For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

One of these takes place in Inferno 13, within the circle of the suicides.13 There is no mistaking the Virgilian atmosphere of the setting, for Dante has taken its densely wooded landscape, its demonic harpies, and a bleeding plant from several places in the Aeneid." It is the latter "borrowing," however, that actually forces itself on us, as Virgil stages an encounter with his own prior account by openly referring to it. The likeness/dissimilarity of his Polydorus and Dante's Pier delle Vigna then becomes the specific point of encounter between the old poem and the new.

In Aeneid 3, Aeneas follows his book-long narrative of Troy's fall with an account of his several attempts to find the new Trojan Promised Land. The first of these attempts takes him to the plains of Thrace. Upon arrival, plus Aeneas sees a low mound that is overgrown with saplings. It seems the perfect location to prepare an altar of thanksgiving, and so he proceeds to cut and uproot the young trees growing on the mound in order to make the place ready for sacrifice. What happens thereafter repeatedly stops him in his narrative tracks: "horrendum et dictu video mirabile monstrum" (26; "I see an awful portent, wondrous to tell"); "mihi frigidus horror / membra quatit, gelidusque coil formidine sanguis" (vv. 29-30; "A cold shudder shakes my limbs and my chilled blood freezes with terror"); eloquar, an sileam? (v. 39; "Should I speak or be silent?"). The first sapling he pulls up by the roots secretes a trickle of dark blood that stains the earth with gore (vv. 28-29). The second tree, when tackled, flows with black blood from its bark. When he wrestles with the third stalk, a voice is heard emerging from the mound (vox reddita fertur ad auris; v. 40), its words carried upward from the earth to Aeneas's ears:

"Woe is me! Why, Aeneas, dost thou tear me? Spare me in the tomb at last; spare this pollution of thy pure hands! I, born of Troy am no stranger to thee; not from a lifeless stock oozes this blood. Ah! Flee the cruel land, flee the greedy shore! for I am Polydorus. Here an iron harvest of spears covered my pierced body, and grew up into sharp javelins."

Polydorus goes on to tell how the Thracians, ignoring every sacred obligation of hospitality to a stranger, not only seized his gold but murdered him as well. With his injunction to "flee the cruel land, flee the greedy shore" ringing in their ears, Aeneas and his men agree to move on, but not before according the grave of their former comrade every sacred ritual and custom, thereby laying his aggrieved soul to rest: animamque sepulchro / condimus (vv. 67-68).

This moment in Aeneid 3, along with the moral given to the episode by Aeneas-"quid non mortalia pectora cogis, / auri sacra fames!" (vv. 56-57; "To what dost thou not drive the hearts of men, O accursed hunger for gold!")-becomes a touchstone within the epic, another example of desecrating greed.15 Nor is it likely that a reader who knows Virgil's text-perhaps not tutta quanta, but reasonably well-would come to Inferno 13 and fail to recognize a strong recall. Even if he or she were to do so, however, the recollection of Aeneid 3 is impossible to miss, for it is none other than Virgil who brings it to mind.