For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

5 Barolini 256-69 gives an excellent reading of the Statius encounter. see also Mazzotta 194-95 and 222-24, and Franke 191-213. For the Biblical allusions that play so large a role in Purgatorio 21-22, see both Stephany and Hawkins ("Resurrecting the Word").

6 At the end of his twelve-year labor, the twelve-book Thebaid, Statius closes his epic with an acknowledgment of his "position" with regard to the Aeneid and its author: "vive, precor; nee tu divinam Aeneida tempta, / sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora" (12.816-17; "O live, I pray! nor rival the divine Aeneid, but follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps"). In the Commedia, the pilgrim literally follows in Virgil's footsteps until Purgatorio 28, when Dante enters Eden ahead of his master-a changing of position that is underscored in Purgatorio 30.43, when Dante turns around to face Virgil only to discover that he is gone. Nor does Dante poet ever promise not to rival another writer. he makes this clear in the opening of the Paradiso (1.7), where he boasts that the poetic waters he is about to sail have never been navigated before.

7 The Aeneid text that turns Statius from his prodigality is none other than the Polydorus story in 3.19-68, which shows a creative "misreading" of Virgil's text in Statius's transformation of auri sacra/ames (3.57) into sacrafame de Vom (Purgatorio 22.40), which Singleton in turn mistranslates as "accursed hunger of gold." see his discussion on pp. 521-24 of his Purgatorio commentary, as well as those in Sapegno vol. 2: 242-43, Bosco and Reggio vol. 2: 375, Sayers 343-45, Martinez, and Franke 197-98. I take it that Statius "found" in Virgil what he needed-an injunction not against avarice but prodigality-and thereby recalled the words he "read" in Aeneid 3 rather than those Virgil actually wrote.

8 On the surprise of Statius's Christian faith, see Lewis, Paratore 420, and Franke 193-96.

9 see Comparetti.

10 Paolo Toschi, 34-36, describes a fourteenth-century liturgical drama for Advent, which begins in the church's choir and then moves out to the nave. There the congregation would sing a hymn, bidding the prophets (from Moses to Virgil and the Cumaean Sibyl) to proclaim their prophecy of Christ. All of these profeti were dressed in emblematic costumes. They would come to life, so to speak, in brief scenarios, their particular role in salvation history articulated through an "annunciation" of direct address. The procession would continue to the altar, and the Ordo prophetarum culminate in a celebration of the Mass.

11 Jacoff and Schnapp include three essays on this sequence by Putnam, Hawkins, andjacoff (94-144). See also Freccero 207-08; as well as Bloom, Anxiety 122-23; and Flawkins, Dante's Testaments 121-24.

12 See Barolini's discussion of Dante's rewriting of Virgil on the matter of Manto/Mantua in Inferno 20.214-22, also Hollander in Jacoff and Schnapp 76-93.

13 Mazzotta gives a fine reading of this episode, 188-90. see also Barolini, esp. 211-12, and Paratore.