1
Hail, True Apollo!

The ancient march commenced in the Campus Martius, processed through circuses and theaters, circled the Palatine, and then by the Via Sacra traversed the Roman Forum to ascend the Capitoline to Jupiter's temple.^[1] Yet Petrarch braved the ideal route of Scipio Africanus, for it was his poetic celebration of that hero that merited him the laurel wreath on 8 April 1341:

I too, when fifteen centuries had passed
through their appointed cycles, greatly strove
with all the means my meager strength allowed
to follow o'er the rough and thorny path
those precious traces and to imitate
with similar crown, like site, and glorious name,
the ancient heroes and their dignities
sublime, lest what the Greek bard had foretold
of me might prove a faulty prophecy.^[2]

At his departure from Avignon for this momentous journey, he had anticipated the envy his triumph might provoke. Despite his insistence that his art was considerable,^[3] his epic Africa, although conceived three years prior, was still in progress.^[4] Two decades later friends continued to importune its publication. Petrarch died, however, refusing to release the manuscript, which was only rescued by intrigue from the flames, if not from the revisionists. Only with the turn of the century was the heralded epic published.^[5]

Before the laurel had wilted on his brow, however, Petrarch, inflated by the praise, was inspired to revive the desultory project.^[6] The most ambitious epic since antiquity, Africa was to honor in nine books the military exploits of Scipio Africanus the Elder during the Second Punic War to defeat Hannibal's encroachment on the Roman empire. Already Petrarch had shown—probably recited—a partial manuscript to King Robert of Naples, whose patronage of the Roman coronation he had solicited. Impressed with the endeavor, the monarch had asked for its

dedication to himself,^[7] which request the poet obliged, while promising a worthier sequel to praise the valor of that modern hero.^[8] This royal approval of Africa issued in a document that conferred on Petrarch not only the coveted insignia of the laurel wreath but also the privilege of crowning other poets; the faculty of reading, debating, and interpreting ancient and modern literature, and the rights of the professors of the liberal arts; the titles of honorific "great poet and historian" and of academic "master"; and Roman citizenship.^[9] Although the epic would fail to equal the formal excellence of classical verse, its enterprise was historic. Petrarch's celebration of Scipio's brave deeds in noble words was designed to elicit patriotic spirit by a new humanist reconciliation of history, poetry, and philosophy.^[10] Its program absorbed the poet and the monarch in conversation and in contest just prior to Petrarch's coronation. In these private and public examinations, Petrarch excelled in the defense of poetry.^[11]

Petrarch's presentation at court rehearsed the oration he would deliver on the Capitoline. In that brief collation on a Vergilian verse, he declaimed the mutual difficulty and desire of poetry, its allegorical truth, and its reward of glory, immortality, and the laurel.^[12] In that oration a motif emerged that distinguished Petrarch's poetics: the sacred art. A Christian tradition had countenanced poetry as a figurative imitation of the truth, and thus a reflection of divine verity. As Petrarch acknowledged this theory anagogically, poetry beheld the same light as did philosophy or history, but by oblique illumination. He argued that although poetry clouded this truth in fiction, its perception might prove the sweeter for its arduous discovery.^[13] This native difficulty of the art, and its delight, Petrarch related to the necessity of divine inspiration. By reviving a classical equation of poetry with theology, he exceeded and challenged Christian poetics, which had tolerated the art as a mere propadeutic to theology. "The inherent difficulty of the poet's task lies in this," he proposed, contemplating his own ascent of Parnassus, "that whereas in the other arts one may attain his goal through sheer toil and study, it is far otherwise with the art of poetry, in which nothing can be accomplished unless a certain inner and divinely given energy is infused in the poet's spirit." He cited Cicero's testimony in Pro Archia, a manuscript of which he had enthusiastically discovered, that "'whereas attainment in other activities depends upon talent, learning, and skill, the poet attains through his very nature, is moved by the energy that is within his mind, and

is as it were inspired by a divine inbreathing—so that Ennius fairly calls poets sacred in their own right, since they appear to be commended to us by the possession of a divine gift.'" He also recalled the nobility of mind and the indomitable spirit that Juvenal ascribed to poets as beholding the faces of the gods. And he exclaimed with Lucan: "Sacred and great is the task of the poets."^[14]

This sacred status Petrarch notably expounded in an apologetical epistle for his first eclogue. The pastoral genre of the Bucolicum carmen, he explained, suited his intention of commenting safely on controversial matters through a veil of ambiguity that few readers would penetrate, although many would enjoy it.^[15] Such poetic artifice would not, he feared, charm his brother Gherardo, who was contracted as a Carthusian cleric to asceticism. Petrarch argued with him, therefore, that his poetic eclogue was not the antithesis of religious fervor. "In truth," he wrote, "poetry is not in the least contrary to theology. Does this astonish you? I might almost say that theology is the poetry of God." This definition of theology as rhetorical rather than dialectical, in humanist confrontation with scholastic method, Petrarch reinforced with examples of scriptural figures rather than syllogistic conclusions. "What else is it if not poetry," he asked, "when Christ is called a lion or a lamb or a worm? In Sacred Scripture you will find thousands of such examples too numerous to pursue here." Indeed, he continued, the Savior himself invented parables or allegories, the very texture of poetry, which weaves together the subjects of God and man. Petrarch traced the pedigree of the poet as theologian to the authority of Aristotle. He offered the etymology of poet as further proof of this identity, for the word originated in the effort of primitive man to create a religious homage not in common speech but in uncommon language, one that was artful, exquisite, and novel, in Greek called poetices . To the anticipated rejoinder of his brother that poetic sweetness contradicted religious severity, Petrarch adduced the precedent of the Hebrew prophetic and sapiential literature, especially the psalms, whose author deserved the title "the poet of the Christians," since he sang metrically of Christ. In patristic literature, moreover, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome employed poetical forms and rhythms, as did those devout Christian poets Prudentius, Prosper, and Sedulius. A practice so approved by the saints should not be spurned, Petrarch proposed. As a principle one should rather embrace the intended meaning of a text, if it is true and salutary, regardless of its

style. "To praise food served in an earthen vessel while feeling disgust at the same meal served on a golden platter is either a sign of madness or hypocrisy," he concluded.^[16]

It was fitting, therefore, that in the exordium of his coronation speech Petrarch termed his oration "theological," although he declared that he would refrain from elaborating the distinctions that were usual in such declamations. It was theological precisely because it lauded poetry defined as an allegory of the truth.^[17] Before him Albertino Mussato, who had been awarded the laurel in 1315 at Padua,^[18] had proclaimed poetry a heaven-sent knowledge, a science by divine right. Poetry was a philosophy to rival Aristotle's. It was "a second theology." This poetics had provoked an altercation between Mussato and the friar Giovannino of Mantua concerning the divine versus human origin and nature of poetry.^[19] In the reverberating debate Petrarch championed poetry as divine in origin, holy in purpose. As he had concurred with the ancient author, "Sacred and great is the task of the poets."^[20] These exalted sentiments countered the modest role that poetry had been assigned in Christian apologetics. As rhetor and doctor of grace, Augustine defined its status for centuries of Latin authors by cleaving Horace's designation of poetry as a unity of profit and pleasure: poetry as "useful and enjoyable."^[21] In Augustine's distinction the enjoyable rendered men blessed, while the useful merely aided and sustained their movement toward blessedness. A confusion of the useful with the enjoyable impeded and deflected men from their true course, restraining or even preventing by the shackles of an inferior devotion their attainment of sanctity. Although he acknowledged that truth, wherever discovered, was universally the Lord's, Augustine advised that the arts and sciences were not to be embraced, but rather to be assessed soberly for their utility, and then applied moderately to the quest for beatitude. He appropriated the Mosaic principle of despoiling the Egyptians (Ex. 3:22, 11:2, 12:35–36), by which the Christian might plunder the treasuries of antiquity while eschewing their idols. The Christian was to be ever mindful in this practice, however, that in comparison with biblical wisdom, pagan knowledge was slight and neither promoted nor ensured salvation.^[22] This theology was the fruit of Augustine's tortuous conversion from the ardor and ambition of a secular profession to that of a sacral vocation. His own experience of subordinating, then sublimating, aesthetics to rapture recapitulated a patristic tradition that had asserted the unique claims of the gospel by

reducing, if not denying, those of the arts. Guilt dogged Christians who favored the Muses. Reflecting in senescence on his literature, Augustine regretted that he had attributed so much to the liberal arts, when many saints were ignorant of them and many learned in them were not saints.^[23]

From the perspective of his own old age, Petrarch defended poetry by indicating that the Fathers had established doctrine on a foundation of the classics, as fortifying and consoling human experience. While he thus exploited the Christian appreciation of secular study, he subverted and exceeded it by rebuking the remorse of the elder Augustine. If learning was unnecessary to piety, Petrarch ventured, neither was it an impediment. "I know of many who have attained to extraordinary sanctity without literature," he acknowledged, "but none do I know who has been hindered from it by literature." In considering the diverse paths to salvation, he stated that, although every such pilgrimage was blessed, "the more enlightened and sublime the route is, surely, the more glorious, whence the devotions of the cultured and the rustic are incomparable." Propose any saint from the illiterate herd, he challenged, and he would counter with a holier one from the learned class.^[24] The ray, however oblique, that had symbolized poetry in his coronation speech, Petrarch still affirmed as more gracious than the pall of ignorance and more pious than blind faith.

