2
The Sylvan Citizen

A poet, Petrarch declaimed from the Capitoline, is a prophet. As divinely inspired, he exercises an Apolline genius in the sacred task of articulating the civil destiny, and so of fostering patriotic zeal. Petrarch declared himself impelled to his arduous ascent by love. The same love of the fatherland that had animated Scipio now prevailed upon him to seek Roman citizenship and the laurel wreath. In praise of that bough he related that its touch to the head of a poet would realize dreams and foretell the future.^[1] This equation of the poet and the prophet was as ancient as the Roman ruins he surveyed from that vantage, for it was in the Augustan age that Petrarch's customary term vates had been extended from its denotation of "priest, soothsayer" to include "poet." The neologist was Vergil, and he introduced this usage to convey a solemn religious significance to the art.

Occurring first in the sense of "poet" in the Eclogues , the term recurred four times as "seer" in the Georgics , a verse of which Petrarch selected as the text for his coronation speech: "But a sweet longing urges me upward over the lonely slopes of Parnassus." After this Vergil consistently preferred vates , and the term poeta appears only once in his entire literature, and then only to refer to Greek practice. In his famous profession, moreover, he affirmed: "But as for me—first above all, may the sweet Muses whose holy emblems, under the spell of a mighty love, I bear, take me to themselves, and show me heaven's pathways."

Vergil's definition of the poet's role thus coincided with that of Posidonius concerning the Gaulish ouateis . Emphasizing the hieratic function of the poet, metaphors in the exordium of the third book of the Georgics derived from the temple and its sacrifice. The foundation of the Palatine temple of Apollo, the library and votive offering, was especially important for Augustan poets, as in Horace's celebration of the solar quadriga as an imperial emblem. Vergil appropriated its foundation and cult as a principle of his epic Aeneid . In its first five books the term vates was a leitmotif especially associated with Apollo, while

in the sixth book, as Aeneas prayed at the Delian altar, the term was applied to the god himself. The hero's prayer promised precisely the foundation of the Palatine temple to Apollo by the emperor Augustus. It was under the protection of that god that the vates Museus thus guided Aeneas to his father, and the vates Sibyl enlightened his conversionary descent to the underworld. It was, therefore, in a context of Apolline service that Vergil restored the term vates to honor, both in its old sense as "priest" and in its new as "poet" by combining religion and art. The vates as poetic spokesman was inseparable from the god Apollo.^[2]

Although in Vergil's verse, as in Roman cult, Apollo retained his Greek character (indeed, as the most important of the Hellenic deities), the poet emphasized his association with Rome through the Sibylline oracles and the patronage of the Augustan poets, as well as of Augustus himself. Apollo was originally imported to Italy early in the fifth century B.C. as a god of medicinal healing, but his prophetic gift soon emerged. From the colony of Cumae he transmitted the Sibylline oracles that were destined to inspire Roman religion. With the possible exception of Jupiter, Apollo or Phoebus was mentioned more frequently by Vergil than any other deity. The poet acknowledged Apollo's manifold nature as medicinal, poetic, musical, and solar, but he especially emphasized the prophetic. Elevated from his popular pose in the Eclogues as solver of riddles, Apollo assumed in the Aeneid the more dignified role of inspirer of oracles. Apolline oracles were integral to the numinous structure of that epic, for they revealed the divine will. The hero Aeneas consulted Apollo at Delos and at Cumae, where the frenzied Sibyl so famously dramatized her possession by that god.^[3]

By associating the poetic vates with Apollo, Vergil elevated the status of poet to an extraordinary prophetic ideal. As vates the poet was entitled to propose morals and manners to the citizenry and to control the national myth, if not the national destiny. Vergil referred to himself as vates in the explicit context of Aeneas's promise of the foundation of the Palatine temple to Apollo and of the revelation of Rome's future glory. This exaltation of the art in early Augustan poetry declined, however. Although Horace initially employed the word vates in a solemn sense, he later reduced it to the mere equivalent of poeta . In Augustan verse the vates acted as a leader and educator of the populace; the poeta played a neutral, lesser, or pejorative role. Tibullus dallied with the term vates ; Propertius used it to acknowledge his position. Pro-

fessing to be a vates who was forced by Cupid into the service of love, Ovid further depreciated its meaning by extending the title to all poets. With this disintegration of the Vergilian ideal, the concept failed, and Hellenistic ideas again triumphed.^[4] Petrarch's ambition was a revival of this Vergilian ideal by which poets as spokesmen of the gods established public morality and religion. The poet was again to be a man of vocation, set apart by his vis mentis , to recall Varro's etymology of vates , his inspiration or genius.

Vergil was himself endowed with the Apolline grace, poetic and prophetic, that Petrarch would claim. With an intimate knowledge of magical practice and belief, Vergil described the charms and spells of Italian folklore: the evil eye, the witch's potion, the amorous incantation. As dramatic devices he also employed omens. Such natural events, especially the meteorological and the avian, were piously regarded as indicating the divine will: the oak struck by lightning, a croaking crow, bloody wine. The traces in his literature of these omens as influencing fate or foretelling the future reflected primitive superstition. More sophisticated was the appeal by his characters to a deity for confirmation of such omens. More religious still was their belief in omens as deliberately willed and conferred by the gods. As incorporated into an elaborate Roman system of augury, formal divination involved either a sign voluntarily sent by a god and requiring interpretation, or a sign petitioned for by man and granted by a god in response. Auspices were specifically the omens undertaken to determine whether or not the gods approved of an endeavor, especially the assumption of office or engagement in battle. Vergil recorded the traditional vocabulary and observance of omen and augury with precision. Rivaling in his verse these more primitive notions were prophecy and oracle. To the Italian notion of a gifted human or an animistic spirit as uttering a divine word he added the Greek influence of the dream-vision. More important, he employed the anthropomorphic concept of divine revelation through the instrumental oracle of a human priest or priestess at a sacred site. Apollo was the exemplar of this method, and his oracular seats such as Delos and Cumae, where Aeneas consulted the god, were renowned in the Augustan age. For Vergil, Apollo was supreme in prophecy.^[5]

Yet it was not Vergil's Apolline service as seer that prevailed after the Augustan age. The assiduous medieval study of his texts perpet-

uated rather the ideal of linguistic perfection that had also elevated him to fame in classical antiquity. Vergil and grammar became synonymous. His verses were mined for the practical instruction in Latin that was the aim of their exposition in the medieval schools. While grammar dominated the study of Vergil, there was, nevertheless, a philosophical sympathy for him as a pure and noble soul, a Christian before Christ. The Aeneid was explored as an allegory of the vicissitudes of human life in its aspiration toward a perfection that was not only linguistic but moral. The golden bough that admitted its hero Aeneas to the underworld symbolized Vergil's own wisdom as the entry to secret truths. The medieval commentaries that both examined and invented this profundity were synthesized and surpassed in the Commedia of Dante, who elected Vergil as his guide through the hazards of hell.^[6] It was perhaps such adulation of his extraordinary knowledge of natural secrets that fostered Vergil's reputation for magic. John of Salisbury initially reported in his Policraticus that Vergil had provided Naples with a talismanic fly to rid the city of that pest. Such necromantic legends, emerging in the twelfth century, were multiplied by the tongues and pens of chroniclers, encyclopedists, and troubadours. Vergil, who had lived in Naples, was particularly portrayed as expressing his affectionate concern for the welfare of that city by granting such talismans as a miniature model of the city in a bottle as a palladium against attack, a bronze horse that healed infirm ones, a butcher-block that preserved meat from decay, and a bronze statue of an archer with drawn bow and ready arrow aimed at Vesuvius to prevent its eruption. Vergil also reputedly banished all serpents in the city to beneath one gate and provided the populace with therapeutic baths. Whenever his bones were exhumed and exposed, the atmosphere would darken and the wind would rise so that the sea swelled and raged about the Neapolitan castle in which they had been interred. Imitative Roman legends were invented that identified the poet with various monuments of the city he had once called golden. Most ancient and most popular was the tale of a marvelous palace Vergil had constructed, whose statues rang bells of alarm whenever the provinces meditated revolt.^[7]

