[In the following essay, McGaha explores the indebtedness of Cervantes to Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.]

Don Quixote, the first modern novel, is surely one of the most original books ever written, yet paradoxically, it is hard to conceive of a book more firmly rooted in the literary tradition. Modern scholarship has destroyed forever the myth of Cervantes the untutored genius who managed to compose his masterpiece by a stroke of miraculous inspiration and who was ultimately incapable of understanding what he had accomplished. Don Quixote abounds in allusions—some obvious and others oblique—to literary works of all periods and genres. Cervantes, a man who was in his own words “extremely fond of reading anything, even though it be but scraps of paper in the streets,”¹ was so steeped in literature that he was hardly capable of formulating a thought without immediately thinking of an analogue from his reading. The superimposition of many of these analogues on the images of his own fantasy helped to create the multiple levels of meaning in Don Quixote which have made the book one of the most fascinating and enigmatic works of Western literature.

The search for the sources which provided Cervantes with the raw material which went into the composition of Don Quixote has resulted in a vast corpus of critical writings which, in spite of their uneven quality, have contributed immeasurably to our understanding of Cervantes' intellectual formation. Nevertheless, one book which seems to have exercised an important influence on several very significant aspects of Cervantes' thought has been inexplicably neglected by critics.

I am referring to Cicero's treatise on the Dream of Scipio and the famous commentary on it written in the fifth century by Macrobius. The treatise by Cicero originally formed the conclusion of his De re publica. The remainder of that work was lost until the rediscovery of a major portion of it in 1820, only the Dream having been preserved in manuscripts of Macrobius' Commentary. The Dream and its accompanying Commentary exerted an enormous influence on medieval and Renaissance literature. Macrobius' Commentary was frequently cited as an authority on such diverse subjects as the immortality of the soul, the prohibition of suicide, the classification and interpretation of dreams, Pythagorean arithmetic, the harmony of the spheres, astronomy and geography. Nearly fifty manuscripts of the Commentary survive, and at least thirty-three editions of the Latin text were printed before 1597, eleven of them appearing in Cervantes' lifetime. Juan de Jarava's Spanish translation of the Dream of Scipio was published at Anvers in 1549.

A brief survey of the contents of the Dream and Macrobius' Commentary will serve to give us a general idea of just how greatly Cervantes was indebted to this work. One could cite hundreds of passages from Cervantes's writings to illustrate that the contents of Macrobius' Commentary formed an important part of Cervantes' cultural background, but I shall have to limit myself to a few of the most obvious and important examples of direct influence.

In the Dream Scipio Africanus the Younger relates how, during a visit to Africa, he had a dream in which his adoptive grandfather, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus the Elder, appeared to him and took him up his to abode in the heavens. The elder Scipio predicted several important events in his grandson's future career, concluding that when he reached the age of fifty-six, he would find himself in a dangerous situation in which he would be called upon as dictator to save the Roman commonwealth, “if you escape death at the hands of your wicked kinsmen².” In order to prepare the younger man for this experience, his grandfather has come to him in a dream to point out the rewards of civic virtue. The younger Scipio sees his father, Aemilius Paulus, enjoying the glories of the afterlife, and he is so much impressed by the superiority of that state to mortal experience that he is tempted to commit suicide, but his father explains to him that this is forbidden as a dereliction of duty. As Scipio the Younger looked down from his vantage point among the stars, “the earth appeared so small that I was ashamed of our empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface³.”

