and the Sea with storms and hurricanes").^ Natural
® Quart Livre, xxvi, 612. Quoted material is taken from the following edition:
Oeuvres completes, ed. Jacques Boulenger (Paris 1955). Further references are desig-
nated by book, chapter and page number, and incorporated into the body of the
paper. —All the English translations of Rabelais are cited from The Works of Mr
Francis Rabelais, 1653, repr. London 1931, by the Navarre Society by book, chapter
and page number: here from Book IV, c. 26, p. 174.
H. H. Glidden 201
calamities were thus construed as portents of earthly loss. Rabelais

uses this occasion to praise his deceased patron, Guillaume Du Bellay,
and then has Pantagruel assert that all ethereal souls ("toutes ames
intellectives") are exempt from death. As evidence of their immor-
tality, he offers the story of the death of Pan (IV, xxviii, 617-19).
According to Robert Marichal, Rabelais translated the Pan episode

directly from his favored source, Plutarch, whose De defectu oraculorum,
xvii, includes the story of how a boatman named Thamous was
instructed by voices from afar to announce Pan's death to the people
of Paloda, who, on hearing the news, lament loudly, in chorus, like
one voice.' Tiberius Caesar, on hearing of Pan's death, sends for
Thamous and questions him. He believes the boatman's story, but
he also seeks corroboration by asking his scholars to confirm Pan's
identity. They inform him that Herodotus held Pan to be "filz de
Mercure et de Penelope" and that Cicero also reports this parentage.^
Rabelais then has Pantagruel offer an allegorical interpretation of
the story in which Pan is identified with Christ, "Nostre Tout," the
great shepherd, who "loves not only his sheep but his shepherds
also," and who was lamented when he died not just by a town but
by the whole universe.
At first glance, the reference to Herodotus seems minor and
contained. But, if we look again at the allegorical interpretation
Pantagruel offers, in which no mention of Herodotus appears, and

examine it for Herodotean content, the whole episode takes on
another dimension. In Herodotus' Book Two, the one Rabelais
probably translated, we learn that the Egyptians refused to sacrifice
goats, male or female, because they "believe Pan to be one of the
eight gods who existed before the subsequent twelve" (II, 121). Most
strict in this observance are the Mendesian peoples, who love all their
goats, and one above all. As Herodotus explains: "when [the revered
one] dies the whole province goes into mourning" (II, 121).
It not possible to assert unequivocally that Rabelais had this
is
Egyptian practice in mind as he constructed his allegory on the Pan

story, or that he intended to place a layer of curious ethnography
beneath the ultimately serious crucifixion story. We do know, however,
that when he wrote his Tiers Livre he had remembered the Mendesians,
for there he notes that the Mendesian women are so promiscuous
that they find pleasure in goats (III, xxxiv, 451). On this point,
Rabelais cites Herodotus and Strabo. But it is not likely that he
' Cited in the Marichal edition of the Quart Livre, Textes Litteraires Franâis
(Geneva 1947), p. 136.
8 Herodotus 11, 160.
consulted his writer's text anywhere but in his memory, for in

Herodotus only one Mendesian woman, not the whole population,
was given to pleasure with goats. It is, however, this passage on the
Mendesians which also contains the report on their attitude toward
goat sacrifice and their mourning for their most revered goat.
In Rabelais' Pan story and allegory, it is likely that Herodotus' text
plays a larger role than the direct citation indicates but this is not —
provable. The case for a wider net of reference is stronger in
Pantagruel, xv, where Rabelais sets the scene for the battle with the
Dipsodes. Pantagruel started off from Paris after hearing news that
the Dipsodes had invaded the land of the Amaurotes. His hearty
band has set out on their first expedition; before they advance to
meet the enemy, Pantagruel enjoins them to pause and deliberate
upon a strategy. The individuals swear allegiance to their prince and
boast about how they will spy on the enemy. As war is not thinkable
without reference to heroes of classical antiquity, his lieutenants
Panurge, Epistemon, Eusthenes and Carpalim all prepare to go behind
enemy lines by emulating venerable models. The choice his trickster
Panurge makes is revealing:
Je (dist Panurge) entreprens de entrer en leur camp par le meillieu

des guardes at du guet, et bancqueter avec eulx et bragmarder a leurs
despens, sans estre congneu de nully, visiter I'artillerie, les tentes de
tous les capitaines et me prelasser par les bandes, sans jamais estre
descouvert. Le diable ne me affineroit pas, car je suis de la lignee de
Zopyre. (II, xxv, 272-73)
"My self (said Panurge) will undertake to enter into their camp, within
the very midst of their guards, unespied by their watch, and merrily
feast and lecher it at their cost, without being known of any to see
the Artillery and the Tents of all the Captaines, and thrust myself in
with a grave and magnifick carriage, amongst all their troopes and
companies, without being discovered; the devill would not be able to

peck me out with all his circumventions: for I am of the race of
Zopyrus." (II, 24, 273)
In the Histories III, 237-241, Herodotus had related the story of

Zopyrus, who helped his King Darius defeat the Assyrians by muti-
lating himself and slipping into Babylon to feign friendship with the
enemy. Panurge, too, sees himself as an infiltrator penetrating the
enemy walls without, of course, suffering the horrible mutilations.^
On one level, the reference to Zopyrus is simple. On another —
Rabelais' more characteristically complex one —
it is a sign or emblem
^ The Zopyrus story is also found in Erasmus' Adages II, x, 64. Rabelais was
acquainted with the Adages but also knew his Herodotus, as I shall attempt to show.
H. H. Glidden 203
for the entire personality and purpose of Panurge. Consider the

strategy of Zopyrus in Herodotean detail: he was to gain the
its full
confidence of the Assyrians and eventually be entrusted with the keys

to the gates of the city. In fact, his deception was so thorough that
"Zopyrus was now the one and only soldier in Babylon, the city's
hero, and was created General in Chief and Guardian of the Wall"
(Herodotus, II, 240). Zopyrus showed his cunning by eventually
opening the city gates and admitting the Persians into Babylon.
Zopyrus is remembered chiefly, then, as the keeper of the gates.
Panurge is Rabelais' Zopyrus, both in his craft and in his role as
sentinel. Was it not he who taught Pantagruel an original new way
'"
to build the walls of Paris?
In and around the Dipsodian War, Rabelais wove a texture of
allusion to Herodotus' history of the Persian War. Plattard neglected
to list one of the more revealing borrowings. The scene is the merry-
making after the first skirmish with the invading Dipsodes. Panurge
has felled the enemy by military and strategic cunning; the victorious
Pantagruelists then boast of the sexual conquests they will make.
Epistemon reassures his master that he will not fail to rally when
military duty calls:
Je vous las rends a roustir ou boillir, a fricasser ou mettre en paste. ^

Ilz ne sont en si grand nombre comma avoit Xarces, car il avoit trente
cans mille combatans, si croyaz Herodota at Troga Pompone. Et

toutasfois Thamistoclas a pau da gans las dasconfit. Na vous souciaz,
pour Dieu. (II, xxvi, 279)
"Basta, (said Epistamon), enough of that, I will not faila to bring tham
to you, aithar to rosta or to boila, to fry or put in paste; they are not
so many in number, as were in the army of Xerxes, for he had thirty
hundred thousand fighting men, if you balaava Herodotus and Trogus
Pompaius: and yet Themistocles with a few man overthrew them all:
for Gods sake take you no care for that." (II, 26, 279).
Panurge, not to be outdone by his mate, replies with a sexual /

military sweep:
Merde! marde! (dist Panurge). Ma seule braguette espoussetera tous

les hommes, et sainct Ballatrou, qui dedans y repose, decrottera toutes
las femmas. (Ibid.)
"Cobsminnia, Cobsminnie, (said Panurge) my Codpiece alone shall

overthrow all the men; and my St. Sweephole, that dwells
suffice to
within it, shall lay all the women squat upon their backs." (II, 26,
279)
'"
See below, p. 210 passim.
The source is the Histories VII, 70; but the source has much more
to tell us about the genesis of the chapter than would appear. The
chapter in Rabelais relates how Panurge ambushed the invading
cavalry. What was his tactic? He enticed the horsemen into ropes laid
on the ground. What this trick has in common with the text of
Herodotus is the image of troops in a circle:
The counting was done by first packing ten thousand men as close
together as they could stand and drawing a circle round them on the
ground; they were then dismissed, and a fence, about navel-high, was
constructed around the circle; finally other troops were marched into
the area thus enclosed and dismissed in their turn, until the whole
army [1,700,000] had been counted. After the counting, the army
was reorganized in divisions according to nationality.
Rabelais' memory is inflated; he must have recalled that the army

of Xerxes was large, that is all. Is it not likely that Rabelais was
impressed with Herodotus' account of the measuring technique, as
well? In the preceding chapter (xxvi), the narrator relates how a
clever tactic brought the enemy cavalry to its defeat. To summarize:
the Pantagruelists were spotted by the enemy Dipsodian cavalry
which, to defend their land, comes riding toward their ship. Panurge
refuses to go beneath the hull and takes charge of defending the
ship. His strategy is to cast two ropes out onto the ground, at a
distance from the ship and, using Eustenes and Carpalim as decoys,
to lure the enemy cavalry into his net by pretending that his men
will surrender. When the Dipsodian horsemen arrive, their horses
slip and slide on the mud around the ship; when other horsemen
arrive with reinforcements, Panurge gives the signal, and the ropes
are hauled back toward the ship. In effêct, he lassoes the enemy,
bringing them to their knees. In what shape was the trap laid? In
the shape of a large circle, with a second concentric circle inside it.
The allusion to Herodotus and to the size of Xerxes' army, at the
end of the chapter, is then the cue that the fuller context came to
bear on the episode as well. Without recalling the detail of the
Herodotean source, Rabelais may well have associated the peculiar
mode of calculating with the size of the army; what remained was
the image of troops herded together in a circle. That circle became
the vehicle of Panurge's battle plan:
les deux cordes se empestrerent entre les chevaulx et les ruoyent par
terre bien aysement avecques les chevaucheurs. (II, xxv, 275)
the two cables so entangled and impestered the legs of the horses,
that they were all of them thrown down to the ground easily, together
with their Riders. (II, 25, 275)
H. H. Glidden 205
The three different borrowings from Herodotus cited so far are

examples of the three topoi noted above as common to Rabelais' and
Herodotus' texts. The two writers employed: (1) folklore, or folk
stories, with roots in various cultures that indicate both the diversity
of cultures and certain underlying samenesses; (2) scatological stories
in which military conquests suggest sexual conquests either meta-
phorically or metonymically, and both kinds of conquests assert the
place of the corporeal in any true view of the world; and (3) stories
presenting complex quantifications, or measurements that at once
survey terrain or human artifices and put this material world in a
transcendent perspective. Let me now take these topoi one by one,
starting with the last, to show how Rabelais read, and used, Herodotus
in a way that involved no direct citations.
II. The World Quantified
In Herodotus' Histories, as in the Rabelaisian chronicles, measurements

serve to authenticate amazing tales. The strange is thus presented as
if it were "natural" (i.e. quantifiable). What Herodotus displays as a
story-teller is the instinct to map, inventory, measure — in short, to
quantify the space of his historical world. Herodotus began Book
Two, Egyptian journey, by calculating the length and width, of
his
the Mediterranean coastline, the proximity of one city to another,
the course of the Nile. His precision serves to inscribe the unknown
within a fixed frame of reference, and thus to domesticate it. He
writes of a pharaoh who had statues of himself built 40 feet high in
Ethiopia; his son had obelisks built not less than 12 feet across; his
successor erected statues measuring 38 feet high, and his successor,
Cheops, ordered pyramids built towering 800 feet high. The list
rambles on with marvel after marvel studiously calculated. Egypt is
thus understood mathematically: its dikes form geometrical patterns
(II, 141); its three hundred and forty-one generations of kings are
reckoned at 11,340 years; its festivals number "as many as seven

hundred thousand men and women —
excluding children" (II, 126).
Herodotus was overwhelmed by a labyrinth containing three thousand
rooms arranged in upper and lower stories: "the baffling and intricate
passages .were an endless wonder to me" (II, 161). Elsewhere
. .
Herodotus notes truly amazing statistics: blades of wheat that measure

three inches across (I, 92) and a shrine that was fashioned out of
twenty-two tons of gold (I, 87). His sizing-up has the ironic effect of
poising his chronicle on the boundary between history and fantasy.
Numbers are intended to counteract the myth-making of the poets,
but in Herodotus' hands the calculus has the effect of representing
size,rather than objects themselves. Height and weight signal a

transcending of the quantification he intended and move the Histories
toward the mystification they are intended to eradicate."
Rabelais' chronicle moves in the same direction more self-con-
sciously:by stressing incredible heights and weights, he aims at mystical
truths, transhistorical observations, idealized modes of living. His
mockery is, ultimately, elevating. To achieve his purpose, Rabelais
appears to be aping, more than once, the exaggerations of his
predecessor. The genealogy of Pantagruel numbers some three dozen
forebears; his father Gargantua begat him "en son eage de quatre
cens quatre-vingtz quarante et quatre ans" (II, ii, 177: "at the age
of foure hundred, fourescore fourty and foure years," II, 2, 179),
and numerous lists fill the book. The later Gargantua offers even
sharper similarities.The genealogy of Gargantua was found in a field
where diggers unearthed a huge, bronze tomb, "long sans mesure"
(I, i, 8); compare this extraordinary tomb with Herodotus' passage
recounting a smith's discovery of the body of Orestes: "as I was

digging I came on a huge coffin —
ten feet long. I couldn't believe
that men were ever larger than they are today, so I opened it and —
there was the corpse, as big as the coffin" (I, 39). Note, furthermore,
Rabelais' precision in tabulating the survivors of the mock catastrophe
that follows:
Lors, en soubriant, [Gargantua] destacha sa belle braguette, et, tirant
sa mentule en I'air, les compissa si aigrement qu'il en noya deux cens

soixante mille quatre cens dix et huyt — sans les femmes et petitz
enfans. (I, xvii, 54)
Then smiling, he untied his faire Braguette, and drawing out his
mentul into the open aire, he so bitterly all-to-bepist them, that he
drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, foure hundred and eigh-
teen, besides the women and little children. (I, 17, 54)'^
Compare, moreover, the intricacy of Herodotus' three thousand room

labyrinth with the mathematical complexity of Rabelais' Abbey of
Thelema:
Entre chascune tour, au mylieu dudict corps de logis, estoit une viz
" Francois Hartog considers quantification to be a source of power over the

unknown: "Les joies de I'arpentage, c'est aussi, I'indice d'un pouvoir. Comment mieux
faire croire que Ton connait un edifice ou un pays, surtout s'il est lointain, qu'en
etant capable d'en fournir les mesures?" Le Miroir d'H'erodote. Essai sur la representation
de I'autre (Paris 1980), p. 347.
'^
This stock comic device is thought to be a pastiche of biblical narratives in
which reckoning excluded women and children; perhaps Herodotus' formula "ex-
cluding children" should be added to Rabelais' repertoire of comic sources as well.
H. H. Glidden 207
brizee dedans icelluy mesmes corps, de laquelle les marches estoient

part de porphyre, part de pierre numidicque, de marbre serpentin,
longues de xxij piedz; part I'espesseur estoit de troys doigtz, I'assiete
par nombre de douze entre chascun repous. (I, liv, 150)
Between every tower, in the midst of the said body of building, there
was a paire of winding (such as we now call lantern) staires, whereof
the steps were part of Porphyrie, part of Numidian stone, and part
of Serpentine marble, each of these steps being two and twenty foot
in length, and three fingers thick, and the just number of twelve
betwixt every rest, or, (as we now terme it) landing place. (I, 53, 154)
The symmetry of the edifice, mathematical perfection, inspires

with its
awê, just as the labyrinth with its provoked amaze-

intricate passages
ment in Herodotus. Rabelais is heir to an extensive Greco-Roman
number symbolism, but it is tempting to find in his Utopian structure
an impulse similar to the Greek historian's for civilizing open spaces
by measuring them. For what is a Utopia if not an emblem of order
representing the measured harmony of idealized human relations?
From the cost of Gargantua's ring estimated at the value of "soixante-
neuf millions huyt cens nonante et quatre mille dix et huyt moutons
a la grand laine" (I, viii, 30: "threescore nine millions, eight hundred
ninety foure thousand and eighteen French Crowns of Berrie," 1,8,
32), to the numerous attributes of the Lenten monster in Book Four,
sizing-up mystifies, even as it purports to delimit. Rabelaisian lists
slide from neat accumulations into monstrous fantasies.
III. Scatology in the Service of World-View
To a great degree, both Herodotus and Rabelais express curiosity,

even lust, for the life residing beneath culture's more chaste, cere-
monial exteriors. Their religious or mythic impulses were in constant
and complex relation with their admiration for the corporeal world.
Herodotus studied Egyptian festivals to find in them the origin of
Greek ceremonies and gods; he was struck by the similarities in the
worship of Dionysus, noting in particular that in both Egypt and
Greece an oversized phallus is paraded in the god's honor. What I
am suggesting is that Herodotus studied Egyptian culture the better
to study his own.
Rabelais studied Herodotus, similarly, the better to identify the
grotesque, bodily life that lay before him in its raw, chaotic immediacy.
In festivals, disembodied organs have a ritualistic importance; in
Rabelais' fiction, bodily parts stand in mockery of any airy mind that
would claim its own virtue disembodied, in other words, that it is
nobler than the carnal desires of its body. Rabelaisian personages
break wind before meditating on lofty subjects; the young Gargantua

listens to the Scriptures while performing his bodily functions.
In Rabelais' text, festivals show the importance of the body, but
so, too, do military conquests. Particularly in the episodes of the
Dipsodian War —
Rabelais' Persian War, so to speak —
scatological
tales present the relation of the key corporeal loci of virtue: all is
bodily in love and war. I will examine two of these tales to show
their Herodotean foundations.
In Pantagruel, xxvii, 280-83, both Pantagruel and Panurge raise
trophies to mark their victory over the Dipsodes. Pantagruel, we
recall, raises his monument to his troops. It consists of a huge trunk
upon which the soldiers' gear is hung: saddles, harnesses, stirrups,
and more. Then he recites memorial verses dedicated to his army's
prowess. Pantagruel's rhetorical high style ("Ce fut icy qu'apparut la
vertus/ De quatre preux et vaillans champions" "Here was the —

prowesse made apparent of / Foure brave and valiant champions of
proof" II, 27, 280) is parodied by Panurge's comic low style ("Ce
fut icy que mirent a baz culz / Joyeusement quatre gaillars pions" —
"Here was it that foure jovial blades sate down / To a profound
carowsing, and to crown ." II, 27, 281), and by the trophy he
. .
erects: a stake bearing numerous animal parts. Other debasing re-

joinders follow: Pantagruel: "II n'est umbre que d'etendardz, il n'est
fumee que de chevaux et clyquetys que de harnoys" ("there is no
shadow like that of flying colours, no smoke like that of horses, no
clattering like that of armour" II, 27, 282); Epistemon: "II n'est
umbre que de cuisine, fumee que de pastez et clyquetys que de tasses"
("There is no shadow like that of the kitchin, no smoke like that of
pasties, and no clattering like that of goblets" II, 27, 282); Panurge:
"II n'est umbre que de courtines, fumee que de tetins et clyquetys
que de couillons" ("There is no shadow like that of the courtaines,
no smoke like that of womens breasts, and no clattering like that of
ballocks" II, 27, 282). Now there was nothing unusual about raising
monuments to celebrate victories. Rabelais' editors make the point
and common sense tells us so. What lurks, however, is a shadow
text — Herodotus' account of an Egyptian field general. To sum-
marize: whenever Sesostris encountered a courageous army, he erected
pillarson the spot inscribed with his own name and country, and a
sentence to indicate that by valor his forces had won the victory. If,
however, a town fell easily, without a struggle, he added to his
inscription on the pillar the image of female genitalia. By this he
meant that the people of that town were no braver than women (II,
102). As decorative genitalia signalled ignominious defeat in ancient
H. H. Glidden 209
Egypt, two monuments mark the spot where the 660 Dipsodian
knights went down, if not women,
at least "bien subtilement."
like
Let us look again at the two trophies in Pantagruel, xxvii, as both
echo and parody of a fragment from Herodotus' Egyptian book.
Pantagruel's monument is martial and his verses are grounded in
evangelical teachings. Panurge's emulation shows a literal debasement
("Ce fut icy que mirent a baz culz"); his monument consists of edibles,
and his verses celebrate the eating and drinking of the band. The
symmetry of the speeches is evident; Pantagruel's estrivieres, esperons
and haubert are matched by Panurge's aureilles de troys levraulx, rable
d'un lapin, mandibules d'un lievre. But special attention must be paid
to Panurge's mocking monument, an emblem of erotica in its own
right. Among its decoration are les comes du chevreul puis les . . .
aureilles de troys levraulx, le rable d'un lapin, les mandibules d'un lievre
("the homes of a roebuck . . . the eares of three levrets, the chine

of a coney, the jawes of a hare" II, 27, 281). Is it not arguable that
here Rabelais evoked the fair sex by metonymy, lapin being the
sixteenth-century term for the middle French noun conin?^^ The
comment a nom remains chastely hidden beneath the code of references
to game; but how much more explicit need Panurge be than to name
levraulx, lapin, and lievre, all derived from the libyo-iberian lapparo
(yielding lapereau and the Latin lepus, lapin, lievre) with its associzi-
tions?'"* Scatology is in this episode emblematic, taking off from the
Herodotean image of genitals affixed to a victory monument. In

Panurge's structure, the genitalia are present by verbal association.
Not so in the other chapter in which pudenda are not only evoked
metonymically, but become the building blocks of the edifice itself.
In one of the most obscene chapters in Rabelais' oeuvre, Panurge
suggests a strange new way to build the walls of Paris: "Je vois que
les callibistrys des femmes de ce pays sont a meilleur marche que les
pierres. D'iceulx fauldroit bastir les murailles ." (II, xv, 233: "I . .
see that the sine quo nons,or contrapunctus of the women

kallibistris,
of this Countrey are better cheap than stones: of them should the
walls be built ." II, 15, 237). He notes further that the walls will
. .
be tough and that they will not be struck by lightning ("ilz sont tous
benists ou sacrez"). Panurge the city-planner spins out other refine-
'^ Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue frangaise du seiiihne siecle, v. 2, gives conin

E.
as a diminutive mot litredenoting the female sex. According to Abel Lefranc, "I'ancien
et le moyen franâis disent conin, encore courant au XVT s. et que Rabelais lui-meme
emploie frequemment." The common word lapin would then be of more recent
usage. See his critical edition, Oeuvres de Francois Rabelais (Paris 1922), v. 4, p. 265.
'*
Dictionnaire Robert (Paris 1966), v. 4, p. 41.
ments of building and design to a Pantagruel who finds his scheme

isgood fun: "Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!"
Critics of Rabelais have kept their distance from this most grotesque
of walls, preferring discussion of the Lion-Fox fable that follows to
discussion of the wall's sexual symbolism.'^ The disembodied organs
have proved, like the fortification they pretend to be, impenetrable.
As an edifice, the walls stand mute, like an emblem, whose familiar
picture conceals a hidden message. The walls could be studied from
various angles (thematic, linguistic, sociological), but in this context
I will view them as a sign, or icon, whose presence signals a network
of intertextual reference: the walls of Paris have their analogue in

the Histories of Herodotus.
Let us turn to Herodotus and to the tale he told about the building
of the pyramids. In one account he reports that the pharaoh Cheops
sent his daughter to a brothel when his finances got low. In addition
to collecting the going rate, the daughter asked each client to
contribute a block of stone to her own, private collection. The stones
(so the story goes) produced a pyramid towering 150 feet high (II,
152). Herodotus relays this curiosity as is, without reflecting on it.
He does not draw the connection, but we may, between the two
elements of the story: sex and building stones. The individual stones
collected by the daughter are reminders of her trade; the accumulated
stones of the pyramid, piled high in their monumental mass, stand
as an emblem of women's alleged insatiability. At the very least, the
parallel is drawn between an edifice and building stones, the latter
representing the sex of which they are the sign.
That Panurge imagines the is not then
walls of Paris as pudenda
so disconcerting as it seems of the pudenda
at first reading. Instead
yielding up a massive stone edifice, as in Egypt, the pudenda of Paris
are building stones transmuted into an organic edifice, reversing the
Herodotean source. Rabelais underscores the balanced design of the
whole: ". . . les arrengeant par bonne symmeterye d'architecture et
mettant les plus grans au premiers rancz, et puis, en taluant a doz
d'asne, arranger les moyens et finablement les petitz ." (II, xv, . .
233: "ranging them

good symmetrie by the rules of Architecture,
in
and placing the largest in the first ranks, then sloping downwards
ridgewayes, like the back of an Asse. The middle sized ones must be
ranked next, and last of all the least and smallest" II, 15, 237),
For Francois Rigelot, the walls are "la lourde facetie populaire dont le joyeux
'^
compagnon use et abuse de fagon coutumiere. Aucune trouvaille stylistique ne vient

racheter ce comique ordurier un peu trop evident," Les Langages de Rabelais (Geneva
1972), p. 116.
H. H. Glidden 211
Panurge's construction is image of a wall

rationally ordered, yet the
"a doz d'asne" would seem inappropriate, since the shape we would
expect for a wall is rectangular, not triangular, as suggested by the
verb "taluer," and by the arrangement of small organs on top of
larger ones. How fortuitously we cannot say, but does the symmetry
of the projected wall not evoke the geometrical perfection of the
pyramids, with its broad base and tapered sides? The wall so-designed
is the organic analogue of the stone structure.
The two scatological stories Ihave presented — the mon-

victory
uments and the Walls of Paris — have common elements. They were
also, it seems, consciously related by Rabelais. Rabelais' editors have
noted Erasmus as the probable source for the patriotic saying of

Agesilas, Spartan king, that Pantagruel cites to open the topic of city
walls: "II n'est muraille que de os" ("there is no wall but of bones"
II, 15, 235). By this he means that the city whose citizens are virtuous
has no need for fortifications. How reminiscent of that wisdom,

however, is the claim that Pantagruel makes when the victory mon-
ument is raised: "II n'est umbre que d'estandardz." The banqueting
will end and the joyous band will set off again for new adventures.
Both remarks express the Roman ideal of civic virtue, but more to
our purpose is the structure of exchange between Pantagruel aryj
Panurge. In both the Walls of Paris and the Victory monument
chapters, Pantagruel prepares the comic ground with a sober dictum
ripe for debasing by Panurge. Whereas this interplay repeats itself
throughout the Pantagruel, it is only twice phrased in the terms quoted
here: in the two episodes under study. Finally, it is worth repeating
that what both chapters have in common is an edifice. Whether
victory monument or city walls, trophy or fortification, the fantasy
construct has as its foundation the relation of female parts to a
standing structure.
The argument for the relatedness of these two episodes is enhanced
by critics who find structural symmetry in the Pantagruel as a whole.
When Floyd Gray notes that "les exploits de Panurge chez les Turcs
et son plan pour les murailles de Paris annoncent le depart en
Dipsodie et ses stratagemes de guerre,'"^ he identifies a balanced

design thatis confirmed by the link I have discovered in the specificity
of two episodes. The link becomes apparent only by identifying the

third term to which both have reference, the Egyptian tales of
Herodotus.
'^ Gray, Rabelais I'kriture (Paris 1974), p. 63.

et
IV. Folkloric Ordering

The third topos by which Rabelais structured his narratives is that
of folklore. Herodotus, too, repeated many tales from Egyptian lore —
some of which he declared nonsensical. In both texts, the folkloric
elements establish temporal and spatial relations: they relate historical
and mythical time, and they relate present geographical-political
entities and wondrous divisions of the world made by less pedestrian
means. Sometimes it seems that Rabelais echoes Herodotean sources
as he goes about his folkloric accounting. For example:
En ycelle [annee] les kalendes feurent trouvees par les breviares des
Grecz. Le moys de mars faillit en karesme, et fut la my-oust en mai.
. . . bruncha quelque peu, comma debitoribus, a gauche,
Le soleil et la
lune varia de son cours plus de cinq toyzes. (II, i, 171-172). . .
[in that yeare] the Calends were found by the Grecian Almanacks,
there was that year nothing of the moneth of March in the time of
Lent, and the middle of August was in May. The Sunne . . . . . .
tripped and stumbled a little towards the left hand, like a debtor
afraid of Serjeants, coming right upon him to arrest him: and the
Moon varied from her course above five fathom. (II, 1, 174)
As the epic of origins unfolds, time is at odds with itself. In that time
out of time, a race of giants is born, defying natural law and human
precedent: "le premier fut Chalbroth, / Qui engendra Sarabroth, /
Qui engendra Faribroth, / Qui engendra Hortali, qui fut beau
mangeur de souppes et regna au temps du deluge ." (II, i, 174). . .
The genealogy of Pantagruel includes biblical, mythological and

fictional ancestors. Be they "real" or not, they constitute an authentic
lineage, a past, that inscribes the giant in Time, a fictional Time.
Listen now to Herodotus:
Up to this point I have relied on the accounts given me by the

Egyptians and their priests. They declare that three hundred and
forty-one generations separate the first king of Egypt from the last I
have mentioned —
the priest of Hephaestus —
and that there was a
king and a high priest corresponding to each generation. Four . . .
times within this period the sun changed his usual position, thrice
rising where he normally sets, and twice setting where he normally
rises. (II, 158)
The historian charts dynasties and nations, their rise and fall, and
the fortunes of individual men. His chronicle is a means of truth-
tellingand yet he records the wonders that blur the distinction
between history and fable.
Rabelais used folklore and, in particular, tales of origin, to amuse
H. H. Glidden 213
and poke fun at philosophers whose abstract speculating he found

to
vain and useless. Geography is the privileged subject of such tales;
the land and its features appear eternal, and without cause, except
in terms of an extraordinary event. And so, Rabelais returned to the
mythical reign of King Pharamond, among others, to explain why
the leagues of France were so small in comparison with those of
other countries. As the story goes, young and frisky lads were
dispatched with fresh young maidens to chart the boundaries of the
lands. A stone was supposed to mark the spot each time a couple
stopped to frolic on the ground. The tale accounts for an apparently
random fact of geography as it is meant to do: the leagues of France
are shorter close to the capital (when the young were rested) and
longer far from the capital (when they had become tired and frolicked
only rarely). It also suggests the tie between sex and a modern
kingdom: the land is divided along the lines of play, not of political
expediency. Herodotus had a similar impulse for mythic geography.
He explains, for example, that a floating island was formed when the
goddess Leto saved Apollo by hiding him in its earth. "That is why
it was made to float," he says with apparent credulity (II, 165).
Herodotus provided both the heroics and the farce to make folklore
into history, and history into folklore. As a storyteller, he was a master
of the art of digression, as was Rabelais, and often his most wondrou^
tales emerge spontaneously from the deliberate recitation of official
history. The tales he tells he knows from hear-say reported to him
by his informants, the Egyptian priests. In one tale, Herodotus tells
how the Egyptian Cambyses dispatched an army of 50,000 men to
reduce a warring tribe to submission. The troops left Thebes, but
never arrived, disappearing somewhere in the desert around Oasis.
The priests explained the disappearance thus: the men were swallowed
up by "a southerly wind of extreme violence (that) drove the sand
over them as they were taking their mid-day meal" (II, 185). Such
a fact is stranger than most fictions, but not stranger than Rabelais'
fiction about an entire army marching against King Anarche and
taking shelter during a storm under the huge, beneficent tongue of
Pantagruel.
We have seen already how Rabelais played with the device of
gigantic dimensions. The device is sustained in context of the amazing
folk tale of Pantagruel's mouth by a bizarre understatement. Rabelais'
narrator claims moderately, without exaggeration, that Pantagruel
extended his tongue "seulement a demy," only halfway. As narrator
and teller of such "veritables contes," he enters into the gigantic
mouth to record what it contains. He asserts the novelty of his project:
no one has ever seen this land of twenty-five kingdoms, "sans les
desers, etung gros bras de mer" ("besides deserts, and a great arme
of the sea" II, 32, 308). Chief among his discoveries is a countryside
resembling French Touraine where a peasant is busy planting cabbage.
There is nothing new under the sun —
the narrator finds that the
peoples of unknown, exotic lands live just like his neighbors at home.
This ironic discovery of sameness behind diversity is the one that
Herodotus made in Egypt, in that land full of deserts and bordered
by a big coastline.
The object of this article has been to study how two texts are
related in thecomplex way that imitatio entails. If the relation has at
times been coaxed out of particular textual loci, the affinity of
imagination between the two writers would seem palpable. A nexus
of techniques, from allusion to pastiche and borrowing, is involved
in the homage Rabelais paid to Herodotus. Both writers possessed
the immense gift of translating, without traducing, a reality most
fully apprehended in art.
Tulane University, New Orleans

Medea and Imitation
in the French Renaissance
DONALD STONE, Jr.
It is not possible to work in the Renaissance field for very long
without encountering various authors' assurances that their adapta-

tions and translations of classical poets were executed in order to
revitalize an inelegant vernacular literature. As a result, the possibility
has always existed for speaking of the Renaissance as, in part at least,*
a renewed and profound communion with classical letters. Certainly
Petrarch intimates something of the sort when he writes to Guido
Gonzaga of "How far the eloquence of other tongues / Is by our
Latin eloquence surpassed" ("Itala quam reliquas superet facundia
linguas"), giving, as an example of the vernacular best, the Roman
de la Rose, and adds:
Ut tuus ille olim melius conciuis amoris
Explicuit sermone pathos, si fabula diues
Inspicitur frigiaque expirans cuspide dido.
How much more nobly, in the days of old

Your fellow citizen set forth the sorrow
Of passionate love, in his illustrious tale
Of Dido's death upon her Phrygian sword!'
In France, Du Bellay repeats the thrust of the comparison when he

demands that his fellow poets abandon the medieval "episseries" in
'
Librorum Francisci Petrarche itnpressorum annotatio (Venice 1501), sig. 243'' (punc-
tuation modernized); the English translation is from Petrarch at Vaucluse; Letters in
Verse and Prose, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (Chicago 1958), pp. 39-40.
favor of the genres practiced by the ancients {La Deffence et illustration
de la langue franqoyse, II, iv).
Unfortunately for the scholar who has to interpret the details that
surround such pronouncements, defining the precise nature of the
communion between modern and ancient writers proves to be a very
frustrating task. The importance of classical letters for Renaissance
poets can never be doubted, but it is far from clear that the
commitment of Renaissance authors to the ancients equaled compre-
hension of the spirit or perspective of the writers they were imitating.
To make this point, we examine below a number of texts from the
French Renaissance based on Latin models. The texts are merely
illustrative of the problem at hand; still, armed with such illustrations,
we can feel better prepared to understand what actually happened
when the humanists passed from their pronouncements about anti-
quity to the job of handling its verse.
Du Bellay's Deffence did not appear until 1549; yet, when Paris
printers decided in 1538 and 1539 to reissue Colard Mansion's prose
translation of the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise, updating the
language and omitting from the text the allegorical glosses that were
retained in the 1520 reprinting of the same translation, we may well
infer that Renaissance humanism was already working its effect,
banishing from a classical work such medieval excrescences as asso-
ciation of the golden fleece with worldly riches. King Aeetes with
God the Father, and Medea with the Virgin Mary (1520, f. Ixviii').^
Moreover, at the point in the text equivalent to Metamorphoses VII.