Vergil's role as a civic benefactor paled, however, when Christian moralists interpreted these innocent marvels as diabolical sorceries. For his own enthusiastic embrace of the ancient poet, Petrarch was

himself accused of magic by the plenary papal court of Avignon. "See what I have received when I ought to have won a reputation for integrity," he exclaimed of the slanderous whispers in advance of the trial:

the suspicion of exercising new machinations and malicious cunning against the very finest men. Perhaps—as has often reached my ears by chance when I was in the company of great men, great by fortune but not by talent—perhaps, I say, by this time I appear to many as a necromancer and magician. I no doubt appear so because I am frequently alone and because, as those experts say and I do not deny, I read the works of Virgil, an opinion which elicits in me bile mixed with laughter. I have indeed read them. There is the reason for mistrust; there is the reason for the bad reputation of studies!^[8]

As he also related of the incident, "I shall say something that will make you laugh even more. I myself, the greatest enemy of divination and magic, am oftentimes called necromancer by these excellent judges because of my admiration for Virgil. How low our studies have sunk! O hateful and laughable nonsense!"^[9] In his formal examination for the poetic coronation, Petrarch had been questioned by King Robert, about whose capital of Naples the necromantic legends concerning Vergil had just been published.^[10] Of the popular tale that Vergil had by incantation bored a tunnel through Mount Posilippo near his tomb at Pozzuoli overnight, Petrarch jokingly replied that he had never read that Vergil was a stonemason. The king nodded a severe assent to his judgment that the tunnel had been created not by magic but by tools. In a later description of that landscape Petrarch ventured as his own explanation of the legend the presence of Vergil's bust at the site.^[11] He also knew of the talisman of the enchanted egg that Vergil had reputedly fashioned to protect the fortress on which he founded Naples.^[12]

Petrarch's revelation of the Vergilian secrets that so astonished his royal patron exceeded such Neapolitan lore, however. It was precisely his knowledge of the sublime meaning veiled in Vergil's poetic fiction, as Petrarch attested to Boccaccio, that had secured him the laurel wreath with honorific titles and Roman citizenship.^[13] Petrarch did record on the flyleaf of his manuscript of Vergil the pious legend of St. Paul's visit to the tomb of Vergil, as expressed in a sequence chanted on the feast of the apostle's conversion. Reverently shedding a tear at the site, St. Paul exclaimed: "What would I have not rendered thee if

I had found thee still living, O greatest of poets!"^[14] The singular Vergilian mystery that captivated the imagination of Christians, however, was the song of the Cumaean Sibyl in the fourth eclogue:

Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high. Only do thou, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall first cease, and a golden race spring up throughout the world! Thine own Apollo now is king!^[15]

These verses, celebrating a universal regeneration through the birth of a child, were acknowleged by theologians no less severe toward pagan poetry than Augustine as an inspired prophecy of Christ's nativity.^[16] Petrarch was inclined to suspect in the Sibylline oracles, as in the Apolline ones, "the fallacy of extremely inimical spirits." Except he did allow that Christian doctors gave credence to them as predictions of Christ, especially the oracles of the Erythraean Sibyl, an apocryphal manuscript of which he possessed.^[17] Petrarch thus wrote of "the Sibyls, those divine women with a single name, who were prophetic and cognizant of the divine plan." Indeed, he continued, "they had made so many predictions about the end of the world and especially about the coming of Christ that, when the latter was fulfilled, this name common to all the Sibyls was included by our learned men among the names of the holy prophets."^[18] Concerning the celebrated song of the Cumaean Sibyl, he thought that Vergil's literal reference was to the birth of Caesar Augustus, and that pious readers had subsequently interpreted it to be that of the celestial emperor, Christ. Yet he believed that faith legitimated the interpretation of the Christ Child. To those whom God has graced with Christian faith, he explained, "all these events are clear without any external witnesses, and thus rays of divine light flood the eyes of the faithful so that there is no blind man who does not perceive with his mind Christ, 'the sun of righteousness.'" He was convinced that, if this true light had shone into Vergil's eyes, "undoubtedly" he would have referred the prophecy of the golden age literally and not figuratively to Christ rather than to Caesar.^[19]

Whether this Sibylline oracle was interpreted as intentionally or inadvertently pronounced of Christ, it was revered by Christians as a testimony among and to the nations of divine providence. The popularity of the text, promoted in homily and drama, coincided with the medieval adulation of Vergil, so that he was often depicted in litera-

ture and in art as the companion of the Sibyl. And, just as in the solemn funereal sequence "Dies irae" the advent of Christ was "testified by David and the Sibyl" so Vergil himself was elevated to the status of the canonical prophets of scripture.^[20]

A significant display of this honor was the inclusion of Vergil in the medieval design of the tree of Jesse. This iconography depicted Isaiah's prophecy of a Messianic rule of idyllic peace, justice, and piety:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
  the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
  the spirit of counsel and might,
  the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

(Is. 11:1–3)

By vocalic exchange the shoot, virga (Vg), was as early as the third century interpreted as a prefiguration of the Virgin Mary, virgo, while the rod signified Christ. The artistic type, which emerged at the end of the eleventh century and developed by the fourteenth into complex forms, was a recumbent figure of Jesse, from whose body grew a tree on which appeared the ancestors of Christ and at its top Christ himself.^[21] Petrarch constructed an epistolary exhortation to humility on this popular theme. Indicating that Christ despised the fame of birth from noble lineage and chose rather the obscure family of Jesse, the poet lauded his ancestors as exemplars of that virtue: the impoverished widow Ruth amid an alien people, Jesse himself, David the callow shepherd, a humble ancestry regressing to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were not splendid regents but lowly herdsmen.^[22] The figure of Vergil was introduced into this biblical genealogy in the thirteenth century. The impetus for the association was his renowned citation of the prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl, who herself became included in the tree of Jesse. Since her oracle of the virgin was traditionally interpreted as being of the Virgin, portrayal of the Sibyl and of her spokesman Vergil was deemed an appropriate addition to this Marian and messianic iconography.^[23] It was this concept of a prophetic Vergil, who could be grafted, although pagan, onto the very tree of Jesse as an ancestor of Christ, that informed the frontispiece of Petrarch's famous manuscript of the Mantuan seer.

That cherished codex featured the major poetry of Vergil—Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid —framed by the paragon of medieval commentaries, that of Servius. Petrarch himself annotated these texts and also recorded on the flyleaf of the volume important personal notices.^[24] The literary value of the manuscript was enhanced artistically by a unique painting, executed on the verso of the first folio by the Sienese master Simone Martini (1283–1344). The scene allegorically illustrates Vergil's mastery of the classical rhetorical styles—the lowly, the average, and the lofty—as symbolized by a shepherd, a farmer, and a general, corresponding to the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid . Each of these figures is portrayed with an appropriate instrument from the medieval scheme of "Vergil's wheel": the shepherd with a crook, the farmer with a pruning hook, and the soldier with a lance. As they pause in their occupations, the commentator Servius indicates to them, with an emphatically extended arm, an open book on the lap of their author, the poet Vergil. Two winged inscriptions by Petrarch, who apparently commissioned the painting, announce:

Bountiful Italian earth, you nourish distinguished poets,
but this one enabled you to attain the goals of the Greeks.

