The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets

3 Lucan and Vergil: Judgment and Poetic Authority in Dis

3 Lucan and Vergil Judgment and Poetic Authority in Dis As suggested by Lucan’s fleeting appearance as the last of the “bella scola” in Limbo and the dismissive naming of him in Inferno 25, Dante’s appropriation of Lucan differs fundamentally from his use of Vergil, but Lucan plays an important role in his imagining of hell. Dante’s representation of infernal punishment draws heavily on Lucan’s virtually inexhaustible supply of images of cruelty and monstrosity, and the prophecies of political misfortune delivered by several of Dante’s sinners clearly recall the Pharsalia.1 But Lucan is present in the Commedia principally as the source of Dante’s Erichtho and Cato, figures whose roles depend very largely on their function in the Pharsalia. For Lucan they serve in their very different ways to emblematize the futility of the poem’s action and the anger and despair which lie behind it, qualities crucial to Dante’s use of them. Often identified as essentially a historian by medieval commentators,2 61 1. See Bon, “Lucano all’Inferno,” 78–96. 2. Moos, “Poeta und historicus.” Quint, “Epic Tradition,” 205–6, refines this view: “Paradoxically, the Pharsalia makes history its subject matter in order to demonstrate the inauthenticity of poetic interpretations of history.” — 62 The Ancient Flame Lucan is for Dante a major poet, but a poet who claims to be so utterly at the mercy of the history he narrates that epic turns involuntarily to satire as he writes, and no redeeming perspective is possible. As with Vergil , Dante will come at last to a tentatively redemptive understanding of Lucan’s undertaking but only after he has exploited to the full the bitter irony that pervades the Pharsalia. Erichtho Lucan’s aggrandizing presentation of Erichtho vividly exemplifies the pessimism which expresses itself most plainly in his vision of the political situation of Rome and in a profound religious skepticism. It is, moreover , part of a sustained attack on Vergil. The Pharsalia aims to use recent Roman history to expose as false the high hopes embodied in the historical prophecies of the Aeneid, by showing that the triumph of Julius Caesar entailed the death of Roman liberty and paved the way for the horrors of imperium enacted during Lucan’s own brief lifetime. This historical vision is framed by a bizarre, stunted version of epic convention in which the traditional gods play no significant role, and are effectively displaced by fortune, fate, and various kinds of magic. All these peculiarly Lucanian features converge in the Erichtho episode, introduced by a survey of Thessalian magic which refers again and again to the impunity with which its practitioners ignore the sacred authority of the gods, usurp or arrest their cosmic functions, and compel them to submit to its power. Erichtho, the most wicked of these witches, is also the most powerful. Though she offers neither prayer nor sacrifice, the gods accede to any wicked design at the first sound of her voice, fearful of what a second incantation might produce (Phars. 6.527–28). What is realized in the art of Erichtho is precisely what religion denies and the highest poetry refuses to countenance, an utterly godless communion with death through control of the physical laws of nature. It is all the truth Lucan allows his hapless Rome. The prophecies Erichtho extorts through her magic are doubly circumscribed, by religious despair and by the grim contemptus mundi of the prophesying shades, whose only desire is never to be made to live again. Inevitably, the resulting vision of Rome’s future is a nightmare, Lucan’s bitter rejoinder to Vergil’s Augustan pageantry. In effect Lucan’s Erichtho episode rewrites Aeneid 6 as “scritta morta,”3 and thereby declares the suitability of Lucan to serve, not as a guide, but as a sort of conditioning agent for Dante’s descent into Dis. Vergil remains present to the Pilgrim as the journey proceeds, but the invocation of Lucan sanctions an indulgence of anger and an emphasis on horror and the grotesque for which Vergil offers no precedent. There is no discrediting of Vergil in this; indeed Dante’s recourse to Lucan is a covert acknowledgment that it is the very high seriousness of the “altissimo poeta” that makes the Aeneid an inappropriate model at this stage, and the Pharsalia an apt one. For if Dante unquestionably admired Lucan, as a poet of great power...