7 - Dante and the classical poets

Summary

Introduction: mimesis and literary models

ALTHOUGH all medieval literature in the romance vernaculars may be characterized – even defined – as a sustained, dynamic response to the classical canon, Dante's Divina Commedia is an altogether exceptional case. For, in a variety of fundamental ways, the entire Commedia is built on a series of extended encounters with four Latin poets: Virgil, Statius, Lucan, and Ovid. The Commedia's plot line figures these encounters in four principal (and interrelated) manners: First, Dante-protagonist meets and interacts with all four poets, who are characters in his poem. Second, Dante-protagonist undergoes (and/or witnesses) a series of key experiences that are visibly modelled on narrative events from the Aeneid, the Thebaid, the Pharsalia, and the Metamorphoses. The most important, frequent, and systematic instances of this process involve two alternatives: either Dante-protagonist functions as a new, Christian Aeneas, modeled on the single protagonist of Virgil's epic; or he functions as a corrected version of one of the many protagonists of Ovid's multi-narrative epic.