Servius disclosing the secrets of Vergil to speak aloud
so that they might be manifest to knights, shepherds, and farmers.

A third couplet below, also by Petrarch, praises the illustrator:

Mantua bore Vergil, who composed such songs,
Siena, Simon, who with a finger painted them.

If the arm of Servius, which creates the dynamism of the composition, is continued imaginatively, it aligns with his text on the complementary folio, which describes the three rhetorical styles. The illustration thus exemplifies the Vergilian ideal of eloquence.^[25]

Although Petrarch declared his own genius to be one of agility,^[26] his poetics comprised more than such rhetorical versatility. Above all Latin geniuses he revered Vergil as excelling by the divine artifice of his style in the elegance and enlightenment of doctrine beneath the poetic veil.^[27] Petrarch had declared in his coronation speech that poetry was allegory, the veiling of truth in fiction, and the background of Martini's illustration includes such a veil, suspended before three trees in a bucolic setting. Although the action of the scene has been described as Servius

pulling the veil away from Vergil,^[28] Vergil is already disclosed. He reposes visible in full figure, with pen in hand and book in lap, in a state of contemplation. Servius is not drawing the veil from Vergil but rather from the central image of the illustration, a laurel tree. His hand is superimposed on its trunk, which coincides with the vertical axis of the composition. If, moreover, the illustration is subjected to a geometrical analysis according to the root-two construction that Martini often employed, the arc passes through Vergil's eyes.^[29] Although this aspect of the design may only suggest the poet's inspiration, there is a plainer visual correlation. The arc passes through Vergil's eyes directly to the lofty foliage of the central tree. Vergil is not musing vacantly into some space beyond the page but regarding the laurel. If again an arc is extended from the curvature of the pen poised in his hand, it too coincides with the laurel, at the branching of its trunk. This is iconographically appropriate, as according to legend Vergil's mother dreamed in pregnancy that she bore a laurel bough, which when it touched the earth immediately grew into a mighty tree laden with blossoms and fruit.^[30] This structural focus on the laurel emphasizes his eloquent style, for which that tree served as a symbol in the medieval "wheel." Servius's direct gaze at the general, the type of the Aeneid in that "wheel," reinforces the excellence of the eloquent style.

Yet the allegory is profounder still than this allusion to the poetic laurel that wreathes Vergil's head in the illustration. The posture of the poet is reminiscent of the figure of Jesse in the medieval depictions of Isaiah's prophecy (Is. 11:–13). Just as in that iconography the tree of Christ grew from the body of Jesse, so in this example the laurel rises from Vergil's. Its roots are secured near his feet. In the exemplar, especially in French art, Jesse was not necessarily recumbent but was often seated, as is Vergil here. Nor did the Jesse tree necessarily portray an explicit genealogical motif or represent Christ or the Virgin in human form.^[31] Simone Martini's illustration derives from the artistic and literary tradition that included Vergil among the Hebrew prophets who foretold the advent of Christ. The vertical axis passes directly through the middle of the laurel to the middle of the shepherd, who symbolizes Vergil's Eclogues . It was in that very work that the poet had uttered the "messianic" oracle of the Cumaean Sibyl that elevated him among Christians to the status of a prophet. The laurel at which Vergil gazes and to which his pen points is, then, a symbol of Christ. It is his cross in bloom. Although its verdant foliage is revealed, as is

the base of its trunk, which disappears into Vergil's body, its middle is veiled. This veiled section of the tree corresponds to the area of the cross on which the body of Christ hung with outstretched arms. Flanking this tree in exact alignment, while inclining toward it in pathetic fallacy, are two other trees. These are of a species different from laurel; perhaps myrtle, as suggested by their silver-blue color in distinction to the yellow-green pigment of the central tree. These represent the crosses on which the two thieves executed with Christ hung to death. The laurel that wreathes Vergil's head is a significant prophecy of the crown of thorns to circle that of the crucified Christ. This will prove to be an emblem of Petrarch's poetics.

The other figures in the illustration deviate from the medieval iconography of Vergil's "wheel." The general holds a lance rather than the sword, the usual symbol of the Aeneid, perhaps in reminiscence of Martini's crucifixion scenes, in which lances are prominent. The shepherd is milking goats rather than sheep; the farmer is pruning a barren thornbush rather than a luscious fruit tree. These deviations from, even reversals of, the medieval scheme may allude to the evangelical parables of judgment in which the antitheses of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:32) and of the fruit tree and the barren tree (Matt. 7:16–20, 21:18–19) figure. Judgment will prove to be the act of Petrarch's prophesying. As his couplet interpreted this pictorial allegory, Servius was not revealing Vergil but "the secrets of Vergil." The Latin noun arcana was specifically religious, denoting sacred secrets or holy mysteries. It was the same disclosure of the secrets of Vergil that had engaged Petrarch in formal examination by Robert of Naples and secured for him the poetic laureate.^[32] His own wreath, unlike that of Vergil, which is depicted as laurel intertwined with myrtle, was of laurel alone. That bough symbolized for him the crown of Latin poetry, the eloquence of the Aeneid, which he essayed to imitate in his Africa .^[33] And although the laurel may also have symbolized a Laura, a noble lady upon whom Petrarch lavished in exquisite lyric his ardent yet plaintive love,^[34] that interpretation seems, like his very definition of poetry, a fiction of the truth. As the sacred branch of Apollo, the laurel symbolized his own prophetic vocation and the personal and patriotic glory that genius would merit. Ultimately it signified the arboreal mystery on which all true oracles converged for that Christian poet, the cross of Christ.

On the flyleaf of the manuscript, in the position corresponding

exactly to the laurel of Martini's illustration, Petrarch recorded this famous remembrance: "The laurel, illustrious through its own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins . . ." Although this reputedly relates an encounter with a Laura, Petrarch wrote "laurea," not "Laura." It was coincidentally, as he continued his memorial, "and in the same city, also on the sixth of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, that light was withdrawn from the light of day."^[35] These initial and final dates were confirmed by the recurrence of the phrase "the sixth of April" and "at the first hour" in two of the commemorative poems of Rime sparse and again in Triumphus mortis .^[36] It was also coincidentally on the sixth of April, in 1338, that Petrarch conceived of his epic Africa .^[37] The third poem of Rime sparse convinced commentators as early as the quattrocento that the sixth of April indicated Good Friday. As Petrarch wrote of his enamorment:

It was the day when the sun's rays turned pale with grief for his Maker when I was taken, and I did not defend myself against it, for your lovely eyes, Lady, bound me.