297 (Medea's deception of Pelias's daughters), the 1538 and 1539
printings suppress an interpolation that had been created to explain
the magician's actions. Ovid speaks only of a "feigned hate" (v. 297)
assumed by Medea regarding Jason in order to be received as a
suppliant by Pelias. No further background for the episode is provided
"Neve doli cessent" (v. 297).
save an unexplained allusion to "doli":
had robbed Jason of his crown and exiled him,
In reality, since Pelias
Medea was wreaking vengeance on her husband's enemy. The Ovide
moralise attributes to Medea a quite diff"erent motive, to wit, the desire
to curry favor with Jason, who at the death of Pelias would rule the
world.
It is interesting that this scholarly cleansing of the Ovidian tale is
^ The following editions of Ovid have been used: Heroides and Amores, ed. and
trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1971); La Bible des poetes de
Ovide Methamorphose, translate de latin en francoys (Paris 1520?); Le Grand Olympe des
hystoires poetiques du prince de la poesie Ovide Naso en sa Metamorphose (Paris 1538); Les
XV. Livres de la Metamorphose d'Ovide (Paris 1539); Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank
Justus Miller. 2 vols. (London and New York 1916).

Donald Stone, Jr. 217
also haphazard. Verses from the Metamorphoses left untranslated in

the Ovide moralise, such as VII. 350-93, are not restored; if the
interpolation regarding Medea's attitude toward Pelias disappears,
the addition at VII. 149 of the story of Medea's dismemberment of
her brother is allowed to stand. Even the suppression proves incom-
plete and botched. Having sketched Medea's "fol pensement" ac-
cording to which Jason would reward her for killing Pelias, the 1520
prose version adds.
Dune grande folie sappensa Medee pour occire le roy Peleus: dont
elle la mort desiroit. (f. Ixix^
Very foolishly Medea conceived of the idea to kill King Pelias, whose
death she desired.
In 1538 and 1539 the suppression stops just before this sentence for
which there exists no equivalent in the Metamorphoses and whose
preservation scarcely restores the passage to its original state. Perhaps
those responsible for the 1538 and 1539 volumes did not know the
complete story of Jason and Pelias. If so, that ignorance too should
be noted; but more important still is the fact that a quick glance at
Hyginus's Fabularum liber would have revealed the essential: "lason
cum Peliae patrui sui iussu quo-
tot pericula adisset, cogitare coepit,
modo eum sine suspicione hoc Medea se facturam poK
interficeret,
licetur."^ Evidently in 1538 eschewing the medieval allegorization of
the Metamorphoses did not go hand in hand with informed or careful
scholarship.
We may not be surprised, then, to find Francois Habert, the author
of a credible —
and successful —
translation of the Metamorphoses,
publishing in 1550 an "Epistre de Dieu le Pere a la vierge Marie"
as part of his Epistres hero'ides tressalutaires pour servir d'exemple a toute
dme fidele. Again the problem arises as to what to stress: the presence
of the word "heroides" in the title, alerting us to the influence of
another Ovidian genre on Habert, or the remarkable incongruity
between Ovid's epistles and a companion piece addressed by God to
the Virgin Mary.
By mid-century, however, impressive teachers had found impressive
students, and yet even as we enter the realm of the more learned
poets, comparable difficulties confront us.
When Jean de La Peruse composed one of the earliest French
tragedies in the classical mode, Medee,'^ he chose to depict the princess's
' Hyginus, Fabularum liber (Basel 1535).

*
Published 1556: Jean Bastier de La Peruse, Oeuvres poetiques, ed. Gellibert des
Seguins (Paris 1867; repr. Geneva 1969).
final hours with Jason and Creon. Available to inspire him were the
versions of both Seneca and Euripides (in George Buchanan's Latin
translation).^ He opted to follow Seneca despite the verse in Horace's
Ars poetica which roundly censures a trait of the Senecan drama: "ne
pueros coram populo Medea trucidet" (v. 185).'' La Peruse ignored
the dictum and retained Seneca's "fault." Another principal source
of dramatic theory in his day, the grammarian Diomedes, defined
tragedy as encompassing "the fortune of heroes in adversity" and
added, "sadness is the distinguishing mark of tragedy" (pp. 23, 25)."^
From the outset of French Renaissance tragedy, these statements
were taken quite seriously, as can be seen from the following passage
in Jodelle's Cleopdtre captive (performed 1553):^
Des hauls Dieux la puissance

Tesmoigne assez ici,
Que nostra heureuse chance

Se precipite ainsi.
Quel estoit Marc Antoine?
Et quel estoit I'honneur
De nostre braue Roine
Digne d'vn tel donneur?
Des deux I'vn miserable
Cedant a son destin,
D'vne mort pitoyable
Vint auancer sa fin:
L'autre encore craintiue
Taschant s'euertuer,
Veut pour n'estre captiue
Librement se tuer.
Telle est la destinee

Des immuables Cieux,
Telle nous est donnee
La defaueur des Dieux.
(vv. 421-36, 441-44)
The power of the mighty gods gives ample evidence here that our
good fortune is cast down thus. What was Mark Antony? And what
was the honor of our noble queen, worthy of such a bestower? Of
the two, one, distraught, giving in to his destiny, has advanced his
^ Medea, Euripidis poetae tragici Georgia Buchanano Scoto interprete (Paris 1544).
® Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.
and London 1970).
' "De generibus poematos dramatici vel activi," in Handbook
of French Renaissance
Dramatic Theory, ed. H. W. Lawton (Manchester 1949), pp. 22-27.
* Etienne Jodelle, Cleopdtre captive, ed. Lowell Bryce Ellis (Philadelphia 1946).
end through a piteous death; the other, still fearful, trying to gather
courage, wants of her own choice to kill herself in order to avoid
captivity. Such is the immutable heavens' destiny; in this way the gods'
disfavor is given us.
The Senecan Medea scarcely fits such a mold. To be sure, Jason's

marriage to Creusa introduces calamity into the life of the princess,
but Medea meets that adversity with undisguised fury. She is neither
"craintiue" nor brought to suicide. With her initial speech she cries
for vengeance. Her allusion to the passion that brought about her
ill-fated liaison vsîth Jason (v. 136) is soon lost among outbursts against
Creon and his new son-in-law. A description of fortune's effect gives
way immediately to the fierce pride that is Medea's dominant stance:
Quamuis enim sim clade miseranda obruta,
expulsa, supplex, sola, deserta, undique
afflicta, quondam nobili fulsi patre
auoque clarum Sole deduxi genus,
(vv. 207-10)9
Can we say, in view of La Peruse's preference for Seneca, that he

reached back in time and willingly bypassed certain recognized canons
in order to capture the full dramatic force of the Seneca play? The
textual evidence offers us a less than conclusive answer.
When we first see the French Medea, she is a victim of Jason's
perfidy, a heroine in adversity who passes quickly to the vengeful
tone so reminiscent of Seneca. Yet as her first words show, Seneca
does not determine everything. Some of the most virulent verses he
composed for Medea (e.g. vv. 25-55) do not reappear in Medee and
new material is added. Medea's (invented) final speech in Act 1 brings
back the posture of the wrongfully treated, uncomprehending wife.
In the exchange between Medea and Creon as conceived by Seneca,
Medea does not go beyond "fortasse moriens" (v. 290) and "miserae"
(v. 293) when describing herself. Even Euripides, using the chorus,
injects a more pathetic note at this juncture:
Infelix mulier, misera, malis
Miseris obnoxia, quo tandem
Te uertes? cuius amicitiam,
Cuius tectum, aut terram inuenies
Portum malis? (Buchanan, f. IT)
La Peruse outdistances both, introducing into Medea's lines the

image of the Renaissance tragic hero:
traditional
9 Seneca, Tragedies, ed. Leon Herrmann (2nd ed., Paris 1961).

Ou iroy-ie, Creon, sans aucune conduitte,

Pauure, seule, esploree? ou prendroy-ie la fuitte?
Bons Dieux! qui eust pense qu'vne fille de Roy

Peut quelques fois tomber en vn tel desarroy?
(p. 49)
Where shall I go, Creon, without a guide, wretched, alone, tearstained,

where shall I fly? Dear gods, who would have thought that a king's
daughter could fall victim to such confusion?
La Peruse has been criticized for ignoring Seneca's first chorus

(which contains a of Medea's beauty) in favor of the
lyric description
second-act chorus (reference to the perilous voyage of the Argonauts)

but, again, as La Peruse develops his material, its relevance to a
Renaissance tragedy becomes apparent:
Medee, trop heureuse

Et hors de tous regrets.
Si par mer fluctueuse
N'eusse suiuy les Grecs!
Encore plus heureuse

Si ton mal-heureux sort
Ne t'eust faict amoureuse

De I'aucteur de ta mort!
Encor plus fortunee
Si, sans plus long seiour,
Tu fusses morte et nee
En vn et mesme iour! (p. 31)
Medea, too fortunate and free of all regret, if only you had not
followed the Greeks across the foaming sea. More fortunate still if
your had not made you love the agent of your

ill-starred destiny
death! More fortunate yet if, without any further delay, you had come
into the world and left it the same day!
Given that so many changes effected by La Peruse seem calculated

to achieve a balancebetween the fierce Medea in the Latin play and
the pathetic figure required by dramatic theory, one cannot help
wondering why La Peruse did not choose to make Euripides his
model. The Medea we encounter in Euripides' tragedy immediately
adopts a distraught posture: "Infelix ego, miseris curis / Confecta,
hei mihi quomodo perii!" (f. 6'). Was La Peruse swayed by Seneca's
portrait of the conjuring Medea? Certainly magic and magicians long
held the attention of the French public.'" Seneca's language, too,

must have played its part.
Horace had insinuated that the verses of tragedy contained "am-
puUas et sesquipedalia verba" {Ars poetica, v. 97). Erasmus echoed him
in his definition of "Tragice loqui": "Est uerbis uti magnificentioribus.
Est enim Tragicorum character sublimis, amatque tragoedia ampullas
et sesquipedalia uerba."" In the Senecan version of Medea's story
La Peruse found repeated examples of the rhetorical display referred
to here as well as the "grandeur d'argumens, & grauite de sentences"
considered by a fellow humanist as characteristic of the ways in which
tragedies surpass all other works of literature.'^ Although Euripides
brings Creon and Medea into confrontation, Seneca, not Euripides,
makes of that confrontation a moment for two distinct passages of
stichomythia (vv. 192-202, 290-97). Similarly, when including in his
play a portrait of Medea as magician, Seneca insisted upon making
of the scene a monologue of considerable proportions (vv. 740-842).
In the face of Seneca's powerful presentation of the Colchian
princess, it is disturbing to think that La Peruse was more likely
drawn to the Latin play for reasons external to that presentation,
and yet, just as (to the period) Seneca's language made him the ancient
dramatist to emulate, so contemporary thinking on the nature of
tragedy clashed with the reality of the Senecan heroine and La Pertise
followed the wisdom of his day. In that regard, no passage from
Medee proves more telling than the close of the tragedy.
In Euripides' version, the play ends as the chorus reminds us that
the gods bring about many an unexpected event:
spes euentu
Fraudant saepe suo. quae credas
Fieri baud posse, expediet deus ut
Finem haec nunc sortita est fabula. (f. 32")
Medea closes with the disappearance of the murderess into the clouds
and Jason's sarcastic commentary: "Per alta uade spatia sublimis
aetheris / testare nullos esse, qua ueheris, deos" (vv. 1026-27). La
Peruse imitates neither text. In his play, Medea speaks the final lines
(addressed to Jason):
Qui aura desormais de faux amant le blasme,
'"
Interest in magicians reappears in Jean de La Taille's Saiil le furieux (1572) and
in numerous secondary works catalogued by Jean Rousset in his La Litterature de I'dge
baroque en France (Paris 1953), pp. 266-67.
" Adagiorum Opus (Basel 1526), p. 466.
'^
Guillaume Bochetel, trans.. La Tragedie d'Euripide, nommee Hecuba (Paris 1550),
p. 4.
A I'exemple de toy se garde du danger

Par qui i'apren mon sexe a se pouuoir vanger! (p. 76)
Whoever will henceforth be censured for infidelity, let him, following

your example, protect himself against the peril by which I show my
sex how to avenge itself.
Not the mystery of divine action in general nor the mystery of

Medea's capacity to act with (presumed) impunity, but Jason's merited
punishment completes the action of the French text. There is incon-
sistency in this last speech, which begins with Medea throwing at
Jason the corpse of their murdered child; however, that inconsistency
characterizes much of La Peruse's adaptation, where the demonic
magician alternates with the unjustly betrayed wife, so clear was it
in the day that tragedy treated of "the fortune of heroes in adversity."
Medea also provides the subject matter for a substantial work in
rhymed couplets by Jean-Antoine de Baif entitled "L' Amour de
Medee," a poem that never rises above a very close translation of
verses 5-99 from book VII of the Metamorphoses.^^ judging by Baif's
introductory lines, such fidelity derives from the desire of a patron,
D'Angennes, marquis de Maintenon, to have the Ovidian passage
made French, even though Baif preferred to expend his energies in
other ways:
Tv que Je raconte en ryme

as voulu
Comme Medee en sa jeunesse prime,
D'Angennes, sent du nouueau Cupidon,
Premierement la fleche & le brandon:
le te complais, encores que bien rare
le prenne en main cette mode barbare,
Me plaisant plus aux nombreuses chansons
Des vieux Gregeois, qu'aux modernes faôns.
(II. 298-99)
You, D'Angennes, have wished that I tell in verse how in the flower
of youth Medea feels for the first time new Cupid's arrow and torch.
I obey you, even though I rarely take up this barbarous mode, finding
more pleasure in the ancient Greeks' many songs than in the modern
ways.
The last four verses are not easily understood and like many
problematic passages they remain, as far as we can determine, without
critical comment. The poet cannot mean: "I dislike imitating Ovid."
Baif went several times to the Metamorphoses for inspiration, and did
" Jean-Antoine de Baif, "L'Amour de Medee," in his Evvres en rime, ed. Ch.
Marty-Laveaux. 2 vols. (Paris 1883), II, pp. 298-304.
so from the beginning of his career as a published poet/'* Does he

mean that he prefers the tone of his epigrams, taken from the Greek
Anthology, to the cliche-ridden vocabulary of sighing lovers in the
Ovidian, Petrarchan "fagons" so often criticized in the century? It is
possible and although the phrase "mode barbare" ill befits a style
that poets censured for the insincerity of its rhetorical flourishes,
Baif's Amours (1552) do contain more examples of "gauloiserie" than
can be found in comparable recueils of love poems published at that
time by the Pleiade.'^
This reading of Baif's problematic verses can be no more than a
hypothesis but, if valid, it would highlight Baif's own awareness that
"L' Amour de Medee" is a set piece, a description of some of those
many moments in the poetic transcription of loving that by mid-
sixteenth century had become recognized literary commonplaces.
Baif's reluctance to repeat them one more time may strike us as
admirable but it is noteworthy that his response says nothing about
the intrinsic quality of the Ovidian passage, about its portrait of
innamoramento which is also an inquiry into a particular mind, soon
to conceive and execute astounding acts. By the poet's own admission
the impetus behind "L'Amour de Medee" stems from a patron's
wish. Ovid's fascination with the character (did Baif know Ovid had
written a tragedy about Medea?) appears not to have been contagious,
and somewhat in the same fashion that La Peruse recasts Seneca's
Medea as the Renaissance hero in adversity, Baif permits the Ovidian
Medea to exemplify a mind struggling between reason and love,
achieving momentary release from passion and then succumbing
utterly to it.
Before we judge Baif, we should realize that his work, too, is "of
its time." How does Medea's resolve to follow reason crumble? She
sees Jason again:
Ainsi I'Amour qui t'eust semble n'aguiere

Deja languir, deja tout adoucy,
Voyant lazon, par vn ardent soucy
De sa beaute qu'elle voit en presence,
Plus violent que deuant recommence. (II. 303)
Thus Love, which previously appeared to you to be already languid

and subdued, seeing Jason, returns more violent than before through
a burning heed for the beauty she sees in front of her.
'''
See Mathieu Auge-Chiquet, La Vie, les idees, et I'oeuvre de Jean Antoine de Ba'if
(Paris 1909; repr. Geneva 1969), pp.208 ff.

'^
However, his inspiration was by no means exclusively Greek. Second's Basia,
for example, influenced Baif to a significant degree.
No less a student of classical lore than Boccaccio found in the Latin

original of these lines a basic truth about human behavior. Concluding
his chapter on Medea in Concerning Famous Women, he observed:
Sed ne omiserim, non omnis oculis praestanda licencia est. Eos . . .
quippe si potens clausisset Medea, aut aliorsum flexisset dum erexit

auida in lasonem, stetisset diutius potentia patris, uita fratris, & suae
uirginitatis decus infractum, quae omnia horum impudicitia periere.
{De Claris mulieribus [Bern 1539], f. xii')
to stop here, I will say that we must not give too much freedom
Not
our eyes.
to Certainly, if powerful Medea had closed her eyes or
. . .
turned them elsewhere when she fixed them longingly on Jason, her
father's power would have been preserved longer, as would her
brother's life, and the honor of her virginity would have remained
unblemished. All these things were lost because of the shamelessness
of her eyes.'^
Evidence abounds in French Renaissance poetry for a continued

belief in thepower of the eye as well as in the reality of the mental
debate between reason and passion. Dizain 6 of Delie (1544) retells
how through his eye the lady stunned the poet's soul and ended his
independent ways; later, dizain 79 recounts the tug between reason
and love. In Cleopdtre captive, the shade of Mark Antony laments:
O moy deslors chetif, que mon ceil trop folastre
S'egara dans les yeux de ceste Cleopatre!
Depuis ce seul moment ie senti bien ma playe,
Descendre par I'ceil traistre en fame encore gaye.
(vv. 75-78)
Woe is me, miserable from the moment my too wanton eye lost its
way in the eyes of this Cleopatra! From that very moment I felt my
wound descend through that traitorous eye into my still happy soul.
Ronsard knew the same experience, if we may believe the second
sonnet of his Amours (1552):''
Du ciel a peine elle estoyt descendue,

Quand je la vi, quand mon ame esperdue
En devint folle . . . (IV. 7)
She had scarcely descended from the sky when I saw her, when she
drove my lost soul mad . . .
'^
Giovanni Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino (New
Brunswick 1963), pp. 36-37.
" Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres completes, ed. Paul Laumonier. 20 vols. (Paris 1914-
75).
an experience which, like Medea's, included a battle between reason

and love:
Lors ma raison, & lors ce dieu cruel,

Seulz per a per d'un choc continual
Vont redoublant mille escarmouches fortes. (IV. 51)
Then my reason and this cruel god, equal against equal in continuous
clash, keep intensifying a thousand fierce encounters.
These quotations —
which could be multiplied many times shed —
useful lighton the unenthusiastic tone of Baif 's introductory verses;
by the same token, the capacity of contemporary thinking to color
sixteenth-century responses to the classical world, too, emerges from
Baif's same verses and warns of the distance back to antiquity that
had to be bridged and yet often proved difficult to travel, even for
France's finest poets.
Joachim Du Bellay, for 1552 volume, Le
example, inserted in his
Quatriesme Livre de VEneide de Virgile, an
traduict en vers francoys,
adaptation of Ovid's seventh epistle from the Heroides.^^ The book
opens with an epitre-preface to Jean de Morel in which Du Bellay
explains that he added the "Complainte de Didon a Enee, prinse
d'Ovide" to the verses taken from Virgil, "tant pour la continuation
du propos, que pour opposer la divine mageste de I'ung de ces
aucteurs a I'ingenieuse facilite de I'autre" (VI. 252: "as much because
of the continuity in subject matter as to oppose the divine majesty
of one of these writers to the inventive facility of the other").
Du Bellay's characterization of Ovid, which was repeated many
times over in the sixteenth century,'^ also proved decisive with regard
to the poet's choice of form: for his translation of Virgil, decasyllabic
couplets; for the imitation of Ovid, heterometric sizains of seven-
and three-syllable lines arranged 737737 and rhymed aabccb. Ron-
sard's incomplete epic, the Franciade, composed likewise in decasyl-
labic couplets, assures us of the strong association in the period
between that form and poetic grandeur. Every trait of the form of
the "Complainte," on the other hand, relates it to the lyric mode
'*
Joachim Du Bellay, "Complainte de Didon a Enee," in his Oeuvres poetiques, ed.
Henri Chamard. 6 vols. (Paris 1908-1931), VI, pp. 306-30.
'^
Introducing his translation of the Metamorphoses (book I), Marot comments on
"la grande doulceur du stille" {Oeuvres completes, ed. C. A. Mayer, VI, 113). Ronsard
speaks of"LedouxOvide" (XIV, 67)andof "I'ingenieux Ovide" (XIV, 77); Montaigne,
of "sa facilite et ses inventions" {Essais, II, x). A Shakespearean character observes
that "for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, Ovidius Naso was
. . .
the man" {Love's Labor's Lost, IV, ii).

and to the tradition of the chanson in particular,^" even though

whatever fluidity, wit, or suavitas we may find in the Heroides cannot
disguise the fact that the letters remain highly artificial and rhetorical
in nature. Moreover, in the Heroides Ovid used the elegiac meter
composed of distichs of hexameters and pentameters. For decades
before Du Bellay wrote the "Complainte," poets had followed suit,
employing in their elegies equally long lines, that is, the very form
used by Du Bellay to translate Virgil and by Octavien de Saint-Gelais
in the last years of the fifteenth century to translate the Heroides:^^
Comme le eigne quant mort luy est prochaine

Doulcement chante et a voix tresseraine
Pareillement dido pour tout voir
ie
Qui ne te puis par priere esmouuoir

Et qui plus nay en ta vie esperance
Ores te faitz scauoir ma doleance. (sig. F5'')
Just as the swan, when death is near, sings sweetly and with a tranquil
voice, so, to show all, I who cannot move you with my entreaty,
Dido,
and who hold out no hope from you, now reveal to you my suffering.
Whereas Saint-Gelais twice calls upon the adverbial form in -ment,

evoking thereby the rhythm of the Latin original, in Du Bellay's first
Comme I'oizeau blanchissant,

Languissant
Parmy I'herbette nouvelle,
Chante I'hymne de sa mort.
Qui au bort
Du doux Meandre I'appelle (VI. 307)
As the white bird, languishing among the new bladelets, sings his
hymn of death, which, at the edge of the sweet Meander, calls him
the rhyme "blanchissant / Languissant" thrusts at the reader an

entirely new rhythm. The poet then emphasizes further his choice
of the lyric mode through use of the diminutive "herbette" and the
adjective "doux," neither justified by the Latin text. Moreover, with
^° See, for example, the texts reprinted by Brian JefFery in his two-volume Chanson
Verse of the Early Renaissance (London 1971-76).
This is not to say that an elegiac tone was never heard in sixteenth-century lyric
forms. Mellin de Saint-Gelais's famous "Laissez la verde couleur," which recasts
Venus's lament on the death of Adonis, appeared in a volume of chanson verse

first
(1545). The poem is composed of isometric quatrains, however, and achieves thereby
a solemnity not compatible with Du Bellay's heterometric pattern.
^'
Sensuyt les xxi epistres dovide: translatees d' latin en francois par rei>erend pere en
dieu maistre Octovien de Saint Gelaix (Paris 1525).
abandonment of Ovid's comes a comparable lack of

elegiac distich
concern for Ovid's This double play with past participles and
artistry.
gerundives, "facta fugis, facienda petis; quaerenda per orbem /
altera, quaesita est altera terra tibi" (vv. 13-14), falls away completely
in the French:
Le bien asseure tu fuis,

Et poursuis
Une incertaine entreprise.
Autre terra est ton soucy:
Cete cy
T'est sans nulie peine aquise. (VI. 308)
Assured happiness you flee and pursue an uncertain enterprise. An-

other land preoccupies you. This one is yours for no eff"ort at all.
We are left with a correlation, not between version and source, but
between abstraction (Ovid's "facilite") and form into which only the
content of Heroides 7 has been poured.
From such a small sampling of texts it would be foolish to draw

any broad conclusions. However, these examples cannot fail to create
in us an awareness that during the Renaissance classical letters are
"reborn" into a period with its own past and perspectives, a period
whose features emerge as much from its recasting of those reborn
works as from its outspoken commitment to make their past glory
live again.
Harvard University
6
Thomas Stanley's Aeschylus:

Renaissance Practical Criticism of
Greek Tragedy
MARGARET ARNOLD
Thomas Stanley, Caroline poet, translator, and popularizer of ancient

learning, deserves a more complete exposition and evaluation of his
practical criticism of Aeschylus than he has yet received. Since his
folio text, translation, and commentary (London 1663) drew the
praise of Isaac Casaubon's son, Meric, shortly after publication; since
Ezra Pound, much
later, praised the strength and skill of the trans-
lation; and Eduard Fraenkel has given a judicious account both

since
of Stanley's sources and of the increasingly perceptive manuscript
notations Stanley added after publication,' this insistence may appear
presumptuous. Before defending such a claim, a writer should cite
Fraenkel's praise for Stanley's continued effort in annotating Aes-
chylus to "make the work worthy of its subject. What he here sets
down as necessary elements of a commentary on a dramatic poet
'
Meric Casaubon, "cuius praestantissimam editionem Londini curatam Viro
clarissimo D. Thomae Stanleio debebit aliquando posteritas," printed by Samuel
Butler, ed., Aeschyli Tragoediae quae Supersunt (Cambridge 1809), III, p. 148. Ezra
Pound's praise of Stanley's Latin in comparison with Browning's English translation
of Aeschylus appears in "Early Translators of Homer," Literary Essays of Ezra Pound,
ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Connecticut 1954), pp. 269-75. Eduard Fraenkel, in his
edition of the Agamemnon (Oxford 1950), discusses Stanley's scholarship (I, pp. 38-
44) and gives a judicious account of Stanley's unacknowledged indebtedness to the
work of John Pearson, Anglican divine, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and
former classmate of Milton (I, pp. 78-85).
goes far beyond the ideas of his own time: it anticipates conceptions
of the nineteenth century."^
Why, then, should we return to examine Thomas Stanley's thought-
ful exposition of Aeschylus for his seventeenth-century audience?
One motive is certainly the desire to develop and expand Fraenkel's
point beyond the major examples he But other reasons are cites.
more cogent. Since Stanley presented the first Aeschylean text,

translation, and commentary for a non-specialized audience, the ideas
he communicated are important for students of later Restoration and
eighteenth-century poets and translators. In fact, the circulation of
Stanley's work increased with Jan Cornells de Pauw's re-edition,
which included the 1663 commentary (The Hague 1745), and, even
later, with Samuel Butler's Aeschylus (Cambridge 1809), which con-
tained many of Stanley's manuscript addenda as well as original notes.

Even more important than the influence Stanley's ideas may have
exerted, however, is the amplitude of the literary, historical, and
philosophical exposition accompanying the edition. Quite simply,
Stanley is the first editor of Aeschylus to undertake criticism on this
scale. The great continental editors who preceded him wrestled with
the problem presented by the mutilated text of a puzzling author;
their introductions and notes do include critical evaluations but usually
confine themselves to general observations about Aeschylus' unique
and obscure style. Petrus Victorius (Pier Vettori), whose 1557 edition
first included the complete Oresteia, makes one of the most specific
stylistic comments preceding Stanley, noting Aeschylus' coining of
new words and introduction of archaic and foreign terms. ^ Francesco

Robortello's preface to his edition of the Aeschylean scholia (Venice
1552, pp. 1-8) provides the first practical criticism of one drama, the
Prometheus Bound, in Aristotelian terms. Stanley not only supplies a
broader context but implicitly suggests Robortello's limitations. In a
area Willem Canter's Aeschylus (Antwerp 1580) contains a
diff'erent
supplement for the reader which, making no distinction between
tragedy and history, arranges Aeschylus' characters and plots in a
chronology beginning with Prometheus, who "flourished at the time
^ Fraenkel, I, p. 41.
' Petrus Victorius' preface to his Aeschylus (Stephanus: Geneva 1557), "quu infinitis
locis obscurae admodum sint, invenianturque in ipsis multa nomina valde a consue-
tudine remota. llle enim, ut undique amplu grandeque id poema efficeret, & plura
quam alii eiusdem lociverba novavit & vetusta etiam peregrinaque liberius usurpavit,"
sig. a iv'. I am omitting the lengthy Greek and Latin titles of the early editors when
a brief citation identifies the work.
Margaret Arnold 231
of Joshua and Cecrops," and concluding with the Persians/ Stanley's

historical comments are more precise than Canter's although he has
not totally freed himself from the traditional allegoresis of pagan
authors which Don Cameron Allen traces in Mysteriously Meant: The
Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the
Renaissance (Baltimore 1970).
Not only are Stanley's interests broader than those of preceding
editors; in addition, many of
emphases are new for an editor of
his
Aeschylus, reflecting an effôrt one of the most puzzling
to bring
pagan authors into a literary and philosophic tradition Stanley can
accept and defend to his audience. His notes are eclectic, drawing
parallels with classical and patristic authors, citing earlier humanists,
and even referring the reader to the contemporary history of volcanic
eruptions. Three areas of emphasis, however, extend his analysis of
Aeschylus beyond the comments of preceding editors to set the
ancient tragedian in a context accessible to his readers. The first is
a moral and mystical reading of Aeschylus, suggested first in Stanley's

dedicatory epistle to Sir Henry Newton Puckering (the same man
who possessed the MS of Milton's early poems):
Pollet etiam tacita quadam, Pythagoricae affini, sapientia.^
He [Aeschylus] is strong in a certain secret wisdom, associated with '
Pythagorean wisdom.
Previous editors had called Aeschylus a Pythagorean because Cicero

had done so, but Stanley's commentary repeatedly demonstrates
correspondences, ranging from individual word-choices to a shared
conception of the structure of the universe. In the process of dem-
onstrating Aeschylus' Pythagorean qualities, Stanley also draws as
many Biblical parallels as possible but, unlike Canter, he retains a
clear historical perspective.
A second area of emphasis is more strictly "literary": it includes
*
Willem Canter identifies tiie passage as Chapter 4 of iiis Novarum Lectionum,
Libro V (printed in his edition of Aeschylus [C. Plantinus: Antwerp 1508], pp. 9-13).
His chronology includes the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides but begins and
concludes with the Aeschylean plays cited.
^ Thomas Stanley, dedicatory epistle of his Aeschylus (J.
Flescher: London 1663;
repr. Samuel Butler 1809), Vlll, Subsequent citations of Stanley are from this
xiii.
edition. Butler uses brackets to indicate passages from Stanley's marginalia added
after the 1663 edition. Butler's quotations have been compared with Stanley's 1663
edition and his MS material in the Cambridge University Library. Except for very
brief passages, I have translated Stanley's Latin and Greek to provide continuity in
a discussion requiring citation of a text which is not immediately accessible to many
readers.
the visualization of Aeschylean plays as dramas to be staged, a

contribution well noted by Fraenkel (I, 44). Stanley supplements this
visualization with a discussion of Horatian and Aristotelian precepts
as they were understood broadening the received
in his time, often
definitions to justify his reading of a particular Aeschylean play.
Further, Stanley provides the most thorough analysis of Aeschylean
style by an early editor. A final dimension of Stanley's interest is
political: his devoted Royalism is apparent when he discusses the
Suppliants, although his conceptualization of national and international
law is one we might expect to find in a seventeenth-century interpreter
of a great pagan author.
When Stanley presents Aeschylus as a "Pythagorean" philosopher,

the interpretation is often more nearly Neoplatonic.*^ He is quite
interesting when he considers the structure of the universe in these
terms. For instance, lines 5-6 of the Agamemnon ("Those bright
potentates conspicuous in the sky who bring winter and summer to
man")' prompt his consideration of universal order. This has the
flavor of the Pythagorean school in whose teaching Aeschylus was
immersed according to Cicero:
Ille enim primus coelum nuncupavit Koanov a decore stellarum. . . .
ovpavov Koaixou Trpoarjybpevat, dLCt to reXtiov eivai kol Tract KiKoaixriadai, Tolq
Tt îCOLq, KOL Tolq KoXolq. Quam pulchritudinem participat a primo et
intellectuali pulchro. (Ill, p. 140)
For he [Pythagoras] was the first to call the heavens a kosmos after the
adornment of the stars . . . because it is perfect and adorned with all
things which are alive and beautiful. He says that this beauty has a
share in xhe first and intellectual beauty. (Italics mine.)
The conception of living, harmonious inhabitants of space and of
^ See Allen's similar assessment of the Cambridge Platonists, p. 34. Stanley's silent
collaborator, John Pearson, contributed to the scholarship on the Neoplatonist
Hierocles (Fraenkel, I, p. 83). Stanley demonstrated his interest in Neoplatonism and
Pythagoras before he began the Aeschylus. Galbraith Miller Crump, in his edition of
The Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley (Oxford 1962), includes Stanley's
Upon Love," published in 1651 (pp. 197-
translation of Pico's "Platonick Discourse
poem with commentary, "Pythagoras his moral Rules,"
229), as well as Stanley's early
pp. 68-74. See Crump's discussion of Stanley's sources, which include Hierocles'
commentary on "The Golden Verses" attributed to Pythagoras, pp. 389-90. Stanley's
poem itself is consistent with his "Pythagorean" discussion of Aeschylus.
' Fraenkel's translation of this line, I, p. 91. All references to plays and line
numbers are to Aeschyli Septem quae Supersunt Tragoedias, ed. Denys Page (Oxford
1972). Subsequent translations of Aeschylean lines are my own.
Margaret Arnold 233
a more perfect "idea" beyond them may be read in a Neoplatonic

context familiar from various sources to Spenser, Sidney, and Milton.
Stanley's own translation of Pico's "Platonick Discourse upon Love"
subordinates the "idea," "minde," or "world-soul" to God.® Similarly,
in his earlypoem, "Pythagoras his Moral Rules," he observes "How
nature is by general likenesse chained" (line 54) and, in his notes,
adds the gloss: "By him who gave us Life, God" (p. 73). In the
Aeschylean commentary Stanley is moving far from his dramatic
context (the words of the Watchman in the Oresteia) to present
Aeschylus as a philosopher approaching truth in terms which had
attracted Renaissance men for several centuries. Equally interesting
is his digression in the Eumenides to consider the mystic origin of the
kosmos. Again, he expands upon one line, "[Marriage] is mightier

than an oath, and is guarded by Justice" {Eum. 218):
Atque hinc etiam confirmari possit Aeschylum Pythagoreis jure an-

numerandum; etenim apud illos jurisjurandi religio summa; quo fit ut
aureorum carminum auctor primo praecepto de Diis colendis hoc
adjungat, —
koI a'^ôv opKov —
ad quem locum vide sis Hieroclem, qui
humanum jusjurandum quasi rivulum ac imaginem esse contendit
magni illius jurisjurandi quo naturae totius universitas obstricta est
eique obtemperare cogitur. (VI, p. 127)
From this source we can confirm that Aeschylus should rightly be

numbered among the Pythagoreans, for they had the highest regard
for an oath. For this reason the author of "The Golden Verses" adds
this to the first commandment about worshipping the Gods: "And
reverence your oath." On this passage, see Hierocles, who contends
that a human oath is, as it were, a small derivative and a copy of that
great Oath by which the whole order of Nature is bound and is forced to
conform with it. (Italics mine)
Not only has he moved from his context to present a human oath as
an imperfect "copy"; the idea that a mysterious oath binds created
order (although Stanley does not make the idea explicit) is not
inconsistent with belief in a divine Creator whose Logos is his
"effectual might."
Stanley's Pythagorean reading may commend Aeschylus to a
thoughtful Christian reader. He is careful to suggest moral and
philosophic congruencies and to explain differences when they occur.
He observes that the Pythagoreans subjected God to Fate, an opinion
which the Stoics approved {Prom. 518, St. 517). After the comment,
a commendable perception of the characters' lack of omnipotence,
^ The Poems and Translations . . ., ed. G. M. Crump, pp. 199-200. All citations of
Stanley's work other than his Aeschylus are from this text.
he does mediate between the ancient philosophers and his reader:

