Purgatorio (115 page)

28–35.
   A paraphrase may help make clear the general sense of these lines: “As my situation among the avaricious made you take me for one of them—and a better understanding shows the opposite sin to pertain, just so did your text seem to be condemning avarice—until my personal understanding revealed that it condemned my own prodigality.” On the problem of the belatedness of prodigality’s appearance as a subject on this terrace, of which it is supposedly the cotitular occupant, see Barnes (Barn.1993.1), pp. 288–90.
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36.
   Statius has already said (
Purg
. XXI.68) that he had to spend five hundred years and more on this terrace, thus more than six thousand months.
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38.
   The verb used by Statius to indicate his comprehension of Virgil’s text will turn out to be pivotal, in that he does not say “when I read” but “when I understood,” i.e., allowing us to comprehend his latent meaning: “when I construed your text so that it matched my need.”
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40–41.
   The meaning of these lines, clearly a translation of a text of Virgil (
Aen
. III.56–57), is the subject of much debate involving questions about the exact nature of what Dante wrote (“Per che” or “perché”?) and what he took Virgil to mean (or decided to make Virgil say). Here, as always, we have followed Petrocchi’s text in our translation, even though in this case we are in particularly strenuous disagreement with him. Here are the texts, Virgil’s first:

(to what do you not drive human hearts, impious hunger for gold?)

As for Dante’s text, it may be either of the following:

(
to what end,
O
cursèd
hunger for gold, do you not
govern
[drive] the appetite of mortals?)

or

(
why
do you not
govern
mortal appetites, O
holy
[i.e., temperate] hunger for gold?)

It is true that the Latin adjective
sacer
can mean either “holy, sacred” or “unholy, impious.” However, the meaning of Aeneas’s outcry, recounting the horrific deed committed by Polymnestor against Polydorus (see note to
Inf
. XIII.31–39) is clear to all; he means “impious.” But what of Dante’s text? The “traditional” reading has him maintaining the negative valence of Virgil’s
sacer
(which would then be the only occurrence among twelve in which
sacro
does not mean “holy” in his poem). Perhaps no early reader, among those who understood Statius as deliberately misreading Virgil, was as “modern” and “revisionist” as Francesco da Buti (1385), who simply argued that Dante was deliberately giving Virgil’s text another meaning than it held because it suited his purpose to do so. Bianchi (1868) is the first to appreciate the absurdity of the notion that Dante had used the verb
reggere
(to govern) in a pejorative sense. The debate continues into our own day, mainly propelled by the notion that Dante could not possibly have misunderstood Virgil’s words and therefore did not grossly misrepresent them. This, however, is to overlook the fact that it is the character Statius who is understanding them as they took on significance for him, guilty of prodigality, not of avarice. And just as he will later reveal his “misinterpretation” of Virgil’s fourth
Eclogue
at vv. 70–72, a “misreading” that saved his soul, so now he shows how his moral rehabilitation was begun when he “misread” a passage in the
Aeneid
. The debate is finally in such condition that this view, present in some of the earliest commentators but energetically attacked over the centuries, now may seem only sensible. See, among others, Ronconi (Ronc.1958.1), pp. 85–86; Groppi (Grop.1962.1), pp. 163–68; Paratore (Para.1968.1), pp. 73–75; Hollander (Holl.1980.1), pp. 212–13, and (Holl.1983.1), pp. 86–89, completely in accord with Shoaf’s earlier and nearly identical reading (Shoa.1978.1). They are joined by Barolini (Baro.1984.1), p. 260, and, at length, by Martinez (Mart.1989.2). A similar, if less developed argument, is found in Mazzotta (Mazz.1979.1), p. 222. And, for wholehearted acceptance of Shoaf’s argument, see Picone (Pico.1993.2), pp. 325–26. Neglected, by all but Barolini and Shoaf, is Austin (Aust.1933.1). Mainly forgotten as well is the then daring support of Francesco da Buti by Alfredo Galletti (Gall.1909.1), pp. 17–18. Among Italian students of the problem who accept this basic view of its resolution see Chiamenti (Chia.1995.1), pp. 131–37, who offers most of the essential bibliography for the problem but is, however, surprisingly unaware of the support for his position available in his American precursors’ analyses of what he considers “the most beautiful example of free translation in Dante” (p. 134). For the general question of Dante’s Statius see Brugnoli (Brug.1969.1) and Rossi (Ross.1993.1); for more recent bibliography see Glenn (Glen.1999.1), p. 114, and Marchesi (Marc.2002.1), an extended discussion of the possible Augustinian sources of the “aggressive” reading of Virgilian text attributed to Statius by Dante.
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46.
   Statius’s description of the prodigal as having shorn hair repeats that element in the description of those damned for prodigality in
Inferno
VII.57.
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47.
   The fact that, according to Statius, the prodigal do not understand that their behavior is sinful underlines the importance of Virgil’s words about the “holy” hunger for gold in bringing about his own salvation. Their ignorance of their own sinfulness may help explain why there is so little reference to their form of sin on this terrace. See discussion in the note to vv. 52–54.
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49–51.
   The reference of the adverb “qui” (here) in this tercet is a matter of debate. One should be aware that the notion that it refers to all of purgatory (rather than to this terrace alone) is of recent vintage and is intelligently opposed by Bosco/Reggio (1979). Further, if one examines all eighteen uses of the adverb by penitents who have speaking roles on the mountain, it is plain that only twice does it not refer to the particular terrace on which the speaker is found. In short, there is every reason to believe that the reference is only to this particular terrace, the only one on which a particular sin and its opposite are purged.
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52–54.
   We can begin to understand that Dante has constructed this terrace in a way that is much different from that in which he structured the Circle of Avarice and Prodigality in
Inferno
. There the two sins are treated, at least approximately, as equals, each of them sharing literally half the realm. Here it would seem (one cannot be certain) that there is no set place for the penitent prodigal nor any exemplary figures that refer directly to their sin. In fact, this is the terrace of Avarice on which prodigals seem to be gathered, too. Since the only one we know of—and he refers to no others in his condition—is Statius, we have no way of knowing or guessing how many others there are like him, or even whether there are any others at all, although, from vv. 49–51, there seem to be.
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55–63.
   Virgil is referred to as the author of the
Eclogues
, the fourth of which will shortly come into prominent play in Statius’s narrative of his conversion (vv. 70–73). His question reveals that Dante treats him as having read—and with some care—Statius’s
Thebaid
, a work written roughly one hundred and ten years after his death. (We have observed a similar bit of business in
Inf
. XXXI.115–124, where Virgil borrows from the texts of Lucan as he attempts to flatter Antaeus [see Hollander (Holl.2000.2)].) Do we imagine, as more than one discussant has, that Virgil had read Lucan (or Statius) in Limbo? Or do we realize that Dante is a poet and takes liberties when he wishes to?
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55–56.
   The sons of Jocasta (by her son Oedipus) are Eteocles and Polynices. Their fraternal rivalry results in the civil war in Thebes that is the main subject of Statius’s only completed epic.
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58.
   Statius twice invokes Clio, as the muse of history, in the
Thebaid
(I.41; X.630). Virgil’s question suggests that the text of the epic, while historically valid, does not seem to him to yield any hint of Statius’s Christian faith. But see the note to vv. 64–73.

