From Vocational Emulation to Addition:
The “Complementing” of Vergil by
Mapheus Vegius and Dante

Stephen Beale

Few classical authors have matched the extent to which the Latin poet Vergil has permeated Western intellectual and literary development. His influence has touched writers from Ovid to Shakespeare (Highet 1948: 216) and his works have left their mark on most major intellectual movements of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[1] Domenico Comparetti neatly sums up the depth and breadth of Vergil’s impact: “As supreme centre of the literary inheritance left by the Romans, as representative of classical learning, as interpreter of that Roman sentiment which survived the downfall of the Empire, the name of Vergil acquired in Europe a significance well nigh equivalent to that of civilization itself” (Comparetti, 1895: 74). The responses to Vergil among the writers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance subsisted largely in allusions and imitations of Vergil. However, several authors introduced modifications into the art of imitation. The English poets Edmund Spenser and John Milton escalated this tradition of emulation by patterning their careers after Vergil’s (Neuse, 1978), perfecting the art of “vocational emulation.”

Although the Italian poet Vida originally pioneered the art of vocational emulation, two of the greatest Italian poets, Mapheus Vegius and Dante, did not conform to the strictures of Vergil’s career. Instead, both pursued radically innovative and different methods of treating Vergil. Mapheus Vegius wrote a thirteenth book of the Aeneid and Dante actually inserted the poet Vergil into his comedy. While on a superficial level these two strategies share no similar features, a closer examination reveals that in fact both authors take the art of emulating Vergil to an empyrean level by building on what he has already written—pioneering the art of “complementing” Vergil. Vegius more conspicuously complements Vergil by simply adding his Supplementum to Vergil’s text, which contrasts well with Dante’s free-standing masterpiece. Therefore, Dante's Divine Comedy is best viewed through the clarifying lens of Vegius' Supplementum.

To fully comprehend and appreciate Vegius’ sequel to the Aeneid and to understand Dante, it is first necessary to examine the context within which Vegius composed his Supplementum. Born in 1407 in the Lombard town of Lodi, Vegius first attended school in Milan and then transferred to the University in Pavia. At both institutions, Vegius immersed himself in the classics, especially Vergil. Anna Brinton depicts the intensity of Vegius’ studies: “The Puritan habit of discoursing in Biblical language is the closest literary parallel to Mapheus Vegius’ habit of employing words and phrases of his adored master, Vergil” (Brinton, 1930: 11-12). To study the Aeneid, Vegius utilized “the same epideictic filter as so many other humanists of the early Italian Renaissance [did]” (Kallendorf, 1989: 104). Vegius exhibits this attitude in his De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus when he describes Dido’s usefulness as a model of virtue and vice and Aeneas “a man endowed with every virtue” (De educatione 2.18, quoted in Kallendorf, 1989: 102) This allegorical approach required not only the use of reason but also the method of Faith to attain truth (Brinton, 1930: 26). In this respect, a fundamental problem emerged with Vegius’ reading of the Aeneid as an “allegory of the soul” (Brinton, 1930: 2): “As a parable . . . the poem was ethically incomplete. Not only was there a this-world ending, but the saint’s reward was not described” (Brinton 1930: 26). The need to complete the Aeneid and conform it to reigning allegorical interpretations was universally recognized, prompting several other Italian humanists to attempt their own thirteenth books to the Aeneid, including Vegius’ contemporary, Pier Candido Decembrio (Brinton, 1930: 1). Vegius’ supplement is notable because his book was the only one to gain acceptance in the literary world, earning its place beside Vergil’s first twelve books for a century and a half following its first printing in 1471 (Brinton, 1930: 1). Thus, this need to complete the Aeneid, from the perspective of allegory, inspired Mapheus Vegius to construct a supplement to Vergil’s Aeneid.

