by Dante
78. Tommaseo (1837) rightly suggests that congaudere (rejoice) is a biblical word; further precision was offered by Campi (1888), citing I Corinthians 12:26: “sive gloriatur unum membrum, congaudent omnia membra” (if a single member glories, then all members rejoice along with it). St. Paul is developing the analogy between parts of the human body and the individual members of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. [return to English / Italian]
81. Virgil’s specific question at last elicits a sort of vita poetae from his interlocutor. See note to Inferno I.67–87 for the similar vita Virgilii found there. [return to English / Italian]
82–93. Publius Papinius Statius (45–96) was born in Naples and not in Toulouse, birthplace of a different Statius, a rhetorician; Dante’s error was a common one (perhaps deriving from the glosses by Lactantius [ca. 300] to the poems of Statius) and he helped propagate it, since he is probably responsible for the mistaken birthplace found both in Boccaccio and in Chaucer. Statius’s Thebaid, an epic in twelve books, composed in the years between between 80 and 92, was the source of a good deal of Dante’s sense of what for us is the “Oedipus story,” in Statius seen as the civil war between the forces loyal to one or the other of Oedipus’s royal sons.
Dante’s reference to Statius’s laureation is problematic. Since it seems clear, despite an occasional argument to the contrary, that Dante did not know Statius’s collection of his “fugitive” poems, the Silvae (see the note to verse 90), he could not have read (in Silvae III.v.28–31) that, while the emperor (Domitian) had crowned Statius with gold at an “arts festival” at Alba, he had not done so at Rome, i.e., Statius did not get the laurel for his epic. And thus it remains possible but seems unlikely that he ever received the laurel; however, his dedication of the Thebaid to Domitian, coupled with the opening lines of the Achilleid (I.9–11), where he asks Apollo for laureation and intimates that he had been previously coronated, might have made Dante think he had been. This second epic, which he did not finish, getting only as far as into the second book, was the source of most of what Dante, Homerless, knew about Achilles. [return to English / Italian]
82–84. Born around A.D. 45, Statius was thus about twenty-five when Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, destroyed in A.D. 70 the Second Temple in Jerusalem as part of his attack upon the Jews, an event to which Dante will advert in Paradiso VI.92 (for Dante’s sense of the “just retribution” involved in this event, see the note to that passage). Titus succeeded Vespasian as emperor (79–81). [return to English / Italian]
85–87. The “name” to which the speaker refers is that of poet. The surprising, even shocking, culmination of his statement of his debt to Virgil in the next canto (verse 73: “through you I was a poet, through you a Christian”) is adumbrated here, where Statius owns himself (at the age at which Dante suffered the loss of Beatrice, twenty-five) to have achieved fame as a poet but not yet faith in Christ. [return to English / Italian]
88. Dante had already referred to Statius as “lo dolce poeta” (the sweet poet) at Convivio IV.xxv.6, as Tommaseo (1837) pointed out. Pietro di Dante (1340) was the first to suggest that the source for the phrase lay in Juvenal’s Satires (VII.82–87). For strong support of this notion, see Ronconi (Ronc.1965.1), pp. 568–69; see also Tandoi (Tand.1969.1). Ettore Paratore, “Giovenale,” ED III (1971), pp. 197–202, offers probably the most balanced and useful introduction to the problem of Dante’s knowledge of Juvenal. [return to English / Italian]
90. There has been much confusion over the meaning of Statius’s reference to being crowned with myrtle leaves. The myrtle tree was sacred to Venus (see, e.g., Aen. V.72). And, indeed, Statius himself, in his Silvae (IV.vii.10–11), asks to be crowned as a lyric poet (and not as a writer of epic) with myrtle leaves. However, as nearly all admit, or even insist, Dante could not have been acquainted with the Silvae. Then what does Dante mean us to understand by Statius’s insistence that he was crowned with myrtle? As Daniello (1568) notes, Virgil speaks of both laurel and myrtle (Egl. II.54): “You, too, o laurels (lauri), I will pluck, and you, neighboring myrtle (myrte)”; Daniello believes that Statius is associated with myrtle because he was a poet of love. Disagreeing with him, Tommaseo (1837) thinks that the phrase, for Dante, meant that the myrtle wreath was secondary to the laurel, an opinion followed by Porena (1946) and developed by Mattalia (1960), who argues that, while Dante himself makes Statius one of the poete regolati (i.e., the classical Latin poets worthy of emulation [Dve II.vi.7]), it is Statius who speaks now, and he wants to show his awareness of his dependence upon Virgil, of his role as secondary poet following in the wake of a master. See verses two lines from the ending of the Thebaid (XII.816–817), which explicitly make a highly similar claim: “do not attempt to rival the divine Aeneid, but follow at a distance, always worshiping its footsteps.” Moore (Moor.1896.1), p. 243, was perhaps the first to suggest that this passage was being cited here in vv. 94–97. For its possible earlier relevance, see the note to Inferno XXIII.145–148. [return to English / Italian]
