The Orlando Furioso and Ovid's Revision of the Aeneid

Author(s): Daniel Javitch

Source: MLN, Vol. 99, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1984), pp. 1023-1036
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905398
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 The Orlando Furioso and Ovid's
Revision of the Aeneid

Daniel Javitch

Readers of the Orlando Furioso have recognized Ariosto's debt to

Ovid ever since the first version of the poem was published in 1516.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, editions of the Orlando
Furioso already pointed out that such notable episodes in the poem
as Bireno's abandonment of Olimpia and her ensuing lament, Rug-
giero's rescue of Angelica from the monster Orca, Orlando's sim-
ilar rescue of Olimpia, Fiordispina's lament upon discovering Bra-
damante's female identity, and other such pathetic monologues,
were all imitations of Ovid. It would be redundant, then, to show
that the Metamorphoses is a major subtext of the Orlando Furioso.
Moreover, to point out that Ariosto imitated episodes from Ovid's
major poem does not serve to distinguish him from a number of
previous post-classical poets similarly indebted to Ovid. What does
require emphasis and further comment is the fact that Ariosto's
use of the Metamorphoses reflects a new understanding of Ovid's
sensibility and intention. By its imitations of the Metamorphoses and
by its formal and stylistic affinities with the Latin poem, the Furioso
betokens a critical appreciation of Ovid that is unprecedented in
the post-classical fortune of the Metamorphoses. Ariosto rediscov-
ered features of Ovid's narrative technique and style which, though
recognized in our time as distinctive aspects of Ovid's poetry, had
gone largely ignored until Ariosto reclaimed them.
In an earlier article, entitled "Rescuing Ovid from the Allego-
rizers," I began to illustrate how Ariosto's imitation of the Meta-

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1024 DANIEL JAVITCH

morphoses aimed to restore previously neglected aspects of Ovid's

wit and style. Focusing on Ruggiero's rescue of Angelica from the
monster Orca (O.F. X.91-115), I discussed how this imitation of
Perseus' rescue of Andromeda (Metamorphoses IV.663-764) re-
vealed Ariosto's appreciation of Ovid's playful retelling of myths
and, at the same time, displayed his awareness that this aspect of
Ovid's narrative had been ignored and distorted by prior readers,
especially the medieval Christian allegorizers of the Metamorphoses.
I argued, in fact, that to restore the wit and style of Ovidian nar-
rative to its rightful centrality Ariosto's imitation defied the prior
Christian allegorizations imposed on Ovid's episode by deliberately
divesting of any Christian symbolic meaning Angelica's liberation,
and by association Andromeda's. By dwelling on the all-too-human
and erotic reflexes of his heroic protagonist, by bringing out the
ludicrous possibilities of the epic encounter with the sea monster,
by his incongruous mixture of styles and genres, by his flouting
of decorum, Ariosto makes it clear that he fully appreciated Ovid's
irreverent treatment of solemn myth and that it was precisely
Ovid's anti-sacramentalism that he found so kindred and so nec-
essary to rehabilitate.'
Through observing Ariosto's appreciative imitation of Ovid's
treatment of myth in this episode I was led eventually to ask the
following questions: did the Italian poet also appreciate in Meta-
morphoses XIII and XIV Ovid's irreverent retelling of Rome's prin-
cipal historical myth, namely the story of Aeneas' journey from
Troy to Rome? Did Ariosto perceive, on the basis of this revision
of the Aeneid, Ovid's general defiance of Virgil's vision of Roman
history and of the world? And was he inspired by Ovid's example
to challenge, in turn, Virgil's literary and moral authority?
What, it may be asked, has Ariosto's appreciation of Ovid's
playful telling of myths got to do with Ariosto's possible awareness
of Ovid's revisionary relationship to Virgil? Recent studies of
Ovid's treatment of serious myths-most notably Charles Segal's
articles on the subject-point out that Ovid's humanized and
playful versions of remote, monumental myths reflect Ovid's reac-
tion against Augustan ideology and high seriousness.2 Such hu-
manization of myth, as Segal observes, is related to Ovid's skeptical
refusal to celebrate Roman gravitas or to treat such themes as
checking violence, suppressing passion, or imposing order on one-
self and the world, but instead, in defiance of Virgilian conceptions
of commitment and sacrifice to a larger transcendent order,'to