This reversal of values was famously argued in De secreto conflictu mearum curarum,^[25] Petrarch's fictional dialogue with a mock Augustine cast in the role of philosopher-physician. Assiduously the saint plied the poet with the ascetical commonplaces. A vivid and profound reflection on death and misery, he advised, together with a passionate desire and drive for ascent, would repel all worldly seductions. By subjecting the carnal to the spiritual in accordance with the golden mean, virtue would yield Franciscus true happiness in triumph over poetic melancholy. Yet this voluntarist theodicy, in which perfect knowledge of one's evil condition assured perfect will to supersede it, faltered on Franciscus's own experience. The poet summoned Truth itself as a witness to the futility of such a cure. To Augustinus's rejoinder that his will for health was merely self-deception, Franciscus initially agreed. "From my youth upwards I have had the increasing conviction," he said, "that if in any matter I was inclined to think differently from yourself I was certain to be wrong." Observing that Franciscus was agreeing with his argument "more out of deference

than conviction," Augustinus invited him, "Pray feel at liberty to say whatever your real judgment suggests."^[26]

As the dialogue progressed, the abrasion of Augustinus's asceticism on Franciscus's passion goaded him to the formation of conscience: a mature conscience as established in his experience rather than one merely derived from authority. He dared to state that the honored maxims Augustinus adduced were to him but "paltry pleas." He boldly asked: "But I beg you will produce some more solid arguments than these, if you know any, for experience has taught me that all this is more specious than convincing." Augustinus's appeal to Franciscus's conscience as an incitement to shame for his base affections testified contradictorily to the poet's ardent love for things eternal. Poetry, he eloquently parried, has a mind disdainful of earth, zealous of heaven; a visage radiant with divine beauty; a character of perfect honor; a voice and vision of immortality; a form and rhythm unique. This affirmation Augustinus angrily denounced as falsehood. The charm of poetry, he charged, had only allured Franciscus to a ruinous neglect of virtue. "She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the creature more than the Creator." To Franciscus's protest that "the love which I feel for her has most certainly led me to God," Augustinus retorted that it had rather "inverted the true order." Creatures were to be cherished for their Creator, not the Artificer for the art. Yet Petrarch refused to concede, and avowed that he would remain steadfast even under torture against such allegations of depravity. He had loved the soul more than the form of his mistress, he declared. He thus rejected as impossible Augustinus's moral of a flight to freedom, or at least to imprisonment by a milder discipline. There was no substitute for poetry, which he continued to compose.^[27]

The conversation was classically therapeutic.^[28] It healed Franciscus's wounds, not by application of the patent medicine Augustinus prescribed, but by perception of the truth, which the dialogical process itself manifested. Augustinus was ultimately not the magistrate, however well he may have served as the master. Both interlocutors were subject to Truth, the silent judge of their colloquy. Franciscus expressed his gratitude for its patient witnessing of their discourse. He then concurred with Augustinus's parting admonition to be true to himself—for he could not be faithful to God if he betrayed himself—and turned to his daily occupations. These, especially poetry, were so

much of himself that to renounce them ascetically would transgress the principle of truth.

"To her," he explained in personifying his poetic art, "to her I owe whatever I am, and I should never have attained such little renown and glory as I have unless she by the power of this love had quickened into life the feeble germ of virtue that Nature has sown in my heart. It was she who turned my youthful soul away from all that was base, who drew me as it were by a grappling chain and forced me to look upwards."^[29] In celebrating his art in the vernacular verse of his Rime sparse, Petrarch lauded poetry as a heavenly Idea born in paradise, who is divinely revealed yet clothed in humanity. She is an illumination that manifests heaven on earth, a testimony to its beatitude. Her eyes, he affirmed, beam "a sweet light that shows me the way that leads to Heaven." By her glance she turns his thoughts toward salvation. "She is indeed blessed," he exclaimed, "who can make others blessed with her sight."^[30] Franciscus thus concluded his deliberations with Augustinus: "I am not ignorant that, as you said a few minutes before, it would be much safer for me to attend only to the care of my soul, to relinquish altogether every bypath and follow the straight path of the way to salvation. But I have not the strength to resist that old bent for study altogether." To Augustinus's reluctant blessing on his choice Franciscus added: "May God lead me safe and whole out of so many crooked ways; that I may follow the Voice that calls me."^[31]

That "heavenly siren" who lured him was the "invisible form" of truth, as liberated in paradise from the poetic veil; or the "naked" truth that language cloaks on earth. That "voice, pleasing even in Heaven" called Petrarch from beyond, admonishing him to spurn the attractions of the world, begging him not to delay in elevating his soul. "From there she rules me, from there she forces me," he stated. "Nor do I beg her to set me free, for all other paths to Heaven are less straight."^[32] Petrarch thus rejected the ascetical commonplace expressed by Augustinus that poetry, like all secular science, is a deviant occupation that deflects men from beatitude. Considering the path to salvation, he asserted that "no one who participates in honorable activity may be excluded" from it.^[33] His declaration that poetry is the most direct path inferred that it is also the most honorable. Petrarch defended poetry vigorously against the dialectical argument that since it was by the Horatian canon for pleasure and for ornament, it was therefore less

noble in proportion as it was less necessary. Madness! cried Petrarch. "If necessity enobles the arts, the most noble of all would therefore be the shoemaker's, the baker's and the other lowest of mechanical trades." But as Aristotle himself affirmed, he reminded the critics, while these trades were more necessary than philosophy and all the arts that render life blessed, cultivated, and adorned, they were not more worthy.^[34] Petrarch insisted that it is the poetic laurel that indicates "the straight way to Heaven"; indeed, all other paths are less direct.^[35]

Thus it was that Petrarch honored poetry:

"From her comes the amorous thought that, while you follow it, sends you toward the highest good, little valuing what other men desire;

"from her comes the courageous joy that leads you to Heaven along a straight path, so that already I go high with hope."^[36]

And, he prayed: "Let her meet me, and let her draw and call me to herself, to be what she is in Heaven," for as he averred, "my highest desire is to be permitted to follow her . . . by a straight and unimpeded road." Praising his heavenly guide, he wrote:

She teaches me to go straight up, and I, who understand her chaste allurements and her just prayers with their sweet, low, pitying murmur,

I must rule and bend myself according to her because of the sweetness I take from her words, which would have the power to make a stone weep.^[37]

Ignorance—"the level road of the lazy"^[38] —Petrarch thus rejected for the heady ascent of Parnassus, at whose cloud-capped summit he gazed from the Capitoline on that triumphal Easter of 1341. Had not Augustinus unwittingly urged him there? "You would indeed be of all men the most miserable were you to try to arrive at the truth through the absurdities of the crowd, or to suppose that under the leadership of blind guides you would reach the light," the saint had advised. "You must avoid the common beaten track and set your aspirations higher; take the way marked by the steps of very few who have gone before, if you would be counted worthy to hear the Poet's word—

On, brave lad, on! your courage leading you,
So only Heaven is scaled."^[39]