It did not seem to me a time for being on guard against Love's blows; therefore I went confident and without fear, and so my misfortunes began in the midst of the universal woe.^[38]

Did this not recall the miraculous eclipse of the sun during the crucifixion of Christ, as creation hid its beauty in mournful shame at the death of its Creator (Luke 23:44–45)?^[39] Did the poet's onset of misfortune not match the lugubrious solemnity of the liturgy? Although the feast of Good Friday did not coincide with the sixth of April in any of the years Petrarch cited—in 1327 and 1338 that date was Easter Monday, and in 1348, two Sundays before Easter—the association has persisted since the Renaissance. Although historically inaccurate, the date has been considered ideal. It has been supposed a synthesis of an imagination sacred and profane in which these highlights of the poet's career were incorporated into the universal history in which man was created on the sixth day and redeemed on the sixth day.^[40]

The date was apposite for enamorment. April, as Petrarch knew, was the month of Venus, from aphros for the foam from which she sprang, or better, as Macrobius thought, from aperilus, because in the spring Nature opens (aperio ) in leaf and blossom.^[41] The sixth day of any

week was also consecrated to this goddess of love, according to the custom universal since the first Christian century of naming the seven days after the seven planets.^[42] Yet although the crucifixion of Christ would prove in Petrarch's poetical theology to be the perfect expression of passionate love, his reference to the sixth of April may have been not fundamentally sacred but secular, not Christian but classical. The phrase "the sixth of April" may indicate the rhetorical figure of adynaton, the hyperbolic impossibility. Adynaton initially appeared in a poetic fragment of Archilochus that complained of the reversal of the world during a total eclipse of the sun at Thasos on 6 April 648 B.C.^[43]

Nothing will surprise me anymore, nor be too wonderful
for belief, now that the lord upon Olympus, father Zeus,
dimmed the daylight and made darkness come upon us in the noon
and the sunshine. So limp terror has descended on mankind.
After this, men can believe in anything. They can expect
anything. Be not astonished any more, although you see
beasts of dry land exchange with dolphins, and assume their place
in the watery pastures of the sea, and beasts who loved the hills
find the ocean's crashing waters sweeter than the bulk of land.^[44]

In explaining its device of making another speak censure in one' s place, Aristotle cited a verse of this influentially in his Rhetorica: "There is nothing beyond expectation, nothing that can be sworn impossible. "^[45] The entire poem was also preserved in the Florilegium of Stobaeus, a collection of Greek poetical and ethical texts dating to the late fifth century A.D.^[46] Petrarch included Archilochus in his own visionary catalogue of inspirational poets thus:

Next I saw one who, destroying the firmest of hopes, could stir anger.
And with his blazing iambics bring about death and destruction.^[47]

The coincidence of two eclipses on the sixth of April, in the poetry of Archilochus and in the poetry of Petrarch, suggests imitation, although a precise Latin intermediary for that date remains elusive. The fragment of Archilochus marveling at the total upheaval of the laws of Nature during the eclipse of the sixth of April did inspire rhetorical imitation. While the figure of adynaton as the reversal of the natural order was employed with restraint in Greek drama and poetry, its form was varied. The figure encompassed as its types such proverbs as

counting hairs or grains of sand; such fables as the hare and the tortoise or the wolf allied with sheep; and such folkloric and poetic impossibilities as the sceptre that blooms or the pine tree that bears pears. Other motifs were derived from the observation of Nature: cosmic and astronomical impossibilities, such as the sun changing its course, the stars fading, and the sky plunging into the sea. There were also paradoxical unions, such as heaven joining hell, or day, night: human reversals, such as a man without reason; and historical examples, such as Achaeus aiding Troy. The Greek origin of the figure in popular speech was perpetuated in the vivid Latin expressions for "Impossible! never!" that punctuated the comedies of Plautus. In the classical period, however, adynaton acquired a different aspect. Elaborated even to five hexameters, it achieved tone and rhythm and certain literary figures and motifs. With the decisive examples of Vergil, such as the "messianic" prophecy of the fourth eclogue in which the lion and the lamb coexisted in peace, adynaton attained a remarkable status in Latin poetry. The verse of Ovid especially aggrandized this imperious and ingenious hyperbole. The figure, whether apt or abused, was most frequent in bucolic and elegiac poetry, especially in the expression of personal sentiment, whether that of the author or of his characters. Since its theme often accompanied a promise of fidelity, of attachment, or of recognition, it flourished principally in the elegy. Adynaton was nationalized in the Augustan age, which envisioned an eternal Rome as so conforming to natural law that its fall was patriotically imagined as the emphatic impossibility, the supreme adynaton.^[48] Persisting in the Latin poetry of the postclassical and Carolingian periods, the figure also survived in Old French and Provençal poetry.^[49]

Petrarch typically employed adynaton to express the impossibility of embracing his elusive beloved, as figured in Daphne's thwarting of Apollo's embrace:

May I be with her from when the sun departs
and no other see us but the stars,
just one night, and let the dawn never come!
and let her not be transformed into a green wood
to escape from my arms, as the day
when Apollo pursued her down here on earth!

But I will be under the earth in dried wood,
and the day will be lit by the tiny stars,
before the sun arrives at so sweet a dawn!^[50]

His wish to possess her ever before his eyes was foiled:

Then my thoughts will have come to shore
when green leaves are not to be found on a laurel;
when I have a quiet heart and dry eyes
we shall see the fire freeze, and burning snow.^[51]

Again, echoing the adynaton of Archilochus (cf. Wis. 19:19) in which the solar eclipse beached dolphins, he lamented:

Alas! snow will be warm and black, the sea without waves, and all the fish in the mountains, and the sun will lie down beyond where Euphrates and Tigris have their one source,

before I find in this either peace or truce, or Love or my lady learn another fashion, who have plotted wrongfully against me.^[52]

His enamorment was impossible of fulfillment:

I have never had a tranquil night,
but have gone sighing morning and evening
since Love made me a citizen of the woods.
Before I rest, the sea will be without waves,
and the sun will receive his light from the moon,
and the flowers of April will die in every meadow.^[53]

Again he asserted:

The sea will be without water and the sky without stars when I no longer fear and desire her lovely shadow and no longer hate and love the deep wound of love that I hide so ill.

I do not hope ever to have rest from my labors, until I am disboned and dismuscled and disfleshed or my enemy feels pity for me.

Every impossible thing will happen before another than she or Death heals the wound that Love made in my heart with her lovely eyes.^[54]

The prominence of the figure of adynaton as presaging "every impossible thing" argues that Petrarch's citation of "the sixth of April" for the decisive events of his poetic vocation indicated not a calendrical date but a rhetorical figure. By identifying the visionary appearance and disappearance of the laurel wreath and also the con-

ception of Africa with this commonplace of the world upside down, he declared their astounding, their prodigious, their impossible defiance of the laws of Nature. The description in the sonnet of enamorment would thus refer not to the eclipse of Good Friday but to the classical invention of adynaton. The failing light in Petrarch's memorial of the death and burial of the laurel wreath was similar imagery. As he recorded, he first spied the laurel at the hour of matins, at dawn, and again on the sixth of April "that light was withdrawn from the light of day."^[55] If Petrarch referred by that date of eclipse to adynaton, he announced the stupendous import of the vision and withdrawal of the laurel wreath and of the conception of Africa . He was certainly confronted with the supreme adynaton of Vergil: the eclipse of eternal Rome in the absence of empire and papacy.

The event of envisioning the laurel wreath and of being stricken with desire for it was related to the Apolline tradition of the prophetic quality of that bough. In composing poetry Petrarch allied himself, as had Vergil, with Apollo. The initial version of his Rime sparse, begun in the year following his coronation, was introduced by a salutation to that diety:

Apollo, if the sweet desire is still alive that inflamed you beside the Thessalian waves, and if you have not forgotten, with the turning of the years those beloved blond locks;

against the slow frost and the harsh and cruel time that lasts as long as your face is hidden, now defend the honored and holy leaves where you first and then I were limed;

and by the power of the amorous hope that sustained you in your bitter life, disencumber the air of these impressions.