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 M L N 1025

treat themes that stress the need of human affection and love, or
that depict passion as a pardonable weakness, thereby vindicating
the personal and emotional life. Illuminating criticism like Segal's
served to confirm my impression that Ovid's refusal to immerse
his readers in a serious and unified mythical universe was part of
his reaction against Virgil's Augustan ethos. It became apparent to
me, as it is to other modern readers of the Metamorphoses, that
Ovid's irreverent retelling of myth affirmed his revisionary rela-
tionship to Virgil.3 But had this been equally apparent to Ariosto?
What evidence does the Orlando Furioso provide that Ariosto, fa-
miliar as he was with both Ovid's and Virgil's poems, appreciated
Ovid's critical reaction to his major precursor? Let me try to pro-
vide an answer.
Even more often then he imitates the Metamorphoses Ariosto bor-
rows from and imitates the Aeneid. For example, the military con-
flict between Agramante and Carlomagno, one of the major plot-
lines of the Furioso, is modelled on the war between the Trojans
and the Latins in the last four books of the Aeneid. Paris besieged
by the Saracens recalls the Trojan camp besieged and attacked by
the Rutulians; the pagan Rodomonte's single-handed massacre of
his foes within the walls of Paris and his eventual retreat are imi-
tations of Turnus' similar exploits in Aeneid IX; Rinaldo's return
to Paris and his reinforcement of the Christian army with fresh
British troops is modelled on Aeneas' return to his Trojans with
Etruscan and Arcadian troops; the fatal confrontation of the young
Saracen prince Dardinello with the stronger Rinaldo is an imitation
of the duel between Pallas and Turnus when Pallas meets his
death; the disastrous expedition of Cloridano and Medoro is partly
based on that of Nisus and Euryalus. I do not intend to examine
any of these imitations in detail. But my study of them leads me
to make this general distinction between them and Ariosto's imi-
tations of Ovid. Whereas imitations of Ovid in the Furioso tend to
assimilate smoothly to their contexts, imitations of Virgil do not,
but are more often qualified, made incongruous or simply dimin-
ished by their contexts. When Ariosto evokes or imitates the Me-
tamorphoses he does so to reveal the affinities between his poem and
Ovid's. He usually imitates Virgil's epic to signal his departures
from it. He thereby reveals his appreciation of the distinct poetic
styles and outlooks of the two Augustan poets. But aside from
recognizing these differences, was Ariosto aware that Ovid not only
did not share Virgil's sensibility, but was consciously defying that

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1026 DANIEL JAVITCH

sensibility? In other words, was Ariosto already aware-unlike

most of his contemporaries-that Ovid and Virgil were not ex-
ponents of some unified, monolithic classicism, but, on the con-
trary, that their interpoetic relation exemplified the dialectical, re-
visionary process of Roman, indeed of all, literary history? I believe
that Ariosto did possess such awareness (and that his appreciation
of the difference between Rome's two greatest poets could only
help develop such awareness), but in order to demonstrate it, I
must first comment briefly on Ovid's critical rewriting of the Aeneid
in the Metamorphoses.
The presence of the Aeneid, in the form of verbal echoes, rec-
ollections, borrowings, and parodies, can be felt throughout Ovid's
poem. But Ovid's most direct and extensive confrontation with
Virgil's epic is to be found in Books XIII and XIV of the Meta-
morphoses where Ovid provided his own version of the Aeneid.4
What can first be observed very generally about this retelling is
that Ovid treats the story of Aeneas' voyage no differently from
his many other mythical tales. This already indicates the poet's
refusal to grant what was, after all, Rome's principal historical myth
any more privilege or importance than his other stories. Ovid's
main intent, however, was to challenge Virgil's authority, to defy
his already classical precursor by denying Aeneas' voyage the epic
size, the status of national myth, the unity, and the teleology Virgil
had given it. Ovid did this primarily by radically abridging the
Aeneid, and by depriving his account of Aeneas' search for a new
homeland of any continuity or coherence. The narrator exploits
every opportunity to drop Aeneas from his narrative in order to
shift, instead, to romantic or fantastic stories that, though uncon-
nected to Aeneas' exploits, are granted more amplitude and im-
portance. In the segment of about 1150 lines that begins with
Troy's destruction (Met. XIII.399) and ends with an extremely
brief reference to the fall and death of Turnus (Met. XIV.573)
about 175 lines are devoted to Aeneas' wanderings, and the rest
to stories that repeatedly interrupt this very truncated (in com-
parison to Virgil's) version of Aeneas' journey to Italy.
Consider, for example, the lack of continuity and abridgement
in Ovid's account of Aeneas' trip from Crete to Sicily and then to
Carthage, and eventually to Cumae. Aeneas' wanderings from
Crete to Sicily, which took Virgil almost 450 lines (Aeneid 3.121-
569) are summarized by Ovid in 19 lines (Met.13.711-729). But
once Aeneas' party reaches the straits of Messina, guarded by the

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 M L N 1027

monsters Charybdis and Scylla, Ovid abandons his brief chronicle

of Aeneas' wanderings, as though it had already grown too tedious, to
tell us about Scylla before her metamorphosis (Met. 13.730ff.). The
story of Scylla is itself a frame for the story of Polyphemus' un-
requited love for Galatea which, in turn, leads to digressions about
Glaucus' transformation, his love for Scylla, her spurning of it, and
finally Circe's jealous intervention which brings about Scylla's
transformation into a monster. After abandoning Aeneas for more
than three hundred lines, in the course of which Ovid devotes
more attention to the Cyclop's wooing of Galatea than he ever does
to any of Aeneas' exploits, the poet returns to Aeneas and his men,
but only long enough to make the reader aware once again how
drastically he is abridging Virgil's version of the story: in less than
50 lines Ovid summarizes Aeneas' stay in Carthage, Dido's tragedy,
the hero's return to Sicily, his trip to Cumae and his visit to the
underworld. Actually, Ovid abridges Aeneas' visit to the under-
world, the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, to less than four lines (Met.
14.116-119). He totally disregards the vision the hero is granted
of his descendants, but dwells instead on the conversation Aeneas
strikes up with the Sibyl as they return to the upper world, an
exchange which allows the Sibyl to launch into the pathetic story
of her spurning of Apollo's love and her consequent metamor-
phosis. Such a focus on the decidely human, unreligious, and un-
heroic aspects of Aeneas' visit to the underworld is characteristic
of Ovid's general treatment of Aeneas' exploits. So, too, is the
digression to a pathetic love story not directly related to the hero's
quest.
It was not just fondness for variatio nor the governing need to
tell stories about transformations that prompted Ovid to revise
Aeneas' story the way he did. One of Ovid's motives for making
repeated digressions and interruptions in his account of Aeneas'
journey was to flout utterly the continuity and generic uniformity
that Virgil bestowed upon it. Also, by refusing to grant Aeneas'
journey the connectedness and purposeful design it had in Virgil's
poem Ovid affirms a view of time as a random, discontinuous
succession of events and thereby defies the principle of order and
teleology that is made to inform Roman history in the Aeneid.
Moreover, by granting equal importance and size to the numerous
tales of love interrupting Aeneas' journey Ovid also sought to call
into question the epic length and status Virgil had given Aeneas'
wanderings. One is struck by the different kinds of narrative, the

