For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

With like affection did the shade of Anchises stretch forward (if our greatest Muse merits belief), when in Elysium he perceived his son. O blood of mine! O overbrimming grace of God! For whom was ever heaven's gate thrown open twice, as it has been for you?

Dante openly draws upon one of the most memorable scenes in the Aeneid (when father and son are passionately reunited in the Elysian Fields) only to demonstrate that the living cannot reach out and touch the dead (Aeneid 6.699-702). No doubt Dante could count on his reader's knowledge of that warm but failed Virgilian embrace; indeed, he could rely on it to supply a powerful emotional charge to what in the Paradiso is, after all, only an ardent meeting with a flame. No doubt he also wanted to highlight the difference between Virgil's tragedy and his comedy, to contrast the unalloyed joy of the pilgrim, who confesses here that he has "touched the limit of my beatitude and of my paradise" ("toccar lo fondo / de la mia gloria e del mio paradiso"; vv. 35-36), with the shadow of futility that falls upon the more heartfelt moment in the Aeneid: "Thrice there [Aeneas] strove to throw his arms about [his father's] neck; thrice the form, vainly clasped, fled from his hands, even as light winds, and most like a winged dream" (par levibus venus volucrique simillima somno; 6.699-702). But Dante does more than compare and contrast Virgil's text with his own; he casts doubt upon the veracity of the source he draws upon, wondering almost parenthetically if in this matter nostra maggior Musa merits our trust-a perfect example of biting the hand that feeds. The effect of this authorial suspicion is to suggest a distinction between the truth of the Commedia's account and the possible fiction of a poem that heretofore has been treated as if it were nothing less than history.

Toward the end of the encounter with Cacciaguida and just before this pater familias tells the pilgrim in no uncertain terms about the Florentine exile that has been but foreshadowed until now, we are given another reminder to consult our Aeneid as we turn Dante's page. But now we are asked not to take in at least a superficial likeness between the two texts but, rather, to plumb their profound dissimilarity-clarity on the one hand and hopeless obscurity on the other:

In no dark sayings, such as those in which the foolish folk of old once ensnared themselves, before the lamb of God who takes away sins was slain. But in clear words and with precise discourse that paternal love replied, hidden and revealed by his own smile.

Just a few lines before this passage, the pilgrim reminisces with Cacciaguida about the earlier course of his journey when he was a Virgllio congiunto (v. 19; "in Virgil's company"). Here the poet makes a conjunction with the Aeneid, from which come two accounts of the Sibyl's dark sayings (ambage). In book three, Helenus tells Aeneas and his men that they must seek their future from the inspired prophetess of Cumae, who spells out the decree of the fates on the fragile parchment of leaves: