Purgatorio (122 page)

64–65.
   See Benvenuto’s (1380) paraphrase: “as though to say, so that I may write of you souls and give your true reputation, in case there should remain in the world infamous word of your lust.” Dante’s way of promising to record the penitents’ presence on the road to salvation (we must remember that his charitable offer is made without knowing the identity of any of the souls whom he here addresses) so that it may draw prayers from the living and thus hasten their passage to bliss will be enlarged in Guido’s final request of Dante (vv. 130–132), where he hopes for prayers of intercession on his behalf in Heaven itself.

The language here reflects the mode of preparing a manuscript for inscription, the penciling in of guidelines that can be erased once ink is set to vellum or paper. Dante imagines, from the vantage point of his progress through the second kingdom of the afterworld, the preparation, by his own hand, of the manuscript of the
Comedy
once he is back in the world. Here the preparation of the page equates with its completion, the inscription of Guido Guinizzelli in the Book of Life. See
Inferno
XXIX.54–57 and note; see also the less generous, but similar, offer made to Bocca degli Abati at
Inferno
XXXII.93. Bocca is also recorded, but in the Book of the Dead.
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75.
   Guido uses a nautical metaphor to praise Dante’s on-loading of this precious cargo of knowledge, paraphrased by Benvenuto (1380) as follows: Dante is one who “gathers and assembles in the bark of his wit” the mountain’s source of knowledge that will allow him a better chance for salvation.
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76.
   Guido now addresses Dante’s question (vv. 65–66), brought on by the sight of the second group of penitents that had caught his attention (vv. 25–27).
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77–78.
   As part of his rather cruel treatment of Julius Caesar, who has already been put forward as a
positive
exemplary figure of zeal (see
Purg.
XVIII.101–102 and note), Dante now makes him an “informal exemplar” (this practice is observable elsewhere only once on the mountain: see note to
Purg.
XXIII.25–30) of homosexual lust (that is, he is not a part of the “official” program of those who are presented to all penitents, but is mentioned only to Dante by Guido). This makes him perhaps the only exemplary figure in
Purgatorio
to have both positive and negative valences. Again we can see how complex, troubling, and unremitting Dante’s response to Julius was.

