In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, David Wilson-Okamura
<david@virgil.org> writes
>I've been writing this month about the underworld. Here's something
>I'm curious about: when Dante and Virgil are going through hell, Dante
>asks his guide whether anyone from limbo ever visits the lower circles.
>That was 35 years ago. To my knowledge, no one has discovered a
>source for the episode, and I think B. d. I. was probably right: this was
>Dante's invention. But why does he drag Erichtho into it? The
>connection between Aen. 6 and Phars. 6 is obvious, interesting, and
>one that commentators in the Middle Ages had a lot to say about. But
>whom did Virgil "draw forth" from the circle of Judas, and did
>Erichtho animate Virgil's corpse to do it?
>
The commentaries I own do not answer these questions, though Tommaso Di
Salvo sees in the story an answer to the rationalizing reader's
question, how Vergil knows his way around, even as Vergil provided an
answer to the question how the Sibyl knew. Let us take it from there.
Lucan's Erictho, in the same-numbered book as Aeneas' katabasis and all
the more a kind of anti-Sibyl, could also substitute for Hecate (who as
a heathen goddess was not available for Dante), since as Lucan tells us
(6. 513-15):
coetus audire silentum,
nosse domos Stygias arcanaque Ditis operti
non superi, non uita uetat.
Neither the gods above nor her own way of life forbid her to hear the
assemblies of the silent dead, to know the Stygian halls and the secrets
of hidden Dis.
However, since unlike Hecate she does not reside in the underworld, she
operates by power of magical command, bringing a dead man back to life
in order that he may prophesy to Sextus; she picks over the unburied
corpses; wolves and carrion-birds while she chooses one to be her
soothsayer:
dum Thessala uatem
eligit.
Dante, I suggest, while no doubt being fully aware of the real meaning,
creatively reinterpreted this as 'when [a standard medieval use of
_dum_] she chooses the inspired poet', namely Vergil, who is made to
fetch the deceased soul so that he shall know the way when Dante needs
him to do so. The soul so fetched is no more in need of identification
than the dead soldier whom Lucan's Erictho restores to life.
I offer this to be improved upon.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
--
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ
tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/353865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237
email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home)/[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
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