[In the following essay, Forcione details the influence of the Aethiopica in sixteenth century literary circles.]

Not everyone can be a Theagenes or an Aristotle.

Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa

I offer you the Trabajos de Persiles, a book which dares to compete with Heliodorus.

Cervantes

In 1526, one year before Alessandro de' Pazzi wrote the dedication to the translation of Aristotle's Poetics which would lead to the reorientation of Renaissance literary theory, an event occurred which was to have far-reaching consequences in the development of the European prose narrative. During the sack of Buda by the Turks, a soldier discovered the richly bound manuscript of Heliodorus' Aethiopica in the library of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. Shortly thereafter this postclassical Greek romance¹ came into the possession of Vincentius Obsopoeus, who published it in Greek in Basel in 1534. In 1547 Amyot's French translation appeared, to be followed shortly by Warschewicski's Latin (1552) and Ghini's Italian (1556) versions. The Spanish humanists were quick to turn their attention to the newly discovered classical work, and the celebrated Hellenist, Francisco de Vergara undertook the task of translating it. Unfortunately his translation has not survived; and so credit for the first Spanish rendering of the Ethiopian History must go to an unknown translator, whose version, based on Amyot's French, appeared in Antwerp in 1554. In 1587 Fernando de Mena, claiming to offer a more faithful translation by working from the original Greek text, published a new edition in Alcalá de Henares.²

In this chapter I am not concerned with the many cases of specific influence which Heliodorus' work had on all forms of literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³ As I am seeking to clarify Cervantes' artistic intentions and aspirations in the plan of the work which he regarded as his masterpiece, I have found it more fruitful to situate the Greek work within the climate of literary tastes and problems which I have attempted to describe above in Chapter I. Various critical documents indicate beyond all doubt, first, that the Ethiopian History was a frequent topic of discussion among the Renaissance classicists and was measured favorably by all the aesthetic categories which they had derived in their rigorous exegesis of the poetics of Horace and Aristotle, and, second, that the Greek work in its relation to the old prose romances of chivalry came to occupy a place in literary theorizing analogous to that of the classical epic in its relation to the verse romances.

By close examination of the major theoretical writings concerning the subject, I hope to reveal how the Ethiopian History was drawn into the orbit of contemporary literary theorizing and to shed more light on those fundamental aesthetic preoccupations—the legitimation of the marvelous and the matter of unity—which we must understand if we wish to understand the Persiles and numerous scenes in the Quixote. I find it convenient to begin with two documents which chronologically frame the development of the prose narrative from which Heliodorus' work cannot be dissociated. The one points toward all the major lines of development that the ensuing decades would witness, the other recapitulates the entire development within a fully formulated, classical theory of literature. I begin with the latter, reversing the order followed in the first chapter, for in its application of the Horatian-Aristotelian canon to the prose narrative, the stance represented by the document is analogous to that of Tasso's discourses in relation to the verse epic.

PIERRE-DANIEL HUET

Huet's Traité de l'origine des romans (1670) is the first systematic historical and critical treatment of the prose narrative in the history of criticism.⁴ In tracing the development of the genre from its origins in the Milesian fables to the state of perfection which it reaches in the heroic roman of his contemporary, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Huet accords to Heliodorus a most important role. The Ethiopian History represents for him a perfected form which the genre had achieved only after centuries and which was completely lost during the period of barbarism following the collapse of ancient civilization. However, at the moment when the medieval roman (i.e., the romance of chivalry) had fallen from its modest peak of aesthetic refinement in the late verse romances of the Italians (i.e., Ariosto and Boiardo) and found itself in a state of complete decay, Heliodorus' masterpiece was discovered. With the example of this “Homer of the roman” before them, writers undertook the process of purification which led to the perfection of the seventeenth-century French works.

In his analysis Huet establishes a division between roman regulier and roman irregulier, or, works which conform to high standards of art and those which do not. Huet's criteria of excellence include both didactic and aesthetic values. The major purpose of the roman is educational; hence both natural and moral wisdom are necessities in its composition (“The principal aim of romans … is the instruction of their readers, who must always be shown virtue rewarded and vice punished”).⁵ Of equal significance, however, are its observance of verisimilitude in its subject matter and plot (“verisimilitude, which is not always to be found in history, is essential to the roman”;⁶romanciers must know how to “tell lies resembling the truth” [conter des mensonges semblables à la verité]) and its artistically coherent structure, which excludes any unessential elements and achieves a natural integration of episode and main plot.⁷ These standards are obviously derived from the classical movement in criticism, and in effect Huet's theoretical effort was little more than an application to the roman of the theories on epic poetry which had been developed in the sixteenth century by the various theorists associated with the exegesis of Aristotle's Poetics. In fact at one point in his tract, he admits: “I call regular those [romans] which conform to the rules of the heroic poem.”⁸

Like nearly all theorists of the Renaissance Huet follows Aristotle in regarding imitation and not verse as distinguishing poetry from nonpoetry; romans are poems, and he goes so far as to say that a metrical work can be a roman, offering Theodorus Podromus' History of Rhodantes and Dosikles as an example (p. 178).⁹ In his occasional attempts to make distinctions between roman and epic, Huet succeeds merely in bringing into the foreground certain secondary possibilities for epic composition encompassed in the literary theorizing of the preceding century. Epic, in this theory, deals primarily with matters of war and politics and only occasionally with love, whereas romans “have love as their principal subject and treat politics and war only incidentally.”¹⁰ As for the fusion of the marvelous and the verisimilar, which the classicists had demanded in the epic, Huet claims that the romancier must pay more attention to the latter, and the epic poet more to the former, although he can never sacrifice verisimilitude. Moreover, although both romancier and epic poet must observe unity of plot, the former enjoys a greater license in the introduction of varied subject matter. Like the epic and tragic poets, the writer of romans must mingle the true, or the historical, and the false to construct a plausible plot. However, recalling Aristotle's recommendations of the historical plot for tragedy as well as his allowance for the possibility of an entirely fictious, plot, Huet adds that in the roman the entirely feigned plot is particularly successful (“la fiction totale de l'argument est plus recevable dans les Romans” [p. 118]).¹¹ In the judgment of Huet, Heliodorus is the writer who perfected the artistic possibilities of the genre and whose work has stood as a model for succeeding romanciers; he is indeed the Homer of the roman.

Until then nothing more artfully contrived had been seen, nothing more finished in the art of writing romans, than the adventures of Theagenes and Chariklea. Nothing is more chaste than their amours … in them are seen much fertility and inventiveness. Events are frequent therein, new, verisimilar, well arranged, and well worked out. The denouement is admirable; it is natural; it arises naturally out of the subject; and nothing is more touching or more pathetic. The horror of the sacrifices, in which Theagenes and Chariklea are to be offered up and in which the heroine's beauty and admirable qualities inspired compassion in everyone, is followed by the joy of seeing this young woman emerge from this danger through the recognition of her parents and put an end to her lengthy misfortunes by a happy marriage to her lover, to whom she brings for a dowry the crown of Ethiopia. … it served as a model to all writers of romans who followed it, and it may be said just as truthfully that they have all drawn upon it, as it is said that all poets have drawn upon the model of Homer.¹²

Significant for our purposes is Huet's analysis of the epoch succeeding the invasions of the barbarians as a period of decadence in the history of the roman, in which the perfection of the Greek roman regulier was forgotten and a new, inferior type emerged in France, of which the Spanish romans (i.e., the libros de caballerías) and Italian romanzi are the most modern descendants. Huet theorizes that the old French romances were the developments of earlier attempts to write historical chronicles by men who were incapable of distinguishing between the true and the false, e.g., Turpin, Hunibaldus Francus, Teilessen, and Melkinus. The fantasies of these attempts at historiography were so appealing to the audience of the Middle Ages that they soon disengaged completely from the bonds linking them to reality, and a new literary genre was born (see pp. 192-195). Huet has little respect for this degeneration in the fortunes of the roman: “Thus Spain and Italy received from us an art which was the fruit of our ignorance and of our rudeness.”¹³ The pleasure offered by the medieval works is based on the attraction which the uncultivated mind feels for the purely fantastic; edifying and instructive matter is wanting in them; and in their composition they fail to follow the rules of the romans reguliers (218-219). In contrast to the tightly coherent structure achieved by Heliodorus the “old French had multiplied the actions without any kind of order, without proper connections, and without art. It is they whom the Italians have imitated. In taking the romans from them, they have taken their defects.”¹⁴

Huet concludes his study on the optimistic note that the long period of decadence, in which the romance of chivalry flourished, has finally ended, and that through the efforts of d'Urfé (“the first to rescue our romans from barbarism and to subject them to the rules”)¹⁵ and Mademoiselle de Scudéry the genre has rediscovered the perfection which it had once known with Heliodorus' work.¹⁶

In summary, Huet's treatise presents a theory of prose fiction based entirely on Aristotelian-Horatian poetic doctrines. It applies to the prose narrative the theory of epic poetry developed by classicists of the preceding century (i.e., heroism, love, unity, verisimilitude, the exemplary, the encyclopedic). It celebrates Heliodorus as the example of the perfection achieved by the Greeks in the cultivation of the roman regulier and therefore as a model for subsequent romanciers. And finally, it clearly formulates a distinction between the roman regulier of Heliodorus and Huet's contemporaries and the primitive romance of chivalry.

AMYOT

From Huet's vantage point the process which brought the end of the romance of chivalry and the triumph of the “purified” roman of his epoch is complete and clear. For our purposes it is necessary to direct our attention to the incipient stages of the process, following the steps which led to Cervantes' attempt to realize aesthetically all the goals which Huet's discursive formulation would set for the prose narrative fifty years later. Appearing in 1617, the Persiles stands on the threshold of the movement in prose fiction which Huet was to applaud. However, in reality the roots of the Persiles reach back through three quarters of a century of literary theorizing to those basic aesthetic problems raised by the early critics of the romance of chivalry. It is significant that perhaps the first broadly aesthetic evaluation of the romances of chivalry which appeared in Spain was the preface by which J. Amyot introduced his 1547 French translation of Heliodorus' Ethiopian History. The 1554 Spanish version is accompanied by this document, included by “a secret friend of his country” (un secreto amigo de su patria), who redirects Amyot's criticism of the old French romances against their Spanish counterparts.¹⁷

Amyot's standards of aesthetic evaluation are by his own admission derived from Horace's Ars Poetica and Strabo's discussion of poetry in the first two parts of Book I of the Geography. In the last analysis, poetry is to be judged for its utility and is subordinate to historical writing. It is justified insofar as delight and relaxation from the serious side of life are demanded by humanity in its weakness.¹⁸ Nevertheless, its instructive value is of primary importance, and by no means is a poet to rely solely on delight through the presentation of pleasing fictions. By synthesizing passages of Horace and Strabo, Amyot derives a theory of verisimilitude which is essentially the same as that by which the Renaissance interpreters of Aristotle's Poetics would repeatedly judge the romances. Invoking Horace, he claims that “it is necessary that things which are feigned for entertainment be close to the truth.”¹⁹ He retreats, however, from the possible implication that poetry could conceivably be entirely based on “untruth” by adding “it is not necessary that everything be feigned, for, as we know, this is not even permitted to the poets themselves”²⁰ and interpreting Strabo's formula for poetic creation:

Because, as Strabo writes so learnedly, the art of poetic invention consists of three things: first, of history, the aim of which is truth. Consequently it is not permitted that poets, when speaking of natural things, should write as they please, contradicting truth, because this would be attributed not to their license or art, but rather to their ignorance. Secondly, of order and disposition, the aim of which is to present the subject matter and to hold the reader's attention. Thirdly, of fiction, the aim of which is to inspire wonder and to arouse that delectation which proceeds from the experience of the novelty of things which are strange and wonderful. Accordingly, unrestricted license in the inclusion of things should be all the more prohibited in fictions which we wish to disguise with the name of true history. It is necessary to mix intelligently truth and falsehood, maintaining always the appearance of truth and relating the one to the other, so that there is no discord between the beginning and the middle, and between the middle and the end.²¹

The passage is characteristic of the dominant tendencies of Renaissance criticism. It reveals both the theorists' inability to divorce the poetic process from standards of informative or historical writing, standards which we no longer regard as relevant to the literary work, and their distrust of the purely fantastic, which is, as it were, almost grudgingly recognized as necessary but which is carefully restricted so as to exclude the implausible. Writing in the epoch in which Aristotle's doctrine containing a defense of the marvelous was just beginning to affect critical circles in Italy, Amyot in effect is acknowledging the necessary role of a marvelous which may be based on fiction, as Strabo had done in discussing the Homeric poems, and offering a compromise solution to the problem raised by the suspicious aesthetic category. His compromise is essentially the same as that which all commentators of the Poetics will make as they attempt to reconcile Aristotle's acknowledgment of the necessity of the marvelous with his demand for verisimilitude.

It is significant that in his discussion of verisimilitude Amyot refers to the type of literature represented by Heliodorus' work and by the older romances of chivalry as fictions written in the form of histories and disguised “with the name of true history.” For at this moment the traditional, uncritical use of the word historia to refer to both works of historiography and works of imaginative fiction, specifically the romances of chivalry, was coming into sharp criticism by the emerging historiography of Renaissance humanists,²² a criticism that would be reinforced by the influential Aristotelian differentiation of the provinces of the poet and the historian. Indeed Amyot's use of the term suggests that its long-established literary usage is still unshaken by the new critical forces. To him “disguised history” (historia disfrazada) remains a valid genre of prose literature, and Heliodorus' work in contrast to the old romances is an example of the perfectibility of the genre. Unlike its predecessors it combines the true and the false ideally to present an illusion of reality (aparencia de verdad). This flexibility within the range of uses of the term “history” is important to note at this point. As we shall see, Cervantes will exploit it for a humorous equivocation throughout his literary production, most notably in his creation of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli.

The statement of the aesthetic necessity of verisimilitude in the “disguised history” or “book of entertainment” (libro de entretenimiento) is the point of departure for a full-scale attack on the romances of chivalry, “books of this type which in the past have been written in our Spanish tongue.”²³ Amyot's critique demonstrates well the degree to which didactic and aesthetic criteria were intertwined in the Renaissance humanist's view of art. Recalling the Horatian judgment of grotesque art which combines haphazardly various parts into unnatural wholes, a judgment which since Petrarch's “dream of sick minds and foolishness of romances” had become a topic of criticism of the romances, Amyot writes of the older works: “They are usually so dissonant and so removed from any resemblance to truth that they are more similar to the dreams of a sick man who raves in his fits of fever than to the inventions of a man of acumen and sound judgment.” Moreover, in these works there is “no erudition, no knowledge of antiquity, nor a single thing, in truth, from which one may profit.”²⁴ Amyot concludes that, lacking verisimilitude, erudition, and edification, the works cannot please a “good intellect,” which does not recognize the appeal of “coarse and rude things.” Here we observe another characteristic feature of the Renaissance critical movement, which will become a significant factor in the polemic over Ariosto and Tasso and in Cervantes' various examinations of the problems underlying the aims and functions of literature. Like nearly all Renaissance theorists Amyot stresses the importance of reason and education in the creation and apprehension of a work of art and treats the lower faculties of perception, i.e., the senses and the imagination, with contempt. The romances are the products of a sick mind rather than a healthy one (sano juicio). The pleasure that they afford is idle (ocioso), for it is not directed at the intellect (juicio). Underlying Amyot's demand for plausibility is an assumption which Tasso and his fellow neo-Aristotelians will develop further in their theories of verisimilitude and which Cervantes' Canon of Toledo will unquestioningly accept. An aesthetic pleasure which is based on reason is allegedly impossible if the object of apprehension clashes with the laws of empirical reality or, viewed in terms of a work of literature, if the things and actions which form the plot do not faithfully reflect the external world. “But just as among paintings the ones which represent the truth of the natural world are judged to be best by those who know, so among fictions the ones which are closer to nature and in which there is more verisimilitude please those who measure their enjoyment with their rational faculties and take their pleasure wisely.”²⁵

The educated reader will find all that is wanting in the old Spanish romances in Heliodorus' Ethiopian History. It is an “ingenious fiction” (ingeniosa ficción), by which Amyot apparently, in accordance with Strabo's counsel on the legitimate marvelous, means a plausible plot, or what most Renaissance neo-Aristotelians, including Cervantes' Canon of Toledo, will refer to as a “verisimilar fiction.” In the work there are “beautiful discourses taken from natural and moral philosophy, many notable sayings and pithy maxims, and many orations and colloquies, in which the art of eloquence is employed very well.”²⁶ Amyot's enthusiasm for such qualities is illustrative of the rhetorical emphasis of the Horatian critical tradition which will survive in the Renaissance commentaries of Aristotle's Poetics. As we shall see, rhetoric remains an important part of the Aristotelian-Horatian Canon of Toledo's formula for the perfect book of chivalry. And finally the reader of the Ethiopian History will observe “human passions and inclinations painted so true to life and with such propriety that no one will be able to find in it any inspiration for wrong-doing. For the author shows all illicit and dishonorable inclinations leading to unhappiness and all good and honorable ones leading to happiness.”²⁷ Behind these words of praise lie the Horatian precepts on the importance of pathos in poetry, the necessity that emotions be presented plausibly, and the civilizing and moral mission that poetry undertakes.²⁸

At this point in his evaluation of Heliodorus' work Amyot turns his attention from all that concerns the subject matter and invention to the second traditional category governing rhetorical writing, dispositio, and voices a judgment which is to remain central to all succeeding commentaries on the Ethiopian History:

And certainly the disposition is extraordinary, because he begins in the middle of the history, just as heroic poets do; and this immediately causes the readers to marvel and arouses in them the passionate desire to hear and understand the beginning; and moreover the author maintains their attention through the ingenious relating of his story, for they do not understand what they have read at the beginning of the first book until they see the end of the fifth; and when they have arrived at that point, they find themselves even more eager to see the end than they have been to see the beginning. Thus the reader's mind remains constantly in suspense until he comes to the conclusion, which then leaves him satisfied in the way in which people are satisfied when they finally possess and enjoy a thing which they have long hoped for and desired.²⁹

Amyot's praise of Heliodorus' disposition and by implication his criticism of that of the older “disguised histories” rests on a veneration of the classical epics of Homer and Virgil and once again on the authority of his master in aesthetic matters, Horace. Horace's praise of Homer's narrative economy and swiftness based on the in-medias-res beginning was well-known to the Renaissance, and there were few pieces of literary theory dealing with the epic or the romanzi which failed to mention the “egg of Leda.” Amyot's understanding of the in-medias-res structural technique, however, goes beyond that of Horace and is undoubtedly the product of his correct interpretation of Heliodorus' peculiar technique. It is not artistic selectivity and economy that he applauds but rather the admiratio occasioned by the suspense that the structure of the work arouses. Horace judges the basis of Homer's technique to be the general knowledge that his audience shares with the poet about the events that precede the opening moment of the narrative.³⁰ Amyot correctly interprets Heliodorus' structure as based on the reader's total ignorance of the occurrences surrounding the origins of the wanderings of his heroes and his desire to discover them. Amyot's association of suspense and admiratio with the in-medias-res technique was generally accepted by Renaissance theorists in the many discussions of the subject produced in the polemic surrounding heroic literature, both epic and romance.

After having praised the work of Heliodorus on the grounds discussed above, Amyot abruptly turns about-face and retracts his praise: “Still I do not wish to waste much time recommending it, for in the final analysis it is merely a work of fiction.”³¹ Again we observe the ambiguous attitude toward literature of entertainment characteristic of the Renaissance humanist, who could judge the products of the creative imagination only in reference to the practical needs of life. He proceeds to ask forgiveness of the educated for having devoted his energies to such an insignificant task, to request that they accept his work as a means of relaxation from more serious readings, and to remind them that he translated the Ethiopian History in spare moments to relax from his work on “other better and more fruitful translations,” referring undoubtedly to his long labors on the works of Plutarch. In the midst of this apology he inserts a criticism not of imaginative literature in general but of the Ethiopian History in particular, a criticism that will be repeated by subsequent judgments of the work and may suggest that Cervantes did indeed think that he could surpass his model. In the Ethiopian History one fails to find grandeur, for its hero Theagenes does not perform “any memorable feat of arms.”

In conclusion Amyot's translation of Heliodorus appears at a moment of crisis in the history of the genre of medieval romance both in its verse form in Italy and its prose form in France and Spain. His prologue is of particular significance in Spain, for it offers one of the earliest documents containing an attack on the romances of chivalry from a fully formulated aesthetic view of literature. As such it can be compared with the roughly contemporaneous attacks on the Spanish romances of the Aristotelians Trissino and Pigna in Italy and stands as an example of the aesthetic criteria associated with Renaissance humanism in its orientation toward the informative and edifying possibilities of literature³² and in its derivation from the classical theories of poetry of Horace and Strabo. However, Amyot's prologue is most important in its introduction of Heliodorus' work as a new, purified form of the “disguised history,” acceptable to the prevailing tastes in literature, which had already judged the older form to be unsatisfactory.

In his celebration of the Greek romance Amyot employs critical standards which will be taken over with minor modification in the emerging Aristotelianism that will dominate the academic movements of the second half of the century and lead to the influential theories of Tasso. In comparing the disposition of the Ethiopian History to that of the heroic poems and acclaiming the erudition, eloquence, and moral and natural philosophy which the work offers—qualities traditionally celebrated in Homer and Virgil—Amyot prepares the way for the theoretical acceptance of the possibility of the epic in prose. It will in fact become a frequent topic of literary discussion with the popularization of Aristotle's Poetics and its affirmation that imitation and not meter is the factor differentiating poetry from nonpoetry.

