Lucan and Virgil: from Dante to Petrarch (and Boccaccio)

Questioning recent accounts of Dante's Lucan, this article argues that Dante does not view Lucan as an "anti-Virgil", but rather regards and redeploys the "Bellum Civile" and the "Aeneid" as fundamentally consonant with each other. In the "Divine Comedy", Dante interweaves Lucan's and Virgil's works as expressions of the same moral, poetic, and historical universe: this literary strategy finds significant parallels in medieval Latin commentaries on Lucan's poem. In the "Monarchia" and "Epistles", Dante combines Lucan's and Virgil's texts to underpin his pro-monarchist agenda, effacing the contrast between Roman Republican and Imperial ideals. Far from regarding Lucan as a "nihilistic" author, Dante references him as a moral-philosophical "auctoritas"; in the "Convivio", he applies to the "Bellum Civile" the same allegorizing reading he adopts for the "Aeneid". The article demonstrates the difference between Dante's and late-fourteenth-century views of Lucan in relation to Virgil. Unlike Dante, the early humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio emphasize Lucan's controversial biography and the idea of his poetic rivalry with Virgil. However, the concept of Lucan's anti-Virgilianism, which underlies twentieth-century interpretations of the "Bellum Civile", is much more nuanced in fourteenth-century receptions of the poem, where it emerges only gradually and in a very limited, mostly biographical, sense.