Thus we shall then together see a marvel—our lady sitting on the grass and with her arms making a shade for herself.^[56]

This inaugural poem commemorated the myth of Apollo's pursuit of the nymph Daphne. According to the Thessalian version Ovid adopted, Apollo defied Love, who in revenge wounded him at the sight of Daphne's seductive beauty. The nymph resisted the wooing of his amorous discourse, then fled at his bolder attempt to subdue her by force. Invoking her father, the river god Peneus, she was metamorphosed into a laurel on his nurturing banks. Apollo embraced the tree, consecrated it to his divine person, and bestowed upon it immortality. Daphne the laurel became the perfect symbol of the desire for the

unattainable so celebrated in the medieval poetry of troubadour and "courtly" love: a perpetual insatisfaction in an amorous quest that frustrates desire but provokes admiring praise.^[57] This pursuit of the unattainable beloved as poetic truth motivated Petrarch's lyrics.^[58] In the inaugural apostrophe to Apollo, the poet allied himself with that god by whose inspiration "we shall then see together a marvel." He identified the object of his pursuit as the same as Apollo's desire, "our lady." Petrarch named her "Lauretta" or "Laura," the French and Latin versions of Daphne. As his confidant the poet Boccaccio stated: "That illustrious Lauretta should be taken allegorically for the laurel wreath."^[59]

Petrarch located his laurel conventionally in a pleasance, the beautiful, shaded natural site that had been the principal motif of descriptions of Nature since the Roman empire. Its typical features were one or several trees, a meadow, a spring or brook and variously, flowers, bird song, and a breeze. The classical source was the Vale of Tempe, the cool, wooded valley between the steep slopes of Ossa and Olympus through which the river Peneus coursed. Such a landscape afforded to poetic invention the charm of a river valley and the grandeur of a rocky gorge.^[60] The site was Apolline, for it was at Tempe that the god had pursued Daphne until she was transformed on the bank of the Peneus. It was to such a pleasance that Petrarch recommended the recourse of the poet "to sow the seeds of new projects in the field of his genius," so that upon returning to his chamber the germinating thoughts might achieve perfect expression. The recollection of literature and the mental composition through which the poet aspired were most effectively achieved, he was persuaded, in such locales. As Petrarch advised in De vita solitaria, the princes of eloquence, Vergil and Cicero, adhered to this practice of solitary refuge amid oaks, beeches, and poplars, accompanied only by the sounds of breezes, birds, and rippling waters. In such retreat they imitated Plato, who conceived his republic and its laws in such a site.^[61]

Petrarch described the laurel by the properties he had praised in his coronation speech: its fragrance, shade, incorruptibility, verdure, and immunity to lightning. The laurel was lofty, noble, even regal. It was redolent with a fragrance that surpassed the rarest perfumes of Orient and Occident, wafting its incense even to heaven. Eternally green, preserving its leaf through the change of seasons, it flourished to propagate an entire wood from a single tree. Its sweet shade, exceed-

ing less beautiful pleasures, was marvelously formed by the arms of his lady seated on the grass. Petrarch envisioned her there under this canopy of virtue, chastely seated with his lord. It was in the laurel's shade that he also spied the symbolic white doe. Adopting the classical motif of composing poetry on the grass beneath trees and near a spring, Petrarch interjected himself into the landscape. He wrote both light and lofty thoughts in the shade of the laurel to the sound of waters. The shade gave repose to the cares of his weary life, and it made his feeble genius flourish. To it he escaped, "fleeing the pitiless light that was burning down upon me from the third heaven." Fearful of being seared by the celestial bolt of judgment, he sought refuge beneath the graceful branches of "the tree most favored in heaven." In its shade he was sheltered from harm. Its honored status rendered it and him immune from lightning, Jove's bolt. As a symbol of immortality, it was thus a fitting crown to honor famous brows, the sole ensign of the twin valors of the emperor and the poet.^[62]

The laurel was most nobly, however, what Petrarch termed it in the inaugural apostrophe to Apollo, a "holy" tree.^[63] This religious denotation repeated from the coronation speech his praise of it as "a sacred tree, to be held in awe, and to be reverenced." He had cited Vergil's testimony of the erection of altars in its groves and of the garlands of laurel the priests of Apollo wore at sacrifices. The bough was indeed worthy to adorn temples and the very Capitol from whose site he declaimed it.^[64] The very word laura , as Petrarch ingeniously demonstrated, teaches "LAU-d and RE-verence. "^[65] In yet another conceit, in which love planted within the poet's heart a laurel rooted in virtue, he even worshiped the tree:

With his right hand Love opened my left side and planted there in the midst of my heart a laurel so green that it would surpass and weary any emerald.

My pen, a plow, with my laboring sighs, and the raining down from my eyes of a sweet liquid have so beautified it, that its fragrance has reached Heaven, so that I do not know if any leaves have ever equaled it.

Fame, honor, and virtue and charm, chaste beauty in celestial habit, are the roots of the noble plant.

Such do I find it in my breast, wherever I may be, a happy burden, and with chaste prayers I adore it and bow to it as to a holy thing.^[66]

This sentiment reflected the primaeval belief that forests were pervaded with mystery. They evoked awe as a numinous environment in

which spirits were thought to dwell in the branches of trees and to whisper revelations in the rustling of their leaves. Sanctity was attributed to trees because of their organic life as displayed in growth. They manifested the divine vitality inherent in all living things. Their vegetative cycle of birth and renewal, creation and rejuvenation, also engendered the concept of the "tree of life." In ancient civilizations it was an enduring symbol of the values of life and creativity.^[67] This symbolism of vegetative regrowth was also an important type of the self-awareness of the Renaissance artist.^[68] It was from this tree of life that Petrarch's laurel was sown as a symbol of the waxing and waning and waxing again of his poetic invention. Although the laurel represented the chastity of Laura, the ideal form of truth that eluded him, just as Daphne had foiled Apollo's embrace, it was as a tree of life also an emblem of the fertility of his invention.

There was allusion in Petrarch's laurel to an archetypal fertile woman of antiquity, the Magna Mater, or Phrygian goddess Cybele, who was mistress of trees. Her iconography as seated beneath her ensign, the evergreen pine, receiving the offering of the first fruits of her bounty,^[69] suggests Petrarch's portrait of Laura seated beneath the evergreen laurel receiving the homage of his verse.^[70] The laurel was a feature of the ideal landscape in epic poetry^[71] and a particular symbol of Vergil's Aeneid .^[72] So, too, in Petrarch's Rime sparse did it particularly represent his own epic Africa, which he conceived in imitation. And in Africa, at the climax of his famous description of the gods whose portraits adorned the palace of Syphax, he honored Cybele:

Last comes the great mother Cybele, to whom
no land is fairer than Mount Ida's slope
In case disposing her vast body's bulk,
in garb of many hues the ancient dame,
revered for her great sceptre and the key
she holds, is seated. Rich in progeny,
she wears upon her head a lofty crown
of Phrygian towers. The old legend tells
that she brought forth the family of the gods,
aye, and the Thunderer himself. 'Tis true
her fickle womb likewise the Giants bore,
a scourge to all the world in ages past.
Yoked lions draw her chariot.^[73]

Although this supreme honoring of a Phrygian goddess in an Ethiopian palace is anachronistic, Petrarch's poetic reverence and emphasis was

apt, even prophetic. It was the transference to Rome at the dictates of the Sibylline books of the black stone in which Cybele was incarnate that stemmed the tide of Hannibal's army at the end of the Punic wars in 204 B.C. Cybele drove the enemy from Italy. In jubilee her stone, a meteorite, was installed on the Palatine in the Temple of Victory, and a festival in her honor, the Megalesia on 10 April, was proclaimed.^[74] Thus the evergreen laurel was for Petrarch a symbol of fecundity, in allusion to maternal Cybele, whom he hoped would once again ensure a Roman victory through the inspiration of his epic Africa .