SCALIGER

In 1561, seven years after Amyot's prologue appeared in Spain, Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetices libri septem was published posthumously in Lyon. This voluminous and influential treatise offered a synthesis of Horatian and Aristotelian literary theory, a critical-historical discussion of all categories of literature, a manual of instruction for those who would undertake the profession of poet, and an encyclopedic presentation of critical evaluations of works of literature written in the classical tongues. As we have seen, Amyot observes an analogy between the Ethiopian History and the works of the heroic poets in narrative structure. However, far from proceeding from analogy to identification, he not only fails to classify Heliodorus' work as epic but also censures it for its lack of epic subject matter, evidently adhering strictly to Horace's “Res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella” as the formula for epic poetry. Scaliger goes further than Amyot in his estimation of Heliodorus. While refusing to admit the possibility of an epic in prose,³³ he offers the Greek work as a model for the disposition of an epic and, more significantly, places its author in the company of the “greatest of all poets,” Virgil.

For Scaliger, the epic is the highest form of poetry, that which is “most noble of all, because it contains all possible subject matter” (“omnium est princeps: quia continet materias universas”) and sets the standards for all other forms.³⁴ Deriving his formula for epic composition from Aristotle and Horace, he maintains that the poet must draw his subject matter from the “birth, life, and deeds of heroes” (heroum genus, vita, gesta).³⁵ In matters of disposition he proclaims two basic laws. The poet shall not begin his work ab ovo but shall seize an important event from which all else of necessity follows. Thus the in-medias-res technique is not associated with suspense as it had been in Amyot's prologue, but with unity of action. The second law, however, emphasizes the importance of suspense in the narrative structure of epic. Aristotle would give the epic poet license to incorporate into his work varying but relevant episodes to relieve the hearer of the boredom that the poet would inevitably arouse if he limited himself to the narration of the main plot. Basing his argument on Aristotle's discussion of this point, Scaliger recommends interruptions and fragmentations of the major narrative thread both for the sake of holding the hearer in suspense and arousing in him admiratio through the variety which episodes afford.³⁶ In words which recall those which Amyot used in discussing the effect of Heliodorus' in-medias-res structure, Scaliger writes: “Accordingly you should not set forth at the beginning what you select for the beginning, so that the mind of the listener is held in suspense, for he seeks something that does not yet exist. This, to be sure, is the unique or outstanding virtue, to hold the listener as if he were a captive.” In illustration of the perfectibility of this technique he adduces the example of the summus poeta Virgil, whose history of Camilla represents the way in which the poet should combine relevant episode and main plot for suspense and variety. Following his praise of Virgil, he adds: “You observe this most splendid manner of constructing a work in Heliodorus' Ethiopian History, a book which I think should be read with great attention by the epic poet and which should be proposed to him as the best model possible.”³⁷

The recognition of the Ethiopian History as an example of the perfect execution of the classical precepts of Horace and Aristotle, the elevation of it to the rank of model for contemporary poets who would attempt to re-create the classical epic, and the association of Heliodorus with Virgil mark a high point in the literary fortunes of the Greek romance in the Renaissance, a point from which it will not descend for over a century.

TASSO

Torquato Tasso's unending literary preoccupation was with the re-creation of the classical epic, and, as we would expect, he devotes little attention in his writings to the prose narrative and the work of Heliodorus. In the Italian literary tradition the prose romances were thoroughly eclipsed by the dazzling creations of Ariosto and Boiardo,³⁸ and it was with these that Tasso had to reckon in his struggle to press their undeniable qualities into the classical mold of epic poetry. His attempt was analogous to that which Cervantes' canon proposes for the epic in prose, but the question of prose narrative did not concern him. Nevertheless, there are several indications that he held Heliodorus' work in high esteem and like Scaliger looked upon it as a model for epic composition. It is well known that the history of the warrior maiden Clorinda of the Gerusalemme liberata (Canto XII) is modeled closely on that of Chariklea, the heroine of the Aethiopica.³⁹ More important for us are the few theoretical observations about Heliodorus' work scattered through his critical writings.

In his early Dell'arte poetica (written between 1561 and 1566, published in 1587), Tasso broadens the range of epic subject matter from the traditional res gestae regumque, which we have observed in Amyot and Scaliger's theories, to include love. It should be recalled that Amyot had censured the Ethiopian History for the lack of grandeur in its passive hero. Tasso admits that love is not so lofty a subject as heroic deeds and that a poem based on it cannot equal the perfection of the Aeneid, but maintains that the cases of Florio and Biancofiore and Theagenes and Chariklea prove the suitability of the theme in epic.

Although I do not deny that a heroic poem can be made about less magnificent events, such as the amours of Florio and those of Theagenes and Chariklea, nevertheless, in the most perfect poem, the formula for which we are now seeking, it is necessary that the subject matter be in itself of the highest quality in nobility and excellence.⁴⁰

What is interesting in this passage is the underlying assumption that the prose narrative of Heliodorus is categorized as epic poetry as well as the absence of any speculation as to the validity of this assumption. Here Tasso remains consistent with his acceptance of Aristotle's principle that imitation and not meter is the distinguishing feature between poetry and nonpoetry, e.g., historical writing.

In a letter to Scipione Gonzaga, May 20, 1575, Tasso echoes the familiar evaluation of Heliodorus' work as a model for disposition in epic. In discussing the critical problem of incorporating episodes into a unified plot, Tasso uses words which recall Amyot's praise of Heliodorus' technique of capturing the reader's interest by offering him an action at its midpoint and arousing in him the desire to discover its origins: “Holding the listener in suspense as he proceeds from confusion to clarity, from the universal to the particular, is the enduring art of Virgil; and this is one of the reasons why Heliodorus is so enjoyable.” Claiming to have employed this technique of fragmentary clarification many times in his work, Tasso points to the history of Erminia in the Liberata. In the third canto of his poem the reader discovers “a shadowy fragment of confused information” about the maiden; “his knowledge of her becomes more distinct in the sixth canto; and in the penultimate canto it is rounded out with most specific detail revealed through her own words.”⁴¹ Here we observe again the association of Heliodorus with Virgil and the recommendation of his work as a model for the epic poet which first appeared in Scaliger's poetics. It is well to note how Tasso's words on his development of the Erminia narrative thread could be applied to Cervantes' exposition of the history of Persiles and Sigismunda, which is offered the reader in shadowy fragments and is fully illuminated only in the final chapter of the work.

EL PINCIANO

THE EPIC IN PROSE

The influence of Aristotle's Poetics was slow in spreading to Spain. The first full exposition in Spanish of the doctrines and critical problems which had been dominating Italian academic circles since the middle of the sixteenth century was the Philosophía antigua poética of López Pinciano, published in 1596, two years after the death of Tasso. It is not surprising that we discover in this work more attention devoted to Heliodorus than in any of the Italian tracts on poetry and a more thorough confrontation of his work in terms of the major aesthetic preoccupations of the Aristotelian movement. The indigenous literary tradition which the Spanish classicists had to confront was not that of Ariosto and the verse romance but rather that of the Amadís de Gaula and the prose romance. It was this tradition to which the “friend of his country” referred in offering his translation of Heliodorus as an alternative to the older works in Spanish.⁴² Perhaps because there was already a tradition of prose which a new genre could supplant, the work of Heliodorus not only aroused the interest of Spanish theorists and translators, but also inspired imitation, while in Italy the interest of educated circles in the Greek work remained always secondary to its interest in the recreation of the classical epic vis-à-vis the verse romances.⁴³

On many occasions in El Pinciano's dialogues the principal interlocutors, Ugo, Fadrique, and El Pinciano, refer to Heliodorus' Ethiopian History as an epic in prose. The first reference is in the third epistle “De la essencia y causas de la poetica,” in a discussion of Aristotle's dictum that imitation and not meter determines whether a piece of writing is poetry or history. All enthusiastically accept the doctrine and invoke the example which appears in nearly all documents of Renaissance criticism—Lucan's Pharsalia is history although it is written in meter. At this point the conversation takes a humorous turn as Ugo and El Pinciano make an unconventional application of the principles of imitation and verisimilitude to verse to claim that, since nobody speaks in meter, meter is entirely inimical to imitation and hence to poetic composition. This piece of sophistry is made for the sake of humor, and Fadrique, who usually speaks for el Philósopho, corrects his ingenuous colleagues, coming to the defense of meter (“‘Not so harsh,’ said Fadrique at this point. ‘Do not inflict so many injuries upon meter’”)⁴⁴ and suggesting that “the imitation in meter be called a perfect poem, and the imitation without meter and the metrical composition without imitation should be called imperfect poems.”⁴⁵ Nevertheless, in his sophistical rejection of meter the speaker El Pinciano presents an opinion which the author El Pinciano undoubtedly shares: “I understand that the Ethiopian History is a highly praised poem, although it is written in prose.”⁴⁶ In the sixth epistle, “Lenguaje,” we discover a similar context of humor involving the speaker El Pinciano's misunderstandings, in which attention again is drawn to the fact that Heliodorus' work is a poem in prose: “In poems without meter, lofty and perfect language is not so necessary, as is demonstrated by Heliodorus and others.”⁴⁷

THE STRUCTURAL EXCELLENCE OF THE ETHIOPIAN HISTORY

In the fifth epistle “Fábula,” in which the speakers discuss the manner of composing a perfect plot, El Pinciano turns his attention to the techniques of disposition which Amyot, Scaliger, and Tasso had praised in the Greek romance. However, in his interpretation of the qualities and effect of Heliodorus' disposition, El Pinciano varies somewhat the traditional approach. Whereas Amyot's intelligent explanation of the suspense which the Ethiopian History arouses is based on an original interpretation of Horace's recommendation of beginning in-medias-res (i.e., the reader's desire to discover the unknown origins of the plot), and Scaliger's analysis of the same effect is founded on an original application of Aristotle's statement on dissimilar threads (i.e., the reader is kept in the dark by retarding interruptions in the development of the principal plot), El Pinciano's interpretation is a complete application of Aristotle's criteria on tragedy to epic. It is based on Aristotle's discussion of the two parts of the plot of tragedy, complication and unraveling. The properly constructed plot “is considered to be like a thread, which has a knot and an unraveling.”⁴⁸ The knot of complication in the threads of dramatic action must be tightened until there seems to be no way of unraveling it. However, the poet must always leave free “a bit of thread which he can catch hold of” and must avoid an entanglement that can be resolved only by the introduction of a miraculous element, which in its implausibility destroys the effect of the peripeteia. At the moment of highest tension the unexpected way out or unraveling is found, and the catastrophe or peripeteia occurs, bringing a relaxation of tension. Ugo humorously compares the process to that of garroting, the confession or death of the tortured man forming the “unraveling.” The best plot moves with increasing tension toward one catastrophe and denouement, but because of its length the epic must usually present a series of tightenings and loosenings of the knot of complication. One observes such a process in the fourth book of the Aeneid when Juno apparently relents in her persecution of Aeneas. In the process of “tying and untying” (atar y desatar) Heliodorus surpasses Virgil, for in spite of the epic length of his work, it presses toward the final peripeteia with ever increasing tension.

Then El Pinciano said: “Heliodorus' history is epic, but, if one examines it carefully, one discovers that it continuously ties the knot of complication and never unravels it until the end. I say this because there is no contradiction between being epic and tying a single knot tighter and tighter throughout the work.”

