For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

After Statius discovers that the poet he lauds so warmly is in fact the figure standing before him, he continues to express his indebtedness on fronts other than the literary: it was by reading Virgil that he came to terms with his own soul. A passage in Aeneid 3, for instance, affected a moral reckoning;7 his meditation on the fourth Eclogue brought about his Christian conversion. Thus, as it turns out, Virgil made him not only a poet but a Christian, too: "Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano" (22.73).

Virgil greets this latter revelation with an incredulity that should also be shared by the reader, for there is no other testimony that Statius ever set his sails "to follow the Fisherman," St. Peter (22.63) or, out of fear, concealed his faith as a chiuso cristian (22.90), a "closeted Christian."8 More interesting than this announcement of Statius's otherwise unknown religious commitment, however, is the news that he was brought to faith by none other than the pagan Virgil, the one "who first did light me on to God" ("prima appresso Dio m'alluminasti"; 22.66). In this case, the transformational Virgilian poem was not the Aeneid but, rather, the fourth Eclogue, a highly enigmatic text that had enjoyed a christological interpretation at least since the days of Constantine and Eusebius:9

Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high. Only do thou, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall first cease, and a golden race spring up throughout the world! Thine own Apollo now is king!

It is easy to see how Christian exegetes, trained to go from letter to spirit, could find in these words a prophecy of the Virgin Mary, her divine offspring, the kingdom of heaven come to earth, and the church's golden age flourishing under its own Sun King. Statius lived in a world in which Virgil's text was an "old testament" just beginning to be interpreted according to the "new." He describes it as "pregnant" (pregno) with the Christian faith, its official paganism already infiltrated by a gospel that had been "seminata / per li messaggi de l'etterno regno" (vv. 77-78; "sown by the messengers of the eternal realm"). There may have been nothing about these apostles to catch the attention of a second-century Roman man of letters, but because their words seemed so uncannily consonant with those of the fourth Eclogue-"si consonava a' nuovi predicanti" (v. 80; "were so in accord with the new preachers")-Virgil's venerable poem lent a kind of credibility to their teaching. As a result of the coincidence between the birth of Christ and Virgil's celebration of a "new progeny descending from heaven" ("progenie scende da ciel nova"; v. 72), Statius began to frequent Christian assemblies and in time received (however secretly) the sacrament of baptism. He mentions the holiness of these believers as a draw to their company, but it was not the church that initially led him to God; it was the fourth Eclogue. Without its glossing of the Nativity, without the validation provided by Rome's altissimo poeta, the Christian Scripture would have remained unintelligible, no matter how fervent its preachers. It would have been a buried treasure, a sealed casket. But because of the strange concordance found between Virgil's words and those of the nuovi predicanti, a door was opened: