Forgetting Dido: A Note on the Decameron, Introduction to Day Four

"Cacciata aveva il sole del cielo già ogni stella e della terra l'umida ombra della notte, quando Filostrato levatosi tutta la sua brigata fece levare" (Dec. 4.intro.44)—so concludes the narrator's introduction to the fourth day of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, devoted to "coloro li cui amori ebbero infelice fine." As a source, commentators indicate the Vergilian verses, "Postera Phoeba lustrabat lampade terras / umentemque Aurora polo dimoverat umbram" (Aen. 4.6-7: "The new day's Dawn was lighting the earth with Phoebus's / brightness, and dispelling the dew-wet shadows from the sky"). Striking similarities in terms of content and syntax, along with Boccaccio's rendering of umentem with umida (a hapax legomenon in the Decameron), confirm the source model. Taken at face value, Filostrato's words may appear as a factual description varnished with a classical reference, like many other passages in Boccaccio. We could be satisfied and move on but, as Pier Massimo Forni would say, this is when we might look for other mice behind the walls of the text.¹ [End Page S-118]

In fact, to my knowledge, no attention has been paid to the verses immediately preceding those volgarizzati by Boccaccio:

At regina gravi iamdudum saucia curavolnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni.Multa viri virtus animo multusque recursatgentis honos, haerent infixi pectore voltusverbaque nec placidam membris dat cura quietem

(But the queen, wounded long since by intense love,feeds the hurt with her life-blood,weakened by hidden fire.The hero's courage often returns tomind, and the nobilityof his race: his features and hiswords cling fixedly to her heart,and love will not grant restful calm to her body).²

The restless regina is clearly Dido, enraptured by the words of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who has just finished recounting the death of his father, Anchises. The relevance of the now disclosed citation becomes apparent to the intendente persona or cunning reader,³ after being contextualized as the introduction to the day of tragic romance, of which Dido is a well-established archetype. But this allusion to Dido is not an isolated occurrence and, in fact, several other elements scattered throughout the text are topographically or functionally connected to it: Vergil's verses quoted above are taken from the incipit of the fourth book and Boccaccio's version of the same verses opens the fourth day of the Decameron; the fourth novella of that day is set in Tunis, that is, near ancient Carthage, the founding of which was traditionally attributed to Dido; the fourth novella, which deals with the mutual but not consummated and, in fact, forbidden love between Gerbino [End Page S-119] and the daughter of the King of Tunis, is narrated by Elissa, whose literary association with Dido was demonstrated by Giuseppe Billanovich.⁴ Although Dido is never expressly mentioned in the Decameron, the existence of a well-identifiable subtext woven around the figure of the lovestruck African queen is nonetheless undeniable. In what follows, I shall advance a hypothesis regarding the meaning of this subtext and the system of references that Boccaccio had designed for the cunning reader to unveil.

In the vast mosaic of Boccaccio's sources, the myth of Dido is no secondary component. Indeed, as rightly pointed out by Anna Cerbo, who was among the first to investigate this topic, understanding "la predilezione del Boccaccio per Didone significa esaminare tutto l'arco della sua produzione."⁵ In dealing with Boccaccio's treatment of Dido, Simone Marchesi has shown how it intersects with some critical questions in literary history.⁶ By the time Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, several literati had discussed the figure of Dido at length, focusing primarily on the motivations for her suicide. For some, such an extreme gesture was the result of the queen's regret for betraying the memory of her late husband, Sychaeus—a Vergilian theme, seen in the verse "Non servata fides cineri promissa Sychaeo" (Aen. 4:552: "I have not kept the vow I made to Sychaeus's ashes") and famously amplified in...