Fadrique said: “Gift of the sun is Heliodorus, and in this matter of tying and untying knots, he is unsurpassed, and in the other techniques of composition, he is excelled by but a few.”⁴⁹

Like Huet, El Pinciano lavishes praise on Heliodorus' final peripeteia and recognition scene, apparently failing to share the modern reader's reservations about the author's sacrifice of narrative logic in favor of a maximum prolongation of the reader's suspense. In the same epistle El Pinciano introduces the climactic scene in Meroe in a discussion of the Aristotelian formula for recognition scenes. The speakers end their discussion of the four types of recognition outlined in the Poetics, concluding that it is impossible to determine which is to be most recommended, for each can serve very well the purpose of the “unraveling” of the plot. Fadrique recalls Aristotle's final words on the matter, that the “best [recognition] is that which arises from the incidents themselves, where the startling discovery is made by natural means.”⁵⁰ Ugo apparently forgets Aristotle's explicit exclusion of recognitions based on tokens from this category and proceeds to offer Heliodorus' conclusion as an illustration of this most effective type of recognition scene.

I have nothing more to say than to verify and illustrate your axiom with Heliodorus' Ethiopian History, which in my opinion is a fine tale [fábula]; throughout it the poet sowed the seeds for the recognition of Chariklea, first with writings, then, with gems, and after that, with bodily marks; from all of these proceeded the final recognition and the unraveling of a knot so graceful and pleasing that there is none other to rival it. And although in its form the recognition belongs to the category of the least artistic recognitions, which is that of will [El Pinciano reinterprets Aristotle's discussion of recognition to fit into the three categories of intellect, will, and memory; his recognition by will is a modification of Aristotle's second category and includes all those recognitions in which a character deliberately reveals his identity], nevertheless, the poet was so skillful, and he designed the recognition so artfully, that it equals those of higher categories, because he did not make Chariklea the revealer of herself but rather Sisimithres, who was the man who raised her. [In other words, unlike Ulysses, who informs his shepherds that he is Ulysses and then shows them signs in proof (sic), Chariklea, much to the discomfort of Theagenes and the modern reader, refuses to inform her parents of her identity and thereby end the danger of sacrifice which menaces her and her lover. When, after considerable delay, she decides to reveal herself, she chooses to allow the priest Sisimithres to make the discovery by interpreting the writing on her garment.]⁵¹

Regardless of what we may think of El Pinciano's interpretation of Aristotle on this matter, we nevertheless observe in the passage his admiration for Heliodorus' work and his interpretation of it as a perfect execution of Aristotelian theories on tragedy.

In the long eleventh epistle “La Heroyca,” the speakers discuss epic composition and freely draw examples to support their precepts from the practices of Homer, Virgil, and Heliodorus, treating the works of each as belonging to the same species of poetry.⁵² Resuming his praise of the high qualities of disposition observable in the Greek romance and applauding its effects of suspense, El Pinciano now invokes not Aristotle's analysis of the tragic plot but rather the Horatian precept on the in-medias-res beginning, interpreting its workings as Amyot had done. The reader must be seized by the desire to discover the origins of the action. Hence the epic poem “should begin in the middle of the action, and Homer proceeded thus in his Odyssey, and Heliodorus in his Ethiopian History; and the reason is that, as the heroic work is long, it needs a trick in order to make the reader read more attentively; and thus it is that, as the poet begins in the middle of the action, the listener proceeds desirous of discovering the beginning, which he comes upon in the middle of the book, and having passed the mid-point of the volume, he finds little annoyance in reading the remainder.”⁵³ In the execution of this technique Heliodorus surpasses Homer and Virgil: “Heliodorus observed this technique with more exactitude than any other poet, because Homer did not observe it with such rigor … and if we examine Virgil, we discover that he too did not begin in the middle, because, of his twelve books, he devotes slightly more than two, the second and the third, to the action that has already occurred.”⁵⁴

In the discussion of the quantitative divisions of the epic plot, the work of Heliodorus appears once again as a subject of examination, and a principle for the composition of prose epic is formulated. Whereas the classical epics consist of a prologue or proposition, an invocation, and a narration, the Ethiopian History begins with the narration. Acknowledging that epic perfection demands the former procedure, Fadrique suggests that it is a convention of the prose epic to dispense with proposition and invocation: “… it is a great perfection of heroic poetry to begin with a proposition and an invocation, which are generally lacking in heroic poems which are not in meter; such poems begin with a dissimulated prologue and the narration.”⁵⁵ Fadrique's claim that there is such a thing as a prólogo dissimulado is simply a convenient way of preserving venerated terminology and avoiding the admission that in Heliodorus' work a prologue is lacking.

The association of Heliodorus with the models of classical epic continues as El Pinciano proceeds to point out the parallel function of the accounts of Ulysses at the court of Alcinous, Aeneas at the court of Dido, and Calasiris in the presence of Gnemón in their respective works, claiming that each is like a necessary prologue on which the narrations of the final events of the poems are dependent. His statement provokes an objection on the part of Ugo that the poet could have presented the events which they contain in a normal prologue and followed the chronological order of events in his narration. This objection becomes a point of departure for an introduction of Aristotle's precept that the heroic poet “should speak as little as possible” (deue hablar lo menos que el pueda [III, 208]) and a recollection of his praise of Homer for observing this precept.⁵⁶ The implication is that had Heliodorus, Homer, and Virgil begun by narrating the events which in fact their characters relate, they would have violated the rule.

SUBJECT MATTER AND VERISIMILITUDE

If in matters of structure Heliodorus is adjudged superior to Virgil and Homer on the basis of two of the Aristotelian-Horatian principles of disposition, in the all-important matter of epic subject matter, El Pinciano is in accord with Tasso in characterizing the work as belonging to a secondary type of epic poetry. Once again the issues are the suitability of love as a subject and the absence of the traditional heroic deeds of arms in the Greek romance. El Pinciano allows three types of subject matter in epic poetry: “Some poets treat religious subject matter, as did Marco Girolamo Vida … others sing of cases of love, as did Musaeus, Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius; others sing of battles and victories, as did Homer and Virgil, and this type of poetry has been distinguished with the name “heroic.”⁵⁷ El Pinciano, however, immediately qualifies his admission of the first two: “Religious subjects, by their very nature, are not well suited to imitation;⁵⁸ and it would seem that amatory subject matter is likewise unsuitable. But, when writers of such subject matter are as serious as the three mentioned above, one can well allow it, because below that apparently insubstantial chaff there is very solid grain; thus I praise them; I do not condemn them.”⁵⁹ In other words El Pinciano is much more skeptical than Tasso about the suitability of love, and will allow it only because of his great admiration for Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Musaeus. At the conclusion of the epistle on heroic poetry El Pinciano is more explicit in judging Heliodorus' work to be a secondary type of epic. Following a list of the great virtues of the work, his sudden retraction recalls that of Amyot.

As for the Ethiopian History, I must confess that Heliodorus, its author, was a very serious man and an excellent poet, particularly in the art of tying and unraveling; he pleases with his skillfully contrived tale and even with the solid doctrine which he has sown within it. But, if we are seeking epic perfection, it does not seem to me that the Ethiopian History has the necessary grandeur. I am not referring to its language, which, as it is not in meter, is pardoned, but rather to its very subject and plot, because its ordinary characters have a greater role in the action than its lofty characters.⁶⁰

Most of El Pinciano's remaining comments on the high qualities of Heliodorus' narrative are in connection with the widely discussed problem of verisimilitude. As they are all informed by a preoccupation with the empirical-historical implications of the concept of mimesis, they are illustrative of the tendencies in Renaissance criticism which I have emphasized in Chapter I. It should be recalled that already in 1547 Amyot had praised the Greek romance for its plausibility, basing his criterion on Strabo's skeptical attitude toward the value of the purely imaginary in fiction. The half century following his preface witnessed the emergence of Aristotle as the authority dominating literary taste and an intense critical ferment surrounding the exegesis of the Poetics. As I have pointed out in the preceding chapter, the development was not nearly so revolutionary as the sudden proliferation and wide diffusion of commentaries on the Greek text might suggest, for the theorists approached the Poetics with the same attitudes toward literature which marked the writings of the earlier humanists such as Amyot. The same suspicion as to the autonomous value of literature, the distrust of the purely imaginary, and the belief that literature had its justification only in the instructive and the edifying were the dominant preconceptions which in general the humanists could not escape in their readings of the Poetics, and these preoccupations produced such distortions as the Christian-ethical interpretation of catharsis⁶¹ and a historically-empirically oriented interpretation of the related concepts of mimesis, verisimilitude, and poetic truth-historical truth.

El Pinciano's theories of imitation are essentially the same as those of Tasso, although to be sure the exploration of the problematic aspects of these theories vis-à-vis the marvelous which fills Tasso's writings and underlies a series of dramatizations of literary problems in Cervantes' works is absent in the work of the Spanish theorist. His first reflection on the verisimilitude of Heliodorus' work in relation to these theories occurs in the discussion of tragedy in Epistle Eight. Ugo has repeated Aristotle's recommendation of historical personages for tragedy, for, since their grandeur is universally acknowledged, they will be ideal for evoking compassion in the audience, and, with the authority which historical acceptance and documentation provide, their actions will be accepted as plausible. However, he proceeds to fall into the error of assuming that subject matter from history is absolutely essential in the verisimilar plot and admits his bewilderment before the dilemma which Heliodorus' work then presents: “… Heliodorus' History, which is feigned in its entirety, even in the names of its characters, and is one of the best poems ever written.”⁶² Fadrique's answer illustrates well the difference between the verisimilar and the historical and the subordination of the latter to the former in the Renaissance Aristotelian's conception of the properly constructed plot:

This difficulty is not so great, for Theagenes was not so great a prince that his name should have been preserved in memory and fame (although he was the descendant of Pyrrhus), and Chariklea, heiress to the kingdom of Ethiopia, was a figure who would be unknown here and in Greece; and, by inventing her as a queen and princess of unknown lands, the poet obeyed the mandate of verisimilitude, because nobody could say that there was not such a king as Hydaspes nor a queen such as Persina in Ethiopia.⁶³

In other words the Ethiopian History is a legitimate historia fingida or disfrazada, to recall Amyot's terms, because it is plausible and because our familiarity and that of Heliodorus' immediate audience, the Greeks, with the history of Ethiopia is limited by spatial distance and the absence of documentation. Thus the poet is protected from a fear which, to judge by theoretical writings of the epoch, must have been an obsession, the fear of contradiction by the pedantic historian and the consequent charge of lying implausibly.⁶⁴ This fear lay behind Tasso's recommendation of subject matter from medieval history for the epic poem. Not only do the events from this period have the grandeur which history has bestowed upon them and occur in an age in which customs and beliefs are not so different from those of the present as to strike the modern audience as implausible (as would the customs of antiquity); but, moreover, they are surrounded by a veil of incomplete historical knowledge, which will shield the poet from the cavilings of pedants and allow him ample sweep for his inventive talents as he transforms history into an imitation.⁶⁵ A corollary of this approach and solution to the problem of verisimilitude is the recommendation of the history of distant lands as a source of epic subject matter. Knowledge of the existence of these lands coupled with an ignorance as to details concerning them on the part of the audience is the basis for the recommendation.⁶⁶ El Pinciano's praise of Heliodorus for selecting “unknown lands” is based on this doctrine. The historicity of his subject is not important. The important thing is that neither we nor the Greeks can know whether it is historical or not, and, since in other respects the actions of the work are plausible, the poet “obeyed the mandate of verisimilitude.”⁶⁷

El Pinciano's comment on the fame of Theagenes, which begins his judgment of the verisimilitude of Heliodorus' work, dramatically reveals the extremes of tortuous thought which the Renaissance notion of mimesis could produce about matters which today we consider irrelevant to poetic creation. Here there is indeed a problem, which remains in spite of the Ethiopian setting, for (a) the hero is Greek, the land of the audience, and (b) he is presented as a descendant of a famous historical figure Pyrrhus (the son of Achilles). The problem arises not because the Theagenes of the literary context does not conform to his historical model, but because there is no historical model widely known or recorded for a man who by virtue of his ancestry alone must be illustrious; and it is implausible that the name of a figure of grandeur not be recorded in history.⁶⁸ An audience may be troubled by this and begin to doubt the plausibility of the entire work.