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1028 DANIEL JAVITCH

variety of minor genres (e.g., debate, aition, ekphrasis, idyll,

threnody, etc.), that interrupt Ovid's account of Aeneas' travels.
In fact, Ovid reduces Aeneas' journey to an epyllion, making it
equal to the various small genres of poetry that interrupt it, and
thereby challenging again the epic amplification of Virgil's version.
Furthermore, by giving more importance to the appalling suf-
fering of Hecuba and her children than to the destruction of the
Trojan state, by dwelling more exhaustively on the Cyclop's wooing
of Galatea than on any of Aeneas' heroic exploits, Ovid also aimed
to overturn the Aeneid's hierarchy of values. For by suggesting that
a mother's or a lover's sufferings count for more than the sacrifices
of Aeneas Ovid quite subverts the Virgilian view that public re-
sponsibilities outweigh private passions.
In every way possible Ovid sought to reduce the Aeneid to simply
another story. As Joseph Solodow has pointed out, Ovid did not
just drastically abridge Virgil's version, he cut out precisely those
parts of the epic that Virgil had charged with larger, transcendent
meanings.5 For example, the Fourth Book of the Aeneid, containing
the tragedy of Dido and the dilemma Aeneas faces between fol-
lowing his personal longings or carrying out his historical mission,
Ovid compresses into four lines. So, as was noted above, Aeneas'
visit to the underworld, the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, is abridged
to less than four lines. Ovid briefly sums up Aeneas' descent to
the underworld but does not even mention its climax, the vision
the hero is granted of his future descendants. To be sure, Ovid,
fully appreciative of Virgil's poetic powers, was judicious enough
to avoid invidious comparison by retelling such famous and un-
matchable parts of the Aeneid. Nonetheless, by abridging the
tragedy of Dido to four lines, while providing soon after the Sibyl's
extended account of her predicament after she spurned Apollo's
love, Ovid implies that Dido's tragedy can be subordinated to, and
is therefore less important than the number of other stories of
spurned lovers Ovid chose to tell in this segment of his poem. In
any case, by his technique of radical abbreviation and subordina-
tion Ovid empties the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas of the emblem-
atic force which Virgil has bestowed upon it. Ovid does this re-
peatedly in his revision of the Aeneid.6 And when he does not
radically truncate the events in Aeneas' search for a homeland that
Virgil had charged with proleptic meaning and made an integral
part of a large moral design, Ovid trivializes the heroic or extraor-
dinary aspects of Aeneas' exploits, or reduces them to activities

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 M L N 1029

th~at might occur every day. So, for example, in Ovid's version,
Aeneas' visit to Delos is reduced from a religious quest for divine
guidance to a sight-seeing tour. Similarly, when he briefly sum-
marizes Aeneas' visit to Hades, by completely omitting all of the
details which imparted solemnity and terror to the scenes
preceding the descent, Ovid reduces this awesome experience in
the Aeneid to an ordinary, quotidian event.
The overall effect of such reduction is to leave the reader with
the impression that Aeneas' quest for a new homeland in Italy is
no more privileged, no more significant a story than the innu-
merable other stories Ovid recounts. And it was to challenge the
authoritative status of Virgil's version that Ovid sought this effect.
So he deprived the story of epic grandeur, continuity, unity, his-
torical and ethical meaning in order to expose, by contrast, the
fictitiousness, fabrication, and mere artifice of these features in the
Aeneid. In sum, the revised account of Aeneas' wanderings in the
Metamorphoses aimed to undermine the already canonical status of
the Aeneid by making readers aware that what passed for the au-
thorized version was simply a fiction created by Virgil, no more
definitive, no more sanctified than the next poetic version.
Consider again the more apparent counter-Virgilian aspects of
Ovid's retelling of the Aeneid: the defiance and implicit distrust of
epic continuity, the flouting of generic uniformity, the refusal to
grant privileged, let alone transcendental meaning to epic action,
the stress on personal emotions or responses rather than on self-
abnegation, and, relatedly, the subordination of heroic to erotic
matters. All these characteristics should be familiar to readers of
Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. For the preeminence of variation the
flouting of epic unity and continuity, the deflation of epic's generic
priority, the stress on erotic susceptibility rather than on heroic
self-sacrifice, are also characteristic of Ariosto's poem. The simi-
larity between Ovid's and Ariosto's defiance of classical epic norms
already attests, in my opinion, how readily Ariosto could appreciate
and be inspired by Ovid's revision of the Aeneid.
Ariosto's flouting of epic continuity, for instance, to achieve sub-
versive effects similar to Ovid's, is particularly noticeable in the
segment of the Furioso that runs from Cantos XV to XVIII. In this
section of Italian poem the narrative constantly shifts from the epic
conflict within and around Paris under siege to the romantic and
more fantastic adventures of Astolfo and Grifone in the Middle
East. Not only are the interruptions of the epic action more abrupt

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1030 DANIEL JAVITCH

here than Ariosto's usual narrative breaks, but they also seem more
gratuitous, since nothing, except the poet's desire for varieta, pre-
vents him from providing a continuous account of the epic struggle
in Paris.7 After the recurring experience of having the epic nar-
rative abruptly cut off, and always when the action is about to reach
its highest pitch, the reader gradually realizes that these drastic
breaks in the narrative are techniques of alienation aimed to frus-
trate his or her desire for continuity. At the same time, moreover,
these abrupt narrative shifts deprive the epic matter of the im-
portance, the priority, or indeed of the moral seriousness that the
reader might be inclined to assign it. One of the reasons, inciden-
tally, that the reader is led to expect epic grandeur and seriousness
when Ariosto describes the siege of Paris is because his account of
it, as I mentioned earlier, is filled with echoes and imitations of
the Aeneid. But the epic expectations these very allusions to Virgil's
poem arouse are constantly frustrated by Ariosto's technique of
discontinuity. Let me briefly illustrate this with an example.
In Canto XVIII, after Rodomonte's forced exit from Paris where
he has decimated the population, Ariosto devotes twenty octaves
to the massive battle raging around Paris and then gradually fo-
cuses on the outstanding feats of the young Saracen prince Dar-
dinello (XVIII. 47ff.). Dardinello's aristeja is modelled on that of
the young Pallas in the Aeneid (10.362-438) just before Pallas fights
the much stronger Turnus and gets killed by him (10.439-509).
To the extent that Ariosto's imitation is recognized, it contributes
to the sense of Dardinello's impending doom that builds up even
as he overcomes one Christian knight after another. But at the
point when, after all his successes, Dardinello encounters the more
formidable Rinaldo, just before the moment of tragic pathos when,
like the young Pallas, Dardinello will meet his death much too
early-a pathos that depends for its effect on our continuing in-
volvement with the young Saracen prince-Ariosto suddenly in-
terrupts the action (XV111.59) and shifts to the story of Grifone in
the Middle East to resume the latter's vendetta against the Da-
mascans. The narrator then goes on to describe the reconciliation
between Grifone and the Damascan ruler Norandino, after which
he recounts Aquilante's capture of the treacherous Orrigille and
Martano, and the latter's shameful punishment at the hands of
Norandino and the Damascans. Marfisa, the second greatest lady
warrior in the poem is then introduced, and after she links up with
Astolfo and Sansonetto, they all proceed to Damascus where they

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 M L N 1031

also create havoc b

Marfisa, Sansonetto, Grifone, Aquilante, and Astolfo depart for
France by sea. But at the height of a raging Mediterranean storm
the narrator suddenly abandons them (XVIII.146) to resume the
duel between Dardinello and Rinaldo that he had interrupted
nearly one hundred octaves earlier. Needless to say, however sim-
ilar it may be to Pallas' death, the dramatic sequel to Dardinello's
fatal encounter with Rinaldo is resumed much too late to retain
the reader's involvement and thereby have the emotional impact
that Virgil's continuous account of Pallas' aristela and death could
convey.
Ariosto constantly flouts epic continuity in this way in the course
of describing the siege of Paris. And one reason why he alienates
his reader from the epic action by such abrupt transitions is to
deflate the higher status traditionally assigned to heroic narrative.
For the effect of his interruptions is to make the reader aware that
such narrative, modelled on Virgil's to boot, has no more sanctity,
no more priority than any other kind of fiction or story, in this
case the romantic adventures of Grifone or the fantastic chivalric
exploits of Astolfo. Such deflation of epic, and by association Vir-
gil's epic in particular, to the status of all other fiction, I find this
very similar to Ovid's own critique of Virgilian authority in Meta-
morphoses XIII and XIV. I do not mean to suggest that Ariosto's
subversion of Virgil's epic norms depended on Ovid's example, or
that he borrowed his technique of discontinuity from the Latin
poet. The strategies Ariosto uses to flout epic continuity and to
deflate heroic narrative are usually very much his own. But surely
by his very use of such strategies and by their effects one can infer
that he could fully appreciate Ovid's similarly subversive effects.
Moreover, that Ariosto could find precedent for his own defiance
of Virgilian authority in a text as canonical (however counter-clas-
sical in spirit) as the Metamorphoses could only encourage and make
more legitimate his critical departure from traditional epic norms.
The death of Dardinello brings to mind, of course, another well-
known imitation of the Aeneid at the end of that same canto XVIII:
Cloridano's and Medoro's disastrous night expedition to retrieve
the body of Dardinello, their beloved young prince (XVIII.165-
XIX. 16), an episode modelled in part on the ill-starred expedition
of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid IX. This episode in the Latin poem
ends, it will be recalled, with the violent and futile death of the
two young Trojan warriors. Although in Ariosto's poem Cloridano,