In an article published in 1970⁴, Franklin O. Brantley pointed out that this passage is the most likely source for the famous episode in Don Quixote II.41 in which the knight and his squire undergo a mock ascent into the heavens on the wooden horse Clavileño. Although Cervantes presents the whole episode as resulting from a deception performed upon Don Quixote and Sancho, the result for Sancho is the same as if the ascent had actually taken place. Describing his experience in what amounts to a humorous paraphrase of Scipio's words, Sancho says that “it seemed as if the whole earth was no bigger than a grain of mustard and the people walking about on it were a little larger than hazelnuts⁵.” In the following chapter Sancho assures the duke and duchess that “ever since I looked at the earth from up there and saw how little it is, I am not as anxious to be a governor as I was once upon a time. What greatness is there in ruling over a grain of mustard, or imperial dignity and power in governing half a dozen human beings the size of hazelnuts? For there did not seem to me to be any more than that. If your Lordship would be pleased to give me a little bit of Heaven, even if it was no more than half a league, I'd rather have it than the biggest island in the world⁶.” The ascent through the spheres to the region of fixed stars, described according to the Ptolemaic system as explained by Cicero and elaborated on by Macrobius, purges Sancho of avarice and prepares him to rule justly as Governor of Barataria.

In chapter five of the Dream Scipio's grandfather speaks of “the people who dwell in the region about the Great Cataract, where the Nile comes rushing down from lofty mountains; they have lost their hearing because of the loud roar⁷.” This passage clarifies why Don Quixote describes a loud noise of water in I.20 as seeming to be “falling precipitously from the mountains of the moon⁸.” The name of the mountain range should be capitalized, for, according to Ptolemy's Geography, it is the location of the Great Cataract.

After a brief digression concerning the habitable regions of the world, the elder Scipio emphasizes the ephemeral nature of human fame, counseling his grandson that “if you will look upwards and contemplate this eternal goal and abode, you will no longer give heed to the gossip of the common herd, nor look for your reward in human things. Let Virtue, as it is fitting, draw you with her own attractions to the true glory; and let others say what they please about you, for they will talk in any event. All their gossip is confined to the narrow area at which you are gazing, and is never enduring; it is overwhelmed with the passing of men and is lost in the oblivion of posterity⁹.” In Don Quixote II.8 the knight, after comparing himself to many historical figures who risked life and limb in pursuit of fame, tells Sancho: “We … are more concerned with the glory that, in ages to come, shall be eternal in the ethereal and celestial regions than we are with the vanity of that fame that is to be won in this present and finite time; for however long such fame may endure, it needs must finally end with the world itself, the close of which has been foreordained¹⁰.”

Both Cicero in the Dream and Cervantes in Don Quixote make the important point that true heroism lies first of all in the conquest of self and only secondarily in heroic deeds.¹¹. Indeed, this could be termed the central meaning of both works. Scipio's Dream relates how the Roman general was purged of vain ambition by a revelation of the fact that the heavenly reward for virtuous living is far greater and more desirable than any earthly glory. We can detect exactly the same process of purgation in the two books of Don Quixote.

Macrobius begins his Commentary on Scipio's Dream with an elaborate defense of the value of fiction as a means of communicating philosophical truth. He condemns two types of literature—that which merely pleases without instructing and that which includes matters that are “base … and are monstrosities of some sort¹²”, giving as an example of the latter the stories of gods caught in adultery. Licentiousness, lack of didactic value and “monstrosity” figure prominently among the reasons given by Cervantes for his condemnation of the novels of chivalry¹³. In the type of literature which Macrobius defends, “a decent and dignified conception of holy truths, with respectable events and characters, is presented beneath a modest veil of allegory¹⁴.” We have ample reason to believe that Cervantes shared this view. In his admirable book Cervantes's Theory of the Novel, E.C. Riley has observed that “Cervantes's obsession with truth in literature was so powerful that it is difficult not to believe that the “utility” of prose fiction depended for him above all on its poetic truth¹⁵.”

Macrobius goes on to explain that philosophers have preferred to use imaginative literature rather than straightforward explanation to express their teachings because “a frank, open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature, who, just as she has withheld an understanding of herself from the uncouth senses of men by enveloping herself in variegated garments, has desired to have her secrets handled by more prudent individuals through fabulous narratives¹⁶.” This statement recalls Don Quixote's reference to a “disordered order … in which art, imitating nature, would seem to have outdone the latter¹⁷”, words which Joaquín Casalduero has described as a definition of Cervantes' sense of composition. “Nature”, he writes, “has a divine and secret order; the artist, the creator, is capable of inventing, by means of imagination, an order which competes with that of Nature. The poet finds the unity of the multiple; he finds it because he invents it. Hence the superiority of art over Nature: it imposes the form of permanence on the natural and the various; that is, it reveals to physical and moral nature its meaning¹⁸”.

