The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

1. Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa

chapter one Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa =< the enigma of petrarch’s africa That Petrarch’s Africa would pose challenging and interesting interpretive problems might seem, on its ‹rst encounter, an unlikely proposition. Its account of Scipio’s victory over Hannibal follows Livy’s narrative closely, and most of the details of Scipio’s prophetic dream upon his landing in Africa come right out of the Somnium Scipionis fragment of Cicero’s De republica (known to Petrarch and his contemporaries through the commentary on it by Macrobius). The Africa’s references to the coming of Christ and the glory of Christian Rome have struck many readers as clumsy, too “forced,” and no less distracting than Petrarch’s trademark, hyperbolic encomiums to poetry and poets (his and himself especially). But most problematic of all is the Africa’s depiction of its hero. Scipio seems merely to embody a catalog of pre-Christian virtues (which Petrarch lays on thickly indeed), and there is no escaping the now-embarrassing circumstance that Petrarch’s celebration of Scipio’s achievements recalls nostalgically Rome’s imperial conquests and subjugation of “barbarian” peoples. For all these reasons, the Africa is not widely read even in translation, and since even avid students of Renaissance epic are not likely to have read it recently, I will take a few paragraphs to summarize its action before explaining how we may recognize it as our foundational Augustinian epic. In book 1, we learn that Scipio has recently driven the Carthaginians out of 20 Spain, but instead of returning directly to Italy to protect Rome from Hannibal ’s approaching army, Scipio has landed in Africa to prepare a siege of Carthage. In a revised version of Scipio Africanus the Younger’s dream from the Somnium Scipionis, Scipio the Elder dreams that he meets the spirits of his father and uncle, both killed in battle, who recite the names of Roman heroes and, in book 2, inspire Scipio with a prophecy of his and Rome’s future glory, although Scipio also learns that his ungrateful countrymen will spurn him in later years. His uncle brings Scipio up to the heavens to view the smallness of the world and pettiness of human affairs, but he nevertheless admonishes Scipio to remember that his destiny in this life is to earn honors for noble service in the current war to save his homeland. He also tells him to ‹nd some small consolation in the knowledge that his fame will endure for many centuries—thanks in part to the labors of a future “second Ennius,” meaning Petrarch—and to enjoy much consolation in the prospect of eternal peace in the next life. In book 3, Scipio sends his friend and captain Laelius to persuade the African king Syphax to break his alliance with Carthage and join forces with Rome. Laelius is received by Syphax, delivers rich gifts, and recites the exploits of Roman heroes and former kings to demonstrate the nobility and manifest destiny of Mother Rome. At the king’s request, he also tells of the rape of Lucretia and the expulsion of the Tarquins, “the cause of [Rome’s] change of state” from kingdom to republic. At the opening of book 4, Syphax agrees to the proposed alliance with Scipio against Hannibal and asks for a full account of the young Roman general. Laelius obliges, telling the story of Scipio’s life up through the recent Spanish campaign and praising him for his many virtues of character . Book 5 then opens abruptly after a substantial lacuna, with Massinissa, Rome’s other African ally, entering the defeated capital of Syphax’s kingdom . As we know from Livy, during the interval that Petrarch has left unnarrated, Syphax had married the daughter of Hasdrubal, the leader of Carthage’s troops in Spain, and reverted back to his old alliance. By the time of Massinissa’s appearance in the poem, Syphax has been routed in battle and is a prisoner. At the opening of book 5, we meet Sophonisba, Syphax’s queen, coming to the doorway of the palace to surrender herself to Massinissa. Overwhelmed by her beauty and by pity for her plight, Massinissa offers to be her protector and new husband, and they are married shortly afterward. Once Scipio hears of this, he confronts Massinissa with his trespass, lectures him on the dangers of unbridled passion, and demands that Sophonisba be relinquished to him for transport to Rome. Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 21 = Massinissa is persuaded to break off the hasty marriage, but he ful‹lls his promise to Sophonisba that she will not become Scipio’s war prize, by arranging to have a cup of poison delivered to her tent. She drinks it, and in book 6, her spirit joins others in Hades who have died for love. Scipio is shocked by Massinissa’s role in Sophonisba’s suicide, but he consoles his heartbroken ally and then rallies him and the Roman troops to prepare for war against Hannibal, who has set sail from Italy to defend Carthage. In book 7, Scipio agrees to meet Hannibal to hear his peace proposals, but Hannibal’s attempts to cajole and dupe the young Roman general into breaking off his siege are ignored. Scipio will accept only total surrender. Since neither side ›inches, the great enemies ready for battle; meanwhile, in the court of heaven, two matrons, young Rome and aged Carthage, plead their cases before Jupiter, whose verdict is that Rome must be victorious. The battle commences near the end of book 7, and the Carthaginians are swiftly defeated. Book 8 describes Hannibal’s ›ight and Carthage’s surrender . In the ‹nal book of the poem, Scipio returns to Rome, accompanied in his ship by Ennius, who tells him of his dream of Homer and his vision of a future poet—Petrarch again—who will immortalize Scipio and his deeds. The poem ends with Scipio’s arrival at Rome and triumph on the steps of the Capitol. At his side is Ennius, “his temples likewise crowned” with laurel , “honored for his great learning and life-giving Poetry.”1 Whether one knows the Africa only on the basis of this plot summary or is well acquainted with the poem, it is probably just as startling to encounter the exuberant declaration of Giuseppe Toffanin, ‹rst published in 1933, that “the Africa remains . . . the poem of Humanism par excellence, the great bridge ›ung to us across the pagan centuries by God.” “The Africa,” says Toffanin, is “the real Divine Comedy,” the true “Christian sequel to the Aeneid.”2 As we might expect, the initial critical reaction to Toffanin’s grandiose assessment of Petrarch’s epic was one of skepticism. Most scholars downplayed or rejected the Africa’s potential to be read as Christian fable or allegory, instead arguing that it only praises the virtues of the perfect pre-Christian man, virtues that now may be hailed as universal because they are consistent with Christianity. In the same year that Toffanin ’s Storia dell’umanesimo appeared in English translation, for example, E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that “the principal importance of Africa . . . is that it marks a complete transfer of the centre importance from the allegory to the heroic poem, from the theme of the soul’s pilgrimage towards its heavenly home to that of the politics of the world” (1954, 190). Published eight years later, Aldo Bernardo’s seminal monograph on Petrarch’s epic faults earlier scholars for having largely “failed to grasp the signi‹cance of the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 22 < the fact that the Africa was, in effect, the ‹rst and perhaps last sincere attempt to write a purely classical epic since Virgil and Statius” (1962, 168). In Scipio, says Bernardo, “we have the portrayal of the humanistic ideal of the supreme man of action acknowledging beauty, art and re‹nement” (47); or as he puts it shortly after, “Petrarch was conceiving of Scipio as the most perfect exemplar of the cardinal virtues offered by antiquity” (54)— “prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice” (63). Despite these statements, Bernardo recognized that Petrarch’s “ultimate goal” was not actually to write a “purely classical epic” but to strike “a compromise between the classical and the Christian conceptions of poetry” (43), with Scipio being “either the instrument of a Christian Providence or the unconscious follower of the three Christian virtues [i.e., faith, hope, and charity]” (63). Indeed, he notes also, Scipio’s “ultimate exploit”—the defeat of Hannibal—“will be instrumental in making Rome both the City of Man and the City of God” (158–59), re›ecting Petrarch’s long obsession with reconciling not just classical and Christian poetics but classical culture with Christian faith. Ultimately, as so many scholars have stressed, this was a reconciliation that Petrarch could never realize. “Scipio summarizes in Latin a humanistic ideal whose counterpart Petrarch had tried all his life to de‹ne in Italian through the image of Laura,” says Bernardo; but this ideal, rather than being a “concept of virtue that complements a concept of glory in a way that makes both acquire” Christian meaning, merely is one that attains “near-Christian hues” (64, my emphasis).3 Other scholars who have likewise emphasized the strain of Petrarch’s effort to reconcile his Christian faith with the study of pagan classics and the celebration of a pagan hero—most notably, Francisco Rico and Enrico Fenzi—have argued that the irresolvable paradox led eventually to Petrarch’s “paralizzante senso d’inutilità” (Fenzi 1975, 85), a “paralysis” that made it impossible for him to complete the Africa. David Groves, for example (in an essay titled “Petrarch’s Inability to Complete the Africa”), maintains that it is possible to examine “the structure of the work” in order to “suggest what some of the dif‹culties” were that “Petrarch was unable to overcome” (1975, 11). He concludes that “there are two reasons combining to paralyze Petrarch in his writing of the epic: the spiritual crisis made manifest in the Secretum; and the inability to harmonize satisfactorily different sources of inspiration [i.e., Christian and pagan] which result in different types of poetry” (18).4 At this juncture, one might observe that in Petrarch’s mind there need not have been any necessary con›ict between the Africa’s classical subject and its ostensible Christian aim. In the Secretum, it is true, Augustine Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 23 = admonishes Petrarch to “abandon Africa,” to leave off chronicling “the deeds of the Romans”—yet Petrarch understood that “the deeds of the Romans” could and ought to inspire men to love heaven, according to Augustine’s own words in The City of God. There we are told that “it was not only for the sake of rendering due reward to the citizens of Rome that her empire and glory were so greatly extended in the sight of men”; rather, “this was done for the advantage of citizens of the eternal City, during their pilgrimage here, so that they might diligently and soberly contemplate such examples, and see how great a love they owe to their supernal fatherland for the sake of life eternal, if an earthly city was so greatly loved by its citizens for the sake of merely human glory.”5 Thus Petrarch could reasonably claim to be performing a service according to this formulation, by contributing , in his histories and Roman epic, to that stock of “examples” of virtuous pagan actions for Christian pilgrims to “soberly contemplate.” But Petrarch does not claim this. The Africa’s justi‹cation resides instead in its Christian allegory, whose ‹rst clue is the poem’s un‹nished state. The Africa’s apparent “abandonment,” in other words, indicates a strategically advertised—rather than any actual—“paralysis” or “crisis” in Petrarch’s soul. As Pier Paulo Vergerio and Hieronimo Squarza‹co both point out in their biographies of the poet that prefaced most early editions of Petrarch’s collected works, there is hardly anything missing that would interfere with the progress of the poem’s narrative, even though whole segments of the Second Punic War are passed over. Echoing Vergerio, Squarza‹co writes: The published edition of the poem proves to be imperfect because the progression of its events does not proceed as the subject has them, for if the whole of the war is considered, we may perceive that much is wanting, such as the journey of Scipio from Spain to meet Syphax [etc.]. . . . and besides this, neither the crossing of the army into Africa, nor the nighttime burning of Syphax’s camp is explained, or how afterwards Syphax and Hasdrubal were beaten in battle; nor how at last the impious king was conquered and captured in his realm by Massinissa and Laelius: but all these things, as Vergerio writes, may be supplied by reason [by which Squarza‹co means the memory of Livy’s history that Petrarch’s readers generally possessed]. “And besides,” Squarza‹co concludes, “these other things which reveal the work not to have been completed, the half-lines and imperfect meter, they the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 24 < are as frequent in our Maro.”6 By this point, Squarza‹co implies—wittingly or not—that incompleteness is one feature of Vergilian imitation. As for the most glaring lacunae, such as that between books 4 and 5 (which skips over all the events listed by Squarza‹co as “wanting”), I would direct us back to Francisco Rico’s casual suggestion that we should understand by these “imperfections” that Petrarch “did just what Augustine admonishes Francis to do” in the Secretum;7 that is, Petrarch eventually abandoned the poem rather than further risk endangering his soul—and the evidence of this decision is there for all to see. So, characteristically, Petrarch means to have his cake and eat it too: the poem is un‹nished, but it is not too un‹nished. Yet the implications of Rico’s insight, which he leaves unpursued in his own study, are still to be articulated. If, in part, the Africa is supposed to be taken as Petrarch’s belated acceptance of Augustine ’s counsel, a confession of his sin and testimony of his penitence, then it is worth asking in what other ways, besides its un‹nished state, the poem re›ects Petrarch’s effort to compose an Augustinian epic. The lacuna between books 4 and 5, I will argue, as much as it is a gap that leaves out Livy’s history, is also one that allows Petrarch’s readers to glimpse that Christian meaning behind the poem’s classical narrative. At the end of book 4, Laelius is describing to King Syphax the aftermath of Scipio’s successful siege of the Spanish city of Cartagena, established by Hasdrubal and named by him after “great Carthage” (4.260–62; 353–55). Laelius praises his general for having taken special care to assure the women of the city that they would be safe from sexual assault by his soldiers. Scipio had ordered the women to be set apart from the other prisoners, indoors and out of sight, “because seducing eyes insult modesty and the bloom of a chaste face is plucked by gazes” (quod lumina blanda pudori / Insultant, castique oculis ›os carpitur oris [4.382–83; 514–16]). Then, in the very last lines of the book, Laelius marvels speci‹cally at Scipio’s self-discipline when confronted by the temptation of female beauty. Proh, superi, mortali in pectore quanta Maiestas! spectate senem iuvenilibus annis. Nam simul etatis stimulos formeque virentis Blanditias perferre grave est. (4.385–88) [Ah, what majesty, gods, in this mortal breast! Behold maturity at a young age! For to endure both the incitements of youth and the allure of blooming beauty is very hard. (519–22)] Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 25 = Abruptly, book 4 ends and book 5 opens with another hero “at a young age,” Scipio’s African ally Massinissa, entering the defeated city of Cirta. He immediately encounters there Syphax’s beautiful queen, Sophonisba. Petrarch emphasizes her beauty in this passage and the sexual attraction that beholding her excites. Ille nec ethereis unquam superandus ab astris Nec Phebea foret veritus certamina vultus Iudice sub iusto. Stabat candore nivali Frons alto miranda Iovi, multumque sorori Zelotipe metuenda magis quam pellicis ulla Forma viro dilecta vago. (5.20–25) [Her face, unsurpassed by the stars of heaven, would not fear Phoebus in a contest under the eyes of a just judge. Her brow, white as snow, stood a wonder to high Jove, and to his jealous sister a source of much greater fear than any mistress’s beauty prized by her errant husband. (27–34)] In contrast to Scipio, whose restraint was just extolled, Massinissa will take one look at Sophonisba and feel “a burning wound spread through all his marrow” (Vulnus inardescens totis errare medullis / Ceperat [5.70–71; 93–94]), so that rather than serving as the protector of his female prisoner from his soldiers’ lustful eyes, Massinissa himself is in›amed with desire. This side-by-side contrast between the two leaders’ behaviors is surely Petrarch’s design, hardly the coincidental result of “wanting” material. That is, judging only in terms of the sequence of events, we mark a major lacuna between books 4 and 5, one so vast that we cannot help but recognize that Petrarch has “abandoned” the completion of his epic, as he admits in the Secretum that he ought to do; but in terms of what he was unwilling to abandon in the Secretum, his study and imitation of classical literature toward a Christian end, there is no lacuna. We are looking at a two-part but single segment of the Africa, comprised of the last episode of book 4 and the ‹rst episode of book 5, whose function is to alert us to the theme of sexual temptation and renunciation that will be developed in the coming books and that is central to the poem’s Christian meaning. This theme is obvious in the subplot of Massinissa’s liaison with Sophonisba, as all the Africa’s critics have noted. Yet most of them seriously misrepresent the episode by condemning Sophonisba as an evil temptress. She has been compared to Circe (Bernardo 1962, 151), interpreted allegorithe augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 26 < cally as “the embodiment of lust” (Seung 1976, 145), and called “an earthly demon” who, like “her model Dido,” is one of the “evil forces in the world” (Wilhelm 1976, 588–89). Craig Kallendorf similarly comments that she is “an unmistakable Dido ‹gure,” and he asserts that she is “pure evil, the incarnation of an all-consuming passion” (1989, 40, 47). Even Donald Gilman, who states his intent to read her character sympathetically “within the contexts of patriarchal prerogatives and the limitations of liberty,” declares that Sophonisba “embodies attributes of the stereotypical seductress ” (1997, 111–12). The ›aw in such pronouncements is that nowhere in the Africa are we told or encouraged to suspect that Sophonisba is lustful or that she even considers trying to seduce Massinissa. Petrarch embellishes on Livy’s description of her stunning beauty, but he follows his source faithfully in reporting only that she meets Massinissa upon his arrival in the defeated city, kneels before him, and, clasping his knees and right hand, begs to be killed rather than turned over as a prisoner to the Romans.8 In Livy, a single comment after this scene suggests it might be Sophonisba’s intention to seduce Massinissa: at the conclusion of her tearful prayer, he says that “her speech was now more like blandishment than entreaty” (propriusque blanditas iam oratio esset quam preces [30.12.17]).9 But Petrarch does not include that comment. He gives no indication that her pleas are insincere or designed to ensnare her captor’s heart, and more important, both authors stress that it requires no machinations on her part for Massinissa to become in›amed with desire and resolve to make Sophonisba his queen. Before even consulting her on his plan, he announces on the same day he sees her that he will marry her (Livy 30.12.20; Africa 5.114–15). Later, as in Livy, we will see Syphax, as a prisoner, attempting to explain away his breach of faith with Scipio by claiming he was under the spell of Sophonisba ’s love, but clearly it is Petrarch’s intention not to mitigate Massinissa’s culpa by suggesting that the young gallant has come under the powers of a “seductress,” let alone an “embodiment of lust” or “evil demon.” Just as Augustine, in the Secretum, reminds Petrarch that Laura is not to blame for Petrarch’s idolatrous love for her,10 the fault and the epic drama reside entirely in the male soul. The manner of Sophonisba’s association with Dido works to illustrate the same point, for only after Massinissa has fallen for her and declared that she will become his wife is Sophonisba explicitly associated with Vergil’s Carthaginian queen. In her ‹rst plea to Massinissa, she is compared by Petrarch to the goddess Venus, but to the “tremulous” (corusca) Venus who begs Jupiter to save Aeneas from shipwreck in the storm of Aeneid 1, Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 27 = not to Venus as symbol of cupidity (5.59–62; 79–82). After Sophonisba has been married to Massinissa, her conscience is troubled despite his assurances that Syphax’s defeat and capture in war free her from her ‹rst marriage bond, which is similar to the guilt that Dido feels for breaking her vow never to remarry after the murder of her husband, Sychaeus. In a dream, Sophonisba “clearly saw herself torn away from her second husband, and heard the threats and rebukes of the ‹rst” (Visa est sibi nempe, secundo / Rapta viro, sentire minas et iurgia primi [5.262–63; 346–48]). Later, when she is about to take her life by drinking the poison Massinissa has sent her, she curses Scipio, Rome, and Massinissa in a speech that echoes Dido’s curse against Aeneas and the Trojans (5.748–66; 977–1004). She laments, too, that she departs to Styx “before my day” (adeo, licet ante diem [5.737; 963]), and when her spirit appears in Hades, Rhadamanthus rules that she has not merited this suffering (immerite neque hec iniuria [6.22; 37–38]), in lines that echo what Vergil says of Dido’s suicide in the Aeneid—that “she did not die a merited death, but a wretched one before her day” (merita nec morte peribat, / sed misera ante diem [4.696–97]). It is Massinissa, then, not Petrarch, who makes a dangerous Dido ‹gure out of Sophonisba. For Petrarch, she is a Dido ‹gure only in respect to her feelings of guilt, her required sacri‹ce for the preservation of Rome’s national destiny, and her resentment of this role. In most other respects, Massinissa himself is the Dido of the Africa. Like the restless queen who wandered her palace at night, who was “tormented by heavy care, and fed her wound with her blood, and was wasted by hidden ‹re” (regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura / volnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni [Aeneid 4.1–2]), Massinissa is the one, we have seen, who suffered “a burning wound through all his marrow” (Africa 5.70–71; 93–94). He, not Sophonisba , “turns in his bed: because all night love rages in his breast and cruel cares tear his heart, he burns with desire,” and “grief, fear, anger and madness bar him from sleeping” (Volvitur inde thoro: quoniam sub pectore pernox / Sevit amor lacerantque truces precordia cure, / Uritur; invigilant meror, metus, ira furorque [5.527–29; 693–96]). Furthermore, Petrarch’s determination to remove the ‹gure of Dido as an exemplum of female lust helps to explain his rejection of Vergil’s fanciful version of Dido’s fate,11 as we hear in the song of a prophetic bard at Syphax’s court. Post regina Tyro fugiens his ‹nibus ampla Menia construxit magnam Carthaginis urbem. the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 28 < Ex re nomen ei est. Mox aspernata propinqui Coniugium regis, cum publica vota suorum Urgerent, veteris non immemor illa mariti, Morte pudicitiam redimit. Sic urbis origo Oppetiit regina ferox. Iniuria quanta Huic ‹at, si forte aliquis—quod credere non est— Ingenio con‹sus erit, qui carmine sacrum Nomen ad illicitos ludens traducat amores! (3.418–27) [Later a queen, ›eeing to these parts from Tyre, built within vast walls the great city of Carthage. On this account it has its name.12 Soon after, having spurned marriage with a neighboring king, never forgetful of her former husband though her subjects’ prayers were urging her to wed, she redeemed her virtue in death. Thus the ‹erce queen, founder of the city, perished. How great an injury to her will be done—it is not possible to believe—if perchance there will be someone who, having trusted in his talent, would mockingly in verse drag her sacred name into a forbidden love affair! (524–37)] This is the noble Dido extolled in an alternative tradition, the Dido whom Petrarch knew from Justin (the second- or third-century historian) and from Tertullian and Jerome, a model of chastity rather than of uncontrolled passions.13 Petrarch chooses to disperse the “injurious” traits of the falsely represented Dido among other characters in the Africa—and not only Sophonisba and Massinissa. For example, he transfers Vergil’s description of Dido’s suicide to Laelius’s story of Lucretia’s tragic end and, in the process, reminds us again of Dido’s properly “sacred name.” In the Aeneid, Dido falls on Aeneas’s sword, with “the blade foaming and her hands spattered with blood” (ensemque cruore / spumantem sparsaque manus [4.663–65]). In the Africa, Lucretia kills herself in the same way, and her husband, Brutus, kneels beside her, “drawing the bloody steel from the foaming wound and raising it, vehement, in his hand” (cruentum / Fervidus educens spumanti vulnere ferrum / Attollensque manu” [3.740–42; 942–44]). So Syphax, hearing this story, remarks: Sentio . . . quid femina vestra pudica Morte velit: ne cunta sibi iam candida Dido Arroget. (4.4–6) Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 29 = [I understand . . . what your chaste lady desired in death: that the already fair Dido not claim it all to herself. (5–8)] With the drama of a woman’s soul tormented by love thus transferred, in the Africa, to the soul of a man, Massinissa, it is up to the hero, who is steadfast in his virtue, to counsel the sufferer. In an elaboration on Scipio’s boast to Massinissa in Livy (30.14.6), Scipio in the Africa declares that his chastity is his greatest honor. Certe ego, si proprio michi non sordescit in ore Gloria, non alia tantum virtute superbum Me fateor, quam quod blande michi ‹rma tenere Frena voluptatis videor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Precipue tamen hec nitide suspecta iuvente Pestis, et etati pretendit retia nostre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [D]amnosa voluptas Nocte dieque furit; numquam tu menibus illam Arcebis: mediis veniet penetralibus inter Excubias vigilesque canes, ferrata potentum Limina transiliet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gloria magna quidem magnum vicisse Siphacem; Sed maior, michi crede, graves domuisse tumultus Pectoris atque animo frenum posuisse frementi. (5.395–420) [If my glory does not turn foul coming from my own mouth, certainly in no other virtue do I acknowledge more pride, than that I am seen to hold pleasure’s lure ‹rmly in check. . . . In youth especially this evil is a danger, and spreads nets at our age. . . . Ruinous pleasure rages day and night; never will you keep her from the walls. She will come within the inner chambers past guards and vigilant dogs, and pass through the iron gates of the powerful. . . . Indeed, to have conquered great Syphax is a great glory; but believe me, greater still to have tamed the mighty disturbances of the heart and to have reined in a raging spirit. (519–50)] the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 30 < As Aldo Bernardo recognizes, “in many ways, the relationship between Scipio and Massinissa during the latter’s affair with the African queen is highly reminiscent of the relationship depicted by Petrarch in the Secretum between himself and St. Augustine” (1962, 150). Unlike Scipio, however, Augustine counsels Petrarch in the Secretum from the position of one who has indulged his lusts before he was able to overcome them. When he observes of his charge, “your condition has been that of many others” (contigisse tibi hactenus quod multis [49]), we are expected to keep in mind that Augustine was once among their number and is now able, in consequence , to penetrate more deeply into Petrarch’s sufferings than Scipio attempts with Massinissa. In the very same sentence, in fact, Augustine accuses Petrarch of false penitence for bewailing his imprisonment by Laura. “[Your condition],” Augustine continues, “can be expressed in that verse of Vergil’s: ‘The mind remains unmoved; the tears ›ow in vain’” (quibus dici potest versus ille Vergilii: mens immota manet, lacrime volvuntur inanes [49]). This familiar line from the Aeneid (4.449) occurs after Dido tearfully and angrily pleads with Aeneas not to abandon her. According to its usual reading, his mind “remains unmoved” by her distress because he is now ‹rm in his purpose to leave Carthage.14 But in Augustine’s statement in the Secretum, both halves of the verse apply to Petrarch, and both are negative: his mind remains unmoved by the tears that he himself weeps, because they are not sincerely tears of contrition. A praiseworthy application of this allusion would have been such as that which Petrarch knew from The City of God, where Augustine writes: The mind [that clings to virtue] permits no disturbances to prevail in it contrary to reason, even though these assail the baser parts of the soul; instead the mind itself is master of all such disturbances and, by withholding its consent from them and resisting them, exercises a reign of virtue. Such a mind was that of Aeneas, whom Vergil describes when he says, “the mind remains unmoved; the tears ›ow in vain.”15 One way to characterize Petrarch’s progress in the Secretum is as a shift in the application of Vergil’s verse. Petrarch is freed from the chains of lust (as spiritual pilgrim, he reaches his destination) when he is able to alter his erring mind with honest tears of contrition, moving it to a state of steadfast resolution in virtue, from which it will remain unmoved by lust or any Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 31 = other disturbance of the soul that can be represented allegorically in the ‹gure of Dido and her tears. That is exactly the transformation required of Massinissa in the Africa, and thus I have formulated at this point two initial answers to the question, how can the Africa be called an Augustinian epic? The ‹rst and most obvious answer is that it conveys, once more, Augustine’s message in his own writings, especially in the Confessions, and his counsel to Petrarch in the Secretum—that one must abandon ignoble love and dedicate oneself to what really matters, which in Scipio’s pre-Christian time would mean the cardinal virtues and such noble worldly goals as protecting and building Roman imperium. The second and not much more interesting answer is that Petrarch’s insistence in the Africa that Vergil’s Dido never existed and his alteration of the Aeneas-Dido story into one in which all of love’s ‹re is located in the male sufferer rather than in the female object of desire (and it is a passion that is overcome by Massinissa rather than fatal to him) supply an epic of male pilgrimage toward virtue rather than the distracting tragic love story that the Dido episode represented for Augustine during the stage of his adolescent straying from God. Says Augustine in the Confessions: Unmindful of my own wandering, I was made to learn the wanderings of Aeneas and to weep over the death of Dido because she killed herself for love, while all during those times I was a wretch with dry eyes, dying apart from you oh God, my Life. What indeed could be more pitiful than such a wretch, unpitying of his own misery and shedding tears for Dido’s death, which was caused by her loving Aeneas, yet weeping no tears for his own death, which is caused by not loving you, oh God, who are the light of my heart, bread of my inmost soul, and the goodness conjoining my mind and heart’s thoughts? But I did not love you . . . and I did not weep over this, but wept for Dido who met her death at the end by the sword.16 These two answers to the question might be minimally adequate, but they are unsatisfying because, to be “Augustinian,” Petrarch’s epic should refer more speci‹cally to Christian salvation, not just the overcoming of destructive passions. So far, we have only seen that the Africa’s rejection of lust redelivers a moral lesson already available in Livy’s history. We might reasonably expect more from the poet of the Canzoniere, and besides, Petrarch indicates to us at least twice that a deeper meaning, a “truth,” resides behind a “veil” in the Africa. On the journey back to Rome after the decisive defeat of Hannibal, ‹rst of all, Ennius instructs Scipio, the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 32 < licuisse poetis Crede: sub ignoto tamen ut celentur amictu, Nuda alibi, et tenui frustrentur lumina velo, Interdumque palam veniant, fugiantque vicissim. (9.97–102) [Believe this to have been allowed to poets: that their illuminations, elsewhere exposed, are concealed under a cloak, though it be unknown, and they deceive the eye behind a light veil, one moment coming into the open, the next taking ›ight. (131–39)] If this is so and the Africa only serves to celebrate Scipio’s virtues of character , then what cloak veils them? In particular, how concealed is Scipio’s direct admonishment to Massinissa that it is a great glory to maintain one’s chastity—“to have tamed the mighty disturbances of the heart and to have reined in a raging spirit”? No, Scipio’s merits and such strictures are all plainly in sight. As in the Secretum, Petrarch’s moral on avoiding ignoble love is explicit and ‹nal. Ennius invites us to seek something else, something that is “concealed” in the poem. Lady Truth, in the Secretum, does the same. Referring to the Africa when she ‹rst appears to Petrarch in his dream, she says to him: “That I have been well known to you for a long time is witnessed by [the Africa’s] subtle circumlocution.”17 I translate the last phrase (arguta circumlocutione) very literally: Draper renders it “‹nelywrought allegory” (Petrarch 1911, 2), while Carozza and Shey have Lady Truth praise the “intricate allusions in [Petrarch’s] poem” (Petrarch 1989, 37). She is telling us, we would all agree, that there is some hidden meaning in the Africa—a truth subtly or cleverly veiled by the poem’s roundaboutness . But where do we ‹nd subtle circumlocutions, and to what truths do they bear witness? The few suggestions put forth thus far, such as Toffanin’s that the Africa is “the real Divine Comedy,” are left similarly vague by their proponents or for other reasons have not won acceptance, let alone inspired elaboration, in subsequent scholarship on Petrarch’s epic.18 Its Punic allegory remains to be detailed, so to this task I now turn. the allegory of the africa In a letter to the young poet Frederigo Aretino in Petrarch’s Epistolarum de rebus senilibus (cited here as Seniles 4.5),19 Vergil’s Aeneid is subjected to an allegorical interpretation that is generally described as thoroughly traditional , in that it seems to depart little from earlier explications of the Aeneid Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 33 = that have come down to us from medieval times. This letter tends to be treated as just another example of the “ages” or “stages of man” interpretation of the Aeneid, with Aeneas representing the vir bonus, without any consideration given to the potential value of Petrarch’s local interpretations to our understanding of his purposes in his own epic.20 But in fact, in one startling respect, Petrarch departs signi‹cantly from other commentators on Vergil, and the next chapter will suggest that this difference may have had more of an in›uence on Renaissance epic poetry than scholarship has yet allowed for Vergil commentaries generally. Here, however, I have the more restricted aim of identifying the clues in Seniles 4.5, together with those in the Secretum, that indicate the allegory of the Africa. Just as Ennius claims of poetry in general and as Lady Truth attests of the Africa, Petrarch opens his letter to Aretino by asserting that there are hidden meanings in the Aeneid that are “as gems wrapped in linen.”21 He then promises his correspondent that he will reveal these gems, “once having removed the veil of allegories that is covering the truth,” for as it is commonly known, explains Petrarch, Vergil “intended something loftier than what he says in that divine work.”22 When Petrarch commences his explication of the poem with a statement of Vergil’s overall design, he indeed only repeats conventional wisdom (even as he takes personal credit for it) in saying that Vergil’s “goal and subject, in my judgment, is the perfect man” and that “this perfection consists either solely or principally in virtue.”23 But in turning to the interpretation of speci‹c details in the Aeneid, Petrarch emphasizes one theme far more than do other commentators whom we know. Traditionally, the story of Aeneas’s affair with Dido represents the stage of adolescent abandon, of youthful lust that is brie›y indulged before being controlled, but Petrarch extends that allegory of man’s battle against lust from the ‹rst to the very last event in the poem. An overview of this unique characteristic of Petrarch’s interpretation is in order, for it is too little known or discussed.24 On the subject of the violent storm that tosses Aeneas’s ›eet in the opening scene of the Aeneid, Petrarch says, “the winds have seemed to me to be nothing other than the soul’s attacks of anger and disturbances of lust residing in the breast and within the heart,” while “Aeolus,” the god who keeps the winds from exerting their fullest force, “is reason itself controlling and restraining the wrathful and concupiscent appetite of the soul.”25 Aeneas and other survivors of the storm then ‹nd themselves washed up on an unknown shore, and as he explores the terrain, his mother appears to him in disguise: “Venus, visible in the middle of a wood, is lust,” explains Petrarch, “and she takes on the the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 34 < habit of a maiden in order to deceive the unknowing.” He continues: “For if anyone were to perceive her as she is, no doubt terri‹ed by that one glimpse he would run away, for as nothing is more attractive than lust, so too nothing is more foul. . . . Further, she wears the habit of a huntress, because she hunts the souls of the wretched.”26 He tells us, too, that Venus befriends