It was the fertility of Laura, as expressing her carnal nature, that Augustinus despised. In lecturing Franciscus he scorned her as worn out with excessive childbearing.^[75] This was probably an allusion not to a matron of Avignon but to the source of all poetic invention, Mother Rhetoric herself. Petrarch especially esteemed Carmenta. In mythology Carmenta was a prophetess. It was she who taught the Aborigines to write. Like Daphne, she was a woodland nymph. She was also the goddess of childbirth, revered by matrons. Carmenta herself was a mother, the mother of Evander, the original settler of Rome. Prophecy, literacy, rusticity, fertility, and the settlement of Rome were all united in her cult. In his peripatetic epistle on the arts and ruins of Rome, it was the palace of Evander and the shrine of Carmenta that Petrarch first visited.^[76] In Africa he described it thus:

Here dwelt the mild Arcadian spirit, here
took place the greatest wonders of all time:
the finding of the books, the works of love
wrought by Carmenta, prophetess benign
to be revered through all the years to come
for her endowment of the Latin arts.^[77]

The verse expressed Petrarch's belief that Latin secular literature was born from Carmenta the inventress.^[78] The concept of the book as a child was a popular personal metaphor, diffuse in medieval literature and a favorite of Renaissance authors. It originated in Plato's doctrine of Eros, in which certain men by converse with a noble soul in a beautiful body spiritually engender poetry. Their verses, as if children, ensure an eternal fame, which endures beyond the monuments of physically begotten progeny.^[79] As Plato wrote:

Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children—this is the character of their love; their offspring, as

they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness and immortality which they desire for all future time. But souls who are pregnant—for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies, creative of that which is proper for the soul to conceive and bring forth: and if you ask me what are these conceptions, I answer, wisdom, and virtue in general—among such souls are all creative poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor.^[80]

It was the fecundity of poetic verse that Petrarch sought in the shade of Laura. She was a symbolic tree of life that engrafted to it the fertile Carmenta, who had engendered the first settler of Rome, and the fertile Cybele, who had saved the city from foreign conquest. By their inspiration Petrarch hoped to populate and protect Rome once again.

The laurel was a "holy tree,"^[81] the object of his cult. He was its prophet, priest, and poet. His vocation demanded of him the sublime experience of rapture, for, as he wrote of poets, they "raise themselves aloft on the wings of their genius, for they must needs be carried away by more than human rapture if they would speak with more than human powers. "^[82] Aesthetically, he was an ecstatic, "rapt by Love's hand I know not where."^[83] He confessed that at the sight of his beloved, "my soul trembles to rise in flight."^[84] At the prompting of Love, who "gathers her wandering breath into a sigh and then looses it in a clear, soft, angelic, divine voice":

I feel my heart sweetly stolen away and my thoughts and desires do change within me that I say: "Now comes the final plundering of me, if Heaven reserves me for so virtuous a death."

But the sound that binds my senses with its sweetness, reins in my soul, though ready to depart, with the great desire for the blessedness of listening;

so I live on, and thus she both threads and unwinds the spool of my appointed life, this only heavenly siren among us.^[85]

Yet he could not check the impulse of his soul decisively, for it was seized by a mad, uncontrollable desire:

So far astray is my mad desire, in pursuing her who has turned in flight and, light and free of the snares of Love, flies ahead of my slow running,

that when, calling him back, I most send him by the safe path, then he least obeys me, nor does it help to spur him or turn him, for Love makes him restive by nature;

and when he takes the bit forcefully to himself, I remain in his power, as against my will he carries me off to death.^[86]

Petrarch depicted his soul as driven, mastered by a "humble wild creature" that visited him "in human appearance and in the shape of an angel," so whirling him about "in laughter and tears between fear and hope, that she makes uncertain my very state." If this instability was not soon resolved, the poet predicted his demise, for "my fragile and weary strength cannot any longer bear so many changes; for in the same moment it burns, freezes, blushes, and turns pale."

If she does not soon either accept me or else free me from the bit and bridle, but still, as she is wont, keeps me between the two, by that sweet poison I feel going from my heart through my veins, Love, my life is over.^[87]

The poet was, in a cluster of metaphors that pervaded his Rime sparse, "yoked," "chained," "snared," and "netted."^[88] The bonds were symbolized by Laura's hair, in an extension of the metaphor of the Song of Solomon 5:7, which described the lover as netted in the tresses of the beloved.^[89] Since golden tresses often vied with solar rays in the medieval poetry derived from an aesthetic of light,^[90] her golden locks were also an Apolline symbol of inspiration. When they were loosened on the breeze they signified Petrarch's ecstatic seizure. A consistent classical description of ecstasy, especially of Maenadism, was the tossing back of long hair in the wind, as when the possessed Cassandra "flings her golden locks when there blows from God the compelling wind of second sight."^[91] It was precisely when Laura's "golden hair was loosed to the breeze, which turned it in a thousand sweet knots" that from her eyes burned the light from which the poet caught fire. She seemed to him then "an angelic form, . . . a celestial spirit, a living sun."^[92] As he again acknowledged the agent of his captivity:

nor can I shake loose that lovely knot by which the sun is surpassed, not to say amber or gold: I mean the blond locks and the curling snare that so softly bind tight my soul, which I arm with humility and nothing else.^[93]

When Laura's locks were spread to the wind, he was bound: "No one shall ever set me free from that golden snare, artfully neglected and thick with ringlets."^[94]

At this moment of entanglement in her hair, the inspirational

breeze assumed over the poet the power of Medusa, the monstrous Gorgon of Greek mythology whose eyes could turn men into stones. The rays of celestial light that beamed from Laura's eyes and shone from her locks petrified him. Since Gorgo had snakes for hair, an evil allure might be attributed to Laura's locks, as if to ensnare him in sin. The Gorgon's head was an apoptropaic symbol, however, one that warded off evil, not that enticed it.^[95] A religious rather than moralistic reading is appropriate to this image of poetic inspiration. The snake was the common Roman totem for the natal genius.^[96] When Petrarch confessed himself captured by Laura's golden locks, those solar rays of illumination that exercised a serpentine power over him, he referred to his epic Africa, since the snake was the legendary symbol of the genius of Scipio Africanus. As Petrarch repeated from Aulus Gellius the lore of his hero's celestial issue:

'Tis said a glittering serpent oft was seen upon his mother's bed, that terrified all who beheld it. Hence came the belief, now held in many corners of the land, in origin celestial. And for sure the child thereafter born, as he grew up, in semblance seemed no mortal man.^[97]

The poet's entanglement in Laura's curling, snaky locks, which she loosened ecstatically in the heavenly breeze, thus symbolized the conception of the epic that would express Petrarch's natal genius and win him the laurel. This inspiration, he confessed, "has the power over me that Medusa had over the old Moorish giant, when she turned him to flint."^[98] The beams of inspiration that enlightened him could be withdrawn at divine will, so that the poet froze in the shade and trembled with fear. Or they could assume a different aspect, as judgmental lightning-bolts that struck at his audacity and with a superior glance turned him "to marble," to "an almost living and terrified stone." Embedded in this rock, Petrarch trembled when his lady angrily rebuked him: "I am not perhaps who you think I am!" He speculated that Apollo might be incensed that a mortal tongue should presume to speak of his eternally green bough.^[99] The rock into which the poet was metamorphosed in such ecstatic moments asserted the transcendence of his vision and signified his religious fear of the numinous: literally he was "petrified."