Acknowledging the validity both of his implied criticism of Heliodorus' allusion to Theagenes' ancestry and of the assumption on which the criticism is based, El Pinciano overcomes the difficulty by casually asserting that the Greek audience would think that Theagenes must not have been such a great prince that his name and deeds would be preserved by history and fame, despite his illustrious ancestry. It never occurs to him to infer from his own apparent lack of concern that perhaps an audience never is troubled by such preoccupations with credibility in its apprehension of a work of art. As we shall see, it remained for Cervantes to ridicule the way in which the Renaissance critical movement dealt with the questions of imitation and belief in literature.

In his discussion of the epic in Epistle Eleven El Pinciano returns to the problem of verisimilitude, and once again Heliodorus' work appears as an example of the correct way to “deceive with the appearance of truth.” The occasion is of particular significance in our study, for it is the only allusion in the poetics of El Pinciano to the controversy which had dominated Italian critical writings during the preceding decades, the polemic over Ariosto and Tasso. The speaker El Pinciano admits that he is baffled by the problem of what subject matter is suitable in epic poetry. Fadrique recognizes that there is currently a variety of theories concerning the subject, many contradictory, and claims that the source of the difficulty is “the poems which are now very fashionable, the so-called romanzi of the Italians, which lack any foundation in truth.”⁶⁹ Here we observe once again that recurrent problem of sixteenth-century classicists as they confronted the enormously popular nonclassical genre. Fadrique's solution follows the pattern of the “ancients” in Italy, as he refuses to admit that the romances constitute a new genre and insists on measuring them by Aristotle's principles. Like most of his contemporaries he asserts that there is no essential difference between fictitious romance and historical epic. The essence of poetry is imitation and not truth, and—as Aristotle had pointed out, citing the example of Agathon's Antheus—a mimetic work could conceivably be based entirely on fictitious elements.⁷⁰ However, the measure of the perfection of a work is its grandeur coupled with its maintenance of verisimilitude. In general, historical subjects are to be preferred to fictitious ones, for they offer subject matter which meets these two requirements. Nevertheless, it is possible that an entirely fictional work can have the grandeur and verisimilitude demanded by the heroic genre. The works of the Greek romancers provide examples.

The loves of Theagenes and Chariklea, by Heliodorus, and those of Leucippe and Clitophon, by Achilles Tatius, are as epic as the Iliad and the Aeneid … the heroic poem which lacks a foundation in truth can have much beauty and perfection in its composition, and in some respects it may surpass those works which are founded in truth; I, for one, would rather have been the author of Heliodorus' Ethiopian History than the author of Lucan's Pharsalia.⁷¹

On the other hand, in their lack of verisimilitude and edifying doctrine, the romances of chivalry are to be judged as inferior to these lofty works (see III, 178).⁷²

The discussion of the verisimilitude of the Ethiopian History concludes with a full summary of the qualities which the Aristotelians found in the Greek romance. It is occasioned by the speaker El Pinciano's suggestion that the fact that Heliodorus wrote a historia and chose prose as his medium proves that he is not a poet. Fadrique comes to the defense of Heliodorus:

There is no doubt that Heliodorus is a poet, and one of the finest epic poets who have ever written. At least there is none in the world who produces more tragic delight or ties and unravels better than he. His language is very fine, and his sententiae are very lofty. And, if one wanted to squeeze out some allegory, he could easily extract it from this work, and it would not be bad.⁷³

LITERARY THEORY IN A HUMOROUS CONTEXT

Throughout El Pinciano's dialogues, the character El Pinciano often assumes the role of the novice, misunderstanding the arguments of his more learned colleagues or drawing ridiculous conclusions on the basis of naive interpretations of the Aristotelian terminology. For example, he occasionally interprets imitation and verisimilitude in a more literal way than even the most unimaginative of the Renaissance neo-Aristotelians. He can argue that, since nobody speaks in meter, literary imitation should not employ meter. He objects to a poem describing a garden paradise, asserting that it could not be an imitation because real gardens are never so perfect (I, 263). One of his arguments is particularly interesting, for it points toward one of Cervantes' favorite equivocations. Following Fadrique's reference to Heliodorus' History and the Pharsalia, Ugo recalls the well-known judgment of Lucan: “The latter is not held to be a poet.” El Pinciano makes the blunder of assuming that Ugo's “the latter” refers to Heliodorus, and readily offers some support for his opinion: “He is right … because, in addition to the fact that the work is not in meter, its title says History of Ethiopia, and not poem.”⁷⁴ Fadrique and Ugo smile at each other and proceed to enlighten their ingenuous friend concerning his unfortunate, literal interpretation of the term historia and his ignorance both of the irrelevance of versification in the determination of poetry and of the contemporary judgment that Lucan's epic is history rather than poetry. In all these cases humor arises in a dramatic context and works against the ignorance of the Philistine, who is reprimanded by the man of unquestioned superior knowledge.

As will be pointed out in the following chapters, Cervantes continually exploits the possibilities for equivocation in the aesthetic terminology of the contemporary Aristotelians. For example, the double implication in the term historia, i.e., the validity of El Pinciano's naive interpretation of the term,⁷⁵ is the basis for a recurrent literary joke in the Quixote and the Persiles. Cervantes' humor is much more complex than that of El Pinciano and generally moves in the opposite direction, striking at the “man of unquestioned superior knowledge” and the entire Aristotelian poetic canon. Nevertheless, to the extent that such possibilities are exploited for humorous dialogue by the theorist El Pinciano, the Philosophía antigua poética can be seen as an important forerunner of Cervantes' literary scenes.⁷⁶

CONCLUSION

The detailed examination of various documents of literary theory, from Amyot's prologue to his translation of Heliodorus' Ethiopian History to Huet's Traité de l'origine des romans, has revealed that educated circles, from the early sixteenth century on, universally condemned the popular romances of chivalry, measuring them by the resurgent classical literary doctrines of Horace and Aristotle, and seized upon the newly discovered Aethiopica of Heliodorus as an alternative form of prose fiction which satisfied the most rigid standards set for acceptable literature by the classicists. The process inevitably led to the application of Aristotelian-Horatian criteria for tragedy and epic to the prose narrative, and with the diffusion and acceptance of the Aristotelian distinction between historical writing and poetry, the possibility that the work might receive special consideration as a composition in prose vanished. In the writings of Tasso and El Pinciano, the Ethiopian History is considered to belong to the genre of epic poetry, and, when nearly a century later Huet did formulate a theory of prose fiction, he readily admitted that he was merely applying the rules of epic poetry to the prose narrative.

In accordance with the strongly ethical orientation of the Renaissance classical aesthetic, theorists praised the exemplary value of Heliodorus' work: the purity of the love of the protagonists, the moral wisdom contained in its sententiae, and the fact that in it virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. In accordance with the Renaissance's revival of the Horatian celebration of the high civilizing mission of poetry and application of the Ciceronian ideal of the orator's encyclopedic knowledge to the poet, theorists acclaimed Heliodorus' work for its wealth of erudition. Of more interest to us, the classicists discovered in the Greek work two aesthetic qualities which were absent in the romance of chivalry and formed the basis of nearly all aesthetically oriented attacks on the popular genre: unity and verisimilitude. In its singleness of action, proper subordination and integration of episode, and in-medias-res beginning, the Ethiopian History was offered by Scaliger beside the work of the “greatest poet,” Virgil, as a model for all aspiring epic poets. Similarly Tasso, whose struggle with the problems involved in the disposition of epic subject matter was long and arduous, acknowledged that Virgil and Heliodorus are the masters of the elusive technique of fragmentary exposition. In the poetics of El Pinciano the critical discussion of the Greek romancer broadens to encompass not only his structural techniques, which indeed are declared superior to those of Virgil and Homer, but also his successful observation of the principle of verisimilitude as it had been interpreted by the Aristotelian theorists of the age. In this context the Ethiopian History appears as an example of Aristotle's allowance for the possibility of a purely fictitious, yet completely verisimilar, plot for tragedy and epic and is contrasted with the romances of chivalry, which, although belonging to the same species of poetry, are immeasurably inferior in their failure to observe verisimilitude. Moreover, the possibility of the epic in prose is often discussed by El Pinciano, and Heliodorus' work is repeatedly offered as the example of its perfectibility. As the Ethiopian History was completely drawn into the orbit of the theorizing surrounding the re-creation of the classical epic, which dominated the influential academic movement of the second half of the sixteenth century, it is easy to see that the Greek work stood in relation to the romances of chivalry as in Italy the Aeneid and the Homeric poems stood in relation to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and the other romanzi.

It is only against this background of literary theorizing that we can properly understand Cervantes' undeniably high literary aspirations in the conception of the Persiles, his desire to rival Heliodorus, his theorizing concerning the possibility of the purification of the romance of chivalry and the creation of the epic in prose, the important thematic role that contemporary literary theory—particularly those problems surrounding the polemic over Ariosto and Tasso—has both in the Quixote and the Persiles, the creation of the Persiles, and finally the literary humor which functions so successfully in the context of the Quixote but gives the Persiles a puzzling ambivalence. Cervantes' most important discussion of literary theory and all the problems which we have discussed up to this point occurs in the debate between Don Quixote and the Canon of Toledo. It is here that the study of Cervantes' relationship to the classical aesthetic must begin.

