La guerra degli orchi - 1. I figli del lupo (Omnibus) (Italian Edition)

I Era ato maestro al Sannazaro. E l Aragonese comparve improvviso nel golfo con la sua potente armata e costrinse l esercito angioino a ritirarsi ad Aversa I, t, diretta a Lucio Crasso, il poeta dice: I Et Sinuessanas spectas, mea gaudia, nympbas, I Quiqlle novo semper sulfure fumat ager. I Et modo miraris veteres in litore portus; I Nunc Liris gelida qua fluit amni. Chalcidieasque arces, Parthenopenque subit. Sed quonism instabiles animos muliehria versant Pectora, sU8peCtos deserit ille lares, Ac patriae petit arva suae, nee longa moratus Ultores rursum ducit in arma deos, Obsessamque intrat nymphis comitantibus urbem, Qua per operta vagus Iabitur antra liquor ,.

Il principe stesso era agitato dall ansia umanistica di quei tempi di rinascenza. Fissava anche egli, come i migliori dei contemporanei, gli occhi cupidi verso quel mondo greco che a mano ,a mano veniva svelando i suoi tesori letterari; e retribuiva con vera.

Ai greci, che fuggivano alla presa di Costantinopoli del , apri la sua corte con entusi8. La storia di quella guerra la narra il Pontano con lingua e stile di Livio; e vi accenna il Sannazaro nell epica elegia al Duca di Calabria: J De bello n6op. O, dell unificazione d Italia.

Ed al suo fianco, in gran parte di quelle spedizioni, era Jaeobo Sannazaro, guerriero e poeta. Il quale ne baldi occhi del suo signore vedeva rispecchiarsi un non lontano avvenire di gloria per quell umile Italia, ch era stata patria di Seipione e di Virgilio. Chi sa quante volte, stando a Napoli, il giovane Sannazaro, piena la mente de versi di Lucano e delle storie di Livio, e ricche le vene di sangue vivo e generoso, sam andato, solitario, alla tomba di Ladislao, in San Giovanni a Carbonara, a interrogare quei marmi ed a trame auspicii!

Neve foret Latio tantum diademat8 fem, Ante 8Uas vidit Gallica seeptra pedes. Cumque rebellantem pl 8ll8isaet pontibus Arnum, MOri vetuit sextam elaudere 01ympiadem ]t. Alfonso - pensava Jacobo - vale bene Ladislao. Per poter degnamente celebrare il suo eroe, al poeta non sorride la Musa bellicosa di Virgilio o l erotica di Ovidio, di Properzio, di Catullo o di Tibullo, non la pindarica di Orazio: Flaccus pindaricos dividit aure modos. Pasaeris exequias fraeto canit ore Catullus.

Tu Nemesim laudas, culte Tibulle, tuam. Omnia non uno desudant esseda campo, Noster in exiguo tramite currit equus It.

• Arcadia, secondo i manoscritti e le prime stampe.
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Le tue grandi imprese trasporteranno i miei spiriti. Ancor giovanetto percorresti le ultime provincie del Regno e sedasti i tumulti e cacciasti i nemici da confini della patria. D Digltized by Googre. E dalla Magna Grecia passasti in Toscana, e l Arno venne a te con le soggiogate acque.

Quante faretrate torme di Turchi sagrificasti ai mani ausoni! Sia grazia agI Iddii d Italia: E celebrero - egli aggiunge - quelle imprese di cui io stesso feci parte: Tempora militiae prima luere meae. Bis Nomentanas, bis magni Tiburis arces Vidimus ad nostros projicere arma pedes Quum jam Mit media trepidatum pene Subura; Et Capitolino vota parata lovi. TI poeta guerriero della rinascenza non ha dimenticate le forti frasi di Orazio o di Virgilio; ma per seguire le insegne trionfatrici di Alfonso ha ben dimenticato che la terra di quei grandi era sacra.

Inebriato dal ricordo di tante vittorie, infonde al molle e libidinoso distico ovidiano l efficacia epica I Sentite un po come si dice in elegante latino il nome della Madonna: E Roma si aft accia, col cipiglio di madre tradita, alla fantasia. E il poeta ricorda le giornate sulle rive del Po e a monti Euganei. Ma l umanista elegiaco del Quattrocento non sa finire con questo grido di trionfo, e domanda una chiusa di eletto a Ovidio. Ma l umanista, che avea dato principio al suo canto con l invocare con desiderio la Musa di Virgilio e dei poeti elegiaci, non sa dargli termine senza che a quella Musa non paghi un tributo.

Cogit et invi80 subdere colla jugo. Nee prosunt lacrimae, nee verba precantia mortem, Ille SU88 in me concutit ueque faces. Quare si nostri veniet tibi nuntia leti Fama, triumpbales jam prope mte rotas; Atque haec ad cinerea moerens effare sepultos: Saevitia dominae rapte poeta, jaces ,. Quel che non valse a far Roma, ora fa lo sguardo di una femminetta; e l eroe Alfonso ha da fermare il suo carro trionfale innanzi al sepolcro del poeta, per dirgli: Ci fa ricordare dell Unicorno, bestia medievale.

Un grosso temporale intanto minacciava il regno di Napoli. In occasione di n0Z7. Ferdinando ed Alfonso da prima disprezzarono il pericolo e minacciarono Carlo che c andarebbono ad incontrarlo infino ai monti:. E forse queste nuove cure accelerarono la morte di Ferdinando, che avvenne il 25 gennaio del 2. Nam cum vobis regni haeres quod felix faustumque sit Alfonsus alter maximus natu filius obtigerit, cuius excellens ingenium, singularia virtus, incredihilia sapientia bello et pace claruit, ingrati profecto fuerimus, si non quantum relictum, aed quantum sit ademptum respexerimus, praesertim com subsidiis tot tantiaque regnum fulciatur.

Dux enim sulfectus Calabria Ferdinandus alter Alfonsi filius, quem et ipsum nohia fama refert, omnibus eorporis animique dotihus exeellere, aic ut mullis magnisque rebUI non dubium iam regiae cuill8dam indolis speeimen dederit. Accedit eo Federicus magna prudentia, Digltized by Google. Che malinconia per lui, che, insieme con le rive incantate a mano a mano dileguantisi, vedeva svanire tanti bei sogni della fervida giovanezza; meo fortunato di Ladislao, cui almeno era concesso riposare in quella terra beata!

E che sconforto per chi aveva sognato con lui, e sperato di veder Napoli metropoli di un forte ed indipendente stato italiano; magoa dexteritate. VII; Ranoviae, , p. I Il Sannazaro sfoga la sua ira in due sonetti, che pa. Di tuoi chiari trionfi altro volume Ordir credea; ma per tua colpa or manca; Ch augel notturno sempre abborre il lume lt.

Scriva chi fama al mondo aver non vuole, A cui non fur giammai le Muse amiche. Scriva chi perder vuoI le sue fatiche, Lo stil, l ingegno, il tempo e le parole lt. DBo scrisse un feroce sonetto contro re Alfonso: Andate voi personalmente al Sangiac e poi al Gran Signore con eccessiva celeritate. Voi intendete lo biBogno: Nec fas ingenium tollere ad astra caput. Quodque diu partum est virtute, et fortibus armis Imperium, faedae servit avaritiae lt. Ma il lezzo di quella conquista, che dopo tanto apparato era finita in un carnevale, era venuto auche all imperatore, al papa ed a principi che l avevano provocata o favorita.

Ferdinando, aiutato dal Graneapitano Consalvo di Cordova, da Veneziani e dal Papa, riconquistb il trono; ma nello stesso anno , nel settembre o nell ottobre, moriva. Auspice te, nostrae nullis ineursibul arces, Succumbent nulli, litora nostra minis. Sed bene habet; cessere metus, cessere pericla; Barbarus hostiles ad sua vertit equ Jam juga, jam lati respirant undique campi, Nee tuba veliferas concitat ulla rates, Tu tamen ad patrios revocabere victor honoree, Maternoeque sinue, Parthenopenque petes.

Fu un sogno anche questo. E Federico, rinchiusosi in castel Nuovo, venne a patti co conquistatori, riserbandosi per altri sei mesi l isola e il castello d Ischia e un intera l Epigr. Qoando, ad Ischia, si apparecchiava a salpare per la Francia, lo raggiunse il Sannazaro, pronto a seguirlo.

Aveva venduto due castelli e la gabella del Gaudiello, e nniva a metterne il prezzo 2 a disposizione del suo re. Campo Vita di J. Tutto era buio per l avvenire della patria. Ma mentre il Sannazaro era in Francia, a Venezia, nel 12 maggio del , veniva in luce un libretto in ottavo, col titolo: I Oon gratia et privilegW.

Atergo della prima pagina, c era questa prefazione: Ho voluta farla stampare in questa forma per lo egregio homo maestro Bernardino Verceleso loquale li ha posto ogni studio et diligentia infar dieta Opera sia eorrecta come meritamente rechiede: Nela Inclita et famosissima Cita de Venetia: Molto magnifico ed osservando signore. In tante cose V.

Allego in questo V. Mi rincreace avere a combattere col vento. Dio Digltized by Google. Le cose mie non meritano uscire fuori, e questo non bisogna che altri mel dica, che Dio grazia il conosco io stesso. Meliw non tangere c14mo. Il meglio che rimanesse a fare era ristampare il libro, ritoccato e compiuto. E ci si mise un amico vero del Sannazaro, anzi uno degl interlocutori stessi dell Arcadia, Pietro Summonte, quello fra gli eruditi del tempo a cui dobbiamo non solo l edizione delle cose sannazariane ma anche del Pontano e del Chariteo.

La nuova, bella, corretta e completa stampa compane in Napoli nel marzo del I con somma et assidua diligenza di Petro 8um I manno: Con privilegio del Illustrissimo. I Gran Capitanio Vice Re: I sotto la pena: In quel tempo il Sannazaro era in Francia; e un usente poteva accennare al Summonte, ch era in Napoli, nel modo come fa lui. Cardinale di Aragona, Petro Summontio. La cagione che principalmente ad questa mia non voluntaria audacia mi mosse Reverendissimo et lllustrissimo Signor mio: Vedendo chiaramente che la fortuna non satia di subvertere li regni: Anchora aIe nostre memorie: Cosa veramente lontanissima et molto diversa dal desiderio di chi scrive.

Non bastava ad questa cieca Dea: In tante cose il nostro Measer Jacobo Sannazaro havere, offeso. Anchora neli suoi scritti: Concio sia cosa che mentre egli in Francia dimora: Per non mancare al vero offido di perfetto et honorato Cavaliero: Furono hor BOn tre anni impresso in Italia le sue colte et leggiadrissime Ecloghe tutte deformate et guaste: Da poi vedendo li impressori Venetiani la cosa easere in prezzo: Peroehe eUa stata compolla IOn gia molti aDni: Non ho po8IIuto supportare: Et per questo senza altra sua ordinatione: Facendole imprimere da quello originale medesimo: Peroehe 8BBendosi nel grembo di essa et coneeputa et portata il debito tempo tal genitura.

Dovea poi ragionevolmente da quella parturirse. Ma se non saM la stampa di quella bellezza: Deveraae ad questa nostra patria concedere pietosa venia. Trovandosi adeBBO per le reE sa" bene cosi. Legga dunque felicemente tua Reverendissima et Illustrissima. Et poi che lo auttore di quella BOI per Bervare fede: La lingua poi, la sintassi, l ortografia sono notevolmente ritoccate con criteri uniformi, e risanate di tutte quelle viziature dialettali venete che avean prese nelle mani del primo tipografo.

Vide mi Acci quantum in hac mea laboriosa provincia mihi 8I8Umam. Cum quia mittit aliquid muneli ei, cuius est munua, videtur temeritatis, atque arrogantiae crimine accusandus. Nostra enim non aliena debemus dono mittere: Ipsa autem id faciena: Sed redeo ad ArDigltized by Google. Sed de his plura, ut spero, coram vel brevi. Se e quanto l edizione aldina differisca da quella del Summonte, vedremo pib.

Onde io credo che esse siano state fatte proprio per questa, Dei due anDi che intercedono fra Digltized by Google. IV Digltized by Google. D intorno si st. Qui la giovenca e il formoso toro, la camusa capra e l immondo caprone celebrano le loro nozze i qui mille giacigli di Driadi, mille covi di Satiri ed antri, graditi nascondigli della Dea delle selve.

Ne era a capo Calliope, circondata dalle sorelle. Denique praeeinetumque hederis et virgine lauru, Ad eitharam dulees edoeuere mod Venerat omne genus peeudum, genus omne Cerarum, Atque i1la Cestum luce habuere diem. Androgeumque, Opieumque, et rustica aaera aeeutua, Commovi laerimia mOl[ pia salta meis, Dum tumulum earae, dum Cestinata parentis Fata eano, gemitus dum, Melisaee, tu Siamo in Arcadia, nella vera e propria terra di Grecia, alla cima oper le falde del monte Partenio.

Co i quali tutti erano usati secondo il costume della patria, a lodare i genii, gli beroi et gli Dei. Dopo questo ammaestrati dalle discipline di Philosseno et di Timotheo, facevano I I cinque libri delle Storie di Polibio furono conosciuti ben per tempo dagli umaniati. Il papa Niccolb V Tommaso da Sa1 7. Tibi vero ingentea ago gratiu agamque dum vivam, quod me URum ex multia, cui hoc munus delegares, elegiati.

Finalmente tutta la vita loro si spendeva in queste canzoni, non tanto che si dilettassero d udire le consonanze, quanto per esercitarsi cantando insieme. Ultimamente i giovani fanno ogni anno ai cittadini spettacoli et giuochi ne i theatri con canti et con balli. Volendo fare una natura piacevole et trattabile, la quale da 88 pareva troppo feroce et dura, introdUro prima tutte quelle cose che di sopra habbiamo raccontato, da poi le ragunanze comuni et assaissimi sacrificii, ne i quali gli huomini et le donne si ragunassero insieme; ultimamente le compagnie delle vergini et de i fanciulli.

Tutte le quali cose fecero a questo fine, accioche quello clle da natura era troppo duro ne gli animi loro, per usanza si placasse et piil piacevole si facesse:. Era una gente rozza, che viveva a modo di fiere, ignara di ogni arte e di ogni esercizio umano. Nessun toro ansava sotto l adunco vomere, e nessuna terra era sotto il dominio del coltivatore. Non si faceva uso di cavalli, ciascuno trascinava se stesso; e la.

Quegli uomini andavan nudi e indurivano i loro corpi all aria aperta, buoni a sostenere le gravi piogge e i venti di tramontana 2. E in Arcadia il Sannazaro sperava di potere staccar lui dal pino sacro a Pane lo. Ma finalmente un pastore, bello come Paride, gli domanda dei suoi casi; ed egli, sospirando, li racconta. Se non alla mort. E niente di pib. Allo attingerne direttamente dalla natura viva e reale, preferisce raschiare e rammollire i colori delle tavolozze di Teocrito, di Virgilio, di Claudiano.

E da un accozzo, non sempre organico, di studi e macchiette altrui, vien formando i suoi quadri di paesaggio. Anzi la natura viva del di fuori turba, e bisognerebbe chiuder le finestre per paura che non penetri in casa la tentazione di far di testa propria, alla barba di Longo Sofista e del Boccaccio. Florio, lontano dalla sua Biancofiore, non sa darsi pace e piange e la chiama finanche nel sonno.

Andiamo a pigliar gli usati diletti:. Ma vedendolo cosi malinconico e pensoso, aggiunse: Quali pensieri t occupano? Quale accidente ti ha potuto sl costrignere. Ne teneri anni della mia puerizia sicome voi potete sapere ebb io continua usanza con la piacevole Biancofiore, nata nella paternal casa meco in un medesmo giorno. La cui bellezza, i nobili costumi e l adorno parlare generarono un piacere, il qual sl forle comprese il mio giovanetto cuore,ch ioniuna cosa vedeva che tanto mi piacesse.

In questo luogo mi rilegb in esilio, sotto colore di voler ch io studiassi. Tu dei credere che elli pensano alla tua salute, ed io credo senza dubbio, che questa dimora non sia senza gran bene per te. Dunque confortati; e se per te non ti vuoi confortare, confortati per amor di lei e di noi, acciocch ella e noi abbiam ragione d allegrarci.

Cotesta narrazione boccaccesca somiglia tanto alla sannazariana, che o bisogna supporre che Sincero narri come propria una storia non sua, o che i suoi casi amorosi siano cost curiosamente identici a quelli di Fiorio, da tirarlo involontariamente a descrivere gli stessi momenti psicologici e patologici, quasi con le stesse parole, e a sospirare e a lagrimare nel modo medesimo! Laonde io un giorno incominciai, con dolenti voci, a pregar gl Iddii del cielo e della terra e qualunque altri, che i miei dolori terminassero; e infinite volte dimandai e chiamai la morte, la quale impossibil mi fu di potere avere,.

I C Et quod temptabam dicere versus erat ". I lettori che ne hanno voglia, troveranno in questa edizione allineati parallelamente al testo sannazariano, fra gli altri, anche i luoghi del Boccaccio che in massima parte son valsi a formarlo. Ma, prima che per questi, anche per altri innamorati i letti erano stati c: Me,liseo, qui proprio assisimi:. Pontano e i suoi tempi, v. I, nota mostra d ignorare completamente il matrimonio con la Eugenia. Questa nota scettica e spregiudicata ci fa volentieri perdonare al Colangelo lo scerpellone di sette.

Certo, per quanto aenza buon fondamento gli siano stati attribuiti dei figli naturali l, di scappatelle il sticisque Architriis et protocollis ad Historiam Neapoli. Il, c in quo ploratur filius umeus. Ma il povero Sannazaro non parla a nome suo, ma di una signora Letizia, madre sfortunata: Per non disperarsi, i biografi si sono stretti intorno all annotatore del Crispo, ed hanno ripetuto a coro NatuB erat miserae lux unica matris, ocellus Unicus, hune Lachesis noxia Bubripuit.

I primi due versi somigliano alquanto a un canto popolare napoletano antico: Extinxitque Sll8S ipsa Erycina faces. Quae tumulo increvit laurus myrtique rosaeque Pieridom e lacrymis noveris esse aataa. Harm08ine extineta est, Sensusque extinctus amandi. Nemo amat, et numen desiit esse, Venus.

VI Digltized by Google. Mi par precio dell opera metter sott oz: Cntdeli" hllpias Immanem pharetram Dei minacis. PU"l grttLtlm Vtlnerem, rimt: Quaerunt ludere, non dolere amantes. Ed il Colangelo, tratto nel in errore dal De Luna, nel 26, come abbiamo visto, si corresse. Quanto poi la pasf. Non ha saputo il Crispo decidersi a separare l una dall altra. Ma appunto senza separarle, avrebbe potuto immaginare che ". Tutte codeste creature boccaccesche, che non differiscono se non pel colore dei capelli o del vestito 2, purtroppo indurrebbero a crederlo; ma bisogna tener conto che son tutte figlie dello stesso padre, il quale le.

Le donne del Boccaccio, raccolte insieme, farebbero lo stesso effetto di una sala da museo, dove siano schierate l una dopo l altra parecchie statue greche di Veneri, variamente atteggiate ma sempre simili nella loro divina bellezza. Chi che il poeta inglese Don ai aia ricordato. Anche a voler prendere come storica la narrazione dell A,.

Di Amarante nell A,. I quali si son preoccupati nel sentire Ofelia, subito dopo di averla chialQata Amaranta, per rimbeccare il rivale che aveva detto: E lo stampatore veneto ha subito corretto e stampato: Vittorio Emanuele di Roma. Napoli, , e Bartolommeo Gamba nella scelta di c Operette di istruzione e di piarere. Venezia, , ristampando l Arcadia, vi aggiun88J O anch essi le note del PortireUi, in grazia del listemtJ ridotto. Unde odor hicY cineri thura ministrat Amor. Unde pyrd ex pharetra. Ast haec illachrimans quae legit ossa1 Venus.

Fortunate lapis, tumuloque beatior omni! Tu tegis in terris siquid honoris erat ,. IIl, 76 e TI Sannazaro, in fine del romanzo, racconta di una sna visione l. Una Sirena sednta sopra uno scoglio piangeva amaramente; e Jaoobo, tutto intento ad ascoltarla, non si avvede d un ondata che quasi lo travolge. Gli parve poi di vedere un suo c albero bellissimo di arancio.

Le quali, pur essendo importanti per la storia della lingua italiana fuori. Insieme con la lingua e le forme poetiche di Dante e del Pet V. I Et quas det iuveni pueUa charo. I Haee aunt suavia dulciora melle I Hyblaeo, et Siculae liquore eannae. I Oaee sola ambroaiaeque neetarillAue I Succoa fondere, sola hahere poeaunt. Quis tunc divitias, quis aurum et omoes I Assis me potet. I, 6t , addirittura le chiede i baci sull eaempio di Catullo: Da mibi tu, inea lu, tot buia rapta petenti, IQuot dederat vati Leabia blanda suo.

I Sed quid pauca peto, petiit ai pauea Catullua I 8asia pauca quidem, si numerentor, erunt. Sa a mente Teocrito e Virgilio, che sono i suoi maestri e i suoi autori principalissimi. Il quale, accennando a paesi ed ai poeti da lui conosciuti, dice pure: Ho presente l ediz. Sette savi, l Esiodo ecc. Teocrito vuoI dire c uomo di divino giudizio. Lo studio del Sannazaro su Teocrito ci viene anche comprovato dalle lettere ch egli scrisse a proposito del suo poema. Pb essere che sua S. Lac mihi non estate novum non fri-.

