Amicus eius: Dante and the Semantics of Friendship

Dante’s writing bears witness to the importance of friendship in his poetry and in his life and testifies to a semantics of friendship that he developed over many years. This essay moves from Dante’s earliest lyric poetry to the Commedia, tracking the word amico and using its itinerary through Dante’s works to reconstruct the poet’s thoughts and feelings on amicitia. In my commentary on Dante’s youthful lyrics I approached friendship through two lenses: that of the sociology of the brigata, through which Dante’s poems can give us limited but still precious access to distant interactions between long-ago friends, and that of the semantics of friendship.¹ In this essay I elaborate the latter into a coherent category of analysis for Dante’s thinking on friendship (and with possible implications for other poets whose work is discussed here: Guittone d’Arezzo, Dante da Maiano, Guido Cavalcanti). The starting-point for this study was the realization that it is difficult to gloss with accuracy Dante’s use of the word amico, a word that is apparently straightforward but that is in fact deeply inflected by the conventions of Duecento Florentine society and by Dante’s own idiosyncratic practice.² By no means a survey of all Dante’s references to friendship or an attempt to write the Dante chapter in a history of friendship, this essay identifies rhetorical tropes that became staples of the poet’s evocation of friendship through time, and endeavors through analysis of these perduring tropes to illuminate Dantean amicitia.³

The word amico itself—the ways in which Dante employs it over time, either featuring it or staying away from it—is key to telling this story. If we consult the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini (TLIO) we see that the primary form of amico is that of a noun, meaning “a man who is bound to one or more persons by affection, solidarity, and esteem” (“chi è legato a una o più persone da un rapporto di affetto, solidarietà e stima”), and that the word is somewhat semantically unstable, requiring qualification to achieve its significance. Hence the entry amico in the online vocabolario offers the following subcategories: 1.1 Amico antico, 1.2 Amico carnale, 1.3 Amico falso, 1.4 Amico intimo, 1.5 Amico perfetto, 1.6 Amico singolare, 1.7 Amico speciale, 1.8 Amico stretto, 1.9 Amico di ventura, 1.10 Amico vero/verace, and 1.11 (“in formule allocutive”) Bell’amico, bel dolce amico.⁴ In such a loose semantic context, one of Dante’s achievements is to have created, in the Commedia, a linguistic and semantic environment in which the word amico can be employed to his satisfaction without being paired with an adjective. Thus, in Purgatorio 22, in the verse “e come amico omai meco ragiona” (21), to which we will return at the end of this essay, we find amico able to signify fully and unequivocally without the support of an adjectival qualifier.

The rich prose of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio is invoked in TLIO to illustrate various nuances of the noun amico. Similarly, Emilio Pasquini’s essay “Amico” in the Enciclopedia Dantesca is particularly valuable on the Convivio, a treatise in which the critic finds “i minuti supporti di un trattatello ‘de amicitia.’”⁵ Less attention is paid to Dante’s verse, in the case of Dante’s early lyrics most likely because usage is less a lexical than a contextual variable: meaning is highly dependent on context. The only Dantean verses cited to illustrate amico in the online dictionary are two from the Commedia (“l’amico mio, e non de la ventura” [Inf. 2.61] and “fuor de la braccia del suo dolce amico” [Purg. 9.3]), and one from an early sonnet: the adjectival use of “amica” in “emagina l’amica openïone” comes from Savete giudicar vostra ragione, a sonnet that Dante Alighieri wrote to the poet Dante da Maiano, whose opinion is here defined as that of a “friend.”

Savete giudicar is Dante Alighieri’s reply to Dante da Maiano’s...