Lombardi (1791) was perhaps the first commentator to suggest the (debated but viable) idea that
tastare
here means “pluck the strings of the lyre” in accompaniment of the poet’s song.
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61–63.
   Virgil would like to know what sun (God?) or what candles (human sources of enlightenment?) enlightened Statius, removing him from the darkness of paganism in Domitian’s Rome so that he could “set sail,” following the Church’s instruction. St. Peter, the rock on which Jesus built that church, is portrayed as a “fisher of souls” in Mark 1:17.

The Castalian spring, source of poetic inspiration in classical myth, had its own source among the caves of Mt. Parnassus.
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64–73.
   Statius’s response surprises Virgil and continues to surprise nearly everyone. It was Virgil whose example made him want to be a poet and Virgil who brought him to love the true God. The culminating verse of his answer begins by restating the first part of the equation, to which no one can object, and then the second (“per te cristiano”). There is no external authority, competent or otherwise, who would have brought Dante to believe such a thing.

However, if Dante believed, or had decided to believe, that Statius was a Christian, when did he think he first converted? Virgil’s own remark about his not finding any evidence in the text of the
Thebaid
that supports a Statian conversion to Christianity is perhaps a clue to what we should do in examining that text. That is, the “dating” of such a conversion might have seemed ascertainable from Statius’s texts themselves. Mariotti (Mari.1975.1) discussed Poliziano’s view that a passage in the
Thebaid
(IV.514–518, naming the mysterious “high lord of the triple world” [Demogorgon?]) seemed to authorize understanding of a Christian intent on the part of its author. Mariotti’s argument did not convince Hollander (Holl.1980.2), pp. 206–7, who argued instead that a passage early on in the work (
Thebaid
II.358–362) revealed, unmistakably, a reference to the key prophetic text in Virgil’s fourth
Eclogue
. (He might have argued that there is an even more precise reference at V.461, the phrase “iam nova progenies” [and now a new race] that matches exactly Virgil’s key phrase in the
Eclogue
[IV.7].) Thus, if for Dante the phrase in Virgil that converted Statius is that one, it only makes sense that, finding it in the text of Statius’s epic, he could argue that, by the time he was writing its second book, Statius was already a closet Christian. For a discussion see also Chiamenti (Chia.1995.1), pp. 205–8.

On the continuing complexity of the problem of Statius’s supposed Christianity see, among many others, Brugnoli (Brug.1988.1), Scrivano (Scri.1992.1), and Heil (Heil.2001.1), pp. 52–101. For the narrower discussion of the dependence of Dante’s view on putative existing medieval sources for such a belief, see Padoan (Pado.1959.1), Ronconi’s rejoinder (Ronc.1965.1), and Padoan’s continuing insistence (Pado.1970.1). It seems clear that Ronconi’s view, that the conversion of Statius is entirely Dante’s invention, is the only likely solution to an intriguing problem.
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65.
   In classical myth the Castalian spring, flowing in the grottoes of Parnassus, is the source of poetic inspiration in those who drank from it.
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70–72.
   Dante’s translation of the crucial lines of the fourth
Eclogue
(5–7) deforms them just enough to show how a Christian might have found a better meaning in them than did Virgil himself:

From
Monarchia
I.xi.1 we know that Dante believed that Virgil’s
Virgo
was not a woman named Mary but Astraea, or Justice. Still, primal justice was the condition of humankind in the prelapsarian Eden, that “first age of man”
(primo tempo umano)
, which is open to a wider interpretation than Virgil’s “Saturnia regna.” Statius’s version of Virgil had to rearrange very little (and that seems to be Dante’s hard-edged intention) to make the prophecy a Christian one. Dante’s identical rhymes
(ri-nova, ciel nova)
add a repeated word that has a deeply Christian ring to it, “new,” thus pointing to the concept that
almost
emerges from Virgil’s text. He came very close, but he failed.
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