Notes

1. Throughout my study I refer to the prose works of Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus as “Greek romances.” I regard the designation novela bizantina, commonly used by Spanish literary historiography to refer to these works and medieval and Renaissance imitations of them, inappropriate and misleading. I prefer to follow Erwin Rohde, who makes a distinction between Greek and Byzantine works (see Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer [Leipzig, 1900], pp. 554ff.), using “Byzantine” as a chronological-geographical (i.e., not a stylistic) term to refer to the civilization which flourished in Constantinople from around the fifth century to the fall of the city to the Turks in 1453 and to the cultural production of this civilization. As for the term “novel,” if it is to mean anything more specific than “long prose fiction,” I prefer that it be used to refer to fiction in which actuality and character are dominant elements. “Romance” is a convenient term in English (although not in Spanish) for referring to fiction in which plot or action (as opposed to character) and the wish-fulfillment dream (as opposed to actuality) are dominant.

2. See Michael Oeftering, Heliodor und seine Bedeutung für die Literatur, Litterarhistorische Forschungen, Vol. XVIII (Berlin, 1901), pp. 44-57; F. López Estrada, prologue to his edition of Historia etiópica de los amores de Teágenes y Cariclea, tr. F. de Mena (Madrid, 1954), pp. vii-xviii.

3. A study of specific influence can be found in Oeftering's Heliodor und seine Bedeutung für die Litteratur, pp. 57-168.

4. See Max Ludwig Wolff, Geschichte der Romantheorie (Nuremberg, 1915), pp. 43-51.

5. “La fin principale des Romans … est l'instruction des lecteurs, à qui il faut toûjours faire voir la vertu couronnée, & le vice puni” (Pierre-Daniel Huet, Traité de l'origine des romans, ed. A. Kok [Amsterdam, 1942], p. 115). Huet's definition of the roman: “Des histoires feintes d'aventures amoureuses, ecrites en prose avec art, pour le plaisir & l'instruction des lecteurs” (p. 114). The page references which follow are to this edition.

6. “… la vray-semblance qui ne se trouve pas toûjours dans l'Histoire est essentielle au Roman” (p. 118).

7. Huet's preference for the in-medias-res structural technique is evident in his censure of Longus (p. 179) and Iamblique's Babyloniques: “… l'ordonnance de son dessein manque d'art. Il a suivi grossierement l'ordre des temps, & n'a pas jetté d'abord le Lecteur dans le milieu du sujet, suivant l'example d'Homere” (p. 156). In criticizing the irrelevance of Achilles Tatius' digressions, Huet writes that the episodes “devroient estre ajustez si proprement avec la piece, qu'ils ne parussent qu'un mesme tissu” (p. 161).

8. “J'appelle reguliers, ceux [les romans] qui sont dans les regles du Poëme Heroïque” (p. 182).

9. Rohde describes the metrical work of this twelfth-century Byzantine monk as an unbearably decadent imitation of the Aethiopica (see Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer, pp. 562-565).

10. “… ont l'amour pour sujet principal, & ne traitent la politique & la guerre que par incident” (p. 116).

11. As in all the other distinctions which mark his attempt to define roman vis-à-vis epic, Huet does not succeed in getting away from the theories of epic poetry formulated in the preceding century. He immediately qualifies his assertion by limiting it to plots involving characters of low condition, for example those of comic romans, suggesting the laws of comedy recognized by classicists on the basis of the ninth book of Aristotle's Poetics. For “dans les grands Romans, dont les Princes & les Conquerans sont les acteurs, & dont les aventures sont illustres & memorables … il ne seroit pas vray-semblable que des grands évenemens fussent demeurez cachez au monde, & neglegez par les Historiens” (p. 118). The same assumptions (the necessity of grandeur and verisimilitude) lie behind Tasso's recommendation of historical matter for the epic and cause El Pinciano some difficulty in dealing with the verisimilitude of the Ethiopian History (see below).

12. “Jusqu'alors on n'avoit rien veu de mieux entendu, ni de plus achevé dans l'art Romanesque, que les aventures de Theagene & de Chariclée. Rien n'est plus chaste que leurs amours … on y remarque beaucoup de fertilité & d'invention. Les évenemens y sont fréquens, nouveaux, vray-semblables, bien arrangez, bien débroüillez. Le denouëment en est admirable; il est naturel, il naist de sujet, & rien n'est plus touchant, ni plus pathetique. A l'horreur du sacrifice, où l'on devoit immoler Theagene & Chariclée, dont la beauté & le merite touchoit tout le monde de compassion, succede la joye de voir cette jeune fille sortir de ce danger par la reconnoissance de ses parens, & finir enfin ses longues miseres par un heureux mariage avec son amant, à qui elle porte pour dot la couronne d'Ethiopie. … il a servi de modele à tous les faiseurs de Romans, qui l'ont suivi, & on peut dire aussi veritablement qu'ils ont tous puisé à sa source, que l'on a dit tous les Poëtes ont puisé à celle d'Homere” (157-158). The italics are mine.

13. “Ainsi l'Espagne & l'Italie receurent de nous un art, qui estoit le fruit de nostre ignorance & de nostre grossiereté” (p. 211); see also p. 219.

14. “… les vieux François les [actions] avoient multipliées sans ordonnance, sans liaison, & sans art. Ce sont eux que les Italiens ont imitez. En prenant d'eux les Romans, ils en ont pris les défauts” (p. 168); see also p. 170. Huet proceeds to reject Giraldi's defense of the multiplicity of actions of the romanzi, affirming the Aristotelian principle of a single action, to which all others are subordinate, and drawing the analogy which nearly all of the classicists, including Cervantes' Canon of Toledo, use to describe the well-made plot: “… le Roman doit ressembler à un corps parfait, & estre composé de plusieurs parties differentes & proportionnées sous un seul chef, il s'ensuit que l'action principale, qui est comme le chef du Roman, doit estre unique & illustre en comparison des autres; & que les actions subordonnées, qui sont comme les membres, doivent se rapporter à ce chef, luy ceder en beauté & en dignité, l'orner, le soustenir, & l'accompagner avec dépendance: autrement ce sera un corps à plusieurs testes, monstrueux & difforme” (p. 169).

15. “… le premier qui tira nos Romans de la barbarie, & les assujettit aux regles” (p. 228).

16. Huet points out that Heliodorus' final scene of reversal and recognition inspired a similar scene in L'Astrée (p. 158). Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself writes in her prologue to Le Grand Cyrus: “Je vous diray donc que j'ay pris et je prendrai tousjours pour mes uniques Modelles l'immortel Héliodore et le Grand Urfé” (cited by Oeftering, Heliodor und seine Bedeutung für die Literatur, p. 77).

17. Historia etiópica de los amores de Teágenes y Cariclea, tr. F. de Mena, ed. F. López Estrada (Madrid, 1954), pp. lxxvii-lxxxiii. The following page references are to this edition.

18. “… la imbecilidad de nuestra natura no puede sufrir que el entendimiento esté siempre ocupado a leer materias graves y verdaderas” (lxxvii). Amyot, who regarded his most serious enterprise to be the translation of Plutarch, is typical of Renaissance historians in his theory of the utility of historiography: “… ella [la historia] haya de ser escrita o leída, antes para por ejemplos de lo pasado instruirse en los negocios de lo venidero …” (lxxviii-lxxix). Literature of entertainment has its justification because historical writing is “un poco austera” and lacks the delightful rhetorical embellishments which human nature in its “imbecilidad” demands. Cervantes' curate and canon, whose theories on the purification of the romance of chivalry recall many of Amyot's judgments, have the same skeptical attitude toward the function of literature. The best of literature is to be allowed only because “no es posible que esté continuo el arco armado, ni la condición y flaqueza humana se pueda sustentar sin alguna lícita recreación” (Don Quijote, I, 488).

19. “… es menester que las cosas fingidas para delectación sean cercanas de las verdaderas” (lxxix). The allusion is to Horace, Epistola ad Pisones, l. 338.

20. “… no es menester que todas las cosas sean fingidas, sabiendo que aun a los poetas mismos no es permitido” (lxxix).

21. “Porque el artificio de la invención poética, como doctamente escribe Strabón, consiste en tres cosas: primeramente en la Historia, de la que el fin es verdadero. Por lo cual no es lícito a los poetas, cuando hablan de las cosas de natura, escrebir a su voluntad de otra suerte que la verdad, porque esto les sería imputado no a licencia o artificio, mas a ignorancia. Segundamente, en orden y disposición, de lo cual el fin es la declaración y fuerza de atraer al lector. Terceramente, la ficción, de la cual el fin es admiración, y la delectación que procede de la novedad de las cosas extrañas y llenas de admiración. Por lo cual, mucho menos se deben permitir todas cosas en las ficciones que queremos disfrazar con el nombre de Historia verdadera, antes es menester mezclar tan doctamente lo verdadero con lo falso, guardando siempre aparencia de verdad, y refiriendo lo uno a lo otro, de suerte que no haya discordancia del principio al medio ni del medio al fin” (lxxix-lxxx). The passage is based on Strabo, I, 2, 17 (see Geography of Strabo, tr. H. L. Jones, Loeb Classical Library [London, 1917], I, 90-93), and Horace, Epistola ad Pisones, ll. 150-152.

22. See above, Chap. I, pp. 18-20.

23. “… los libros de esta suerte que han sido antiguamente escritos en nuestra lengua española” (lxxx). The Spanish translator here modifies Amyot's “escritz en nostre langue” (L'Histoire aethiopique de Heliodorus, n.p.).

24. “… están las más veces tan disonantes y tan fuera de verdadera similitud, que paresce que sean antes sueños de algún enfermo que desvaría con la calentura, que invenciones de algún hombre de espíritu y sano juicio”; “… no hay ninguna erudición, ningún conoscimiento de antigüedad ni cosa alguna, por decir verdad, de la cual se pueda sacar algún provecho.”

25. “Mas ni más ni menos como entre las pinturas las tablas son estimadas por las mejores de los que algo conoscen porque representan mejor la verdad del natural, así entre las ficciones aquellas que están más cerca de natura y en las cuales hay más de verisimilitud son las que agradan más a los que miden su placer con la razón y que se deleitan con juicio” (lxxix). The italics are mine.

26. “… hermosos discursos sacados de la filosofía natural y moral, muchos dichos notables y palabras sentenciosas, muchas oraciones y pláticas, en las cuales el artificio de elocuencia está muy bien empleado” (lxxx).

27. “… las pasiones y afecciones humanas, pintadas tan al verdadero y con tan gran honestidad, que no se podrá sacar ocasión de malhacer. Porque de todas aficiones ilícitas y deshonestas, él hace el fin desdichado; y, al contrario, de las buenas y honestas, dischoso” (lxxx).

