Seizing Rifëo: The defiant poetics of Paradiso 20

"The whole story of Ripheus is nothing less than outrageous," says Robert Hollander, with complete justification. 

With the introduction of this Trojan warrior-turned Christian believer before the Christ event, Dante deliberately strains credulity. Why single out this obscure character from a pagan epic and turn him into a unique example -- one seized with such loathing for paganism that he finds the true savior, apparently, by imagining an alternative to all the gods he knew?

That Ripheus could, through his own unparalleled sense of justice, reach a higher vision is a pattern we have seen elsewhere. It fits with the motif that what is not able to be seen or grasped can offer more significant evidence than that which is visible. That we are unable to see and know everything argues that our roots lie beyond what is available to the senses, as noted in the Eagle's statement in Paradiso 19.

Ripheus is at that breaking point between the inner imaginings of his heart and the complete failure of his pagan world to reflect what he believes is true. But Dante could have singled out other ancients for this role -- why choose obscure Ripheus? A few suggestions are below.

As usual, it's revealing to look at the entire context of Dante's allusion to Ripheus in the Aeneid. He appears only in Book II, and is named three times in the course of Aeneas's tale of the Trojan Horse and the end of Troy. More particularly, Ripheus is part of a band of Trojans who have donned Greek armor and were successfully killing many Greeks, until one of their group, Coroebus, sees Cassandra being dragged from the temple of Minerva. As one who loved her, he cannot stand by, and loses his life in seeking to save her. Ripheus joins in, and dies too, along with several others:

         cadit et Ripheus, iustissimus unus
qui fuit in Teucris et servantissimus aequi
(dis aliter visum);  

then Rhipeus fell;
we deemed him of all Trojans the most just, 
most scrupulously righteous; but the godsgave judgment otherwise.  (Aeneid II: 426-28)

The first mention of Ripheus comes as he is among a group of fellow Trojans whom Aeneas rallies with an argument built upon despair:

My men, hearts vainly valiant, if your desire is fixed to follow me in my final venture, you see what is the fate of our cause. All the gods on whom this empire was stayed have gone forth, leaving shrine and altar; the city you aid is in flames. Let us die, and rush into the midst of arms. One safety the vanquished have, to hope for none!" (Aeneid II: 348-353)

This is the code of the Roman warrior who is confronting the darkest moment of his existence. A moment earlier, Aeneas, had recalled the words of Panthous, a priest of Apollo, telling him that all is lost:

"It is come -- the last day and inevitable hour for Troy. We Trojans are not, Ilium is not, and the great glory of the Teucrians; in wrath Jupiter has taken all away to Argos; the Greeks are lords of the burning city." (Aen. II: 324-327)

“Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus
Dardaniae: fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens
gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter Argos
transtulit; incensa Danai dominantur in urbe."

The belief that Troy has been abandoned by the gods doesn't paralyze Aeneas, but it colors the entire scene with Ripheus and Coroebus that follows. The crisis of faith here is double -- the priest of Apollo can no longer believe in the survival of Troy because, he believes, the gods themselves no longer believe in, or care about, the city that once was the darling of the Olympians.

The crisis leads to Aeneas's rhetoric of despair -- "nothing left to lose" -- and they soldier on.

The salient points of the text where Ripheus appears are thus deeply relevant to the viability of faith and hope in the face of total annihilation. Dante's selection of Ripheus as the pagan baptized by the theological virtues brings this dark moment of Virgil's poem into view precisely as the mention of the three virtues at the right wheel of Beatrice's car reminds us that that is the last moment Virgil appears in the Commedia. The point is well made by Teolinda Baronlini:

Dante picks as his messenger of hope a character who, necessarily, because of his provenance in the Aeneid, brings with him not just hope but complicated feelings of loss and exclusion. Dante manages the story of Ripheus in such a way as to implicate both the author of the Aeneid, Vergil, and the memory of the character, Virgilio, a virtuous but unsaved pagan whom we last saw viewing the very same theological virtues involved in Ripheus's baptism. 