Seventy-five lines shorter than the shortest book of the Aeneid, Book IV, Mapheus Vegius’ Supplementum provides a condensed formula for “complementing” Vergil. In terms of the progression of the plot, Vegius continues the narrative and offers resolution: Aeneas accepts the surrender of the Rutulians; the Latins return Turnus’ corpse to his father Daunus in Ardea; and Aeneas emerges from the fray to marry Lavinia, found a city, and rule for three years. In reward for his righteousness, Aeneas is granted sainthood by Jupiter, and the hero takes his place among the stars. Two observations follow from the structure of Vegius’ continuation. First, by bringing the plot of the Aeneid to a happy ending, Vegius confers a “comic vision” on the Aeneid, reversing its equivocal ending of “tragic loss” (Kallendorf, 1989: 126). Second, Vegius, by recognizing Aeneas’ righteousness, imbues the Aeneid with a coherent “ordered universe that functions along such patently moral lines, where right is rewarded just as clearly as wrong is punished” (Kallendorf, 1989: 126). The burning of Ardea and the establishment of a new city symbolize the construction of this ordered moral universe. Vegius achieves these ends through the “epideictic” methods of “amplification” in which “virtuous accomplishments are described in greater detail, repeated for emphasis, [and] compared to the good deeds of others” (Kallendorf, 1989: 105). According to Kallendorf, these thirteen speeches serve a dual purpose: “praise for Aeneas and vituperation of Turnus” (1989: 101). Besides conveying most of the action of the book, the speeches also strictly adhere to the types of speeches Gilbert Highet outlines in the Aeneid (Kallendorf 1989: 108). Kallendorf demonstrates the extremes to which Vegius attempts to follow Vergil’s style and diction:

A little less than 47% of the Aeneid is direct speech, compared to a little more than 43% of the Supplement. Of Vergil’s speeches, 7.6 percent follow the patterns of formal rhetoric; for Vegio, the corresponding figure is 7.7 percent. In one important respect, Vegio’s Aeneas resembles Vergil’s: Neither gives a speech over twenty-nine lines long (1989: 108).

Moreover, Vegius’ diction echoes Vergil’s word usage, “creat[ing] an aura of genuiness with language” (Kallendorf, 1989: 113). For example, Supplementum 24 (“what madness grew so great inside your soul”) alludes to three passages of Vergil: Aeneid 5.465, Eclogues 2.69, and Eclogues 6.47. Likewise, the close of the supplement, in which Jupiter fulfills his promise to Venus, draws heavily from Aeneid 1.229-96. Thus, Mapheus Vegius’ Supplementum offers a simple formula for complementing Vergil: comic completion, establishment of an ordered moral universe, emphasis on speech over action, and faithfulness to the style and diction of the original Aeneid.

On what grounds can a comparison of Mapheus Vegius and Dante be justified? Vegius appends an extra chapter to Vergil’s text; Dante writes a three-part epic poem, and inserts Vergil as his guide through part of his epic journey. What similarities do they share? First, both authors certainly operated out of the same Italian tradition of allegorization, although Dante preceded Vegius by approximately a hundred years (Brinton, 1930: 24). Dorothy Sayers affirms the preeminence of allegory in Dante’s age: “Allegory was, in Dante’s time . . . the dominant literary form” (Sayers, 1957: 54). And also like Vegius, Dante wrote his own allegorizations of the Aeneid. (See Convivio 4.26.) Second, both authors create comedies. By adding an extra book to the Aeneid, Vegius transforms it from a tragedy into a comedy. Gilbert Highet explains how Dante’s Divine Comedy in much the same way stands as a comic complement to Vergil:

When we recall that Dante makes Vergil himself describe the Aeneid as ‘my tragedy,’ we see that Dante considers ‘comedy’ to connote what we would now call an epic, a poem of heroic length, provided it has a happy ending. By calling his own work ‘comedy’ in contrast to Vergil’s ‘tragedy,’ he clearly means to set up his poem as a complement, not perhaps a rival, but certainly a partner, to Vergil’s Aeneid (1949: 71). [Italics mine.]

Applying Vegius’ formula for a supplement to Dante’s Divine Comedy will reveal that although both authors utilize radically different methods, fundamentally they endeavor to accomplish the same effect: comically complementing Vergil. Furthermore, an analysis will reveal that many of the elements of Dante’s complement subtly resemble those prescribed by Vegius.

Beginning the comparison raises a central question. How does Dante signal to his readers that he is complementing Vergil’s tragic Aeneid? Unlike Vegius, Dante does not incorporate the text of the Aeneid in its entirety into his work and merely append a small comic book to adjust the ending. Instead, he writes his own epic, the Divine Comedy. Thus, a major task of examining Dante’s strategy for complementing Vergil involves first establishing the ways in which Dante sets up his own replica of the Aeneid within his text so that he can complement it. By writing his own epic, Dante frees himself of some of the strict limitations imposed on Vegius such as Vegius’ attention to style and diction. This independence permits him to represent the tragedy of the Aeneid through a multiplicity of devices, enriching and empowering his complement of Vergil’s Aeneid. Dante’s poem is composed of three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, symbolizing the transition from tragedy (hell, bad ending) to comedy (heaven, happy ending). Thus, the search for how Dante reproduces the Aeneid must begin with Inferno (and Purgatorio).