93. Statius’s “second burden” was his unfinished Achilleid. [return to English / Italian]
94–96. For the relationship of Statius’s text to these lines, see the concluding remarks in the note to verse 90. The image of the Aeneid as being the divine torch that has set aflame many another poem, including this one, similarly “divine,” if surely in different ways, will be explored as this scene unfolds. [return to English / Italian]
97–99. The appearance of the word mamma here is stunning, for we find it, a spectacular instantiation of the low vernacular (see the last item in the note to Inf. XXXII.1–9, the passage in which it has had its only previous appearance), used in the same verse with the word that may have represented for Dante the height of classical eloquence, Eneïda, the title of the greatest classical poem, here in its only use in the Comedy.
The passage applies to Statius, but increasingly students of this passage have been convinced that Statius’s fictive biography serves as a sort of stand-in for Dante’s genuine one, that is, in Statius’s words here about his dependence on Virgil we are also reading Dante’s confession of his own debt to the Roman poet. For this view see, among others, Paratore (Para.1968.1), pp. 72–73; Padoan (Pado.1970.1), p. 354; Hollander (Holl.1980.2), pp. 123–24, 205n.; Stephany (Step.1983.1), p. 151; Picone (Pico.1993.2), p. 330. In the next canto the extent of that debt will assume staggering proportions.
A dram is the equivalent of one-eighth of an ounce. [return to English / Italian]
100–102. While some have understood that Statius’s gesture offers a single day of lingering (first, the Anonimus Lombardus [1322]) and others a solar cycle of twenty-eight years (first, Jacopo della Lana [1324]), most, after the Ottimo (1333), believe that he means one more year. [return to English / Italian]
103–114. The first of these two adjacent and charming passages to return to earlier moments in the canto adverts to the discussion of the absolute and conditional wills in vv. 61–69. Here we see that Dante’s absolute will is conquered by his emotions. In the second, Dante’s smile is probably to be understood as exactly such a sign as Virgil gave to arriving Statius at vv. 14–15.
One does not want to read in too moralizing a light this extraordinary little scene. There is no serious consequence if Dante gives away Virgil’s little secret, or if Statius becomes overenthusiastic once it is known. The three poets share a moment of common freedom from the constraints of their missions. It is typical of this great and securely serious theological poet that he can indulge himself and his readers in moments of such moving happiness. This is perhaps as close to experiencing Christian fellowship as Virgil ever comes. [return to English / Italian]
125–126. The protagonist’s understanding of Statius’s debt to Virgil is obviously not yet fully developed. In his formulation it was from the greater poet that Statius learned “to sing of men and of the gods,” an adequate description of the work of a pagan writer of epic. We will learn in the next canto that, behind the
façade of pagan trappings, Statius was in fact a secret Christian. See note to Purgatorio XXII.67–73. [return to English / Italian]
130–136. With regard to the supposed “failed embrace” between Statius and Virgil, Hollander has argued (Holl.1975.1), p.359, that Dante’s failed attempt to embrace Casella (Purg. II.76–81), pointing to a physical impossibility, is countered in the successful exchange of embraces between Sordello and Virgil, both shades (Purg. VII.2, 15). In both of those scenes there is a desire to embrace that is either frustrated or accomplished. Here Statius desires to embrace Virgil but, once advised against doing so by the author of the Aeneid, wills not to. Since we know from Sordello’s and Virgil’s shared embraces that in fact shades are capable of embracing, we may not properly say, as most who deal with the scene do, that Virgil and Statius, “being shades, cannot embrace,” or that they “are not capable of embracing” (Cecchetti [Cecc.1990.2], p. 107). They are perfectly capable of embracing; Virgil convinces Statius that it is not a fitting gesture in this higher realm. For another view of the supposedly problematic program of embraces see Iliescu (Ilie.1971.1). And see the note to Purgatorio XIX.134–135 for the probable biblical source of a similar scene: Pope Adrian’s refusal to accept Dante’s obeisance. In the end Statius won’t embrace Virgil because up here souls do not behave “that way,” just as Virgil did not want to have his identity revealed for a similar reason. [return to English / Italian]
PURGATORIO XXII
1–6. The scene with the angel, which we expect, having experienced such a scene at the end of the description of each terrace, is here done retrospectively and as briefly as possible. The giving of directions to the next terrace and the removal of Dante’s (fifth) P are referred to simply as having occurred. The remembered angelic recital of a Beatitude (here the fourth, Matthew 5:6, “Blessèd are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness [justice, iustitiam, in the Vulgate], for they shall be filled”) is given in truncated form. Responding to this economy, Benvenuto (1380) refers to Dante’s “novum modum scribendi” (new way of writing). What exactly was omitted from the Beatitude has been a subject of discussion, but it clearly seems to be “hunger and” (saved to be deployed, words more appropriate to Gluttony, at Purg. XXIV.154) and perhaps the ending as well (“for they shall be filled”), possibly omitted in both utterances.
It is as though the poet were clearing every inch of available space for the second scene with Statius, and indeed the arrival at the Terrace of Gluttony will be postponed for over a hundred lines (until verse 115), the longest such intermezzo we find among the seven terraces.
From verse 3 it seems inferentially clear that Statius does not have what would have been his final P removed. Dante describes his own letter being removed from his brow by the angel (“avendomi dal viso un colpo raso” [having erased another swordstroke from my brow]). Had he wanted to include Statius as having the same experience, he would only have to have written “avendoci” (from our brows). Thus, like all “regular” penitents, it seems most likely that Statius did not have his brow adorned by the writing of the warder at the gate of purgatory. See the note to Purgatorio XXI.22–24. [return to English / Italian]
7–9. We are reminded of Dante’s increasing similarity to the unburdened souls of the disembodied. Traversing two more terraces will make him as light as they. [return to English / Italian]
10–18. Dante’s charming fiction has it that Juvenal (for the reason behind the choice of him as praiser of Statius see the note to Purg. XXI.88), arriving in Limbo ca. A.D. 140, told Virgil of Statius’s great affection, which then caused a similar affection in Virgil for the unknown Statius. Benvenuto (1380) offers a sweet-tempered gloss to this passage: “Often we love a virtuous man, even if we have never met him—and in just this way do I love dead Dante.” [return to English / Italian]
19–24. Virgil wraps his delicate yet intrusive question in pledges of friendship, and then asks Statius how such as he could have been stained by the sin of avarice. The phrase “tra cotanto senno” (amidst such wisdom) recalls the identical words found at Inferno IV.102, and thus reminds us of the five classical poets encountered there by Dante. It may also remind us that Limbo is precisely where anybody else would have assumed Statius would spend eternity. [return to English / Italian]
25–26. As Benvenuto says, “Statius now smiles at Virgil’s mistake just as Dante had smiled, earlier [Purg. XXI.109], at Statius’s mistake.” Statius is also obviously allowed to be pleased to have been guilty of prodigality rather than avarice, no matter how seriously Dante took the latter sin. [return to English / Italian]
28–35. A paraphrase may help make clear the general sense of these lines: “As my situation among the avaricious made you take me for one of them—and a better understanding shows the opposite sin to pertain, just so did your text seem to be condemning avarice—until my personal understanding revealed that it condemned my own prodigality.” On the problem of the belatedness of prodigality’s appearance as a subject on this terrace, of which it is supposedly the cotitular occupant, see Barnes (Barn.1993.1), pp. 288–90. [return to English / Italian]
36. Statius has already said (Purg. XXI.68) that he had to spend five hundred years and more on this terrace, thus more than six thousand months. [return to English / Italian]
38. The verb used by Statius to indicate his comprehension of Virgil’s text will turn out to be pivotal, in that he does not say “when I read” but “when I understood,” i.e., allowing us to comprehend his latent meaning: “when I construed your text so that it matched my need.” [return to English / Italian]
40–41. The meaning of these lines, clearly a translation of a text of Virgil (Aen. III.56–57), is the subject of much debate involving questions about the exact nature of what Dante wrote (“Per che” or “perché”?) and what he took Virgil to mean (or decided to make Virgil say). Here, as always, we have followed Petrocchi’s text in our translation, even though in this case we are in particularly strenuous disagreement with him. Here are the texts, Virgil’s first:
Quid non mortalia pectora cogis,
auri sacra fames?