E poco dopo ci attesta esplicitamente il auo studio giovanile aul bucolico Siracusano: Anche il Poliziano recb in versi latini uno Digltized by Google. Catullo, ad chi Virg. Anzi, sotto un certo rispetto e con una tal quale esagerazione, e l Arcadia e le Piscatorie e il poema De party Virginis si potrebbero addirittura riconnettere aUa serie dei tanti centoni virgiliani di cui fo pieno il medioevo 1.

Ma cotesto culto per Virgilio era tott altro che privilegio di pochi, come invece era quello per Teocrito. E lo studio di Virgilio e della sua I Cfr. Virgilio avrebbe dovuto parere scolorato, snervato, molle ed insipido. E Virgilio galleggia su tutto il non lieto periodo della decadenza romana e riesce a tenersi su anche nella morta gora del medioevo. Anche a lui, sotto il velarne di quegli esametri meravigliosi, par di fiutare un alto ed arcano significato morale e politico; ed anzi. Ma Dante a buon conto crede al significato allegorico delle egloghe virgiliane: E le prese ad imitare.

A giudizio anzi di questo entusiastico. Certo, le egloghe petrarchesehe hanno molte e mirabili bellezze poetiche: Betussi, pago 25f; Venetia, f L una e l altra bucolica fanno degna testimonianza della parentela, rara in ogni tempo e luogo. Ma nelle mani di Virgilio divenne addirittura - e dove non divenne si credette che fosse divenuta - allegorica. Se dunque Virgilio stesso - che per gli uomini del medioevo era il creatore non che del genere pastorale2 ma t Cfr.

Bernardo Pulci scrive nella prefazione della SUa traduzione delle Bucoliche virgiliane t E vien notando, BI. VIU Digltized by Google. Le quali tutte COlle essendo dirittamente considerate, quale studioso huomo. E come Coluceio, molti di quegli umanisti dovettero sentirsi rapiti da cotesto insano amore verso il genere pastorale. Novati, il quale attende da parecchio ad un lavoro completo sul famoso umanista toscano; e dalla sua gentilezza ne ho avute queste.

Pero io non ho ancora perduta la speranza di vederle veair fuori una volta o l altra: Calpurnio Siculo, e, separate da queste, quelle di Aurelio Nemesiano poeta cartaginese, e poi i Bucolicon di Fra. In fine ad un suo opuscoletto, che tratta in forma dialogica della scultura, stampato in Firenze nel , egli scrive: E in fine al volume: J Digltized by Google. E qui pare cbe abbian subito trovata fortuna, cosi da esser messe nelle mani degli scolari insieme con quelle dello stesso Virgilio. Di cbe Cinzio Giraldi, il classico ed acuto istoriografo di quel periodo letterario, si mostra scandalizzato.

Parlando appunto di Calpumio, esce a dire: Fuit quidem cum ego eas omnes septem eclogas avidissime legarem, nam et me puero magni. Pietro Crinito, discepolo del Poliziano e che fu de primi a tentare una storia dei poeti latini da. E fin dal , in Roma si. Il Crinito scrive di lui: Cito qaesto giudizio del Crinito dal libro: Poeta6 tres egregij nutk: HalieutiaSn liber acephalus; M.

E queste quattro egloghe pare che siano state conosciute ben per tempo, certo. Nessuno, dopo Virgilio, ha saputo tentare con fortnna il genere pastorale, dice il poeta napoletano. E forse, anzi senza forse, ha ragione; ma alle volte una sentenza. Cosi ne scrive il Summonte al Puderico stesso, nella lettera dedicatoria del dialogo del Pontano Actius: Etiam ad n08 attulit Ovidii fragtnentum De piscibus, Uratii poetae Oynegeticon cuius meminit Ovidius ultima de Ponto elegia.

Un secolo prima del Sannazaro, vi aveva attinto non poco il Boccaccio, quantunque in fondo li Numatiani elegos, quorum tenuitatem et elegantiam e saeculo iUo agnoscas Claudiani lt. Mi pare non privo d interesse un brano della lettera del Logo ad Antonio Fuccaro, che serve di prefazione al volume aldino: Is mihi trium optimorllm et antiquissimorum autborum, qui tam diu Jatuerunt, ut peoitus in oblivionem hominum venerint , copiam fecit: Aurelij Nemesiani, qui idem traclavit argumentum; quibus adiunctum erat P.

Ovidij Nasonis fragmentum de piscibus. II1ud vero dolendum summopere est, quod tam lacer et mutilatus ad nos pervenit, ut non pauca in eo videantur desyderari. Aesiandcr quidem ex vetuatiasimo codice, quod nobilis et cultissimus nostri temporis poeta Accius Syncerus Sannazarius longobardicis literis ICriptum ex GaJlijs secum aJiquando attulerat, quam potuit integre et incorrupte descripsit una cum autoribus iIli coniunctis.

Quorum exemplar mihi cum dedisset, non modo ut edendos curarem volenti mihi permisit, verum etiam id at Cacerem, ultro ipse me est adhortatus lt. Lo Zumbini, per esempio, addita alcune derivazioni del Filocolo dai romanzi di Senofonte Efesio, di Eumanto, di Giamblico, di Eliodoro, di Achille Tazio 3; ed a me sembra che pur tutta la storia del primo innamol amento di Florio con Biancofiore sia ritessuta su quella di Dafni e Cloe nel romanzo di Longo Sofista.

In questa mia edizione dell Arcadia son venuto spesso notando, fra gli altri, anche non pochi riscontri di alcuni luoghi del Sannauro con altri di Longo o di Achille Tazio. Quei romanzi non furono ammessi all onore della stampa se non molto tardi, sulla fine del Cinquecento. Pure, giravano in numerosi manoscritti. Ma se cotesti scrittori greci e latini fornivano al Sannazaro la materia pastorale, la forma del romanzo gliela fornl invece quello fra tre grandi toscani ch era venuto a predicare in Napoli la buona novella della nuova lingua. Al giovane umanista, avido di quella luee che il mondo classico gli veniva a mano a mano svelando, il Boccaccio, piena la testa e la penna di versi e di sentenze degli antichi scrittori, poteva anticipare la gioia della contemplazione intera e libera d un orizzonte sconfinato e pieno di luee.

I romanzi del Treeentista toscano erano come le relazioni e i disegni di quel maraviglioso mondo classico che si ardeva dal desiderio di vedere. Omero, egli Boccaceio aveva saputo, primo fra gl Italiani moderni, gustare! Ma come che molti auttol i greci habbia veduto, nondimeno per dimostratione del mio precettore ne ho compreso alcuni, de quali secondo il bisogno. Composto per il clarissimo poeta Messer Johanne Boccaccio da certaldo ad instancia,.

E solo tre anni dopo, nel , se ne fece a Napoli stessa una ristampa 2. I C Incomincia il libro chiamato nimphale: Boccacci in Certaldo; Bologna, ; pago H. Echi dell elegia latina e specie delle Metamorfosi, che riproducono tanta parte della poesia alesssndrina, e sono come una serie di piccoli romanzi e piccoli. La severa terzina di Dante viene spesso a smorzare, con la sua studiata e mistica armonia - come una fuga o un canone a moto perpetuo fra mezzo a un pazzo ed allegro turbinio di note -, l entusiasmo lirico e direi melodico del romanziere.

Il Sannazaro, che nell. E Dante stesso non era. E per questo non si limitava al solo ninmIe di Amelo: X , Goffredo da Viterbo sec. XIIl , Benzone aerivono le loro cronache frammettendo appunto versi alla prosa. La tessitura del r0manzo, le descrizioni o di persone o dell aurora o del tramonto, la maniera di lamentarsi per pene amorose, il modo di periodare, le frasi e le parole salvo qualche crudo latimsmo; tutto insomma li del Boccaccio.

Il Sannazaro non dice propriamente lo stesso, ma Per la qual cosa anchora. Dopo il proemio, nell Ameio segue un invocazione in versi, che manca nell Arcadia; ma subito dopo comincia nell uno e nell altra la narrlUiofte, con un intonazione identica. Nelle piagge del quale fra gli strabocchevoli balzi 8urgeva d alberi, di querce, di cerri e d abeti uno folto bosco e disteeo in4no alla IOmmitA del monte. Dalla sua destra tm chiaro fiumicello. In questo cossi facto luogo sogZiono sooente i pastori con li loro gregi da li eicini monti convenire, et quivi in diverse et non ligiere prove exercitarse.

Ma U6Imdono una fiata tra l altre quasi tu tti y convicini pastori con le loro mandre quivi ragunati, et ciascuno varie manere cercando de BOllazzare, si dava maraviglioea festa; Ergasto solo. Ascolta per un pezzetto, poi si va accostando al luogo donde la canzone provie. Altre posti giuso i boscherecci archi e li strati, sopra quelle sospesi i caldi visi, sbracciate, con le candide mani rifaceano belli con le fresche onde. Il Boccaccio riproduceva la scena di Atteone dalle Metamorfosi ovidiane, il Sannazaro invece il madrigale del Petrarca: L uno e l altro attingono a Fasti di Ovidio, e ne traducono pib o men fedelmente lunghi brani: Per mezzo de i quali trovammo molte pastorelle ligiadrissime, che di passo in passo se andavano facendo nuove girlandecte.

Nell Arcadia, alla canzone di Galizio, segue subito la descrizione della pastorella Amaranta: Dopo, veramente il Sannazaro par che si voglia un po ribellare al suo modello.

Stan Nicholls

E, per premio, il napoletano continua a porre cerbiatti e vasi intagliati, laddove il Boccaccio avea fatto c apparecchiar ghirlande:. E ciascuna di quelle donne ha una storia d amore da raeeontarci ed una canzone da cantare. TI Boccaccio, con la smania inestinta di narrarci ancora una volta i suoi amori con madonna Fiammetta e di descrivete le belle dame della corte Angioina, c invita ad assistere ad uno di quei seducenti ritrovi, dove tutte quelle donne convenivano Digltized by Google.

Alla memore fantasia dell innamorato di fiammetta si ripresentano, anche piil. Ameto, come nel Filocolo Florio e i Buoi compagni, le ninfe le fanno largo e le cedono il miglior posto. E lei, c0desta maga seducente, diventa centro del romanzo, Digltized by Google. Quando i suoi piedi toccano la terra, rinascono erbette e fiori e mandano un profumo caldo ed inebriante, i ruscelli che pareano ghiacciati scorrono mormorando, e le fulgide onde guizzano spumeggiando fra gli scogli, mentre un popolo di uccelli, che fin allora pareva dormisse, intuona un concento armonioso che s accorda alsusurro delle foglie eal mormorio del fiume.

E come nel Filocolo, avviene nell Ameto: Come in una uggiosa. Peccato che proprio qui al nostro Jaeobo venga meno il coraggio di tener dietro al suo autore. Boccaccio e della Vita Nuova di Dante, la storia d amore della fanciulla d otto anni; e ne fa raccoiltare un altra, tanto per cercar di seguire anche in questo l Ameto che ne ha ben sette, dal pastore Charino: Ma quelle infino nella loro venuta picciole ai nuovi popoli, per la loro cresciuta prole, abbandonarono; e vicini al lago d Averno, via certiBBima agli Iddii infernali e all onde del mirteo mare, e di Vulturno aUa torbida foce, quasi in mezzo, in terra ferma posarono i pam loro; e salutati i vicini monti, li quali d alberi copiosi conobbero.

E con questo consiglio declinando del monte vicini alle poche onde, che tra Falerno e Vesevo stanche mettono in mare. Essi, nel primo fondare, di candido marmo una nobile sepoltura della terra nel ventre trovarono; il titolo della quale, di lettera appena nota, tra loro leggendolo, trovarono che dicea: Gli altri in numero minori, ma non nelIi effetti, infra Salerno ed essi si posero nel poco piano, per una gittata di pietra vicini a primi poeti.

Una lingua, uno abito, e quel medesimi Iddii erano all uno che all altro; solamente gli abitatori erano divisi. Mi par bene riferire qui due dei principali luoghi dell Arcadia che riguardano Napoli, sperando che a qualche lettore, che abbia preso interesse a questa discussione di fonti, non riesca discaro se per questa volta sola deroghi alla legge che mi BOno imposto di rimandare, pel testo dell Arcadia, alle pagine corrispondenti di questo volume.

Coi quali anchora mi tornaro aUa memoria i soaviBlimi bugni, i meravigliosi et grandi edificii, i piacevoli laghi, le dileto tosa et belle iette, i sulphurei monti, et con la cavata grotta la felice costera di Pausilypo, abitata di ville ameniasime et soavemente percossa da le salate onde. Ad questa cogitatione anchora si aggiunse il ricardarmi de le magnificentie de la mia nobile et generosissima patria.

La quale, di the80ri abond. Il loro commovente canto interpreta il sentimento di melanconia provato dai singoli personaggi. Misler e Bowlt , 42, , n. La madre fra i lamenti comincia a cercarlo ovunque senza mai fermarsi. Come si legge nei versi: Rimpiangendo il figlio perduto, la donna interroga gli alberi, i sentieri, la luna e il sole. Il tormento come prez- 8 Vedi la poesia Au lecteur nella raccolta Les fleurs du mal Baudelaire , La figlia della signora di Pohjola, concessa in matri- monio a Ilmarinen, viene preparata dai suoi alla partenza: Giunto ormai il momento di salire sulla slitta del marito, la giovane sospira, singhiozza e pro- nuncia queste parole: Come si narra nel poema: Cammi- nando, giunge nel mezzo di un boschetto, proprio nella radura in cui ha sedotto la sorella: Salot vastahan saneli, I monti selvosi le fecero eco, kankahat kajahtelivat: Ella stessa aggiunge che sarebbe stato meglio per lei morire in solitu- dine piuttosto che in seguito al terribile incesto.

Come il fratello Kullervo, la fanciulla appare predestinata alla sventura. A entrambi non resta altra soluzione al dolore del rimorso che il suicidio. Nel Kalevala alla melanconia dei personaggi si associa quella del ritmo ca- denzato dei versi intonati dai laulajat cantori e quella del suono del kantele, lo strumento musicale della tradizione, che li accompagna. Ahto, re delle acque, udendo quel suono, pro- nuncia queste parole: Celebri artisti, non solo pittori e scultori, ma anche compositori musicali, co- me il famoso Jean Sibelius, si sono ispirati alla tristezza dei personaggi kaleva- liani.

Riferimenti bibliografici Andersen, Hans Christian. Les fleurs du mal. Il linguaggio della voce: Aspetti storici, espressivi, psicologici, professionali, patologici e riabilitativi. Tra arte, mito e fiaba. Dal mito alla tradizione. Il nostro bisogno di consolazione. Appunti sui motivi kalevaliani nella musica e nella letteratura fin- landesi di oggi. In Simboli e miti della tradizione sciamanica, a cura di Carla Corradi Musi, Misler, Nicoletta; e John E.

A Hero and his Fate. Translated and edited by Ritva Poom. Indiana University Press I ed. Le radici storiche dei racconti di magia. Newton Compton I ed. For the ancient Mesopotamian case, there have been few attempts of analysis of the suitability of the term. Nonetheless, Marten Stol , , in his study on epilepsy, has dedicated a few pages, rich of data and hypotheses, to the topic.

To summarize, a man with a broken heart can be ill-tempered, suspicious, have a nervous breakdown, be full of apprehensions, be worried, or in panic. Sumerian is transcribed in boldface; Akkadian, in italics. Erica Couto-Ferreira and sad feelings. Although such a relation may have been contemplated by the Mesopotamian scribes, there is no indubitable prove of it, so the following statement the author puts forward should be carefully handled: Besides, he interpreted the evidences under the light of contemporary medical theories, and tried to identify ancient accounts of symptoms with modern diseases.

A similar methodology has been applied by Scurlock , The hero, deeply touched by the death of his companion and friend, begins his search for eternal life in a desperate attempt to beat mortality tablets IX-XI, George , Scholars that have tried to analyse melancholy and depression in Meso- potamia have done it from different perspectives and following different episte- mological patterns, which proves the difficulty of the task of touching on the topic of feelings in ancient times.

See below for further analysis. Neither the cuneiform textual corpus reveals the idea of well-defined personality types based on humoral predominance4. In Mesopotamia melancholy is a symptom revealing an external negative influ- ence, and not derived from the inner nature of the person. But to be able to get some insight on how these realities were referred to and cope with in the texts, as well as under- stood within the frame of Mesopotamian written tradition, we will proceed to a further analysis of cuneiform sources. The variety of terms is so vast and the nuances so subtle, that it often makes it difficult to translate a due term into our own categories.

Some of the traits historically attributed to the realm of melan- choly in Western thought can be also observed in Mesopotamia5, but because of its cultural dissimilarities and background, and its absence of etymological and aetiological relation with Western ideas, it must be born in mind that the Mesopotamian case represents a reality of its own and that its linking with any Western or Eastern theoretical frame depends on further identification and research of cuneiform sources.

All things considered, melancholy could be loosely applied to the Meso- potamian case in reference to a set of feelings, moods, behavioural modes, and states marked by distress, sadness, panic, antisocial and extravagant behaviour, etc, without linking it with humoral theories.

The specific characteristics of these states will be analysed below. These accounts [by classical authors] bear a striking similarity to modern textbook descriptions of depression […]. The cardinal signs and symptoms used today in diagnosing depression are found in the ancient descriptions: The texts tend to focus on the con- crete without formulating general universal explanations or abstract theories. Therefore we find, for example, medical texts on eye problems that gather treat- ments to cure different pathologies without including any reflection on the anatomy of the eye or how sight works or why the body gets ill and why certain cures are effective6.

In consequence, expositive theories on how the human body and mind operate are absent of the textual corpus, and only flashes on some kind of theoretical thought can be traced down when taking into account significant groups of written sources. Nevertheless, we know that orality7 was a key element in practice as well as in transmission of knowledge, so more gener- al and abstract considerations may have been transmitted that way. When it comes to the research of the concept of melancholy in Meso- potamian cuneiform texts, there are three main textual typologies that are use- ful: It is difficult to evaluate how these textual sources represent the thought of the period when they were compiled or copied, since, as it has been well attested for the Mesopotamian case, texts hardly ever are dated and, besides, they were handed down within scribal tradition over the centuries Rochberg-Halton ; Verderame with previous bibliogra- phy.

In this article we will take into account textual evidences from ca. For this reason, the results presented here should be handled critically until further evidence comes to light. Formulas, as abstraction and distillation of thought, were not presented as such in the written tradition. See the collective volume edited by Vogelzang and Vanstiphout for the relation between orality and literature.

We have clear evidences of the association among thought, feeling and internal organs in the cuneiform textual sources. Reflection, decision, happiness, fear, and sadness are described as originating and developing in the abdomen lit. Usual Sumerian expressions are Most states related to melancholy and depression will consequently be described in association with the insides, often combined with allusions to ges- tures and body language. The vocabulary of depression As we will see in the following sections, depressive states can also include episodes of terror, panic, torpor, dizziness, worry, insomnia, sense of loss, etc.

A close analysis of all the terms and expressions used to describe these states would exceed the aims of this article, so we will proceed to point out just a few relevant elements. Nonetheless, readers are invited to consult the final bibliog- raphy for further reference. The Sumerian compositions referring the destruction and abandonment of Sumerian cities, the so-called laments, that mourn the devasta- tion of urban centres, constitute a relevant literary example of this The Sumerian zarah and the Akkadian nissatu are two of the main terms to refer to depression, sadness and low mood in these contexts.

We find equations among Sum. In the neo-Assyrian from the tenth to the seventh century B. In this text many other Akkadian terms associated with distress, worry and lack of rest are included: For a general introduction to this literary genre and related compositions, see Krecher and Hallo , with previous bibliography. For more insight on cuneiform lexical lists, see Cavigneaux According to the author, it designates desolation, sadness, tears, weeping, rites of lamenta- tion, etc, both at an individual or collective level.

See Abusch for a general introduction. Having in mind the fact that organiza- tion, grouping, and classification following thematic principles was one of the key elements in intellectual scribal thought, and considering that these symp- toms and disturbs are mentioned together, we can verify their pertaining to the same semantic sphere. Textual evidences also talk about significant changes in the outside appear- ance of the depressed or melancholy individual.

Why is it ] your face is burnt [by frost and sunshine, and] you roam the wild [got up like a lion]? These evidences are com- bined with expressions referring to what happens within the body Jacques The wrath of god and goddess 3. These physical and mental conditions derive from the quality of the relationship between man and divinity, a topic that has been studied in deep in Assyriology and which consti- tutes a motif repeatedly found in both literary sources and therapeutic texts.

According to Mesopotamian thought, every man can count on the protection of his personal god and goddess. But when the deities, for some known or unknown reason, turn their backs to man, he becomes an easy prey to every evil possible Jacobsen , The fall of man into disgrace usually fol- lows a more or less fixed pattern of misfortunes that can be traced down both in Sumerian and Akkadian literary texts.

In the Old Babylonian from the nine- teenth to the sixteenth century BC Sumerian composition Man and his god, the sufferer sees how he loses credibility and respectability before men, he is despised by those who have previously been friends, he starts feeling low and desperate, while he states his unawareness of what has caused this to be I am a young man, I am knowledgeable, but what I know does not come out right with me.

