Louis Verreth (Leiden University)
Of all rivers Ovid mentions being dried up by Phaëton on his hapless ride with the chariot of the sun, only the Roman Tiber is said to be the destined ruler of the world. Similarly, in Claudian’s panegyrical epic for Probinus and Olybrius, consuls of 395 AD, the personified Tiber boasts that a foreign river has never witnessed such eminent rulers. In Neo-Latin epic, much like in classical epic, rivers are often symbols of national identities, that can be compared with other streams in terms of reach and power. Early modern Latin poets transfer classical representations of the Tiber to the rivers of their cities and nations and use them for ideological purposes. In my paper on two epic texts from Quattrocento Florence, the Volaterrais (1474) of Naldo Naldi and the Florentia (1490) of Pandolfo Collenuccio, I discuss how Neo-Latin poets strategically appropriated classical epic in their images of the Arno river and modelled it as a symbol of the Florentine empire and its de facto ruler Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492).
Whereas scholars of Roman Antiquity have justly recognised rivers as symbols of power in literature (Jones) and culture (Meyers; Campbell), studies concerning Neo-Latin epic are still limited to single observations in scattered commentaries. My focus on passages in Laurentian panegyrics where the Arno and Tiber river are juxtaposed allows me to indicate the transformation of classical river topoi in a specific corpus of Neo-Latin epic. The central argument of my paper is that river metaphors in Laurentian poetry, modelled on classical epic, were used to defend the claim that Florence had inherited the political and cultural legacy of the Roman empire. I explain my argument by focusing on two different strategies humanist poets adopt: while some poets stress the vicinity and similarities of the Arno and the Tiber, others focus on the distinct identity of the Arno and claim it to be an alternative to the Tiber’s classical status as river of empire.
To illustrate the first strategy, I discuss a key passage from Naldi’s Volaterrais (1.15-23), in which the poet uses river imagery to stress that Florence embodies the dominion as well as the cultural primacy of ancient Rome. By applying an intertextual approach to the text, I point out how Naldi by stressing the convergence of their flow areas argues that the Arno has taken over the role of the Roman Tiber as symbol of empire (cf. Aeneid 8.328-332). In addition, I contend that Naldi used the Arno river as a meta- poetical symbol, as he seems to have played with the idea that rivers, like texts, have sources. I suggest that Naldi holds the Tiber to be a symbol of classical literary culture, which he claims to be continued on the banks of the Arno where Florence now experiences a cultural heyday.
In the second part of my paper, I turn to Collenuccio’s ‘epyllion’ Florentia, in which the poet depicts the Tiber and the Arno to contrast the great but lost Roman empire with the modest yet lively Florentine realm (Florentia 46-52). This example shows again how visions of Rome’s dominion in the Aeneid became a touchstone for humanist poetry on the Arno, yet in this case as a symbol of opposition between empires. With the examples of Naldi’s Volaterrais and Collenuccio’s Florentia I aim to demonstrate that Laurentian poets consciously recurred to the classical theme of rivers in order to sustain their claim that Florence was a successor of ancient Rome