the Trojans because they have been devoted to “the life of lust and pleasure, which is allotted to Venus,”27 and that she “is called the mother of Aeneas because even strong men are begotten by lust and because he had such singular grace that, though he was a needy exile, he is described as one who was pleasing even to chaste eyes”28—a reference to Dido, to whose kingdom the goddess directs him.29 At the end of book 2, Aeneas loses track of his wife, Creüsa—“that is, the one joined to his mind in the habit of pleasure from an early age”30— during the panicked ›ight from burning Troy. This interpretation means that Aeneas’s arrival in Carthage represents a backsliding into ›eshly pleasures , rather than a new fall. In Carthage, “he begins to be loved disgracefully ” by Dido, and “for a while he too is overcome because it is dif‹cult, even for perfect men, not to be moved by the sight of excellent things, especially when they perceive themselves to be loved and desired.”31 Once Jupiter determines that Aeneas has too long delayed his destined journey to Italy, he instructs Mercury to visit Aeneas with a message to set sail immediately . Yet before describing Mercury’s visit, Petrarch makes a comment that might as well refer to the experience he claims for himself in the Secretum , after Augustine has demonstrated the error of his sinful love for Laura. “That man is indeed blessed,” he remarks to Aretino, “who though he has consented and succumbed to sin, or—what is more grievous—is caught in the lime of evil habit and bound with chains and stooped under the burden, yet at long last, through the silent inspiration of God or the warning of someone who relates what is pleasing to God, rises up, and having neglected what had restrained him, pleasure, returns to the straight path of virtue and glory.”32 Aeneas is thus rebuked by Mercury, and though Aeneas is “given over to suffering, ‘and with his heart shaken by great love,’” writes Petrarch, “nevertheless he obeys the command from heaven.”33 Aeneas leaves Carthage, and Dido “in the end kills herself, because,” Petrarch declares, “truly, as the Apostle [Paul] teaches, when the soul, forgetting past ways, converts back to honest things, foul lust destroys itself.”34 For other allegorizers of the Aeneid, the conclusion of book 4 marks the end of the good man’s bout with youthful passions: he moves on to the last Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 35 = stages in his progress toward perfection (which they have him attaining by the end of book 6). But for Petrarch, this struggle continues in Aeneas’s breast right up to his ‹nal battle against Turnus. King Latinus, whose daughter, Lavinia, is fated to marry Aeneas, “is the mind,” Petrarch explains, while “her mother is the ›esh betrothed to the mind.” Because the mother is “weaker, and incapable of reason, she troubles to wed her daughter with one born at home and of the same race (that is, to carnal desires and earthly endeavors).”35 So Turnus as well symbolizes the sin of lust (and “earthly endeavors,” the signi‹cance of which phrase is treated in the next chapter), and the details of Aeneas’s duel with Turnus are interpreted accordingly.36 When Turnus ‹nds that he must abandon his chariot, “falling with a headlong leap, he goes on foot into battle: since even after the urgings of the ›esh have been conquered and extinguished, the internal ›ame still does not subside.”37 When the two warriors meet, Turnus succeeds in wounding Aeneas ‹rst: “Aeneas is struck by an arrow, and totters on his knee (because to be sure a man, however well he is armed with virtue, sometimes is wounded by temptations, just as if he limps toward his goal).”38 Aeneas throws a spear, but it lodges in a bitter olive tree, for “so long as the spear-point of the mind is directed against carnal desire, I know not what it will ‹nd of love.”39 It is Venus who removes the spear for Aeneas, but now she is said to represent “delight in the accomplishment and in good and honest pleasure,”40 not concupiscence. Finally the battle is decided: “The foreigner Aeneas—that is, virtue, or the brave man, conqueror of the ›esh—picks up in his hand the spear that is now easy and compliant and hurling it more fruitfully and surely at the native, carnal rival, strikes passion to the ground.”41 As Petrarch thus interprets it, then, there is one moral that consistently lies behind the veil of the Aeneid, a moral that “accords with that most famous doctrine of Plato, which Augustine and many others reverently embrace”—that “nothing more impedes the human mind from the consideration of divinity than Venus and a life devoted to lusts” (151).42 Thus Dido and Turnus both demonstrate, in this view of Vergil’s allegory, that “with lust dominating, there is no place for temperance, nor in a realm completely given over to pleasure is virtue able to exist, and so in the end it extinguishes all the light of the mind.”43 We must pause to take in the signi‹cance of this letter. If for Petrarch, reading the Aeneid means reading it allegorically (according to Vergil’s presumed intentions), then ‹rst of all, to assert that Petrarch intended to write “a purely classical epic” would mean, for him, to write an epic that contains “something loftier” than merely “what he says”: an epic that can be read allegorically.44 But in the second place, Petrarch’s partly conventional but the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 36 < partly idiosyncratic interpretation of the Aeneid should alert us to the possibility that the Africa shares with Petrarch’s Aeneid the defeat of lust as a major theme, not just in the obvious places—the stories of Massinissa and Sophonisba, of Aeneas and Dido—but elsewhere throughout, on an allegorical level. It is for this reason that, when Craig Kallendorf considers the relevance of Seniles 4.5 to the Africa (Turnus, he notes, represents “the spiritual blows of temptation, but [Aeneas] overcomes the lures of evil pleasure and drives to the ground his opponent, carnal passion” [1989, 50]) and when he then observes that “Scipio is to Hannibal as Aeneas is to Turnus,” it seems to me he stops short of the implications of his own insight by concluding merely that Scipio’s victory over Hannibal represents “the victory of praiseworthy virtue over damnable vice” (53). Petrarch invites us to be more precise than this. Scipio is to Hannibal as Aeneas is to Turnus because Scipio represents the virtuous man and Hannibal—defender of Dido’s Carthage and ful‹llment of her curse—represents carnal passion. That allegory of the Africa’s action is implied by Petrarch’s explication of the Aeneid, but it is likewise suggested by the ‹gure of Augustine, who sharpens the de‹nitions of its terms. As we have already seen, Augustine, too, associates Carthage with carnal sin in the story of his life journey: there, he reports in the Confessions, “a frying pan of shameful loves roared round [him] on every side,” infecting his soul with “the ‹lth of concupiscence ,” “the hellishness of lust” (3.11). But additionally, in the Secretum Petrarch has his admonisher, Augustine, make an explicit link between Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and Petrarch’s battle against lust. In reply to Petrarch’s justi‹cation of his love for Laura (fully quoted in my introduction ) that “her mind knows nothing of earthly concerns and burns only with a desire for heavenly ones,” Augustine scolds: Ah, madman! Is this not how you have fed the ›ames of your soul with false ›atteries for sixteen years? Truly Italy’s most famous enemy was not longer threatened, nor did she more frequently suffer the assaults of arms nor blaze with more raging ‹res, than have you in these times endured the ›ames and assaults of a most violent passion. At last one was found who forced that man to retreat; but who will ever drive your Hannibal from your neck, if you forbid him to go and, now a willing slave, invite him to remain with you?45 What Petrarch most desperately needs to save himself, says Augustine, is a Scipio to defend him from Hannibal—that is, the exercise of the virtue given him by God’s grace to drive out the lust that invades his soul. I proPetrarch ’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 37 = pose that this passage in the Secretum invites us to discern in the Africa an allegory that works not only as a general morality tale and admonition to defeat one’s carnal passions, as Petrarch reads the Aeneid, but also as an autobiographical allegory. “Petrarch,” says Aldo Scaglione, “is the last Augustinian Christian autobiographer” (1984, 33). If that is so, then I suggest that the Africa so distinguishes him no less than does the Secretum. The Africa is the con‹rmation and celebration of Petrarch having once and for all driven Hannibal from his neck.46 A series of comparisons between passages in the Africa and the Aeneid illustrate this symbolic function of Hannibal and the city of Carthage. I start with one of Petrarch’s references to Carthage that, given the praises heaped on Dido’s character elsewhere in the poem, seems contradictory and baf›ing. During Scipio’s dream in book 1 of the Africa, his father, Publius Cornelius, points out Carthage to him not by name but with reference to its founding. Viden illa sub Austro Menia et infami periura palatia monte Femineis fundata dolis? (1.179–81) [Do you see the walls to the south, and the per‹dious palace built by a woman’s guile upon the mount of infamy? (244–46)] As legend had it, and as Vergil reports, having ›ed from her brother Pygmalion , the murderer of her husband, Dido came to the realm of King Iarbas , who offered her as much land as could be enclosed by an oxhide, which she then cut