His mentor hardly imagined the ironic subversion of this advice, by which Petrarch would abandon him as purblind. Nor did Augustinus

perceive the ambiguity in his own liberal citation of classical poets to illustrate his refutation of their art. From the tedious compendium of ascetical rules the "saint" proffered, Petrarch selected this essential principle: "Listen only to that Holy Spirit who is ever calling, and in urgent words saying, 'Here is the way to your native country, your true home.' You know what He would bring to mind; what paths for your feet, what dangers to avoid. If you would be safe and free obey His voice. . . . Follow the lead which the inspirations of your own soul give you."^[40] Franciscus prayed in response: "May God lead me safe and whole out of so many crooked ways; that I may follow the Voice that calls me."^[41]

In a celebrated letter narrating an allegorical ascent of Mont Ventoux,^[42] Petrarch illustrated the divergent paths to blessedness: the shortcut, direct but steep, of religious profession and the highway, smooth but meandering, of secular occupation. At its unclouded summit, a visionary Petrarch imitated the conversionary experiences of Augustine and Anthony, but as prompted by reading a different sort of text. The conversions of the bishop and anchorite, as symbolizing the active and the contemplative offices in the Church, had been through ascetical precepts: "Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires" (Rom. 13: 13–14); and, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Matt. 19:21). The text of Petrarch's admoniton was illuminative rather than purgative: "And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the oceans and the revolutions of the stars and they overlook themselves." This injunction of Augustine's provoked Petrarch to rage because of his admiration from Ventoux of the natural scenery rather than of the human mind. From the exterior vista he thus turned his eyes to interior reflection.^[43] The dictum "What could be found within they go seeking without" became monitory for Petrarch's own poetic quest for the truth.^[44] It guided him "from thought to thought, from mountain to mountain," as he ascended and descended poetizing, ever elevating his mind by the contemplation of the beautiful idea.^[45] In retrospect from that insight, the physical altitude of Ventoux seemed to him squat in comparison with the spiritual loftiness of man, once unstuck from the mud in which he

had wallowed since the Fall, and uplifted to the dignity of his standing in Christ.^[46] "Tear off the veil; disperse the shadows," Augustinus had urged.^[47] On Ventoux, Petrarch stood entranced. There above the clouds in the sacred ether common to Athos and Olympus, he perceived the translucent truth to which his allegorical path had led him.^[48] The veil was rent, the shadows were banished. The summit of sanctity was revealed through interior vision. And in such introspection, in obedience to the interior vision rather than the exterior spectacle, Petrarch was to encounter his genius.

Classically, genius was innate talent, particularly as associated with invention. It was opposed to art as the skill learned by rule and imitation. The phrase "art and genius" (ars et ingenium ) became a critical and polemical concept in the medieval defense of poety.^[49] In medieval authors the term genius acquired associations that created a dimension of meaning, on a scale from cleverness to prophecy, that had not been inherent in the classical texts from which they derived the antithesis.^[50] In psychology and poetry it became a mental faculty that comprised noble and base impulses: the capacity of the will toward comprehension of the arts and its curiosity toward transitory images.^[51] In the usage of Dante, the constituents of genius were natural instinct, intuition for the investigation of reality, perception of sensory impressions, and transmission to memory. Genius encompassed the ability to discern the particular purposes and ends of life and the poetical source and origin of the imaginative and aesthetic world. It was an instinct to be controlled by reason, as in rhetorical invention, lest the mind be determined toward a distorted object.^[52] Yet from the classical poetics derived from Platonism and recorded by Cicero, Horace, and Seneca there endured a concept of genius as involving inspiration and insight that are divine. The poetic theory of the Renaissance was profoundly influenced by this, and it was in this tradition that Petrarch wrote.^[53]

A genius was originally the tutelary spirit that so animated nature as to reside in every plow, every plot, for the peasants who cultivated the Italian soil in antiquity. This animism was particularly embodied in the genius of the family, whose generative power spiritually symbolized physical semen. The Latin word genius was derived from gignere , "to engender," a fitting description for the spirit who ensured the propagation of the crops and the clan. In the earliest literary allusions to it, in the comedy of Plautus, the concept was extended beyond the paterfamilias to represent the vital fluid of every male, his virility, his

energy. With the introduction of Greek polytheism and philosophy to Italian culture, this generative spirit was transferred to other paternal figures—the founders of cities and of institutions, then the gods, the senate and the plebs, the emperor, and finally the Roman state. As deified, the genius was the personal double of every man, guiding him from womb to tomb, regulating his fortune for good or evil, and demanding honor and propitiation. In Horace's important verse, the genius was "the companion which controls the natal star; the god of human nature, in that he is mortal for each person, with a changing expression, white or black." These popular beliefs were elaborated philosophically by the ascription of a genius, functioning as an agent of generation or of fate, to the universe. Astrologically, the genius as natal god determined the constellation or horoscope of an individual, and hence his temperament or destiny. Cosmologically, the procreative power of the genius was identified Stoically with the immanent reason of paternal Jupiter as world-soul.^[54]

Although the Theodosian edict (A.D. 392) finally imposed capital punishment for sacrifice to the genius on one's birthday, the deity survived. The genius proved an impregnating spirit indeed in the fertile imaginations of medieval poets. The Roman piety of indulging the genius with sensual pleasures, especially food, so as to be "genial," promoted a medieval equation of genius with appetite, or concupiscence. The pagan genius, conforming to its phallic origin, was thus adapted for Christian moralizing. By appropriation from the Horatian definition of the genius as "the god of human nature," he was personified in Bernardus Silvestris's Cosmographia as the agent of natural descent, the concupiscent soul of microcosmic man. In Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae this generative role was translated into a moralistic censure of homosexuality. The sacerdotal role by which, as priest of Nature, the genius also wed form and matter and excommunicated perverse sinners was appropriated and complicated in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose . There the genius as instinct, or cosmic priest of Nature, condemned chastity, while as reason, or earthly bishop of God, he exhorted virtue. A dualistic identity was maintained in John Gower's Confessio Amantis , in which the genius, as priest of Venus shrove a lover and instructed him in the seven deadly sins by relating classical tales of distraught paramours.^[55]

Not only did medieval allegorists exploit the procreative power of the genius for moralizing about lust and chastity. They also explored

its creative power for developing a poetic theory, thus elevating natural genius to artistic invention. The Greek analogue of the Roman genius had been the daemon, or divine messenger. Traditionally he consorted with men through dreams and visions, whose phantoms became associated with the figures of poetic artifice. The dream-vision, which disguised the truth by integument, became incorporated into a literature of descent to the underworld. De planctu Naturae, Roman de la Rose , and Confessio Amantis , in which the genius figured allegorically, were all compositions of this genre. In that of Alain de Lille, Genius represented the archetypal poet Orpheus as the source of the artificial creation that secreted truths in a figurative envelope. In the vision of Jean de Meun, however, Orpheus was condemned as a poet and a pederast, and the falsity of his images was imputed to demonic provocation or human illusion. Gower concurred that fantasies disrupted psychosomatic harmony, and thus alienated man from Nature, but he argued that poetry, by concealing truth in fiction, soothed the soul, reconciled it to the body, and thereby regenerated man.^[56] As metamorphosed in each author's vision, the internalized genius of the poet could thus serve a beneficient or a maleficient purpose. That fickle spirit, white or black, had so varied human fortune ever since antiquity.

When, in pondering his epic Africa , Petrarch expressed great confidence in his genius, he therefore acknowledged a complex convention sprung from the very soil on which he reclined in that secluded Tuscan valley of his own invention. As in the medieval allegories, the figure of his genius emerged in a dream-vision; moreover, one that adumbrated his poetics. At the climax of Africa , the bard Ennius theorized about poetry as an integument of truth, as had Petrarch in his coronation speech. Whoever would essay a poem, he said, must first establish

"a firm foundation of the truth whereon
he then may build a cloud-like structure, sweet
and varied, veiling the foundation."

The labor of divining the truth would then be the sweeter for the exertion, he instructed. Poetic license extended to the subjects of history, natural science, and moral philosophy, yet not as those disciplines exposed the truth:

"but to be disguised beneath
a covering cloak, or better, a light veil
which tricks the watcher's eye and now conceals
and now discloses underlying truth."

A fabricator, one who did not compose from the truth, was neither a poet nor a seer, but a liar. This theory Ennius ascribed to Homer, of whose specter he had just dreamed during the Carthaginian contest. In his imaginary company, Ennius spied a youth plaiting a laurel wreath in contemplation of some noble task. Homer divulged his identity as one Franciscus, a Florentine who would in the future lure the exiled Muses back to Helicon with his song. Peerless for ten full centuries, he would worthily assemble the exploits of Scipio into a volume called Africa .