By plucking Ripheus, whose death is not even described in the Aeneid (wearing Greek armor, he loses his life as he tries to help Coroebus rescue Cassandra), from Virgil's poem and raising him to the eyebrow of the Eagle, Dante is doing something extraordinary. It is a plucking, a seizing, of this "iustissimus" character from a pagan poem, elevating him to a very high place. Indeed, it is almost a kind of savaging -- as an eagle might swoop down, grasp, and raise up some prized prey.

This is a kind of intertextuality one doesn't often see. Dante returns to his human poet-guide, but instead of being guided, he rewrites the ethos of soldierly courage and speaks of a soul who, despite all that anyone could dream of, envisioned another kind of courage. Ripheus is taken from Virgil in an act that re-creates our entire sense of him -- one that his own author couldn't have dreamt of. The imaginative leap of Ripheus is not unlike that of a poet, dreaming of something beyond what his experience has given him. (It is not by chance that in the pupil of the Eagle may be found David, the poet/warrior/king.)

All this is done through arbitrary fiat - nothing leads anyone to expect it, including Ripheus himself. It is the unbelievable in its pure state -- the sort of thing that rational people think of as foolery, or folly, much as the first apostles seemed idiots to the philosophically sophisticated gentiles.

One additional point: Perhaps there's another clue besides context to help us understand what the Commedia is doing here. Here's how Ripheus is introduced:

Chi crederebbe giù nel mondo errante
che Rifëo Troiano in questo tondo
fosse la quinta de le luci sante?

Who would believe, down in the errant world,
That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round
Could be the fifth one of the holy lights?

If the seizing of Rifëo seems more an act of creation than of derivation or mere allusion, it very much is. It's taking liberty in an almost violent way with a belief system that would find it more credible to think that a fallen city was abandoned by the gods. Rather than concede that only the absence of hope remained and could be a source of strength, Dante re-makes Rifëo into one helped by a kind of capricious grace. To re-make in Italian is rifare, which obviously bears a resemblance to Rifëo. The word appears in the opening lines of the canto:

lo ciel, che sol di lui prima s'accende,
subitamente si rifà parventeper molte luci,
in che una risplende; (Paradiso 20: 4-6)

The sky here, instead of going dark with the sun's setting, brightens with the many lights that reflect the sun's sole light (with a similar wordplay of sol and sol).* This brightening is expressed as "making itself reappear." This reappearance of the sun, not as itself, but in the form of its many star reflectors, remakes the sky. This making is a form of poesis that goes beyond mimesis. Rifëo Troiano is remade as the fifth light in the brow of the Eagle, even as the word for remaking appears in the fifth line of the canto, which is about reappearing lights.

Whatever else this is, it's a mode of intertextuality that plays havoc with normal notions of allusion and reference. To remake Rifëo is to recreate the poetry of Virgil. Ripheus's name echoes the act of making new:

The violence to the corpus of Virgil returns when the Eagle speaks to the quiditate of the exaltation of Ripheus:

Regnum celorum vïolenza pate
da caldo amore e da viva speranza,
che vince la divina volontate:

'Regnum coelorum' suffereth violence
From fervent love, and from that living hope
That overcometh the Divine volition;

For Dante, the act of faith is a creative leap beyond reason, fueled by lively hope. It is acted out here in the mode of poetic arbitrariness. Far from mimicking Virgil's portrait of Rifëo Troiano, Dante catachretically re-creates and sublimates him. As we've seen at other moments, Paradiso defies mimesis, adopting a poetics that violates and transforms nature via the powers known as the three theological virtues.

*Hollander points out that Dante does not name the sun after Paradiso 10, yet here, speaking in periphrasis about the sun -- sol -- he uses the homonym sol, i.e., "only." The wordplay is not unlike that of rifare and Rifëo.

Comic Relief: Palinurus renewed

(Written with time in short supply - a future post might be warranted.)

