[In the following essay, Raby examines Dante's use of Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio in his Purgatorio.]

When Dante, with Virgil as his guide, came out from Hell ‘to return unto the bright world’ by a ‘hidden path’ leading to an opening through which they saw ‘the lovely things that the heaven brings forth’, they found themselves in that mysterious and beautiful part of the earth, the island in the encircling sea, from which Mount Purgatory rose to the heavens. There, in the sky, were the Four Stars, which were never seen save by our first parents. The heavens seemed to rejoice in their flames:

O settentrional vedovo sito,
poichè privato sei di mirar quelle!

These stars are none other than the Four Cardinal Virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. Dante was to meet them again in the Earthly Paradise at the summit of the Mount in the divine pageant, and afterwards by the side of Beatrice, where they appear as her hand-maidens in an eternal heavenly dance—‘here we are nymphs, and in the sky are stars’.

The thought of what mysterious lands might lie in the southern hemisphere beyond the ocean had a fascination for Dante as well as for generations of mediæval men. This appears with a wonderful impressiveness in the account which Ulysses gives in the Inferno¹ of his last and fatal voyage. Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations,² had said: natura inest mentibus nostris insatiabilis quaedam cupiditas veri videndi, et orae locorum illorum, quo pervenerimus, quo faciliorem nobis cognitionem rerum caelestium, eo cognoscendi cupiditatem dabunt. (There is naturally in our minds a certain insatiable desire to know the truth, and the very place itself to which we shall come [i.e. the celestial region], as it gives us a more immediate knowledge of celestial things, will also increase our desire for such knowledge.) And again, in the De Finibus,³ he had spoken of the human cognitionis amor et scientiae which refused to be deterred or thwarted by any hindrance. Cicero proceeds on the authority of Homer⁴ to depict the Sirens as promising Ulysses knowledge, for they knew not only the story of Troy, but Omniaque e latis rerum vestigia terris, ‘all the tracks of things over the wide earth’. This was enough for Dante, who must have had in mind, as well, the Horatian picture of Ulysses presented to us by Homer as a ‘type of virtue and knowledge’,⁵

Quid virtus et quid sapientia possit,
utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixen.

Ulysses' account of his last adventure, as given to Dante, is too well-known to be set out in detail here. No desire to return home could conquer, he says, the ‘ardour that I had to gain experience of the world, (a divenir del mondo esperto)’, and so he set sail beyond the pillars of Hercules, encouraging his small company not ‘to deny to this brief vigil of your senses that still remains, experience of the unpeopled world (del mondo senza gente) beyond the sun. … Ye were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge’—‘virtute e conoscenza’, the very words of Horace. They saw the ‘stars of the other pole’, and, in the distance, the Mountain, crowned, indeed, with the Earthly Paradise, but not yet clothed with the terraces of Purgatory. A tempest smote them, and, in punishment for their transgression of the bounds of knowledge allowed to man, by the divine decree the sea closed over ship and crew.

The standard authority for all things concerning the structure of heaven and earth was Cicero's famous Somnium Scipionis, with its lengthy and even more valuable Commentary by Macrobius.⁶ Dante had studied them with care, for he needed them for his whole construction of the celestial world, and in particular to use them, in a poet's creative fashion, for the setting of his Purgatory. The Dream of Scipio, the counterpart to Plato's myth of Er, was the closing section of Book vi of Cicero's De Republica. It relates how Scipio Africanus the Younger sees in a dream his adoptive grandfather, the great Africanus, who takes him up to the starry abode of the blessed, shows him the world below and the wonders of the heavenly spheres, and urges him in the path of virtue, so that, along with great men who had served their country virtuously and well, he may obtain his reward in the true fatherland of the soul. It is not necessary to follow Macrobius in his long and, to us, often tedious exposition of Cicero's text. We need only observe how Dante uses some of this rich material in his Purgatory.

Scipio, who is relating his dream to Laelius, says that he looked down from the Milky Way upon the starry heavens, and ‘all things appeared splendid and wonderful’—praeclara et mirabilia. Some stars were visible ‘which we never see from this place (the earth) where we now are’. Macrobius explains why the southern hemisphere is not visible to us and has its own stars, sidera sua, and also why the sight of them filled the beholder with wonder.⁷ The north and south poles are perpetually frozen, but in the southern part of the earth there is a habitable temperate zone corresponding with our own in the north. This zone, however, is cut off from our direct knowledge forever. We infer its existence solely by reason, and, what is more, it was not and never will be allowed us (neque licuit unquam nobis, nec licebit agnoscere) to know by whom it is inhabited.⁸ It is a forbidden land. So Ulysses meets his doom because he has sought to transgress the limits of what, according to Macrobius, it is lawful for mortals to know.