"Deum, i.e. Divinam providentiam, vel fortunam." He is interested
in the primacy the Pythagoreans assign to fire among the elements
(Prometheus' invocation, St. 88), the medicinal power of music {Ag.
17), the importance of memory, and the "purer" predictions of the
Pythagoreans without the aid of blood and sacrifice (5^. 25, St. 27).^
Elsewhere he approves Pythagorean moral values: marital fidelity in
the Suppliants and observance of the "mean" in wealth {Ag. 471, St.
479). Even the Aeschylean "kennings" ("winged hounds" for "eagles"
in Ag. 135, St. 139) are attributed to Pythagoras' search for teaching
and for learning truth. He "used to say certain things in a mystical
fashion, symbolically, of which Aristotle has given a fuller record":
Nee minus cothurnum Tragicum quam Scholam Pythagorae sapit haec

loquendi forma: de quo Porphyrius in Vita, eKeyt de Tiva Koci fivariKO)
Tpbir(ji avulSoXiKobi;, a 5ri iTnirXeov ' ApLaTOTtkrjq aueypaypep. (Ill, p. 169)
By documenting Aeschylus' "Pythagorean" attributes, with the

further citation of Neoplatonists such as Hierocles, Stanley associates
the first great tragedian with the two ancient writers most highly
respected by Renaissance Christians for their faith. Allen, for example,
has demonstrated the acceptance of Plato and Pythagoras both by
patristic writers and certain Cambridge Platonists (pp. 21 and 35).
Aeschylus emerges as the representative of a philosophy with proph-
etic insight, the illustrator of an orderly and beautiful universe, the
advocate of high moral values, and a participant in mystic approaches
to truth, such as musical charms to heal and unusual word usages to
provide insight.
Stanley's Christianization of Aeschylus merges with his Pythagorean
reading in his annotation of the Prometheus Bound. Although we might
have predicted such an interpretation, we do not in fact receive it
from other editors of the period:
Nonnulli e Sanctis Patribus Promethei vincula fabulosa cum passione
Domini nostri conferunt, hisce forsan aut similibus rationibus perducti:
Christus est 6 A6yo(;, l,0(pia RaTpbc,, quem et a Pythagora Soîac dictum
volunt aliqui: eo non abludit Promethei nomen; ambo (piXavdpoiirot.
Causam deaeuiq Prometheae ab aliis novam et longe diversam statuit
Aeschylus, sed huic analogiae valde congruentem. (I, 155)
® The consideration of fire as the highest and noblest element is, of course, a
famihar part of the "chain of being." Stanley translates Pico on the subject in "A
Platonick Discourse .
.," p. 202. Memory is the mother of the Muses, whom Pico
.
allegorized as guardians of the spheres (p. 203). Music, concord, and harmony make
up "Beauty in the largest sence" (p. 207).
Margaret Arnold 235
Some of the holy Fathers compare the legendary chains with the
passion of our Lord, perhaps being influenced by these or similar
reasons: Christ is the Logos, the Wisdom of the Father, whom some
people claim was called Sophia by Pythagoras also; the name of
Prometheus is not inconsistent with this idea: both are philanthropoi.
Aeschylus gives a reason for the binding of Prometheus which is
original and quite diff"erent from other writers but quite relevant to
this analogy.
He The Souda (Suidas) for a definition of Xecopyoq (knave,

cites
miscreant) as "one who dies for the people" and calls special attention
to the "apparatus by which Prometheus is crucified." Stanley leaves
the relationship of Prometheus and Christ a limited analogy, however,
and does not pursue it throughout the play. Hermes' final advice to
Prometheus, "and never say that it was Zeus who cast you into
suffering unforeseen" (1073-75; St. 1072), provides an occasion for
the justification of the ways of God to men with support from ancient
and contemporary writers. Stanley relates his line to a similar sententia
discussed by James Duport, professor of Greek at Cambridge, 1639-
54, observing that Duport "says that this is a celebrated proverb and
praised everywhere by the ancients, containing a defense of God and
his providence regarding evil: whoever makes God the author of it
acts impiously and unjustly" ("Celebris, inquit, gnome, et a veteribus
passim laudata, continens apologiam pro Deo ejusque providentia,
circa malum: cuius auctorem impie et inique Deum faciunt, quicunque
faciunt" [I, 261]).'° The implication is that Zeus is not responsible
for Prometheus' suffering. Since Stanley has already observed that
even Zeus lacks omnipotence, however, the interpretation can be
more general. He and Duport are asserting that even the pagans
considered men the authors of evil. Although Stanley has admired
Prometheus earlier, the final comment is more reserved; Prometheus'
concern for mankind may have been Christ-like, but he is the author
of his own torture. Further, he has foreseen the consequence of his
actions.
Stanley's parallels of pagan and Judaeo-Christian faith and ritual
reveal a similar ambivalence. Sometimes he wants to show the
similarity of ancient belief to the Biblical tradition. At other points,
however, he corrects earlier commentators with an awareness of
history: the pagan authors preceded Christ, and parallels should be
'"
Stanley is reading the Aeschylean line as a proverb which resembles Duport's
citation and discussion of the Odyssey (L 7; 32 ff.). Milton makes the same point with
the same reference at the end of his chapter on Predestination in De Doctrina
Christiana. See John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes
(New York 1957), p. 931.
regarded cautiously in this context. When he suggests Hebrew-Greek

similarities, he is usually drawing Old Testament parallels; the greeting
of Jacob to Joseph resembles, for example, the Herald's first words
to the Chorus in the Agamemnon {Ag. 539, St. 548). He sees similar
tiesbetween the Greeks and Hebrews when they attribute victory to
God (or the Gods), in his comment on line 4 of the Seven against
Thebes ("For should success be ours, we owe it to Heaven"):
Putabant Gentes victoriam a Diis suis esse, ad eosque referebant. . . .
[Plane ut Moses apud Josephum, III. 2. Ovaaq 5e XAPI2THPIA 0o}nbv

ibpwTai uiKotov ovonaaaq tov dtbv. Ita Graeci Troja direpta to. ttjc, dKi^c,
xapi(JTr)pia dvovm, multa scilicet Diis sacrificia peragunt.] (IV, 158)
The pagans thought that victory came from their Gods and used to
attribute it to them. Qosephus notes that] . . . Moses, having sacrificed
thank-offerings, established a victory altar, calling upon the name of
God. So the Greeks, when Troy was plundered, sacrificed thank-
offerings for victory.
His choice of parallels is further justified by the "historical" idea

continuing into the Renaissance that the Greeks derived some of
their metaphors from the early Hebrews." The nets and snares of
the Agamemnon, for example, he attributes to Hebraic influence, citing
Ezekiel 12:13: "My net also will I spread upon him, and he shall be
taken in my snare."
In addition, Stanley emphasizes evidence for the immortality of
the soul or for belief in God in "pagan" philosophy of any period.
He explains Electra's complaint that Agamemnon was not properly
buried by referring to the historical context appropriate to the play,
but expands the discussion of this scene to consider the existence of
the soul and its judgment. Aeschylus' lines further support the idea
that "the funeral pyre consumes only the body, not the soul of the
deceased person, which he proves to be immortal ..." ("Rogus
funebris absumit corpus tantum, non animam defunti [quam immor-
talem esse, nee una cum corpore interire, ex eo probat]" V, 128).
Then, citing Plutarch's "On Those Who are Punished Late by the
Deity," he concerns himself with that philosopher's belief in reward
and punishment after this life:
[SouTf u ixrjdev iari ttj \p^xV MfT« tW reXevrfiv, aXXa koI xoipi-TOc, ir'epac,
" Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask
(New York 1953), traces the idea that the Hebrews were the true teachers of the
Greek poets and philosophers to the writings of the Alexandrian Jews, p. 211. Allen
demonstrates the survival of this idea into the seventeenth century. See especially
pp. 30-37.
Margaret Arnold 237
aira<T7]c, Koi Tinupiaq b davaroq, naWov ocp tic, eiiroi Totq raxv KaXaônevoiq
tCjv TTOvqpuv Kot airodvfiaKOvaL, /uaXa/cox; kol paOvfiuq xP'7<''^«i to daifibv-
t.ov.]{ibid.)
If there is nothing to the soul after death, if death is the end of all
requital and punishment, one would rather say that the deity deals
gently with those of the wicked who are quickly punished and who
die.
To strengthen this point, Stanley links Aeschylus, the Psalmist, and

the Stoics to consider briefly the value of belief in God. The
Aeschylean line "But that men lacked reverence" {Ag. 372, St. 381)
follows the Chorus' consideration of mortals who trample "inviolable
sanctities." Stanley immediately cites Psalm 14:1, "The foolish man
says in his heart there is no God," and comments favorably, "Stoici
ubique per sapientem virum probum intelligunt."
As fully as possible, he is giving his reader the opportunity to
consider Aeschylus and other virtuous pagans not only as men familiar
with Hebraic customs but as believers in the tenets revealed by natural
light before the Incarnation.'^ It is interesting to a modern reader
that Stanley is not disturbed by some of the attributes of God which
horrified William Empson.'^ Stanley comments straightforwardly:
[Deus malorum ridet insaniam et poenam, Psal. ii. 4. Qui habitat in.
eKyiXaaeTm
coelis> irridebit eos; avrovq, et Dominus subsannabit eos].
(VI, 151)
God laughs at the madness and the punishment of the wicked. Cf. Ps.
2:4, 'He who lives in the heavens will laugh at them and the Lord
will deride them'. {Eum. 560, St. 563)
Stanley often transcends the idea of a stern and punitive deity,

however, to suggest that he considers the divine mind a mystery
which men can never fully comprehend: he parallels lines 1057-58
(St. 1065) of the Suppliants, "Why should I attempt to look at the
divine mind / A sight without depth" with the Psalmist's "Thy

judgments are a great abyss" (Ps. 36:6). The ancients (especially the
'^ Although many scholars can be cited on this point, I prefer Thomas More's
discussion of these two central beliefs in Utopia. On natural revelation of a Creator,
"They [the Utopians] think that like other designers He has exposed the workings
of the world to the sight of man (whom alone He created with ability to understand
it). . .
." On the afterlife, Utopus "issued severe and careful restrictions against
anyone's so falling away from the dignity of human nature as to believe that the soul
dies with the body or that the world revolves by chance without divine providence."
Trans, by Peter K. Marshall (New York 1965), pp. 85 and 111.
'^
Particularly the "jeering" of the Father and Son, pages 96-97 o{ Milton's God,
rev ed. (London 1965).
"Pythagoreans" and Stoics) do resemble Stanley and his readers, but

he emphasizes the beliefs Aeschylus and Renaissance Christians share:
humans are responsible for evil fortune, here and hereafter; God
laughs at the plight of those who oppose him; and His mind remains
unfathomable.
With the possible exception of the Hebraic influence on ancient
Greece, Stanley maintains his historical perspective. When he makes
a verbal parallel with the Annunciation, the emphasis is simply upon
"divine protection," not the Virgin Birth (VI, 180). He draws a
careful distinction between pagan lustral rites and Christian baptism
(on Ag. 1037, St. 1046), for example, concerning the "holy water"
{x^pvLûiv) which Clytemnestra invites Cassandra to share:
[Quanquam quod innuit Justinus Martyr, Apolog. 2. Ethnicos sc. ritum

hunc aqua se aspergendi in ingressu templorum a Christianorum
baptismo, daemonum instinctu didicisse, minus verisimile videatur,
cum longe antiquior fuerit baptismo iste Gentilium ritus. . . . qui
Christum natum saeculis aliquot antecessit]. (Ill, 247)
Although Justin Martyr, Apolog. 2, suggests that the pagans learned

this custom of sprinkling themselves with water at the entrance of
their temples from Christian baptism by the inspiration of devils, this
seems unlikely since that ritual of the Gentiles was much more ancient.
. [He goes on to point out that Justin's authority, Theophrastus.l
. .
preceded the birth of Christ by several centuries.
Stanley has chosen a long-disputed issue and resolved it with the

awareness of historical distance which Allen suggests ". in due . .
course fathered a shadowy form of cultural anthropology" (p. 241).

The interest in placing unfamiliar customs within some historical
context is, perhaps, predictable in sixteenth or seventeenth-century
editions, but Stanley is far more meticulous in his historicity than
Canter had been.
II
Stanley's interest in historical accuracy leads to his second major

consideration, ancient tragedy as drama intended for performance,
in his addressing the question of marriage between cousins in the
Suppliants. He examines
Danaus' argument to his daughters histori-
cally by citing Augustine {Civ. Dei XV. 16) and Livy, to conclude that
"in fact marriages between cousins were not considered illegitimate"
{Su. 225, St. 233). Having accounted for the historical question, he
then explains Danaus' strong objections in terms of dramatic moti-
vation: "This is spoken appropriately in the character of Danaus who
knew well that these marriages would be fatal for him" ("[Apte
Margaret Arnold 239
quidem sub persona Danai, quod fatales sibi fore has nuptias bene
noverat, hoc dictum est]" II, 116). In the same play Stanley thinks
that a dramatic motive is required to explain Pelasgus' ignorance of
lo's history when that king questions the Danaides (Su. 295 ff., St.
302): "It is astonishing that he makes the Argive king ignorant of

the history of lo. But the truth is that he is pretending to be ignorant
in order to discover whether the Danaides know the details thor-

oughly" ("Mire facit Regem Argivum ignarum historiae lus. Sed
fingit potius se ignarum, ut sciat utrum Danaides rem ipsam probe
noverint" II, 124). This interest in the motivation of characters within
the context of the action recurs as he considers the appropriate
excuse for Orestes' absence at the end of the Agamemnon (877; St.
886) or for the Chorus' knowledge of the details of Agamemnon's
death {Choeph. 523, St. 521). This meticulous attention to the char-
acter who speaks to another and to his reasons for doing so leads
Stanley to the excellent insight praised by Fraenkel, that the Chorus,
not a messenger, perceives the entrance of Clytemnestra and salutes
her (Ag. 266):
Non magis simile atque huic locus ille est in Persis, ubi senes
lac lacti
Persici, ex quibus constituitur Chorus, de expeditione Xerxis valde
soliciti, ut Graeci nostri de Agamemnone, longa adhibita oratione,
tandem ingredientem reginam, mutate genere carminis, salutant: quod

videntur non animadvertisse qui nuntium hie ingressum, et Trojae
expugnationem quam ab accensa face didicerat exponentem, commenti
sunt. Quo nihil a poetae mente magis absonum. (Ill, 182)'*
Milk is no more like milk than this passage to the one in the Persae
where the Persian old men who make up the Chorus, very troubled
about the expedition of Xerxes, give a long speech and finally salute
the queen as she enters, changing the style of the verse. This does
not seem to have been noticed by those who have wrongly contrived
that a messenger enters here describing the sacking of Troy. . . .
Nothing could be more discordant with the poet's intention. . . .
Here the careful attention to similarities in style and characterization

passage clarify the dramatic interaction of Clytemnestra
in a parallel
with the Chorus so that her character —
particularly her power,
initiative, and cleverness — is strengthened for future readers by the
contrast.
In this scene and elsewhere Stanley introduces another of his
literary interests: he Chorus' behavior. Consistently, he
visualizes the
asks his reader to approach Aeschylean drama not only as an art
form for reading but as a spectacle actually staged; in fact, he is the
pp. 44-45.
''•
See Fraenkel's discussion of this passage, I,
first editor to ask this of his readers. He gives frequent "stage

directions," for example, his note on the 710 (St.
Suppliants, line
718): "Danaus had from the place to which he has been led,
seen,
the fleet of the Aegyptii pressing toward them" ("[Viderat Danaus a
loco in quem deductus fuerat, instare classem Aegyptiorum,]" II,
150), or on the Eumenides, line 34: "We must understand that the
Prophetess, having entered the temple, suddenly returned raving,
terrified, and trembling" ("Intellegendum est vatem ingressam tem-
plum subito rediisse insanam, pavefactam, et trementem," VI, 110).
He also wants his reader to visualize the prophetic garb of Cassandra,
a matter important to the interpretation of a scene he admires not
only for its its technikon. The reader is to hear her cries
pathos but for
as appropriate for a person inspired by a deity and to observe the
laurels and staff she will discard before she, too, becomes a victim.
Stanley has even searched Strabo's geographical work to give his
readers a description of the Furies: they wore black cloaks, tunics to
the feet, and walked with staff's. Furthermore, other commentators
notwithstanding, he insists that there were fifty of them "but the
people, terrified by this number, thenceforth reduced the number to
fifteen by law" ("sed consternatus hoc numero populus lege redegit
exinde tragicum chorum ad quindecim," VI, 101). The accuracy of
his authority, Pollux, may be questioned, but Stanley wants his reader
to share the horror of seeing this Chorus. Stanley's concern with
visualization of the drama does not appear in other textual editors;
it is worth noting that William R. Parker admired the same quality
in the work of Stanley's great contemporary, John Milton.'^

In his application of dramatic theory, Stanley repeats some of the
Aristotelian and Horatian ideas of his time; often, however, his careful
reading of Aeschylus demands the clarification of a concept or outright
disagreement with an earlier theorist. His definition of tragedy at
the beginning of the commentary on the Eumenides is worth citing
because of its scope as well as its contradiction of such influential
men as Joseph Scaliger and Daniel Heinsius:'^
Non est tragoediae necessarium ut semper habeat horrendos rerum
exitus, et mortes et caedes et venena; Alcestis Euripidis in exitu omnia
habet laeta; ostendit enim Alcestin Admeti uxorem a morte auxilio
'^
William Riley Parker, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore
1937), p. 143.
'®
Scaliger's definition of tragedy as "Imitatio per actiones illustris fortunae, exitu
infelici,oratione graui metrica" is cited and evaluated by Bernard Weinberg, A History
of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago 1961), II, 746. For a discussion
of Heinsius' idea that "the happy ending is undesirable," see Paul R. Sellin, Daniel
Heinsius and Stuart England (Oxford 1968), pp. 139-40.
Margaret Arnold 241
Herculis liberatam. Quae vero tragoediam x<xpoiKTr}piôvai duo sunt.

Primo, Personae, quas esse oportet aut Deos, aut heroas, aut reges,
aut viros clarissimos, non vero e plebecula aut notae inferioris. . . .
Secundo, Res quae repraesentatur, quam non oportet esse e communi

vita depromptam, sed grandem et severam. Haec si succedant fabulae,
quiscunque exitus sit, tragoedia est. Idem et de Supplicibus dicendum.
(VI, 99)
It is not essential that tragedy always have dreadful conclusions,

deaths, murders, and poisonings. The Alcestis of Euripides has an
ending which is entirely happy, for it shows Alcestis, the wife of
Admetus, freed from death by the help of Hercules. In fact, there
are two things which characterize a tragedy: First, the characters, who
should be Gods, heroes, kings, or distinguished men, but certainly
not from the common people or of a lower rank. Second, the . . .
events represented, which should not be drawn from common life but
should be lofty and serious. If these things are in a play, whatever the
conclusion is, it is a tragedy. The same must be said of the Supplices.
Stanley's first criterion appears in medieval interpretations'' but his

applications certainly do not. A modern reader is surprised that he
considers the Suppliants a completed tragedy rather than part of a
trilogy in which bloodshed is yet to occur. However, Stanley seldom
speculates about Aeschylean trilogies. He
approaches the question
when he calls the Oresteia a tetralogy whose central figure
is Orestes
{Choeph. 660, St. 666), but he examines each play separately and does
not trace the progression throughout the sequence of plays.'® His
application of the definition is thus to the Eumenides, rather than to
the Oresteia as a whole. In the same decade Milton's preface to Samson
Agonistes commends David Paraeus' discussion of Revelation as a
"high and stately tragedy." Stanley's criteria, applied to either work,
permit not only a "happy ending" but a renewed cosmic order to
be termed "tragic."'^ The ready admission of these works to the
genre suggests that the tragic frontiers were wider for these men
than for other theorists and, perhaps, for us.
Stanley also clarifies the concept of anagnorisis when he defends
'^
Joel E. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1908; repr. New York 1963),
listed the idea as "medieval," D. W. Lucas, ed., Aristotle, Poetics (Oxford 1968),
p. 42.
"
agrees with Stanley's criterion to the degree that "heroes and 'persons of quality'
are proper tragic subjects, commenting on airovbdiovc, ri (f)av\ovq, 48a 2, p. 63. Subsequent
references to the Poetics are to Lucas' edition and commentary.
'®
Consideration of the trilogy problem is rare before the nineteenth century. A
landmark is Friedrich G. Welcker's Die Aeschyleische Trilogie (Darmstadt 1824).
'^
For a distinction between Aeschylus' plays and other Greek "tragedy," see C.
J.Herington, "Aeschylus: the Last Phase," Arion iv, 3 (Autumn, 1965), especially pp.
399-402.
the frequently parodied recognition of Orestes and Electra in the

Choephoroi.He quotes Aristotle: "The fourth type oi anagnorisis [arises]
from comparison or inference {ek syllogismou), as in the Choephoroi
because someone similar has arrived and someone similar is no one
but Orestes" (Poet. 1455a. 4-5, although Stanley places it in Chapter
11). To develop his own discussion of the concept, Stanley corrects
the scholiast on Aristophanes' Clouds to state that Aristophanes is
indeed making fun of Aeschylus,
nee merito id quidem. Non enim Electra ex similitudine crinium statim

colligit Orestem esse qui tw ^barpvxov dedicavit, sed satis apte rationis
calculos ponit; neminem
scilicet illic crines depositurum nisi qui
Agamemnonem cognatione prope contingeret: non id facturam Cly-

temnestram, nee a se factum esse, ideo ab Oreste Electrae simili. (V,
119)
. .although this criticism is not deserved. For Electra does not

.
immediately gather from the similarity of the hair that it was Orestes
who dedicated the lock, but she makes her deductions appropriately
enough; she says that no one was likely to lay hair there unless he
were close to Agamemnon in kinship; Clytemnestra would not do this
and she had not done it herself; therefore it was Orestes, who was
like Electra, who had done it.
In the process he has placed Electra's reasoning into the form of a

logical syllogism more precise than Aristotle's words suggest. He then
insists that this attention to reasoning is essential for properly inter-
preting Aristotle: "and thisis what Aristotle means when he says that
this anagnorisisoccurred through syllogismos, not from comparison,

but from logical argument," an interpretation D. W. Lucas has
accepted in his commentary on the Poetics, p. 63. In addition, Stanley
disapproves the introduction of comic matters into tragedy when he
mentions Euripides' parody of Aeschylus' scene in Electra, attacking
him for twisting the earlier tragedian's v(j)a(Tna (woven goods, such
as the piece of handwork Orestes shows Electra) into "cloaks and
robes. This type of quibbling is more suitable to the witty style
. . .
of Aristophanes than to the seriousness of tragedy" ("per ireirXovq et

0apca: explicans. Quod cavillationis genus Aristophanicae potius lep-
iditati quam tragoediae gravitati convenit," V, 122). Commenting
thus upon a particular scene Stanley has clarified the "fourth type
of anagnorisis'' for critical theorists at the same time that he criticizes
Aeschylus' parodists, particularly Euripides who has violated tragic
decorum.
Stanley's careful reading of the text elicits the consideration of
ethos as he defends the decorum of Cilissa's rambling in her grief
Margaret Arnold 243
about the care she gave Orestes in infancy {Choeph. 749, St. 747).
He praises Aeschylus by comparing his treatment of a simple character
of lower birth with Vergil's similar treatment in his fifth Eclogue of
"that simplicity which best characterizes a shepherd and country
people. . Full of the same type of simplicity in this locus. Although
. .
the words may not seem sufficiently consistent with each other,
nevertheless the passage must not be considered defective since it
suits a doting old woman all the more for that reason":
simplicitatem illam quae pastorem et rusticos xoip(XKTr]pii;u optime

exprimit. . . . Ejusmodi simplicitatis planus est hie locus, qui, licet
verba non satis inter se congruere videantur, mutilus tamen non
censendus, cum eo magis deliram anum deceat. (V, 153)
Stanley's emphasis upon the suitability of speech for "a doting old
woman" suggests that he sees the ethos of a character as the expression
of a generalized type. He supports the idea further with Aristotle's
distinction {Rhet. 2. 12) relative volatility of young men
between the
and the mature of older men, applying the contrast
hesitation
perceptively to Vergil's portrayal of Turnus and Latinus in the Aeneid
(XII. 11 ff.). In his actual definition of ethos Stanley is willing to
consider the uniqueness of the individual within certain limitations,
"for ethe vary in accordance with age, sex, fortune, country, emotions
and also the nature which is particular and individual to each person":
variantur enim rjdrj pro ratione aetatis, sexus, fortunae, patriae, afFec-
tuum, et etiam naturae unicuique propriae et individuae. (V, 152)
His specific examples from Aeschylus usually emphasize the general

type the character fits. His illustrations from the Agamemnon are
interesting from this point of view; they are also interesting because
he makes no suggestion that Agamemnon fell as the result of hubris
or any character flaw:
sic alia est persona, aliud ^doc, senis, aliud juvenis; aliud viri generosi
et candidi, qualis erat Agamemnon; aliud mulieris adulatricis et vafrae,
qualis Clytemnestra. (V, 152)
so there is one persona and one ethos for an old man, another for a
young man; one for a noble and open-hearted man, such as Agamem-
non was; another for a fawning and cunning woman, such as Clytem-
nestra. . . .
Similarly, he accounts for the Chorus' hesitation in the murder scene,

appropriately considering the Chorus as "characters." They are old
men and senators; as a result they waver and do not act rapidly. In
his discussion of the Seven against Thebes, however, Stanley is reluctant
to generalize his statements about a character to the point that he

makes the "type" inconsistent with the individual variation the play
itself reveals. The character who receives the most specific treatment
is Amphiaraus, whose shield is pure and without a device "as he
himself was," and whose words, characterized as "wise and reverent,"
are reserved for appropriate disclosures, including prophecy, "as if .
. Amphiaraus would not have used that dissuasion to his fellow

.
soldiers unless he had foreseen that they would be conquered":
[Ad orationem prudentissimam et piissimam Amphiarai, quam recen-

suerat nuntius, referenda haec sunt: quasi diceret Eteocles, Amphiaraus
ad commilitones suos dehortatione ilia non usus fuerat, nisi eos victos
fore praevidisset]. (IV, 224)
Amphiaraus may still be generalized, but he is no longer simply the

exemplar of "the prudent man" a previous editor had made him.^°
In other applications of critical theory Stanley reflects the opinions
common to his period. He corrects the hypothesis to the Agamemnon
by pointing out that Aeschylus does not show the murder itself but
removes violent action from the stage, a familiar enough Horatian
interpretation. He is also concerned with a certain verisimilitude in
dramatic time, especially in the speed of Agamemnon's death and
burial: "However, he makes a mistake, as was observed by G. Vossius
. 'When Agamemnon, according to Aeschylus, is killed and buried
. .
"
with such speed the actor is scarcely given time to catch his breath'
("Peccat tamen, ut observatum est eruditissimo Ger. Vossio, Instit.
Poet. I. p. 22 'cum apud eum Agamemnon tanta celeritate et occiditur
et tumulatur, ut actori vix respirandi tempus detur', " III, 270).
Stanley's desire to make dramatic time believable recurs when he
adds that Aeschylus has been "deservedly" criticized for having
Agamemnon return on the same day Troy was captured. On this
point he expresses his preference for Seneca's handling of time "more
carefully" in his Agamemnon. It is the only "unity" which troubles
Stanley, but he would like to see less compression in Aeschylus' play.
A concern for historical verisimilitude recurs throughout the notes
on the Persians because Stanley continues to observe that Aeschylus'
Persians follow Greek rites and customs: "a fault, but nothing is more
common in the poets. Homer not excepted":
Hos ritus non ex more Persarum, sed Graecorum, describit. 'AixopTrtfia,

sed quo nihil poetis,Homerum non excipio, frequentius. (VII, 206)
^^
Joannes Caselius, Septem ad Thebas Duces Aeschyli Tragoedia (Stephan Myliander:
Rostock 1582), is the only preceding editor who discusses the characters of this play.
Eteocles is the exemplar of the public man, the ruler (sig. AS"^); Amphiaraus is the
prudent "private" man who "minimeque videri, sed bonus esse velit," sig. A3.
Margaret Arnold 245
In addition to his consideration of dramatic motivation and theory,

Stanley provides a most thorough analysis of Aeschylean style by an
earlier editor. In his dedicatory epistle he echoes earlier commentators
to observe that Aeschylus is grandiloquus, but he adds that this style
may sometimes be compressed or restrained (castigate) and be em-
ployed to convey weight and seriousness (pondus). His comments on
specific passages develop each of these observations. He further affirms
that the grand and lofty style is important for the tragedian's art;
for support he cites "Longinus," an authority increasingly important
in England but not mentioned by the earlier continental editors.
Another justification of the elevated style, for Stanley, is the value
of varying the choice of words in order to avoid tautology. His own
careful reading, however, permits him to criticize the scholiast's
remarks (on Frogs 814) about the "lofty" style in the first six lines
of the Prometheus Bound: "Certainly in the first four verses there is
nothing particularly sonorous, nothing loftier than the style of Eu-
ripides or indeed of Sophocles" ("certe in quatuor prioribus nihil
admodum sonorum, nihil quod supra Euripidem, nedum supra So-
phoclem, se attollat," I, 158, on line 1). Stanley's careful textual
reading, in addition, does not confine him to stylistic comments about
Aeschylean grandiloquence without the examination of passages of
brief but effective statement. He calls attention to the breviloquentia
which emphasizes each word when Clytemnestra stands over her
husband's body and addresses the Chorus: "This is Agamemnon, my
husband —
a corpse, the work of this right hand ." (Ag. 1404-06, . .
St. 1413). He also admires a section of the Eumenides (lines 45 ff.),

suggesting that Aeschylus frequently follows rather long, harsh, or
unfamiliar words {duriuscula) with those familiar to the common
people.
We have already noted one of Stanley's observations of stylistic
qualities distinctive to Aeschylus: the"kennings" which he ascribes
to Pythagorean obscurity. He also joins Petrus Victorius^' in admiring
Aeschylus' repeated paronomasia, citing not only names of characters
but even such instances as line 717 of the Prometheus, "[the river]
hybristes, not wrongly named." Other rhetorical figures are noted and
usually approved within the commentary: examples of tralatio, epi-
^' Stanley is citing Victorius' Variae Lectiones, XXXVI. 24, "[Nam argumentum ab
etymo non est leve aut contemnendum. . . . Sed etiam Aeschylus, non poeta solum,
sed doctissimus vir ac merito philosophus existimatus, utitur eodem argumento in
eadem persona notanda, vitioque cui affinis erat demonstrando, in fabula cui nomen
est 'Eirra im Qr)0a(;. Atque id non semel: unde etiam perspicitur ipsum id non leve
nee nugatorium existimasse; neque enim tam crebro eodem se contulisset,]" IV, 220-
21.
phonema, and sarcasmos. "Tautological" figures are defended by re-

ferring to Aeschylus as an imitator of Homer. The only rhetorical
device Stanley disapproves is the anachronism of referring to Scythia
in line 2 of the Prometheus Bound since the name is derived from a
yet unborn descendant of Hercules. Criticism of this error is common,
even in the scholiaf^ in Stanley's case the meticulous attention he
devotes to Greek history may account for his objection. One of the
most interesting combinations of historical knowledge with legal
rhetoric is Stanley's comment upon Orestes' defense before the
Areopagus {Eum. 443, St. 446): "There is a great deal of the poet's
skill (ars), and of his wisdom (prudentia), in this speech of Orestes;
for in such a short speech he skillfully treats the arguments necessary

in a capital case":
[Multa est in hac Orestis prfaei turn ars turn prudentia poetae: fabre
enim in tanta breviloquentia necessaria in causa capitali argumenta
persequitur.] (VI, 144)
Throughout the commentary Stanley has confined his rhetorical

discussion to the most familiar terms and emphasized particularly
Aeschylean choices; here his comprehension of the effective use of
Greek legal rhetoric within a drama anticipates a more sophisticated
analysis,such as Bernard Knox has applied to the legal rhetoric of
Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus}^
III
Stanley's political glosses are valuable as the observations of an
educated and fervent Royalist three years after the Restoration. (His
Psalterium Carolinum, rendering the Eikon Basilike in verse,may have
been known to Milton.^"*) In other notes he interprets Aeschylus
according to national and international law, referring to his major
European authority, Hugo Grotius {De Jure Belli ac Pads), a man
whom Milton also admired.
Before a consideration of these major emphases, it is valuable to
examine one indignant exclamation which shows Stanley's under-
standing of the Prometheus Bound. He is moved by his reading of
Zeus' seduction of lo to exclaim that power, now economic and
political, still has its privileges in affecting young women's lives:
"Rulers, sometimes by force, sometimes by gifts, sometimes by the
^^ Pedantic attention to anachronismos is regular in the scholiasts: e.g., the Medicean

scholia on Prom. 411 and 846 or Eum. 566.
" Bernard M. W. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven 1957; repr. 1966), pp. 79-
98.
^''
Crump, p. liv.
Margaret Arnold 247
magnificence of their royal apparel, easily dazzle the eyes of women,

sway their minds, and overcome their chastity. Sic et magnatesV
[Reges qua vi, qua muneribus, qua etiam regalis cultus pompa, foe-
minarum oculos facile perstringunt, animos inflectunt, pudicitiam
expugnant. Sic et magnates!] (I, 249)^^
From a literary standpoint Stanley's comment diminishes an objection

directed at this play by Francesco Robortello, whose contribution to
Aeschylean criticism is noted above. Stanley's comment glosses line
901 ff. (St. 903), the Chorus' reaction to the story of lo, expressing
the desire to marry within their own rank and avoid the attention
of the "mightier gods" —
a passage Robortello considered outside
the central action. Stanley appears quite willing to see that the choral
observation is natural after lo's story of torment and Prometheus'
prediction of future trials before she will find peace. Politically,
however, he goes beyond the account of the play (consistent to this
point with "sometimes by force") to describe men who resemble
Tudor or Stuart courtiers more nearly than they do Zeus.
In his quotations from Grotius, Stanley's royalists sympathies are
suggested by his emphases and omissions. He chooses for exposition
the Danaides' idea that Pelasgus is an absolute monarch, "You are
the state; you are the people" {Su. 370, St. 375), by quoting the
Dutch humanist's juridical statement at length. Grotius is taking up
an historical question about the presence of absolute monarchs in
antiquity, but portions of the statement do Pelasgus an injustice in
this play. According to the quotation, both Biblical and Roman
precedents make anointed kings responsible only to God: "Hence
the anointed king is said to be above the people, above the inheritance
of the Lord, above Israel." Grotius continues to assert the "truly
kingly" authority in the Roman Empire: "Hence the dictum of M.
Antoninus, the philosopher: 'No one but God alone can be a judge
of a princeps'. "^•^ Stanley further cites Grotius on the point that
Aeschylus' Argos, unlike Athens, was an absolute monarchy. Grotius
had not accounted for, and Stanley does not choose to gloss, the
passages Milton chose from the same play to refute Salmasius in the
Defensio Prima: Pelasgus' refusal to make an agreement on his sole
authority {Su. 368-69) and his obligation to consult an assembly of
citizens before he makes any decision concerning the suppliants (398-
^^ The comment follows discussion of an emendation by Robortello.