Before a favoring wind
the fleet sped on. The line in close array
was led by Palinurus, in whose course
all ships were bid to follow.

ferunt sua flamina classem.
Princeps ante omnes densum Palinurus agebat agmen;
ad hunc alii cursum contendere iussi. Aeneid V.832-34

When Dante fails to see Virgil's shadow in Purgatorio 3, he leaps to the conclusion that Virgil is not there. Why does he do this? Because he assumes, or believes, that the same rules apply to Virgil that apply to him. He doesn't entertain the idea that certain rules are unique to him alone here with all these souls.

In his final moments, Manfred could similarly have assumed he was a dead man -- the second death of hell -- and not have asked for forgiveness because he was too outrageously bad. But instead, in tears, he begs. And enters the ship of the angel.

Nothing prepares us for Manfred. If Dante is the unexpectedly live soul among the dead, Manfred is the soul saved despite all the theocratic power of the popes, the unburial and scattering of his remains along the Verde river. Both play against the figure of Palinurus, Aeneas's helmsman whose death, as Jupiter decrees, enabled the Trojan leader's ship to reach the promised land.

One only sinks beneath th' engulfing seas, —
one life in lieu of many. Aen. 5.

Without burial Palinurus's spirit cannot cross the Cocytus to rest. His failure to arrive (he is suspended -- sospesi -- as Virgil says of all the ancients including himself, who are in Limbo), and this failure is bound up with Aeneas's successful arrival to Cumae with the remnant of Troy.

For a pilgrim such as Dante, arriving on the shore of Purgatory is the equivalent of Aeneas's arrival to Latium. Only here Dante arrives early, and cannot stay. But he finds Manfred, who according to all official accounts ought to be an outcast soul like Palinurus, yet instead not only is assured eternal life, but seizes this opportunity to speed up his way to it.

Throughout the Commedia, the irreducible incalculability of Revelation (the Christian dispensation) is juxtaposed again and again with the ancient Greek and Roman sense of Nature, man, and the divine. As it is here.

Capo Palinuro

On one hand, there are the baleful words of the Sybil, who consoles Palinurus with the notion that his name will be remembered, as it is even today, in the name Capo Palinuro, but who speaks of a threshold that bars his spirit from rest:

desine fata deum flecti sperare precando 

Cease to dream that heaven's decrees may be turned aside by prayer.
                                                        Aen. VI.376

On the other hand, compare the words of Manfred:

Orribil furon li peccati miei;
   ma la bontà infinita ha sì gran braccia,
   che prende ciò che si rivolge a lei.

Horrible my iniquities had been;
   But Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms,
   That it receives whatever turns to it.  (Purg. 3. 121-23)

Canto 3 moves from the cognitive difficulties that arrive with the dawn -- the errors of shadow and light -- to a singular act of salvation, which comes when si rivolge - one turns oneself.

Of course, this turning is both an act and a mode of directionality -- the performance of a navigator who finds his way not via the angle of sun or star, but spontaneously, profoundly, an instant before annihilation.

It is precisely "wrong-way Manfred" who divines the way, metamorphosed into a saved Palinurus. The latitude of the gran braccia brings what can only be termed "comic relief," so long as we take that term of art with a new literalness.

Addressing Ulysses: The perfect contrapasso

Virgil in Inferno 26 tells Dante not to speak to Ulysses - he'll speak for him, because, he says, "They were Greeks, perhaps they'd disdain your words."

Words, language, are the substance of rhetoric -- the very sound of words plays a part in whether the one addressed deigns to respond. So too with spelling. Consider how differently you regard a message seeking your input, or your money, when the message itself lacks orthography, syntax, the basics of civilized discourse.

Virgil fears Dante's address would "lack address," in the secondary sense of adroitness of delivery, the manner of coming at someone:

1 dutiful and courteous attention especially in courtship —usually used in plural 

2 a: readiness and capability for dealing (as with a person or problem) skillfully and smoothly : adroitness 

b obsolete: a making ready; also : a state of preparedness

3 a: manner of bearing oneself  

b: manner of speaking or singing: delivery

Turning to the Greeks, the Roman poet employs a full-bore captatio benevolentiae -- working on his audience by alluding to his own alti versi, the lofty lines of his epic (lines that in fact do nothing to enhance Ulysses' reputation):

"If I deserved of you while I lived . . . if I deserved of you much or little when in the world I wrote the lofty lines, do not move on, but let the one of you tell where, being lost, he went to die."