The knots that fastened him, the snaring, serpentine locks of Laura that symbolized his Apolline genius, were "the bonds of Venus."^[100] The intimacy of love and prophecy that inspired Petrarch to veil his

prophetic ecstasy in lyrics of love derived from the Socratic theory of Eros. The art of divination, according to Plato's Symposium, was discovered by Apollo under the guidance of Love, so that the prophet was necessarily a disciple of love. Love was the intermediary spirit between the divine and the human. "Through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way."^[101] As a prophet Petrarch was thus captive to Love. "I am not deceived, but beset by forces much greater than magic arts," he responded to the doleful lecture of Augustinus on self-deception. "I see what I am doing, and I am not deceived by an imperfect knowledge of the truth; rather Love forces me." As any saint should know, "No human defense avails against Heaven." Although Petrarch acknowledged that his aspiration to express truth in verse surpassed the history of rhetoric in prose and poetry, Latin and Greek, he was compelled to the task: "Mortal tongue cannot reach her divine state; Love drives and draws his tongue, not by choice but by destiny." Again he declared: "Alas, Love carries me off where I do not wish to go, and I see well that we are crossing beyond what is permitted."^[102]

Petrarch was thus enraptured to the ecstatic state, divinely induced in the poet. In this rapture he typically described himself as captive to extremes of sense and sensibility:

Peace I do not find, and I have no wish to make war; and I fear and hope, and burn and am of ice; and I fly above the heavens and lie on the ground; and I grasp nothing and embrace all the world.

One has me in prison who neither opens nor locks, neither keeps me for his own nor unties the bonds; and Love does not kill and does not unchain me, he neither wishes me alive nor frees me from the tangle.

I see without eyes, and I have no tongue and yet cry out; and I wish to perish and I ask for help; and I hate myself and love another.

I feed on pain, weeping I laugh; equally displeasing to me are death and life. In this state am I, Lady, on account of you.^[103]

As he described his poetic transport "from thought to thought, from mountain to mountain":

as Love leads it on, now it laughs, now weeps, now fears, now is confident: and my face, which follows wherever my soul leads, is clouded and made clear again, and remains but a short time in any one state; and at the sight anyone who had experienced such a life would say: "This man is burning with love and his state is uncertain."^[104]

It was to the shade of the laurel tree that Petrarch had initially fled for refuge from divine judgment:

To the Sweet shade of those beautiful leaves
I ran, fleeing a pitiless light
that was burning down upon me from the third heaven;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
so that, fearing the burning light,
I chose for my refuge no shade of hills
but that of the tree most favored in Heaven.^[105]

And he acknowledged that "a laurel defended me then from the heavens."^[106] In its shade he discovered a divine delight:

In a young grove were flowering the holy boughs of a laurel, youthful
and straight, that seemed one of the trees of Eden,
  and from its shade came forth such sweet songs of diverse birds and
so much other delight that it had me rapt from the world.^[107]

There he succumbed to Love, who transported him ecstatically "for he gives wings to the feet and hearts of his followers, to make them fly up to the third heaven." That sphere Petrarch declared the celestial site of those love poets Guittone d'Arezzo, Cino da Pistoia, Dante Alighieri, and Franceschino degli Ablizi, whose souls had preceded him in death.^[108] It was more famously to the third heaven that St. Paul had been rapt in the ecstasy that became a paradigm of Christian mystical experience: "I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter" (2 Cor. 12:2–4). Petrarch wrote of his own poetic ecstasy that he was "rapt by Love's hand I know not where." Echoing St. Paul's assertion that the pleasures of paradise are inconceivable (1 Cor. 2:9), he continued by saying of his revelatory voice, "he could not conceive it who has not heard it."^[109]

Unlike St. Paul, who dared not reveal these mysteries, Petrarch divulged the speech of his lady during his poetic rapture to the third heaven:

My thought lifted me up to where she was whom I seek and do not find on earth; there, among those whom the third circle encloses, I saw here more beautiful and less proud.

She took me by the hand and said: "In this sphere you will be with me, if my desire is not deceived; I am she who gave you so much war and completed my day before evening.

"My blessedness no human intellect can comprehend: I only wait for you and for that which you loved so much and which remained down there, my lovely veil."

In remembrance the poet sighed: "Ah, why did she then become still and open her hand? for at the sound of words so kind and chaste, I almost remained in heaven."^[110] He thus saluted the heavenly state of poetry "who made so bright and famous in the world her virtue and my madness."^[111]

He was reduced to "raving" at sheer contemplation of the unattainable truth.^[112] As the madness of prophecy was presided over by Apollo, Petrarch appropriately invoked him as his native deity. In the inaugural verse of the Rime sparse in its original form, Petrarch invoked Apollo: "Thus we shall then together see a marvel—our lady sitting on the grass and with her arms making a shade for herself."^[113] A gaze "as full of wonder as anyone who ever saw some incredible thing" reinforced this marvelous nature of his poetic vision. And he exclaimed, "What a miracle it is, when on the grass she sits like a flower!" He praised this manifestation as "the high new miracle that in our days appeared in the world." Again, its image was a "miracle," "a noble miracle."^[114] Its depiction became his poetic task:

The high new miracle that in our days appeared in the world and did not wish to stay in it, that Heaven merely showed to us and then took back to adorn its starry cloisters,

Love, who first set free my tongue, wishes me to depict and show her to whoever did not see her, and therefore a thousand times he has vainly put to work wit [genius], time, pens, papers, inks.

Poetry has not yet reached the summit, I know it in myself and anyone knows it who up to now has spoken or written of Love;

he who knows how to think, let him esteem the silent truth which surpasses every style, and then let him sigh: "Therefore blessed the eyes that saw her alive."^[115]

Again: "I bless the place and the time and the hour that my eyes looked so high, and I say: 'Soul, you must give great thanks that you were found worthy of such honor then.'"^[116] And, heeding this inspi-

ration he blessed his inaugural prophetic vision, and all its consequences, bitter and sweet:

Blessed be the day and the month and the year and the season and the time and the hour and the instant and the beautiful countryside and the place where I was struck by the two lovely eyes that have bound me;

and blessed be the first sweet trouble I felt on being made one with Love, and the bow and the arrows that pierced me, and the wounds that reach my heart!

Blessed be the many words I have scattered calling the name of my lady, and the sighs and the tears and the desire;

and blessed be all the pages where I gain fame for her, and my thoughts, which are only of her, so that no other has part in them!^[117]

His soul, unable to endure the radiant presence of beloved poetry at the gate Love has barred shut, sighed: "Oh, blessed the hours of the day when you opened this path with your eyes!"^[118]

It was for the perpetuation of this vision that Petrarch invoked Apollo:

Life-giving sun, you first loved that branch which is all I love; now, unique in her sweet dwelling, she flourishes, without an equal since Adam first saw his and our lovely bane.

Let us stay to gaze at her, I beg and call on you, O sun.

Yet he lamented the daily solar course that refused his prayer: "and you still run away and shadow the hillsides all around and carry off the day, and fleeing you take from me what I most desire."^[119] He prayed that his beloved image might not elude him as it did Apollo: "and let her not be transformed into a green wood to escape from my arms, as the day when Apollo pursued her down here on earth!"^[120] Nevertheless, when he achieved the inaugural vision of the laurel that eluded even the god, he discovered that it was he who was captive, not she:

I saw that I had come to the piercing, burning, shining arms, to the green ensign of victory, against which in battle Jove and Apollo and Polyphemus and Mars lose, where weeping is forever fresh and green again; and, unable to escape, I let myself be captured, and I know neither the way to escape nor the art.^[121]

Petrarch was more than captive to love, however. Love transformed him with the patronage of his lady "into what I am, making me of a

livng man a green laurel that loses no leaf for all the cold season."^[122] He became a denizen of the sacred grove: "Love made me a citizen of the woods."^[123]