^^ Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pads, i.e. Sect. 8., "[Hinc
Stanley's citation of
rex unctus dicitur super populum, super haereditatem Domini, super Israelem. . . .
Hinc illud dictum Marci Antonini Philosophi; Nemo nisi solus Deus judex principis
esse potest,]" II, 132.
401; 517-18)." Thus Stanley selects his evidence from the comments
of the Danaides favorable to a strong monarchy and remains silent
on the speeches revealing Pelasgus' clear limitation of his own
authority.
Stanley, Grotius, and Milton are closer to agreement when Stanley
considers Pelasgus' comment {Su. 390, St. 395) that the Danaides are
subject to the law of their own country:
[Magnus vero Grotius 'quod si id cujus accusantur supplices non

. . .
sitvetitum jure naturae aut gentium, res dijudicanda erit ex jure civili
populi unde veniunt, quod optime ostendit Aeschylus Supplicibus'.]
(II, 134)
The great Grotius interpreted the passage thus: 'But if the crime
. . .
of which the defendants are accused is not forbidden by the law of

nature or by international law, the case must be judged according to
the civil law from which [the defendants] come, as Aeschylus shows
very well in the Supplices'.
The concepts of the jus naturae and the jus gentium are familiar
enough by the time Stanley is writing; he has already suggested that
marriages between cousins would not violate basic moral absolutes.
In a deceptively similar way Milton places the concepts into Samson's
rebuke to Dalila:
aught against my life,

... if
Thy country sought of thee, it sought unjustly,

Against the law of nature, law of nations.
{Samson Agonistes 888-90)^8
Samson's argument is more subtle, however, because his "civil" and
"natural" law are Judaic; hence the Philistine government is not a

moral or legal sovereignty to be obeyed. The Suppliants could raise
a similar question in the argument of the Danaides (lines 395 ff.),
but Stanley does not annotate their appeals to dike or to the gods in
terms of the jus naturae.
Stanley, throughout his commentary, has considered both the
predictability of the physical cosmos and the universality of the moral
absolutes within "natural law." But he places the miraculous on a
different level of consideration. For example, he makes a Biblical
2' For Milton's discussion of this play, I am referring to his Pro Populo Anglicano
Defensio, ed. Clinton W. Keyes, in The Works of John Milton (New York 1932), VII,
307-1 1. The lines cited from this play are those he quotes and translates from Greek,
to Latin in his argument.
^8
Milton's poetry is quoted from Hughes's edition, p. 572. For Milton's prose
discussion of Samson's motivation, see the Defensio Prima, ed. cit., VII, 219.
Margaret Arnold 249
parallel to the dialogue of Prometheus and Hermes (Prom. 1 00 1 , St.
1000), but draws his distinction carefully:
Hinc apud Evangelistas, ut Matth. VIII. 27. "Auefioi koI daXaaaa t;
non sine specie proverbii, de re quae praeter ordinem

viraKovovaiv ovto),
naturae. (I, 256)
So in the Evangelist (Matt. 8:27) "Winds and sea obey him," not
without the appearance of a proverb on a topic beyond the law of
nature.
Stanley, then, has considered the "law of nations" and the "law of
nature" as permanent concepts applicable to Aeschylus and his
characters as well as to the seventeenth century. However, he retains
his original reverence for Pythagorean and Christian "mystery" by
suggesting that divine revelation cannot be limited by these laws.
Accepting as fact the survival and reprinting of Stanley's criticism

into the early nineteenth century, how are we to assess its value? Not
only did he provide the popular edition of Aeschylus; he supplied
first
a necessary transition in interpreting "pagan" tragedy. His Pytha-

gorean allegoresis is tempered with the awareness of historical dis-
tance: he also wants to know what Greek and Roman geography,
customs, and beliefs actually were. He begins the close analysis qf
Aeschylus' unique style, and challenges the poetic theory available to
him when his author's text so requires. In many respects Fraenkel's
commendation of a famous later scholar may be applied to Thomas
Stanley's seventeenth-century endeavor: "For him there was no such
thing as a watertight compartment of textual criticism, another of
metre, another of history of religion, another of ancient law, and so
forth: they had all to be subservient and to co-operate to one
. . .
purpose only, the adequate interpretation of the text in hand."^^
University of Kansas
^^ Fraenkel is discussing Wilamowitz, whose stature in the history of classical

scholarship certainly surpasses Stanley's. I cite only the comment evaluating the
German scholar's literary criticism (I, 60-61), which summarizes an attitude and
purpose applicable to Stanley in the seventeenth-century context discussed in this
paper.
Myrrha's Revenge: Ovid and Shakespeare's
Reluctant Adonis*
KAREN NEWMAN
In all the controversy over Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, commen-

tators agree on one"Shakespeare's Adonis, contrary to the
issue:
whole tradition, scorns love.'" This fundamental change in the myth
* An earlier shorter version of this essay was presented at a Brown University
conference on Ovid and the Ovidian influence, March 1979. I wish to thank Charles
Segal, William Carroll, and S. Clark Hulse for reading this paper and making many
welcome suggestions and comments.
'
Don Cameron Allen, "On Venus and Adonis',' Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies
Presented Frank Percy Wilson, ed. Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (Oxford 1959),
to
p. 100; on Adonis' unwillingness, see also T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of

Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana 1950); Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and
Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (New York 1957), p. 7; William Keach, Elizabethan
Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick, N. J. 1977), and S. Clark Hulse, "Shakespeare's
Myth of Venus and Adonis," Proceediyigs of the Modern Language Association 93 (1978).
The one exception is A. Robin Bowers,
" 'Hard Armours' and 'Delicate Amours' in
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," Shakespeare Suniey 12 (1979), who argues Adonis
does acquiesce by kissing Venus and is, therefore, destroyed by the boar, a symbol
of lust. Bowers' allegorical reading fails to explain why, if Venus herself represents
lust, she so vehemently opposes Adonis' hunting of the boar; he also ignores Venus'
jealousy and confessed frustration in lines 597-98; 607-10; J. D. Jahn presents a more
convincing argument that Adonis, though reluctant, nevertheless tempts Venus in
"The Lamb of Lust: The Role of Adonis in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,"
Shakespeare Sun'ey 6 (1972).
The willing Adonis of earlier myth can be found in Orphic Hymns, No. 56;
Theocritus, Idylls, 1,3, 15; Bion, "Epitaphium Adonidis"; Hyginus, Fabulae, 164,
271; and Fulgentius, Mythologia, IIL
For a summary of earlier criticism and major issues raised by Venus and Adonis,
particularly the debate as to its "seriousness," seej. W. Lever, "The Poems," Shakespeare
Sun<ey 16 (1962), pp. 19-22, and more recently, Keach, cited above.
has never been satisfactorily explained, for though Adonis complies

with Venus' desires in the earliest versions, in the Ovidian account
which is generally regarded as Shakespeare's primary source, we are
told almost nothing of Adonis' response to her advances except that
he does not reject them outright.^
Critics have advanced various biographical, historical and literary
arguments to explain Shakespeare's unwilling Adonis. At the time
Shakespeare wrote and published Venus and Adonis, the Earl of Sou-
thampton, to whom the poem was dedicated, was fighting an arranged
marriage with Elizabeth Vere. Shakespeare must have known of the
young earl's unwillingness to marry.^ Those interested in psycho-
biographical causes explain Shakespeare's preoccupation with the motif
of older women and young, inexperienced men by citing his own
marriage at eighteen to Anne Hathaway who was eight years his senior."*
Panofsky proposes that Shakespeare's lover was influenced by the
"Venus and Adonis" in which Adonis
visual arts, specifically Titian's
actively evades Venus' embrace. William Keach refutes his argument
by pointing out first that Titian's virile young hunter is strikingly at
odds with Shakespeare's effeminate Adonis, and then that "nothing
in the painting proves that Titian thought of Adonis as having resisted
Venus throughout the encounter."^ Adonis, after all, traditionally
^ In Book X of the Metamorphoses, we learn only that Venus, grazed by an arrow

of Cupid's, has fallen in love with Adonis and forgotten her usual haunts and
occupations. Transformed by love, she goes about dressed like Diana and hunts
animals, warning Adonis against the lion and wild boar. When he asks why, Venus
stops to rest him a story. Before beginning her warning tale of Atalanta,
and tell
Venus places her head and neck in the lap of the reclining youth and interrupts her
own words with a kiss ("inque sinu iuvenis posita cervice reclinis / sic ait ac mediis
interserit oscula verbis" Metamorphoses X. 558-59). All quotations are cited from
W. S. Anderson's Teubner edition, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metaynorphoses (Leipzig 1977). In
Renaissance pictorial representations Adonis is always depicted with his head in
Venus' change from Ovid which reflects the aggressive Venus of earlier as well
lap, a
as later versions of the myth.

'
G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Ma. 1968),
p. 196.
* Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare(New York 1972), pp. 23 if. See
also William Empson's introduction to the Signet edition of the Poems, ed. William
Burto (New York 1968), p. xx, and Stephen's discourse in the library in the Scylla
and Charybdis chapter of Joyce's Ulysses.
^ Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York 1969); Panofsky notes that "the
painting ordered by Philip II remained in England for several years and was widely
accessible in sixteenth-century prints by Giulio Santo (dated 1559) and Martino Rota
(died 1583) .".p. 153; Keach, p. 56; see also David Rosand, "Titian and the 'Bed
.
of Polyclitus'," Burlington Magazine 1 17 (1975), pp. 242-45; and John Doebler's recent
article in Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982), pp. 480-90, "The Reluctant Adonis: Titian
and Shakespeare."
Karen Newman 253
ignores Venus' warnings and evades her protectiveness. Neither

biographical nor historical arguments provide a completely satisfac-
tory explanation for Shakespeare's unwilling Adonis.
Recent literary studies of Venus and Adonis have more often explored
the psychology of Shakespeare's reluctant lover than the sources for
his reluctance. Wayne Rebhorn claims that Adonis is part of a long
line of Renaissance epic heroes who fear being "reabsorbed symbol-
ically into the womb of this seemingly benevolent but really quite
deadly mother."'' Adonis' rejection of Venus' advances, then, is positive
and places him in the good, if surprising, company of Spenser's
Guyon and Tasso's Rinaldo. For Coppelia Kahn, Shakespeare dram-
atizes the narcissism characteristic of adolescent boys who fear the
devouring mother and project that fear outside themselves.' She
looks elsewhere in Ovid to explain Shakespeare's restive young man,
to the myths of Hermaphroditus and Narcissus.^ T. W. Baldwin long
ago pointed out that the common denominator of the Ovidian myths
of Adonis, Hermaphroditus and Narcissus is "the irresistibly beautiful
youth wooed by the over-ardent female."^ Though Ovid's presentation
of these diffident young men certainly influenced Shakespeare's
portrayal of his reluctant lover, we should not jettison too hastily
Ovid's tale of Venus and Adonis. Preoccupation with Adonis' pre-
dicament obscures rather than clarifies the mystery of the unwilling
Adonis, for as classicists have long recognized, the main psychological
interest in all three Ovidian tales is the frustrated female lover.'"
The active reluctance of Shakespeare's Adonis can best be under-
stood not by looking at other unwilling boys in Ovidian myth, but
by looking at the structure of the Metamorphoses, at its later com-
^ "Mother Venus: Temptation in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," Shakespeare

Studies 11 (1978), p. 13.
^ "Self and Eros in Venus and Adonis" Centennial Review 20 (1976), pp. 351-71.
^ BuUough notes the relationship between the Hermaphroditus and Narcissus
myths and Shakespeare's portrayal of Adonis, I, pp. 162-63; see also Allen, "On
Venus and Adonis',' who suggests another possible source in the story of Hippolytus,
the chaste hunter. He points out that "ancient poets and mythographers sometimes
said that a jealous Mars or an avenger Apollo sent the boar that killed Adonis, but
Passerat, a French contemporary of Shakespeare's, invented a new, and perhaps more
congenial legend. Diana sent the boar to revenge the killing of Hippolytus. ." In
. .
addition, there is a supporting hint in the interpolated tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes
found in Ovid's version of the myth. "Hippomenes (nrTro-Mfi'Oi; passion or strength of
a horse) has a connection with Hippolytus and with Adonis's stallion that [a poet]
with 'small Greek' would notice," p. 107; Donald G. Watson, "The Contrarieties of
Venus and Adonis," Studies in Philology 75 (1978), pp. 32-63, explains Adonis' reluctance
as a witty reversal of Petrarchan roles.
3 Baldwin, p. 84.
'°
See, for example, Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge 1970).
mentaries, and at Shakespeare's Venus from whose point of view,

after all, most of the poem's action is recounted. This shift in
perspective from Adonis' unwillingness to Venus' desire demands a
re-evaluation of the poem in psychological as well as literary terms.
What follows is first a reading of Ovid which suggests how Shake-
speare's contemporaries understood the tale of Venus and Adonis;
next I consider the implications of a Renaissance reading for Shake-
speare's poem; and finally I re-evaluate traditional psychological
interpretations of the myth in terms of a feminist analysis which
offers a new perspective on Venus' central position in the poem.
I, The myth of Venus and Adonis ends Book X of the Metamorphoses,
but the central story recounts the incestuous passion of Myrrha for
her father, Cinyras. Adonis is the son of their unnatural union which
Venus has caused by enflaming Myrrha with desire for her father.
Implicit in Shakespeare's poem is the submerged irony that Venus'
love for Adonis is incestuous, like Myrrha's for her father in Ovid.
Myrrha's revenge on Venus for inspiring her unnatural passion is
worked out through Adonis' rejection of the goddess of love.

Frustrated love motivates much
of Ovid's narrative, and in Books
IX and X, unnatural generated by the female
love, particularly that
libido, causes situations which can only be resolved through death
and metamorphosis. As Brooks Otis points out in his study of Ovid

as an Epic Poet, the series of tales beginning with the story of Byblis
and climaxing in the story of Myrrha recounts the vagaries of perverse
love and sexual desire." The story of Caunus and Byblis, which
begins with a warning "that girls should never love what is forbidden"
("ut ament concessa puellae" Met. IX. 454), initiates the themes of
incest and frustrated love which link the two books. Byblis loves her
brother, but her love, as Ovid emphasizes throughout the tale, is
unnatural, not fitting between brother and sister. Inspired by an
erotic dream of sexual pleasure with her sibling, Byblis writes him
confessing her love. Caunus rejects her proposal and flees. She is
driven mad and eventually her tears of grief are metamorphosed into
a fountain bearing her name. The Byblis story, in which unnatural
love remains unconsummated, occupies the central position in Book
IX; it is paralleled by the tale of Myrrha in Book X whose incestuous
love is actually satisfied.
Book X begins with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but its
avowed subject, as Orpheus tells us, is boys beloved of gods and girls
frantic with forbidden fires so as to merit punishment ("dilectos
" Ihid., pp. 225 ff.

Karen Newman 255
superis, inconcessisque puellas / ignibus attonitas meruisse libidine

poenam," Met. X. 154-55). The climactic episode and the center of
the book is the story of Myrrha's unlawful passion to which Ovid
devotes 222 out of 735 lines. After her father discovers he has been
tricked into incest with his daughter, Myrrha flees to escape his wrath.
Praying to an unnamed goddess, she is changed into the myrrh tree
from which the incestuously conceived Adonis is born. The tale ends
with a brief parody of the epic genealogy: Adonis is born from his
sister and his grandfather: "'ille sorore / natus avoque suo" {Met. X.
520-21).
Ovid's emphasis on the strange circumstances of Adonis' birth
should also remind us that Myrrha's own father was the result of an
unnatural union, for he is the grandson of Pygmalion and the statue
which Venus had brought to life. Following the account of Adonis'
birth, Ovid describes his unnatural beauty by comparing him to the
Amores (Met. X. 516), Cupid-like cherubs who appear frequently in
Roman art with wings and quivers.'^ The link between Adonis and
Cupid is made explicit, however, in the medieval and Renaissance
commentaries and translations: in the Ovide moralise, for example,
Adonis "le dieu d'amour ressemblast"; Golding translates Amores
simply as "Cupids."'^
Ovid begins Adonis' own tale with yet another description of his
beauty which pleases Venus, but more significantly, avenges the desires
of his mother ("matrisque ulciscitur ignes" Met. X. 524). Ovid says
outright that Venus' love for Adonis avenges his mother's unnatural
passion, a passion which most versions of the myth attribute to Venus'
inspiration.''' The poet goes on in the next line to describe Venus as
a mother herself: while giving his mother ("matri") a kiss, Cupid
wounds her one of his arrows; the result of this

accidentally with
wound is her love for Adonis. In two lines, the word mater refers
first to Myrrha, then to Venus, and thereby implicitly joins their
guilty passions. For if we remember that Adonis has been explicitly

identified with the Cupid-like Amores, and in the medieval and
Renaissance traditions with Cupid himself, we can recognize the irony
'^
See W. S. Anderson's commentary in his edition of Books Vl-X, Oi'id's
Metamorphoses (Norman, Oklahoma 1972), p. 519.

'^
Ovide moralise, ed. C. De Boer (Wiesbaden 1966, repr. from 1936 ed.). All
references are to this edition; Ovid's Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, 1567, ed.
John Frederick Nims (New York 1965), p. 265.
'•
See W. Atallah, Adonis dans la litterature et I'art grecs (Paris 1966) and Marcel
Detienne, Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, tr. Janet Lloyd (New York 1977),
both of whom review the ancient sources of the myth. Medieval and Renaissance
commentaries also recognize Venus' part in Myrrha's love for her father (see below).
implicit in Ovid: Venus' love for Adonis, like Myrrha's for her father,
is incestuous.'^ Though Shakespeare does not refer specifically to the
Myrrha myth, Baldwin points out that "In Shakespeare's day, that
knowledge could be assumed.""' Both the Ovide moralise and its
humanist successor, the Regius commentary (1492), make Adonis'
origins explicit:
Venus, la mere au dieu d'amours,

Le fil Mirre ama par amours.
(3703-04)
Venus, the mother of the god of love, was in love with Myrrha's son.
Adonis ex incesto patris ac filie coitu natus.'^
Regius goes even further in his gloss at the beginning of the tale by
settingup a careful equivalence between Venus and Myrrha: Venus
delighted in Adonis no less than Myrrha in her father ("Adonem
cognominatus quem non minus Venus dilexit quam ilia patrem
Cinyram dilexerat beneficio Cupidinis").
In his seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter," J. Lacan demonstrates
the importance of what absent to psychoanalytic interpretation.'^
is
Literary critics and theoreticians have transferred Lacan's insights to

literary analysis by showing how the not-said or silences of a text are
analogous to the overdetermined details of dream or the analytic
session. Such details make manifest what is absent or latent a past —
trauma or event not overtly present in the patient's discourse.'^
Silences can signify, sometimes more eloquently than what is spoken
aloud. In the case of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, what is absent
shaped the Renaissance reader's understanding of the poem in
significant ways, for the poet undoubtedly recognized this submerged
theme of incest and exploits its ironic potential.
When Venus presents her argument on behalf of procreation, her
'^
Reach admits "there is a submerged suggestion of incest, a suggestion which
glances at the story of Adonis's mother Myrrha," but he ignores the significance of
his own glancing remark, (p. 77); see also Rebhorn, who notes the incestuous
implications of Venus' role as mother (p. 3).
"^ Baldwin, p. 4.
" Raphael Regius, P. Ovidii Metamorphosis {1526), sig. M6\ Baldwin quotes a similar
argumentum derived from Regius's commentary, p. 87.
'*
Jacques Lacan, "Le seminaire sur 'La Lettre volee'," Ecrits I (Paris 1966), pp.
19-78.
See for example the work of Pierre Macherey, Pour une theorie de la production
'^
(Paris 1978); Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (Atlantic Highlands,

litt'eraire
N. J. 1976); and Shoshana Felman's introduction to the volume of Yale French Studies
entitled Literature and Psychoanalysis 55-56 (1977).
Karen Newman 257
allusions to Adonis' own begetting would inevitably have recalled to

Shakespeare's audience, so familiar with Ovid, the unnatural circum-
stances of Adonis' conception and birth. "Sappy plants" she reminds
him, are made
"to bear" (165), certainly an odd end to the series
which begins "Torches are made to light" (163), but a reminder to
a knowing audience of Ovid's etiological tale which explains Adonis'
birth in terms of the bole which exudes the myrrh tree's sap. Venus
ends the stanza with the exhortation "Thou wast begot; to get it is
thy duty" (168). She also chides Adonis for his reluctance by re-
minding him of his own mother's willingness, and obliquely links her
frustration with Myrrha's:
"Art thou a woman's son, and canst not feel

What 'tis to love? how want of love tormenteth?
O, had thy mother borne so hard a mind.

She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind."
(201-04)
Shakespeare also wittily recalls Adonis' unnatural descent from Pyg-

malion and his statue when he has Venus characterize Adonis as
cold and senseless stone.

Well-painted idol, image dull and dead.
Statue contenting but the eye alone, *
Thing like a man, but of no woman bred!
(211-14)
Venus not only an aggressive masculine wooer; she is also from

is
the poem's outset a loving mother.^" The notorious image of the

goddess plucking Adonis from his horse and tucking him under her
arm suggests not so much Venus as the "bold-faced suitor" of the
first stanza, butVenus as a mother, lifting and carrying her small
child.Shakespeare describes Adonis here as "the tender boy," thereby
establishing our sense of him as a child. Later he is "like the froward
infant stilled with dandling" (562). Venus' solicitous care for Adonis
^° Spenser's portrayal of Venus' relation to Adonis as maternal in Book III of the

Faerie Queene (1590) must inevitably have influenced Shakespeare's characterization
of Venus and Adonis. In the Garden of Adonis Spenser describes the goddess as
"great Mother Venus" who "takes her fill" of a "wanton boy," an epithet which
conflates Adonis and Cupid. For a discussion of Spenser and Shakespeare's different
uses of Ovid, see Ellen Aprill Harwood, "Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare's Critique
of Spenser," Rutgers University Library Journal 39 (n.d.), pp. 44-60; Rebhorn assembles
the evidence for Shakespeare's maternal Venus, pp. 1-3; for an earlier classical account
in which Venus' relation to Adonis is portrayed as maternal, see Charles Segal,
"Adonis and Aphrodite, Theocritus, Idyll III, 48," L Antiquite classique 38 (1969),
pp. 82-88.
and her fear of his hunting wild animals, certainly inspired in part
by Ovid's portrayal of Venus, suggest the motherly concern which
critics often remark, but without noting its incestuous implications.
Don Cameron Allen, for example, points out:
Adonis is a child with her. When she swoons, he fusses over her as a
boy might over his mother. He will readily kiss her goodnight when
it is time for bed. The goddess takes advantage of the filial-maternal
relationship which is really all Adonis wants. ^'
Venus, however, wants much more. Later in the poem she is
described as a "milch doe" seeking to feed her fawn and, of course,

a park which beckons Adonis to "Feed where thou wilt" (229-240).
But the maternal-filial imagery is nowhere more obvious than in the
poem's penultimate stanzas:
"Poor flow'r," quoth she, "This was thy father's guise —
Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire —
For every little grief to wet his eyes;
To grow unto himself was his desire,
And so 'tis thine; but know, it is as good
To wither in my breast as in his blood.
"Here was thy father's bed, here in my breast;

Thou art the next of blood, and 'tis thy right.
Lo in thishollow cradle take thy rest;
My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night:
There shall not be one minute in an hour
Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love's flow'r."
(1177-1188)
Venus crops the Adonis flower and her invocation of "thy father"
reminds us of its direct, familial tie to Adonis. Having lost the father,
she will have the son. Shakespeare alludes to Adonis' descent from
Myirha when he has Venus call Adonis "a more sweet-smelling sire."
She places the flower in her breast which she calls "thy father's bed";
in "this hollow cradle" she will rock it "day and night."^^
^'
Allen, p. 109; see also A. C. Hamilton, "Venus and Adonis," Studies in English
Literature 1 (1961), p. 14; Richard Lanham, Motives of Eloquence (New Haven 1976),
p. 86; and Keach, for whom the incestuous maternal-filial imagery suggests "not a
scandalous unnaturalness, but a connection between the erotic and the maternal
aspects of the feminine psyche," p. 77.
^^ Kahn
(p. 357) claims that the comparison of the boy Adonis to a flower is
unconventional and therefore emphasizes his youth and peculiar role with relation
to Venus. On the contrary, the comparison of young men, particularly young men
who die prematurely, to flowers dates from Homer and would have been well-known
to Shakespeare from many sources including the story of Nisus and Euryalus in the
Aeneid.
Karen Newman 259
We can now see the significance of this imagery and its relationship
to Shakespeare's Ovidian source: Adonis' rejection of Venus' advances
is Shakespeare's self-conscious elaboration of Myrrha's revenge for
her own disappointed love. He portrays Venus loving a mere boy in

an incestuous relationship which wittily reverses the myth of Myrrha
and Cinyras in which daughter loves father. For Shakespeare and the
reader, mother Venus loves her unwilling "son" Adonis and his death
is analogous to Myrrha's loss of her beloved father. The audience
for which Shakespeare wrote his poem, the Earl of Southampton and
his sophisticated coterie of friends, were sure to be amused by the
deliberate working out of Myrrha's revenge which medieval and
Renaissance glosses of Ovid make explicit:
Adonis a vengeance prise

De la grant honte at du mesfait
Que Venus a sa mere a fait
Quant el li fist amer son pere
Or revenche Adonis sa mere.
Adonis took vengeance for the great shame and wrong Venus did to
his mother when she made Myrrha love her own father. Now Adonis
avenges his mother.
William Barksted's Mirrha (1607), a poem generally agreed to be

prompted by Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, provides further testi-
mony of this revenge motif:
Wei, wel (quoth she) thou hast reveng'd the spight

Which from my accurst sons bow did fowly light
On thy faire Mother, O immortall boy
Though thou be faire, tis I that should be coy.^'
Ovid's incestuous story of Myrrha informs the poem, acting as a witty

and ironic subtext to the text itself.
II. By focussing on the incest theme and frustrated female desire,

the Myrrha story, Ovid's tale and its later commentaries serve, in
addition to psycho-biographical and historical arguments, to explain
Shakespeare's reluctant Adonis. They also point to a central problem
in the poem which has always disturbed commentators. The Shake-
spearean narrator's distance from Venus' desire, manifest in his often
noted comic exaggeration of her size and ridicule of her overbearing
lust, conflicts with a shift in our sympathies in the last section of the
poem. After Adonis' departure to hunt the boar, the narrator, and
^^ Quoted by Rufus Putney, "Venus and Adonis: Amour with Humor," Philological
Quarterly 20 (1941), p. 536.
consequently the reader, becomes increasingly sympathetic toward

Venus' feelings. This shift makes the poem more emotionally powerful
than is often admitted. Modern archetypal and psychological inter-
pretations identify Venus and the boar with opposing aspects of the
Great Mother and Adonis with the figure of her son-lover who in
adolescence begins to differentiate himself from the unconscious and
affirm his masculine otherness.^"* As E. Neumann describes it in The
Origins and History of Consciousness:
he is her lover as well as her son. But he is not yet strong enough to
cope with her, he succumbs to her in death and is devoured. The
mother-beloved turns into the terrible Death Goddess. The . . .
masculine principle is not yet a paternal tendency balancing the

maternal-female principle; it is still youthful and vernal, the merest
beginning of an independent movement away from the place of origin
and the infantile relation. ^^
The boar is a complicated symbol in myth, its phallic character,

according to Neumann, a trace from that period when masculine and
feminine are united in the uroborus or Great Mother. It is associated
in Ovid with the wood and the cave, the womb-like realms of the turrita
Mater, and by implication, with Venus who causes the lovers Atalanta
and Hippomenes Venus and
in their interpolated tale within Ovid's
Adonis story to copulate Such an interpretation of the
in Cybele's cave.
myth certainly fits Ovid's larger narrative structure, for this tale, which
ends Book X, is followed by the death of Orpheus at the hands of the
Maenads, the maddened, destroying matrons of Thrace.
Traditional psychological interpretations such as Neumann's adopt
a peculiarly masculine perspective toward Venus' desire; they project
male fears of female sexuality onto Venus by attributing the boar
and its An alternative and less limited view is
destructiveness to her.
to see theboar as a symbol of male virility, both in physical appearance
and in myth. A. T. Hatto in fact argues that Venus is jealous of the
boar with whom she competes for Adonis' affections. ^^ He documents
^''
Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull
(New York 1954), p. 78. See also Hereward T. Price, "The Function of Imagery in
Venus and Adonis," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 31 (1945),
pp. 295-96, who calls the boar "Venus in her most terrible aspect."
p. 47; in his discussion of the Adonis myth, Atallah points out that Adonis'
^^ Ibid.,
effeminacy and the phallic character of the boar probably date from the Alexandrian
period, not from any so-called "primitive" past, pp. 48-49, 63-74.
^^ Hunting the boar is traditionally associated with the hero's initiation. For a
review of the medieval and Renaissance pedigree of the boar as a symbol of male
virility, see A. T. Hatto, ''Venus and Adonis — and the Boar," Modern Language Notes
41 (1946), pp. 353-61. Hatto also points to Shakespeare's own use of the boar as a
sexual-phallic symbol in Cymbeline II, v.
Karen Newman 261
the medieval and Renaissance identification of the boar with male

sexuality and points out that in Shakespeare's poem mention of the
boar inevitably leads Venus to discourse on jealousy.^' Her explicit
sexual description of the slaying of Adonis supports his argument:
the boar "thought to kiss him, and hath killed him so" (1110) and
"by a kiss thought to persuade him there; / And nuzzling in his
flank, the loving swine / Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin"
(1114-16). Adonis, who seeks to avoid sexual love with Venus,
encounters it with the boar. The late classical and continental sources
of this conceit reinforce such a reading, for in pseudo-Theocritus
and the Italian versions, the boar himself describes his act as a kiss
and thereby makes the rivalry between Venus and the boar explicit.^^
If Venus is cast as mother in this poem, and Adonis as son, the
boar suggests not so much the Great Mother, as conventional psy-
chological interpretations claim, but her rival, a kind of sexual father
whose violence reinstates the sexual difference which Adonis' beauty
and Venus' incestuous love endanger. Venus can avenge her wrong
only by prophesying an endless chain of reciprocal male violence in
love which will punish men:
It shall be cause of war and dire events

And son and sire ...
set dissension 'twixt the
(1159-60)
Shakespeare's poem, Ovid's tale and indeed the myth itself re-
enact that primitive act of violence which Rene Girard describes in
his Violence but with a difference.^® Girard liberates desire
et le Sacre,
from its Freudian familial model by arguing that all desire
specifically
is mimetic. The Oedipal desire of son for mother is generated not
from some inherent sexual urge toward a particular object at an early
Hatto notes the boar's role as a usurper both in Venus and Adonis, and Richard
^^
III, ii, and V, ii. With amusing understatement, he calls the Venus-Adonis-boar
III,
relation an "unusual triangular situation," p. 361.