"How great will be his faith in his own gifts [ ingenium ]!
How strong the love of fame that leads him on!"

Finally, Homer prophesied, Franciscus would ascend the Capitoline in triumph to be crowned with the laurel whose fashioning he now rehearsed.^[57]

Such confidence in the poetic genius as to attract the notice of those ancient bards exceeded the norm of Christian apologetics, however conventional Petrarch's explanation of the art as truth veiled in fiction was. His defense against the asceticism exemplified by Augustinus and Gherardo was to attribute to his poetic nature a divine origin: a genius, a lofty genius given him by heaven.^[58] Its bestower he named as the god Apollo. This was no reversion to pagan religion, however, as Petrarch subscribed to anthropomorphism. The inventors of the arts, he thought, had been deified by the ill-advised gratitude of mortals, who were in fact committing sacrilege. "The harp," he stated, "has made a god of Apollo."^[59] In adopting Apollo as his benefactor, Petrarch nevertheless departed from the tradition that had associated the genius, a paternal spirit, firmly with Jupiter.^[60] The classical provinces of Apollo were prophecy, music, and medicine. Yet Petrarch in his coronation speech affirmed him as the source of his courage for the aspiration to Parnassus by ascent of the Capitoline. The triple impediments of poetry, he said—failed inspiration, bitter fortune, and public disdain—were surpassed by its triple allurements—the honor of the republic, the charm of personal glory, and the stimulation of one's confreres. "And I do not deny," he continued, "that in the struggle I have had the advantage of a certain genius given to me from on high by the giver of all good things, by God himself—that God who may rightly be called, in the words of Persius, 'Magister artis ingenique largitor' [Master of the arts and bestower of genius]." In lauding the laurel as a fitting reward, Petrarch specified his divine benefactor. A touch to the

head with its foliage was believed to make dreams come true, and poets were said to sleep on Parnassus, he explained. Since the laurel moreover foretold the future, it was singularly the emblem of Apollo, the god of prophecy. "Accordingly," he concluded, "since Apollo was held to be the god of poets, it is no wonder that deserving poets were crowned with the very leafage of their own god, whom they regarded as their sustaining helper, whom they called the god of genius."^[61]

As a precedent for this attribution, Petrarch described in Africa the genius of Ennius as Apolline:

"since great Apollo gave you at your birth
the heavenly talent [ingenium ] which has won you fame,
and goddesses, while you were still a child,
immersed you in the sweet Castalian spring of sacred
Helicon and led you forth
to the high hills, bestowing on you there
the pen and voice and spirit of a bard."

So the ancient poet praised "kind Apollo / the god of genius."^[62] Although there was no historical evidence for the attribution of the natal genius to Apollo, Petrarch may have been inspired to it by a fragment of Ennius preserved in Cicero's De divinatione . That treatise defined the human soul as endowed with "an inherent power of presaging or of foreknowing infused into it from without, and made a part of it by the will of God." The abnormal development of that power was termed furor , a state in which the soul withdrew from the body and was vehemently excited by a divine impulse. Cicero illustrated the theory with a citation from Ennius's tragedic Alexander , which thus explained the sudden rage and burning eyes of the prophetess Cassandra:

"I have been sent to utter prophecies:
Against my will Apollo drives me mad
To revelation make of future ills."^[63]

By identifying his natal genius with Apollo, Petrarch expressed the divine endowment of his poetic nature. It was one excited by a desire he was unable to curb, as Franciscus stated, despite the admonitions of Augustinus.^[64] His would be a different devotion. Even the "saint" had recognized that in his zeal for poetic excellence Franciscus was "borne up on the wings of genius," although he had decried poetic genius as touched with madness.^[65] It was not Augustinus, however, but King

Robert whom the aspirant Petrarch considered among all men "the judge of [my] genius."^[66] Indeed, Petrarch compared him as the singular judge of the poetic gift with Augustus, the patron of Vergil.^[67] In addressing Augustinus, whose advice he declined, Franciscus explained how the exigency of the human condition deflected him from the pursuit of higher values. With the ancients he attributed this psychic duality to a divine source. "It is not without reason, I imagine," he said, "that the poets of antiquity dedicated the double peaks of Parnassus to two different divinities. They desired to beg from Apollo, whom they called the god of Genius, the interior resources of the mind, and from Bacchus a plentiful supply of external goods." This perspective was recommended to him by the testimony of the wise and corroborated by his own experience. "Moreover," he continued, "although the plurality of deities may be ridiculous, this opinion of the poets is not devoid of common sense. And in referring a like twofold supplication to the one God from whom all good comes down, I do not think I can be called unreasonable, unless indeed you hold otherwise."^[68]

Augustinus did hold otherwise. He wished Franciscus to descend not only from the base peak of Bacchus but also from the illusory peak of Apollo. Who was Apollo, his eponym had once asked, but a seer and physician identified with the sun by deluded pagans? In the very book that is Petrarch's first recorded purchase of a text, De civitate Dei, Augustine had scoffed at "poetical theology" and had refuted the very concept of the genius. "And what is Genius?" Augustine had inquired. Consulting Varro, he observed its worship as the potentate of everything born, or Jupiter, and again as the rational soul of every man. This contradiction, he argued, permitted the absurd conclusion that every man's soul was a god.^[69] Petrarch, however, was not embroiled in polemics against paganism. From the secure perspective of a Christian culture he could envision a continuity of art and religion. Pagan symbols could be appropriated poetically, as in the stunning conceit of Africa in which Jupiter prophesied his incarnation:

"Now hearken well. It is my fixed intent,
since now the splendor of the earth is dimmed,
once more among you to descend, assuming
the shape and flesh and bondage which are man's;
aye, and for love to suffer shameful death.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                                                 Already I
am captive to a Maid, whose tender breasts
seem now to soothe me with their flowing milk."^[70]

When Petrarch identified the god of his genius as Apollo, he transgressed classical piety, which associated genius and Jupiter. When he further identified this genial Apollo with Christ, he affronted Christian piety. In the apology for poetical theology addressed to his brother Gherardo, Petrarch offered a key to the interpretation of his first eclogue. The shepherds Silvius and Monicus who conversed about their distinct vocations to the active and contemplative life were Petrarch and Gherardo themselves. In their rivalry over the superiority of classical or biblical verse, the figure of John the Baptist at the Jordan was recalled:

"This I have heard: it is said that once on the shores of that sparkling
River a hirsute youth laved the golden limbs of Apollo.
Blest were the wavelets that were, if the tale I heard is a true one,
Privileged to touch that immortal body."

"Apollo," Petrarch explained, "the son of Jupiter, is called the god of genius. For him I interpret Jesus Christ, true God and true son of God, the God, I emphasize, of genius and wisdom."^[71]

With this allegory Petrarch upset the tradition of Christian apologetics that had refuted pagan religion by unmasking Apollo as a demon and discrediting his oracles as frenzied hallucinations. It was an argument that Petrarch certainly knew.^[72] Origen had elaborated on it by ridiculing the method by which the Pythia at Delphi received Apollo's sacred utterance through a spiritual penetration of her womb. "Consider then," he proposed, "whether this does not indicate the impure and foul nature of that spirit in that it enters the soul of the prophetess, not by open and invisible pores which are far purer than the womb, but through the latter part which it would be wrong for a self-controlled and sensible man to look upon or, I might add, even to touch." The Pythia's frenzy and fainting in the oracular experience also evidenced to him a demonic origin, since true communion with a deity ensured clarity of vision. Origen further marveled that Apollo should have preferred to prophesy through a vulgar woman—and a married woman rather than a virgin at that—instead of through a wise man. Reflecting on the claim that the disembodied Apollo passed into the Pythia through her genitals, he preached: "But we hold no such opinion about Jesus and his power; the body born of a virgin consisted of human substance, capable of suffering wounds and death like other men." Christians, he summarized, "will not tolerate it if you compare Jesus with Apollo."^[73]

As Lactantius (whom Petrarch cited) argued, the sign of the cross terrorized such demons. A pagan priest had no power to cure a demoniac by invoking the name of Apollo, whereas the same demons would flee in fear at the name of Christ. Indeed, at the name of the true God, the seer of Apollo would himself shudder, and Apollo would depart from him as quickly as a demon from a demoniac, since the pagan gods were merely impersonations of demons.^[74] Gregory the Great verified this notion with the legend of the founding of the Benedictine oratory on Monte Cassino. The site was an ancient shrine of Apollo, in which groves the local peasants even in the Christian era still worshipped him with sacrifices. Saint Benedict destroyed the idol, overturned the altar, and cut down the groves. In the temple of Apollo he constructed a chapel in honor of St. Martin, and on the location of the pagan altar, a chapel in honor of St. John. He also converted many in the region by his preaching. The devil whom he had expelled from the site appeared to him in an open vision as a most foul and fiery creature who raged against him with flaming mouth and eyes.^[75]

While most Christians might be assured by Saint Benedict's example that the Apolline demon could be abjured simply by prayer,^[76] it was also observed that among the pagans Daphne alone had escaped the corruption of that prophet.^[77] Tatian exulted: "You now I laud, O Daphne!—by conquering the incontinence of Apollo, you disproved his power of vaticination; for, not foreseeing what would occur to you, he derived no advantage from his art."^[78] Like that chaste maiden who foiled Apollo's grasp, Christian poets obedient to such apologetics also spurned his art, or so they feigned. The exemplar of this rejection of the classical convention of poetry was the tenth poem of Paulinus of Nola. This verse was composed in the fourth century during its author's ascetical transit from a literary education and consular career, both as a pagan, to the office of a Christian bishop. Responding to the inquiry of his friend and mentor Ausonius, it delineated lucidly a conflict between classical and Christian modes of being a poet.^[79]

Why, father, do you bid the deposed Muses to return to my charge? Hearts dedicated to Christ reject the Latin Muses and exclude Apollo. Of old you and I shared common cause (our zeal was equal if our poetic resources were not) in summoning deaf Apollo from his cave at Delphi, invoking the Muses as deities, seeking from groves, or mountain ridges that gift of utterance bestowed by divine gift. But now another power, a greater God, inspires my mind and demands another way of life.^[80]

That vocation demanded of Paulinus, as he testified, the surrender of his life to its divine source. It required the renunciation of the leisure that had traditionally fostered poetry. It bid him spurn the fictions of literature, which clouded the divine light with poetic invention. Of poets he wrote:

These men steep our hearts in what is false and empty. They form only men's tongues, and bring nothing to bestow salvation or to clothe us in the truth. What good, what truth can they possess who do not have the Head of all, God who is the Kindling and the Source of truth and goodness, whom no man sees except in Christ?

As he evoked this new inspiration: "He is the light of truth. . . . He is the Sun of justice [righteousness]. . . . He has flashed his rays over our hearts."^[81] With this resolute displacement of Apollo by Christ, refulgent in the solar imagery of the deity deposed, Paulinus affirmed his conversion. Like Augustine disciplining his concupiscence by Truth, he exposed his poetic fiction to the Light. "I was wayward," he confessed of his secular career in poetry, "my eyes enveloped in falsehood's darkness, wise in what God brands as foolishness, living on death's sustenance."^[82]

Not all Christians who composed poetry shared his stern conviction of the incompatibility of artistic and religious commitments. Paulinus himself had attempted a reconciliation of classical and Christian pieties with a metaphor of Christ as repairing in his body the broken cithara of humanity, by plucking its strings while he hung crucified like a lyre.^[83] Prudentius integrated the fractured commitments by giving a religious perspective to literary culture in a manner deserving of the title of Christian poet. Without artificial compromise he liberated pagan convention for new purpose, as inspired by an intellectual engagement with his faith.^[84] Yet the search for an accommodation of the secular impulse toward poetry and the sacred injunction toward piety was fraught with tension. Could the Christian poet dismiss Paulinus's cry that the Muses were only "deaf nobodies," invocations to whom dissipated in the wind?^[85] Was it not more certainly salvific to imitate his example and supplant the classical invocation to Apollo and the Muses with a prayer to Father, Son, or Spirit?^[86] As Prudentius declared:

I shall not summon Castalian Muses, the ghosts of poets, nor rouse deaf Phoebus from the Aonian rock. Christ will inspire my song, for it is

through Christ's gift that I, a sinner dare to tell of His saint and of heavenly things.^[87]

Resounding with the new song of Christ, even Prudentius polemicized: "Apollo writhes when the name of Christ smites him, he cannot bear the lightnings of the Word, the lashing tongue torments him sorely whenever the praises of the God Christ's wonderful works are sounded."^[88] And thus he spurned the classical emblem of coronation that Petrarch would covet:

Put away, my Muse, the paltry ivy-leaves wherewith thou hast been wont to encircle thy brows; learn to weave mystic garlands and tie them with a band of dactyls, and wear thy hair wreathed with the praise of God.^[89]

This was a decision Petrarch rued. In his visionary catalogue of poets, "Laurea occidens," the tenth eclogue of Bucolicum carmen, Petrarch surveyed the consequences of Christian poets spurning the laurel and the Muses:

I saw a tawny-haired tiller [Arator], with clumsily fashioned plowshare
Furrowing a sacred meadow, turning a soil rich and fertile;
And as he labored, two workmen, one prudent [Prudentius], one
   sedulous [Sedulius], followed,
Striving with rigid harrows to break up the stubborn earth clods.
Fecund the soil but the oxen were weary and there was no laurel
Nor ivy nor myrtle nor any green for a garland, nor zealous
Cult of the Muses, and voices were weak.^[90]

As the cultural confrontation waned with the evangelization of Europe, however, poets ventured to revive the classical invocation, even in manifestly Christian verse. Dante apostrophized Apollo in undertaking Paradiso:

O good Apollo, for this last labor make me
such a vessel of your worth
as you require for granting your beloved laurel.

Thus far one peak of Parnassus has sufficed me,
but now I have need of both, as I enter
the arena that remains.

Enter into my breast and breathe there
as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath
of his limbs.

O divine Power, if you do so lend yourself
to me that I may show forth the image
of the blessed realm which is imprinted in my mind,

you shall see me come to your beloved tree
and crown me with those leaves of which the
matter and you shall make me worthy.

So rarely, father, are they gathered,
for triumph of caesar or of poet—
fault and shame of human wills—

that the Peneian frond ought to beget
gladness in the glad Delphid deity
whenever it causes anyone to long for it.

A great flame follows a little spark:
perhaps, after me, prayer
shall be offered with better voices that Cyrrha may respond.^[91]

Yet this address was no more serious than similar invocations by classical poets when the religion that had inspired such entreaty dwindled to convention. Apollo would indeed find "a better voice" in Petrarch. He would be echoed by such a humanist as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who in his Oratio de hominis dignitate lauded "the true Apollo—not the fictive one—the one who enlightens every soul coming into this world, Christ himself."^[92] Well after Petrarch composed his bold invocation to that deity, however, John Milton was still repeating the traditional Christian rejection of Apollo in his poem "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity":

The Oracles are dum,
No voice or hideous humm
  Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving,
Apollo  from his shrine
Can no more divine,
  With hollow shriek the steep of  Delphos  leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
Inspires the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.^[93]

Petrarch was inclined rather to the judgment of Lucan: "But the Delphian oracle became dumb, when kings feared the future and stopped the mouth of the gods; and no divine gift is more sorely missed by our age."^[94]

While the ancient Christian poets replaced Apollo resolutely with Christ, and their medieval posterity revived him experimentally, Petrarch symbolically synthesized the god and God. He introduced Africa with a double invocation to pagan and Christian spirits:

Muse, you will tell me of the man renowned
for his great deeds, redoubtable in war,
on whom first noble Africa, subdued
by Roman arms, bestowed a lasting name.
Fair sisters, ye who are my dearest care,
if I propose to sing of wondrous things,
may it be given me to quaff full deep
of the sweet sacred spring of Helicon.
Now that a favoring Fortune has once more
restored me to clear springs and pleasant meads,
the welcome shelter of the sun-bathed hills,
and the soft stillness of the lonely fields,
inspire, I pray, within your bard the song
and give him heart.
  Thou too, Who art the world's
securest hope and glory of the heavens,
Whom our age hails above all gods supreme
and victor over Hell; Whose guiltless flesh
we see scarred by five gaping wounds, O come,
all-highest Father, bear me succor here.
Full many a reverent verse shall I bring back
to Thee—if verses please Thee—from the crest
of high Parnassus. If they please Thee not,
then Thine shall be the guerdon of those tears,
which long since I might fittingly have shed
save that my wretched blindness checked their flow.^[95]

The initial invocation was addressed to the muse of heroic poetry, Calliope, its succeeding verse to an Apolline Christ. The conflation of the "all-highest Father" with the crucified Christ was no expression of patripassianism, but a classical attribution in imitation of Vergil. At the original shrine of Apollo in Delos the altar was erected to him as "the Father." It was at this site that Aeneas had worshipped, with Vergil observing the proper style by addressing Apollo as "Father."^[96] This appellation Petrarch also knew from the Saturnalia of Macrobius, which synthesized the diverse cults of Greek and Roman cultures into the honor of one god: the sun personified as Apollo.^[97] In essaying his epic Africa, Petrarch thus revived the classical invocation to the Muses and Apollo, but Apollo in a new manifestation as Christ. The equation was justified by the medieval adaptation of the myth of Python to the drama of salvation. As Christian allegorists compared these gods, just as at Delos Apollo had slain the monster Python, so at Calvary did Christ slay Satan.^[98] Nor did Petrarch scruple to introduce his vernacular lyrics, Rime sparse, with the invocation, "Apollo, if the sweet desire," while concluding with a Christian counterpart, "Beautiful

Virgin."^[99] It was a matter of knowing, he explained, what is due to Apollo the cither-player and what is owed to Mary the Virgin Mother, and to her Son, the redeemer, true God and true man.^[100]

Petrarch did not merely juxtapose these classical and Christian fonts of inspiration. He conflated them, equating Apollo and Christ^[101] in the first eclogue and in the prologue of Africa . A single verse, once attributed to Paulinus but of uncertain provenance, appears to be the ancient precedent. In apostrophe to Christ, slayer of Satan as Apollo was of Python, a poet wrote: "Hail, O true Apollo, Paean renowned!"^[102] Other legendary attributes of the deity also suggested parallels. Like Christ, Apollo was a human god; indeed, as the son of Zeus and the titaness Leto he was firstborn of the god-men. As early as the Homeric Hymn he was celebrated as a revealer, the herald of Zeus's paternal secrets. An expiator and sufferer, exiled on earth for slaying Python, he also anticipated Christ's role as the Savior.^[103] The medieval vogue for reading pagan mythology as an allegory of Christian doctrine exploited these parallels. Scholia and glosses recreated an Ovid so edifying that even nuns could peruse his amorous tales.^[104] The twelfth-century commentary by Arnulf of Orleans allegorized a solar Apollo who dessicated the noxious humors of earth, Python. As wise reason Apollo exterminated Python as false credulity. His futile pursuit of the chaste nymph Daphne became a moral on virginity preserved.^[105] John of Garland moralized poetically on the virtuous victory over evil:

Phoebus subdues Python,
  and wisdom, wickedness,
And he tramples human error beneath reason.

In the human mind the tree of wisdom he so ardently pursued would shoot forth a victorious and verdant rod:

It is the rod of Phoebus,
  wisdom made a crown,
The laurel wreath which man
seeks with desirous mind.^[106]

In an Ovide moralisé, composed during Petrarch's formative years, an anonymous Franciscan friar baptized the Apolline fables by immersion. The malevolent serpent Python that terrorized and devoured men was the devil. "But Phoebus, also named Apollo, god of wis-

dom, namely Jesus Christ, the true sun and light of the world, so fights on behalf of man that he vanquishes and overcomes the devil and delivers man from imprisonment in limbo." Apollo, the god of wisdom who indoctrinated everything, was proposed to be Jesus: the light of the world who illumined everyone, was master of every discipline, art, and science, and who for love of humanity joined himself to Mary, as Apollo desired to unite with Daphne.^[107] This identification of solar Apollo with Christ as "the true sun and light of the world" was the immediate inspiration for Petrarch's poetics, as for allegories by his artistic intimates Pierre Bersuire and Giovanni Boccaccio and even by his spiritual advisor, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro.^[108] The most elaborate of these contemporaneous expressions was in Bersuire's Reductiorum morale, a moralizing compilation that proposed to harmonize pagan thought with Christian dogma by purifying the mythology. Apollo represented the glorious victors of virtue over vice, especially as the god of wisdom, that is, Christ, the wisdom of God the Father. He was inflamed with undying love for Daphne as the human soul with whom he sought perfect union. For its refusal the soul was transformed into a laurel, the cross Phoebus, or Christ, the sun of righteousness, bodily embraced.^[109]

Petrarch justified his own portrayal of Christ in Apolline figure "because he is the god of genius and wisdom."^[110] This dual attribution reflected the Pauline appellation of Christ as "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24). The identification of Christ as the personified Wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures was consistent in patristic literature, although medieval piety often transferred the attribution to Mary. As Petrarch explained his Apolline metaphor for Christ, "As is well known among theologians, among the attributes of the persons of the supreme and undivided Trinity, wisdom is attributed to the Son and he is the very wisdom of the Father."^[111] He cited copiously from Augustine's theology of the Son as wisdom, and therefore the true end of the philosopher as a lover of wisdom.^[112] "The true wisdom of God is Christ," he declared, "so that in order to philosophize rightly we must first love and cherish Him.^[113] Petrarch did not explain, however, why he presumed to call Christ "the god of genius" as well, although he did repeat of him the phrase "master of arts and bestower of genius," which he had originally ascribed to Apollo in his coronation speech.^[114] The Greek noun dunamis of the

Pauline verse (1 Cor. 1:24) probably suggested the idea, however. The noun means not merely "power," but specifically any natural capacity or faculty that may be applied for good or evil. This definition coincides with the common understanding in antiquity of the genius, once the Italian natal god fell under the spell of the Greek daemon.^[115] The probable source of Petrarch's attribution was Horace's definition of the genius as "the god of human nature,"^[116] the classical meaning that governed the medieval allegories of that figure.^[117] In the Christian creed the ascription of human nature could only be to the Son, and so it was plausible for Petrarch to term Christ as the god of human nature the god of genius.

This adoption of Christ in Apolline figure as the genius of his poetic vocation was a moral justification of art against asceticism. The classical definition of the genius as a personal double who regulated fortune was perpetuated in Petrarch's belief in a guardian angel who had been assigned him as a companion to ensure virtue by his monitory presence. More profoundly, the concept of the genius related to his even more impressive and awe-inspiring belief" in the omnipresence of Christ to him as a witness of his thoughts and actions. "There is absolutely no Christian who doubts," he wrote, "that Christ himself is always present in the most secret recesses of the soul, examines what goes on there and sees everything as though it were openly exposed."^[118] For himself Petrarch did not need to resort to the ascetical device of an imaginary witness to incite shame for base deeds and desires. He believed rather in this presence of Christ, "Christ alive and real and always present to us." Thus he invoked as a testimony to his rectitude: "I call to witness our Apollo, the only son of the heavenly Jove and true God of wisdom, Christ."^[119] It was this interior presence that singularly associated Christ with Apollo in Petrarch's theology, in advance over the medieval allegorizations. As Franciscus stated to Augustinus in defense of poetry, Apollo as the god of genius represented "the interior resources of the mind."^[120]

Christians had not been as reticent in the plastic arts, as they had been in literature, to synthesize their faith and pagan culture as did Petrarch the humanist. At the beginning of the fourth century, during which the Christian rejection of Apollo dominated poetry, an ageless Christ modeled on manly heroes began to appear on sarcophagi. Just after the Edict of Toleration (A.D. 311), his prototype became the geniuses in the seasonal depictions on triumphal arches, the geniuses who as sons of

the gods promised the empire constant good fortune. The beautiful style of the midcentury created from these pagan examples a youthfully innocent Son of God, who adorned sarcophagi and ivory carvings and was depicted by a famous statuette.^[121] The impressive portrayal of Christ as Apollo, however, was the mosaic forming the vault of a small burial chamber in the cemetery beside the Via Cornelia in Rome, now beneath the Vatican. At its splendid golden apex of intertwining vines is the figure of Christ with the Apolline attributes of a quadriga and horses. Seven rays emanate from his nimbused head in evangelical allusion to the light of the world (John 8:12, 9:5, etc.). This solar personification, which reappeared in a fifth-century mosaic in Sant'Aquilino, Milan, was characteristic of Christian iconography in the era preceding and contemporaneous with Constantine.^[122] The nimbus with seven equidistant rays, similar to the radiated crowns on Greek and Roman coins, especially symbolized Apollo as the sun, beaming to each planet a ray.^[123]

Although Apollo was not a solar deity in Greek religion, his Roman domestication converted him into one. His prophetic role as the exclusive interpreter of Zeus favored him during the monotheistic critique of divination. Apollo became associated with the power and virtue of the sun as a beneficent cosmic force. Through a convergence of political fortune with religious currents as diverse as the Pythagorean, Mazdean, and Mithraic, the attribution expanded into cult. The decisive impetus for this piety was Apollo's reputed epiphany in the miracle of Actium (31 B.C.), in which battle Octavian defeated Antony in the civil war. As the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus appropriated Apollo as his personal god, constructing in his honor a temple on the Palatine adorned with a solar quadriga. As Horace memorialized it:

O quickening Sun, that in thy shining car usherest in the day and hidest it, and art reborn another and yet the same, ne'er mayest thou be able to view aught greater than the city of Rome!