into strips and used to mark the boundaries of Carthage. It seems obvious that Scipio’s father is alluding, in the preceding lines, to this tale of “a woman’s guile.”47 But this is strange indeed. Dido’s “guile” in the story is ordinarily treated as evidence of her resourcefulness in desperate circumstances, not anything that would be associated with Carthage as a “per‹dious palace” on a “mount of infamy.” And why would Petrarch damn Dido so after having praised her as a paragon of chastity in book 3 (as discussed in the ‹rst section of this chapter), as one whose “sacred name” should never have been tainted by Vergil? The key is in the word dolis (with guile or deceit). In Vergil, this word is used several times in reference to the guile directed against Dido—‹rst her “poisoning” by Cupid in the form of young Ascanius, which causes her, as the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 38 < Petrarch says, to begin to love Aeneas “disgracefully” (Secretum 83), and later the scheme to bring her to a cave to be joined with Aeneas, in a union that it will be her culpa to call marriage (coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam [Aeneid 4.172]). Says Venus to Cupid in the ‹rst instance, “I mean to catch the queen by guile and encircle her with ›ames” (quocirca capere ante dolis et cingere ›amma / reginam meditor [1.673–74]), and she instructs her son that she will lull Ascanius to sleep “so that in no way may he know this guile or come between it” (ne qua scire dolos mediusve occurrere possit [1.682]). With the success of their plot, Juno confronts Venus and says sarcastically, “Such great and remarkable divinity, if one woman is conquered by the guile of two gods!” (magnum et memorabile numen, / una dolo divum si femina victa duorum est [4.94–95]). Finally, Juno proposes the scheme that supplies the inevitable outcome of Dido’s infection by Venus’s poison, and Venus smiles at its articulation. “speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem devenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa voluntas, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo; hic hymenaeus erit.” non adversata petenti adnuit atque dolis risit Cytherea repertis. (4.124–28) [“Dido and the Trojan prince shall come to the same cave. I will go there and, if certain of your good will to me, I shall join them in ‹rm wedlock and declare it perpetual; this shall be their nuptial.” Not averse to this entreaty, the Cytherean nodded her assent and smiled at the guile discovered.] If the guile of any woman has made Carthage the site of per‹dy and infamy, it is the guile of Vergil’s Venus, the goddess “who is lust,” says Petrarch, the Cytherean who “revolves in her breast new wiles, new schemes” (Cytherea novas artis, nova pectore versat / consilia [1.657–58]), converting Dido from chastity to disgraceful love and ultimately provoking Dido’s curse against Aeneas, which calls Hannibal into the world.48 And he, we discover in the Africa, is to be feared for possessing the same guile. Scipio is warned by his father to be wary of Hannibal, in words Vergil uses to describe Venus: “He will attempt to circumvent your intentions by various devices and new tricks” (Ille quidem varia tentabit ›ectere mentem / Arte dolisque novis [2.47–48; 61–62]). Also, Vergil’s comment at the moment Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 39 = that Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, is playing in Dido’s lap—that she is “ignorant how great a god takes possession of her, to her sorrow” (inscia Dido, / insidat quantus miserae deus [Aeneid 1.718–19])—is slightly echoed in Scipio’s father’s warning “Beware the insidious schemes of this man” (Tu furta caveto / Insidiasque viri” [Africa 2.39–40; 52–53]). After their meeting in the cave, Aeneas settles with Dido in Carthage, and “immediately” (extemplo) malicious Rumor races through the land, spreading “facts and lies together” (pariter facta atque infecta [Aeneid 4.190]), a report that Aeneas and Dido are “neglectful of their kingdoms, and in thrall to shameful lust” (regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos [4.194]). When rumors spread in the Africa, it is of Hannibal’s invasion and burning of Italy. Turbida quin etiam rumoribus omnia miscens Fama procul nostro veniens crescebat ab orbe Arcibus instantem Ausoniis volitare sub armis Hanibalem, patrieque faces sub menia ferri; Illustres cecidisse duces, ardere nefandis Ignibus Hesperiam, atque undantia cedibus arva. (1.139–44) [Murky reports arose, arriving from afar with rumors confounded, that the invading Hannibal was speeding toward the citadels of Ausonia, bringing torches to the very walls of the fatherland; great generals had fallen, Italy was burning with nefarious ‹res, and the countryside was welling in blood. (190–97)] In the Aeneid, Rumor “in›ames the soul” (incendit . . . animum [4.197]) of nearby King Iarbas with jealousy, but in contrast to this and in contrast to Dido’s soul, which has been so “in›amed by love” that she has “lost her shame” (animum in›ammavit amore . . . solvitque pudorem [4.54–55]), a “noble ›ame was burning in [Scipio’s] eager heart” (Fulgentes calido generosas corde favillas [Africa 1.151; 206]). Speci‹cally, “revenge spurred and ‹lial piety moved” Scipio “to pursue the work he had begun,” which was “to cleanse the shame from Italy’s face” (Urgebat vindicta patris pietasque movebat / Ut ceptem sequeretur opus. . . . Itala detergi fronte pudorem [1.145–48; 198–202]). In reporting this eagerness to Syphax, Laelius declares that Scipio “already in his mind shakes the walls of lofty Carthage” (Carthaginis alte / Menia iam quatit ille animo [4.150–51; 200–202]), echoing Vergil’s phrase the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 40 < “the walls of lofty Rome” (altae moenia Romae [Aeneid 1.7]). The fact that the assault on Carthage is “already in his mind”—or, just as accurately, “in his soul” (animo)—is key to this spiritual allegory. Scipio’s victory over Hannibal is destined in part because his personal commitment to chastity is unshakable—as Massinissa admires when he says to himself, “I could have lived a king without a wife, and this would have been preferable, just as our Scipio has lived a celibate” (Licuit sine coniuge regem / Vivere, et id satius fuerat, quia celibe vita / Scipio noster erat [Africa 5.579–81; 760–63]). But also, Scipio’s siege of Carthage represents a reversal of the situation in the Aeneid and the Confessions, where Carthage is the site of the soul’s capture by lust’s encompassing ‹re.49 Whereas Vergil, as we have seen, describes Venus’s plan to “encircle the queen with ›ames” (cingere ›amma / reginam [Aeneid 1.673–74]), and whereas Augustine tells us, “I came to Carthage, and a frying pan of shameful loves roared round me on every side” (Veni Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago ›agitiosorum amorum [Confessions 3.1.1]), Scipio asserts, “It is my design to encircle the city and walls of cruel Carthage” (Michi menia circum / Cingere propositum et seve Carthaginis urbem [Africa 6.117–18; 152–53]). He will contain and extinguish the ›ames that endanger the soul. In a similar sense, we see that Scipio “‹ghts ‹re with ‹re.” With Hannibal routed and Carthage conquered, Scipio’s departure for Rome at the end of Africa 8 and beginning of book 9 is modeled on and contrasts with Aeneas’s ›ight from Carthage at the end of Aeneid 4 and beginning of book 5, in a manner that underscores that the city’s defeat in Petrarch’s poem is conceived as both historical event and allegorical sign. The image of ‹re, in particular, functions differently in these episodes. In the Aeneid, just after Dido falls upon Aeneas’s sword, the palace handmaids respond as if Carthage were being razed by a foreign army. lamentis gemituque et femineo ululatu tecta fremunt, resonat magnis plangoribus aether, non aliter quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis Karthago aut antiqua Tyros, ›ammaeque furentes culmina perque hominum volvantur perque deorum. (4.667–71) [The buildings clamor with lamentations and with groans and women’s howling, and heaven resounds with loud wails, as if all of Carthage or ancient Tyre were falling to invading enemies, and raging ›ames were rolling over the roofs of men and gods.] Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 41 = In the Africa, Carthage is defeated by an army, although Scipio restrains his ‹rst impulse to destroy the city. Instead, he orders the Carthaginian ›eet to be burned so that it cannot be used to invade Italy again. Petrarch describes the citizens’ reaction to the destruction of their ships in familiar terms. Scipio provectus paulum subsistit et omnes Imperat hostiles ›ammis absumere puppes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Torpuerant miseri cives sua damna gementes, Haud aliter quam si subito predulcia cuntis, Coniugia et nati atque arces et templa deorum Ipsaque Carthago ›ammis arderet in illis. (8.1069–84) [Scipio, departing, pauses brie›y and orders that all the enemy ships be destroyed in ›ames. . . . The wretched citizens, grieving for their losses, had been struck dumb, as if suddenly everything else they cherished, their wives and children, their citadels and temples of the gods, even Carthage itself, were burning in those ›ames. (1521–41)] By repeating the Vergilian simile—as if Carthage itself were being destroyed by ‹re—Petrarch invites us to perceive an equivalence between the two calamities, the death of Carthage’s queen and the destruction of its ships. This equivalence is con‹rmed and its purpose clari‹ed as we move to the opening lines of the next books.50 At the start of Aeneid 5, Aeneas and his ›eeing shipmates look back to see that the walls of Carthage are aglow with the ›ames of Dido’s funeral pyre. Interea medium Aeneas iam classe tenebat certus iter ›uctusque atros Aquilone secabat moenia respiciens, quae iam infelicis Elissae conlucent ›ammis. quae tantum accenderit ignem causa latet; duri magno sed amore dolores polluto, notumque furens quid femina possit, triste per augurium Teucrorum pectora ducunt. ut pelagus tenuere rates nec iam amplius ulla occurrit tellus, maria undique et undique caelum, olli caeruleus supra caput astitit imber, noctem hiememque ferens et inhorruit unda tenebris. (5.1–11) the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 42 < [Meanwhile Aeneas with his ›eet held steadfast to the course out to sea and cleaved the waves with the north wind, looking back on the city walls that now shine with the ›ames of unhappy Elissa. What cause set alight so great a ›ame is hidden to them; but the cruel woes from great love de‹led, and what a woman in rage is able to do, is known, and it leads the hearts of the Trojans to grim foreboding. As the ships reached the open ocean and the land no longer could be seen, with only sea and sky in all directions, black rain clouds appeared overhead, bringing night and a winter storm, and the waves bristled up in the darkness.] In pointed contrast, the opening lines of Africa 9 describe Scipio and his crew sailing across calm seas in perfect weather. Scipio provectus pelago Romanaque classis Iam placidum sulcabat iter. Non rauca procellis Equora fervebant; ventisque silentibus undas Victorem sensisse putes. Tranquillior illis Vultus erat, celo facies composta sereno. Sic hostile fretum, sic cunta elementa videres Obsequio mulcere ducem. Iam litora longe Africa linquebant alacres et bella canentes Ibant ac valido frangebant remige ›uctus. (9.1–9) [Scipio, departing with the Roman ›eet, now cleaved his way across the placid open ocean. The rough seas were not roiling with storms; the waves, it seemed, acknowledged the victor with quiet winds. A countenance more tranquil was that composed by the serene sky. Thus the hostile waters, thus the elements all around, seemed to yield to the general in obedience. Now the shores and battles of Africa have been left far behind, and the crewmen, cheerfully singing, dash the waves with powerful oars. (1–11)] Dido’s suicide in book 4 of the Aeneid may represent for Petrarch “lust destroying itself,” but he also sees that as Aeneas and his companions look back on the ›ames of Dido’s funeral pyre, a literalization of the ›ames of love with which Venus had surrounded her, the sight ‹lls them with foreboding of future misery. They rightly guess that the cause of the ‹re is Dido’s “de‹led” love and “rage,” and immediately, as if to seal their fears Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 43 = and to signal that Dido’s curse against the Trojans has been heard, the sky darkens and they ‹nd themselves battling another storm. Lust is not dead; it will return to threaten the “good man” again in the form of Turnus. The two images of a burning Carthage, ‹rst in the simile describing the despair of Dido’s handmaids and then in the glowing walls seen by Aeneas and his companions, alike foreshadow the future sufferings of Romans and Carthaginians, because the fruit of Dido’s curse will be not only the rise of Hannibal and Rome’s near destruction at his hands but, ultimately, Hannibal ’s defeat, the surrender of Carthage, and Scipio’s burning of its ships. In the terms of the Africa’s allegory, it takes the ›ames of Carthage’s burning ships to extinguish the ›ames of burning Dido, and for the good man who sets those ships a‹re, safeguarding virtue from the shameful invasions of carnal passion, the sea and soul are placid. Another version of the same logic appears in a startling simile comparing the behavior of Hannibal after his defeat in battle with that of a ravished matro. Mestissimus ergo, Confususque pudore gravi ac merore, latebris Edgreditur, qualis rapto matrona decore, Que quamvis culpa careat, sibi conscia tanti Dedecoris, silet ipsa tamen refugitque videri Exhorretque viri aspectum faciemque suorum. (8.263–68) [At length, after long resisting, he is unable to ignore the commands of his people and city fathers. Wretched and bewildered by deep shame and grief, he leaves his hiding place, as if in the manner of a raped matron who, altogether without fault but conscious of her disgrace, is silent, tries not to be seen, and fears the glance of her husband and the sight of her kin. (376–83)] Scipio has “cleansed the shame [pudor] from Italy’s face” by conquering Hannibal, so in a strange expression of symbolic justice, Hannibal ‹guratively now suffers the same shame that he had before in›icted on Italy: that is, as symbol of lust, Hannibal is likened to a victim of lust, becoming a case in point for a dictum stated earlier in the Africa: “The conqueror of love is love and lust by lust is conquered” (Victor amoris amorque libidine victa libido est [6.202; 261–62]). That line, however, was applied to Massinissa, who replaced his ignoble the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 44 < love for Sophonisba with a renewed commitment to conquering his and Rome’s enemies and adding new kingdoms to his own. It may just as well apply to Petrarch, who, through the Africa’s allegory, glori‹es chastity in the person of Scipio and celebrates victory over his own carnal passions— the victory of having driven Hannibal from his neck—but who still remains shackled in the chains of his other culpa, his desire for literary fame, if the Africa is a poem he still intends to complete. In his opening invocation to Jesus, Petrarch confesses to the problem. Tuque, o certissima mundi Spes superumque decus, quem secula nostra deorum Victorem atque Herebi memorant, quem quina videmus Larga per innocuum retegentem vulnera corpus, Auxilium fer, summe parens. Tibi multa revertens Vertice Parnasi referam pia carmina, si te Carmina delectant; vel si minus illa placebunt, Forte etiam lacrimas, quas (sic mens fallitur) olim Fundendas longo demens tibi tempore servo. (1.10–18) [And you, the world’s surest hope and glory of heaven, whom our age knows as the conqueror of all gods and of hell, whom we see bearing ‹ve deep wounds upon your innocent body, bring me aid, Father on high. I shall bring back many pious verses to you from the heights of Parnassus , if verses delight you; but if they please you little, perchance I may offer my tears as well, which formerly (for so my mad mind was deceived) a long time I kept from shedding for you. (14–25)] Petrarch here offers us the same mix of enlightened progress and strategic waf›ing that he represented in himself in the Secretum. He offers tears of repentance in this poem, tears that for too long he held back while his “mad mind was deceived,” which can only refer to the mad desire for Laura that he has since renounced. Because that battle is won, he is now in a position to write the personal morality tale that is veiled behind Scipio’s decisive defeat of Hannibal. What he dares to hope is that his tears of repentance for that sin will make his verses, if not a delight to God, then perhaps palatable to him and at least not damning, even though they testify to Petrarch’s continued delay of meditating on death, of putting the care of his soul before the mere worldly fame that his “little books” might win for him. Petrarch’s personal references in the last book of the Africa even more Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 45 = explicitly confess to his vainglory, and again he hints at the troubled condition of his soul that this sin has wrought. On the trip back to Rome, Ennius tells Scipio that he was recently visited in a dream by Homer, who told him of a future poet: “His name will be Franciscus,” says Homer to the dreaming Ennius, “and all the great exploits that you have witnessed with your eyes, he will gather in one work,” and “the title of that poem will be Africa” (Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grandia facta, / Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum / Colliget . . . titulusque poematis illi / AFRICA [9.232–36; 318–22]).51 “Yet,” Homer next admits, “how much will faith in his own talent , how much will the spur of praise drive him!” (Quin etiam ingenii ‹ducia quanta, / Quantus aget laudum stimulus! [9.236–37; 323–24]). Ennius then is shown this Franciscus, sitting in a grove with a pen in his hand, “weighed by cares” (curis gravidum [9.274; 377]). Eventually, Homer says, Franciscus will succeed in winning fame. He will “at last ascend the Capitol in a tardy triumph” (seroque triumpho / Hic tandem ascendet Capitolia [9.238; 325–26]). But we and Petrarch know that his suffering is greater than Homer or Ennius can imagine, for his faith is in his talent, not in God. That would seem to bring us back to the Africa’s un‹nished condition as evidence that Petrarch at last abandoned his writings and made a tardy recovery. Yet I insist that Petrarch strives for something more audacious in the Africa than justi‹cation by fragment alone. That is only the safety net. These are “pious” verses, says Petrarch. Their purpose is to convey tears of contrition for his ignoble love rather than to elicit tears of pity for an ignoble love story. Unlike the Aeneid, Petrarch can insist, the Africa will not lead wayward readers (such as another young Augustine) astray.52 Instead, through its moral allegory, the poem encourages its readers to lead a virtuous life, and through its scattered references to Christ it reminds them that all virtue has its source in God. But the allegory of the Africa does not merely celebrate victory