Tityrus in Limbo: Figures of the Author in Dante’s Eclogues

After years spent among the minorissime of Dante’s opere, the eclogues are starting to be pulled in from the margins. Scholarship on these curious poems, which were born out of an epistolary exchange with the professor and proto-humanist Giovanni del Virgilio during the last years of Dante’s life, has long been haunted by the specter of inauthenticity, but now that this hypothesis has been more than sufficiently discredited, scholars have returned to these poems with renewed vigor, resulting over the last three years in the publication of two new commentaries and a handful of articles, which by the eclogues’ standards is a great deal.¹ While a substantial amount of analysis continues to revisit a relatively small set of questions, this work has also shown how much we still have to learn about these poems.²

As the eclogues assume a somewhat more central position within Dante studies and new interpretive pathways are explored, it is essential that they retain their intrinsic and indispensable alterity, for they at once distill and programmatically transgress Dante’s prior poetics. In terms of contiguity with previous iterations of” Dante,” they are rife with familiar tropes, imagery, language, and ideologies. For example, the second eclogue begins with an astronomical periphrasis, a trope with a well-established Dantean pedigree, especially in Purgatorio, while some of the descriptive texture of the pastoral landscape also brings the Commedia to mind, especially in the first eclogue, whose Lethe-like river and grasses painted with flowers explicitly evoke the description of Earthly Paradise in Canto 28 of Purgatorio.³ Indeed, there are specific calques of the Commedia in the eclogues, though none more dramatic than the desire expressed by Tityrus (a figure for Dante) to receive a laurel crown along the banks of the Sarnus (i.e., the Arno), in language in clear dialogue with, and perhaps the model for, the famous opening of Canto 25 of Paradiso: “Se mai continga che ‘l poema sacro, / al quale ha posto mano e Cielo e terra / sì che m’ha fatto per più anni macro” (1–3).⁴ Moreover, the eclogues’ rehearsal and examination of key Dantean issues is not limited to the Commedia, for there are also conceptual parallels with De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio, even verbal echoes of them.⁵ In particular, the first eclogue’s defense of the vernacular, especially in the figural link it establishes between milk and the mother-tongue, revisits the Latin treatise, while the pedagogical role that Tityrus assumes toward his companion Melibeus replays the mediational role taken by Dante between the “alta mensa” of the philosophers and the “pastura del vulgo” in Convivio 1.1.8–10, a parallel secured by the bread imagery with which the eclogue ends.⁶ The eclogues also represent the final product of Dante’s decades-long engagement with Vergil through his choice to return to the Bucolica, assume the name of Tityrus (a character associated with Vergil by the Servian commentary tradition), and revitalize the pastoral genre. From this vantage point, these poems, written alongside and after the composition of the poema sacro, emerge as a valedictory stocktaking and “a final succinct statement of Dantesque poetics.”⁷

At the same time they constitute a far-reaching departure from the poetics of the Commedia and are, in fact, unlike anything else Dante ever wrote. Most conspicuously, they are Dante’s sole attempt at the composition of Latin poetry.⁸ They are written to a single recipient, at least nominally, which veers sharply from the Commedia’s approach to textuality, temporality, and audience. Even more surprising is the identity of his chosen interlocutor, for at this point in his career modern readers would expect him to respond to questions from John the Evangelist, not John of Vergil. The only partial analogue within Dante’s oeuvre is found in his early tenzoni, yet though the epistolary exchange with Giovanni may represent an intriguing extension of the tenzone form into the language of Latin and the genre of the eclogue, Dante’s decision to return to a pre-Vita Nova version...