The ploy works; Ulysses begins a speech that manages to contain a full life's quest within a few lines.

I want to look at the first thing he says, simply because in the large commentary devoted to this canto, these lines might receive short shrift. Ulysses begins:

When I parted from Circe, who held me more than a year near Gaeta before Aeneas so named it . . .

The parallel is clear: Ulysses was "held" -- the verb sottrarre can carry the suggestion of something taken fraudulently -- by Circe, the witch who turned his men into animals. Aeneas, coming to the same place, chooses to name it for his beloved wetnurse, and it bears that name today: Gaeta.

The contrast is between the wily Greek who, though escaping bestial enchantment, nonetheless is caught in the charms of Circe for "more than a year," and the Roman leader who, seeking a new land, names a beautiful portion of it for the nurse who nurtured him (and his son, some say), and who died at that point in their journey.

Throughout the Aeneid the Romans show themselves often nobler, more generous, and more rooted in the realm of the heart than the Greeks. In bestowing the humble nurse's name upon the isle of Circe, Aeneas moves toward the obliteration of the memory of Ulysses' experience there. Ulysses is being written out of epic memory on the Roman peninsula.

For Dante and his world, many of the names they use derive from the exploits, stories, the emperors and poets of Rome. The world was a palimpsest; one could dig down and find Greek predecessors, but they have been overwritten -- put into Italic form, or completely replaced by names that bring in indigenous Roman stories and achievements. Romans accepted the fact that they came after the brilliant world of Greece, but they push back, asserting different values and priorities. Allusively the point is made: Ulysses and the Greeks might have mapped out the world, explored it, given us knowledge, but the romance of the Roman people, their quest and glory, has remapped it with its own aura and meanings.

If Ulysses's language is usurped in this way, it points to another, larger eclipse further on in his journey. To know things is to name them, and Ulysses is rather meticulous in giving his auditors the names of places he and his men took in on their last voyage:

                            Spagna,  

fin nel Morrocco, e l'isola de' Sardi . . . 

. . . Sibilla . . .

 . . . Setta.

Passing the pillars of Heracles they sail five months into the blank oceanic void beyond. A mountain appears, and with it the storm that takes them under. Ulysses has no name for the mountain, of course (see previous post). He has no idea what it is, that it's made of earth that fled the body of Satan as he plummeted down and reamed out the core of the planet.* Ulysses lacks all sense of this, and, of course, he had no one to whom to tell his tale. So neither a name, nor a memory of the exploit, lives on -- other than in the Commedia. 

The world's most accomplished traveler, this former hero of the nostos, not only doesn't return, but also leaves no tale of his final destination, no trace. This silence, this aphasia, is the antithesis of kleos for the Greeks. Only a judicial imagination of genius could have produced what happens here: a contrapasso loaded with irony potent enough to punish Ulysses.

For the Greek teller of tales knows that this, his greatest exploit, was swallowed up with his drowning, and this will help us understand why Ulysses is Dante's uncannily nightmarish doppelganger. To have seen what he saw but cannot name or chart, and then to drown, puts his staggering final tale out of reach of knowledge, fame, earshot, of language itself. For this Homeric hero, no greater punishment is conceivable than to have been graced with achieving one incomparable feat, only to lie beneath the sea in eternal silence in the absolute certitude (he will never know otherwise) that no one will ever hear the greatest story he or his odyssey ever could have told. In this certitude, the hero encounters a judge who knew precisely how he deserved to be addressed.

*Lucifer, in falling, excavated the earth that creates the empty cone of hell, carved into the northern hemisphere; the displaced earth fled from Lucifer and then became Mount Purgatory, a cone of earth that rises up in the middle of the southern hemisphere.

Columbia University, Digital Dante.

Giving and taking: Heroides 7 (III)

Mortal action in the ancient epic world is shrouded in murk. Even chosen sons of goddesses like Aeneas have very little notion of what they are doing, or why.