The first traces of the Aeneid can be found in the style of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Gilbert Highet explains that in one of his essays on vernacular Italian style, Dante suggests that “grand language should be kept for poetry written in the tragic manner,” and Highet notes that his poem “is far less elaborate in style, and its vocabulary far plainer, than the work of Vergil and other classical heroic poets” (Highet, 1949: 71). This attention to style and genre explains why Dante wrote in “vernacular Italian contrasted with literary Latin” (Highet, 1949: 72). It is a conspicuous departure from Mapheus Vegius, who of course writes his Supplementum in Latin.

Readers are reminded of the contrast between Vergil’s “high” Latin and Dante’s “low” Italian by Dante’s extensive use of allusions to Vergil’s Aeneid (Highet, 1949: 71-72). Collectively, these allusions play a major role in representing the entire text of the Aeneid. Highet estimates that these allusions number two hundred (1949: 79). Teodolinda Barolini makes an interesting observation about Dante’s placement of these allusions: “It is no secret that Dante’s imitation of the Aeneid decreases as the comedy progresses. Whitfield points out that of the two hundred uses of Vergil claimed by Moore, ‘90 of these passages concern the Inferno, 34 the Purgatorio, and 13 the Paradiso’” (Barolini, 1984: 201). Furthermore,

Petrocchi establishes a pattern of inverse relation between Dante’s use of translations from the Aeneid and his use of translations from the Bible: while translations from the Roman text occur seven times in the Inferno, five times in the Purgatorio, and only once in the Paradiso, translations from the Christian text occur twelve times in the Paradiso, eight times in the Purgatorio, and only twice in the Inferno. The Inferno is thus Vergil’s canticle . . . saturated with his text (Barolini, 1984: 201-202).

In other words, the concentration of the Aeneid allusions in the Inferno and their incremental replacement by Scriptural allusions in Paradiso alerts the reader to Dante’s complement of Vergil. The Inferno concerns human reason, indicated by the Aeneid; Paradiso marks the supremacy of divine revelation by profusely quoting the Bible. This hierarchy in no way diminishes the value of the Aeneid, rather it constitutes a “high complement”: Dante saw the Aeneid and human reason as a necessary prelude to ascending into God’s paradise. Dante confirms this relationship by using the “same language for its seminality that he employs for Scripture, and the word ‘autore’ is reserved exclusively for Vergil and the ‘author’ of Holy Scripture” (Jacoff and Schnapp, 1991: 2). Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey Schnapp summarize the strong connection between the two scriptures: “[Dante] sets up Vergil’s inevitable displacement. Just as the Old Testament ‘must’ give way to the ‘New,’ so…classical tragedy [‘must’ give way] to Christian comedy.” Thus just as Vegius requires the text to write his supplement, so also Dante reproduces the text by intensively alluding to the Aeneid.

Unlike Vegius, however, Dante edits the text of the Aeneid, a freedom Vegius denies himself. Robert Hollander asserts that the most obvious cases of these “misreadings” consist of three major examples from Inferno 20. The first instance concerns Manto, whom Vergil mentions in Aeneid 10.198-203. According to Hollander, Vergil “distorts the tradition of the founding of Mantua in an extraordinary way. . . .Vergil has gone out of his way to associate his birthplace with the vatic capacity” (1991: 78-79). Dante corrects for this distortion starting in Inferno 20.52-57, culminating in vv. 97-99. In Dante’s version, Manto may be the first to find the location of the city Mantua, but she does not found the city (1991: 81). Hollander interprets the emendation to signify that the price of incorporating Vergil’s text into the Divine Comedy means that it must be purified of its errors (1991: 83). He also lists Eurypylus, whom Dante modifies by putting in Aulis and making him an augur in Inferno 20.106-14 (1991: 85-86). Finally, he addresses the double placement of Manto “in the Malebolge in Inferno 20 and in Limbo in Purgatorio 22” (1991: 90). Hollander views the two Mantos as representing the two Mantos of Vergil and Statius and the double placement underlines the “paradox of the salvation of Statius and the damnation of Vergil” (1991: 92). What purpose is served by these changes? Hollander believes that they constitute “a pattern that shows Dante to be capable . . . of a playful and ironic distancing.” But this does not satisfactorily explain why Dante goes to the expense of altering such minor characters as Eurypylus (Barolini 1984: 221). Moreover, Dante even pays attention to such details as the giant Briareus, who is reduced from the unrealistic Brobdingnagian proportions attributed to him in the Aeneid to more realistic dimensions (Inf. 31.104-105). Barolini suggests that these changes reflect Dante’s attempt to restore “truth” to the Aeneid, to permit its employment in his Divine Comedy (Barolini 1984: 227). In this sense, his obsession with mathematical precision towards the giant mirrors the precision with which Vegius obeys the style and diction of Vergil. However, not only do these emendations restore complete truth to the Aeneid, they also bring it to life. Contrary to Hollander’s dismissive explanation that Dante is attempting to distance himself from the Aeneid (1991: 88), these revisions inject a life into the text that cannot be matched by simple allusions. Dante hints at this reading when in Inferno 13, 46-51 he breaks the branch of a soul. This action is regarded as necessary by Vergil because, “the truth was so incredible, /I [Vergil] urged him on to do the thing that grieves me” (Inf. 13.50-51). In the same way, the text of the Aeneid must be “broken” to make it believable, to make it come alive, to the readers. This effect is impossible with Vegius’ method of complementing the Aeneid (Biow, 1991: 50-57).