The truth which I speak has been turned? A liar has over- whelmed me like the south wind and prostrated me before him. My unwitting arm has shamed me before you. You have doled out to me suffering ever anew. When I 17 Kunstmann Specific transgressions are mentioned in the form of long lists, in the hope that at least one of them may match the cause of divine anger. I promised and then reneged; I gave my word but then did not pay. I did wrong, I spoke improper things, I repeated [what should not be uttered], improper things were on my lips. In innocence I went too far.

Lambert , lines I spoke lies, I pardoned my own sins, I spoke improper things, you know them all. I committed offence against the god who created me, I did an abomination, ever doing evil. I coveted your abundant property, I desired your precious silver. I raised my hand and desecrated what should not be so treated.

In a state of impurity I entered the temple. Constantly I committed a terrible abomination against you, I transgressed your rules in what was displeasing to you. In the fury of my heart I cursed your divinity, I have continually committed iniquities, known and unknown Lambert , lines When I, a young man, go out into the street, I am depressed lit. Man and his god, in eTCSL; cfr.

Kramer , lines My righteous shepherd has become angry with me, a youth, and looked upon me with hostility. My herdsman has plotted malice against me although I am not his enemy. My companion does not say a true word to me. My friend falsifies my truth- fully spoken words. A liar has spoken insulting words to me while you, my god, do not respond to him and you carry off my understanding. An ill-wisher has spoken insulting words to me. He angered me, was like a storm and created anguish.

I am wise, why am I tied up with ignorant youths? I am discerning, why am I entangled among ignorant men? Kramer , lines As a consequence, the man without divine protection falls in a depressed state characterized by: Tears, lament, anguish lit. Suffering overwhelms me like a weeping child.

In the hands of the fate demon my appearance has been altered, my breath of life carried away. The asag demon, the evil one, bathes in my body. Kramer , lines 20 The seventh century B. Akkadian Poem of the righteous sufferer Lambert , is a three-tablet literary composition that describes the process of alienation and strangeness suffered by a nobleman once his god and goddess abandon him.

The first tablet tells how all omens carry evil messages for him; he loses strength and possessions; the king and his officers keep him isolated and plot against him; slander and lies are told against him; his friends betray him. The victim is unable to reply, to react, to take the reins of his life, which is surrounded by depression I , lamentation I , wailing I and gloom I See Kramer , Gordon , Lambert , Jacobsen , and Mattingly for reference.

They sometimes describe the pitiful state of the sufferer, state that includes signs of depression and behavioural alterations such as bend- ing of the head, weeping as well as crying and incapacity to react: A mighty storm has bowed my head. Like a bird my pinions have been cut off, I have shed my wings and am unable to fly. Stiffness has seized my arms, impotence has fallen on my knees. I moan like a dove night and day I am inflamed, weeping bitterly, tears flow from my eyes. Lambert , lines I am constantly in grief23; my god, where are you? Lambert , line I am feeble, my fear is much Lambert , line Being this the case, the sufferer prays the god or goddess in order to appease them and obtain again their favour.

I have cried to thee, I thy suffering, wearied, distressed servant.

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See me, O my lady, accept my prayers! Faithfully look upon me and hear my supplication! Other healing techniques to treat the anger of the gods Cases of fear, depression, alienation, material and personal losses, etc relat- ed to the anger of the gods can also be treated through other means. In medical texts, symptoms related to mental distress are usually pointed out to be the 22 The same literary image is used in the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer I Lambert , If a man is constantly frightened and worries day and night; losses are suffered regu- larly by him and his profit is cut off; people speak defamation about him, his inter- locutor does not speak affirmatively, a finger of derision is stretched out i.

In another example a similar set of symp- toms, plus some others, are mentioned: In this case, healing is performed through a ritual based on the fastening of figurines in combination with incantations. Farber , 56 edited a similar 24 In some cases, the witch, through slander and other evil means, is able to make the god or goddess turn their back on the victim. Scurlock , , n. Treatment includes an elaborated series of rituals and incantations.

Together with these long, exhaustive descriptions of the suffering provoked by divine anger, we also find more succinct accounts and relatively simple remedies. The text BAM , probably to be dated around the eleventh or tenth century BC, is a six-column tablet of this type dealing with treatments for con- ditions caused by divine wrath or divine abandonment of the patient In BAM these conditions are mainly treated by leather bags containing materia medica of veg- etal and mineral origin to be hang around the neck, although potions are also mentioned.

In other texts, we find examples of fumigations, stone-amulets or necklaces: In order to be effective, it has to be eaten or drunk on an empty stomach BAM 1 i The name of the plant or drug is given, followed by the symptom or disease it cures, plus the right way of preparation and administration. Univocal identification of most Sumerian and Akkadian plant names is not possible at present. This cross-reference system obviously hinders us from any attempt of approaching identification.

On lovesickness in cuneiform texts A peculiar case within melancholy states as described in Mesopotamian cuneiform texts is that of lovesickness Akk. There are three entries dealing with lovesickness in the diagnostics and prognostics series These entries are men- tioned in tablets describing symptoms caused mainly by witchcraft and illicit sexual relations, except for the third case, which is included in a section on 30 Landsberger Therapy is hardly ever included. The symptoms referred to in this text include gastric and digestive trou- ble, as well as behavioural disturbs Two elements are particularly interesting: This last trait is most unusual in the series, especial- ly if we consider how limited and concise information is in our texts.

As far as we can recall, the reference is not mentioned anywhere else so, although not ex- plicitly stated in the text, this clarification must have been included for a reason. It is the same for a man and a woman. It is the same for the man and the woman. We also find sporadic references in literary examples. Most love songs are centered on the praise of female and male beauty, their attractiveness and sex appeal, that is, they depict answered love Westenholz , with previous bib- liography; George , with previous bibliography.

They can pertain to the Inanna-Dumuzi cycle as well, in relation with sacred marriage Sefati , but references to unanswered love is uncommon. However, a small group of Old Babylonian literary texts recently published by George reveal some interesting features on the topic. In the following text it is a woman who speaks. She describes the charms of his beloved, desperately and begging for his attentions, she cries her suffering for love: Stol , above , who links the black organs with epilepsy and melancholy.

I recalled the one who came before me, I who am blooming with health, my god is with you, I appeal to you like a wife, so as not to beg? I think of you constantly, I am consumed, convulsed, tortured? Again I yearned for you, I grew ever more distraught, then I saw your face, you are a god! I implore you, let your heart delight? George , lines As for me, during the day they fem. The women who gossip about me, they have no cares by night and day. May your heart make love? George , , text 9 lines In another text also edited by George , text 8 some other fea- tures are added to the picture.

First of all, it is a man who speaks. Love is repre- sented as something which infests35; the man swings from rage and worry to happiness; he is restless and eager for the love of her beloved. The bulk of cuneiform texts has provided us with examples of incantations sometimes accompanied by rituals designed for a woman to gain the love of a man and vice versa, confirming the fact that both men and women can suffer from the impelling necessity of satisfying their affection and sexual appetites.

Were love incantations used as a cure for lovesickness? The entry in CAD H sub huttutu, only quotes exam- ples from lexical lists, with any mention of the term in literary contexts. Wilcke , lines For a different interpretation of the text published by Wilcke, see Scurlock Other exam- ples of remedies to gain the love of man and woman include phylacteries for a woman to recover the love of her angry husband Scheil , text n.

The variety of the terms and expressions used in the cuneiform texts to describe attitudes, feelings and behaviour dominated by somberness, fear and ill-humour reveal a complex perception of the self. Depressive states in Mesopotamia always develop from external causes, and there is a clear association among depres- sion, insomnia, nervousness and agitation, feeling of alienation, abandonment, material and human losses, and bad luck. The recognition of lovesickness as a disease itself that can affect equally both men and women will surely interest the historians of medicine, and we hope it will inspire a fruitful cross-cultural debate that will take into account what cuneiform sources have to say.

Titled works cited Abusch, T. Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie 7: Witchcraft and the Anger of the Personal God. Textual, Historical, and Interpretative Perspectives, edited by T. University of Pennsylvania Press. Two Collections from the Old Babylonian Schools.

The Mythology of Mourning. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 60 3: Ancient Mesopotamian Potency Incantations. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Philadelphia and New York: Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archaologie 6: Ponti- ficium Institutum Biblicum. A Collection of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 7: The Body in Description of Emotion. Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature http: Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike.

Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Lamentations and Prayers in Sumer and Akkad. Emotion Talk Across Cultures. Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, edited by R. The Treasures of Darkness. A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven - London: University of Chicago Press. Mental Diseases of Ancient Mesopotamia. In Diseases in Antiquity: Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen. Man and His God: Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie 6: Journal of Near Eastern Studies 61 4: Journal of Near Eastern Studies 33 3: King, Babylonian magic and sor- cery.

A Mesopotamian Hero for a Melancholy Age. Prescription for an Anxiety State: A Study of BAM Canonicity in Cuneiform Texts. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 36 2: Catalogue de la Collection Eugene Tisserant. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine. University of Illinois Press. Love Songs in Sumerian Literature. A Babylonian Explanatory Text. Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. Emotions Across Languages and Cultures. Diversity and Uni- versals. Qualche singolo aspetto della ricca stratificazione culturale della malinconia resta tuttavia ancora piuttosto oscuro.

Le eccezioni sono davvero pochissime: Otten, la cui prima sezione, significativamente intitolata Medical Cases. I licantropi letterari, figure di fantasia che vivono essenzialmente nei raccon- ti della tradizione folklorica e letteraria, come, per il Medioevo, Bisclavret, Melion, o Gorlagon. I licantropi demoniaci o magici: I guerrieri, che assumono ritualmente natura, aspetto e comportamenti lupini, come gli ulfedhnar norreni, o i saka haumavarga persiani, o i cinocefali lon- gobardi descritti da Paolo Diacono, che bevono il sangue dei nemici uccisi.

Peucer, Commentarius de praecipuis generibus divinationum…, Witebergae, , pp. Ist aber nach wenig tagen gestorben. In questo quadro, egli tradusse fedelmente la storia di Fincel, che si adattava perfettamente alle sue tesi, appena accentuandone i colori. Tandem non sine multa difficultate captus, incidenter asseuerauit se uerum esse lupum, discrimen solum existere in pelle cum pilis inuersa. Fra gli altri, dal ve- scovo Simone Majoli [Majoli I, ], dal giurista Johann Georg Godelmann [Godelmann Fatti e documenti costituiscono evidentemente solo la materia con cui ciascuno tesse, a suo modo, un discorso tramato a partire dai suoi propri pregiudizi 4.

Una cosa so, che presso i nostri era faccenda di tutti i giorni: Ma i licantropi sono comunque dei lunatici che, per un destino avverso sono settimi figli, nascono la notte di Natale, hanno i denti alla nascita ecc. III, Paris, Klincksieck,, p. Euripide, Baccanti, 73, , , Rielaborando a suo modo i dati della tradizione popolare, la Cratere attico a campana a figure rosse, da Vico teoria medica classica inserisce Equense, c.

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, n. Lo afferma esplicitamente un frammento di Marcello di Side, nativo della Pam- filia vissuto nel secondo secolo dopo Cristo, autore di un apprezzatissimo poe- ma medico in esametri greci. La follia lupina, o canina, come viene chiamata secondo Marcello [di Side]. Si riconoscono da questi segni: Hanno la lingua secca, non secernono affatto sa- liva, e sono assetati. Hanno le tibie esulcerate in modo non medicabile, per le cadute continue, e i morsi dei cani, che cercano carne. A volte, si possono anche somministrare dei sonniferi nelle bevande.

Roscher , che fornisce una ricostruzione comparativa del brano, corredandolo di un dottissimo commento, e la recente, rapida, sintesi di Poulakou-Rebelakou E. Fro- ben, , II, cap. Nel Canone, egli riprende quasi letteralmente il brano di Marcello di Side, ma, differenziandosi dai suoi prede- cessori, vi cancella ogni riferimento a cani e lupi: Le carte in tavola sono sempre le stesse, ma vengono disposte diversamente.

La contrapposizione fra mania e malinconia, dunque, costituisce una specifi- cazione della teoria generale, e non una sua refutazione. In senso proprio qui si tratta nella seconda accezione. La mania o il demonium lupinum proviene dalla materia collerica riarsa, o dalla melancolia riarsa. II, Napoli, Filatre-Sebezio, IX, De lupina insania, pp. II, De actionibus cerebri laesis, cap. XV, De Mania, pp. Queste due malattie non differiscono se non per la posizione della materia.

In Avicenna e nei suoi successori la formula mi sembra infatti possedere solo un significato puramente connotativo: I, in Collectio Salernitana Practica Johanni Serapionis dicta breviarium, Lib. XXI, De Mania, e cap. A volte si ha un morbo, a seguito del quale qualcuno crede di essere un lupo: Zorn, Dissertatio de Daemoniacorum in sepulcretis habitantium lykantropia quam Christus curavit, Miscellanea Duisburgensia, t. Which word, some Physitions do translate Daemonium Lupinum, that is, a woolvish Demoniacke: And it is nothing else in effect, but an infirmitie arising upon such phantasticall imagina- tions, as do mightily disorder and trouble the braine.

Su questa posizione compromissoria si schierarono sia testi di taglio medico, come il De la lycanthropie di De Nynauld cap. VI, De la lycanthropie natu- relle, pp. Sidky, Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease: Arieti, Manuale di psichiatria, Torino, Boringhieri, , vol. Brown, Lycanthropy lives on, British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. Davis, Lou Garew, H. West, Multiple serial lycanthropy. Vartzopoulos, Lycanthropy and demonomania: Certo, per noi questa figura ha ben poco a fare con il malinconico classico, come, poniamo, Amleto o il Jaques di As You Like it.

De Medendis Humani corporis malis: A dangerous reverse intermetamorphosis. Review of 23 cases with the syndrome of lycanthropy, European Journal of Psychiatry, 13 3 , , pp. Nejad, Belief in transforming another person into a wolf: Response to Miles e Drake, Jr. Janakiramiah, Lycanthropy in depression: Two case reports, Psychopathology, 32 4 , , pp. Leong, A case of partial lycanthropy, Canadian Journal of psychiatry - Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 45 2 , , pp.

Arturo Silva, Gregory B. Leong, Lycanthropy and delusional misidentification, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2 , pp. Katz, Anorexie et lycanthropie: Annales de psychiatrie, , vol. Moselhy, Lycanthropy alive in Babylon: Magiologia Basel, Johann Heinrich Me- ver. A Field Guide to Melancholy.

II, a cura di S. Deacon, John; John Walter. Dialogicall discourses of spirits and divels, Londini, Impensis Georg Bishop. Expositio in IX librum Rhazis ad Almansorem. Oti- nus de Luna. De la lycanthropie, transformation et extase des Sorciers. Mogli, fate e lupi mannari. Le voci del Medioevo. Approssimazioni al lupo mannaro medievale. Il serraglio degli stupori del mondo.

Ambrosio e Bartolomeo Dei. Compendium Medicinae Gilberti Anglici. Tractatus de magis, veneficis et lamiis recte cognoscendis et puniendis. Sumptibus Johannis Danielis Tauberi. Physici et medici graeci minores. Super aphorismos Iacobi Foroliviensis in Hippocratis Aphori- smos et Galeni super eisdem commentarios, expositio et quaestiones.

Saturno e la melanconia. Werewolves in Western Culture. Lycanth- ropy in Byzantine Times. The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva. Pshysica Curiosa, sive mirabilia naturae et artis, libris XII com- prenhensa. Sumptibus Johannis Andreae Endteri. De iis quae scrita sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de Sacra Philosophia. Quasimodo, Isola di Ulisse 1. Aldus Books, , Pickering, , vols.

Laterza, , ; Cesare Segre, Esperienze ariostesche Pisa: Nisi-Lischi, ; L. Pampaloni, "Per una analisi narrativa del 'Furioso'," Belfagor 26 Studies in the Poetics of a Mode Prince- ton: Versions of the Source New Haven: The Limits of Theory of an 'errant' plot," 11 as Parker claimed, must remain a question for anyone reading Ariosto today. Closely looking at how Ariosto makes fun of a variety of misreadings, I will show some of the limits of applied deconstruction in accounting for how the poem generates meaning. Because of her focus on the erring plot and her dismissal of the closure of the poem as a mere "literary tour de force," 12 Parker chose not to consider the meaning of the last third of the poem.

In her reading, she treated the poem as a fragment. Her mistrust of totalizing systems led her to dismiss the poem as a whole and to single out certain passages as key to undoing that sense of the whole. For Parker, the important insight gained here is that romance is a "revelation of [literature's] very nature, of the fact that all fictions 'stray. For David Quint, the evangelist's discussion of poetry and patron- age proved that no text can authorize the truth of another.

Quint claimed that this part of the Furioso undermines all textual authority: The ludicrousness of San Giovanni's literary judgments makes me question Quint's suggestion that what San Giovanni says is what Ariosto's text means— "insisting] that all texts tell lies out of self-interest. Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance Princeton: Press, , n. Quint would have us take these lines unironically to mean that Virgil, patronized and controlled by Augustus, portrayed Dido as a whore because she was a threat to Roman imperialism. If we read the text this way, however, we miss the joke in the irony and absurd incongruity of these statements.

Of course Virgil was not Dido's friend; she was a fictional character. Nor was she a whore — either in Virgil's Aeneid or in the many texts indebted to it for their portrayal of Dido, Ovid's Heroides, Roman d'Eneas, and Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus, among others. Part of the humor of San Giovanni's outra- geous statement derives from mixing low style with high matter- using such slang to describe the elevated tragic epic figure of Dido. Another part of the humor derives from the confusion between the literary— Dido— and the historical— Virgil. Quint's assertion that the "'higher' truth delivered from Ariosto's moon is merely that poets lie" raises a whole set of problematic questions.

How can the critic posit the notion of "higher truth" and remain consistent with the deconstructive position on the corrosive character of all language? On what grounds can Quint defend his giving greater weight to this episode in the poem above all others? Isn't the logical consequence of this claim that "all poets lie" the notion that only literary critics like San Giovanni can perceive the "higher truth"?

Ariosto, with the "perception of the Western poetic traditon as a pack of lies," emerged in Quint's version as an early precursor of late twentieth-century canon revisionists. I would argue rather that new poetry does change, but does not destroy, preexisting poetic tradition. Following the old Italian saying, tradutorre, traditore, I would argue that by translating the tradition into something new, every poem both transmits and betrays the inherited tradition. But to destroy poetic tradition is to undermine the possibility of literary change, the possi- bility of new interrelationships among texts within the tradition.

Ario- sto's comic poem creates new perspectives on the texts it parodies, and in creating these new perspectives it contributes to rather than under- mines the memory of these texts. The revisionary perspective is de- fined by its relation to the inherited tradition.

At the same time that the Furioso revises our view of classical epic and medieval romance by impressing upon us that these forms can never be simply reproduced The Limits of Theory or repeated, the poem also creates a new form that relies upon its complex relation to these past forms to produce the comic effects of parody. In other words, Ariosto's intent in writing the Orlando Furioso was not merely "to destroy the authority and influence of the books of chivalry" any more than this was Cervantes' intent in writing Don Quixote.

Not to see this is to miss both the humor and the regenerative, and not simply destructive, force of the Furioso' s parody of traditional epic and romance literature. In some sense in reaction to, but unfortunately not in open and direct debate with such, applied deconstructive criticism, some other recent scholarship has attempted to place the Furioso in a Renaissance cultural and literary context.

His book deals with the intel- lectual context of the poem, i. He has written not an influence study but rather a description of the intellec- tual context. While also incorporating deconstruction and postmod- ernism into his reading of the Furioso, Ascoli attempts at least in part to historicize the Furioso. A more thoroughly contextualized approach is that of Daniel Javitch, who has written a history of how the Furioso became part of the Italian canon through the influence of sixteenth- century Italian literary theory and publishing practices.

Following Foucault, I want to emphasize the discontinuity between past and present cul- tures. Penguin, , From the "Satire" to the "Furioso" Ravenna: Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo Columbia: Although this approach strives to uncover difference rather than continuity, the emphasis on discontinuity is itself a reflection of current fashion.

But rather than set out to view the text as a vindica- tion of contemporary literary theory, I will note in passing how the text resists appropriation by many recent critical concepts. The Foucauldian notion of discontinuity acknowledges limits upon the translation of the poem into contemporary theoretical terms.

The extent to which the Furioso cannot be translated into contemporary theoretical terms is, I believe, due to the concept of language which it presupposes and, therefore, to its concept of poetic composition, and finally to its understanding of the physical cosmos and the relation between humans and the cosmos — all of which are inimical to current academic discourse.

In The Order of Things, Foucault described the pre-seventeenth- century concept of language as Stoic: Ever since the Stoics, the system of signs in the Western world has been a ternary one, for it was recognized as containing the significant, the signified, and the "conjuncture" the Tvyxavov. From the seventeenth century, on the other hand, the arrange- ment of signs was to become binary, since it was to be defined, with Port-Royal, as the connection of a significant and a signi- fied.

At the Renaissance the organization is different, and much more complex: The Stoics were materialists, and so for them, even words have a material Bouchard and Sherry Simon Ithaca: Press, , Knowl- edge, even under the banner of history, does not depend on 'rediscovery,' and it emphatically excludes the 'rediscovery of ourselves. Richard Howard New York: Random House, , The Limits of Theory reality.

Indeed, Foucault would have been more accurate in his ac- count had he added to marks, content, and linking similitudes, the notion of language as sound. Underlying the Stoics' concept of lan- guage is a material universe based on a biological model, in which constant and apparently random activity issues into unity.

Hugh Kenner used the adjective "stoic" to describe the comic literary universe of Joyce, Beckett, and Flaubert, in which the writer foresees everything in and rationally orders the entire text. Ariosto represents the vice and misery of his characters as sheer folly. As Margaret Ferguson has observed, the Furioso provides a kind of comfort, if not a cure, for the unfulfilled desire of Orlando: Ariosto's narra- tive presupposes Stoic notions about reason and order, both ethical and political as well as physical and poetic.

In this study, I will trace these Stoic presuppositions, shared by a number of other early six- teenth-century Italian writers, to actual Stoic texts that were available to Ariosto. This approach comes into conflict with the preconceptions of contemporary literary criticism, which have overlooked the explana- tion of some of the Furioso's poetic effects.

To make the philosophical preconceptions of Ariosto and his contemporaries, rather than our own, the critical point of departure is to concentrate on the role of the writer. This is not to say that this approach will exclude the role of the reader. The reader is in dialogue with the writer and the text. And the narrative structure, the irony, the philosophical content of 21 Kenner, The Stoic Comedians Berkeley: Nevertheless, even to speak of the role of the writer rather than the reader runs counter to contemporary interest in reader-response criticism and to Foucault's critique of authorship.

Ariosto's two revisions of his text for the press in and give evidence of his authorial control, a control much greater than that of most early modern authors, or indeed that of late twentieth-century critics, limited by academic censorship of what can be said in the current discourse, and who is writing letters of recom- mendation and book reviews. This focus on the writer in turn means that I will read the poem from the vantage point of what I have reconstructed as its possible method of composition, the vision organizing the poem's protean plot.

A structural reading of the poem as an alternate cosmos, analo- gous to the Stoic cosmos, proves useful in remembering the plot and thus in better understanding how the parts of the poem are related to one another. My own experience in the past nine years of introducing this way of reading the Furioso to students has convinced me that I have discovered a workable mnemonic device, which may have functioned — either consciously or unconsciously — as such for the author.

When I speak of the "structure of the plot," I am not un- aware of how problematic such a notion is. Without any evidence of Ariosto's intentions external to the three editions of the poem, my analysis of the structure of the Furioso remains a critical construct. Ariosto's intentions with respect to the organization of the poem remain in question.

Ariosto may have stumbled upon the plot haphaz- ardly; but it seems much more likely to me that the writer, working on his epic for over twenty years, had a vision of the action of the poem as a whole. However he improvised within this vision, he needed it to bring his narrative poem to an end. My intuition is based on how writers write.

The Limits of Theory H process of writing, he has a vision that initiates the work and that is modified through that process. Reading the poem according to the process of composition also requires a reading of the entire poem, instead of selected passages. Rather than single out any one passage of the poem as particularly revelatory of meaning, I will consider each passage in relation to the action of the whole poem.

This may seem an impossible task. There are so many plots begun and suspended sometimes in just one canto that to keep track of them must seem beyond the power of memory. But this is where the notion of a structure or an organized vision will help the reader, as I believe it helped the writer, to remember the poem's varied and intricate plots. The passages that critics who have read the poem as fragment have chosen to emphasize— Michele's descent and Astolfo 's lunar voyage, among others— are central to my analysis of the plot.

In reading the poem as a whole rather than as a fragment, the critic must replace the concept of the endless deferral of action and of meaning with an analysis of how action is concluded. How do these conclusions reflect back upon the digressive complications of the plot? How do these conclusions shape our understanding of the way the poem produces meaning? Is meaning endlessly deferred, as Parker has claimed? Is it the case that "deconstruction in the world of the Furioso from which the Logos has been removed and in which signification is entirely man-made reveals only nonsense and madness"?

I will also scrutinize the political implications of recent critical conclusions about how the poem constructs the relation between poetry and power.

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I will analyze such problematic passages as Ario- sto's praise of his patrons and San Giovanni's assertion that poets are paid liars in relation to how they are expressed— in what tone, in what context, with which meanings for which audiences, and to what ends. Does the poem's presentation of the poet-patron relationship persuade us that the meaning of poetry is controlled by the powerful because 24 Quint, Origin and Originality, Does the Furioso support the practices and values of the despotic government of the Estensi?

If certain kinds of blindness to the poetic effects of the Furioso have resulted from attempts to use the poem in order to justify contemporary academic theory, there are also excesses in historicist criticism. Whereas once it was fashionable to deny the philosophical content of the poem, deconstructive critics as well as the historicists have viewed the poem as engaged in philosophical questions. Howev- er, there is a need, I think, to be on guard against destroying the humor of the poem by viewing its philosophical content unironically, as some historicist critics have.

For instance, the expression of Neo- platonic notions in the poem does not necessarily mean that the author affirms them, any more than he affirms the notion that poets are paid liars. That is to say, we need to question the extent to which the poem merely reflects its world.

I challenge the view of the poem as subservient to the purposes of power by attending to the ways the poem creates an alternate world— through narrative and through literary parody. Does the poem either affirm or challenge the ideology of the context in which it was created, and if so how? Those, who, like De Sanctis, assert that with the Furioso, "you don't know whether it is a serious matter, or a joke," 27 have only half-understood the poem.

The poem is a joke and a serious matter at one and the same time. As parodie 24 For instance, Marinclli's Ncoplatonic reading of the poem is strained when he claims that Astolfo, Ruggiero, and Orlando respectively represent the three types of Neoplatonic love: The notion of the mercurial Astolfo as a divine lover seems to stretch the reading a bit. To pose the problem as a matter of either serious matter or joke misses the humor of Ariosto's parody and the seriousness of that humor.

Ascoli uses the term "crisis" to describe not only the issues that the poem represents but also his method of reading the poem. De Man called the competitive ideological struggle, the almost craven vogue of the "new" in continental criticism "crisis- like. Decon- struction was not posited by de Man as a universal literary phenome- non but one specifically tied to the modern European reaction— both in philosophy and literature— to Romanticism.

It seems to me that by using the term "crisis" in his approach to the Furioso, Ascoli astutely acknowledges some of the philosophical and political crises of Ariosto's context. By the same token, in charac- terizing his own method as one of crisis, Ascoli also claims an identifi- cation between his work and de Man's sense of critical crisis. I am not convinced that most academic work, including my own, is engaged in this sense of crisis.

On the one hand, to claim that a literary study embodies de Man's deconstructive notion of crisis assumes that it grapples with urgent cultural philosophical questions. On the other hand, the demand for a criticism of crisis may further discredit the already politically suspect practice of deconstruction— as if through 28 Ascoli, Bitter Harmony, Press, , 5, and for the rest of this paragraph, 7, 8, For me, Ascoli's use of the term "crisis" in part demonstrates the risk that applied deconstructive criticism often runs of becoming mystified.

Criticism is mystified when it claims that criticism alone has the power to demystify literature. As de Man wrote: I would call my own work on the Furioso philological, hermeneutic, literary formalist; it is only critical in the limited sense that it is in a debate with a kind of criticism that is more interested in developing critical theory than in interpreting the poem. For Ascoli's concept of crisis, I substitute parody. Bakhtin's defini- tion of parody, developed in his study of Rabelais, conveys the am- bivalent and paradoxical effects of this form.

According to Bakhtin, parody is at once destructive and regenerative, subversive and conser- vative of the traditional forms which it both mocks and celebrates. Like Alasdair Maclntyre's notion of philsophical tradition as "ongoing argument" with the past, literary parody is in dialogue with the past. Furthermore, parody suggests the secondary character that Nemoianu has recently analyzed as consti- tuting the category of literature itself in its marginal relationship to the world of power and to the central and governing practices of the 30 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans.

Helcne Iswolsky Blooming- ton: Press, , 21, , on the "regenerating ambivalence" of parody. See his Whose Justice? Parody also escapes the charge of anachronism since it is a concept formulated in literary theory as early as Aristotle's Poetics and practiced in literature throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In the next chapter, I discuss Renaissance cosmologica! I provide some historical context and points of comparison for my hypothesis that the poem parodies the Stoic cosmos. Following this comparative analysis, I attempt a structural reading of the entire narrative of the Furioso as alternate world, as literary cosmos.

I base this reading of the Furioso on a comparison of the three editions of the poem, which reveals Ariosto's strategic placement of new material to create a greater degree of formal order. This structural analysis highlights central literary and philosophical parodies. I call them central because they happen to occur at spatial centers of narrative action but also because they have been the most discussed passages of the poem in the critical tradition. These episodes are key to understanding the way the poem plays with its literary and philosophical models.

Since I have indicated where I differ with recent American criti- cism, I want to discuss briefly how my reading of the poem affirms parts of the critical tradition on the Furioso. There is some Italian criti- cism of tremendous suggestiveness and explanatory power that has been overlooked by some of the American critics discussed above. Alex Preminger and T. Aristotle's Poetics al2 is the locus classicus for the term in literary criticism. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, , on the medieval and Renaissance traditions of sacred and popular parodies, as opposed to the purely formal literary parody of modern literature.

If we are not un- knowingly to repeat either the insights or blindnesses of past critics, it is necessary to have some sense of where we stand in relation to this complex body of criticism. Many critics from the sixteenth century to the present seem to share the reaction of Ariosto's patron Ippolito d'Este: If we take "coglio- neria" to mean "sproposito," the poem becomes a blunder, as such rigidly normative sixteenth-century critics as Camillo Pellegrino con- tended.

Joan Redfern New York: Basic Books, , 2: Barbara Reynolds quotes the unbowdlerized "coglionerie," but translates it as "balderdash" in the introduction to her translation of the Orlando Furioso London: Penguin Books, , 1: Nicola Zanichelli, , Here De Sanctis speaks of Ariosto as the poet of "art for its own sake. Must criti- cism subject the poem to a standard— whether it be Aristotelian or deconstructive?

Or is there some sense in which the poem itself can tell us how it wants to be read? The early debates on the poem show that some critics allowed the Furioso to be its own standard. We can gain historical perspective on contemporary Ariosto criticism by examining its relation, whether acknowledged or not, to the initial debates over the poem.

We can also see that there is plenty of prece- dent for viewing the poem as a well-crafted whole. For praise of variety, see particularly Orazio Ariosto, , Lio- nardo Salviati, , and Giraldi Cintio, Cintio speaks of "variety" as the "primary source of pleasure," , and Caburacci, too, sees pleasure as the end of poetry, Salviati, Ariosto, and Malatesta look for unity in the Furioso's variety.