In chapter three of his Commentary Macrobius presents his well-known analysis of the varieties and interpretation of dreams which, like literature, communicate esoteric knowledge under the guise of fiction. However, some dreams, like some literary works, are of no value. This type of dream is merely a reflection of the concerns with which the dreamer is preoccupied during his waking hours, or else it results from an overindulgence in eating and drinking. Meaningful dreams, on the other hand, are oracular—because some tutelary figure appears to the dreamer to reveal the future—and are prophetic and enigmatic. Cervantes' discussion of the causes and types of dreams in chapter six of his Viaje del Parnaso (1614) is clearly derived from this passage in Macrobius' Commentary, as editors of Cervantes' work have usually noted. In the Viaje Cervantes says that dreams result from three causes: (1) the ordinary preoccupations of life; (2) an individual's prevailing humor (i.e., blood, choler, phlegm or melancholy); (3) beneficial revelations. Like Macrobius, he gives the anxious lover who dreams of his love as an example of the first type. And in a similar passage in Cervantes' novel Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) the character Mauricio says that dreams, “when they are neither divine revelations nor illusions of the devil, proceed, either from many foods which cause vapors to rise to the brain, with which they disturb common sense, or else from what a man deals with most during the day¹⁹”. One of the useless types of dream listed by Macrobius is the apparition, which occurs in the intermediate state between wakefulness and sleep. “In this drowsy condition he is still fully awake and imagines he sees specters rushing at him or wandering vaguely about, differing from natural creatures in size and shape, and hosts of diverse things, either delightful or disturbing. To this class belongs the incubus, which, according to popular belief, rushes upon people in sleep and presses them with a weight they can feel²⁰”. Sancho Panza imagines he is having an experience of this kind in Don Quixote I.16 when the serving maid Maritornes climbs in bed with him. “At that moment Sancho awoke and, feeling a bulky object almost on top of him”, thought it must be a nightmare²¹.

Macrobius says that Scipio's dream embraces all three of the reliable types. I think most Cevantean critics would agree with me that the same can be said of Don Quixote's famous dream in the Cave of Montesinos. The sage Montesinos is of course the oracle in that dream. The dream is prophetic in its hints that Don Quixote will ultimately be unable to disenchant Dulcinea. To call the dream enigmatic seems almost an understatement in view of the profusion of interpretations that have been suggested. Don Quixote's own uneasiness about its validity led him to seek the counsel of Maese Pedro's divining monkey and Antonio Moreno's talking head.

Macrobius is troubled by the fact that Cicero seems to give priority to the active over the contemplative life when he says that “nothing that occurs on earth is more gratifying to the supreme God than commonwealths”. He finds a convenient loophole in the words “on earth”, explaining that the contemplative's singleminded concern with divine matters is clearly superior to statesmanship. This contrast will be amply reflected in the discussions of the relative merits of the knight's vocation as opposed to that of the monk or the scholar in Don Quixote²².

