Dante and Virgil

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Dante Alighieri, widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is ... Wikipedia

Born: 1265, Florence, Italy

Died: 14 September 1321 (age 56 years), Ravenna, Italy

Influenced by: Virgil, Guido Cavalcanti, Aristotle, Homer · See more

Full name: Durante degli Alighieri

Spouse: Gemma Di Manetto Donati (m. 1285–1321)

What is Dante most famous for?

Italian poet and scholar Dante Alighieri is best known for his masterpiece La Commedia (known in English as The Divine Comedy), which is universally considered one of world literature's greatest poems.

Canto II

On the evening of Good Friday, Dante hesitates as he follows Virgil; Virgil explains that he has been sent by Beatrice, the symbol of Divine Love. Beatrice had been moved to aid Dante by the Virgin Mary(symbolic of compassion) and Saint Lucia (symbolic of illuminating Grace). Rachel, symbolic of the contemplative life, also appears in the heavenly scene recounted by Virgil. The two of them then begin their journey to the underworld. Feeling uncertain of his worthiness for the journey, Dante reflects on the paths of Aeneas and Paul, who were granted access to the realms of the afterlife, and doubts his own capability to undertake such a passage (Inf. 2.10-36).

Canto II - Wikipedia link

Dante's Inferno

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro was a classical Roman poet, best known for three major works—the Bucolics (or Eclogues), the Georgics, and the Aeneid—although several minor poems are also attributed to him. The son of a farmer in northern Italy, Virgil came to be regarded as one of Rome's greatest poets; his Aeneid as Rome's national epic.

Over the past 300 years, much of Virgil’s long-standard ancient biography, based on hearsay and legends, has been challenged. (Vergil with an e is the classical Roman spelling, normal in Germany, and thence adopted by some in the United Kingdom and the United States, contrary to traditional literary usage). These ancient biographies include much material that has been believed only because it was applied to Virgil. Romans and Italians after his death attributed many myths to Virgil's tomb, for example, which is located near Naples, contending that the cave in which he was buried was carved out from the supernatural power of Virgil's gaze. Now biographers try to piece together Virgil's life from his own writings and the writings of his contemporaries. Virgil almost without a biography, without the lavish myths, turns out to be no less great a poet than he was before.

His earliest poetry reveals a formidable literary training; legend contends that he was sent to Rome at the age of 5 to study rhetoric, medicine, philosophy, and astronomy. The rustic tragedies of his Bucolics 1 and 9 are the stuff of life in Italy during the First Triumvirate (Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus) and the Second Triumvirate (Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian) and not necessarily autobiographical; nevertheless, they show Virgil's concerns in his early career. Already in Bucolic 1 Virgil writes with admiration of the young Octavian, whom Cicero at the same time dismissed as a teenage butcher. How Virgil actually came into contact with Maecenas, early Octavian’s adviser in matters of cultural politics, no one knows. About 38 BCE, however, Virgil was already well enough placed to be able to introduce Horace to Maecenas (Horace, Satires 1.6.54f.), and perhaps in the spring of 37 BCE both Virgil and Horace accompanied Maecenas and various other public figures on their journey from Rome to Brundisium (Horace, Satires1.5). The Bucolics were a huge popular success: the poems were performed on-stage, and more than four hundred years after publication they were recited in the streets of Rome by Christian priests who should have been reciting psalms. This success made Virgil’s next poetic undertaking a matter of public moment. He says (Georgics 3.41) that the Georgics were “your ungentle orders, Maecenas.” “Ungentle,” though, is typically elusive: does Virgil mean that the orders were stern or that the subject-matter of the new poem was not gentle? “Orders” is a crude way of rendering iussa, which Peter White says in Promised Verse (1993) is a word used for many kinds of literary suggestions, invitations, or requests. The text does not suggest that Virgil is the willing (or unwilling) servant of a vast and coercive propaganda machine. Maecenas had seven years to wait for the Georgics, and the poem reflects the political changes of the period of composition. Octavian stopped near Naples for four days in 29 BCE, while returning to celebrate his triumph over Antony and Cleopatra, in order to listen to Virgil and Maecenas recite the newly completed Georgics.

Virgil had become a major national figure, as well as a rich man: his estate came to be worth 25 times the property qualification of a Roman knight, but crude cash handouts in properly behaved circles at Rome were entirely unthinkable, and it would be unjustified cynicism to suppose that Maecenas secured the poet’s loyalty with a series of handouts. The date Virgil actually began the Aeneid is equally uncertain: the proemium to the third Georgic(verses 21-39) suggests that he was thinking of writing an epic long before he actually began it, though he may not even have finished the Georgics before beginning the Aeneid. Virgil died in 19 BCE, before the Aeneid was altogether finished, and formal imperfections have indeed been detected. Just as Propertius was excited by the thought of the forthcoming epic (2.34.61-66), Augustus was urgent to hear something of it before “publication” of the whole; that Virgil read the imperial family three books (2, 4, and 6, though that is not certain) in 22 BCE seems probable. It is related that Virgil wanted to spend three years in Greece to perfect the text, but Augustus, on his way back from the East, met him at Athens, and the poet decided to return to Italy with Augustus. Heatstroke incurred at Megara led to Virgil’s death at Brindisium. Some of this sequence of events may be true; there are objections to almost all of it, however, and various ancient accounts of what Virgil had laid down in his will as to what should be done in case he died with the poem unfinished are strikingly inconsistent. The tale that Augustus saw to the posthumous publication of the epic that the poet himself had wished should be burned if he could not see to its completion is moving but may well be rather a long way from the facts.

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