But for his Purgatory Dante still needed Cicero and Macrobius. He appropriates to himself the wonder with which Scipio looked on these stars which are never seen in our northern clime:

Io mi volsi a man destra, e posi mente
all'altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle
non vista mai fuor che alla prima gente.
Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle.
O settentrional vedovo sito,
poichè privato sei di mirar quelle!(9)

If Dante is to use this Macrobian material for his great purpose, he must mould it accordingly. So the bright stars must be four in number to represent the Four Cardinal Virtues under which our first parents were created. But why does Dante place these virtues here to shed their splendid light upon the approach to his Purgatory? Basing himself on Plotinus (whether directly or through Porphyry does not matter for our purpose),¹⁰ Macrobius explains¹¹ that each of these four virtues has four types—political or social; purgatorial (purgatoriæ); virtues of the fully purified mind (animi iam purgati); and exemplary virtues (exemplares). By political and social virtues a man is made ruler (rector) first of himself, and then of the state, whereas by the purgatorial virtues he becomes divini capax, free from the contagion of the body, and by a kind of flight from human things ready to mingle only with the divine. The third class of virtues belongs to minds already purged and cleansed from all the stains of this world, while the exemplary virtues exist only as ‘forms’ in the divine mind, the νους of the Neoplatonists.

These cardinal virtues of the first type, as Dante knew and emphasized in his De Monarchia, were necessary to man's temporal felicity, but, as Macrobius had pointed out, the purgatorial virtues are also necessary to the soul if it is to be made, in Dante's own words, which are, none the less, pure Macrobian,

puro e disposto a salire alle stelle.

Dante, indeed, chose these words with care, having Macrobius in mind: Hae autem animae [the purified souls] in ultimam sphaeram recipi creduntur quœ απλανής vocatur¹²—the purged soul inherits the region of the stars. It is disposto a salire, for Macrobius says that it is divini capax (disposto), and goes upwards as if by a flight (salire).¹³

In Macrobius these virtues operate in the present life, while the soul is yet in the body, but in Dante's poem they preside over the purification of souls in that intermediate state of penitential expiation. The Commedia, though in its literal sense it is a vision of the state of the souls after death, is also an allegory of man's life and destiny, ‘his need of light and guidance, his duties to the temporal and spiritual powers, to the Empire and the Church. … In the literal sense the Purgatorio is the essential Purgatory of separated spirits. … In the allegorical sense it represents the moral purgatory of repentant sinners in this world; and has for subject man, by penance and good works, becoming free from the tyranny of vice, attaining to moral and intellectual freedom.’¹⁴ So the Purgatorio sets forth allegorically the process of purification necessary in this world for the reception of grace and for the contemplative life which is a preparation for the final vision of God. It is, therefore, appropriate that these four virtues should be represented as a heavenly constellation shedding its light on man's painful journey towards purification. These are natural virtues, which the ancients discovered by their reason. Virgil knows them, but he cannot see beyond them to the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. He must take his leave of Dante with these words: ‘Thy will is now free, upright and whole, and it would be wrong not to follow its prompting. So I crown and mitre thee over thyself.’¹⁵ This is, again, Macrobius, who has said that these four virtues make a man ruler (rector) over himself, as well as over the state.¹⁶ But Dante goes further. The purified soul is not merely crowned, but ‘mitred’ over himself. E. H. Kantorowicz, in his remarkable book The King's Two Bodies, appears to regard this as a kind of spiritual ‘baptism’ by which Dante, like the neophyte in the Church, becomes both ‘King and priest’.¹⁷ But what Dante receives is hardly a ‘baptismal’ crown and mitre. As Dante well knew, at the imperial coronation the Emperor received both crown and mitre,¹⁸ and was henceforth entitled to exercise his full sovereignty—he was, as the imperialist doctrine implied, at once sovereign over himself and over his subjects.¹⁹ It is his duty, by means of the ‘moral and intellectual virtues’, to lead men to the ‘blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of their proper powers and is figured by the terrestrial paradise’. Man ‘has need of a twofold directive power in accordance with his twofold end, that is, the supreme pontiff, to lead the human race, in accordance with revelation, to eternal life; and the emperor, to direct the human race to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of philosophy’.²⁰ It is not for nothing that in Dante's Earthly Paradise the Four Cardinal Virtues, who appear as nymphs in an eternal dance, are clothed in the imperial purple.

