For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

Like the rest we shall come, each for his cast-off body, but not, however, that any man may inhabit it again; for it is not just that a man have what he robs himself of. Hither shall we drag them, and through the mournful wood Our bodies will be hung, each on the thorn bush of its Nocuous shade.

The Aeneid provides Dante with the wonder of a bleeding stalk and a voice from the beyond. The author of Inferno 13, however, takes that legacy and runs with it, increasing our sense of amazement, complicating the conversation with the dead, taking us deep within the twisted mind of the "great thorn bush," and projecting the entire encounter against the theological background of Last Things. When in Inferno 13 Virgil reminds the pilgrim of what the Aeneid should have prepared him to experience, he inadvertently draws our attention to the cosa incredibile of Dante's revision of his source, to his successful rivalry of the esteemed maestro.

Revision of Virgilian precedent in Inferno 13 becomes an open (if polite) challenge in Purgatorio 6, where experience in Dante's afterlife seems to fly in the face of a passage in the Aeneid and therefore puts its author on the defensive. When souls clustered in AntePurgatory perceive that the pilgrim casts a shadow and is therefore alive, they surround him en masse, soliciting prayer that will speed them on their spiritual journey of transformation. In a simile that opens the canto, the poet likens the pilgrim to the winner at the game of hazard: whereas he is pressed on every side by onlookers who hope for some share in the spoils, the loser in the match riman dolente (6.2; "is left disconsolate"). The loser here, of course, is Virgil, who lacks the prayer power that the souls long for. Freeing himself from the clamor of the shades, Dante approaches Virgil with a problem, the contradiction between the teaching of a specific passage in the Aeneid and the burden of the situation they have just gone through. The text in question is Aeneid 6. 337-83, in which the shade of the unburied Palinurus begs Aeneas to carry him across the river Styx-a journey that only the buried can undertake. Before Aeneas has the chance to reply to his comrade, the Sibyl intervenes with a pronouncement that brooks no dispute:

"Whence, O Palinurus, this wild longing of thine? Shall thou, unburied, view the Stygian waters and the Furies' strong river, and unbidden draw near the bank? Cease to dream that heaven's decrees may be turned aside by prayer."

Dante recalls these words quite specifically in order to throw them into question:

As soon as I was free of all those shades, whose one prayer was that others should pray, so that their way to blessedness may be sped, I began, "It seems to me, O my light, that you deny expressly in a certain passage that prayer bends the decree of heaven; and these people pray but for this-shall then their hope be vain, or are your words not rightly clear to me?"

Dante's query underscores his knowledge of the Acneid. He speaks of "a certain passage" (alcun testo), refers to the ancient poet's authoritative utterance ('l detto tuo), and expresses his own desire to make sure that he has been an attentive reader and careful interpreter, a worthy partaker of the revered word. Virgil's response takes pains to reaffirm Dante's accurate recollection of what he wrote (La mia scrittura; v. 34) and to explain why the "scripture" of the Aeneid can no longer be taken at its word.17