The heroization of the Roman emperor was thus symbolized and sanctioned by a cult of the invincible sun, personified as Apollo.^[124]

The identification of Christ with this triumphal, solar deity, as in the notable mosaic, developed from the evangelical metaphor of light. The nocturnal course of the sun from west to east suggested to theologians the gospel of Christ's burial and descent to hell and his ascent and

resurrection to heaven.^[125] Especially significant was the ascription to him of the prophesied title "the sun of righteousness": "But for you who fear my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings" (Mal. 4:2a). This scriptural symbolism was prominent in the Easter liturgy and in the baptismal rite, as Jerome testified: "In the mysteries first of all we renounce him who is in the west [Satan], and we die to ourselves with our sins, and thus turned toward the east, we enter a covenant with the sun of righteousness [Christ], and we promise that we will serve him."^[126] The imagery was transmitted to Christian poetry particularly through the Ambrosian hymns that hailed Christ as the "true sun" who dispelled the darkness of sin.^[127] In medieval piety Francis of Assisi composed his canticle to brother sun in specific memory and honor of Christ's title as "the sun of righteousness." As a memoir recorded, "And because he deemed and said that the sun is fairer than other created things, and is more often likened to our Lord, and that in Scripture the Lord Himself is called 'the Sun of Righteousness,' therefore giving that name to those Praises which he had made of the creatures of the Lord, what time the Lord did certify him of His kingdom, he called them 'The Song of Brother Sun.'"^[128]

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures,
especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who is the day and through whom You give us light.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor;
and bears a likeness of You, Most High One.^[129]

It was not fortuitous that this same prophetic phrase, "sun of righteousness," illumined the conclusion of Petrarch's own Rime sparse . Shot through with Apolline-Christian light, the entire canzoniere lauded and lamented a sun that allured and eluded Petrarch with its rays of inspiration. The personification of his poetics was a lady who was among ladies a "sun," a "living, sweet sun." The day of her birth was the most beautiful the sun ever opened. She descended like the dawn. Her growth was like the diurnal course of the sun, whose rising and setting alternately enlightened and darkened, gladdened and saddened the poet. Her countenance was so radiant as to equal, to rival, even to surpass in beauty and antiquity the splendor of that celestial body at high noon in summer. Her burnished golden hair made the sun envious; so did her eyes, for they were brighter than the sun. Their opening was like the Orient. The lady's glance was sunlight

itself; her gaze, sunbeams. Their light shone in him "as a sunbeam penetrates glass." This sun dazzled him. Gazing into her clear lovely eyes, as "holy lights," enraptured him to heaven. He melted like a snowman in their incandescent rays. He sought the sun as the sole object and hope of his vision.^[130] It was this illumination that inspired Petrarch to compose.

She who among ladies is a sun, moving the rays of her lovely eyes in me, creates thoughts, acts, and words of love.^[131]

This solar Apolline imagery was explicitly Christian. It was Christ himself who once in his humble incarnation "coming to earth to illuminate the pages that for many years had hidden the truth," now in his risen glory granted another "sun" in this lady. Her gentle eyes vivified the poet with their "high divine beauty"; their solar rays warmed, ignited, and kindled his inspiration to compose.^[132]

The epic Africa reflected this Apolline light: the sun's course through the heavens charted the heroic contest of Scipio, from the failure of the god to shine upon Italy to the restoration of his smile. No aloof divinity, Phoebus Apollo was especially active in the lovers' tale, although dimmed by Sophonisba's dazzling beauty. In pity for her lover Massinissa, Apollo dipped his fiery chariot into the sea in mournful memory of his own thwarted passion for Daphne. He concluded their sad affair by appearing radiant at dawn, until Sophonisba saluted him with a suicidal toast. Yet it was Scipio Africanus whom Apollo bathed in such excellent radiance that the sun itself marveled at his human rival.^[133] Scipio's course of life was indeed solar in its energy, ending in an apotheosis reserved for the divine.

He, moving as it were from setting sun
in headlong brilliance to the break of dawn—
for so his conquering course may be described—
will raise the name of Italy aloft
up to the stars. Before him all will bow,
and Fortune, generous in triumphs, will
reward the victor.^[134]

In considering the course of the epic itself, Petrarch would entreat the preservation of its exploits in defiance of "the circling sun that burns away the centuries."^[135]

Yet it was not the sheer aesthetic light that attracted Petrarch to

poetry, but its prophetic virtue. Prophecy captivated him and allied him with Apollo. Had not his own advent and triumph as a poet itself been prophesied, and by the eminent seer Homer?^[136] In the epics of that bard, as in other classical poets, such forecasts had issued most often from omens, either chance sightings, especially avian flight and behavior or chance sounds, especially thunder. Dreamed phantoms in the shape of friend or kinsman, mantic pronouncements of seers, and even epiphanies, were also means of divine revelation.^[137] Among the gods it was supremely Apollo who, as the elected voice of Zeus, prophesied through oracles. The oracles of Apollo were singular in Hellas for their reliance on a single person in a permanent office at a fixed site, rather than on the usual divinatory devices. Indeed, they were singular in the ancient world and since.^[138] From the sixth century B.C. on, the most frequented of these oracles was at Delphi, which site attracted powerful and wealthy clients, cities as well as individuals from Hellas and beyond. Although its prestige popularly orientated it with the foundation of the world, its historical origins are uncertain.^[139] From its zenith between 580 and 320 B.C., the Delphic oracle declined after the age of Alexander through the Hellenistic and Roman eras, but still proffered responses at least until the third quarter of the fourth century A.D. when the Theodosian edict silenced it.^[140] Its propagandists were priests, poets, and aristocrats who composed an intellectual and social elite. Creating an efficacious imperialist myth during Greece's era of colonization, they assimilated the ancient regional gods who presided over certain local rites to Apollo, and then subordinated the various versions of Apollo to the glorious Pythian god of the Delphic cult. Almost all colonial cities attributed their foundation to a consultation with the consent of that god through a Delphic oracle. Under the patronage of Apollo a moral empire developed in which the authority of that oracle governed common ideas and laws, much as Christianity imposed a certain unified perspective on medieval Europe. The intervention of the Delphic oracle in the evolution of Greek cities was well attested, since tradition attributed an oracular source to the most venerable and important institutions of government, law, and religion.^[141] It was this identity of the civic with the prophetic through Apollo that Petrarch would appropriate for the restoration of the empire and the papacy to Rome.

In the mantic session at Delphi, the Pythia, attended by priests and officials, mounted a tripod, from which seat she pronounced Apollo's

response in direct conversation with the inquirer. Although enthusiastic in her inspiration, the Pythia was not hysterical. Whether in verse or in prose, she prophesied articulate, if sometimes ambiguous, oracles in her own voice. The frenzy reported to be characteristic of her behavior by Christian polemics was an allegation derived from a single passage in Lucan that lacks credibility. The Platonic term mania, designating telestic, poetic, and amorous rapture or ecstasy, was commonly mistranslated into Latin as insania, which connotes psychotic behavior.^[142] It was thus that Augustinus had warned Franciscus of perilous poetic "madness."^[143] Yet it was knowledge that Petrarch sought as the fruition of his Apolline genius, a knowledge that coincided with the end of the Christian illuminative way.^[144] "There is no doubt," he affirmed, "that the only true knowledge is to know and to honor God, whence it is written: 'Piety is wisdom.'" The most noble and sacred study of all, theology, had been conferred on man for the achievement of this wisdom. Corrupt human vanity, Petrarch complained, had debased theology into dialectic.^[145] Criticizing those who usurped the title of "theologian" and professed a knowledge of divine affairs, he stated: "Instead of theologians, they are dialecticians, sophists at that; instead of lovers of God, they are knowers of God, nor do they wish to be that, but only to seem to be so; thus although they could follow Him in silence, they pursue Him with raucous voices. Behold the level to which the studies of mortals [have] descended! Oh, if you only knew the drive I feel and the passion that inflames me to speak at length on these matters!"^[146] Petrarch would champion a poetical theology as oracular of divine truth, as in Apollo's utterances at Delphi.

While legendary occasions for consultation of that oracle ranged from plague to pregnancy, in the extant responses from contemporaneous records the pronouncements generally concerned sanctions of religious laws and proposals and prescriptions of cultic acts. Whether direct or indirect, complete or incomplete, quotations of Delphic oracles and allusions to them were preserved in a variety of historical, literary, and philosophical texts, as well as in public and private inscriptions.^[147] Petrarch culled from these classical testimonials a dozen examples of such consultations with Apollo, which he recorded with commentary in his Rerum memorandarum liber . As derived from the conclusion of Cicero's De divinatione, the manuscript was an exposition of the virtue of prudence in the service of rhetoric. Its books examined the parts of that virtue as memory, understanding, and

"providence through which a certain future event is seen before the fact." In reflecting on providence and divination, Petrarch admonished the reader to rejoice and give thanks that as a Christian he had been led forth from the ambiguities of shadowy oracles into the serene light of true revelation. Yet the Apolline utterances testified, Petrarch thought, to the custom of mortals possessed by divine spirits to predict the future. Of the Delphic pronouncements, one that was surely stated without mask or lie he considered to be this: "Socrates is the wisest man of all who have lived."^[148]

Apollo might have designated other philosophers as exemplars of Delphic wisdom. Pythagoras by some accounts received his doctrine directly from the Pythia. Plato founded his ideal republic on the sanctuary of Delphi, as not only the center of religious life and the origin of moral and political laws, but as the supreme authority dominating that city. As priest of that shrine, Plutarch personally united the Greek philosophical tradition with the Delphic religion, exalting Apollo as the master of morality.^[149] Yet the oracle that so esteemed Socrates above all was, as Petrarch suggested, "not falsely stated," at least in Apolline judgment. Socrates regarded himself as "the consecrated servant" of Apollo, from whom he had received his own prophetic gifts. He counseled his friends to consult the oracle of Apollo through the Pythia.^[150] Saliently he established his philosophy on the most famous, although inauthentic, of the Delphic oracles, the gnomic "Know thyself."^[151] This utterance advised a knowledge of the distinction between man and the gods, and thus a prudence in not exceeding one's proper nature. "Know thyself" was related to the other famous Delphic maxim, the cautionary "Nothing in excess." The essence of Delphic doctrine was a religious spirit that expressed itself in a central moral rule of discretion, or sophrosune . In recommending that man take stock of his nature as distinct from the divine, it established him as the center of moral life and invested him with new value. "Know thyself" was inserted into the mouth of Apollo as not only the master of oracular science but also the master of wisdom and piety who located the good in moderation and reverence.^[152] The oracle served ironically as a pretext for the accusation of atheism that occasioned Socrates' death.^[153] So would the anthropocentric revival of Petrarch and other humanists be misjudged as irreverent, even irreligious.

Although the maxim "Know thyself" was also attributed to the seven sages, Petrarch identified it as Apolline.^[154] The command was

decisive in his life and for his literature. Its citation as the only Delphic oracle in Macrobius's commentary on the Somnium Scipionis,^[155] a principal source for Petrarch's Africa,^[156] is particularly suggestive of its influence. There the Apolline oracle occurred during a philosophical consensus that souls originated in the sky and that perfect wisdom acknowledged that the soul, although inhabiting a body, recognized this source. "A man has but one way of knowing himself . . . if he will look back to his first beginning and origin and 'not search for himself elsewhere.'" Recognizing its dignity, the soul would thus assume the virtues that would elevate it to that sky.^[157] The citation of Persius's counsel to search for oneself not corporeally but spiritually, not externally but internally, recalled the text of Augustine that enlightened Petrarch: "And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the oceans and the revolutions of the stars and they overlook themselves."^[158] As assimilated from the classical into the Christian tradition,^[159] the oracle "Know thyself" coincided with the mandate of self-examination in Petrarch's Secretum and with the revelation of self-importance in his epistolary ascent of Mont Ventoux. Petrarch espoused this Delphic wisdom in deliberating with another poet, Tommaso da Messina, concerning the rough and uncertain path to the borders of antique learning. The subject of their mutual investigation was the location of the island of Thule. Surveying the conflicting testimonies and conjectures of geographers and travelers concerning this remotest western land, Petrarch exclaimed: "Alas, how much disagreement! Indeed to me the island seems no less hidden than truth itself." Its location hardly mattered, he decided, "provided that virtue, which is centrally placed, does not lie hidden, and likewise the path of this short life over which a great portion of men proceeds trembling and staggering, hurrying to an uncertain end over an obscure trail." Petrarch advised his perplexed friend to seek information about the obscure problem of Thule from a more learned scholar. As for himself, he averred like Socrates: "If it is denied to me to search out these hiding places of nature and to know their secrets, I shall be satisfied with knowing myself. It is here that I shall be open-eyed and fix my gaze."^[160]

What Petrarch essayed to discover interiorly was not ego but Christ. By this knowledge he hoped to attain to the role of the true theologian. As he counseled concerning the one good: "If you desire it fully and sacredly and reasonably (otherwise such a great thing

cannot be desired), you will find that what you seek is already with you. Seek and you will find Him whom you desire deep in your soul. You need not wander outside of yourself in order to enjoy him."^[161] It was this interior presence of Christ as the author of his genius that established Petrarch's poetic vocation. In Petrarch's experience the emergence of self from tradition, especially from the asceticism that constrained his art, was founded in such consciousness as fostering the formation of conscience. Justifying his decision to continue as a poet, despite the cry against it, he ironically inverted Augustinus's sermon in Secretum on the vanity of eloquence: "What boots it that others shall approve of what you have said," argued the saint, "if in the court of your own conscience it stands condemned? For though the applause of those who hear you may seem to yield a certain fruit which is not to be despised, yet of what worth is it after all if in his heart the speaker is not able to applaud?"^[162] He reversed Augustinus's deprecation of the Capitoline crowd that had honored him with the laurel by applying the norm of conscience to the saint's own words. He thus relativized his authority. Was Augustinus's disapproval to outweigh Robert's approval? or either external judgment to overbalance that of his own conscience? In Petrarch's struggle for spiritual integrity he confuted authority with authority, arguing Augustinus against Augustinus to exploit on behalf of self the ambiguity and contradiction of tradition. Sometimes he regressed to melancholic doubt; sometimes, however, he advanced to inspiring probity.

The "very insistent and uncertain battle for the control of my two selves," as he termed his difficulty from the peak of Ventoux,^[163] was for the integration of carnal and spiritual man, as symbolized in the poetic synthesis of Apollo and Christ. Petrarch experienced the grief and frustration of the purgative way, which demanded the subordination of the one self to the other, until in the presence of Truth he rejected asceticism for being discipline but not wisdom. On the illuminative way of poetry—more enlightened, more sublime, more glorious, as he claimed^[164] —he sought to create a spirituality of the secular that would allow, transfigure, and honor his poetic genius. Petrarch's conjunctive method was through a mediation of culture and experience in which he examined and judged the Christian apologetics against poetry by a hard stare in the mirror of his own conscience. His volumes thus comprised a journal of self-encounter and self-expression. The ascents of Ventoux, of the Capitoline, and of Parnassus itself were simulta-

neously a descent into himself: the external climb of poetry, the internal tunnel of psychology. Or, rather, this exploration was theology, for Petrarch discovered his genius as the divine presence of an Apolline Christ. The psychological search for a personal identity was paralleled by historical research for the public identity, as exemplified in his epic Africa . Petrarch's artistic vocation was one of creation through restoration, of stripping the veneer that had accrued during "the dark ages"^[165] on the pristine truth of ancient revelations, classical and Christian. In this art of pentimento Petrarch discovered prophecy.^[166]