But Dante does not content himself with aggressively treating the Aeneid, he also utilizes Vergil to represent the tragic Aeneid. According to tradition, Vergil is viewed as the personification of Reason (Highet 1949: 76), and as the above paragraphs have demonstrated, the text of the Aeneid also serves as a symbol for reason. Implicitly a close relationship must exist between Vergil and his Aeneid. Indeed, Putnam views Vergil as an “emblem” of the Aeneid’s “many-leveled incompletisms” and of the “epic’s deep pessimism” (1991: 96-97). Thus, Vergil can be seen as symbolizing his own text. Jacoff and Schnapp similarly argue that Vergil and the Aeneid perform “coincidental” functions in the Divine Comedy (Jacoff and Schnapp 1991: 2). In her examination of Purgatorio 30.45-51, in which Vergil’s gradual departure parallels the manner in which Dante treats Vergil’s text, Rachel Jacoff establishes a stronger link between Vergil and his text: “This sequence of quotation, translation, and allusion offers . . . a textual equivalent of the fade-out of Vergil from the narrative” (Jacoff 1991: 131). This concomitant employment of both Vergil and multiple allusions to his Aeneid richly reinforces Dante’s replication of the tragic Aeneid, in preparation for his comic complement to it. Once again, this vividly double presence of the Aeneid is impossible with Vegius.

Not only does Vergil symbolize the Aeneid, he also acts in the Inferno and Purgatorio as a tutor to Dante, instructing him in poetry. According to Highet this must be one of his major roles; otherwise, Dante could have selected Aristotle as his personification of Reason (Highet 1949: 75). Highet also points out that when Dante addresses Vergil, he praises him by saying “you alone [are] the one from whom I took the noble style that was to bring me honor” (Inf. 1.86—87). Recognizing the differences between Dante’s and Vergil’s style, Highet takes the “noble style” to refer to “grandeur of imagination and sustained nobility of thought” (1949: 77). Dante further confirms Vergil’s alternative role as an instructor when he states, “[y]ou are my teacher, the first of all my authors” (Inf. 1.85). In several points of the Inferno, Vergil assumes this didactic task of imparting his knowledge of poetry to Dante. For example, Vergil initiates Dante’s education by introducing him to the other major classical authors in Inferno 4: Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Statius (Curtius, 1953: 17). Dante writes that “Greater honor still they deigned to grant me:/ they welcomed me as one of their own group,/ so that I numbered sixth among such minds” (Inf. 4.100-102). This invitation indicates that Dante, apprentice to Vergil, will eventually acquire such a level of proficiency as a poet that he will become a great poet himself, equal to Vergil (Inf. 78ff, quoted in Curtius 1953: 17). This theory of Vergil the poet-guide sheds new light on the passage in Inferno 13 in which Dante breaks the branch (Inf. 13.22—51). While the passage certainly constitutes a powerful moment in which Vergil’s text is brought to life—as part of the instruction of Dante—it also marks the moment when Dante first begins to supersede Vergil as a writer. The pain Vergil feels follows from “the superior power of Dante’s Christian art to represent the marvelous” (Biow, 1991: 57). In other words, Dante the author’s rendition of Dante the pilgrim’s breaking of the branch is superior to Vergil’s version in the Aeneid. Ironically just at the moment when his text bursts into life, it is superseded by Dante’s text, foreshadowing the moment in purgatory when Christian comedy replaces classical tragedy. Thus, this role of Vergil as a teacher of poetry intensifies and draws attention to Dante’s complement of Vergil.