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1032 DANIEL JAVITCH

like Nisus, is killed by the enemy, Medoro does not share Euryalus'
tragic fate. Instead of being slaughtered like Euryalus, Medoro is
left for dead, but then rescued, healed, and loved by Angelica,
who eventually marries him. It is this union of Angelica to a lowly
footsoldier which will cause Orlando to go raving mad. Ariosto's
refusal to let the Cloridano-Medoro episode end in tragic pathos,
or rather his extension of Virgil's tragic episode into an idyllic and
comic love story-isn't this similar to Ovid's revisionary habit of
transforming Virgil's epic matter into matters of the heart? Here,
as elsewhere in the Furioso, Ariosto displays his tendency to bring
out the erotic susceptibilities of human beings rather than their
heroic potential. Of course, Ariosto's inclination to stress amorous
rather than heroic drives does not regularly aim to challenge Vir-
gil's epic perspective, as such, but the fact that he shares such an
inclination with Ovid could only make him appreciate all the more
easily this aspect of Ovid's rewriting of the Aeneid.
One can also infer that Ariosto fully appreciated Ovid's revision
of Virgil's epic just from the doubts he voices in the Furioso about
the priority or sanctity of any literary text. His profound skepticism
about the monopoly any text may claim to have on the truth is
expressed most explicitly in Canto XXXV of the Furioso when St.
John the Evangelist provides Astolfo with an explanation of the
allegory of the poets witnessed during their visit on the moon
(XXXV.18-30). It is then that Ariosto challenges the authority of
Homer's and Virgil's epics by having St. John propose that the two
ancient poets twisted historical truth to flatter patrons who were
clever enough to treat the poets generously. This proposal that the
matter treated in Virgil's and Homer's epics was open to variation
which was determined by the author's personal prejudice rather
than by historical truth reaffirms Ariosto's belief, revealed in his
poetic practice, that no single literary version of the truth merits
privileged status or authority.8 His defiance of the sanctity of prior
literary texts is enacted in this very part of the poem. For the whole
sequence of Astolfo's adventures in Cantos 34 and 35, from his
visit to Hell, his journey to Earthly Paradise, to his ascent to the
moon with St. John as his guide, constitutes a parodic rewriting of
Dante's Commedia.
Consider for a moment how many similarities this revision of
Dante's poem shares with Ovid's revision of the Aeneid. First of all,
as in Ovid's treatment of the Aeneid, Ariosto drastically abridges
the Commedia. Astolfo's Dantean journey-his visit to Hell, cur-
tailed by overwhelming smoke, his flight to Earthly Paradise and

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 M L N 1033

hisascent to the first sphere of Paradise-all this is reduced to a

single canto in the Furioso. Much like Ovid's irreverent reduction
of the Aeneid, Ariosto's version of the Dantean journey rushes over
when it does not ignore crucial events in the Commedia. For ex-
ample, Astolfo's entry into hell is described, almost casually, in less
than two octaves, whereas it took Dante the opening four cantos
of the Inferno to provide a cosmic frame for this fated descent. As
in other instances of such abridgement, Ariosto's radically trun-
cated account strips the event of all the emotional, moral, and
universal meaning it possessed in Dante's poem. Even when
Ariosto duplicates certain memorable Dantean moments in his
truncated version he trivializes them all the same. So, for example,
when Astolfo manages to escape from the smoky depths, he washes
himself (XXXIV.47), as did Dante's pilgrim, to remove the sullying
traces of his visit to hell. Astolfo's ablutions, however, are reduced
to a thorough but everyday sort of scrubbing and are deliberately
emptied of the symbolic and liturgical significance such ritual pu-
rification was given as the opening of the Purgatorio (1.121-28).
Not only, then, does Ariosto drastically abridge the Dantean
journey, but as Ovid had done in his revision of Aeneas' epic
voyage, he deliberately deprives its parts of larger transcendent
meanings and presents it as just another set of adventures. But,
again like Ovid, he does not hestitate to dwell on or amplify aspects
of that journey disregarded by his precursor but whose human,
personal, or unheroic possibilities he wishes to reassert. Recall how
economically Dante presents the encounters between his pilgrim
and various sinners in the Inferno. Short but highly concentrated
exchanges or monologues serve to reveal to the pilgrim and the
reader the reason for a sinner's place in Hell while providing an
intensified image of the essence of the sinner's being. Overtly de-
fying this Dantean procedure, Ariosto allows Lidia, the one char-
acter Astolfo converses with in hell, thirty-four octaves of confession
to provide, in effect, yet another extended tale of unrequited love
to add to the growing collection of such stories in the Furioso. I
noted earlier that in his version of the Aeneid Ovid preferred to
have the Sibyl recount to Aeneas the story of her disastrous relation
with Apollo instead of dwelling on Aeneas' momentous experience
in the underworld. Similarly, Ariosto finds in Astolfo's visit to hell
an opportunity to provide another tale of love and betrayal but
deliberately ignores the larger system of sin and punishment that
Dante's model of the underworld provided.
One could also show that Ariosto not only deprives Astolfo's