28. Horace, Epistola ad Pisones, ll. 99-113, 196-201, 309-316, 334-346, 391-407.

29. “Y cierto la disposición es singular, porque comienza en la mitad de la Historia, como hacen los poetas heroicos, lo cual causa, de prima facie, una grande admiración a los lectores y les engendra un apasionado deseo de oír y entender el comienzo, y todavía los atrae también con la ingeniosa lección de su cuento, que no entienden lo que han leído en el comienzo del primer libro, hasta que veen el fin del quinto; y cuando allí han llegado, aún les queda mayor deseo de ver el fin, que antes tenían de ver el principio. De suerte que siempre el entendimiento queda suspenso hasta que viene a la conclusión, la cual deja al lector satisfecho, como lo son aquellos que al fin vienen a gozar de una cosa muy deseada y de mucho tiempo esperada” (lxxx-lxxxi). The italics are mine. As has been pointed out in Chapter I, one of the principal concerns of the controversy over the romanzi, which was just emerging in Italy at this time, was the loose structure of the modern works. Minturno claimed that the frequent fragmentation in their plot development and their sudden shifts from one action to another have the effect not of heightening suspense in the reader but rather of exhausting his patience (see L'arte poetica, pp. 34-35). Moreover, theorists noted that the romances frequently failed to observe the in-medias-res structural principle of classical epic, adhering to the principle of chronology, which most classicists thought appropriate only to historical writing (see Giraldi Cintio, De' romanzi, pp. 18-26).

30. Horace, Epistola ad Pisones, ll. 148-149.

31. “Todavía no me quiero detener mucho a la encomendar, porque en fin es una fábula.”

32. Bataillon has discussed this document as an example of the literary tastes of the Christian humanist movement (see Erasmo y España, II, 222-225).

33. Unlike the majority of Renaissance Aristotelians, Scaliger maintains that meter is an essential element of poetry and rejects the widely repeated judgment that Lucan's Pharsalia is history and not poetry. See Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, p. 24.

34. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, facsimile of the 1561 edition of Lyon by August Buck (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964), p. 6. For a treatment of Scaliger's sources, see Eduard Brinkschulte, Julius Caesar Scaligers Kunsttheoretische Anschauungen und deren Hauptquellen, Renaissance und Philosophie, No. 10 (Bonn, 1914); for the epic, see pp. 78-81.

35. Poetices libri septem, p. 144.

36. “Altera lex: Non recto tramite ducendam narrationem, ne taedium pariatur” (Poetices libri septem, p. 144). The possibility of a contradiction between these two rules of disposition and the difficulty which they might present for a poet who would put them into practice, a possibility which was to become a major preoccupation in the theoretical writings of Tasso and a basis for literary humor in Cervantes' works, is neatly avoided by Scaliger's casual insistence on the relevance of the episodes. The same is true of the original passage in Aristotle, where both unity of action and a variety of “varying episodes” are judged to be fundamental to epic. The episodes must of course be “relevant” (see Poetics, xxiii-xxiv).

37. “Hoc ipsum igitur quod pro principio sumes, ne statuas in principio, ita enim auditoris animus est suspensus: querit enim quod nondum extat. Ea sanè vel unica vel praecipua virtus, auditorem quasi captiuum detinere. … Hanc disponendi rationem splendidissimam habes in Aethiopica historia Heliodori. Quem librum epico Poetae censeo accuratissimè legendum, ac quasi pro optimo exemplari sibi proponendum” (ibid., p. 144).

38. This is not to say that they were unpopular. The Spanish prose romances were widely translated and widely read in Italy (see Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry, pp. 180-199).

39. See M. Oeftering, Heliodor und seine Bedeutung für die Literatur, pp. 114-115.

40. “… bench'io non nieghi che poema eroico non si potesse formare di accidenti meno magnifici, quali sono gli amori di Florio, e quelli di Teagene e di Cariclea, in questa idea nondimeno, che ora andiamo cercando, del perfettissimo poema, fa mestieri che la materia sia in se stessa nel primo grado di nobiltà e di eccellenza” (p. 13). The passage is greatly expanded in the Del poema eroico, written nearly thirty years later (see pp. 103-108). Many examples are added to the list: “… l'amor di Leandro e d'Ero, de' quali cantò Museo, antichissimo poeta greco; e quel di Giasone e di Medea, dal qual prese il soggetto Apollonio fra' Greci e Valerio Flacco tra' Latini … o quelli di Teagene e di Cariclea, e di Leucippe e di Clitofonte, che nella medesima lingua furono scritti per Eliodoro e per Achille Tazio” (p. 108). Curiously in defending love as a justifiable theme of epic poetry, Tasso uses the occasion to praise Amadís de Gaula, Amadís de Grecia, and Primaleón, written by “quegli scrittori spagnuoli i quali favoleggiarono nella loro lingua materna senza obligo alcuno di rime” (p. 106), for the noble conception of love which they present.

41. “Il lasciar l'auditor sospeso, procedendo dal confuso al distinto, da l'universale a'particolare, è arte perpetua di Virgilio; e questa è una de le cagioni che fa piacer tanto Eliodoro”; “… alcuna ombra di confusa notizia; più distinta cognizione se n'ha nel sesto; particolarissima se n'avrà per sue parole nel penultimo canto” (Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. C. Guasti [Florence, 1853-1855], I, 77-78).

42. Similarly in France, where the indigenous literary tradition of prose romance was strong, we observe theorists suggesting a purification of the genre in accordance with the model of Heliodorus. In addition to Amyot's criticism of the old books written in French and praise of Heliodorus, we observe in Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye's L'Art poétique (1605) the following: “En Prose tu pourras poëtiser aussi: / Le grand Stagiritain te le permet ainsi. / Si tu veux voir en Prose vn oeuure Poëtique, / D'Heliodore voy l'histoire Ethiopique” (ed. G. Pellissier [Paris, 1885], pp. 78-79). Referring to the old French books, he adds: “Nos Romans seroient tels, si leur longue matiere / Ils n'alloient deduisant, comme vne histoire entiere.” Gomberville, the founder of the French heroic-gallant romance, is very explicit in distinguishing the new genre from the old in its observance of the Aristotelian dictate of verisimilitude. In introducing La Carithee (1620), he writes: “Il y a deux especes toutes contraires en ce genre d'escrire; la plus estimable & la plus difficile est celle où l'on obserue vne si exacte vraysemblance que souuent on se laisse emporter à croire que c'est vne verité: de ceste sorte sont tous les Amours faits à l'imitation de Theagene & de Cariclee. L'autre est plus prodigieuse & plus espouuentable, mais comme elle ne fait point d'impression sur l'ame de ceux que ne s'esmeuuent que pour les choses ou vrayes ou vraysemblables: de ceste qualité sont tous les Poetes Anciens, l'Amadis … & vn nombre infiny d'autres semblables” (cited by Werner Krauss, “Die Kritik des Siglo de Oro am Ritter- und Schäfer-roman,” pp. 170-171).

43. Considering the bulk of Italian theoretical writings, the attention which they devote to Heliodorus' work is very slight. I have found nothing comparable to El Pinciano's discussion of the work in terms of every major aesthetic category of the classical dogma. The best indication of the secondary importance of the Greek work in Italy, however, is the absence of a tradition of prose literature corresponding to the seventeenth-century prose romances of Spain and France. Oeftering writes of Italian literature: “… eine eigene litterarische Geschmacksrichtung wie in Frankreich, als deren Meister Heliodor förmlich gegolten hätte, lässt sich aber nicht auffinden” (Heliodor und seine Bedeutung für die Literatur, p. 113). It is interesting that one of the three sixteenth-century translations of the Aethiopica in Italy should attempt to recast the work in the meter of heroic poetry (ibid., p. 50).

44. “Passo, dixo aquí Fadrique; no tantas injurias a los metros” (López Pinciano, Philosophía antigua poética, ed. A. Carballo Picazo [Madrid, 1953], I, 207; page references which follow are to this edition).

45. “… la imitación con metro llamassen poesía perfecta, y, a la imitación sin metro y al metro sin imitación, poesías imperfectas” (I, 208).

46. “… he caydo en la cuenta que la Historia de Ethiopía es vn poema muy loado, mas en prosa” (I, 206).

47. “… en los poemas sin metro, no es tan necessario el alto lenguaje y peregrino, como lo vemos en Heliodoro y otros” (II, 184).

48. “… se considera como cuerda y tiene ñudo y solutra” (II, 83). “Every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and Unravelling (or Denouement). … By the Complication I mean all that comes between the beginning of the action and the part which marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune. The Unravelling is that which comes between the beginning of the change and the end. … Many poets tie the knot well, but unravel it ill” (Poetics, xviii). I cite S. H. Butcher's translation, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (London, 1898), pp. 65-67.

49. “El Pinciano dixo luego: ‘La historia de Heliodoro épica es, mas, si bien se mira, atando va siempre, y nunca jamás desata hasta el fin. Dígolo, porque no contradize ser épica y ir atando siempre más y más.’ Fadrique dixo: ‘Don del sol es Heliodoro, y en esso del ñudo y soltar nadie le hizo ventaja, y, en lo demás, casi nadie’” (II, 85-86). In his Agudeza y arte de ingenio, written over fifty years later, Baltasar Gracián chooses the same phenomenon in acclaiming the high artistry of Heliodorus' work. Characteristic of the new orientation of his baroque poetics is the association of the technique of plot development not with the sixteenth-century critical preoccupation with overall unity in plot and implications of the principle of verisimilitude, i.e., qualities within the work of art itself, but rather with that peculiar effect of amazement which resides in the reader and which a properly constructed work of art must arouse and that admiration which the reader feels for the virtuosity (agudeza) of the artist who has succeeded in startling him. The artist's ability to unravel suddenly a complicated entanglement is categorized as “la agudeza por desempeño en el hecho.” Drawing analogies to the literary act in the dilemmas and solutions of Alexander before the Gordian knot, Theseus in the labyrinth, and Solomon before the mothers, Gracián claims that the technique of complication “es el principal artificio, que hace tan gustosas y entretenidas las épicas, ficciones, novelas, comedias y tragedias: vanse empeñando los sucesos y apretando los lances, de tal suerte que parecen a veces no poder tener salida … Mas aquí está el primor del arte, y la valentía de la inventiva, en hallar medio extravagante, pero verisímil, con que salir del enredado laberinto con gran gusto y fruición del que lee y del que oye” (Obras completas, ed. A. del Hoyo [Madrid, 1960], p. 439). Horace is cited for the exclusion of the miraculous solution, and among the many examples of this agudeza adduced is that of Heliodorus (p. 440).

50. Poetics, xvi. See ed. cit., p. 61. El Pinciano writes: “… los buenos reconocimientos, de qualquier especie que sean, deuen estar sembrados por la misma fábula, para que sin máchina ni milagro sea desatada; sino que ella, de suyo, sin violencia ni fuerça alguna, se desmarañe y manifieste al pueblo” (II, 38).

51. “… no tengo que dezir más que aprouar y prouar vuestra sentencia con la Historia de Heliodoro, la qual para mí es vna galana fábula, y en quien el poeta sembró por toda ella la simiente del reconocimiento de Cariclea, primero, con las escrituras, después, con las joyas, y, después, con las señales del cuerpo; de todas las quales vino vltimamente el reconocimiento y soltura de ñudo tan gracioso y agradable, que ninguno más. Y, aunque la forma del reconocimiento toca al menos artificioso, que es al de la voluntad, mas el poeta fué tan agudo, y le hizo tan artificioso, que iguala a los demás, porque no hizo a Cariclea manifestadora de sí misma, sino a Sisimithres, que era el que la auía criado” (II, 38-39).