(to what do you not drive human hearts, impious hunger for gold?)
As for Dante’s text, it may be either of the following:
Per che non reggi tu, o sacra fame
de l’oro, l’appetito de’ mortali?
(to what end, O cursèd hunger for gold, do you not govern [drive] the appetite of mortals?)
or
Perché non reggi tu, o sacra fame
de l’oro, l’appetito de’ mortali?
(why do you not govern mortal appetites, O holy [i.e., temperate] hunger for gold?)
It is true that the Latin adjective sacer can mean either “holy, sacred” or “unholy, impious.” However, the meaning of Aeneas’s outcry, recounting the horrific deed committed by Polymnestor against Polydorus (see note to Inf. XIII.31–39) is clear to all; he means “impious.” But what of Dante’s text? The “traditional” reading has him maintaining the negative valence of Virgil’s sacer (which would then be the only occurrence among twelve in which sacro does not mean “holy” in his poem). Perhaps no early reader, among those who understood Statius as deliberately misreading Virgil, was as “modern” and “revisionist” as Francesco da Buti (1385), who simply argued that Dante was deliberately giving Virgil’s text another meaning than it held because it suited his purpose to do so. Bianchi (1868) is the first to appreciate the absurdity of the notion that Dante had used the verb reggere (to govern) in a pejorative sense. The debate continues into our own day, mainly propelled by the notion that Dante could not possibly have misunderstood Virgil’s words and therefore did not grossly misrepresent them. This, however, is to overlook the fact that it is the character Statius who is understanding them as they took on significance for him, guilty of prodigality, not of avarice. And just as he will later reveal his “misinterpretation” of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue at vv. 70–72, a “misreading” that saved his soul, s
o now he shows how his moral rehabilitation was begun when he “misread” a passage in the Aeneid. The debate is finally in such condition that this view, present in some of the earliest commentators but energetically attacked over the centuries, now may seem only sensible. See, among others, Ronconi (Ronc.1958.1), pp. 85–86; Groppi (Grop.1962.1), pp. 163–68; Paratore (Para.1968.1), pp. 73–75; Hollander (Holl.1980.1), pp. 212–13, and (Holl.1983.1), pp. 86–89, completely in accord with Shoaf’s earlier and nearly identical reading (Shoa.1978.1). They are joined by Barolini (Baro.1984.1), p. 260, and, at length, by Martinez (Mart.1989.2). A similar, if less developed argument, is found in Mazzotta (Mazz.1979.1), p. 222. And, for wholehearted acceptance of Shoaf’s argument, see Picone (Pico.1993.2), pp. 325–26. Neglected, by all but Barolini and Shoaf, is Austin (Aust.1933.1). Mainly forgotten as well is the then daring support of Francesco da Buti by Alfredo Galletti (Gall.1909.1), pp. 17–18. Among Italian students of the problem who accept this basic view of its resolution see Chiamenti (Chia.1995.1), pp. 131–37, who offers most of the essential bibliography for the problem but is, however, surprisingly unaware of the support for his position available in his American precursors’ analyses of what he considers “the most beautiful example of free translation in Dante” (p. 134). For the general question of Dante’s Statius see Brugnoli (Brug.1969.1) and Rossi (Ross.1993.1); for more recent bibliography see Glenn (Glen.1999.1), p. 114, and Marchesi (Marc.2002.1), an extended discussion of the possible Augustinian sources of the “aggressive” reading of Virgilian text attributed to Statius by Dante. [return to English / Italian]
