Diana Librandi (UCLA)
In Fam. 24, 11 Petrarch writes about the legacy of Virgil’s works: Aeneas’s glory lives on, the Mantuan fields continue to glimmer thanks to the fourfold cleft of the Georgics, and an older Tityrus, keeps playing his slender pipe (55: Tityrus ut tenuem senior iam perflat avenam). I approach this reference to Tityrus’s age as an entry point into examining a particular aspect of Petrarch’s complex self-fashioning as post-Virgilian poet (Hinds 2004). The shepherd’s old age in Fam. 24, 11 alludes to Dante’s disguisement as Tityrus in his Egloghe, but stands in stark contrast with Tityrus’s absence in Petrarch’s pastoral poems. I argue that this opposition represents a conspicuous, yet overlooked move in Petrarch’s strategy to efface Dante’s mediation between Virgil’s pastoral poetry and Petrarch’s own Bucolicum Carmen.
Tityrus’s old age stands out as a common theme between Petrarch’s Fam. 24,11 and Dante’s Egloghe, where the shepherd is aged and hoary (Egl. 4.12: annosus enim; 4.32-33: tum senior... canum crinem) and considers covering his white hair with a laurel wreath (Egl. 1.41-42: capillos | ... abscondere canos). Born where the Arno flows, this old Tityrus is none other than Dante. Revived in the Egloghe, then, Tityrus becomes Dante’s poetic persona and Dante, in turn, a second Virgil or even Virgil himself, if metempsychosis is worth believing (Egl. 3.33-4: a divine senex, a sic eris alter ab illo, | alter es aut idem, Usher 2005). Although Petrarch follows Servius (ad Ecl. 1.1) in identifying Tityrus as Virgil (Lord 1982), Tityrus never appears as a character in Petrarch’s pastoral poems. Instead, we find Parthenias, Virgil himself (Fam. 10, 4: Parthenias ipse est Virgilius). Dwelling on Parthenias’ influence on his poetry, Petrarch conceptualizes poetic legacy through metaphors of paternity and filiation: Parthenias used to sing to a young Petrarch there where the river Benacus bears a son very similar to itself (Buc. carm. 1.13-5: Parthenias michi, iam puero, cantare solebat | hic, ubi Benacus... | persimilem natum fundit sibi). Petrarch’s construction of poetic kinship with Parthenias/Virgil aims to upstage Dante’s appropriation of Virgilian authority by means of his disguise as Tityrus. By erasing Tityrus from his Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch pointedly bypasses the mediation of Dante’s pastoral poetry while conjuring up, in his letter to Virgil, the image of his rival as an old Tityrus. A further confirmation of the significance of Petrarch’s strategic move comes from Boccaccio’s pastoral poems: there too, Tityrus belongs to a sweeter past (Bucc. carm. 1.82-3: narrare solebat Tytirus, heu! nobis quondam, dum dulcior etas), whereas the new authority of Silvanus, Petrarch’s pseudonym, has overtaken the fields of poetry (Bucc. carm. 16.41: semper Silvanus ubique). The significance of the old age of Dante’s Tityrus does not lie exclusively in its metapoetic reference to Dante's belated attempt to write pastoral poetry (Combs-Schilling 2005, Allegretti 2010), but projects us into Tityrus’s afterlife post mortem Dantis. If Dante’s Tityrus is old, Petrarch deemed Tityrus too old to be revived.