Z 3599
1. Through Goffredo’s prayers, the “Father and Lord” so arranged it that “now a new order of things begins” (13, 73, 5) and sent rain after drought.
Z 3602
1. The following two sentences are added in the margin. Cf. an early entry on Z 112: “Patience is the most heroic of the virtues precisely because it has not the least appearance of heroism.” See also Z 4239–40.
Z 3603
1. In the passage that follows Leopardi interprets Goffredo as a hero of reason “almost comparable to Ulysses” (Damiani) inaugurating thus a line of interpretation of great consequence in nineteenth-century culture after Nietzsche. “The late German Romantic interpreters of classical antiquity following on Nietzsche’s early writings stressed the bourgeois Enlightenment in Homer” (Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectics of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London: Verso Books, 1979, p. 44). Cf. Z 3616.
Z 3607
1. In employing the term pietà (which means “pity” as well as “piety”) Leopardi, reader of sacred texts and of devout literature, has perhaps in mind the Virgin Mary’s love for her son. One might recall Simone Weil’s aphorism: “The Gospels are the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius, as the Iliad is the first…” (S. Weil and R. Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy, New York 2005, pp. 33–34).
Z 3610
1. Virgil, Aeneid 4, 165–72. It is thus as if Aeneas were, from this point of view, a precursor of Tasso’s Goffredo; cf. Z 3597.
Z 3611
1. Aristotle, Politics 1269b, 24–35. The same passage cited, more explicitly, on Z 3765–66. On the fact that, vice versa, heroes inspire love see Z 4390.
Z 3613
1. See Z 1006, 3911, 3934.
Z 3615
1. The passage from “These considerations” to this point is a ms. unattached marginal addition.
Z 3616
1. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime 9, 11–15.
Z 3617
1. Ariosto, Orlando furioso 11, 79, 7–8.
2. See Z 2759 and note.
Z 3619
1. Anadiplosis is a doubling of the initial syllable.
2. Forcellini cites Lucretius, De rerum natura 1, 587. For the etymology “by ear” sancitus–sanctus see Z 1121, note 1.
Z 3620
1. Leopardi cites from his edition of Cornelius Nepos, Padua 1720, p. 140. See Z 42 and note 3.
Z 3622
1. Michele Rosa, Delle porpore e delle materie vestiarie presso gli antichi, Modena 1786, cited by Forcellini.
Z 3623
1. A type of mosaic which draws an outline around shapes using tesserae.
Z 3624
1. That is, the modern Romance languages, derived from Latin.
2. The berry that grows on the scarlet oak, according to modern botany a kind of insect, conchineal kermes.
3. Kelp is a type of algae that is used, among other things, to fabricate a red dye.
Z 3628
1. The misattribution of the book De excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium to Aemilius Probus, rather than to its actual author, Cornelius Nepos, endured up until the latter half of the sixteenth century.
Z 3629
1. In 1474 Niccolò Perotti had gathered some of his own poems, together with fables by Avianus and Phaedrus. Of this latter a good half of the sixty-four fables published were then unknown, because they had been transmitted by a single codex, discovered by Perotti (Damiani).
Z 3630
1. Daniello Bartoli, Dell’ortografia italiana, Bologna 1676. The praise of Bartoli comes from Monti’s words in the Proposta, as cited on Z 1313.
Z 3634
1. The phrase in question, “obsoleti / sordibus tecti” [“the squalor of a tumbledown house”] (Horace, Odes 2, 10, 6–7), was omitted by Frederick II from his translation, on the grounds of its vulgarity (Pacella).
Z 3636
1. Prudentius, Cathemerinon liber 7, 164.
2. What follows this date has been added in the ms. margin in different notes (and perhaps at different times) mainly without insertion marks.
3. Monti, Proposta, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 64–67.
Z 3638
1. Leopardi subscribed to the view, also propounded on Z 1035, that in Wallachia (forming part of present-day Romania), Vulgar Latin was preserved.
Z 3639
1. The passage from here to the page reference 3878 is a ms. marginal addition. See Z 2387–88.
Z 3640
1. In his account of the genesis of the idea of divinity Leopardi, following in the steps of Lucretius (see De rerum natura 1, 151–54; 5, 82–91, 1182–95, 1218–35), is in agreement with an intellectual tradition to which, among others, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, Hume, and Holbach all belong. See also the thoughts referred to at the beginning of this paragraph.