After the Juno-sent rain that brought Aeneas and Dido into the cave, and into what Dido called "coniugium," Jupiter sends Mercury to prompt the Trojan, clarifying his task:

Not such the man
his beauteous mother promised; not for this
twice did she [Venus] shield him from the Greeks in arms:
but that he might rule Italy, a land
pregnant with thrones and echoing with war;
that he of Teucer's seed a race should sire,
and bring beneath its law the whole wide world.
If such a glory and event supreme
enkindle not his bosom; if such task
to his own honor speak not; can the sire
begrudge Ascanius the heritage
of the proud name of Rome?

Non illum nobis genetrix pulcherrima talem
promisit, Graiumque ideo bis vindicat armis;
sed fore, qui gravidam imperiis belloque frementem
Italiam regeret, genus alto a sanguine Teucri
proderet, ac totum sub leges mitteret orbem.
Si nulla accendit tantarum gloria rerum,
nec super ipse sua molitur laude laborem,
Ascanione pater Romanas invidet arces?

Mercury arrives, and:

                                   he saw
Aeneas building at a citadel,
and founding walls and towers; at his side
was girt a blade a-glitter with yellow jaspers

A decorative blade. Virgil's word, stellatus, suggests something studded or bejeweled, in which decor exceeds utility. Clearly not the warrior's. Neither Virgil nor Ovid depict the lovers' exchange of swords, but we need not look far in Heroides 7 for Aeneas's: his sword lies naked, as they say, in Dido's lap:

Adspicias utinam, quae sit scribentis imago!     
Scribimus, et gremio Troicus ensis adest 

O that you could represent me to yourself as writing this letter!
I write, and on my lap lies a drawn sword.

"How well" -- the irony is palpable -- "are your gifts fitted to my destiny!"

Quam bene conveniunt fato tua munera nostro!

The sword is indeed fitted to the destiny of a queen who, as powerful precursor of Aeneas, has accomplished that which he has yet to do. Bestowing her achievement and her pretty sword upon him, giving him Lordship of her world, un-Aeneases him.

When it becomes clear that Aeneas is leaving ("duty calls"), Dido turns his sword against herself. She takes his gift -- a symbol of his power and willingness to protect her -- and uses it not symbolically, but materially -- as a knife. If the symbolic aura of the gift doesn't apply, then its actual heft can, and will.

Readers of Ovid are familiar with this sort of metamorphosis: a symbolic gift suddenly loses its aura (exchange value, meaning) and "fits" (convenio) another use. The gift takes her life (use value, force), and that of their child. In this case, the sword un-Didos Dido when her Aeneas-annihilating gift is not accepted. There's no middle ground with double-edged gifts.

Of course Dido doesn't perish before leaving Aeneas a gift in turn -- a carmen. We'll turn to it in a coda to this overlong analysis.

Heroides 7: Giving and taking (II)

The previous post offered the notion that Dido's passion for Aeneas issues in a mode of giving that is complex, implicative, and carries the power of a taking. Ovid is entirely coherent in depicting this symmetrical model of giving in his Heroides 7, which begins, Accipe, Dardanide.

What does Dido ask of Aeneas in return for her gift? At first blush, she appears to ask nothing more than what any author asks -- to be read. What she is giving in the opening lines is her carmen (song, charm), the last words, in writing, of the dying author. She has no hope of his accepting what she had offered him -- everything, basically -- though at moments she'll seem to waver. After losing all, a few words is a light thing:

Sed merita et famam corpusque animumque pudicum     
Cum male perdiderim, perdere verba leve est.

But since I may have wholly lost my name for merit
and for modesty of body and soul, to lose words is little.

Within her carmen, Dido details all the things the Trojan prince has refused. And, she says,

Uror, ut inducto ceratae sulpure taedae,     
Ut pia fumosis addita tura focis.

I burn like waxen torches smeared with sulphur,
or pious incense cast into the smoking censer.