But why is Dante himself ‘crowned and mitred over himself’? It is because he (and the whole body of purified souls whom he represents), has by the power of these virtues, regained that freedom and sovereignty which Adam possessed before the Fall, when he was ‘free, upright and whole’, his own sovereign, ‘supreme over himself’,²¹ without a temporal master. He is an Emperor, like Adam, lord over himself by means of those purgatorial virtues, which had shed the light of temporal felicity on Adam's Paradise, and now guide the souls in Purgatory up the steep ascent to Paradise regained, where the Virtues are no longer seen as stars by a symbolical adaptation to the weakness of our understanding,²² but as the maiden companions of Beatrice, who will lead Dante to her and to ‘the other three’, the Theological Virtues, ‘whose gaze is more profound’, for their eternal habitation is the Celestial Paradise.

As only a supreme poet could, Dante has taken the commonplace words of Macrobius—his virtutibus vir bonus primum sui atque inde rei publicæ rector efficitur—and has given them a new and richer meaning in their application to the Empire and to sinful humanity.²³

Notes

1. Inferno, XXVI, 90 sqq.

2. Tusc., i, xix, 44. I owe this and other references to Sir Ernest Barker's essay ‘Dante and the last Voyage of Ulysses’ in his Traditions of Civility (Cambridge 1948) and to Bruno Nardi's brilliant essay; ‘La tragedia d'Ulisse’, in Dante e la cultura medievale (Bari 1949), pp. 153 sqq.

3. De Finibus, V xviii 48.

4. Odyssey XII, 184 sqq.

5. Barker, p. 62; Horace, Epist., i, ii, 17 sq.

6. I have used the text, ed. J. Willis, Teubner (1963) and the translation by W. H. Stahl (Columbia 1951) (with valuable introduction and notes).

7. Macrobius, Comment. I xvi. I owe this reference to Mr. Colin Hardie.

8. Comment. II v 17. Neither Barker nor Nardi refers to this passage, though Nardi (p. 160) observes that it was generally recognized that by divine decree the earthly Paradise was inaccessible to man.

9. Purg. I 22 sqq. vedovo is not mere poetical rhetoric; it means that by Adam's sin, the human race has been deprived of the vision of these stars that shone on Paradise.

10. The question of Macrobius's sources, with special reference to his knowledge of Plotinus and his use of Porphyry, is summarized by W. H. Stahl in the Introduction (pp. 29 sqq.) to his translation of Macrobius's Commentary. See also the valuable discussion in P. Courcelle Les lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore (Paris 1948) pp. 3 sqq. If Macrobius read Plotinus, his main debt was to Porphyry.

11. Comment. I viii.

12. Comment. I ix 10.

13. Comment. I viii 8.

14. E. G. Gardner Dante (London 1923) p. 107 and p. 129 sq.

15. Purg. XXVII 140 sqq.

16. Comment. I viii 8.

17. E. H. Kantorowicz The King's Two Bodies (Princeton 1957), p. 492.

18. W. Ullmann The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London 1955) p. 259 and text of Coronation Order, p. 461. The Emperor is made a cleric by being granted the tunic, dalmatic, pluviale and mitre, but he is not given the essentially sacerdotal insignia.

19. De Monarchia I 6; the monarch is aliquod unum quod non est pars; he is a unity above and outside the community; see O. Gierke Political Theories of the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1913) p. 141 (n. 119).

20. De Monarchia III 16.

21. This is Kantorowicz's own phrase, op. cit. p. 494.

22. Cf. Beatrice's explanation of a similar problem in Paradiso IV. 22-42.

23. The extent of Dante's debt to Macrobius and the subtle ways in which he makes use of Macrobian material are set out in G. Rabuse Der kosmische Aufbau der Jenseitsreiche Dantes (Graz-Köln 1958).