2. In the note is a ms. marginal addition, possibly from November 1823, when Leopardi read Pedro de Cieça’s Chronica.
Z 3642
1. Codrus was the mythical Athenian king who sacrificed himself, on the orders of the oracle, in order to save his city. The Decii, father and son, committed suicide on the battlefield. The legendary patrician Marcus Curcius hurled himself, fully armed and on horseback, into a chasm that had opened up in the Forum, because the augurs had said that it would only close up if filled with the most precious thing the Romans had.
Z 3644
1. According to Rousseau, fire was discovered through lightning, volcanoes, or by “some happy chance.” See Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 165) (Damiani). See later entries on Z 4119, 4121. Note how this theme is connected by Leopardi to his poetics of rimembranza: cf. Z 4427.
2. This is what one of the first anthropologists, Joseph-François Lafitau, thinks of primitive societies in America; cf. his Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, Paris 1724, tome 1, p. 40: “some of them are ignorant even of the use of fire.”
3. Leopardi alludes here to Prometheus: see Hesiod, Works and Days 50ff.
Z 3645
1. Rousseau, in his Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 172), had likewise noted how nature appeared to have gone to some lengths to keep the capacity of power to fuse metals a secret from humanity (Damiani).
Z 3648
1. For Leopardi’s critique of anthropocentrism see Z 84 and note. See also Z 1452–53 and note.
Z 3649
1. In the early decades of the nineteenth-century botanists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Augustin Pyrame de Candolle, and Joakim Frederik Schouw were much exercised by the question of the division of the earth into distinct botanical regions, and the debate was followed in the Italian periodical press. Schouw is mentioned, e.g., in Biblioteca Italiana, tome 10, June 1818, p. 424.
2. Analogy had been defined on Z 66 as “one of the foundations of modern philosophy.” See also Z 157 and 947, note.
Z 3652
1. Leopardi refers here to the major and the minor premise in a syllogism.
2. The Samoyedic peoples were hunter-gatherers and reindeer herders, speaking a Uralic language and living in the North Siberian tundra. See Buffon, Histoire naturelle, tome 3, “Variétés dans l’espèce humaine,” p. 372 (LL = Storia naturale dell’uomo, tome 3, pp. 2–3).
Z 3660
1. The savage of California lives happily and healthily because he “does not know thinking,” as is asserted on Z 2712. See also Z 2712, 3180 and note, 3304.
Z 3666
1. Genesis 6:11: “And the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with iniquity.”
2. Leopardi would have found many references in Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains (see Z 3644, note 2), tome 1, pp. 29–41, where this exponent of a missionary Christian universalism collected materials from the Bible and the Greek writers to prove the common origin of the human race. Some of his works are in the LL, under the name Lafiteau, although this one is not catalogued.
1. An ancient technique in painting, used to paint on a wall, on wood, terra-cotta, marble, or ivory with colors melted with wax, hence the use of a heated iron tool. This long-forgotten practice was rediscovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Z 3676
1. Leopardi had certainly in mind Tacitus’s description of the Germans (De origine et situ Germanorum). The mores of the ancient Germans were much celebrated during the war of liberation against the Napoleonic armies of occupation, and became an important element in the northern Romanticism reflected in Staël’s De l’Allemagne.
Z 3680
1. See Z 350.
Z 3682
1. The contrast drawn here and in the preceding pages between north and south was a commonplace of Enlightenment thought, but more immediately Leopardi found it in Staël’s reflections in Corinne and De l’Allemagne. On the contemporary debate in Italy see Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question, Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press, 2002. See Z 74–75, 2086, 4256.
Z 3683
1. As well as the question above (“And are not women … lovers? etc. etc.”), the last two sentences were added in the ms. margin. See Z 55 and note 2.
Z 3684
1. The words to which Leopardi alludes here are to nullify and to vilify, as used by St. Jerome and other ecclesiastical writers (Pacella).
