The substance of the Commedia, practically its whole content of thought, opinion, sentiment, had source in the mediaeval store of antique culture and the partly affiliated, if not partly derivative, Latin Christianity. The mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and of the contents of ancient philosophy, is not to be so very sharply distinguished from the attitude of the fifteenth or sixteenth, nay, if one will, the eighteenth, century, when the Federalist in the young inchoately United States, and many an orator in the revolutionary assemblies of France, quoted Cicero and Plutarch as arbiters of civic expediency. Nevertheless, if we choose to recognize deference to ancient opinion, acceptance of antique myth and poetry as fact,[687] unbounded admiration for a shadowy and much distorted ancient world, as characterizing the mediaeval attitude toward whatever once belonged to Rome and Greece, then we must say that such also is Dante’s attitude, scholar as he was;[688] and that in his use of the Classics he differed from other mediaeval men only in so far as above them all he was a poet.
Lines of illustrative examples begin with the opening canto of the Inferno, where Dante addresses Virgil as famoso saggio, an appellative strictly corresponding with the current mediaeval view of the “Mantuan.” Mediaeval also is the grouping of the great poets who rise to meet Virgil, first Homer, then Orazio satiro, and Ovid and Lucan.[689] More narrowly mediaeval, that is, pertaining particularly to the thirteenth century, is Dante’s profound reverence for the authority of Aristotle, il maestro di color che sanno.[690] It may be that the poet’s sense of the enormous, elect, importance of Aeneas,[691] and his putting Rhipeus, most righteous of the Trojans, as the fifth regal spirit in the Eagle’s eye,[692] belonged more especially to Dante as the Ghibelline author of the De monarchia. But generically mediaeval was his acceptance of antique myth for fact, a most curious instance of which is his referring to the consuming of Meleager with the consuming of the brand, to illustrate a point of physiological psychology.[693] Antique heroes, even monsters, seem as real to him as the people of Scripture and history. It is not, however, his mediaevalism, but his own greatness that enables him to lift his treatment of them to the level of their presentation in the Classics. Noble as an antique demigod is the damned Jason, silent and tearless, among the scourged;[694] and Ulysses is as great in the tale he tells from out the lambent flame as he was in the palace of Alcinoos, telling the tale which Dante never read.[695]
The poet, especially in the Purgatorio, constantly balances moral examples alternately drawn from pagan and sacred story. This propensity was quite mediaeval; for throughout the Middle Ages the antique authority was used to fortify or parallel the Christian argument. Yet herein, as always, Dante is Dante as well as a mediaeval man; and his moral examples, for the aid of souls who are purging themselves for Heaven, are interesting and curious enough. On the pavement of the first ledge of Purgatory, Lucifer is figured falling from Heaven and Briareus transfixed by the bolt of Jove; then Nimrod, Niobe, Saul, Arachne, Rehoboam, Eriphyle and Sennacherib, the Assyrians routed after Holophernes’ death, and Troy in ashes.[696] On the third ledge, as instances of gentle forgivingness, he sees in vision the Virgin Mary, and then appear Peisistratus (tyrant of Athens) refusing to avenge himself, and Stephen asking pardon for his slayers.[697] But the most wonderful instance of this combining of the Christian and the antique, each at its height of feeling, occurs in the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio, where angels herald the appearance of Beatrice with the chant, Benedictus qui venis, and, as they scatter flowers, sing Manibus o date lilia plenis. This unison of the hail to Christ upon His sacrificial entry into Jerusalem and the Virgilian heartbreak over the young Marcellus, shows how Dante rose in his combinings, and how potent an element of his imagination was the antique.[698]
Of course the plan of Hell reflects the sixth Book of the Aeneid, and throughout the whole Commedia the Virgilian phrase rises aptly to the poet’s lips. “Thou wouldst that I renew the desperate grief which presses my heart even before I put it into words,” says Ugolino, nearly as Aeneas speaks to Dido.[699] And in the Paradiso the power of the Dantesque reminiscence rouses the reader, spiritually as it were, to emulate the glorious ones who passed to Colchos.[700] A more desperate passage was the lot of those who must drop from Acheron’s bank into Charon’s boat;—the whole scene here is quite reminiscent of Virgil. The simile:
“Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia,”
is even beautified and made more pregnant with significance in Dante’s
“Come d’autunno si levan le foglie
L’una appresso dell’altra....”[701]
On the other hand, the threefold attempt of Aeneas to embrace Anchises is stripped of its beautiful dream-simile in Dante’s use.[702] A lovelier bit of borrowing is that of the quick springing up again of the rush, the symbol of humility, l’umile pianta, with which the poet is girt before proceeding up the Mount of Purgatory.[703]
With Dante the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters symbolized, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.[704] We may be jarred by the apostrophe:
“... O sommo Giove,
Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso.”[705]