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 1034 DANIEL JAVITCH

voyage to the beyond of the larger transcendent meanings such a

journey possessed in the Commedia but that in addition Ariosto
subverts and defies Dante's allegorical practice when he describes
Astolfo's visit to the moon under the guidance of St. John the
Evangelist. A recent article on Astolfo's voyage to the moon points
out that Ariosto's allegory of the lunarjunkyard consists of a purely
arbitrary and personal system of signs which deliberately ignores
the traditional iconography and typology one finds in Dantean
allegory.9 Part of Ariosto's intention, it would seem, in constructing
this original typology was to expose the equally arbitrary nature of
traditional typology by making us aware that no reason sanctions
the meanings of inherited typology other than long iconographic
and literary usage. However implicit, this exposure of the arbi-
trariness of traditional typology reinforces the sense that Ariosto's
lunar allegory is notjust a spoof of Dante's extra-terrestrial journey
but a critique of his textual authority. And as another instance of
Ariosto's defiance of Dante's authority, the episode serves to reveal
further how similar Ariosto's revision of the Commedia is to Ovid's
revision of the Aeneid. Although Ariosto does not rewrite in his
poem the story of the Aeneid, by providing us with a parody of the
Divina Commedia that shares so many of the techniques Ovid em-
ployed in his rewriting of the Aeneid Ariosto displays, once more,
how readily he could appreciate Ovid's revision of his major pre-
cursor.
But Ariosto could appreciate and be inspired by Ovid's defiance
of Virgil not just because of his skeptical attitude about the au-
thority of prior fiction. Nor did his new understanding of Ovid
stem only from his artistic and spiritual kinship with the Latin poet.
The appreciation of Ovid's counter-Virgilian intentions was also
due to the new understanding Ariosto displays of the Roman lit-
erary past. I am not referring simply to the newly-gained sense of
the past Ariosto shared with his contemporaries and that modern
scholarship has identified as one of the characteristic traits of the
Renaissance. Ariosto's sense of history was even more developed.
He was not only able to appreciate the discontinuity between his
time and the Roman past, but was also aware of the discontinuities
and of the distinguishable styles in Roman literary history. Ariosto
possessed, that is to say, the additional awareness that the legacy
of Roman literature did not consist of a monolithic body of classical
authority but that poets like Ovid had already challenged that au-
thority from within. It is difficult to determine whether this aware-