Benvenuto (1380) dutifully and ashamedly reports Caesar’s one known homosexual experience but surrounds it, in his perplexity and discomfort, with a list of Julius’s (at times outrageous) sexual encounters with women. In a similar mode, John of Serravalle (1416) insists that Julius was a mere fourteen years old at the time of this misadventure. Dante’s source for poor Julius’s escapade in Bithynia may eventually be found in Suetonius’s
Life of the Caesars
(chapter 49), as Daniello reports (1568), citing the lines that were supposedly cried out against him when he returned from Gaul in triumph: “See how Caesar triumphs, having conquered Gaul; Nicomedes triumphs not, but he made Caesar fall.” What had happened? Apparently, when Julius was young and serving in Bithynia, the king, who admired him, got him drunk and had sexual relations with him. Other tales make Caesar a more willing accomplice to the king’s desire, e.g., Suetonius, attributing the story to Cicero, cites the report that he was dressed in purple as the queen of the realm at a wild party that ended in his “deflowering,” etc. Later Dante commentators (e.g., Oelsner [1899]) suggest that Dante’s source was a much condensed version of the events in Bithynia found in Uguccione of Pisa’s entry for “triumph” in his
Magnae derivationes
, which adverts to Bithynia and to Caesar’s being called both “king” and “queen” during one of his triumphs.
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82.
   The word “hermaphrodite” here doubtless means (and only means) “heterosexual” (from Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and the son of Hermes [Mercury] and Aphrodite [Venus], Hermaphroditus [
Metam
. IV.285–388], in which their two genders are eventually included in a single double-sexed human being). If “hermaphrodite” here means other than that, the only souls saved from the sin of Lust would have been homosexual and bisexual, that is, there would be no heterosexual penitents on the mountain. The commentary tradition yields some hilarious missteps on this subject. Francesco da Buti (1385), selecting “hermaphrodite” (in the sense of bisexual) as the second category of the penitent lustful on the mountain, tells the tale of a person he had seen, while he was a youth, who dressed as a man but who sat at the distaff and spun wool, using the name “Mistress Piera.” It is only with Gabriele (1525) and Daniello (1568) that commentators get the problem cleared up: these are the penitent heterosexual lovers. There was still so much confusion three centuries later that even Scartazzini (1900) felt that he had to do a full review of the question. It should be said that it was provocative for Dante to have used the myth as he chose to. Ovid’s original tale is quite startling in its sexual role reversals: Salmacis behaving like a traditional slavering male while Hermaphroditus behaves like a traditional inviting female (even performing an unintended striptease before the excited Salmacis, peeping from her hiding place in the woods). The tale seems fully intended to serve as the foundation myth of hermaphroditism. That was not enough, however, to protect it from Dante’s by now unsurprisingly elastic and eclectic reading of classical material. His meaning for the word is clear: “heterosexual”; to arrive at that unriddling, he probably foresaw, would cause his readers some exertion.
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83–87.
   These lines themselves possess the capacity to settle a problem that some readers prefer to keep open. How can the name of Pasiphaë, who was involved not in heterosexual lust between humans, but in sodomy (sexual contact between human and beast), be used here to indicate the former? He and his companions, Guido makes plain, did
not
commit “unnatural” sexual acts, but broke the laws that govern human sexual concourse, specifically those of marriage, and did so with an untamed energy that is more fit for beasts than humans, and is thus symbolized by a woman who conspired to be entered by a bull.
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90.
   The large number of those who repine their former lust seems to be commensurate with those who are condemned forever to relive it; see
Inferno
V.67–69, where Virgil points out to Dante a vast number of identifiable sinners—and this after we have already seen huge flocks of essentially anonymous lovers (
Inf
. V.40–42). And these sinners here, like those among whom we find Francesca and Paolo, are also compared to cranes (vv. 43–45;
Inf
. V.46–49).
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92.
   The speaker finally reveals himself as Guido Guinizzelli. “The most illustrious of the Italian poets prior to Dante, he belonged to the family of the Principi of Bologna, in which city he was born ca. 1230. In 1270 he was Podestà of Castelfranco; in 1274, when the Ghibelline Lambertazzi were expelled from Bologna, Guido with the rest of the Principi, who belonged to the same party, was forced to leave his native city; he is said to have died in exile at Verona in 1276”
(T)
. His most famous poem is the
canzone
“Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (“Love always finds shelter in the noble heart”). It sets out the doctrine, embraced by Dante in the fourth treatise of
Convivio
, that true nobility is not determined by birth but by inner virtue.
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93.
   Since Guido had died ca. 1276, he has made his way from Ostia in very good time indeed, passing through ante-purgatory and the first six terraces in less than a quarter century. Such speedy passage through purgation is a feature common to all the major figures whom Dante meets on the mountain, one forced on him by his predilection for the recently dead (Statius being the only ancient of note upon the slopes of the mountain allowed a speaking part, while Hugh Capet is the oldest “modern”). However, we have no idea how long any of the souls whom we see will be at their penance (if Statius is a model, a good long time, since he spent more than twelve hundred years purging himself [see note to
Purg
. XXI.22–24]). We simply have no idea how long Guido must stay in the fire for his lust. Time is not over for any of these sympathetic figures, and the mysteries of penance and redemption leave such concerns unresolved. For all we know, Manfred or Belacqua may finish purgation before Guido does.
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94–96.
   In a striking example of
abbreviatio
, Dante boils down a lengthy scene in Statius’s
Thebaid
(V.499–730) to two lines. The story to which he refers runs roughly as follows. Hypsipyle was daughter of the king of Lemnos, whom she saved from death when the women of the island determined to kill all the males on it. She was subsequently seduced and abandoned by Jason (
Inf.
XVIII.88–95), by whom she had twin sons, Thoas and Euneus. When the Lemnian women discover that their king is still alive, Hypsipyle flees, and after a misadventure with pirates ends up in the service of the king of Nemea, Lycurgus. While caring for Archemorus, the king’s son, she was approached by the seven exiled warriors marching against Thebes in civil war. Since they were thirsty, she agreed to show them to water (the fountain of Langia—see
Purg.
XXII.112), but left the baby behind long enough for him to be killed by a snake. Lycurgus would have killed her but for the chance arrival of her twin sons. Once they have quelled the attempt on their mother’s life, they embrace her eagerly, more eagerly than Dante will move to embrace Guido, because he fears the flames.
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97–99.
   Benvenuto (1380) remembers the reference to Guido’s having been “driven from the nest” at
Purgatorio
XI.97–99, and that he had been cast forth precisely by Dante. But who are these other poets who wrote (the verb is in the past tense) better poems than Dante? While most commentators simply avoid this problem, those who deal with it tend to favor Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia. For the later reappearance of the adjective “sweet,” see verse 112 and note.
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107.
   Guido, like Bonagiunta, refers to hearing Dante’s voice with the relative clause “ch’i’ odo” (that I hear). See
Purgatorio
XXIV.57. Both clauses draw attention to the importance that each of these predecessor poets places on listening to the living voice of this extraordinary visitor to their realm.
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109–111.
   Beginning in these lines, words for truth and for speaking or for writing poetry wend their way through twenty-two lines:
ver
in vv. 109, 121, 126;
dir
or its derivative
detto
(poem) in vv. 111, 112, 119, 130.  The conjunction reminds the reader of the importance of the issue of the possibility of poetic truth, given the traditional view that poets are liars. It may be helpful to know that in Dante’s day a poet in the vernacular was known as a
dicitore per rima
, a “speaker in rhyme.”
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112.
   For the rarity of Dante’s use of the honorific
voi
, here given to Guido, see the note at
Purgatorio
XIX.131.

If Guido’s poems are
dolci
(sweet), in what way are they different from those of Dante that are written in the “sweet new style” (
Purg
. XXIV.57)? This is a question that has had a variety of answers. Some make Guido the first practitioner of the “sweet new style” (which is impossible, in Dante’s view, given his precisions at
Purg
. XXIV.49–51 that make his own
canzone
“Donne ch’avete,” written at least ten years after Guido’s death, the first of the “new” poems that constitute the
dolce stil novo
). The better understanding is that Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, others among the Tuscans, and surely Dante himself, all wrote in the “sweet style” (the most effective demonstration of this is found in Leonardi [Leon.2001.1]). But what both Guidos, the early Dante, and just about everybody else failed to do was to find the “new style” that Dante developed from his understanding of Guinizzelli’s sweet style of praise, a mode that he took one step further when he developed his own theologized poetics of Beatrice.

In that he was the first, and had perhaps no more than one companion (Cino da Pistoia, who also wrote “theologically” of Beatrice after her death). This is what the evidence of the texts seems to suggest. In short, Dante honors Guinizzelli for being what he was, as far as the younger poet was concerned, the “father” of the
dolce stil novo
, but not one of its practitioners. Thus we may understand that a number of poets wrote in the “sweet style,” but hardly any of them achieved the
new
“sweet style” that is the hallmark of Dante’s praise of Beatrice. In all aspects of this debate, it is essential to remember that we are trying (or should, at any rate, be trying) to negotiate an answer from what Dante
said
happened, not from what actually happened (or what we imagine actually happened).
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