It was the sacred, especially the prophetic, character of the laurel tree that symbolized Petrarch's poetic vocation. Even more unusual than the presence of the tripod in the Apolline temple at Delphi had been that of the laurel. Like the olive of the Acropolis or the oak of Dodona, this sacred tree may have derived its status from the Cretan-Mycenaean period when Gaea, or mother earth, was mistress of oracles. The Delphic temple consecrated to Apollo was initially constructed of laurel branches from the valley of Tempe and its site was guarded by a serpent entwined with that foliage. The primitive Delphic oracles were supposed to have issued from the laurel itself. Although classical Greek religion preserved other vestiges of an ancient cult of trees, the Delphic laurel was the singular such presence in the interior of an enclosed temple. Painted vases depicted the laurel rooted next to the festooned tripod as a characteristic element of the decor of the adytum, or inner shrine. Its garlands adorned the temple walls, and in the vicinity laurel groves graced the Muses' fountain and the Sibyl's rock, remnants of which trees still grow in this century. The Delphic plantation and usage of the laurel was attested by many literary sources known to Petrarch. The arrival of Apollo at Delphi was saluted by a Greek chorus chanting of the "fine shady foliage of the laurel." And in a poetic debate between a laurel and an olive concerning their nobility and utility, the former argued from its importance in the Delphic ritual. The laurel was indeed, with the tripod and the fountain, a traditional Apolline source of inspiration. The Pythia pronounced her oracles "by the grace of the laurel,"just as Apollo himself had prophesied in the original Homeric Hymn "under the inspiration of the laurel." Prior to the oracular consultation she burnt an incense of laurel leaves and barley. She also slept on a bed of laurel branches. During the ritual session she chewed on laurel leaves, which were sacred to Apollo whose oracle she was about to utter. Crowned with laurel, she held in her hand a branch freshly cut from the same tree, which she shook at the moment of revelation. The role of the laurel in that Apolline cult was indeed so salient that it became symbolic of the Delphic oracle itself.^[124]

The practice of chewing laurel leaves was established in ancient folklore as a means by which seers and poets invoked divine inspira-

tion.^[125] Juvenal satirically equated the phrase "to bite the laurel" with the poetic gift.^[126] Although Petrarch evidently did not resort to this method, the laurel was emphatically the symbol of his inspiration. Ruffling through its verdant leaves was a "calm breeze," he wrote as he punned on the tree, laura, as the very breath, l'aura,^[127] of poetic inspiration. This air struck the poet's brow, stirring in his memory a recollection of his enamorment and revealing in his sight the face of the beloved. It was a "heavenly breeze," "like a spirit of Paradise," even a "sacred breeze." This breeze originated in clearer and happier skies beyond the Alps, where the archetypal laurel was rooted by a running stream. He thus lauded "the breeze that softly sighing moves the green laurel and her golden hair, with sights new and charming makes souls wander from their bodies."^[128] It was this prophetic virtue of poetry to reveal and enrapture that captivated Petrarch and allied him with Apollo and his bough. Had not his own advent and triumph as a poet been prophesied by the bards of Greece and Rome, Homer and Ennius? Had they not spied Franciscus under the laurel, plaiting its leaves into a crown?

Already in his heart the green frond stirs
so great a love, a reverence so deep
that in the Delphic grove alone he finds
his true content. See how he practices
to fashion garlands of the tender leaves,
already comforted by prophecies
of things to come.^[129]

Had not St. Paul compared the imperishable wreath with which the triumphant Christian is crowned to the laurel won by the victor in the athletic contests (1 Cor. 9:24–25)? Had not St. Ambrose sung of the Holy Spirit crowning the evangelist John with the laurel whose leaves were his verses?^[130]

The metaphor of the tree had for centuries rooted Christian theology. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil from which Adam and Eve ate occasioned the fall of man. The tree of the cross on which Jesus hung redeemed him.^[131] As Petrarch stated, "in theology wood was the first cause of human misery and later of human redemption."^[132] Symbolic trees also served moralists who discoursed on human lives as bearing the fruits of good and evil, virtue and vice. In this fashion Petrarch invented an allegory of a rare tree growing in difficult

and solitary locations. Despite this obstacle, it waxed tall, upright, and evergreen, with healthful shade and sweet, abundant fruit. The tree, he explained, was virtue; its branches, the cardinal and theological virtues. It was tended by the husbandman Christ, who vivified it with his blood and with his word. Refreshed by the breezes of pious inspiration, it flourished in the soil of a tranquil mind and clear conscience, and so bore the fruit of its virtue. The other features of the pleasance were also symbolic: the plants signified virtuous actions; the flowers, the beauties of morality and the fragrance of good repute; the bright color, the shining quality of virtue; the fountain and stream, good deeds.^[133] Petrarch's laurel was a symbol of virtue, the virtue he was convinced poetry would inspire.

It was profoundly a symbol of the virtue of prophecy, like the laurel that graced the Delphic shrine and the frontispiece of his manuscript of Vergil. Of all the trees that flourished metaphorically in medieval culture, none loomed so important as the visions of the exegete Joachim of Fiore, which incited a powerful prophetic movement. Joachim's trees were organic figures of universal history as germinating, growing, and fructifying. In his Liber figurarum he employed the tree to symbolize the continuity of history, with branches sprouting and spreading throughout the centuries. The two eras of the Old Testament and the New culminated in the first and second advents of Christ, in incarnation and in judgment. History was, moreover, divided into a triune pattern of states, governed by Father, Son, and Spirit. Joachim envisioned these states as the trunks of three massive trees. The first, rooted in Adam, sprouted twelve branches in Jacob, signifying the Israelite tribes, and then stretched bare from Oziah to Christ. The second, rooted in Christ, sprouted twelve branches, signifying the apostolic churches, and then rose bare to St. Benedict. The third tree, not only mysterious but even mystical, defied precise delineation, for its limbs aspired to the celestial consummation of time.^[134]

Petrarch's vatic symbol of the laurel did not involve such genealogical import, except for the inclusion of Vergil among the prophets of Christ in the Martini frontispiece. It did share with Joachim's arboreal figure a significant allusion to his prophetic identity, however. Joachim had described those triune trees, which he viewed from the summit of the mountain of contemplation, as the cedars of Lebanon of which the prophet Ezekiel had discoursed (Ez. 27:22). The genealogy from Adam to the consummation of the ages that he fashioned into tree

trunks replicated those of that messianic oracle. As Ezekiel had envisioned, Yahweh would pluck a tender twig from the cedar of Lebanon and replant it on the mount of Jerusalem, where it would bear boughs and fruit.^[135] Ezekiel was the prophet of the Babylonian Captivity of Israel, perhaps himself a hostage. In imitation a Babylonian theme informed the prophecy of Joachim. He schematized history on the Apocalyptic pattern of the seven seals or ages of the old covenant and seven openings or ages of the new; each age had corresponding persecutions, and each covenant culminated in the sabbath. The sixth seal of the old dispensation coincided with the era from Daniel to Ezekiel; its conflict was the Babylonian Captivity. The corresponding sixth opening of the new dispensation predicted the immanent fall of the new Babylonian kingdom and the rebuilding of the holy city. The age was associated with the great crisis of the Antichrist preceding the seventh opening, the sabbath in which the new Jerusalem would ultimately triumph over the new Babylon. Joachim equated this new Babylon with the German imperium since Henry I, who had involved the Church in the investiture controversy. For this schism and this tribulation, for transgressing the divine command to keep the peace and defend the faith, Joachim prophesied that the empire would be punished by the sixth angel, who would pour a phial of wrath on the Euphrates to dessicate it; for Rome had indeed become Babylon. Joachim considered its fall with lamentation, already sensing its onset in the defeat of the army of the emperor Frederick.^[136]

Joachim paralleled his own generation with that of Jeremiah and prophesied the imminence of a new Babylonian captivity.^[137] Already captive in Babylon, Petrarch imagined himself to be Ezekiel revived. Like that prophet who had remonstrated with the evil shepherds of Israel, he prayed: "I rely on Him who rules the world and shelters His followers even in the wood to lead me now with merciful staff among His flocks."^[138]