Book II of the Commentary contains Macrobius' treatment of geography. In commenting on the various zones of the earth, he remarks: “… in this zone which we inhabit, all of which is spoken of as temperate, there are portions near the torrid zone which are hotter than the rest—Ethiopia, Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, for example. In these lands the atmosphere has become so rarefied because of the heat that it is seldom or never condensed into clouds. Consequently there is almost no rainfall there. Then there are the regions that closely press the frigid zone: the Palus Maeotis, and the lands about the Don and the Danube rivers …²³” This passage appears to have inspired the delightfully absurd comments about geography in Don Quixote I.29. The character Dorotea, pretending to be a princess form the distant kingdom of «Micomicon», urges Don Quixote to return with her to her kingdom and defend her rights as heiress to the throne, in fact intending to lure him back to his native village, where he may be cured of his madness. The priest Pero Pérez first tells Sancho Panza that the “princess” has “journeyed all the way from Guinea (i.e., Ethiopia)” to seek Don Quixote out²⁴. Sancho accordingly informs his master that Dorotea is “queen of the great kingdom of Micomicon, in Ethiopia²⁵”. Later, however, the priest states that it will take nine years to reach the kingdom, which lies only a little more than a hundred days' journey from “the great Meona—I mean Meotides—lake²⁶”, although Dorotea corrects him, saying that her kingdom is not nearly that far away. Cervantes must have been amused by the fact that a lake would bear the name Maeotis, which a Spanish speaking person would immediately associate with the colloquial verb mear, meaning “to piss”. In case anyone should miss the point, he first uses the form “la gran laguna Meona”, which we could translate roughly as “the great Piss Lake”. The conjunction of Ethiopia and Lake Maeotis, separated by a vast distance but jointly mentioned in Macrobius, strongly suggests that the Commentary was Cervantes' source.

Later in Book II Macrobius refers to the myth of the Golden Age in terms which recall those used by Don Quixote in his famous discourse on the subject: “For who would readily agree that the earth has always existed when historians assure us that the development and improvement and even the discovery of many things are of recent date, and when in the memories and tales of the ancients we find crude men, unkempt rustics, not far removed from wild beasts in their savagery, who did not use the food we enjoy, but subsisting at first on nuts and berries, only recently began to look for nourishment from the plowed furrow; and when we have such faith in the beginning of the world and of the human race itself that we believe that the Golden Age was the first and that subsequent ages degenerated through the baser metals to the last Age of Iron²⁷?”. We can detect in this passage a troubling contradiction between the opposed notions of the progress and development of civilization and of a progressive degeneration from the Golden Age to the Age of Iron, a problem which is reflected in Cervantes' treatment of the theme. Was the Golden Age a time of idyllic pastoral simplicity or of savagery? Is history a record of progress or of decline? Towards the end of the chapter, after a long discussion of the age of the world, Macrobius returns to the theme, commenting: “Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclination submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowing no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages²⁸”.

I trust that the documentation cited in this article will suffice to demonstrate that Cervantes was thoroughly familiar with Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. The influence of Macrobius on Cervantes is evident not only in the many superficial borrowings, of which I have mentioned only a few of the most obvious ones, but also in such fundamental areas as Cervantes' concept of the value and purpose of literature. Like Dante and Chaucer before him, Cervantes found that the passage of centuries had not dimmed the luster of the insights into the meaning of human existence contained in Macrobius' Commentary. But the ideas which Macrobius expressed in the abstract language of philosophy were to take on new life and speak with enhanced power when transformed by the alchemy of genius into the novel we know as Don Quixote.

Notes

1. Don Quixote I.9, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: The Modern Library, 1949), p. 71. All subsequent quotes from Don Quixote are from this translation.

2. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 71. All subsequent quotes from the Commentary are from this translation.

3. Macrobius, p. 72.

4. “Sancho's Ascent into the Spheres”, Hispania, (March 1970), 37-45.

5. p. 776.

6. p. 778.

7. Macrobius, p. 74.

8. p. 146.

9. Macrobius, p. 76.

10. p. 559.

11. See Macrobius, p. 76, and Don Quixote II.73, pp. 977-978.

12. Macrobius, p. 85.

13. See Don Quixote I.47.

14. Macrobius, p. 85.

15. London: Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 84.

16. Macrobius, p. 86.

17. Don Quixote I.50, p. 443.

18. Sentido y forma del Quijote (Madrid: Insula, 1966), pp. 196-197; my translation.

19. I.18; my translation.

20. Macrobius, p. 89.

21. p. 120.

22. See I.13, I.37 and passim.

23. Macrobius, p. 211.

24. p. 249.

25. p. 252.

26. p. 254.

27. Macrobius, p. 217; cf. Don Quixote I.11.

28. Macrobius, p. 219.