52. For example, Fadrique observes that epics generally have happy endings, alluding to the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ethiopian History, and the Aeneid (III, 155).

53. “… deue començar del medio de la acción, y que ansí lo hizo Homero en su Vlysea, y ansí Heliodoro en su Historia de Ethiopía; y es la razón porque, como la obra heroyca es larga, tiene necessidad de ardid para que sea mejor leyda; y es assí que començando el poeta del medio de la acción, va el oyente desseosso de encontrar con el principio, en el qual se halla al medio libro, y que, auiendo passado la mitad del volumen, el resto se acaba de leer sin mucho enfado” (III, 206-207).

54. “Heliodoro guardó esso más que ningún otro poeta, porque Homero no lo guardó con esse rigor … y si miramos a Virgilio, tampoco començó del medio, porque él tiene doze libros, y poco más que dos, que son segundo y tercero, gasta en la acción ya passada” (III, 207).

55. “… gran perfección es de la heroyca començar por proposición y inuocación, de quienes suelen carecer los poemas heroycos que no son en metro, los quales entran con su prólogo dissimulado y narración” (III, 193).

56. Poetics, xxiv. This question does not produce much discussion and elaboration in El Pinciano's dialogues. On the other hand, in Italian critical circles it was one of the most acute problems of theoretical writings. Again it is important to recall the formidable opponent who confronted Italian classicists, Ariosto, whose garrulous narrator used the prologue freely to introduce his cantos.

57. “… vnos poetas tratan materia de religión, como lo hizo Marco Ierónimo Vida … cantan otros casos amorosos, como Museo; Heliodoro, y Achiles Tacio; otros, batallas y victorias, como Homero y Virgilio, y esta especie se ha alçado con el nombre de heroyca” (III, 180).

58. Marco Girolamo Vida wrote an epic in Latin hexameters, the Christias (1535), about the life of Christ. Earlier El Pinciano writes: “… cae mucho mejor la imitación y ficción sobre materia que no sea religiosa, porque el poeta se puede mucho mejor ensanchar y aun traer episodios mucho más deleytosos y sabrosos a las orejas de los oyentes” (III, 168). El Pinciano is echoing Tasso's opinion on the difficulty which scriptural matter presents the epic poet. Because of the exalted character of sacred history, and the detailed knowledge of it which the poet's audience has, the poet dare not employ it as a basis for an epic poem, the aim of which is never the recording of history but the imitation of an action. Imitation demands artistic arrangement of the subject matter, additions based on the peot's inventive powers, and, as may be necessary, a “manipulation” of historical event, which the poet uses in last analysis not in the interest of historiography but in that of giving grandeur and verisimilitude to his imitation. The history of the Middle Ages offers the epic poet an ideal source; for in it he finds events of grandeur, which are neither as exalted as those of the Bible nor as well known in detail as those of recent and contemporary history. Consequently his inventive powers can freely mold them into an imitation (see Tasso, Del poema eroico, pp. 98-99).

59. “… la materia de religión, por ser della, no parece tan bien en imitación; y la materia de amores solamente no es razón que lo parezca, mas, quando fuessen tan graues los escriptores de la amorosa materia como los tres sobredichos, bien se pueden admitir, porque, debaxo de aquella paja floxa, ay grano de mucha sustancia; ansí los alabo; no condeno” (III, 180-181). Just what El Pinciano means by mucha sustancia is not clear. It is probable that he is referring to the erudition and the natural and moral philosophy which these works contain.

60. “… a la Historia de Ethiopía digo y confieso que Heliodoro, su autor, fué vn varón muy graue y gentil poeta en el ñudo y soltura, traça y deleyte de su ficción, y aun en mucha doctrina que tiene sembrada, mas, si se atiende a la perfección épica, no me parece que tiene la grandeza necessaria; no digo en el lenguaje, que por no ser metro está desculpado, sino en la cosa misma, porque las principales personas son menos en su acción, y las comunes son más” (III, 224).

61. Toffanin refers to the moment of this misinterpretation of catharsis in Vincenzo Maggi's commentary on the Poetics (1550) as “la fine del humanesimo,” the moment when a disinterested respect for an examination of all documents from antiquity gave way to a reinterpretive or falsifying impulse based on contemporary preconceptions and expediency. To Toffanin the force of the Counterreformation is responsible (La fine dell' umanesimo, Chap. VI, esp. pp. 89-92). As Bataillon has shown, the difference between the attitudes which mark Christian humanism and the Counterreformation is not so great as has been commonly supposed (see Erasmo y España, II, 432). It is perhaps well at this point to emphasize that such Renaissance “distortions” of Aristotle as the ethical interpretation of cartharsis and the empirical-instructive interpretation of mimesis, although alien to the modern critical temper, cannot be dismissed as negative forces in the history of literature. Dilthey asserts that the flowering of the French classical theater presupposed the close relationship between literature and man's ethical life proclaimed in Scaliger's “Aristotelian” poetics. See Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1914), II, 432-433.

62. “… la Historia de Heliodoro, la qual es fingida toda hasta los nombres y es de los poemas mejores que ha auido en el mundo” (II, 331).

63. “No es grande essa dificultad; que Theágenes no era tan gran príncipe que se deuiera tener el nombre suyo en memoria y fama (bien que decendiente de Pirrho); y Chariclea, heredera del reyno de Ethiopía era de quien acá y en la Grecia auía poca noticia, y, con fingir Reyna y Princesa de tierras ignotas, cumplió con la verisimilitud el poeta, porque nadie podría dezir que en Ethiopía no huuo rey Hydaspes, ni reyna Persina” (II, 331-332). The italics are mine.

64. See Amyot's invocation of Strabo's words on the poet's risks of being called ignorant (above). This was the age in which all theorists felt obligated to deal with Virgil's well-known alterations of history and Tasso would spend twenty years studying the historical sources of his masterpiece, seeking possible errors of fact, the age in which Tasso could write: “… fra le mutate [cose] io ho peggiorati i versi onde ho tolta la parola mori; ma così bisognava, perché gli arabi non son mori nè tartari” (letter to Scipione Gonzaga, April 15, 1575, Le lettere, I, 66), and literary theorists were troubled by the problem of the historicity of Turpin's chronicle.

65. In El Pinciano's recommendation of the history of Pelayo we observe by implication the theories of Tasso: “… la historia es admirable, y ni tan antigua que esté oluidada, ni tan moderna que pueda dezir nadie ‘esso no passó ansí’” (III, 169).

66. “L'istoria di secolo o di nazione lontanissima pare … soggetto assai conveniente al poema eroico, peroché, essendo quelle cose in guisa sepolte nell'antichità ch'a pena ne rimane debole e oscura memoria, può il poeta mutarle e rimutarle e narrarle come gli piace” (Tasso, Del poema eroico, pp. 98-99). The italics are mine.

67. The point is made more forcefully in the subsequent discussion of heroic poetry. El Pinciano criticizes the absence of a historical foundation in Heliodorus' epic. Fadrique replies: “¿Y cómo sabéys vos esso? ¿Por ventura ay alguna historia antigua de Grecia que os diga que Theágenes no fué de la sangre de Pyrrho, y alguna de Ethiopía que Cariclea no fué hija de Hidaspes y Persina, reyes de Ethiopía? Yo quiero que sea ficción, como dezís, y yo creo; mas como no se puede aueriguar, no ay por que condenar al tal fundamento como fingido; y en esto, como en lo demás, fué prudentíssimo Heliodoro que puso reyes de tierra incógnita, y de quienes se puede mal aueriguar la verdad o falsedad, como antes está dicho, de su argumento” (III, 194-195). The fear of contradiction by the historian as well as the primacy of verisimilitude over historical accuracy which characterize Renaissance literary theory is clearly revealed in El Pinciano's example of the improper use of history by poets. If a poet were to compose a plot about the court of Spain, in which the Goth Oronte had the main part, “los hombres que de Historia saben, se reyrían, porque nunca tal rey ha auido en España” (II, 332). On the other hand an Ethiopian or Persian poet could allow himself this license, for in his country his audience knows very little about Spanish history.

68. “… non è verisimile che un'azione illustre … non sia scritta e passata alla memoria de' posteri con la penna d'alcuno istorico … e ove non siano recati in scrittura, da questo solo argumentano gli uomini la loro falsità” (Tasso, Del poema eroico, p. 84).

69. “… los poemas que agora son muy vsados, dichos romances de los italianos, los quales carecen de fundamento verdadero” (III, 164-165).

70. On another occasion Aristotle's “Flor de Agathon” and Heliodorus' Ethiopian History are adduced as examples that a verisimilar plot of tragedy can be constructed on an imaginary, i.e., nonhistorical, foundation (III, 28).

71. “… los amores de Theágenes y Cariclea, de Heliodoro, y los de Leucipo y Clitofonte, de Achiles Tacio, son tan épica como la Ilíada y la Eneyda … la [heroica] que carece de verdadero fundamento, puede tener mucho primor y perfección en su obra, y que en otras cosas aventaje a las que en verdad se fundamentan; yo, a lo menos, más quisiera auer sido autor de la Historia de Heliodoro que no de la Farsalia de Lucano” (III, 165-166).

72. Like Tasso (Del poema eroico, p. 107), El Pinciano excepts Amadís de Gaula and Amadís de Grecia from any censure (III, 178); Cervantes saves Amadís de Gaula, but allows Amadís de Grecia to perish in the flames of the curate's bonfire (Don Quijote, I, vi).

73. “… que de Heliodoro no ay duda que sea poeta, y de los más finos épicos que han hasta agora escripto; a lo menos, ninguno tiene más deleyte trágico y ninguno en el mundo añuda y suelta mejor que él; tiene muy buen lenguaje y muy altas sentencias; y si quisiessen exprimir alegoría, la sacarían dél no mala” (III, 167). The way in which allegory is introduced here betrays El Pinciano's characteristically Aristotelian lack of interest in allegory. Indeed when it becomes a topic of conversation, Ugo claims: “No tengo doctrina de Aristóteles en esta materia poética” (III, 174). The conception of allegory which Fadrique presents is simple. The term refers generally to all that is instructive or edifying in a work and particularly to the fragments of natural and moral philosophy, the sententiae (see III, 175-176).

74. “Tiene razón … porque, allende que no tiene metro, el título de la obra dize Historia de Ethiopía, y no poema” (III, 166-167). The italics are mine.

75. In a context concerning the duplicity of the poetic act, Fadrique alludes to the flexibility of the term: “… tampoco la Historia de Ethiopía es historia, sino que los autores, para autorizar sus escritos, les dan el nombre que se les antoja y mejor les viene a cuento” (I, 214).

76. For a thorough presentation of the Aristotelian commonplaces which El Pinciano and Cervantes share, see Jean-François Canavaggio, “Alonso López Pinciano y la estética literaria de Cervantes en el ‘Quijote,’” Anales Cervantinos, VII (1958), 13-107. See also, William C. Atkinson, “Cervantes, El Pinciano and the ‘Novelas ejemplares,’” Hispanic Review, XVI (1948), 189-208.