As she runs through her arguments, her reasonings and pleadings, Dido is also building inferential reckonings. If Aeneas leaves in midwinter on stormy seas, it is because he must hate her so much as to prefer death to staying with her. And, if his ship sinks, he'll have quite a lot on his plate:

Wicked man, you abandon both pregnant Dido
and that part of you hidden enclosed by my body.
You add the infant’s death to the unhappy mother’s,
and you’ll be author of the funeral of your unborn child. (133-ff)

The tacit perils of gift reciprocity are played out in Dido's gift of herself in the cave. Aeneas, until this moment unaware of the fruit of their amor, now knows and must reckon with the embryonic result of acceptance.

more....

Songs and Letters: Pindar and Ovid

I've come away from our reading of Pindar's Olympian I and Ovid's Heroides I with a stronger and clearer sense of major differences between the Greek ode and the Latin elegiac verse.

The differences run the gamut from choice of theme and tone to formal features such as meter and the level of diction. 

The Ode addresses a god, hero, or man (or all three) in heightened speech, language under the pressure of the Muse. It concerns high exploits, great achievements, along with matters of public conduct, statecraft, and ethics, all couched within a kind of explosion of mythological reference, shifts of thought, time and place so highly charged one sort of has to hang on to the poet's speeding chariot for dear life, and hope to enjoy the ride. 

Pindar never used the same meter twice; he mixed dialects and brought past and present into his Odes -- and though they seem not to obey any rule, they are in fact intricate mirroring tripartite structures of strophes, antistrophes and epodes. And whatever else an ode deals with, it performs the power of voice: poetic creation, rhythm, and utterance:

Golden lyre, rightful joint possession of Apollo and the violet-haired Muses, to which the dance-step listens, the beginning of splendid festivity; and singers obey your notes, whenever, with your quivering strings, you prepare to strike up chorus-leading preludes. [5] You quench even the warlike thunderbolt of everlasting fire. And the eagle sleeps on the scepter of Zeus, relaxing his swift wings on either side, the king of birds; and you pour down a dark mist over his curved head, a sweet seal on his eyelids. Slumbering, he ripples his liquid back, [10] under the spell of your pulsing notes. Even powerful Ares, setting aside the rough spear-point, warms his heart in repose; your shafts charm the minds even of the gods, by virtue of the skill of Leto's son and the deep-bosomed Muses. Pythian I.

Muse playing

In contrast to this high athleticism of the voice in the ode, Ovid's Heroides are letters -- composed, subtle arguments from one who loves to one who is loved. The meter of choice is the elegiac couplet.

Wikipedia:

Each couplet consist of a hexameter verse followed by a pentameter verse. The following is a graphic representation of its scansion. Note that - is a long syllable, u a short syllable, and U is either one long syllable or two short syllables:

- U | - U | - U | - U | - u u | - -

- U | - U | - || - u u | - u u | -

The form was felt by the ancients to contrast the rising action of the first verse with a falling quality in the second. The sentiment is summarized in a line from Ovid's Amores I.1.27: 

"Let my work rise in six steps, fall back in five."

Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat 

The effect is illustrated by Coleridge as:

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column

In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Dido and Aeneas - Thomas Jones

So Dido in the seventh of Ovid's Heroides opens her letter to Aeneas:

Accipe, Dardanide, moriturae carmen Elissae;
     quae legis a nobis ultima verba legi.
Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis
     ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor.

Dardanian, receive this song of dying Elissa:
what you read are the last words written by me.
At fate’s call, the white swan, despondent on the grass,
sings, like this, to the waters of Maeander.

Though a queen is writing, this is not public oratory or song, but personal speech imprinted with one woman's emotion, personal history, passionate temperament, and pride of place.

We will want to explore in more detail how each of these forms - ode and epistle - use myth and prior poetry to build meaning. As Penelope used the Iliad, Odyssey and Pindar for her letter, what better text for Dido/Elissa than the epic of Rome?  How does the heroic world of the Greeks and Romans, Trojans and Carthaginians fare when viewed through the lens of Ovid's Heroides?

A few links:

Complete Virgil in English, translated by the irrepressible Tony Kline.
Aeneid - English and Latin (Perseus)
Aeneid Book IV in English (Kline)