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 M L N 1035

ness stemmed from his appreciative reading of Ovid or whether

the awareness, already developed as a result of his general phil-
ological acumen, was simply intensified by his reading of the Me-
tamorphoses. Whatever the cause, Ariosto was aware that the history
of classical poetry was made up of discrete and frequently adver-
sary sensibilities. Such understanding was not commonly held by
his contemporaries. In fact, it has recently been proposed that the
critical rediscovery of a counter-classical strain in ancient literature,
and especially of Ovid's counter-classicism was a relatively modern
phenomenon that had to await the rise of Romanticism.10 It may
well be true that before the end of the Renaissance there was no
general appreciation of Ovid's counter-classical intentions or of the
conflicting sensibilities of various ancient authors. I have no doubt,
however, that though his perceptions were still not widely shared,
Ariosto had fully grasped Ovid's revisionary relationship to Virgil.
Nor do I doubt that the Orlando Furioso embodies a newly regained
understanding of Ovid's counter-classicism virtually unprece-
dented in the fortuna of the Latin poet. But I want to emphasize,
in closing, that Ariosto's awareness represents a new stage in the
critical understanding not only of Ovid but of the Roman literary
past, and that such new awareness of the revisionary process at
work within the corpus of Roman literature could only help to
liberate further the Renaissance poet from the potentially over-
whelming authority of the ancient poets.
It has already been proposed that the confidence which spurred
the Renaissance poet to emulate his classical precursors stemmed
from his new awareness of history and of anachronism. Thomas
Greene, for example, has cogently argued that the newly gained
sense of anachronism encouraged aemulatio by making the Renais-
sance poet aware of his ancient predecessors' otherness, aware of
the privilege he had by coming later, and aware that this privilege
granted him room for originality." The additional historical
awareness that I find Ariosto possessed of the revisionary and di-
alectical relations existing between canonical predecessors clearly
spurred poetic ambition and emulation all the more. For not only
did this new awareness of an ancient history of revisionism reduce
the uniform weight of classical authority, it actually inspired the
Renaissance poet to establish his modern voice by reenacting the
same process of revision.

New York University

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1036 DANIEL JAVITCH

NOTES

1 See my "Rescuing Ovid from the Allegorizers," CL XXX (1978): 97-107.

2 Charles Segal, "Ovid's Metamorphoses: Greek Myth in Augustan Rome," SP 68
(1971): 371-94; "Narrative Art in the Metamorphoses" CJ 66 (1971): 331-37;
"Ovid's Orpheus and Augustan Ideology," TAPA 103 (1972):473-94
3 For modern interpretations of the Metamorphoses that perceive in Ovid's treat-
ment of myth a critique of Virgil see: Brooks Otis, Ovid as Epic Poet (Cambridge,
19702), 133, 350-5 1; W. S. Anderson, "The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile
nesczo quid" in Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto,
1982), 25-50.

4 Ovid's use of Virgil is discussed in S. Dopp, Virgilischer Einfluss im Werk Ovids

(Munich, 1968). For a recent discussion of Ovid's "Aeneid" (Met. XIII.399-
XIV.580) see G. K. Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses, an Introduction to the Basic
Aspects (Berkeley, 1975), 217ff.
5 In a lecture entitled "The World of the Metamorphoses," the text of which Joseph
Solodow kindly allowed me to read. My comments on Ovid's retelling of the
Aeneid are indebted to Professor Solodow's analysis of Bks. XIII and XIV, which
will be part of his forthcoming book on the Metamorphoses.
6 Another example is Ovid's extremely reduced and perfunctory account of
Aeneas' visit to Buthrotum and the prophecy he receives there from Helenus
(Met. 13.720-24), a central episode in the Aeneid (3.294-462), in which Aeneas
is first assured of ultimate success and during which he becomes aware that he
cannot build another replica of Troy (like Buthrotum), but must establish a new
civilization.
7 For a more detailed analysis of Ariosto's techniques of interruption in this and
other parts of the poem see my "Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso," MLN
95 (1980): 66-80.
8 The best recent account of Ariosto's skeptical disrespect of poetic authority is
to be found in Patricia Parker's chapter on the Orlando Furioso in her Inescapable
Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, 1979), esp. 39-53. To my
knowledge, Professor Parker is the first critic to have noticed the resemblance
between Ariosto's parodic version of Dante's Commedia and Ovid's reductio ad
absurdum of the Aeneid (Inescapable Romance, pp. 45-46). I am indebted to her
for making me aware of the parallels between these two "revisions."
9 David Quint, "Astolfo's Voyage to the Moon," Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 398-
408.
10 W. R. Johnson, "The Problem of the Counter-Classical Sensibility and its
Critics," California Studies in Classical Antiquity 3 (1970): 125. I have proposed
that counter-classical strains in ancient poetry began to be more widely appre-
ciated in Italy by the late sixteenth century, partly as a result of Ariosto's influ-
ence, in "The Influence of the Orlando Furioso on Ovid's Metamorphoses in
Italian,"JMRS 11 (1981): 1-21.
11 See Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy. Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry
(New Haven, 1982), esp. Ch. 3, "Imitation and Anachronism."

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