Salviati argued that Aristotle's theory was based on reason rather than on the practice of Homer and Virgil and that Ariosto had interpreted the rational principles of plot, character, thought, and diction for his own time. Later, in Lo 'Nf arinato secondo , Salviati argued that the episodes of the poem that had been viewed as merely orna- mental were integrated into an epic plot, the unity of which could be compared to an almond-shaped structure, as opposed to the ribbon- like structure of drama. The variety of romance was organized on the model of a little world: Malatesta in Della poesia romanzesca , like Francesco Patrizi in Parere in difesa dell'Ariosto , objected to Pellegrino's interpretation of Aristotelian unity because this notion of a single dominant action has no basis in Homer's poems.

For Malatesta, this requirement could be seen as "consisting in the organization of many actions depending on one another through verisimilitude. And if the poem with a single action is most similar to an animal, then most similar to a very great animal, which is the world, will be the poem with the most actions artfully woven together, because, as the world is composed of five separate bodies all equally important to the constitution of the whole however more or less noble , so it is possible to compose a poem out of many actions, all equally important; indeed such a poem has been created by Ariosto.

For the original, see Torquato Tasso, Discorsi dell'arte poetica e del poema eroico, ed. Laterza, , Vittorio Baldini , , The analogy of the poem to a world that can be represented in a map or globe divided into five equal parts is a precedent for my analysis of the poem's structure as a cosmos.

Orazio represents the totality of the poem as composed of five bodies just as my analysis of the poem yields a comprehensible five-part scheme. More specifically, Ariosto's indication that all the many actions of the poem "artfully woven together" constitute its totality as an alternate "world," in which all the many diverse parts are equally important to the whole, expresses a dynamic model of order that is particularly characteristic of the Stoic cosmos that I use to explain the poem's order.

In the Stoic cosmos, multiplicity is not opposed to but rather issues into unity. The image of the poem as a very large animal, the world, makes Orazio 's version of the poem as cosmos both organic and biological, like the Stoic cosmos, as opposed to static and geometric, like the Neoplatonic cosmos. Benedetto Croce 's criticism is the most important modern con- tribution to the genealogy of criticism that sees the poem as an or- dered whole.

In his essay on Ariosto, Croce developed the concept of cosmic harmony, and yet at the same time he denied that this harmo- ny had any philosophical content. In fact, most important for my work have been two diametrically opposed approaches— the criticism of Croce and the philology of Pio Rajna.

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Laterza, , 1- Rajna, its wealth of literary ancestors; Croce, its harmony. Each unfolds that characteristic with an approach radically different from the other: Rajna with philology and Croce with intuition. Each is in turn terribly suspicious of the other's approach. Rajna fears "concezioni subiettive," 52 and Croce dismisses the search for sources as capricious in its actual selectivity, and "impossible" in what Croce sees as an unlimited field of inquiry.

Rajna's positivism permits him to see only direct borrowings from literary sources and to miss significant indirect borrowings and the larger conceptual structure within which all these are transformed. Croce's particular version of idealism permits him to see only harmony of sentiment but neither the philosophical nor the literary tradition which controls and affects that sentiment.

And yet Rajna possesses a staggering erudition and Croce a synthetic elegance— neither of which could be easily equalled. It was just this erudition and synthesis which made it possible for me to follow that interpretive circle Leo Spitzer describes: What [the scholar] must be able to do Essays in Stylistics Princeton: It was Rajna's philological gloss on the title which first led me to read Seneca's Hercules Furens and Hercules Oetaeus; and so began my investigation of Stoicism, which reached back to Roman and Hellenis- tic texts.

Far from being a source for the poem, Stoic physics provides an analogy for the world of the poem, a way of uniting Rajna's obser- vations on the particulars of literariness and Croce's on the general principle of its harmony. For Rajna's positivism and Croce's idealism I have substituted a more historical sense of Ariosto 's eclectic and parodie treatment of classical philosophy as it was received by his contemporaries.

On the one hand, Rajna's positivistic approach to cataloguing Ariosto's sources cannot tell us why he chose those sources and why he ordered them the way he did; on the other hand, Croce's idealist approach to the soul of the poet in the spirit of the work cannot tell us how that spirit can account for the form of the work as a whole. The conflict amongst different schools of philosophy— particularly that between Neoplatonism and Stoicism— can provide a more historical way to discuss the method by which Ariosto's work is ordered and the philosophical concerns which underly his use of past literature.

Exactly how Ariosto received Stoicism— what books he actually read, for instance— is difficult to ascertain. The influence of Hellenistic Stoicism— particularly Stoic logic, little discussed by the Roman Stoics— is more difficult to ascertain. Ariosto could have known of Hellenistic Stoicism through such authors as Diogenes Laer- tius and Sextus Empiricus, who wrote well after Zeno and his school. Nistri-Lischi, , The late second-century Sextus Empiricus' works were published in Latin in There is also a Latin manuscript which the Teubner editor, H.

Mutschmann, dates as thirteenth century. Hicks, LCL , l: At times it is even difficult to distinguish Stoicism sharply from Neopla- tonism and Aristotelianism, since, like much of Renaissance human- ism, Stoicism was eclectic and heterogeneous. I do not explain the rapport between Ariosto's Furioso and Sto- icism through passive source study, but through careful analysis of the formal and philosophical affinites between the poem and Stoic texts.

This comparison will yield observations concerning the poem as a whole — not merely glosses on individual lines. Stoic cosmology pro- vides a way of describing the structure of the poem. Stoic moral writings, which rest on that rational cosmological order, help me describe the poem's treatment of moral issues— both ethical and political. Stoic concepts of language and art explain how the poem represents the world and how art, like nature, is dynamically ordered. Before discussing the poem itself in detail, I will examine how some other early sixteenth-century Italian texts embody the presuppositions of Stoicism.

I interpret the poem as a cosmos not simply to observe its beautiful form, but to inquire into the larger cultural and philosophi- cal significance of this form. Bury, LCL , l: I introduce Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius into this study not to suggest that they were sources for Ariosto but to clarify the tradition of Stoic thought which Ariosto may have received indirectly, and which, in any case, seems well suited to describe the philosophic outlook of the Furioso.

Bouwsma, "The Two Faces of Humanism: Heiko Oberman with Thomas A. Brill, , 5. Each of the poem's parts has its necessary place in the harmony of the whole. In the unity of its narrative, the Furioso forms an alternate world or cosmos. This alternate cosmos resembles the Stoic cosmos in at least three respects: In these respects we can compare the poetic structure of the Orlando Furioso to similar representations of order in other early sixteenth-century Italian texts: Crossroad, , Richard le May Lugano: These examples of structural models analogous to the Stoic cosmos provide some specific areas of comparison to the cosmo- logical structure of the Furioso's narrative action.

The point, however, is not that these authors directly influenced one another, but that the concept of order which their texts have in common can be explained in terms of common presuppositions. Even though these texts did not influence each other directly, they are "sustained by the same presupposition, The common presuppositions of Ariosto, Pomponazzi, Leonardo, and Machiavelli can be precisely and systematically articulated in terms of Stoic philos- ophy and even located within Stoic texts.

But because of complex formal parallels amongst cosmological structures in such diverse systems as astronomy, architecture, philosophy, and theology, I would add an important qualification here. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine if one representational system was the prima- ry influence on the others. All these structures, in so far as they are analogous to one another, tend to reinforce each other's meaning.

Zone Books, , In fact, there is a major objection to this attempt to trace a Stoic genealogy for the common structural principles of these early six- teenth-century texts: The prevailing view in the history of ideas is that Renaissance natural philosophy is predominantly Aristotelian. Lipsius' interest in Stoic philosophy itself is directly indebted to such earlier work as Erasmus' edition of the works of Seneca. Lipsius' direct explanation of Stoic physical theories is preceded by the indirect or unconscious embodi- ment of these theories in Ariosto's Furioso, as well as in the works of Pomponazzi, Leonardo, and Machiavelli.

While these authors might not always have made a sharp distinction between Aristotelian and Stoic physics, and while they might not have consciously connected the cosmological structures in their works with Stoicism, these struc- tures—whether directly derived from a Stoic text or indirectly derived from an intermediate source — share the common presuppositions of Stoic cosmology.

Liberal Arts Press, , , Desiderius Erasmus Basle, Leonardo's representation of the body as a microcosm parallels the patterned represention of action in Ariosto's poetic cosmos. For Leonardo, organic change produces order in the natural world; similarly, the seemingly chaotic narrative of the Furioso actually produces its own order.

Machiavelli's explanation of the effects of historical repetition and change illuminates the meaning of narrative repetition and change in Ariosto's epic. Stoicism and the History of Ideas A brief review of the literature on Renaissance Stoicism reveals that, with a few notable exceptions, this period has been largely overlooked in the history of ideas. Zanta concentrates on the emergence of neo-Stoicism and the harmonization of Christian and Stoic thought.

She catalogues the participants in this tradition from its originators, the Church Fathers, to both humanist and Reformation authors. The neo-Stoic tradition reaches its fullest realization in the works of the two major late sixteenth-century philosophers, Justus Lipsius and Guillaume Du Vair. Stoicism, as a philosophical system, can be formulated in a very general fashion, as follows: Pomponazzi de- scribes man's relation to the cosmos according to this Stoic correspon- dence between physics and morals.

Leonardo's analogy of nature to art shows the aesthetic implications of this correspondence. Machia- velli's concept of cyclical change in history shows the political conse- quences of the Stoic connection between physics and morals. Not surprisingly, the most recent studies of Renaissance Stoicism concentrate on late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century French authors and neglect these earlier Italian authors. However, Spanneut gives only a very general explanation of why any of these authors might be considered Stoic.

So, for example, Spanneut mentions Giordano Bruno for the impor- tance of cosmology to his thought, even though his theory of infinite worlds corresponds more to an Epicurean than to a Stoic physics. For a comparison of the difference between Epicurean and Stoic physics, see Saunders, Justus Lipsius, , , Analogies to Stoic Cosmology 29 Conversely, Spanneut omits Leonardo and Machiavelli, whose works are informed by the structure of Stoic cosmological theory. In his biography of Coluccio Salutati, Ronald Witt discusses the appeal of Stoic ethics— the emphasis on virtue for its own sake, the need for the individual to stand against the ignorant crowd— to the early Italian humanists.

My discussion of Pomponazzi, Leonardo, and Machiavelli only begins to reconstruct some sense of the Stoicism of the early sixteenth century. In particular, when it comes to Renaissance intellectual history a combination of critical prejudice and positivistic methodology has caused the neglect of Stoicism. The critical prejudice may be Epicure- an, Platonic, Aristotelian, or a combination of these philosophies.

It is easy to see why intellectual historians tend to concentrate on Plato and Aristotle, since their works are so important in the Renaissance reinterpret ation of ancient philosophy and since they are considered the two greatest ancient philosophers. However, positivistic source study has its limitations.

From the point of view of source study, had Pomponazzi never identified some of his positions as Stoic, scholars would never have commented on the Stoic content of his works. The more recent studies of Marcia Colish and Jill Kraye attempt to remedy the neglect of Stoicism in intellectual history. Kraye, in particular, 14 Ronald G.