over lust. It also makes a statement about Petrarch’s other culpa, his imitation of classical epic and pursuit of worldly fame, the very activity in which Petrarch is engaged while writing the poem. This statement, as we would expect, is as equivocal as the conclusion of the Secretum. There Petrarch admitted to Augustine that it would be best for him to abandon his writings even as he hurried off to complete them. In the Africa, Petrarch announces his rejection of classical epic within a work that is modeled on classical epic, and he rejects its martial theme even as he glori‹es the exploits of one of Rome’s greatest generals. The statement is barely veiled behind the story of Marcus Curtius, the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 46 < which Laelius relates in Africa 3 (and which Petrarch knew from Livy 7.6 and Augustine’s City of God 5.18). As Laelius explains to Syphax in his summary of the deeds of noble Romans, “Once in the past, either by a thrusting wind hidden in the earth or by some other cause, a sudden chasm opened up in the Roman Forum and terri‹ed the city” (Namque olim, aut vento terram impellente latenti / Aut causa quacumque alia, prerupta vorago / Romano patefacta foro conterruit Urbem [3.547–49; 689–92]). To the citizens , “it was at once manifest that the anger of the gods was roused,” says Laelius, “and it was deemed the intention of the gods to stamp out the evil” (simul ira deum manifesta moveret, / Consilio superum visum est compescere pestem [3.554–55; 698–700]). The citizens rushed therefore to seek instruction from their priests, who told them, “The gaping pit seeks those things that are valuable to you, of which the opening may be ‹lled with just a portion” (Sunt que vobis pretiosa dehiscens / Fossa petit: paucis plenus concurret hiatus [3.563–64; 711–13]). Most of the citizens misunderstand this message, as we see in the passage that follows, but at last, one Marcus Curtius interprets it rightly and saves the city. His dictis riguere animi, pallorque per omnes Mestus erat: multi gemmas aurumque ferebant Argentumque alii, namque hec meliora putantur Inter inexperta et verorum ignara bonorum Corda hominum, quos ceca ligat terrena cupido Nigraque corporei quos carceris occupat umbra. Unus ibi ante alios iuvenum fortissimus alte Exclamat: “Que tanta animis ignavia, ceci? Vilia pro caris, pro magnis parva tulistis. Nil opus est auro, fedis quod terra cavernis Evomit, aut lectis inter deserta lapillis. Unum ego vos moneo: nobis virtute vel armis Nil melius tribuisse deos: hec summa profecto, Hec vere Romana bona, et si summa reposcunt, Arma virumque dabo!” Dicens hec lumina celo Erexit, templumque Iovis quod presidet arci Suspiciens tendensque manus sursum atque deorsum Atque omnes superosque deos manesque precatus, Ad quos tendebat, validum calcaribus ultro Urget equum baratroque volens infertur aperto. (3.565–84) Petrarch’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 47 = [At the priests’ words hearts stood still and everyone was pale with woe. Many brought gems and gold, others silver, for these things were considered most valuable by the simple and by those ignorant of what is truly good in the judgment of men, by those who were bound by blind, earthly greed and lived in the dark shadows of their mortal prison. But then a certain youth, more brave than the others, cried out from the back: “Blindmen! Why such faintness of heart? You bring things that are worthless instead of precious, small instead of great. There is no need for gold, which the earth vomits out from fetid caverns, or for stones gathered in the desert. I make you this one warning: the gods have given us nothing better than our excellence and our arms. These true Roman virtues are without question our greatest possessions, and if the greatest are requested, then arms and the man I shall give!” Thus speaking, he lifted his eyes to heaven, and gazing on the temple of Jove that stood atop the citadel, and raising his hands high in prayer to all the gods above as well as to the spirits of the underworld, to whom he lay his course, he spurred his horse and deliberately plunged into the wide chasm. (714–37)] There was a mighty crash then, followed by a ›ash of his armor as he disappeared , Ceu quondam immodico celum splendore dehiscit Et velut etherei reserat penetralia mundi; Inde repentino transcurrens turbine ›amma Visa fugit celoque redit sua forma sereno. (3.588–91) [just as sometimes the sky splits with a great ›ash and, as it were, reveals the hidden realms of the heavenly universe; then at once, having been seen, the ›ame whirling in the wind is gone, and the sky returns to its former calm. (742–46)] Consider ‹rst what sort of sacri‹ce is demanded in this anecdote and how it plays in the context of Petrarch’s “pious” poem. The gods were angry and wished to purge some evil in the Romans, so they opened up a chasm in the middle of the Forum into which “a portion” of the “things that are valuable” had to be thrown. At ‹rst it was assumed that the gods were demanding gems, gold, and silver: many citizens brought out these the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 48 < things, therefore, and threw them into the pit. From Laelius’s commentary, it is clear that such was a reasonable guess, because it revealed an evil that resided in the character of the “many” who were “bound by blind, earthly greed and lived in the dark shadows of their mortal prison.” Riches were valuable to the people, so riches must be what the gods were demanding. But a “youth,” Marcus Curtius, then states the right meaning of the priests’ instructions: “our excellence and our arms” are Rome’s most valuable gift from the gods, he tells them, adding, “These true Roman virtues are without question our greatest possessions.” The distinction, then, is between what genuinely is most valuable to Rome, on the one hand, and, on the other, what many Romans mistakenly most value. The gods demand a “portion” of their gifts to be returned to them as a reminder not to take these gifts lightly, not to covet mere riches, but to safeguard Roman virtue and military might. Curtius understands this, and so he casts himself, vir in full armor, into the chasm. Yet, given the Africa’s references to the future coming of another, more “valuable” gift from God—that is, Christ, the Son of God, who will make a sacri‹ce on humankind’s behalf that is in‹nitely more ef‹cacious than Curtius’s for Rome’s—readers are invited to perceive that those touted “true Roman virtues” have now become, in the Christian era, merely the virtues of the “blind,” the lost, the wretched living “in the dark shadows of their mortal prison.” Even as the poem praises Scipio and the achievement of his greatest exploit (the defeat of Hannibal and subjugation of Carthage), Petrarch concedes that Scipio’s virtues and deeds alone, disconnected from the truth of salvation through Christ and from the epic’s Christian allegory, lack meaning or value beyond the merely mundane. Furthermore, Curtius’s last words in the performance of his sacri‹ce imply “loftier” meanings in Petrarch’s epic than just its quintessentially Roman moral. “Arms and the man I shall give” (Arma virumque dabo), Curtius shouts, which we recognize as a variation on the Aeneid’s opening line, “Arms and the man I sing” (Arma virumque cano). As words that announce Curtius’s act as a pious offering to the gods, uttered as he raises his eyes and hands in prayer, they invoke all the grand connotations of the epic invocation and epic poet’s career, the Christianized cursus Virgilii upon which Petrarch has embarked, and they re›ect on the Africa’s own professed purpose as an offering to God. Petrarch gives this poem that sings of arms and a man, a gesture that works on different levels. On one, the heroic exploits and Roman values of Scipio, in themselves, are given up, in the sense that they are scorned and rejected in favor of this new era’s ChrisPetrarch ’s Culpa and the Allegory of the Africa 49 = tian ethos—while the activity of singing about those exploits and values, for their own sake, is likewise given up, abandoned because Petrarch realizes that these are things that he had blindly valued but now recognizes as “worthless instead of precious, small instead of great.” On another level, the Africa is a poem that can be given up to God as an offering because, like Vergil, Petrarch “intended something loftier than what he says,” making it a “divine work” like the allegorized Aeneid. The gods’ approval of Curtius’s sacri‹ce was signaled by a sudden ›ash, “just as sometimes the sky splits . . . and, as it were, reveals the hidden realms of the heavenly universe.” Just so, the Africa bids for God’s approval because “once having removed the veil of allegories that is covering the truth,” there will be revealed the hidden realms of the poem’s heavenly meaning. In this gesture, there lies a paradox that corresponds to that in the Canzoniere , where Petrarch claims to have rejected his love for Laura as ignoble and yet clings to the assertion that it testi‹es to the strength of his love for the Queen of Heaven. The Africa as we have it testi‹es that Petrarch abandoned his epic poem, but it also claims for itself a divine purpose. The Dido whose story brought tears to the eyes of Augustine and who symbolizes the lust to which Petrarch was formerly chained is categorically rejected by the poem. But the story of Marcus Curtius exempli‹es the manner in which Petrarch rejects Vergil so as to follow Vergil, as Dante follows Vergil, with God guiding the poet’s wandering steps through regions of error and peril past Vergil to safety. the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 50 < ...