Z 3686
1. Varro, De lingua latina 7, 9.
Z 3687
1. Dante, Purgatorio 6, 92.
Z 3691
1. Like many other specifications inserted into these linguistic pages, the passage from “That novi … odi, etc.” is a ms. marginal addition.
Z 3712
1. Cf. Z 3002.
Z 3713
1. Leopardi is here talking about boredom (noia).
Z 3715
1. Unlike in many Romantics (e.g., Wordsworth), for whom the state of mind of a man “that is not passion’s slave” can be pleasurable (Rousseau calls it the “sentiment of existence”), for Leopardi this “empty” space is filled by a desire for happiness, an emotion in itself, neither positive nor negative, called here noia. Leopardi was seduced, at various stages, by the ideal in Stoic philosophy of a state where man’s “happiness and his satisfaction, or at any rate his consolation, depend upon himself” (Z 634); but even when this state is achieved, it is generally seen as a “consolation” rather than a positive “happiness.”
Z 3716
1. Leopardi alludes here to the phrase “litterae vastioris” (in Cicero, Orator 45, 153, about the omission of the letter x from Axilla to give Ala), and creates a Latinism, “lettera più vasta,” vastus sometimes meaning in Cicero “rough,” “unrefined.”
Z 3717
1. The preceding list of verbs is an unattached ms. marginal addition.
Z 3718
1. At various places in the Zibaldone Leopardi, drawing on Condillac, has discussed “the faculty of discovering the relations between things” (Z 1650). Here the stress is on the “invention” of such relationships that derives from a poetic imagination (see, e.g., Z 1838–39).
Z 3722
1. The fourth-century Latin grammarian Charisius, author of Institutiones grammaticae, and the Dutch scholar Vossius are mentioned by Alessandro Bandiera, the author of a translation into Italian of Cornelius Nepos, in a note explicating the expression dicis causa (Atticus, ch. 8). See Della vita degli eccellenti comandanti, Naples 1756 (= LL), p. 391 (Pacella).
Z 3724
1. Leopardi refers in his note to the Encyclopédie méthodique and to Hofmann’s Lexicon, cited on Z 1139, note 2.
Z 3725
1. Toward the bottom of that page Leopardi is discussing the perfect and supine of verbs in sco.
Z 3729
1. Andrés, Dell’origine, ch. 11, tome 2, p. 340.
2. Perticari, Apologia, pp. 106–11.
Z 3730
1. In his “Dialogo delle lingue” Speroni says in fact that Greek words were introduced by the earliest Romans into Latin in order to enrich and reinvigorate it. Cf. Z 3764.
Z 3735
1. A legal phrase, usually applied to minerals and timber belonging to a landowner.
Z 3741
1. In this dialogue Peretto regrets the wretched circumstances of his own time, in which, for the study of Greek and of Latin, the vulgar tongue was neglected (Speroni, Dialoghi, pp. 126–27).
Z 3744
1. See, for example, Speroni, Dialoghi, p. 102. On pujanza see Z 3999–4000.
Z 3745
1. Leopardi did not own Salmasius’s edition of the geographical compendium by Solinus entitled Collectanea rerum memorabilium, but, as Pacella has established, derived this passage from Cornelius Nepos, De vita excellentium imperatorum, Mannheim 1778, p. 240. On this topic see also the art. “H” in the Encyclopédie méthodique. Grammaire et Littérature, tome 2, p. 214, col. 2 (with similar examples).
2. Diogenes Laertius, De vitis, vol. 2, pp. 126–27.
3. Keller, Orthographia Latina, pp. 40ff.
Z 3748
1. The pair of terms targeted by Leopardi supply the title of Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (Paris 1802) by the idéologue philosopher Cabanis (see Z 1184 and note), a celebrated treatise which is not in the LL (Damiani). The title of this work features in a ms. list of books that Leopardi intended to buy (see P. Zito, “Gli effetti della lettura,” in I libri di Leopardi, Naples 2000, p. 114, who dates the list to 1825).
Z 3752
1. The example mentioned in the note is to be found in this edition in the main text of the translation.
Z 3753
1. Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae 8, 16, 2.