^^ It has long been remarked that the sexual roles of Venus and Adonis are
reversed to enable Shakespeare to describe a homosexual rather than heterosexual

relation —
obliquely enough, however, for the poem to have won the approval of
the Archbishop of Canterbury who licensed it in 1593. For late classical and Italian
examples of the boar justifying his "kiss," see Hatto, and Hulse, p. 104, who cites
the pseudo-Theocritean "Death of Adonis," accepted as Theocritus, No. 30, in the
Renaissance. Hulse notes that the poem was translated anonymously into English as
Sixe Idillia (1588; repr. London 1922); cited by Gregorio Giraldi, De Deis Gentium,
and imitated by Ronsard and Minturno, "De Adoni ab Apro Interempto," in
Epigrammata et Elegia, pp. 7a-8b, bound with Poemata (Venice 1564).
^^ (Paris
1972); see Diacritics (March 1978) devoted to Girard's work, and more
recently Larry E. Shiner, "The Darker Side of Hellas: Sexuality and Violence in
Ancient Greece," The Psychohistory Review 9 (1980), pp. 111-135.
stage of development, but simply by the desire to imitate those with

power. Men contend for a sexual object, or indeed any object, in
endlessly reciprocal "mimetic desire" which leads to what Girard
terms a crisis of difference. By desiring the same object, father and
son lose their individual identities and become doubles whose rivalry
leads to reciprocal violence. Girard contends that such violence can
only be arrested by collective aggression against a surrogate victim,
an outsider, whether slave, child, foreigner, or pharmakos, whose death
restores difference and, therefore, order. The implied threat of incest
in Venus' love for Adonis, present for author and audience, is deflected
through his death and metamorphosis, thereby maintaining the incest
taboo with its widely recognized, almost universal civilizing function.
But neither Ovid's tale nor Shakespeare's poem wholly conforms

to Girard's model, for the conventional syntax of the Oedipal complex
is inverted: mother, not father, is desiring subject, and Adonis, that
epicene representative of sexual desire itself, the object of her desire.

For Venus, the boar represents the father and phallic power which
destroys her love object; by doing so he re-establishes the familial
bonds upon which patriarchal culture depends. Both the boar and
the narrator of the poem, like Orpheus in Metamorphoses X, are the
bearers of patriarchal order.
By ending Book X not only with the death of Adonis, who rejects
women, but also with the death of Orpheus at women's hands, Ovid
subverts that patriarchal order. At the end of Book IX, we find the
taleof Iphis and lanthe in which both women are desiring subjects
whose desire works within and across gender lines. In that tale, Iphis'
mother, ordered to expose her female child, violates patriarchal
command and instead obeys the Great Mother's behest to raise Iphis
as a boy. She is eventually transformed into a man and thereby
enabled to marry lanthe. Throughout Books IX and X, Ovid coun-
terpoints the overvaluation of love that crosses gender lines in the
Pygmalion and Orpheus who undervalue
incest tales with the tales of
love by refusing womenor loving boys; the tale of Iphis and lanthe
is subversive because it upholds and obliterates sexual difference.
Shakespeare's poem, unlike the Metamorphoses, contains and con-

trols these subversive suggestions, for in Venus and Adonis, Venus is
left with only the delicate purple flower which was Adonis, a flower
which Shakespeare reminds us will "wither," a mere ornament instead

of the flesh and blood object of her unnatural desire. In Venus and
Adonis the witty conceit of Myrrha's revenge focusses our attention
on Venus' frustrated love, a focus in keeping with Shakespeare's
O vidian source. This shift in perspective generates for the reader a
Karen Newman 263
re-interpretation of the myth itself to represent woman as desiring

subject in a changed position in conventionally represented sexual
and familial configurations, but that changed position is finally un-
dermined by the Shakespearean narrator's distance from, even pun-
isment of, Venus' desire.
III. In closing we should consider

the nature of myth itself and what
differentiates from other narratives. Myth, unlike other stories,
it
seeks to contain or overcome oppositions and improbabilities.^" A

general theory of myth is perhaps as hard to formulate as a definitive
reading of Venus and Adonis, but S. Clark Hulse makes a useful
suggestion in his essay on Shakespeare's poem and the mythographic
tradition. Despite their differences, he remarks, all the various theories
of myth are preoccupied with mediation. For Frazer and the ritualists,
myth mediates between the sacred and profane; for Freud and Jung,
between the unconscious and the conscious, the collective and the
individual; for Levi-Strauss and the structuralists, between the op-
posing terms and contradictions of a given social system.^' In classical
versions of the ancient tale as well as in Shakespeare's poem, Adonis
mediates between opposites. In his fascinating book on the system of
dietary, vegetable and astronomical codes attached to the ritual of
the Adonia in ancient Greece, Marcel Detienne recognizes in Adonis*
erotic powers of attraction capable of bringing together opposing
terms. ^^ As a mortal who attracts the goddess of love, he brings
together heaven and earth; as the progeny of the union of Myrrha
and Cinyras, he links those who should be poles apart, daughter and
father. Adonis is not a husband, nor even a man, but a lover whose
effeminacy, his mediating status between masculine and feminine, is
always emphasized by the Greeks' description of his appearance and
his association with the perfume myrrh. In its ambivalence, in its
multiple contrarieties and in Adonis' role as mediator, Shakespeare's
^° Levi-Strauss argues that the function of primary myth is to bridge the gap
between conflicting values through a "series of mediating devices each of which

generates the next one by a process of opposition and correlation. The kind of . . .
logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science. [T]he difference

. . .
lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to
which it is applied" Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G.
Schoepf (New York 1963), pp. 226, 230.
*'
"Shakespeare's Myth of Venus and Adonis," Proceedings of the Modern Language
Association 93 (1978), p. 95.
^^ Detienne argues that
the legend is not a fertility myth at all, but a myth about
seduction: "The two episodes (Myrrha and Adonis) involve a double seduction, that
of the mother as well as that of the son. ... As in the story of Myrrha, seduction
makes it possible to bring together two terms that are usually held apart," p. 64.
Venus and Adonis resembles these earlier versions, for Shakespeare's

transformation of Adonis into unwilling lover, Venus into loving
mother and boar into jealous father, rings another change on the
mediated oppositions characteristic of myth.
Shakespeare's use of antithesis in this poem has been often re-
marked: red and white is united in Adonis' complexion and in the
purple (purpureus, red, dark, violet) and white flower which is Adonis
metamorphosed. Venus manifests the same antithesis because of the
conflicting feelings of fear and desire he generates in her. Adonis'
beauty androgynous: he is "rose cheeked," "the field's chief flower,"
is
"more lovely than aman," with a "maiden burning in his cheeks."

This sexual ambiguity is suggested even in the Ovidian tale, for in
the story of Atalanta Venus emphasizes the young runner's beauty
by saying she was as beautiful as Venus herself, or Adonis "if he were
a woman." Adonis also plays a mediating role in joining the two
hunts of the poem, for he is first the quarry of Venus' sexual chase
which begins the narrative; then a hunter in the literal hunt; and in
a final reversal of roles, the victim of the boar.^^ Adonis also mediates
between the sun and moon, for his beauty shames "the sun by day
and her [Cynthia] by night." The sun, as classicists have pointed out,
frequently suggests danger and destruction in the Metamorphoses. It
is a masculine symbol of sexual power and energy "frequently
represented as the unwelcome obtruder shunned by hunters and
virgins."" And Adonis' own words link Venus with the sun:
Fie, no more of love!
The sun doth burn my face — I must remove.
(185-86)
Both animals and gods act contrary to their natures because of

Adonis: wild beasts are tamed by seeing his beauty and Venus is
transformed from an ardently sought object of love to an aggressor
who "like a bold faced suitor 'gins to woo him." But she is more
frequently described not as a mortal, but as a beast of prey a —
parodic elaboration of Ovid's description of Venus as huntress. The
effêct of Adonis' beauty, which from the first is described as unnatural,
upsets the cosmological order; he threatens that order by endangering

or abolishing the sexual, natural, familial and cultural distinctions
upon which peace, order and fertility depend.
^^ See Hugh Parry, "Ovid's Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Landscape,"

Trans. Am. Philol. Ass. 95 (1964), pp. 268-82, for a discussion of Ovid's exploitation
of the erotic connotations of the hunt.
^^ Both Detienne and Parry (p. 277) point out the powerful and dangerous qualities
of the sun and its associations with sexuality.
Karen Newman 265
The riddle of Shakespeare's reluctant Adonis can be solved not

through the discovery of some new source, but by a more careful
attention to the larger narrative structure of Books IX and X of the
Metamorphoses. Ovid provides not only a source for the plot of this
poem and its psychological configurations, but also a beginning for
itsmost frequently cited stylistic feature, antithesis. And Shakespeare's

use of antithesis and paradox in his portrayal of Adonis, though
and rhetorical climate of his age, can
characteristic of the intellectual
alsobe better understood by considering the nature of myth itself
which seeks to represent in language the multiple contrarieties and
oppositions of human desire.
Brown University
8
Ovidian Pictures and

'The Rules and Compasses"
of Criticism
JUDITH DUNDAS
The decorum of the moderns, generally implied rather than ex-

pressed — word itself is now considered indecorous
for the has—
condemned or refused to take seriously much that was sanctioned by
ancient and Renaissance writers and painters. If we are to approach
these works with the sympathetic understanding they deserve, we
have to respond to them with a sense of the decorum which they
respect and which no longer obtains in the modern world. My
examples —
and this paper is no more than a plea for what needs
to be done some great works of art
for the sake of — will be confined
to the Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare and its parallels in the visual
arts.
Decorum is a more subtle thing than any rules; the general notion
of what it is for any era is not enough to create the right appreciation
of such works as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. For, in the fullest
sense of the word, with each work of art a new kind of decorum is
born; each recreates, as well as observes, the ideal of decorum.
My reference here to "the rules" echoes my title. I have borrowed
the part in quotation marks —
"the rules and compasses" of criti-
cism —
from Laurence Sterne, who in Tristram Shandy satirizes the
standards evoked by ignorant critics, who unwittingly deny the essence
of decorum by too literal an adherence to the rules when they judge
That is a sure way to defeat poetry, both in

individual works of art.'
literature where we need above all to seek, as Thomas
and in painting,
Wilson the sixteenth-century rhetorician said, "some thing that par-
taineth ... to the knowledge of the trueth" or "to the setting forth
of Natures work."^
As a partial context for my immediate examples, I would refer to
the decorum of Ovid. In the Renaissance, his Metamorphoses might
be viewed as breaking Aristotle's "rules," much as writers of romance
epics, such as Ariosto, were breaking them. Giraldi Cinthio, however,
in his essay On Romances, notes that a poet is given the same power
as a painter, namely, he says, the power "of varying likenesses
according to his own judgment as appears to him most to his purpose."'
He cites the example of Ovid, who "laid aside the laws of Vergil . . .
and Homer and did not follow the laws of Aristotle given us in his
Poetics. This happened because he devoted himself to the writings
. . .
of matter for which rules and examples did not exist, just as there
were no materials on our Romances."^ This defense of the poet's
power to invent according to his purpose goes right to the heart of
decorum. Ovid did not hesitate to begin the Metamorphoses with the
beginning of the world, "delivering himself," says Cinthio, "with
admirable skill from Aristotle's laws of art" Aristotle who advo- —
cated beginning in medias res in order to create a unified action.^ But
we should define our art, not by arbitrary rules, but by the practice
of great artists, just as Aristotle himself did. That, in essence, is
Cinthio's defense of the Italian epic poets.
For modern critics of Ovid, the problem has similarly been to
define his relationship to the epic tradition and, in so doing, identify
his purpose in the Metamorphoses. According to his own statement of
purpose, at the beginning of his poem, he will deal with the history
of the world from the beginning to the present, and his theme will
be change. Now this theme itself precludes epic unity and at the
same time invites a tone not unlike Montaigne's who, in his Essays,
was also dealing with change: "I cannot fix my subject," he says.
Montaigne of course was not alluding to epic tradition, as Ovid was,
'
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth 1967),
p. 193.
2 Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford 1901), p. 195.
^ Giraldi Cinthio, On Romances, selections in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed.
A. H. Gilbert (New York 1940), p. 269.
"•
Giraldi Cinthio, On Romances, trans. Henry L. Snuggs (Lexington, Kentucky
1968), pp. 40-41.
^ The phrase occurs of course in Horace's Ars Poetica 148-49, but cf. Aristotle,
Poetics, chapter 23.
Judith Dundas 269
and hence needed no other unity than the unity of his speaking
voice, talking about himself.
For Ovid, various critics have gone to great lengths to show? a
structural pattern in his poem, and
in the earnest pursuit of this goal
have done than justice to the uniqueness of his tone. His seeming
less
objectivity of narration does not preclude his absolute control over
his materials. He is there, at our elbow so to speak, commenting not
only indirectly, by his mode of description, but also directly, by
interjection. When telling the story of Narcissus, for example, he
sounds rather like Philostratus, who cannot help addressing figures
in the pictures he describes; so Ovid says to Narcissus: "Why try to
catch an always fleeting image, / Poor credulous youngster? What
you seek is nowhere. .'"^
Such interjections belong, and are entirely
. .
fitting, to the poet's apparent naivete of description, that delight in

pictorial detail which made him an inspiration to poets and painters
alike.
If the older critics, such as Brooks Otis, have been more concerned
with placing Ovid in the context of literary history and defining his
genre, Richard Lanham, a leading light among rhetorical critics of
the present day, denies Ovid any serious purpose at all. This poet,
he contends, is "rhetorical man," for whom style is all and content
nothing."^ By means of this approach, Lanham effêctively performs a
surgical operation, removing any suggestion of heart from Ovid's
playfulness.
The real task of the critic of Ovid, however, is to recognize all
that his humor implies: sympathydetachment. Could one

as well as
not see the poet's genius as directing him to turn the ancient myths
into an imitation of nature —
in other words, to find and show forth
the truth of these fantastic tales? It is this achievement that surely
made the Metamorphoses a bible for Renaissance poets and painters —
something a hollow style could never do.
Let us turn to Titian for an example of faithfulness to Ovid's
spirit, rather than the imitation which only copies. In illustrated
editions of Ovid, the story of Venus and Adonis is represented usually

by one of two scenes: the embrace of the lovers, or Venus' lamentation
over the dead Adonis —
or a combination of the two [Figures 1,2,
3]. It is noteworthy that these prints represent only one moment of
the story at a time, unlike Titian's great painting which concentrates
^ Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, Indiana 1964), III,
432-33. English translations of the Metamorphoses are taken from this edition. Cf. also
Philostratus, Imagines I. 23.
' Richard Lanham, Motives of Eloquence (New Haven 1976), pp. 48-64.
into one moment the before and after as well [Figure 4]. Dramatically,
between the lovers that is implicit
his picture captures just that tension
inOvid's account, though not developed. This tension is implicit, for
example, in the fact that Venus was driven by love to change her
own nature when she went hunting with Adonis and that, though
she warned him against hunting the boar, he insisted on doing so.
Yet Titian, despite his truth to Ovid, received some criticism in his
own time for "depicting Adonis fleeing from Venus, who is shown
in the act of embracing him, whereas he very much desired her
embraces."^ A similar demand for a precedent lies behind present
day inquiries into the origins of Shakespeare's depiction of a "reluctant
Adonis."
Criticism,even "iconographic," which attaches itself to a supposed
deviation from the text is based on a false notion of imitation, rather
like the tyranny of the Ciceronian style which Erasmus rightly attacked
because, as he said, the true imitation of Cicero consists in absorbing
his spirit, not in copying details of his style.
For a more grateful response to Titian's painting, we may turn to
Lodovico Dolce's famous letter to Alessandro Contarini. He first
describes the almost feminine beauty of Adonis, then his expression:
"He turns his face towards Venus with lively and smiling eyes, sweetly
parting two lips of rose, or indeed live coral; and one has the
impression that with wanton and amorous endearments he is com-
forting Venus into not being afraid." Next, Dolce describes the beauty
of Venus, with her back turned —
"not for want of art but to . . .
display art in double measure" —

then proceeds to her expression:
"Similarly her look corresponds to the way one must believe that
Venus would have looked if she ever existed; there appear in it
evident signs of the fear she was feeling in her heart, in view of the
unhappy end to which the young man came."'° Far from deviating
from Ovid's story, in Dolce's view Titian has succeeded in making
visible the living truth of that story.
If now we look at some other representations, we may agree that
Titian is truer in his characterization of Ovid's figures than, for
example, Spranger or artists of the School of Fontainebleau [Figures
See R. W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York
^
1967), p. 44, and Erwin Panofsky, Probletns in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York
1969), p. 151, note 36.
^ See Erasmus, Ciceronianus
(1528), trans. Izora Scott (New York 1908), pp. 81-
82. See also Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance
Poetry (New Haven 1982), pp. 183-85.
'°
Lodovico Dolce,letter to Alessandro Contarini, in Mark Roskiil, Dolce's "Aretino"
and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York 1968), pp. 213-15.
Judith Dundas 271
5, 6]. He makes whole of the story, whereas the

his picture tell the
lesser painters illustrate only one scene, like the illustrated editions
of Ovid, but of course with more elaborateness and, sometimes,
grace.
If most people would agree that Titian's is a great painting, the
same cannot be said of modern criticism of Shakespeare's poem on
the subject. Evidently, the sensuous beauties of the picture carry an
appeal that the conspicuously rhetorical qualities of the poem do not.
Recent parallels drawn between the two have been mainly concerned
with the so-called iconographic similarity, with even the suggestion
of a possible influence from Titian, or prints after Titian, on Shake-
speare." But in fact their treatment is not identical: in Titian's
painting, we see a fondness in the glance Adonis exchanges with
Venus, as if he were sorry to leave her; Shakespeare, on the other
hand, polarizes the relationship, making it one of opposition and
conflict. Each artist has found and expressed one part of the truth
in Ovid's tale.
Yet if I were to draw a composite portrait of contemporary criticism
of Shakespeare's poem, I would have to show a continued lack of
appreciation for it, based either on psychoanalytic grounds or on
rhetorical grounds.
The two approaches may even be combined, as if to confirm
doubly the impossibility that we as readers can sympathize with either
of the characters. In the words of one critic, when Venus says that
with the death of Adonis, "Beauty is dead," this is not true for us;
it is not beauty that is dead but rather "self-love."'^ It appears not
only that Adonis is narcissistic, but that he actually deserved to die:

"The allegory of Adonis's death seems clear. He is punished for an
empty heart.'"^ But if we read the poem as mimetic narrative, which
this critic refuses to do, we must see Adonis through the eyes of
Venus and must believe that he is beauty, that with him beauty dies.
Though she alludes to Narcissus in her arguments with Adonis, we
have to remember that no one had yet invented the concept of
narcissism.'^ Venus was not psychoanalyzing Adonis but trying to
persuade him to love, which is exacdy her role in the world: "O,
" See, for example, Panofsky, Problems in Titian, pp. 153-54.

'2
Lanham, p. 93.
'»
Lanham, p. 92.
''
Freud distinguishes between the narcissistic man and the man of
Interestingly,
action on the grounds that the latter "will never give up the external world on which
he can try out his strength." Adonis is surely intent on proving himself the man of
action. See Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, in The Complete Psycho-
logical Works ofSigmund Freud (London 1953), XXL pp- 83-84.
learn to love; the lessonis but plain, / And once made perfect, never
lostagain" (407-08). In one of her arguments with Adonis, she herself

echoes the words Ovid's Narcissus addressed to himself: "Why do
you tease me so? Where do you go / When I am reaching for you?
I am surely / Neither so old or ugly as to scare you, / And nymphs
have been in love with me" (III. 454-56). Compare this with the
words of Shakespeare's Venus:
I have been wooed as 1 entreat thee now.
Even by the stern and direful god of war. . . .
Were I hard-fa vour'd, foul, or wrinkled-old,

Ill-nurtured, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice . . .
Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee.
But having no defects, why dost abhor me?
(vv 97-98 and 133-34, 137-38)
But neither Shakespeare's Venus nor his Adonis suffers from Narcis-
sus' particular form of tragedy. Adonis' love is not for himself but
for hunting: "I know not love nor will not know it, / Unless it
. . .
be a boar, and then I chase it" (vv. 409-10).

Lack of sympathy with Adonis has been evenly matched with lack
of sympathy for Venus herself. Her desire gives her the strength and
courage to pluck Adonis from his horse and carry him under one
arm; when she has him down on the ground, "Her face doth reek
and smoke, her blood doth boil,/ And careless lust stirs up a desperate
courage" (vv. 555-56). Can this possibly be "the golden Aphrodite?"
asks C. S. Lewis in bewilderment, forgetting momentarily that love
has its ridiculous, as well as sublime, side.'^ Beautiful as Titian's Venus
is, she too has something of the ridiculous in her pose. But who else
but Venus could continue to look beautiful in such an ungraceful

position, as she tries to hold back Adonis? Shakespeare, similarly, has
seen what love is when it comes down to earth, and he can smile, as
his critics seem unable to do.
This brings me to the rhetorical approach to the poem. Curiously,
critics who profess to take this approach generally deny the poem
any mimetic intention; instead, they treat the mimesis as a strategy
for upsetting narrative expectations. The poet pretends to be telling
a straightforward story but at every turn is forcing us to examine
the "rhetoric of love" by manipulating three different rhetorics
within the poem: the narrator's, Venus', Adonis'. And outside all
these, pulling the strings, is Shakespeare the puppeteer."^ The rhetoric
then is not simply for pleasure, though that is there, but for revealing
'^
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford 1954), p. 499.
'•^
Lanham, pp. 84-90.
Judith Dundas 273
love itself to be a subspecies of rhetoric. Now this argument is so

sophisticated that almost dazzles us into acceptance of both its
it
premises and conclusions. Treating rhetoric as a game, like life itself,

it gives due weight to the opposing points of view in the poem; it
recognizes that Venus and Adonis have both a mythic character and
a dramatic character, and that there may be a comic contrast between
the two, as if the larger-than-life personages suddenly came down to
earth and were like other people — something that, by the way, is
in Ovid as well. Where I partcompany with this approach is in the

conclusion drawn: "It [the poem] teaches seriously, but what it teaches
is the suicidal incompleteness of seriousness, of the tragic Adonis-like
self."''How the comedy of Adonis can turn into "the suicidal
incompleteness of seriousness" is difficult to understand. His boyish
resistance is characterized in such lines as: "Give me my hand . . .
why dost thou feel it?" To which Venus"Give me my heart

replies,
. and thou shalt have it" (vv. 373-74). Neither Venus nor Adonis
. .
persuades us, as readers, to accept a particular point of view. What

we see, rather, is the life and humor of their debate. This is not the
same as saying that the poem is characterized by "ambivalence," that
favorite critical term of today, with its implication that there are no
longer any accepted values to which the poet can point.
Given the fashionableness of "ambivalence" and the fact thar it
carries connotations of a new kind of value and truth, it is little
wonder that decorum has become a dead issue. Lanham may again
stand for the modern rhetorician when he says that when "we call a
style inappropriate, we mean that we don't like the reality it creates."'®
But Renaissance writers do not talk this way about decorum; rather
they speak of the seemliness of suiting style to subject matter, picture
to setting, everything to the occasion, just as dress and behavior
should be appropriate — what George Puttenham, picking up on the
beautiful in the word, calls "This louely conformitie, or proportion,
or conueniencie betweene the sence and the sensible."'^ He goes on
to say that nature herself has observed this conformity in her own
works. But surely this nature is the very objective reality the moderns
reject;and the idea of decorum, and the link which Puttenham and
others made between decorum and morality, has to fall by the wayside,
along with other "positivistic" notions. If used at all today, the word
will have a very limited sense of expectations fulfilled or disappointed;
" Lanham, p. 94.

'*
Lanham, p. 28.
'^
George Puttenham, The
Arte of English Poesie (1588), ed. G. D. Willcock and
Alice Walker (Cambridge 1936), p. 262.
it will not allude to an ultimate standard of what is fitting. For this

reason, decorum is no longer popular either as a critical term or as
And yet Milton went so far as to call decorum
a standard of behavior.
"the grand masterpiece to observe," and in so doing summed up the
view of ancient and Renaissance rhetoric.^"
When Shakespeare and Titian chose to represent the story of
Venus and Adonis, they had in mind the pleasures of a copia on the
Ovidian tale. They did not have a narrow concept of entertainment.
There is a heart behind their smiling. For both, the picture they
present is its own best commentary. When judged by any other
standard —
and here only our own deficiencies in a sense of decorum
stand revealed —
they may appear lacking in greatness. We no longer
make an obvious demand that a poet or painter follow the letter of
his text, as RaflfaelloBorghini demanded of Titian, but we can be
equally demanding an artist prove he is an artist by
in requiring that
not imitating nature. He must distort; he must break up the very idea
of accepted beauties. If Shakespeare's poem is allowed any merit
today, apparently it must be on the basis of his assumed satire of the
rhetoric of both Venus and Adonis. As for Titian, he as a painter is
allowed some degree of mimesis, but it is not this that interests his
commentators; it is either his iconography or his technique. Who
today would dream of giving an appreciation of his painting such as
Dolce's?
And so I return to Laurence Sterne's salutary remarks, as true
now as when he wrote them down. After making fun of the "cant
of criticism," he says that he would go fifty miles on foot
to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the
reins of his imagination into his author's — be pleased he knows
hands
not why, and cares not wherefore.
Great Apollo, thouif giving humour — give me, —
art in a ask I
no more, but one stroke of native humour, with spark of thy a single
own along with
fire — and send Mercury with the and
it, rules compasses,
ifhe can be spared, with my compliments — no to matter.^'
Could we revive the notion of a decorum that does not reside in

rules only? It seems all but impossible, given the relationship the
word implies to a propriety of life, as well as of art. ^^ But this propriety

rests upon an exquisite sense of tact, a grace which cannot be taught.
^° Milton,
Of Education, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt
Y. Hughes (New York 1957), p. 637.
2'
Sterne, p. 193.
^^
See Cicero, De Officiis, 1. 27, where he says that decorum cannot be separated
from moral goodness.
Judith Dundas 275
I like to think that Shakespeare's line at the end of Love's Labor's Lost
alludes to the same freedom
that Sterne was praising: "The words
of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo."

Figure 4. Titian, Venus and Adonis, Prado, Madrid, 1554.
Figure 5. Bartholomaeus Spranger, Venus and Adonis, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna, c. 1595.
9
Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance*
GORDON BRADEN
My title invokes an old scholarly topic, one whose venerability and

general aura of dustiness do not prevent the periodic conviction that
thereis more, even much more to be looked into here. The recent
Arden editions of Shakespeare's Richard III and, surprisingly, A

Midsummer Night's Dream have found appreciably more room for
Seneca in their commentary than those plays have known before^'
and the whole area of Elizabethan Senecanism has recently been
certified a Research Opportunity in Renaissance Drama. ^ The broader
European has received a dauntingly broad compilation whose
field
separate chapters on Seneca's influence on Dutch, Scandinavian, and
Slavic theater figure in a general sense that available scholarship on
the question has been woefully tentative and unthorough.^ Yet along-
side such continuing efforts we have also had developing, especially
in the study of English and Spanish drama, a fairly sophisticated
* A version of this paper was presented at a conference on "Classical Traditions
in Shakespeare and the Renaissance" at the University of Minnesota, April 1982.

Many of the general arguments are developed more fully in my forthcoming book,
Anger's Privilege: Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition.
'
King Richard HI, ed. Antony Hammond (London and New York 1981), with
particular reference to recent source work by Harold F. Brooks, especially " 'Richard
III,' Unhistorical Amplifications," Modern Language Review 75 (1980), pp. 721-37; A
Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London and New York 1979),
especially pp. Ixii-lxiv, 139-45.
^ Frederick Kiefer, "Seneca's Influence on Elizabethan Tragedy: An Annotated
Bibliography," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 21 (1978), pp. 17-34.
^ Der Einfluss Senecas auf das europdische Drama, ed. Eckard Lefevre (Darmstadt
1978).
conviction that the whole question of Senecan influence is just possibly

a ghost topic generated by the predispositions of the researchers, and
if not that, at the very most a tertiary matter, of very little importance
as far as our real interest in Renaissance drama and its development
is concerned. That case for English has best been put by G. K.
Hunter, whose article on "Seneca and the Elizabethans" has become
a classic statement: "If Seneca's tragedies had not survived, some
details [in the history of Elizabethan drama] would have had to be
changed —
but the over-all picture would not have been altered."*
Between these two traditions there has not been much in the way of
contact and dialogue, so that the matter cannot really be said to have
been decided; but one may have the impression that the better minds
among working scholars tend to find Hunter's stand by far the more
sensible.
As things are now, so do I; and though I would probably in the
long run dissent from Hunter's conclusion as just quoted, I am not
sure I would, at least insofar as it concerns claims that Elizabethan
dramatists had in any significant numbers actually read Seneca's
tragedies themselves, whether in Latin or in translation, and that
their dramatic craft was specifically altered by that experience. Those
plays for which one can credibly make such a claim Gorboduc, —
Gismond of Salerne, The Misfortunes of Arthur —
are, dramaturgically,
dead ends, while the "Senecan" moments in the plays that do count
are brief sententiae or local rhetorical flourishes whose presence is far
more convincingly explained by reference to a rather different kind
of "classical influence." Most practicing Renaissance writers, we are
now aware, had much of their contact with classical literature through
commonplace books and rhetorical manuals in which a very wide and
confused mixture of Greek and Latin writers was digested into isolated
sentiments and tricks of phrase. By way of this tradition, a Renaissance
writer could easily produce "Senecan" passages in his text without
ever having read Seneca, let alone intending some meaningful allusion
to the original context —
could produce "Senecan" passages in the
same unconcerned way in which he could, without any sense of
incongruity, produce Horatian or Ovidian or Valerio-Flaccan passages
"
* G. K. Hunter, "Seneca and the Elizabethans: A Case Study in 'Influence'
(1967), Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (Liverpool 1978), p. 173. Hunter
revives and supplements arguments advanced forty years ago by Howard Baker,
Induction to Tragedy (1939; repr. New York 1965); the primary object of criticism in
both cases John W. Cunliff"e, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893;
is
repr. Hamden, Conn. 1965). On Spanish drama, see Herbert E. Isar, "La Question
du pretendu 'senequisme' espagnol," in Les Tragedies de Seneque et le theatre de la
Renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris 1964), pp. 47-60.

Gordon Braden 279
in the same paragraph. I am quite willing to concede that most of

the apparent "Senecanism" in Elizabethan drama — and a good deal
of the "Senecanism" even in the more self-consciously neoclassical
continental theater —
comes by this relatively anonymous route.
Nevertheless, I still vânt to argue that we do not entirely need to
put quotation marks around Senecanism when talking about it: that
we are still dealing with a specific and recognizable factor in the
drama of the time that it makes sense to link with Seneca's name,
and also that that factor is one to be seriously reckoned with in our
general understanding of Renaissance tragedy. T. of course, S. Eliot,
made a similar claim over fifty years ago in "Shakespeare and the
Stoicism of Seneca," a famous essay but one whose suggestions have
never been seriously followed up.^ That is unfortunate, I think,
because Eliot is asking the right kinds of questions about this topic,
questions in the face of which arguments such as Hunter's are not
wrong, exactly, but certainly conceived with misleading narrowness.
That is the tradition of discussion we have needed and not had; what
I want to sketch here is a possible updating of Eliot's case. Like him,
I am concerned not just with Stoicism, but also with the relations
between Stoicism and a certain kind of dramatic speech. Consider,

for instance. Lady Macbeth:
Come thick Night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoake of Hell,
That my keene Knife see not the Wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peepe through the Blanket of the darke,
To cry, hold, hold.
Macbeth 1.5. 50-54^
This is not an isolated conceit; her husband had in the previous

scene called in a similar way for the lights of heaven to avert their
eyes:
Starres hide your fires,
Let not Light see my black and deepe desires . . .
1. 4. 50-51
And later, when he anticipates the murder of Banquo:

Come, seeling Night,
Skarfe up the tender Eye of pittifull Day . . .
^ Eliot, "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca" (1927), Selected Essays (New
York 1950), pp. 107-20.

