Virgils, from Dante to Milton

Abstract

A medieval Companion to Virgil would not have presented him as the author of a tightly limited canon, nor would it have related his works, as modern scholars do, to the context of political life in the early principate or to their Greek sources. It would probably have reproduced exemplary stories about the poet's life drawn from the biography attributed to Donatus, perhaps augmented with tales, which enjoyed widespread circulation in thirteenth-century Italy, of Virgil the magician (whose feats included ridding Naples of flies with a magic bronze statue). It might well have included discussion of the Appendix Virgiliana, the Culex, Ciris and miscellaneous epigrams, which were widely believed to be Virgilian juvenilia, and it would certainly also have contained a large quantity of allegorical commentary on Virgil's works. The Fourth Eclogue was often read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, while commentators such as Fulgentius (in the fifth century) established a reading of the first half of the Aeneid - which persisted until the sixteenth century - as an allegory of the moral progress of the soul from childish cupidity to maturity.

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