Z 3762
1. Niebuhr, Conspectus, p. 352.
2. Sulla, Silla, and Symmachus are all proper names. Angelo Mai had discovered, and then published the fragments of the orations by Symmachus in a codex in the Ambrosian Library (Q. Aurelii Symmaci octo orationum ineditarum partes, Milan 1815). On the first page of the preface Mai notes that in the codex the name was constantly given as “Summachus aut Summacus” (Pacella). Leopardi wrote some notes on this topic, see Scritti filologici, pp. 113–18.
3. Leopardi refers back to the marginal addition on Z 2657 (after the date 20 November 1822), where he speaks of manuscripts. The codex of Cicero’s De re publica and that of Fronto, both discovered by Mai, respectively in Milan and in Rome, belonged in fact to the same codex, originating in Bobbio (Emilia Romagna).
Z 3764
1. Speroni deplores the lack in Italian of scientific terminology and blames it on the “Tuscan fathers,” who in general did not cultivate the sciences. See Z 3728–31.
2. This remark, added later, may derive from reading Rocca, Memorie, pp. 201ff., an author whose observations on animals are recalled on Z 1760–61 and 1798 (Pacella).
Z 3766
1. Aristotle, Politics 1269b, 24–35; see Z 3611 and note, where this same passage is cited, omitting the reference to “unnatural love” (as John Gillies’s translation reads in his Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, London 1797, vol. 2, p. 106). The Greek expression is Leopardi’s.
Z 3769
1. In the present paragraph Leopardi has referred in quick succession to canonical works in the epic tradition by Homer, Virgil, Tasso, and Camoens.
Z 3772
1. We do not know to which author Leopardi alludes here.
2. Speroni, “Alle cortigiane,” in Orationi, p. 195.
Z 3773
1. Here there begins a long thought, which continues until Z 3810. The background of this discussion is Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, on which see Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality,” in Essays in the History of Ideas, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1948.
2. See Z 873 and note.
Z 3778
1. This example comes from Buffon, Histoire naturelle, tome 32, p. 47 (LL = Degli
animali quadrupedi, tome 1, pp. 273–74). Another example of animal cooperation further on, on Z 3781–82. See also Z 288.
Z 3779
1. Arrian, Indica, ch. 13, where the capture of elephants is described.
Z 3782
1. Leopardi applies to the pack of wolves an argument that Rousseau had developed in relation to primitive men (Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 219, note XV): “men who do not know how to assess themselves or to compare themselves with others, can do much mutual violence, if they get some advantage from it, without conversely ever giving offense.”
Z 3784
1. The passage from “Just as with suicide” is a ms. marginal addition.
Z 3791
1. Leopardi refers here, in a marginal addition, to Cieça de Leon, Parte primera de la chronica del Peru, where, in the chapter cited, the forms of war and slavery practiced by the Indians are described.
Z 3793
1. Whether this is a typical characteristic of humans (as compared with animals) or not has been discussed by scientists; see, e.g., Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, London: Radius, 1991.
Z 3796
1. Leopardi refers here to chs. 12, 16, and 19 of Cieça’s Parte primera, numbered in folios.
Z 3797
1. See Leopardi’s operetta morale “La scommessa di Prometeo.” The information contained in this work on the country of Popaian, and regarding the desolate aspect of the region and the primitive customs of its inhabitants, is drawn from Cieça. The following three sentences are added in the ms. margin.
2. Leopardi was able to consult at home the French edition of Garcilaso de la Vega, Histoire des Incas (Amsterdam 1704). He was also acquainted with Algarotti’s Saggio sopra l’imperio degl’Incas, in Opere, tome 4, pp. 157–82. Other information could be gleaned from Robertson’s history (see Z 3180 and note; 3420, note 2) and from Clavijero’s Historia antigua de México (Italian translation in the LL: Storia antica del Messico, Cesena 1780).
3. Pliny, Naturalis historia 6, 35, 195.
Z 3799
1. See Z 416 and note.
Z 3801
1. Leopardi distinguishes here between lingua and linguaggio, implying perhaps that the Californians, having only the latter, hardly have a human language at all. The meaning of linguaggio may derive from a passage of the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 148) where Rousseau states that “the first language of man … before there was any necessity to persuade assemblies of men, is the cry of Nature.” This is however not at all what Clavijero, Storia della California (cf. Z 3180, note) describes in ch. 17.
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