^ I quote Shakespeare, with minor adjustments, from The First Folio of Shakespeare:
The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York 1968); line numbers are from
The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston 1974).
3. 2. 46-47
And it is part of the mood of the whole play that these appeals are
way answered. "There's Husbandry in Heaven,"
in a rather literal
Banquo had observed ominously before the murder of Duncan,
"Their Candles are all out" (2. 1. 4-5); and after the murder we
hear from Rosse:
Thou seest the Heavens, as troubled with mans Act,

Threatens his bloody Stage: by th' Clock 'tis Day,
And yet darke Night strangles the travailing Lampe:
Is't Nights predominance, or the Dayes shame.
That Darknesse does the face of Earth intombe,

When living Light should kisse it?
"'Tis unnaturall," the Old Man replies, "Even like the deed that's
done" (2. 4. 5-11). This is all said, of course, with unmistakably
Shakespearean flair; but what is being said is at base nothing more
than standard Elizabethan theatrics. If we feel pressed to look for
sources, we need go no further than the general bag of rhetorical
tricks making the rounds among Shakespeare's colleagues; under
Lady Macbeth's speech, for instance, Muir cites Anthony Munday:
Muffle the eye of day.
Ye gloomie clouds (and darker than my deedes,
That darker be than pitchie sable night)
Muster together on these high topt trees.
That not a sparke of light thorough their sprayes.
May hinder what I meane to execute.
1 Robin Hood 14/2387-92^
But it is not hard to find other examples, or to see such speeches as

elaborations of a hyperbole that had been second nature to English
dramatic speech since the 1580s:
Weepe heavens, and vanish into liquid teares,

Fal starres that governe his nativity.
And sommon al the shining lamps of heaven
To cast their bootlesse fires to the earth.
And shed their feble influence in the aire.
Muffle your beauties with eternall clowdes . . .
Marlowe, 2 Tamburlaine 5. 3. 1-6®
' Anthony Munday, The Downfall

of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, ed. John C. Meagher,
Malone Society Reprints (Oxford 1965); Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London 1964),
pp. 30-31.
® Quotations of Marlowe are from The Complete Works, ed. Fredson Bowers
(Cambridge 1973).
Gordon Braden 281
That hyperbole informs what may well be the earliest line of Shake-
speare's that we have — "Hung be the heavens with day black, yield
to night" {1 Henry VI — and
I. 1. 1) milieu enough
typifies its to
supply the concluding cliche for Beerbohm's " 'Savonarola' Brown":
"In deference to this our double sorrow / Sun shall not shine to-
day nor shine to-morrow. —
Sun drops quickly back behind eastern
horizon, leaving a great darkness on which the Curtain slowly falls''^ As
far asimmediate genetics are concerned for a play like Macbeth, we
have no particular reason to invoke Seneca; and indeed, none of the
passages just quoted are usually so annotated.
Still, there it is:
non ibo in hostes? manibus excutiam faces

caeloque lucem — special hoc nosiri saior
Sol generis, el specialur, el curru insidens
per solila purl spalia decurril poli?
non redii in orius el remeliiur diem?
Seneca, Medea 27-31'°
Shall 1 noi go against my enemies? 1 shall shake torches from iheir
hands and the light from heaven. Does ihe Sun, father of my race,
see this, and is he still seen, and sitting in his chariot does he travel
his accustomed route through the pure heavens? Does he not return
to his rising and take back the day?
So Seneca's Medea, using one of the most common topics of Seneca's

own dramatic rhetoric. It can be paralleled in a dozen places in the
Senecan corpus; and in what I would argue is Seneca's best single
work, Thyestes, the memorable final action includes a striking liter-
alization of such an appeal:
Quo terrarum superumque parens,
cuius adonus noctis opacae
decus omne fugit, quo uertis iter
medioque diem perdis Olympo?
Thyestes 789-92
Where, father of lands and gods, at whose rising all the splendor of
dark night flees, where do you turn your course and destroy the day
at noon?
The crime of Atreus has driven all the lights from heaven, and
brought on what might as well be the end of the world:
9 Max Beerbohm, Seven Men (London 1919), p. 218.

'"
The Latin for Seneca's plays is taken from L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae, ed.
Giancarlo Giardina (Bologna 1966), with some typographical adjustments; translations
are my own.
solitae mundi periere uices:

nihil occasus, nihil ortus erit.
non succedunt
. . .
nee ullo micat igne polus,

astra,
non Luna graues digerit umbras.
... in nos aetas
ultima uenit? o nos dura
sorte creates, seu perdidimus
solem miseri, siue expulimus!
813-14, 824-26, 877-81
The accustomed cycles of the universe have ended. There will be no

more setting and rising. . . . No stars return and the sky sparkles with
no fire, the moon does not dispel the deep shadows. Has the last . . .
age come upon us? Oh, we were born to a harsh fate, whether,
wretched, we have lost the sun, or whether we have driven him out!
If, for one thing, we conceive of dramatic Senecanism in terms of

kind of hyperbolic rhetoric, the catalogue of Elizabethan Senecan
this
moments immediately becomes much larger than most studies have
argued it to be; such moments are everywhere. I pick only one topic
out of several for which similar examples can be produced; we may

speak here not just of muffling the heavens, but more generally of a
cataclysmic rhetorical disruption of external reality in response to
the feelings and actions of the speaker:
Fall heaven, and hide my shame, gape earth, rise sea,

Swallow, orewhelme me . . .
Chettle, //o/man 5. 1/2066-67"
Chettle might well be translating and elaborating Seneca's recurring

"dehisce tellus" {Phaedra 1238, Troades 519, Oedipus 868); but such
speech is almost wholly naturalized on the Elizabethan stage, to the
point where it usually is not noticed as something that needs to be
accounted for. Yet just that pervasiveness, I think, argues for the
significant presence of Seneca in the background of Elizabethan
dramatic rhetoric: probably not, I admit, by purposeful readings in
Seneca by the important dramatists of the day, and certainly not
without an admixture, in the general anonymity of the rhetorical
tradition, of other, non-Senecan elements of a similar type (the Bible,
for instance, is a particularly rich source for the rhetoric of disrup-
" Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. Harold Jenkins, Malone Society
Reprints (Oxford 1951). Chettle may have made some contribution to Munday's
Robin Hood plays, though he is no longer usually cited as a full collaborator.
I Gordon Braden 283
tion).'^ But the question of specific sources grades here into a larger
question.Whatever the particular route of their continuity, Senecan
tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy are bound together by the fact that
such speech as I have been quoting is natural to them; and the study
of Senecan tragedy impinges on our study of Elizabethan tragedy
most significantly when it helps us to answer the question: What kind
of drama is it in which people can get away with talking like this?
They have not been able to get away with it too successfully since
the Renaissance; we are concerned here with the kind of high
Elizabethan fustian that dramatists from Dryden on imitate only with
great caution, and usually with considerable irony and amusement
(witness Beerbohm). To say that dramatic conventions have simply
changed evades the question of what those conventions themselves
mean; and I think in this case they do mean something that a fresh
understanding of Senecan tragedy can help us pin down.
For there is another bracket to be put up here. In Seneca himself,
this rhetoric offers a significant point of contrast with Greek tragedy:
a theater no less bold with words than Seneca's is, but in not quite
the same w-ay. Human crime there is very frequently dramatized as
an almost physical affront to the outside world:
Koi Toana hpaaaa fjXibv re Trpoa^Xeireu;

^
Koi yalocv, epyov rXccaa bvaaf^îaraTOv . . .
Y.ur\^\des, Medea 1327-28
Even after doing these things you look on the sun and the earth, after
daring a most unholy acti
Yet the onus in such talk on the Greek stage is with some consistency
not on that exterior reality but on the human being who offends it;
and what one cannot easily find in at least the Greek dramatic rhetoric
we have is the wish or fantasy that the extra-human order should
collapse in the presence of human outrage. Characters call to the
earth and especially the sun for witness and possible vengeance —
CO ydxa fifjTep ijXiov t' avairrvxcci,
oucv Xbyuv appjjTOP eiaifKOva' oira.
'*
See, for instance, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus:
Mountaines and Hils, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.
No, no?
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Gape earth; O no, it will not harbour me.
5. 2/1945-49
Dehisce tellus is here put on the same plane as what is clearly a borrowing from
Revelation 6:16 (cf. Hosea 10:8, Luke 23:30).
Euripides, Hippolytos 601-02'^
Oh mother earth and expanse of sun, what unspeakable words I have

heard.
— but not to hallucinate their disappearance:
omnis impulsus ruat

aether et atris nubibus condat diem,
ac uersa retro sidera obliquos agant
retorta cursus. tuque, sidereum caput,
radiate Titan, tu nefas stirpis tuae
speculare? lucem merge et in tenebras fuge.
Seneca, Phaedra 674-79
Let all the sky fall by force and bury the day in dark clouds, and let
the stars turned around run a twisted course backwards. And you,
great star, radiant Titan, do you see the crime of your offspring?
Drown your light and flee into the shadows.
No Greek Thyestes play has survived, but we have reason to think

that even there heaven's light was never seriously threatened.''' The
sun of course was a powerfully literal presence in the Greek theater,
while Senecan tragedy was very likely closet-drama, performed if at
all in the shadows of indoors. But a more important difference also
figures:Senecan dramatic rhetoric testifies, as Greek dramatic rhetoric

does not, to a belief in the power of human evil to overawe or eclipse
anything outside itself. Great crimes in Seneca characteristically
prompt the gods not to vengeance, but rather to flee to leave the —
criminal alone in his world. Guilt is the ultimate human weapon
against the heavens.
Seneca's greatest characters know that and act more confidently
precisely in that knowledge. Their evil, their consciousness of that
evil and their willingness to proclaim it, are part of their strength, a
'^
The solar portent attested in the older Greek sources for the story is generally
not that associated with the banquet, but the one by which Atreus had previously
saved his throne from Thyestes' usurpation; the sun in this version does not flee in
horror, but simply reverses its course as a sign from Zeus that Atreus is indeed the
lawful king. See Euripides, Electra 698 fi"., Iphigenia in Tauris 811 ff., Orestes 995 ff".;
Plato, Statesman 268E-69A; Apollodoros, Epitome 2. 10-12. Two possible fragments

from the Thyestes plays of Sophocles (Nauck^ 672) and Euripides (Nauck^ 861) appear
to refer to this version also. Statilius Flaccus {Palatine Anthology 9. 98) and (less
certainly) a Euripidean scholiast (on Orestes 812) have Sophocles using a version like
Seneca's, but in the absence of earlier evidence we may suspect them of assimilating
the older work what had by then become the usual, largely Roman telling. See
to
The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson (Cambridge 1917), 1: 92-93 and 3: 5-6.
''
Further examples are gathered by W. S. Barrett in his edition of Hippolytos
(Oxford 1964), p. 272.
Gordon Braden 285
strength that Greek tragic characters neither have nor want. Even
the greatest villains of the Greek stage are deeply even if erringly
convinced of the correctness and justifiability of their course; Senecan
tragedy, in contrast, centers most memorably on characters who
embrace their villainy:
age, anime, fac quod nulla posteritas probet,

sed nulla taceat.
Thyestes 192-93
Come, soul, do what no future age may approve, but none may ignore.
So Atreus; Seneca's Medea says something similar {Medea 423-24).

By the end of their respective plays each has made good on that
boast. They are able to do so in great part because this very freedom
from moral compunction allows them to go further than any reason-
able person would expect; and we should perhaps best understand
their evil as a form of radical freedom from any external restraint
on individual will and action.
I think Senecan tragedy generally, despite its manifest deformities
and shortcomings, makes important sense when we take this impli-
cation of its rhetoric seriously. If Greek tragedy is the tragedy of the
failure of human will and pride in a moral universe that deals hardly
with them, Senecan tragedy is the tragedy of the success of the
human drive for moral and personal self-sufficiency, the drive for an
autonomous selfhood that is subject to no order beyond itself. At
their most genuinely harrowing, Seneca's tragedies reveal that very
success as a kind of horror. We can guess at some of the reasons for
Seneca's concern with that horror. The distance from Greek drama
to his is the distance from the intensely local and highly pluralistic
world of the Greek city-states to the far-flung, abstract rule of the
Roman among other things, this new political arrangement
empire;
allowed one man to achieve something far closer to absolute power
than classical civilization had previously been able to offer. The great
drama of Seneca's time was that that very possibility was also the
possibilityof limitless derangement; Seneca himself barely survived
the reign of Caligula and eventually succumbed to the savagery of
his pupil Nero. The principal resource in the face of such unchal-
lengeable madness was aristocratic Stoicism, the philosophy of militant
indifference to an external world over which one no longer has any
control: a philosophy of some genuine moral heroism, but also a
mirror-image of the imperial power against which it is set. "Imperare
sibi maximum imperium est" (Seneca, Epistulae 113. 31) — empire
over oneself is the greatest empire, but imperium remains the value
2
common to both emperor and Stoic. Both insist on absolute control;

the one destroying whatever resists his conquest, the other surren-
dering all interest in whatever falls outside his power, they effectively
divide the world between them. I think Senecan tragedy, dominated
by versions of those two postures, is an exploration of their common

ground: the self which will not deal with external reality except on
terms of utter dominance.
I offer that formulation as a way of "placing" Senecan tragedy
within the classical tradition, a way of defining what it does that

Greek tragedy in comparison does not; and I hope that such a
formulation can bestow on Senecan tragedy a sufficient sense of
dignity and significance, of being about something worth our attention,
that we can in turn think of the Senecan traces in Renaissance tragedy
as being signs of an important Renaissance interest in a version of
the same thing. To what extent, if any. Renaissance reading of the
Senecan dramas themselves caused this interest is of far less moment
than the common terrain itself, within which Renaissance dramatists
would have a natural interest in the rhetorical style of Senecan
tragedy, and would, however unknowingly, naturally seek out and
reconstitute that style even from the homogenized scramble of the
wider rhetorical tradition. The career of Renaissance individualism
on the Renaissance stage is of course far more varied and in most of
its range far more moderate than anything in the Senecan corpus;
yet the character of that individualism is still such that at moments
of extreme pressure, and indeed precisely in some of the landmark

plays of the tradition, it seems both proper and essential for a character
to say things like this:
Willall great Neptunes Ocean wash this blood
Cleane from my Hand? no: this my Hand will rather

The multitudinous Seas incarnardine,
Making the Greene one Red.
Macbeth 2. 2. 57-60
These famous lines of Macbeth's have long been the showcase example
of Shakespeare's Senecanism: the conceit looks very much as if it
could have been assembled from two passages in Phaedra (551-52,
715-18) and one in Hercules Furens (1 323-29).'^ But these were among
'^
Among many discussions, see especially Francis R. Johnson, "Shakespearian
Imagery and Senecan Imitation," \n Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies, ed. James
G. McManaway et al. (Washington 1948), pp. 45-47; the particularly Senecan aura of
the "hand" in Elizabethan rhetoric generally is discussed by Emrys Jones, The Origins
of Shakespeare (Oxford 1977), pp. 268-69. There is a summary of research on the
more visibly Senecan influences on Macbeth in Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays
(New Haven 1978), pp. 211-14.
Gordon Braden 287
the most popular Senecan passages for use in dramatic declamation,

and may be considered by Shakespeare's time to be already part of
an international repertoire of rant:
Ahi, quando mai la Tana, o '1 Reno, o I'lstro,

o I'inospite mare, o '1 mar vermiglio,
o I'onde caspe, o I'ocean profondo,
potrian lavar occulta e 'ndegna colpa
che mi tinse e macchio le membra e I'alma?
Tasso, // Re Tornsmondo 1.3/234-38'^
Ah, when could the Don, the Rhine, or the Danube, or the Unwel-
coming Sea, or the Red Sea, or the Caspian waves, or the deep Ocean
wash away that hidden and unworthy fault that stained and polluted
my limbs and soul?
Muir once again cites Munday: "The multitudes of seas died red
with blood" (2 Robin Hood 7/1391).'' We will justify a concern with
Seneca here less by trying to pin down specific filiations than by
thinking about what is being presented: the soul's tranced sensation
that all external reality is crumpling before its power, that it is filling
the whole world with its influence — a sensation whose megalomaniac

thrill is inseparable from the panicky sense of suff"ocation that waits
when that process is complete.
The story that plays itself out in Macbeth is, in Rossiter's words,
that of "the passionate will-to-self-assertion, to unlimited selfhood,
and especially the impulsion to force the world (and everything in
it) tomy pattern, in my time, and with my own hand.'"^ The witches
tell Macbeth he will become king; his crime is that he cannot simply
let it happen, but must make it happen by his own hand. The dynamic
throughout is Macbeth's search for the decisive act, the one that will
settle everything here and now:
Ifit were done, when 'tis done, then 'twer well
Itwere done quickly: If th'Assassination

Could trammell up the Consequence, and catch
With his surcease, Successe: that but this blow
Might be the be all, and the end all. Heere,
But heere, upon this Banke and Shoale of time,
Wee'ld jumpe the life to come.
'^ Opere di Torquato Tasso, ed. Bortolo Tommaso Sozzi, (3rd ed., Turin 1974).
Munday, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, ed. Meagher, Malone Society
'''
Reprints (Oxford 1967); cf. 1 Robin Hood 12/1880: "made the greene sea red with
Pagan blood," Macbeth, ed. Muir, p. 56.
'^
A. P. Rossiter, "Macbeth," Angel with Horns and Other Shakespearean Lectures, ed.
Graham Storey (New York 1961), p. 218.
1. 7. 1-7
What he finds of course at each step of the way is that something

always slips through his grasp; yet his response is always simply to
tighten his grasp, to berate himself for not having acted more quickly,
more drastically, more decisively:
Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits:

The flightypurpose never is o're-tooke
Unlesse the deed go with it. From this moment.
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand.
4. 1. 144-48
Animating each such step is a radical fear of incompleteness. ''Fleans

is scap'd," his hired murderer tells him, prompting:
Then comes my Fit againe:

I had beene perfect;
else
Whole as the Marble, founded as the Rocke,
As broad, and generall, as the casing Ayre:
But now I am cabin'd, crib'd, confin'd, bound in
To sawcy doubts, and feares.
3. 4. 20-24
"Then comes my Fit againe": the uncontrollable, recurrent rage that

rises at any encounter with what is outside his power, outside himself
— "I had else beene perfect."
The dynamic of much of this can be witnessed in Seneca as well.
Here in particular my own ear picks up a rhyme with Seneca's Medea:
"perfectum est scelus" {Medea 986). The perfect crime is not the
crime that is secret, but the crime that is done, its totality testifying
to a union of will and action: "peracta uis est omnis" (843), all my
power is now complete; "bene est, peractum est" (1019), it is good,
it is completed. Macbeth's attempts to rouse himself to such a pitch
of decisiveness resonate with the strenuous efforts with which Seneca's

killers upbraid their own lethargy: "rumpe iam segnes moras," Medea
tells herself (54), now break off slothful delay; or Atreus:
Ignaue, iners, eneruis et (quod maximum

probrum tyranno rebus in summis reor)
inulte, post tot scelera, post fratris dolos
fasque omne ruptum questibus uanis agis
iratus Atreus? . . .
Gordon Braden 289
quid stupes? tandem incipe

. . .
animosque sume: Tantalum et Pelopem aspice;

ad haec manus exempla poscuntur meae.
Thyestes 176-80, 241-43
Cowardly, idle, nerveless, and (what I think the greatest reproach to

a tyrant in great affairs) unavenged, after so many crimes, after a
brother's deceit and all law broken, do you still make do with vain
complaints, an angry Atreus? . . . Why do

you stand in a daze? Begin,
and summon up your spirits. Look on Tantalus and Pelops; to their
examples my hands are called.
And in this arousal both are haunted by fears of their own laxity,
the possibility that they might not be doing enough:
uulnera et caedem et uagum

funus per artus —
leuia memoraui nimis:
haec uirgo feci; grauior exurgat dolor:
maiora iam me scelera post partus decent.
Medea 47-50
Wounds and slaughter and death working its way through the body —
I have been remembering trivial things. These I did as a virgin. Let
a grief now rise up in weightier guise; greater crimes are fitting after
giving birth.
uidit infandas domus

Odrysia mensas —
fateor, immane est scelus,
sed occupatum: maius hoc aliquid dolor
inueniat.
Thyestes 272-75
The Thracian house has seen an unspeakable banquet — I admit that
crime is great, but already done; let grief find something greater than
this.
The destructive cycle thus spirals outward of its own logic to claim
by the end something close to everything. The discovery that looms
there is that to master life this way is to empty it.
We would probably want to say that Shakespeare is much more
profound and clearer in showing that than Seneca is. Certainly that
truth never comes home to Medea and Atreus as it does to Macbeth.
The Senecan tragedies tend to end with still widening circles of
conflagration reminiscent of the ecpyrosis of Stoic philosophy, but
which we catch on are still essentially within the hero's unchallenged
fantasies of vindictive fulfillment. Senecan drama never quite steps
outside those fantasies. Shakespeare's play, on the other hand, never
loses touch with the reality that ultimately resists and circumscribes
2
any one man's is a world that will outlast Macbeth's rage,

will: there
however total. We need
such a world to make the emptiness of that
rage fully visible. The contrast here is one that holds for almost all
Renaissance drama, even that written in conscious imitation of Seneca:
the Renaissance stage and the Renaissance imagination are more
intractably populous than Seneca's, and always show the Senecan
career playing itself out within some slightly larger, slightly tougher
reality.'^ Yet something like that career nevertheless remains, often
quite memorably, the center of concern; and I would describe the
results at best as, in effect, a meditation on the Senecan subject matter
and meaning, a meditation that precisely because it takes place in
its
a fuller human context ends up telling us more about that subject

matter than Seneca himself does. Macbeth is not, in any usual sense,
an imitation of a Senecan play; but many of the reasons for saying
that are also the reasons for saying that Macbeth is a high point, a
moment of special fulfillment within the Senecan tradition. It is, I
think, not hopelessly outrageous to say that Senecan tragedy un-
knowingly looks forward to the Renaissance for its articulation and
completion. Thinking about Macbeth helps us understand Seneca.
Let me end with a more specific illustration of what I mean by
that. Senecan tragedy, of course, takes almost all its stories from
Greek tragedy, but within the choice of stories and the emphasis
given to them we can detect somewhat elusive but still significant
differences. In the family romances of Greek tragedy, the events that
stand out most powerfully in the cultural memory tend to be the
killing of parents: Oedipus, Electra, Orestes are among the most
resonant names. All are characters at one point or another in Senecan
tragedy; but in surveying the much smaller range of the Latin corpus,
we may be struck by the particular prominence of stories about the
killing of children. Seneca's three most famous and, in the long run,
influential plays are in fact specifically about the killing or worse of
children by their own parents: Hercules Furens, Medea, and most
powerfully Thyestes. Things might look a little bit different if a Greek
Thyestes had survived; but as it is, there is in the Western literary
imagination no more characteristically Senecan topic than the Thyes-
tean banquet, the father's devouring of his own offspring. What, if
anything, might this mean?
It has long been noticed how the fear of children and the denial
or perversion of parentage show up in the action and language of
'^
Cf. Hunter, "Seneca and English Tragedy" (1974), Dramatic Identities, pp. 178
fF.; once more, I think Hunter draws unnecessarily restricted conclusions from some
clear-headed perceptions and arguments.
Gordon Braden 291
Macbeth with special emphasis.^" Macbeth "ha's no Children" (4. 3.

216), and fears "none of woman borne" (4. 1. 80). His wife has
given suck, but would pluck the nipple from her child's boneless
gums and dash its brains out (1. 7. 54 ff.). It is the escape of Banquo's
son Fleance that brings on Macbeth's "Fit againe"; it is the later
gratuitous killing of Macduff's son that results from Macbeth's vow
to make the firstlings of his heart the firstlings of his hand, and that
impresses us as Macbeth's most viciously unnecessary single outrage;
the only killing we see him perform in the final battle is of young
Siward. "Pitty, like a naked New-borne-Babe" (1. 7. 21), prompts
the vengeance that Macbeth fears even before murdering Duncan;
the vision of a ''Bloody Childe'' (4. 1. 76) later gives him equivocal
comfort, but only seems to intensify his fear of possessing a "fruitlesse
Crowne" and a "barren Scepter" (3. 1. 60-61), with no dynasty of
his own to inherit them. In the context of the play as a whole, these
scattered detailsseem to add up: Macbeth, as Swan puts it, "has
refused the terms that time and mortality impose on him, and his
refusal destroys him."^' Children are a pledge ofcommitment to and
faith in a future thatcomes from us but also ultimately escapes our
control and indeed displaces us. The ongoing business of life becomes
possible only through such commitments. Macbeth would extend his
control even to time itself, would bring even the future under his
absolute reign: "Wee'ld jumpe the life to come." But to try that is
to kill one's children, to ensure one's sterility; and it eventually comes

home to Macbeth that all he has accomplished has been to empty
the future of any meaningful human content:
To morrow, and tomorrow, and to morrow,

Creepes pace from day to day.
in this petty
To the last Syllable of Recorded time:
And all our yesterdayes have lighted Fooles
The way to dusty death.
5. 5. 19-23
I would not want to commit myself on exactly where those babies
20 Cleanth Brooks, "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness," The Well
Wrought Urn (New York 1947), pp. 22-49 (especially 39 fF.), remains basic, and is
behind much of what I have to say here; cf. Sigmund Freud, "Some Character-Types
Met with in Psycho-analytic Work" (1916), Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey et al.
(London 1953-74), 14: 318-24. Among recent discussions of the topic, see especially
Madelon Gohlke, " 'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,"
in The Woman's Part, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz et al. (Urbana 1980), pp. 157-58.
2'Jim Swan, "Happy Birthday, Bill Shakespeare!" unpublished essay. Gohlke draws
a similar lesson: "To reject the conditions of weakness and dependence is to make
oneself weak and dependent" (p. 158).
2
came to Shakespeare's play from; as far as classical precedent is

concerned, his imagination may have been led less by Seneca than
by the later conflation, very popular in Renaissance mythography, of
Chronos, time, and Cronos, the Titan who ate his children. And for
credible immediate sources, of course, we do not have to go to the
classics at all; a strong Kindermord motif runs through Shakespeare's
history plays, with the English chronicles behind them.^^ But once in
Shakespeare's play, the topic constitutes an effective interpretation of
Senecan pedophagy, the discovery of a layer of significance not made
clear in Seneca himself, but highly relevant in retrospect. The killing
of parents Greek tragedy is a catastrophic but also a natural and

in
necessary process, an address to the past that is also a looking forward.
The killing of children in Senecan tragedy is a purposeful killing of
the future, an attempt literally to ingest the time to come the —
ultimate act of the self's imperium to ensure that nothing will happen
without its consent. But this of course eventually means ensuring that
nothing more will ever happen; and in refusing to surrender to what
will outlast it, the self also and inescapably guarantees its own more
total and awful extinction. We may find such an extinction at the
end of most of the emotional trajectories in Seneca's writing; the
apocalyptic fury of the Senecan madman, after all, mirrors cosmically
the ultimate heroic act of Seneca's philosophy: suicide. We view their
bleak common terrain in Macbeth's pursuit of his own radical integrity
— an annihilation both of himself and of all around him, a suicide
of the soul.
University of Virginia
^^
I owe this suggestion to my fellow conferee John Velz.
10
Altered States: Ovid's Metamorphoses and

Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres
CYRUS HOY
Ovid's Metamorphoses tell of spectacular changes worked upon human
bodies in moments of extremity. The changes may represent punish-

ments visited upon mortals by angry deities; they may serve as drastic
rescues, aimed at delivering mortals from some impending danger;
they may amount to deliverances from the sorrow and the pain of
life. The metamorphosed shapes become part of nature: flowers,
trees, birds, animals, insects, rocks, and— when occasion warrants —

heavenly bodies. A powerful dynamism runs through all the tales in
Ovid's poem. People are driven by whatever force has them in its
power (or would seek to have them in its power) until they have
reached the limits of their own endurance, or until the arrogance or
the irreverence that they exhibit exceeds the limits of the god's
tolerance; whereupon an end is decisively decreed to the old form
of being which is now no longer tolerable to him or her who possesses
it, or no longer acceptable to the powers that be. A new form —
animate or inanimate — is decreed. In Ovid, the story usually stops
here. The altered shape is absorbed into nature, or mixes forever

with the elements, "rolled round in earth's diurnal course," as
Wordsworth would say, and there we leave it.
The metamorphoses that Shakespeare's principal characters undergo
mark the crucial stages along the way to their dramatic fates. Here
the transformations are spiritual and psychological, not physical as in
Ovid. Shakespearean characters continue, for a time at least, to
function in their altered states in the company of other men and
2
women. The point of contact between Ovid and Shakespeare that I
want to explore in this paper is both poets' fascination with the fact
of human nature's susceptibility to alteration: with the fact that an

individual can be transformed into a nature so different from his or
her original one as to be virtually unrecognizable. The powers of
transformation in Ovid are basically external; in Shakespeare they
are essentially internal. Ovid is primarily concerned with accounts of
material transformations of a person's physical appearance; the em-
phasis in Shakespeare is on the no less spectacular transformations
that can take place in a person's character: in his emotional attitudes,
his motives, his visionof his world and his mode of perceiving those
close to him inShakespeare's familiarity with Ovid's Metamorphoses
it.
is well established, and his use of the poem is evident from the
beginning to the end of his career: from the redaction of "the tragic
tale of Philomel" in the story of the ravished and mutilated Lavinia
in Titus Andronicus, where Ovid's book is brought on stage (in IV. i),
to the adaptation of Medea's incantation {Met. VII) for Prospero's
valediction to the spirits in the last act of The Tempest. But I am less
concerned paper with specific Shakespearean allusions to the

in this
Metamorphoses than I am with Shakespeare's adaptation of the dynam-
ics of Ovidian physical transformations to the dynamics of the
emotional transformations that impel his characters to their comic,

or their tragic, or their romantic ends.
Transformations in the comedies are of a merry sort, and occur
in an atmosphere of festive gaiety. They always have reference to
love: either to the changes love makes in the feelings of the lover,
or to the disguises he or she (like Ovid's gods) must assume in order
to gain the beloved. In Love's Labour's Lost, Berowne in his tree looks
down on, first, the King, then Longaville, and then Dumaine as each,
thinking himself to be alone, reads his declaration of love. He
confronts the three of them with fine indignation for their violation
of the oath they all have sworn to forego the company of women
while they devote themselves to their studies. What a falling off he
has witnessed. He runs through a catalogue of embarrassing meta-
morphoses:
To see a king transformed to a gnat!

To see great Hercules whipping a gig,
And profound Salomon to tune a jig,
And Nestor play at push-pin with the boys,
And critic Timon laugh at idle toys
Cyrus Hoy 295
(IV. iii. 164-68)'
When Berowne himself is exposed as one more

lover, he confesses
his guilt, and they all about their oath.
enthusiastically forget
The design of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is controlled by the
changes that overtake the two young men of the title. Valentine at
the outset views love with scorn and prefers to travel to advance his
education. Proteus prefers to stay at home for the sake of his beloved
Julia, who, he reports in soliloquy, has "metamorphos'd" him (I. i.
66): made him neglect his studies, lose his time, "War with good
counsel, set the world at nought." But in the event, it is Valentine,
once he has met who
proves the faithful lover, while Proteus
Silvia,
(true to his name) reveals himself a master of change by forgetting
Julia once he has seen Silvia. Love's symmetry is thus balanced in
the latter half of the play while Silvia is wooed by two lovers and
Julia is deserted. The balance is only restored when Julia resorts to
what she terms "a disguise of love" (V. iv. 107): the page-boy
masquerade by means of which she wins back her strayed lover.
The symmetry of lovers undergoes even more radical disturbance
in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both young men, Lysander and
Demetrius, love Hermia (and she loves Lysander), but neither loves
Helena (though she loves Demetrius). In the middle scenes of the
play, when Puck has botched Oberon's effort to balance the symmetry
of lovers, Lysander and Demetrius both woo Helena, and Hermia is
deserted. Finally, Lysander's affection is restored to Hermia, while
Demetrius' eyes (doctored by the juice of Oberon's flower) remain
true to Helena.
In all these early comedies, some sort of doctoring, some degree
of alteration in a character's vision or temperament, is necessary if
love is to gain the day. The most flamboyant example is perhaps
Petruchio's reformation of Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. A
subtler version of this comic metamorphosis comes in the later Much
Ado About Nothing, with the transformation of Beatrice and Benedick
from noisy wranglers to lovers. Shakespeare's most farcical treatment
of the alterations love requires in order to encompass its design comes
in The Merry Wives of Windsor. When, in the last act, Falstaff arrives
at Heme's oak for his assignation with Mrs. Ford, wearing the
stipulated horns of a deer, he see himself in a great mythological
tradition:
Now the hot-blooded gods assist me! Remember Jove, thou wast a
'
All quotations from Shakespeare's plays in the present paper are from the
Riverside Shakespeare (Textual Editor, G. Blakemore Evans, Boston 1974).
.
bull for thy Europa, love set on thy horns. O powerful love, that in
some respects makes a beast a man; in some other, a man a beast.
You were also, Jupiter, a swan for the love of Leda. O omnipotent
love, how near the god drew to the complexion of a goose! (V. v. 1
flP.)
In The Merchant of Venice, Jessica takes on boy's disguise in order to

escape from the house of her father, Shylock, and go off vîth her
lover, Lorenzo. Cupid, she says, vsôuld blush to see her thus trans-
formed (II. vi. 38-39). Portia and her maid Nerissa disguise themselves
as young men (a lawyer and his clerk, respectively) in order to save
the friend of Portia's husband from Shylock's legal processes (and
incidentally to test the truth of their men). Rosalind uses her male
disguise in As You Like It as a covert means of getting to know Orlando,
and of winning his love. Viola's male disguise in Twelfth Night places
her in the delicate role of intermediary between the man she loves
and the woman he loves. The imbroglio that threatens when Olivia
scorns the Duke's love in favor of the disguised Viola-Caesario is an
extended and refined version of the equally impossible passion that
causes the haughty shepherdess Phebe to scorn her true love, Silvius,
in favor of Rosalind disguised as Ganymede, in As You Like It. In the
case of Viola, disguise lands her in a romantic limbo; she can neither
affirm her love for the Duke, nor rid herself of Olivia's unwelcome
infatuation. The only solution is to provide a male version of Viola
for Olivia, and one is conveniently at hand in Viola's twin brother.
He serves to round out the quartet of lovers in Twelfth Night, just as
Orlando's formerly wicked brother Oliver suddenly appears in the
Forest of Arden near the end of As You Like It, miraculously reformed,
to provide a husband for Celia.
Shakespeare's work in comedy culminates in Twelfth Night. Viewed
collectively, the comedies prior to this one provide a full repertoire
of the guises under which love appears, the devices to be employed
in securing it, the transformations it works on lover and beloved.
Lovers in the comedies that follow Twelfth Night assume more dis-
turbingly altered shapes than any that we have previously witnessed.
The sense of Viola in a romantic limbo in the central scenes of Twelfth
Night deepens in a play like All's Well that Ends Well where Helena,
after she has been abandoned by her husband, becomes and —
remains until virtually the end of the play —
"but the shadow of a
wife .The name and not the thing" (V. iii. 307-08). She has a
. .
counter-part in the figure of Mariana in Measure for Measure, aban-

doned by Angelo to whom she was betrothed and so a decidedly
equivocal figure in the eyes of society (neither maid, widow, nor
Cyrus Hoy 297
wife); thus her life of retirement at her moated grange. Angelo in

this play Shakespeare's Pentheus (the Pentheus of Euripides' Bacchae
is
or of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book III), though in Angelo's case it is

the rites, not of Bacchus, which he denies, but of Venus. He is a
model of male continence until his austere gaze falls on the chaste
Isabella, and then his repressed sexuality comes violently to the
surface in one of Shakespeare's most extraordinary confrontations:
extraordinary for the perverse manner in which the effect of Isabella's
virtue on the puritanical Angelo incites him to lust. The metamor-
phosis of Angelo from puritan to sensualist, from dignified admin-
istrator of the law to exposed lecher, is the source of the play's most
impressive dramatic movement.
The transformations that love brings, as these are presented in
Shakespeare's purest comedies, are gently worked and entirely pleas-
ing. Such and strains as they occasion are in themselves
stresses
exhilarating; and the principal effect of love's metamorphoses in
Shakespearean comedy is immense satisfaction at the emancipation
from singleness: at the release of self into union with another. In
Shakespeare's comedies, the metamorphoses that love accomplishes
are worked out in terms of the relationship of the lovers themselves
and their surrounding society; they are conducted in an ambiance of
good humor, good sense, and witty contrivance. In treating of fhe
altered states occasioned by the experience of Shakespearean tragedy,
we find ourselves focussing on the moments of extremity which are
common to Ovidian transformations: characters in the tragedies
all
suddenly find themselves in the presence of something — an event,

a disclosure —
that will transform the terms of their existence;
henceforth, things will never be the same, nor will they. We see this
tendency to concentrate the essence of the transforming experience
into a moment of intense confrontation beginning in those satiric
and problematic comedies that Shakespeare seems to have written
just after Twelfth Night. Angelo's confrontation with Isabella, with its
devastating consequences for his moral integrity, is an example. So
is the scene in the last act of Troilus and Cressida when Troilus
witnesses Cressida at her rendezvous with Diomed, realizes her

faithlessness, realizes as well how naive his trust in her has been, and
is transformed into the despairing, bloody-minded figure striding
across the fields of battle seeking revenge in the play's last scenes.
The desire for revenge is prominent in Ovid's tales of metamor-
phosis; violated mortals pursue it no less than outraged deities. It is
a recurrent motive to tragedy in Shakespeare, and not simply in
Hamlet, though that is the most celebrated example. Hamlet's en-
counter with the ghost constitutes one of those moments of extremity
out of which metamorphosed states issue; he is never afterwards the

same, and everybody in the play is promptly talking about the change
that has come over him. The first description of him we have after
the encounter comes from Ophelia, and in it he resembles nothing
so much as another ghost: his look
so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors. . . . (II. i. 79-81)
But his principal mission is not to bring news from hell but (following
the ghost's injunction) to seek revenge, which for one reason or
another is what nearly all of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists seek,
lago, for his own obscure
reasons, hates Othello, and it is not the
least diabolical aspect of lago's manipulations that he manages to
infect Othello with a corresponding hatred for Desdemona. Hatred
breeds a passion for vengeance in each case. As the agent of Othello's
metamorphosis, lago notes with satisfaction how his insinuations
concerning Desdemona are having their effect: "The Moor already
changes with my poison," he says {Othello III. iii. 325), and we witness
the measure of the change later in the same scene when Othello calls
lago to witness that all his "fond love" for his wife is gone. He then
launches an infernal invocation:
Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!

Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne
To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught.
For 'tis of aspics' tongues! (III. iii. 447-450)
The summons its place to vengeance may be taken

to love to yield
asan emblem of the opposing impulses that animate, respectively,
Shakespearean comedy and tragedy, and which preside over the
transformation worked upon the principals in each genre. The
informing experience for tragic figures in Shakespeare is to look on
something that is, for them, unimaginably terrible: some equivalent
to a Gorgon's head. As a
they are figuratively turned to stone,
result,
the power of them. Shakespeare has an early,
feeling killed in
uncomplicated example of this in the figure (not fully a tragic one)
of Young Clifford, who at the end of Henry VI, Part 2, comes upon
the corpse of his father, slain by Richard of York, and thereupon
announces:
Even at this sight

My heart is turn'd to stone; and while 'tis mine.
It shall be stony. (VI. ii. 49-51)
Cyrus Hoy 299
Henceforth, he says, he will have nothing to do with pity; if he meet

an infant of the house of York he will cut it "Into as many gobbets"
as Medea did to the body of her young brother, Absyrtus. Early in
3 Henry VI, he carries out this pledge when he ruthlessly kills York's
young son, Rutland.
The protagonist of Timon of Athens is a more complex product of
this basic sort of confrontation with the terrible. What the death of
his father at the hands of his enemies is to Young Clifford, the
ingratitude of the Athenians whom he believed to be his friends is
to Timon. The play's two halves show us, respectively, Timon in his
prosperity when boundless and he holds the most
his generosity is
confident views of human benevolence; and Timon in adversity when

those whom he has thought to be his friends desert him in his need,
and he retires to the woods, firm in his conviction that there "he
shall find / Th' unkindest beast more kinder than mankind" (IV. i.
35-36). His misanthropy persists to the end of his life, and his end
presents one of Shakespeare's nearest approximations to an Ovidian
metamorphosis: there is a sense in which Timon, in the extremity of
his recoil from human society, dissolves into the elements. He prepares
his grave, what he terms
his everlasting mansion

Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossed froth

The turbulent surge shall cover. ... (V. i. 215-18)
His tomb duly found where he has said it would be, symbolically
is
situated in the context ofits surrounding elements. Alcibiades, when
he hears of the site of Timon's grave and reads its inscription, can
appreciate its metaphoric appropriateness. Though Timon, in the
bitterness of his disenchantment with mankind, scorned human sym-
pathy, yet, says Alcibiades,
rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave ... (V. iv. 77-79)
Timon's shattering confrontation with human ingratitude has often

been compared to Lear's, and there are certainly similarities in the
speeches of bitter denunciation which each utters when he realizes
the unworthiness of those in whom he has put his trust. One of the
things that makes King Lear a greater play than Timon of Athens,
however, is the fact that the confrontation with ingratitude does not
account for the whole of Lear's experience of the terrible. The sense
of the terrible fully breaks over him when he is confronted with the
2
wretched Bedlamite (the disguised Edgar), asks himself the momen-

tous question, "Is man no more than this?" (III. iv. 102-03), and goes
mad. The fact of human ingratitude has, nonetheless, a crucial share
in rendering the sight of Poor Tom so shocking to Lear. Ingratitude
in King Lear first takes the face of Goneril (I. iv), to be joined a few
scenes later by the face of Regan (II. iv). From the outset it is
conceived as something monstrous; Lear personifies it as a "marble-
hearted fiend," more hideous than the sea monster when it manifests
itself in one's own child (I. iv. 259-61). As always in Shakespearean
tragedy, the sense of injury issues in a call for revenge. When the
passion for revenge is upon Lear, he advises Nature concerning the
kind of affliction that might appropriately be visited on Goneril:
Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful. (I. iv. 275-77)
If she must give birth.
Create her child of spleen, that it may live

And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her.
And this,
that she may feel

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
By the time Regan has joined forces with Goneril, Lear is prepared
to take revenge into his own hands, but he is powerless, and his sense
of outrage can issue only in the grotesque fantasy that brings the
daughters to the mock-arraignment that he conducts in the hovel in
his madness.
The protagonists of Shakespeare's later tragedies {Macbeth, Corio-
lanus, Antony and Cleopatra) alter in relation to their circumstances
in ways not quite like any of those who have gone before. Macbeth's
tragic consciousness is comparable to that of the Medea of Seneca or
of Ovid {Met., VII). He is not the kind of tragic protagonist who errs
unknowingly (like Lear), or who is deceived by another (like Othello);
there is no failure of self-knowledge in Macbeth. He could say with
Ovid's Medea that desire persuades him one way, reason another;
that he sees the better way and approves it, but yet follows the worse
{Met., VII. 19-21). Those capable of this degree of moral discrimi-
nation in Ovid are generally women. In addition to Medea, one might
cite the examples of Althaea, debating whether or not to kill her
son, Meleager, who has caused the death of her brothers (Book VIII);
Cyrus Hoy 301
of Procne, debating (like Medea) whether to kill her child to avenge

herself on her husband (Book VI); of Myrrha, lusting for her father
but fearful of the sin of incest (Book X). Perhaps this is why Lady
Macbeth is so scornful of her husband's scruples, and persists through-
out the first half of the play in raising unflattering queries about his
manhood. But he steels himself to the deed of murder, and ultimately
proves himself to be made of sterner stuff than his Lady, for all her
ferocious rhetoric. Much of his strength consists in not seeing what
he does; thus his fear to think what he has done once the murder of
Duncan has been committed (IL ii. 48); his declaration that to know
his deed, it were best not to know himself (IL ii. 70); his announcement
as late as III. v concerning future plans:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,

Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd. (138-39)
The doubleness of this is of a piece with that contained in his appeal

to the heavens before the murder:
Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires;

The eye wink at the hand; yet that be
let
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (L iv. 50-53)
How much he has been altered by what he has done does not permit
of a simple answer. Near the end of the play he says that he has
"supp'd full with horrors" and he alludes to his "slaughterous
thoughts" (V. V. 13-14), but by now he is inured to them; long ago
he had realized there was no turning back (III. v. 135 ft.). One reason
why it is not easy to assess the extent of his change is that it is not
altogether clear justhow innocent he ever was to begin with. Certainly
at the outset of the play he has an heroic reputation and is esteemed
by his King and by his peers; but the play strongly suggests that the
propensity to evil was there from the outset. His rapt response to
the encounter with the witches is suggestive, and his monologues and
his conversations with Lady Macbeth make it clear that crime in itself
is not repugnant to him if opportunity is favorable, and if he can
keep the left hand from knowing what the right hand is doing. He
does what his ambition drives him to do. He never denies that it is
wrong, though he would prefer not to look at his deeds too closely.
He alters to the extent that he inures himself to the horrors attendant
on doing what, from the outset, virtually in spite of himself, he wills
himself to do.
Both Macbeth and Coriolanus present somewhat parallel cases:
once they have set their course, they cannot or will not vary it, and
so in effect they decree their ruin. Coriolanus indeed is given to

making a virtue of his unalterable state. Much is made in the play
of his inability to be other than he is. He cannot pretend, he cannot
compromise; he is always himself, always the same. Ideally, this defines
a high personal integrity (the motto of Queen Elizabeth I, we
remember, was semper eadem). As an ideal, this lofty adherence to an
undeviating code of personal honor is admirable; put into practice,
the rigid behavior that issues from such a code is disastrous, as the
play demonstrates with great clarity and deliberation, and considerable
irony. We applaud Coriolanus for sternly eschewing the hypocrisy
which Roman political life demands; yet a little hypocrisy would have
saved him; and it is a caution to watch him preserve his honor by
becoming a traitor. Rome banishes him —
or, as he would have it,
he banishes Rome —whereupon he goes straightway to the enemies

of Rome, the Volscians, his thoughts bent on revenge. He finds
nothing inconsistent in his leadership of the Volscian armies against
Rome. The vulgar Roman populace rejected him; he turned his back
on the place and went elsewhere, his honor and integrity intact. He
serves the Volscian military endeavors as steadfastly as he had pre-
viously served the Roman ones. It is only when his mother, his wife
and his childappear to him with a plea to spare his native city that
his steadfastness collapses. The moment heralds an immensely poign-
ant metamorphosis, as his natural feelings clamor for expression and
he struggles to suppress them:
My wife comes foremost; then the honor'd mould
Wherein thistrunk was fram'd, and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But out, affection,
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
Let be virtuous to be obstinate.
it
What is that curtsy worth? or those doves' eyes,

Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows,
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod; and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great Nature cries, "Deny not." Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy, I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself.
And knew no other kin. (V. ii. 22-37)
The upshot of the long interview that follows is his yielding to his
mother's intercession; the Volscian armies will turn back and Rome
Cyrus Hoy 303
will be spared. But his uncharacteristic reversal of himself will be

fatal for him, as he knows.
Coriolanus' deflection from his stony resolve for vengeance on
Rome is exceptional. Affections are more often sacrificed to vengeance
in Shakespearean tragedy. The example of Coriolanus has an inter-
esting parallel in the other tragedy that Shakespeare wrote around
the same time, Antony and Cleopatra. As that play enters its final
phase, Antony, convinced that Cleopatra has betrayed him to Caesar,
is swearing horrendous vengeance on her. This is a moment of
extremity of the kind in which Ovid's Metamorphoses deal. Antony, in

extremis, alludes appropriately to Ovid's account (Met., IX) of the
suffering and final passion of the god Hercules, whom the play has
already informed us Antony loved. He cries out after Cleopatra has
left the scene:
The shirt of Nessus is upon me; teach me,

Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o'th' moon.
And with those hands, that grasp'd the heaviest club.
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall
Under this plot. She dies for't. (IV. xii. 43-49)
Cleopatra reports to her women in a rush of Ovidian allusions:
O, he's more mad

Than Telamon for his shield; the boar of Thessaly
Was never so emboss'd. (IV. xiii. 1-3)
Under pressure of the fury produced by his sense of betrayal and

defeat, he is disintegrating, as the play informs us when the scene
shifts back to him in a passage of which the subject is changing shapes,
here figured forth in the clouds that constantly re-form themselves
from one moment to the next. Antony addresses his attendant, Eros:
Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish,

A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world.
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs.
They are black vesper's pageants. . . .
That which is now a horse, even with a thought

The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. (IV. xiv. 2-11)
He himself, he announces, is
2
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,

Yet cannot hold this visible shape . . . (13-14)
He speaks of his previous commitment to Cleopatra, rages at the way

she has "pack'd cards wîth Caesar's," swêars she will "die the death,"
when word comes that she is dead. Antony's rage dissolves. "Unarm,
Eros," he says to his attendant; "the long day's task is done, / And
we must sleep"; and he promptly sets about plans for overtaking
Cleopatra in his own death:
... I come, my queen! . . . Stay for me!

Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand.
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours. (IV. xiv. 50-54)
But Cleopatra, audience knows, is not yet in the other world;

as the
she is still news of her death having been merely a
in this one, the
trick to gain time until Antony's wrath has run its course. Antony,
however, does not know this, and like another Pyramus, rashly
jumping to conclusions at the sight of Thisbe's blood-stained scarf,
he kills himself. Or rather, he tries to do so; the intended sword
thrust misses its mark, and he is fatally wounded but still alive when
Cleopatra's second messenger comes on to report the truth, that
Cleopatra yet lives. Antony is not disturbed by the knowledge of her
previous deception. He does not even allude to it. He merely asks
to be taken to her, that he may die in her arms; and this, after much
heaving on the part of the attendants as his body is hauled aloft to
Cleopatra in her monument (she is afraid to come down lest she be
taken captive by Caesar), is done. There are many things to wonder
at in the last 800 lines of Antony and Cleopatra (from IV. xii to the
end of the play), but among the most wonderful is the way in which
Shakespeare transforms the impulse to vengeance to the impulse of
love: transforms, in effect, the impulse to tragedy to the impulse of
comedy (comedy, let it be understood in this case, of a resplendent
kind). This is characteristic of a play which, throughout its course,
has been all shifting alternation between opposing poles of duty —
and pleasure, of reason and sensuality subsumed under the op- —
position of Rome and Egypt. As for the two principal characters,
change is the medium through which they define themselves. Their
repertoire of forms seems inexhaustible; they could presumably go
on ringing changes on them indefinitely. When circumstances make
this unfeasible, they translate themselves to another sphere, and in
doing so, define themselves for all time in their mutual relationship.
The dying Antony has anticipated the sensation they will create when
Cyrus Hoy 305
they appear together in the realm of the dead (their "sprightly port"
will"make the ghosts gaze"). Cleopatra's anticipation of her reunion
with Antony, and the metamorphosis that will make that possible, is
even more impressive. She has "immortal longings" in her. She urges
her waiting woman to hasten in the work of adorning her with robe
and crown:
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call: I him rouse himself
see
To praise my noble act. I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come!
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life. (V. ii. 283-90)
The replacement of the impulse to vengeance with the impulse to

love, together with the so subtly sophisticated mingling of tragic and
comic attitudes and gestures in the finale of Antony and Cleopatra,
heralds the full-scale intermingling of these opposing elements in the
romances that Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. Altered
states are the very stuff of these last plays. Husbands are transformed
by jealous rages to thoughts of murderous revenge, only to recognize
the unworthiness of their suspicions and to repent of the misery they
have caused (as in the cases of Posthumus in Cymbeline and Leontes
in The Winter's Tale); those supposed dead are restored to life (Thaisa
in Pericles, Hermione in The Winter's Tale); evil-doers confess their
evil (lachimo in Cymbeline, Alonzo in The Tempest). What chiefly alters
the conditions of characters in these plays is the restoration of lost
loved ones: wives (as in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale),
daughters (as in those same three plays), sons (as in Cymbeline and
The Tempest). Always of pre-eminent thematic importance is the
transformation of the urge to vengeance to the capacity to love; this
achieves its apotheosis in The Tempest, when Prospero recognizes that
vengeance is transcended by a rarer quality, mercy.
The emphasis in all four of these last plays on forgiveness and
mercy, on the need to bear sufferings patiently, and on the happy
issue out of all afflictions that informs the repeated ritual of their
endings: all of these qualities have caused the religious signification
of these final romances to be stressed by many critics. The religious
implications are certainly there, and Christian doctrine is echoed at
many points, but these plays would not be what they are without the
literature of classical Greece and Rome. Shakespeare's late romances
display in rich concentration the debt to classical literature that is on
2
exhibit at least to some degree in all his work. Specifically, there is
the sophisticated mythology for which Ovid's Metamorphoses would

have been Shakespeare's principal source. This informs the poetic
imagery throughout the texts of all four of the last plays. It also
furnishes the materials for the chief spectacles of the four: the
epiphanies that comprise the climax of Pericles (in the vision of Diana)
and of Cymbeline (Jupiter's appearance in Posthumus' dream vision),
the pastoral scene with Autolycus and the sheepshearers and the
dance of the twelve satyrs in The Winter's Tale, the masque featuring
Iris and Ceres and Juno in The Tempest. Shakespeare is indebted to
Greek and Roman literature for his sense of the classical pastoral
tradition, which finds expression not only in the fourth act of The
Winter s Tale, but in the scenes in the Welsh mountains in Cymbeline,
to say nothing of the Forest of Arden in As You Like It of the previous
decade. His debt to classical literature in the last plays must, finally,
include his use of story materials from the Greek romances (partic-
ularly the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, and the Clitophon and Leucippe of
Achilles Tatius), and from Plautine comedy: not the farcical Plautus
of the Menaechmi, but the more serious, the more romantic Plautus
of plays like the Captivi and the Rudens.
How closely the narrative materials of the Greek romances resemble
the stories of saints' lives as related in such collections as The Golden
Legend has been demonstrated by such a recent critic as Howard
Felperin.^ It is not difficult to see how stories stressing the virtues of
patience and forgiveness, and celebrating the reunion of loved ones
after long separation, could serve as vehicles for demonstrating the
rewards of faith, the benevolence of God's providence. Nor should
itbe difficult to see how the spectacular changes (for better and for
worse) described in Ovid's Metamorphoses could accord with the
humanistic spirit of an age which placed such emphasis on man's free
power to make and mold himself: "to degenerate into the lower
forms of life, which are brutish," or "to be reborn into higher forms,
which are divine."^ The mythological resonances of Ovid's tales, the
pagan mysteries that also affirm eternal psychological truths and
which are adumbrated in these tales: these are the qualities that
enabled Shakespeare to dramatize the transformations of human
character and not simply to allegorize them. Ovid and the other
great classical authors whom he knew (Virgil, Plautus, Terence,
2 In Shakespearean Romance (Princeton 1972), pp. 163-170.

' From Pico Delia Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man" (translated by
Elizabeth Livermore Forbes), in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (edited by Ernst
Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall, Jr., Chicago 1948), p. 225.
Cyrus Hoy 307
Seneca) delivered him from parochialism in matters spiritual, and

from provincialism in matters of the world. They also delivered
him — as they did all his great contemporaries (Sidney, Spenser,
Marlowe, Jonson) — from drabness in poetry.
University of Rochester
11
Small Latine and Lesse Greeke?

Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition*
J. K. NEWMAN
A Note on Methodology
This paper takes a wholly different line from T. W. Baldwin's two
massive volumes dedicated to William Shakespere's Small Latine Lesse &
Greeke.^ He is concerned with the precise question of what Shake-
speare's education at grammar school in Stratford may have taught
him, and what traces the poet's reading of authors like Terence and
Ovid may have left in his plays. That is of course a great work of
scholarship. The debt to Terence and Ovid is particularly noteworthy,
at least for anyone attentive to echoes of the European tradition,
since Dante had already recommended Ovid's Metamorphoses to the
budding poet in the De vulgari eloquentia, and it has been said that if
Virgil had written dramas he would have written them like Terence.^
These present remarks however are interested, not in exact rem-
iniscence of one author by another, but in pattern and convergence.^
If the Greeks deserve the epithet "classical," it is because, thanks to
* This is a version of a lecture first presented at the conference on "Classical

Traditions in Shakespeare and the Renaissance" organized with characteristic energy
and dedication by Professor Thomas Clayton at the University of Minnesota, Min-
neapolis, April 1982.
'
Urbana 1944.
^ Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II. 6: K. Biichner, Romische Literaturgeschichte
(Stuttgart 1957), p. 136.
^ Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic
Tradition (New York and Oxford 1971), has already emphasized that it is a question
of kinship of imagination between the ancient authors and the modern.
2
their chronological priority, they defined certain classes. They estab-

lished the boundaries within which imagination and creativity will
tend to move among of the western family. Those who come
artists
after them, in fact know too much about
and even those who do not
them, will find that they bump against the same mental furniture as
they grope in the half-dark about the mind's room. This is what is
meant by saying that the Greeks, and their successors the Romans,
are the architects —
and even at times the interior designers of —
our particular version of civilization.
What Shakespeare may or may not have read is not therefore my
first enquiry. He was not a scholar in any usual sense, according to
Baldwin.^ No, he was an artistic genius of the first magnitude, and

therefore by methods not wholly those of discursive reason he knew
things which scholars overlook. My first point will be that he knew
something about dramatic poetry which was also known to Aristotle.
Shakespeare and Aristotle's Poetics
To pronounce same breath the names of Aristotle and Shake-

in the
speare is to be made aware of the riches of the European mind, and
yet to despair of ever finding a central focus or principle in that
mind beyond coincidence of time and —
space. Aristotle it seems —
represents one extreme: that of order, rule, exclusion of the irrelevant,
insistence on category and genre. Shakespeare — it seems —
stands at the opposite pole, bounteous and ungovernable by rule as
Nature herself, laughing at categories and cramped definitions. Can
these two great geniuses be brought into some sort of relationship
other than the most distant of passing nods?
Those who would say "No" to this question have powerful academic
allies. Bernard Weinberg has traced at great length the melancholy
taleof critical reaction to the great masterpieces of Italian literature.^

It isnot a wholly uniform history, and sometimes individual critics
display unexpected flashes of insight. But the general tendency of
such criticism is towards the establishment of a poetic calculus, so
that a properly programmed computer, had one been available at the
time, could have told immediately whether a given work of literature
conformed to the Aristotelian / Horatian model, and have awarded
ita passing or failing grade on that score alone. Weinberg remarks
towards the end of his second volume that the rules there laid down
by Angelo Ingegneri were in all essentials the rules which in the next
* Op. cit. (above, note 1), Vol. II, p. 673.

^ A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (2nd impression,
Chicago 1963).
J. K. Newman 311
century critics would be applying to French tragedy.^ We know what

trouble was caused for Tasso by the late sixteenth-century devotees
of Aristotle: and what problems would be raised by appeals to the
same authority for the wayward genius of Corneille and the passionate
brilliance of Racine.
It is as we pass under review the names of the great writers who
fell foul of the classicizing critics —
Dante and Ariosto as well as
Tasso in Italy; in France, the masters of tragedy just mentioned, for
works Le Cid and Phedre
like —
that we are faced with a dilemma.
We may indeed conclude, grasping one horn of that beast, that
Aristotle was someone whose principles were so rooted in a particular
Greek soil as not to survive transplanting. This is to postulate a
radical discontinuity between the Greco-Roman world and our own
which great geniuses like Dante, or in our own age Thomas Mann
and James Joyce, belie. But, suppose we seize the other horn. Suppose
we dare to suggest that the critics were more concerned with taking
the intellect's revenge on art than with understanding what Aristotle
was really trying to say: and that, if we find out what Aristotle was
trying to say, his poetics could also have accommodated Shakespeare.
It is for this second position that I will be arguing here.
Aristotle's Literary Criticism
Aristotle was the son of a doctor, imprinted by biology, called by

Plato the "mind" of and yet one who left Plato's school
his school,
after the death of its founder because he objected to the turning of
philosophy into mathematics. His universal genius did not respect
the "arts versus science" compartmentalizations to which in our time
we have grown accustomed. He wrote two elliptical volumes on the
art of poetry, of which we now only possess the first. These were
notes intended to guide the lecturer, who would flesh them out with
explanation and example delivered viva voce. The more popular
dialogues, in which Aristotle expounded his theories in a less crabbed
style, using what Cicero calls "a golden stream of eloquence," have
vanished.
What we have left to work with in this context is the famous book
devoted largely to epic and tragedy. Aristotle has an

Ilfpl IIoiTyri/c^q,
organic theory, as befits a doctor's son, of the relation between these
two genres. Epic is the ancestor of tragedy, and the reason why
Homer is the best of the epic poets is precisely that he is dpanartKoc,,
^ Op. at., p. 1093.
^ 2
an adjective which suggested Aristotle may have coined.' Drama

it is
in fact is it contains all that epic can possibly

superior to epic, since
offer, and yet attains its effect in a more concentrated way, and with
a greater attention to unity.
The first point of contact between Aristotle and Shakespeare is
now obvious. Paradoxically, and completely contradicting the easy
notion that he was a backward-looking conservative, Aristotle asserts
that the modern drama and not the long-established and prestige-
laden epic is the highest kind of serious literature. Not surprisingly,
he himself was in trouble with Renaissance critics for this lapse. The
reason for drama's superiority is that it makes a powerful and
concentrated emotional impact, and it does that by not dragging out
its story to undue length. Could the man of Stagira then, if he had
witnessed one of the tragedies of the Jacobean period, and been

presented, by contrast, with something like Ronsard's Franciade, have
been entirely unsympathetic to the man of Stratford? It is indeed
now a commonplace, since the work of Wolfgang Clemen,^ that,
whatever Shakespeare's inattention to the so-called dramatic unities
(of which it will be remembered Aristotle says very little), he did
attend to that overarching unity which is conferred by repetition of
image and metaphor. The classical Athenian playwrights, of whom
Aristotle is thinking when he advances his revolutionary theory of
the primacy of drama, did exactly the same thing.'"
This is, I suppose, what Aristotle means when, in another famous
passage of the Poetics, he defines the qualifications which the poet
needs. He has been talking about poetic language, which must be an
appropriate combination of the compound and the "gloss," a topic
to which we will return later. But the most important thing for a
poet is to be /ticraôpiKog. This is probably another of those tools of
literary criticism now taken for granted which were first forged by
Aristotle. 'Tor this quality alone cannot be taken from someone else,
and is a sign of natural genius. To use metaphor well is to be able
to see what is alike" {Poetics 1459 a 6). When we think of that
extraordinary power enjoyed by Shakespeare of seeing the similar in
the apparently disparate, can we argue that Aristotle's criterion for
' I. During, Arisloteles: Darstellung und Interpretation seines Denkens (Heidelberg

1966), p. 169, note 259. In fairness to Professor During however I should add that
he and I disagree toto caelo over the general interpretation of the Poetics.
® This is the argument of the final chapter (26).
^ Wolfgang H. Clemen, The Development

of Shakespeare's Imagery (Eng. tr. London
1953).
'"
Cf. De Subl. 40. 3 on Euripides, Her 1245: t^ irXaau avaXoyow. The imagery is
repeated from v. 631 (where see Wilamowitz's note) and recurs at v. 1424.
J. K. Newman 313
great poetry is irrelevant or dated; or that Shakespeare fails to meet

its demands?
A wordis in order about Aristotle's doctrine of poetic idiom. In
the he finds it difficult to sympathize with the idea that poetry

Poetics,
can be written in everyday language, and he quotes with satisfaction
a line of Aeschylus using the verb "eat" which was, he asserts, vastly
improved when Euripides substituted for "eats" a word meaning
"banquets upon" (1458 b 23-24). Although it displays a fondness for
the "gloss," the difficult and typically poetic word, this very example
offers a most interesting case of Aristotle's indifference to conventional
literary stereotypes, since already as early as Aristophanes' Frogs in
the late fifth century it is Aeschylus who is distinguished by his
grandiose vocabulary, and Euripides who is attacked for being too
down to earth, too slick and modern. However in the Rhetoric,
probably written after the Poetics, Aristotle has a somewhat different
view. He speaks here of the orator's need to persuade by using the
art which conceals art. He compares the voice of the actor Theodorus
with that of his rivals, and remarks that Theodorus has the advantage
of appearing to use his own voice, while the others seem to have
borrowed someone else's. So with vocabulary: the orator will best
cheat his hearers if he selects and combines his words from the
common way of talking. "This is exactly what Euripides 'does' (the
Greek is kouX as in 'poetry'), and what he was the first to exemplify"
{Rhetoric III. 1404 b 21-25).
Already in the Poetics Aristotle had said that Euripides, even if he
does not involve his chorus as he should in the economy of his plays,
is nevertheless "the most tragic of the poets" (1453 a 29-30). "Tragic"
here seems to mean something like "tear-jerking," or, less pejoratively,

"heart-rending" (Lucas). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle had clearly come
to understand something of that extraordinary mixture of the prosaic
and the lyrical which contributed to Euripides' success in capturing
the sympathies of his audience.
At the same time, it must be recognized that Euripides was an
artist far advance of his age. His few victories in the state
in
competitions in his lifetime, by contrast with his enormous posthumous
popularity, are evidence of this. It is not surprising then that Aristotle
himself should have had to struggle towards a theory of tragic effect
which was at variance with his classical prejudice in favor of the
rational, harmonious, elevated and symmetrical. He believed that the
greatest of Greek dramas was Sophocles' Oedipus Rex,^^ that relentless
search for self-destruction which is itself a powerful critique of the
" So A. E. Taylor, quoted by D. W. Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics (Oxford 1968), p. 132.

2
notion of classical self-sufficiency. At the side of this belief was growing

up another realization, that the most characteristic effect of tragedy
in fact was exploited not by Sophocles, but by Euripides, and that in
the famous definition of tragedy as the arouser of pity and terror, it
was ultimately the pity of it which would make the most lasting
impression.
Aristotelian Criticism after Aristotle
Some kind of poetic then might be deduced from Aristotle which

would find room at the top for a dramatic, concentrated, metaphor-
ically unified, "pitiful" poetry, drawing on the "customary dialect"
for its effects. This is not such an anodyne conclusion as it sounds
when it is remembered that the Poetics has been thought to have had
so little influence on subsequent generations that elaborate theories
of its disappearance have been advanced to explain why this work of
the great philosopher passed so unregarded.'^ The truth is that
Aristotle wrote in a period of rapid change. The Greek world was
about to be measurelessly altered by Aristotle's own pupil, Alexander
the Great. The post-classical poetry, at which Aristotle had aimed
only by innuendo, seemed disconnected from an Aristotelian poetic
increasingly interpreted by modern critics as normative, negative,
apodictic, backward-looking. But the best readers of Aristotle's mean-
ing were in the first instance those who belonged to his school, the
so-called Peripatetics.
The existence of a Peripatetic theory of history, which means in
effect a Peripatetic theory of formal prose narrative, has been dis-
puted.'^ A literary historian is nevertheless compelled to take account
of the prescriptions which may be gleaned from post-Aristotelian
authors about how this kind of artistic prose should be written. The
most important aspect of their theory was its pursuit of what the
Greek rhetoricians call ivapyeLa and their Latin counterparts evidentia.
A scene had to be visualized so powerfully by the writer that his
description of it would work equally powerfully on the reader. This
isindeed a theory which owes something both to the Poetics and to
the second book of the Rhetoric, and perhaps also to the treatise on
history written by Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the
'^
Lucas gives a succinct statement: "Introduction," p. x. See also footnote 19
below.
"'
E.g. by B. L. Ullman, "History and Tragedy," Trans. Am. Phil. Ass. 73 (1942),
pp. 25-53, an article which makes many acute observations, but fails to note that the
theoretical arguments about their metier by hellenistic historians are all conducted in
Aristotelian terms. This may be seen from the materials assembled by P. Scheller, De
hellenistica historiae conscribendae arte (Leipzig 1911).
J. K. Newman 315
Lyceum, Theophrastus. What seems to have happened is that, stung

by the master's criticisms of history in the ninth chapter of the Poetics
as less universal than poetry, because it is too wrapped up with the
particular, later historians determined to make their work as close to
tragedy as possible, even though their medium was prose. When we
read some of the arguments in favor of vivid and dramatic presentation
by these historians and followers of the Peripatos, we seem to hear
once again a criticism which could also do justice to Shakespeare's
incredible power of concrete visualization, placed at the service of
overwhelming tragic effect. The Greeks certainly appreciated such
poetry.
We know that they appreciated it because these are the terms in
which the ancient post-Aristotelian commentators the scholiasts —
("schoolmen") as they are called —
praise the work of Homer.'''
Curiously —
at least, curiously to our modern and inflexible notions
of literary decorum —
both the Iliad and the Odyssey were regarded
by the scholiasts as tragedies, though the Aristotelian notion was not
lost that Homer was the founder of comedy too (a point to be taken
up later). The supremely important criterion of poetic art for these
commentators lay in its emotional appeal, and even the famous theory
of catharsis has not entirely vanished. It was conceded that the
emotions evoked by poetic art might at times be contradictory.
The scholiasts both regard Homer's stories as historically true, and
yet speak of the poet as the free manipulator of his material. His
technique is distinguished by the alternation of suspense and rest
(what Formalist critics in our day have called "staircase structure"),
and by a non-linear presentation. At one point we read: "The poet
commonly turns his story topsy-turvy by bending back, and stuffs the
beginning into the middle. Experts say that in longer narrative poems
to proceed in orderly fashion from the beginning to the actual tale
makes for hard listening, while to start from something more exciting
gives greater pleasure and tension.'"^
Homer, in the analyses of these critics, makes great use of antici-
pation and reminiscence, summing up in this way the whole of the
story of Troy while only telling part of it. This at least is pure
Aristotelian doctrine, drawn from the allegedly "lost" Poetics (1459
a 30 ff.). He found a particular successor here in Euripides. His use
of connected imagery for this purpose was understood.
'*
Cf. M.-L. von Franz, Die aesthetischen Anschauungen der Iliasscholien (diss. Zurich
1943). See also R. R. Schlunk, The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid (Ann Arbor 1974).
'*
From the scholia on the opening of the Iliad, quoted by L. Adam, Die aristotelische
Theorie vom Epos nach ihrer Entwicklung bei Griechen und Romern (Wiesbaden 1889), p.
40.
2
Renaissance critics made a great fuss about "verisimilitude," which

became a handy stick with which to beat any author whose imagination
soared.The scholiasts show that, in the ancient world, verisimilitude
meant simply "persuasiveness." Homer is continually lauded for his
which will convince
ability to select just those details in a description
his listener that he must have been there ("on the scene," as we
might say). The poet's brevity is also commended, by which is meant
his ability to say much in little. Brevity is aided by his use of multi-
sensory metaphors, and of personifications which lend "emphasis"
(i.e. concreteness: the noun is derived from (paivd), not from ^tjmO to
what is said so briefly.

"Fantasy" is another important term in this ancient criticism, of
varying nuance. It can be used of the purely imaginative flight, as
when Zeus holds his hand protectively over Troy (//. IX. 420). But
it can also be the vehicle which transports the listener vividly into a
given scene, so that in places the scholiasts speak of Homer as himself

a witness of what he describes. By a happy choice of expression,
sometimes of the simplest kind, the poet's own fantasy'** is enabled
in itsturn to grip that of his audience.
Homer's narrative is especially vivid because it shows such closeness
to painting. When the mourning Priam veils himself (//. XXIV. 163),
it is an anticipation of the veiled Agamemnon of the artist Timanthes.
"Graphic" (i.e. "painterly") is a frequent term of praise.

But the poet's mastery of acoustic effects, of onomatopoeia and
rhythm, is equally brilliant. All these devices contribute to the
impressiveness and pathos of his story.
Homer avoids the banal, according to these ancient critics, but
that does not mean he writes in some monotonously "sublime"
that
style. The very fact that ancient commentators discovered in him the
models of all three of the later genera dicendi^"^ shows how little they
believed that the epic poet at least should confine himself to some
lament over Patroclus (//. XIX. 282 ff.) is
artificial elevation. Briseis'
said, for example, to belong to the middle style. The episode is
impressive in its narrative parts, and "graphic," while working on
our feelings of pity.
Yet such impressiveness is combined in the poems with variety.

Here, the similes are particularly noted. They have a psychological
as well as pictorial element.
'^
The word is picked up both by Dante and Michelangelo: alV alta fantasia qui
mancb possa, Paradiso 33. 142; Oyide V affetuosa fantasia / che I'arte mifece idol e monarca,
Oxford Book of Italian Verse, p. 177, no. viii, 5-6, from a sonnet to Vasari written in
1554.
'^
E.g. Quintilian XII. 10. 64; Aul. Gell. VII. 14. 7.
J. K. Newman 317
Aristotle had praised Homer for knowledge of when it was

his
suitable to write in his own Such personal writing had to
person.'^
be restricted, since that was not the kind of imitation proper to epic.
The scholiasts find Homer engaged in his own poetry rather more
often than Aristotle would have liked. Sometimes, they believe, he
is showing covert sympathy with Greek fortunes. Sometimes he is
alluding to his own art. His allegedly Greek sympathies allow him
nevertheless to admit the faults of Greek heroes such as Achilles. He
is not a poet of black and white.
Aristotelian Criticism and Shakespeare

The classical, Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian tradition of ancient
criticism proves then on closer acquaintance not to be the monolithic,
normative, unyielding set of prescriptions which it became in six-
teenth-century Italy, at least when expounded by its worst interpreters.
Their view of Aristotle entails all sorts of awkward consequences for
ancient literary history.The "vanishing body" theory has already
been mentioned, by which Aristotle's papers are said to have been
dispersed at his death and only recovered after three hundred or
even seven hundred years. '^ If in fact the Poetics had not disappeared,
then according to another view it can have had no influence on the
way in which subsequent poetry was written. But that is also implau-
sible, since the very scholiasts or commentators on Homer's epic
poetry we have been summarizing seem to be familiar with Aristotelian
principles, while the desperate efforts of the historians to acquire
literary respectabilityboth imply an awareness of Aristotle's censures
on and try to answer those censures according to
historical writing,
an Aristotelian program. What really seems to have happened is that
the history of literary criticism both during and after Aristotle's day
has been, to use a crude term, a mess. Aristotle was misunderstood.
The poetic experiments of the post-classical ("hellenistic") period in
Greek literature have been both divorced from the doctrines of the
Poetics and dismissed as in some way "decadent." Roman literary
criticism has been distorted, notably in the case of Horace's Ars
Poetica, where scholars have been reduced to lamenting that Virgil's
closest friend says nothing which could illumine the student of Virgil's
masterpiece. In fact, Horace not only says much to illumine Virgil.
He also illumines Shakespeare.
We can see this in his doctrine of the genres {AP 86 ff".). Although
'8
1460 a 5-8.
Poetics
See "Callimachus and the Epic,"
'^ in Serta Turyniana, ed. J. L. Heller (Urbana
1974), p. 346, note 18.
2
as a good teacher he lays down the theoretical importance of the

differences between them, he is interested at the practical level in
the occasional approximations which they show at moments of height-
ened tension. A
comic character may express violent emotion, and
so verge towards the tragic. In seeking to touch the heart, a tragic
hero may resort to the simple language of everyday, abandoning the
cumbersome and bombastic. A scholiast reminds us that here Horace
is influenced by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus. Horace chooses
his examples from Euripides, but he certainly also is close to Virgil's

Hecuba^" at this point, as he is to the Shakespeare who is able to
extract a world of tragic pity from the monosyllable. What a disservice
to the history of our civilization is performed by the scholar who, in
discussing this passage of Horace, fails to mention Lear with the body
of Cordelia in his arms!
of uncomprehended tradition, the De Sub-
Finally, after centuries
limitate of "Longinus" has unaccountably been heralded as some sort
of breakthrough, when in fact its chief theories, such as that con-
cerning vividness, are inherited, and its novelty, the insistence on
ekplexis or "knockout" as the principal criterion of great literature,
is a dangerous simplification. Where, for example, would such a
criterion leave that master of the European tradition, and a master

diligently studied by Shakespeare, Ovid?
There is a great work of clearing away to be done in our time by
the classical scholar who wishes to unite the divergent streams of
ancient literary achievement and ancient literary criticism. When the
dust has settled, we be able to see that Shakespeare
will is a lot less
anti-classical than has appeared. Some of the lines which this recon-
ciliation will take are already visible: the recognition, for example,
that drama is the greatest form of serious literature; the ability to
extract the maximum in heart-rending emotion from simple language,
valued by Aristotle in Euripides; the power of vivid imagination,
auditory as well as visual; the gift for metaphor. But Aristotle has
even more to contribute to the most modern analysis of Shakespearean
art, and in explaining this I will redeem my promise to return to the
Aristotelian theory that Homer is the fountainhead not only of tragedy

but also of comedy.
Aristotle, Shakespeare and the Comic

What must be remembered here is that Aristotle did not merely
attribute to Homer the Iliad and the Odyssey. He regards as homeric
2" Cf. R. G. Austin's note on Aen. II. 523.

J. K. Newman 319
also thenow lost work Margites, "The Madman."^' Margites, the hero
of burlesque epic, which looks as if it was written in a variety of
this
meters, was a Simple Simon of his day, "a jack of all trades, and a
master of none." On his wedding night, for example, he proved
unwilling to rise to the occasion because he was afraid, as he explained
to his frustrated bride, that she would snitch on him to her mother.
Eventually that resourceful dreamed up the story that she was
girl
suffering from a terrible malady affecting a certain area which could
only be cured by energetic measures. When the situation was explained
to him Margites agreed out of humanitarian sympathy
in these terms,
that perhaps he and she could go ahead. ^^
This silly story savors of the music-hall humor of my youth, the
kind of folksy anecdote with which studies of British working-class
life are permeated. ^^ What is amazing is that the allegedly conservative
Aristotle was quite prepared to accept this sort of poem as homeric,

and he did so because he was far more aware of the popular roots
of great literature than has been allowed by critics. It is the same
Aristotle who apparently declares that tragedy originated from the
satyr play (1449 a 20), a rough and clownish performance more akin
to the Roman Atellan farce than to anything we normally think of
as Greek. But then we remember that, even in the classical period,
it was normal for the three plays in tragic vein to be rounded off l)y
a fourth in the competitions at Athens. And this fourth play was

usually a satyr play. What Aristotle seems to be saying (following a
hint dropped by his master^'') about both the epic and tragic artist is
that he is likely to show an unexpected kinship with the comic. This
may be attested at quite unexpected places in the undeniably classical
tradition.
The Comic in Racine and Virgil

Who, for example, would expect to find a debt to the comic in so
purely "classical" an author as Racine? If we take a tragedy like
Britannicus, for example, where the arch-villain Neron forces Junie
to reject her uncomprehending lover in order to save his life, while
^'
Poetics 1148 b 36-40. Interestingly, Callimachus agreed with Aristotle: fr. 397
Pf.
^^ The testimonium is to be found in Homeri Opera, ed. T. W. Allen (repr. Oxford
1965), p. 154.
" Cf. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London 1957).
^* He isof course here the true disciple of his teacher Plato, master of the serio-
comic form, avid student of the mimes of Sophron, and proponent of the theory
that the "scientific" poet will know how to write both comedy and tragedy {Symposium
223 D).
2
he himself concealed behind a screen on stage to make sure that

is
she says exactly what she is supposed to, do we not have a framework
typical of Moliere's comedy, even of the Commedia dell'arte? And does

not the whole structure of French classical tragedy, in which the hero
or heroine is always attended by a largely characterless confident(e),
whose purpose is main character an excuse to pour out
to give the
his feelings in a long and often exquisitely musical monologue, smack
both of Greek New Comedy and of Euripides?^^ It was after all
Euripides who for Aristotle represented both the avant-garde and the
"most tragic" of poetry.
If the ancient tradition made room for comedy at the side of
tragedy in the same author, and even in the same work (a feature
particularly striking, for example, in Euripides' Bacchae), we can
understand why Servius remarks at the opening of his commentary
on the fourth book of the Aeneid, paene comicus stilus est: nee mirum,
ubi de amore tractatur. This quotation has been the source of some
puzzlement for the orthodox classical scholar. But Servius is not
talking about "a laugh a line." He is talking about the stilus, the
mode of expression and even, I think, the structure of this book of
Virgil. It is indeed a French seventeenth-century tragedy before its
time. Dido relieves her feelings in long monologues with her sister
Anna, and later in head-on confrontation with her lover Aeneas, and
then again in talking with her old nurse (a particularly "comic"
touch). But to deny the relationship of this sort of mise en scene to
New Comedy, which is all that Servius means, is to ignore a funda-
mental feature of the whole ancient tradition.
Scholarly interpretation of the Aeneid in our time has slowly come
to recognize the profound irresolutions which echo throughout this
work, once thought to be simply and ultimately a loud blast on an
Augustan propaganda trumpet. The whole final book, for example,
is shot through with ambiguity, not least in the characterization of
Jupiter, at once the sublime father of the gods and guarantor of

Rome's future greatness, and the heartless seducer of Turnus' sister
Juturna ("Le Roi s'amuse"). And book XII, with its reminiscences
of Dido, is hardly unique in the poem.
What must be realized is that the popular origins of the dramatic
tradition, shared by both the ancient writers and Shakespeare, carry
with them the stamp of a certain way of looking at the world. The
^^ E. Fraenkel, Elementi plautini in Plauto (Florence 1960), p. 203, note 2, emphasizes

the debt of modern tragic technique not to Seneca, but to Plautus and above ail to
Terence, here the heirs of the Greek Middle Comedy, which flourished in the century
following Euripides. See also T. W. Baldwin, op. cit. (above, note 1), I, pp. 641-42.
J. K. Newman 321
ordinary peasant, in his relentless struggle both with nature and his
human enemies, cannot afford to take any one defeat as the final
word, and still less any one triumph. Life must go on, and in the
family and clan the circle of birth, maturity, death, birth has no
finality. It is the lesson of the seasons, and of the crops and animals
about the farm. Hard knocks are part of the game of life, and their
recipient must grin and bear them.
What this means is that the prime genre is always comic, the
conviction and assertion that things are never as bad or as good as
they look, and ultimately the assertion of life. Tragedy, with its
"reduced laughter," is a creation of special circumstances, and of an
urban, sophisticated, reflective culture. It appears at certain periods,
and then vanishes. But the comic persists, and it is from the comic
(what Aristotle calls to auTvpLKov) that tragedy develops, and to which
it returns at dissolution.
This can certainly be seen to be true in the ancient world, where
tragedy is a creation of the Athenian fifth century, and in the France
of Louis XIV, where the tragic moment ended when Racine, who
had already written Les Plaideurs, turned towards history and operatic
libretti, as carnival fare for the Court, in collaboration with Boileau.
It is true of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, where the absurd antics in the
middle of the play go right back to the knockabout of medieval
mystery plays, and find a parallel in some of the farce of Dante's
Inferno, itself part of a Commedia.
The Comic in Shakespeare's Tragedies

But it is supremely true of Shakespeare, and accounts for those
strange plays which end the canon, and which show the issue of the
tragic genius in the comic.But even in earlier plays Robert Weimann^^
finds elements of folk-drama combined with an artistic profundity
which raises such "topsy-turvy patter," as he calls it, beyond the trivial
to the level of social and metaphysical criticism. Lear speaks:
What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.
Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple
thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is
the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at
a beggar? (IV. 6. 149-155)
^® Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkslheaters (Berlin 1967: Eng. tr. Shakespeare
and the Popular Tradition in the Robert Schwartz [Baltimore 1978]).
Theater, ed.
Evidently Weimann is much influenced by the "carnival" analyses of M. Bakhtin, set
out in Problerny Poetiki Dostoei'skogo (Moscow 1963), and Tvorchestno Franqois Rabelais i
Narodnaya Kul'tura Srednevekov'ya i Renessansa (Moscow 1965).

322 Illinois Classical Studies, IX. 2
Weimann compares a fool's speech from a Weston-sub-Edge play:
I met a bark and he dogged at me. I went to the stick and cut a
hedge, gave him a rallier over the yud jud killed him round stout stiff
and bold from Lancashire I came, if Doctor hasn't done his part John
Finney wins the game.
He comments:
Quite surely it is a coincidence that Shakespeare uses the same image
of the barking dog. Most probably it is also coincidence that the mad
Lear uses precisely this image to show the absurdity of the prevailing
system of law. But the decisive similarity is that in Shakespeare too
there echoes the theme of topsy-turvydom. Even his highly developed
art draws on the dramatic possibilities of inversion.
(Weimann, p. 85: my translation)
Weimann goes on to point out that the motif of the unfair distribution
of goods is basic to the play. "So distribution should undo excess,"
says Gloucester, "and each man have enough." Shakespeare's tragedy
too therefore is in debt to, or at least converges towards, a "satyr"
play-
Part of the comic consciousness of ambiguity is shown by the use
of puns, a device certainly enjoyed by the classical tradition since the
days of Homer, and used to powerful effect, for example, in the puns
on Helen's name in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Weimann compares the
two following passages (pp. 242-43). The first is from a play in the
Dodsley collection:
Lust. My lady is amorous, and full of favour

Inclination, (aside) I may say to you she hath an ill-favoured savour.
Lust. What sayest thou?
Inclination. I say she is loving and of gentle behaviour
The second is from Richard III:
Gloucester. (Aside) So wise so young, they say, do never live long.

Prince. What say you, uncle?
Gloucester. I say, without characters, fame lives long.
(Aside) Thus, like the formal vice. Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.
(IIL 1. 79-83)
It is possible to add to Weimann a scene from A. F. Grazzini's comedy

La Strega, from about 1550. The hero Taddeo, a modern version of
the miles gloriosus, has entered in a home-made uniform. His helmet
in particular is slyly mocked by his valet Farfanicchio:
J. K. Newman 323
Taddeo: You're a rascal. Why do you say the plume of a jennet? Perhaps
ought to be a horse?
I
Far.: (aside) All you need to do is to eat straw [la paglia].

Taddeo: What are you saying?
Far.: I say that you are truly a man of battle [da battaglia].^''
This technique may be traced back to a scene in Aristophanes' Frogs

(645 fF.), where Dionysus and Xanthias are both being flogged. The
one who feels no pain will be the real god. Naturally, in the comedy,
both characters react with shouts and protests to the blows they
receive but, anxious not to betray their identities, they keep inter-
preting their cries as quite the opposite of what they appear to be.
This illustrates the profound comic level from which this kind of
word-play comes.
The Door in Macbeth and Tolstoy's War and Peace

One of the most obvious links which connects comedy and tragedy
in Shakespeare is the porter-scene from Macbeth (Act II, scene 3).
Ancient comedy in particular normally took place in the street, before
a couple of house doors. But ancient tragedy made use of an odd
device called the ekkyklema, whereby a revolving platform could show
to the audience what had just been going on inside the house,, as
when Clytemnestra appears at the end of the Agamemnon with the
dead bodies of her husband and his mistress, Cassandra. This phe-
nomenon of showing and concealing, a feature of the most primitive
art forms, most familiar perhaps from the continual popping up and
disappearing of the puppets in a Punch and Judy show, has been
investigated by O. M. Freudenberg.^^
The banging at the door therefore by Macduff^ and Lennox in
Macbeth, and the accompanying protestations of the porter, are both
comic, finding a parallel in the play of Aristophanes just mentioned,
when Dionysus and Xanthias arrive at the door of Heracles and then
at that of Hades, and tragic, since what enters through those doors
is Death. Tolstoy makes powerful use of the age-old image:^^
He dreamt that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that
Quoted by Marvin
^'
T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana and
London 1966), p. 139.
^* Zhanra (Leningrad 1936), passim.
Poetika Syuzheta i
^^ Which "comic" and "tragic" ultimately of course because it springs from an

is
as yet undifferentiated consciousness. Here the original ambivalence is resolved in

different ways because Aristophanes is concerned with the comic theme of resurrec-
tion, while Tolstoy is removing Prince Andrei from the warm and exciting world oi
the living. Shakespeare maintains the primitive ambiguity.
he was quite well and unwounded. Many various indifferent and

insignificant people appeared before him. Gradually, unnoticed,
. . .
all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the
closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt
and lock it. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear
. . .
was the fear of death. It stood behind the closed door. . . .
After a fearful struggle by Prince Andrei to keep the door closed:
Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were
vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. // entered, and
it was death, and Prince Andrei died.^°
In the play, Macduff says to the comic Porter:
Is thy master stirring?
And answers his own question:
Our knocking has awaked him; here he comes.
Macbeth then leads Macduff to another door, behind which lies the
murdered corpse of Duncan. After a moment, Macduff enters with
the news that the king is dead. His language is that of "breaking and
entering":
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence
The life o' the building!
Three doors have been entered, that of the castle, that of the
bedchamber, that of the king's own wounded body. By this, private
space has been made public. The climactic sequence is religiously
evocative, and a Roman Catholic would say that it ends with the
discovery that the Blessed Sacrament is missing from its Tabernacle.
Aristotle would have said that Shakespeare was fieTa(f)opi.K6q, able
to see similarity in difference. He would not have been surprised that
Shakespeare should draw his images from the deepest wells of folk-
memory, since Greek tragedy, notably in Aeschylus, but also in the
archaizing Euripides, had done the same.
The Leap into Another Dimension

Aristotle, we noted, was oriented towards biology, and it is from a
biological work of his that we may derive another principle which
'° The adapted from Louise and Aylmer Maude, War and Peace (repr.
translation is
London, New Book XU, p. 220. The reader of Horace will

York, Toronto 1970),
remember the impartial foot o{ pallida Mors at Odes I. 4. 13.
J. K. Newman 325
elucidates both the classical poetic and Shakespeare. In the De

Generatione Animalium (768 a 27-28) Aristotle speaks of eKaracLq uc,
ravTiKeineva, "organic change into opposites," which he sees as a

universal rule of life. The reader will recall the many changes
{neTaôXai) which he says tragedy had to undergo before it attained
its own nature (Poetics 1449 a 14), and this in the passage where he
has been speaking of tragedy's popular origins. Significantly, Weimann

comes^' to the same conclusion about Shakespeare. Starting from an
analysis of Shakespeare's characteristic use of anachronism, which
forces the spectator to live in two contradictory worlds at once, as
when the Porter in Macbeth's castle in Inverness is simultaneously
abreast both of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the bumper harvest
of 1606, he generalizes this observation into a principle governing
the poet's entire method of composition. So character is set against
character, and each against tendencies within him or herself: reality
and appearance contrast, truth and falsehood. Already Thomas
Dekker had demanded now tears and now smiles from his spectators.
It is an old principle, inherited from sources as diverse as the Morality
play and even the agonistic style of forensic oratory with its arguments
pro and con, going right back to the Greek Sophistic movement
(Antipho). The agon is already found in Aeschylus' Eumenides. It
recurs in the debates of which Euripides is so fond, and of course
forms a notable part of the Greek comic tradition, for example in
Epicharmus' Land and Sea and Male and Female Logic, as well as in
Aristophanes' Clouds and Frogs. At another level, Corinna wrote a
poem about two contending mountains.'^
But this polar technique is also inherited from the most classical
period of Greek art, as we are informed by the Elder Pliny. In his
famous chapters on the history of Greek painting and sculpture, Pliny
describes a portrait by Parrhasius'* of the Athenian demos, "fickle,
passionate, unjust, changeable, yet exorable, compassionate and pit-
iful, boastful, proud and humble, bold and cowardly, in a word,
everything at once." Need we look further than Euripides' Medea to

find a feminine and tragic counterpart to this painting? Contrast is
indeed a basic feature of what has been called the "pathetic" or
emotional style. Who does not remember from the Iliad (VI. 399 ff.)
the parting of Hector and Andromache, where the counterpoint of
'•
Op. cit., pp. 410 ff.
" Page, PMG

654.
" Cf. The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, tr. K. Jex-Blake, with
Commentary and Historical Introduction by E. Sellers (repr. Chicago 1982). The
passage is discussed by S. Eisenstein Izbrannye Proizvedeniya (Moscow 1964), III, p.
136.
2
life and death, war and peace, feminine and masculine, adult and
baby, evokes from Andromache "laughter and tears" (v. 484), exactly
what Dekker wanted from his audience?
These contrasts are also Aristotelian, since what else are pity and
terror, the prime effects of tragedy according to the famous definition
given by the Poetics (1449 b 27), except contradictory emotions? Pity
makes us feel for the other, and terror for ourselves. They are not
of course exploited by the tragic writer for their own sake, since it
is from comprehension and growth

their ultimate fusion that a larger
emerges. In its oldest form, this fusion may be triggered by the
unexpected intrusion of the deus ex machina, here akin both to Punch
and to Christ in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, as the Disciples were
debating the story of his Resurrection. It is this which resolves the
conflict in so many tragedies of Euripides (it is another proof of his
archaizing tendency), the sudden lifting of the actors' conflicts into
a new dimension of religious and prophetic explanation. Shakespeare
normally ends with some sort of resolution, as when Fortinbras arrives
from a more normal world at the end of Hamlet. Life goes on, a line
is drawn under the past, provision is made for the future. But even
in a smaller way this principle may be seen at work in individual

touches in the plays.
Timanthes' Sacrifice of Iphigenia
Here, another analogy may be drawn with classical Greek painting.

One of the most famous masterpieces of the late fifth or early fourth
century was the Sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes. The daughter of
Agamemnon^^ was shown before the altar at which she was to be
sacrificed to placate the anger of Artemis. Among the onlookers was
Calchas, the priest, perhaps reflecting that this was the will of the
gods, and not therefore concerned in a direct and personal way.
Ulysses was there, himself a reluctant warrior, more humanly involved.
Menelaus watched. Was this not his niece, and was he not showing
himself willing to sacrifice innocence for the sake of recovering an
adulterous wife? There was evidently a crescendo of emotion, ranging
from the regretfulness of the priest to the mixed emotions of the
uncle. Last of all among the bystanders was Agamemnon, Iphigenia's
own father, commander-in-chief of the assembled Greek forces. With
what agony could he give the nod for the butchery to commence?
How could the painter adequately crown his rising scale of involve-
ment and sympathy? Timanthes solved his problem by a masterstroke,
which made his painting celebrated throughout antiquity. His Aga-
'" Pliny, Nat. Hist. XXXV. 73: Cicero, Orator 22. 74.
J. K. Newman 327
memnon had turned away, and muffled his face in grief. Every
spectator could supply the missing features to his own specification,
and every spectator was therefore satisfied.
Et tu, Brute
This leap into a new dimension, which suddenly releases a tension

constructed by the artist, explains why in Shakespeare's /w/iw^ Caesar,
for example, at the moment of his death, Caesar speaks in Latin: et
tu, Brute. One of the lessons of the play is that history is larger than
people. At the human level, Brutus can kill the individual Caesar.
But at the level of destiny, "Caesar" as a symbol of an inevitable
evolution in the government of Rome cannot be killed, which is what
Brutus finds out when the ghost of Caesar promises to meet him at
Philippi. The last words of the play are to be spoken by another
Caesar, Octavian. When Caesar the politican dies therefore, Caesar
the historical symbol of Rome as it had been known for centuries
takes over, and Shakespeare indicates this by making his character
leap into Latin. Suddenly, even in the moment of his triumph, we
are aware of the hopelessness of Brutus' cause. Timanthes would
have saluted the brilliant simplicity of the artistic means which secured
this end.'^
^^
The Fool's Triumph: Antony and Cleopatra

Something similar may be observed in Antony and Cleopatra. At the
opening of the play, Philo notes with contempt that Antony has
become a clown, enslaved to a gipsy: "The triple pillar of the world
transform'd / Into a strumpet's fool." Antony for his part, as he
makes his first appearance, is only too willing to accept this diagnosis
of his condition. "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / of
the ranged empire fall." After the defeat, this is the state of affairs
which Cleopatra most dreads:
Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets and scald rimers
Ballad us out of tune: the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
" The analysis is developed by Eisenstein, op. cit., Ill, p. 63. It is a good illustration
of what may be called "vertical time," time which is superimposed on the present
rather than awaited in a linear development.
2
I'the posture of a whore. *^
Her way out commit suicide (i.e. to test the verdict of time,
is to
which seemed to have decided in favor of Julius
in the earlier play
Caesar). Shakespeare makes her receive the asp which is to poison
her from "a clown," who engages with the queen in the most ancient
of comic banter about death and womankind before he sets down
his basket. Cleopatra now dresses in her royal finery for the last time.
Her pathetic pretence suddenly acquires nobility, for now she is
assuming her role with full awareness of what its mythologem entails.
It is Caesar, puritanically hostile to the comedy inherent in imperial
pretensions, who is now to be fooled, metamorphosed into the typically
carnival animal of A Midsummer Night's Dream:
poor venomous fool

. . .
Be angry and despatch. O couldst thou speak,

That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass
Unpolicied!
And the comment of the guard who discovers the death is: "Caesar's
beguil'd."
Shakespeare has used the imagery of the topsy-turvy world of the
fool and the clown to throw doubt upon the solemn realities of coolly
calculated power. The entry of the clown with the basket of figs and
the serpent —
both potent and popular symbols of sexuality and
death —
suddenly shows Cleopatra how to outfool Octavius Caesar
after all. Weimann^' had already pointed out the verbal reminiscence:
. . . for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or

never recover.
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have

Immortal longings in me. . . .
The great speech picks up the clown's word. The clown's remarks
in fact are the only piece of prose we have in the whole fifth act of
the play, and the only prose since act III, when Eros told Enobarbus
that, with the arrest of Lepidus, conflict between Caesar and Antony
was now inevitable. This is the leap into a new dimension, aided by
the use of the common dialect, which Aristotle's Rhetoric detected in
Euripides, and which Shakespeare shares therefore with classical
technique. A mediocre imagination might have sought to let Cleopatra
die with dignity by muting or repudiating her chequered past.
Shakespeare gives her clowning fresh status, a mythical aura of heroic
^^ Cf. Baldwin, op. cit., II, p. 513: Horace, Satires II. 1. 45-46.
" Op. cit, p. 407.
J. K. Newman 329
martyrdom and exaltation which exploits to the full all the tragi-
comedy of what it means to be a queen.
T. S. Eliot has pointed out^^ that every work of genius modifies

the tradition to which added. There has been a failure on the
it is
part of classical scholarship to see the truth of this argument. An

orthodoxy has filled the histories of Latin and Greek literature which
passes for received and obvious, when in reality it is based on all
sorts of uncritically made assumptions about what literature is or
should be. The height of absurdity has been reached when, on the
basis of this unscientific and unexamined orthodoxy, approval has
been denied to authors whose classical credentials were in fact
impeccable. An amusing corollary of this has been demonstrated in
recent years. As archaeology throws up texts such as those of
Menander's Dyscolus or the new fragment of the elegies of Virgil's
friend, Gallus, the accepted attitude has become a sneer or a yawn.
Menander's reputation has allegedly suffered by the rediscovery of
his play; Gallus turns out to have been no great loss. The explanation
is that the existing canon of classics has been accepted as great only
by force of tradition. When something comes along which demands

a re-assessment of the tradition, it is met, because we misunderstand
that tradition, with incomprehension and rejection. But of course if
Ovid had been lost and just now rediscovered, he too would be an
author whose brilliant reputation was belied by his emerging achieve-
ments.
The remedy for this situation is dialogue. Shakespeare read the
classics he knew with the heart, mind and intuition of transcendent
genius. In this sense the poets are the best interpreters of their
predecessors, something which Alexandria, with its ideal of the scholar
/ knew well enough. And the poets who implicitly in their

poet,
works make these interpretations continue an unbroken tradition,
which is still worthy of being called "classical." Shakespeare is not a
carbon-copy of any Greco-Roman author, any more than any Greco-
Roman author is a carbon-copy of another. But as the master of
dramatic form, of contrast, metaphor, of the serio-comic, of the
resources of plain language, he could have found an appreciative
audience in antiquity.
When Aristotle walked with his pupil Alexander in the royal palace
at Pella, the mold of European history was being set in their conver-
sations for the next thousand and more than thousand years, for
'* "Tradition and the Individual Talent," quoted in Select Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed.
J. Hayward (Melbourne, London, Baltimore 1953), p. 23.

2
Scipio, for Caesar, for Constantine, for Charlemagne, for the Christian
Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and his pupil, Dante. This is ultimately
what the classical tradition is about, and from this company, from
that royal palace, shall we exclude Shakespeare?

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f^CLO^^-^iixD

Patet omnibus Veritas; nondum est occupata;

Sen. Epp. 33. 1

THE LIBRARY OF THE

Printed in the U.S.A.

Responsible Editor: J. K. Newman

The Editor welcomes contributions, which should not normally exceed

Contributions should be addressed to:

Each contributor receives twenty-five offprints.

Tutto mi transferisco in low

The allusion to Lucian hereis not directly to a dialogue by the

Greek but to the brief Renaissance work Virtus Dea, inter-

polated into the Latin translation of parts of Lucian by various hands

Virtue despondently rejoins that she must go away "naked and

Jupiter painting butterflies is engaged in the task of creating souls,

Venuta la sera, mi ritorno in casa, ed entro nel mio scrittoio; e in su

I'uscio mi spoglio quella vesta cotidiana, plena dl fango e di loto, e

mi metto panni reali e curiali; e rivestito condecentemente, entro

When evening comes, I return home, and enter my writing-room. At

courts of the men

Machiavelli uses the word umanita in this letter of December 10,

"poet." The Renaissance evidently believed in a human dialogue,

antiquity in some favorite Cinquecento masterpiece. But then schol-

unsurpassed) work of Renaissance poetry. Even Petrarch's Africa, the

Ovid, and comes alive only when it versifies a romantic episode in

the Teseida (1341?), as it is that of the executed More at the conclusion

scholars, but also by a civilized awareness of the artistic and literary

But the scholar must remember too! We need dialogue, between

civilization, and Renaissance specialists who are less ready to separate

Once again the genre has remembered.

There is not much danger of a one-sided worship of classical

Roman Jokes and the Renaissance Prince, 1455-

Botticelli's Hypnerotomachia in the National Gallery,

Platonic and Pauline Ideals in Comic Dress: "Com-

Medea and Imitation in the French Renaissance 215

Thomas Stanley's Aeschylus: Renaissance Practical

Myrrha's Revenge: Ovid and Shakespeare's Reluc-

Ovidian Pictures and "The Rules and Compasses"

9. Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance 277

10. Altered States: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shake-

1 1 Small Latine and Lesse Greeke? Shakespeare and

I. From Suetonius to the Fifteenth Century

elephant joke, has Augustus saying to a timid man holding out a

although Symmachus twice stresses the pre-eminence of Cicero as a

along with so much else, to Petrarch. In his Rerum memorandarum

II. Real laughing princes: Alfonso and Cosimo

We might expect to find a number of Renaissance kings and princes

mirari tamen magis licuit, quo animo quaque moderatione ipse

insufficient grounds.^ Dated by Wesselski about 1478, the collection

different sources. The real people to whom motti are attributed

* There is only one edition: Angela Polizianos Tagebuch (1477-1479), edited by

Two of Cosimo's retorts were famous, and occur in many other

III. Alfonso from 1485 to 1646

porary Facezie e motti attributed to Niccolo Angeli dal Bucine,^ in

crates, and the Emperors Sigismund, Rudolph, Frederick and Albert.

anecdotes about famous people, often tragic or depressing, many of

mentary (in the 1538 edition) on I. 9 includes the phrase: "Attende,

is entitled Aeneae Episcopi Senesis in libros Alphonsi Regis Commen- . . .

tarius, so that it can presumably be dated between 1450, when