So, in a variety of multidimensional ways, Dante prepares his readers for the complementing of Vergil and his Aeneid. Dante preemptively initiates the process of complementing through the course of the Inferno and Purgatorio: Vergil’s text sustains numerous modifications and Vergil himself is gradually outdone as a poet by Dante. Finally, in Paradiso, Dante consummates his complement of Vergil’s Aeneid. The most obvious level of complementing is the comic nature of the Divine Comedy in that the protagonist, Dante, who stands for Aeneas (Highet, 1949: 78), is absorbed into heaven, having been transformed into a Christ figure (Putnam, 1991: 107). And once again, the passage in Inferno 13 (22-51) also identifies Dante as an Aeneas figure. (See also Haskins, 1939: 82.) Dante suggests another deeper level of complementing when he replaces Vergil with Beatrice, Reason, with Divine Revelation and Grace (Demaray 1974: 111). Finally, like Vegius, Dante furnishes his universe with a very complex moral order represented by its physical geography. Dante is meticulously thorough in constructing this moral order—expanding greatly on Vegius’ simple order in which Aeneas is reconciled with Drances and Latinus, in which the gods appear as speakers, and in which Aeneas builds a new city and is absorbed into heaven. Thus, Dante’s Divine Comedy, like Vegius’ Supplementum both comically resolves the plot and institutes a moral order. In one other respect Dante also foreshadows Vegius—the use of speeches to narrate events. Although the Divine Comedy’s plot centers around active characters, much of it is also narrated through the guides Vergil and Beatrice, who often interpret events for the pilgrim and for the reader. Again, the scene from Inferno 13 serves as an excellent example: Dante never speaks a word as he performs the action of breaking the branch. Instead, Vergil narrates and explains the events to the reader. In only one major respect, Dante differs from Vegius: he does not yoke himself to the text of the Aeneid. Instead of letting it constrain him, he controls it by his manipulation of allusions to the Aeneid and his multidimensional employment of its author, Vergil, as a character in his story.

The conscious attempt to “complement” Vergil represents the acme of the efforts of Christian novelists and epic poets to “Christianize Vergil.” While John Milton and Edmund Spenser retrace the steps of Vergil’s own career in order that they might compose Christian epics to “rival” his Aeneid, Mapheus Vegius and Dante attempt to integrate Vergil and his Aeneid into the process of Christianization, reflecting their deepest respect for Vergil and their intimacy with him and his text. By acknowledging Reason, personified by Vergil, as a necessary step in the ascent of man into God’s grace, they acknowledge a role for Vergil in the Christian world. Through their intensive allusion to and emulation of Vergil, to the point that both authors add to his work, Mapheus Vegius and Dante constitute the ultimate in Western emulation of Vergil. Indeed, by acknowledging Vergil’s greatness, and by incorporating him as an entity and by intimately incorporating his text into their works, the authors not only perfect the emulation of Vergil, they also pioneer the art of comically complementing him.

References

Alighieri, Dante. 1984. The Portable Dante. Edited by Mark Musa. New York: The Penguin Group.

Brinton, Anna Cox. 1930. Mapheus Vegius and His Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Barolini, Teodolinda. 1984. Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Biow, Douglas. 1991. “From Ignorance to Knowledge: The Marvelous in Inferno 13.” The Poetry of Allusion: Vergil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ Edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Comparetti, Domenico. 1895. Vergil in the Middle Ages. London: S. Sonnenschein.

Curtius, E.R. 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Demaray, John I. 1974. The Invention of Dante’s Commedia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Haskins, Charles Homer. 1939. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Highet, Gilbert. 1949. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. London: Oxford University Press.

Hollander, Robert. 1991. “Dante’s Misreadings of the Aeneid in Inferno 20.” The Poetry of Allusion: Vergil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ Edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jacoff, Rachel and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. 1991. “Introduction.” The Poetry of Allusion: Vergil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ Edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jacoff, Rachel. 1991. “Intertextualities in Arcadia: Purgatorio 30.45-51.” The Poetry of Allusion: Vergil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ Edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kallendorf, Criag. 1989. In Praise of Aeneas: Vergil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance. Hanover: University Press of New England.

Neuse, Richard. 1978. “Milton and Spenser: the Vergilian Triad Revisited.” Journal of English Literary History, Winter, pp. 607-639.

Putnam, Michael C. J. 1991. “Vergil’s Inferno.” The Poetry of Allusion: Vergil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ Edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sayers, Dorothy. 1957. Further Papers on Dante. New York.

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[1] Brinton: “Interpretation of the Aeneid is a barometer which registers changes in the thought-climate of Western civilization.”

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