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Salve, Magna Parens: Virgil’s Laudes Italiae in Renaissance Italy and Beyond

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Abstract

This article traces three major strands in the reception of the address to Italy at the end of Virgil’s laudes Italiae in Book II of the Georgics. The first is the adoption of phrasing from these lines as the basis for expressions of devotion to the writer’s country (and for panegyric of contemporary rulers), or in inverted form to lament the present state of the author’s homeland; the second is the appropriation of Virgil’s hymnic apostrophe to his patria in poems on religious themes, where language from this passage is harnessed to invoke the supreme deity or the Virgin Mary, another magna parens; and the third is the use of Virgilian terminology to celebrate Virgil himself as the mighty parent of poetry and poets, whose words (including those of the lines under discussion) have inspired the literary endeavours of his successors across Europe and beyond throughout subsequent centuries.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey, Cambridge, 1969, pp. 293-4, 301-2, 310; Virgil, Georgics, ed. R. F. Thomas, I, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 179-80 on II.136-76; R. F. Thomas, ‘laudes Italiae’, in The Virgil Encyclopedia, II, ed. R. F. Thomas and J. M. Ziolkowski, Malden MA, Oxford and Chichester, 2014, pp. 732-3 (733) (‘the sheer poetry and music of the laudes Italiae, which so well captures the beauty of Italy’s lakes, hill towns, and rural scenery, have kept it in the memory of Virgilian scholars and readers throughout the ages’). For general treatments of the literary theme of the praise of Italy, see esp. J. Geffcken, ‘Saturnia tellus’, Hermes, 27, 1892, pp. 381-8; L. Castiglioni, ‘Le lodi d’Italia e la Roma pastorale’, Rendiconti del Reale Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, 64, 1931, pp. 275-89; H. V. Canter, ‘Praise of Italy in Classical Authors, I’, The Classical Journal, 33, 1938, pp. 457-70; id., ‘Praise of Italy in Classical Authors, II’, The Classical Journal, 34, 1939, pp. 396-409; B. Kytzler, Laudes Italiae -- Lob Italiens, Stuttgart, 1988; U. Gärtner and A. Hartmann, Zum Lob Italiens in der griechischen Literatur, Stuttgart, 2002.

  2. W. Y. Sellar, The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil, Oxford, 1877 (repr. Cambridge, 2010), pp. 258-76.

  3. For discussion see A. E. Housman, ‘Notes on Martial’, Classical Quarterly, 13, 1919, pp. 68-80 (74) (repr. in The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman, III, ed. J. Diggle and F. R. D. Goodyear, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 982-95 [988-9]); R. Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience. Nature and History; Times, Names, and Places, Oxford, 1998, pp. 322, 324; D. S. Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, Cambridge, 2010, p. 63.

  4. See Virgil, Georgics, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1990, p. 119 on II.136-76; Thomas, Virgil: Georgics (n. 1 above), I, 180; Wilkinson, The Georgics (n. 1 above), p. 65; A. H. Krappe, ‘A Source of Vergil, Georg. II. 136-176’, Classical Quarterly, 20, 1926, pp. 42-4.

  5. Virgil, Aeneidos liber quintus, ed. R. D. Williams, Oxford, 1960, pp. 57-8 on V.80 cites Georgics, II.173 and Aeneid, VIII.301. For the repeated acclamation cf. Catullus LXIV.23-23b: ‘…salvete, deum genus! o bona matrum | progenies, salvete iter< um …>’ (‘hail, race of the gods; goodly offspring of mothers, hail once more…’).

  6. See the analysis of Aeneas’s situation at this point in the poem offered by B. Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, Oxford, 1964, p. 272: ‘He is not yet ready for Italy; the gods therefore send him back to Sicily and Anchises.’

  7. On Pliny’s engagement with Virgil, see esp. R. T. Bruère, ‘Pliny the Elder and Virgil’, Classical Philology, 51, 1956, pp. 228-46 (on this passage, p. 245); A. Doody, ‘Virgil the Farmer? Critiques of the Georgics in Columella and Pliny’, Classical Philology, 102, 2007, pp. 180-97.

  8. Statius, Silvae IV, ed. K. M. Coleman, Oxford, 1988, p. 72 on IV.1.17 compares Silvae, IV.2.14-15, ‘regnator terrarum orbisque subacti | magne parens’ (‘ruler of the lands and great parent of the conquered world’).

  9. I have failed to locate any comment on the possible echo of the Georgics in this expression in the scholarship on Silius; B. Tipping, Exemplary Epic: Silius Italicus’ Punica, Oxford, 2010, pp. 138-9, 186, connects the phrase with Ennius’s ‘Scipio invicte’ (‘unconquered Scipio’, Varia 3 [Vahlen]).

  10. For discussion see W. Görler, ‘Vergilzitate in Ausonius’ Mosella’, Hermes, 97, 1969, pp. 94-114 (104-5) (repr. in Ausonius, ed. M. J. Lossau, Darmstadt, 1991, pp. 146-75 [160-1]); Ausonius, The Works, ed. R. P. H. Green, Oxford, 1991, p. 504 on 381-8; G. O’Daly, ‘sunt etiam Musis sua ludicra: Vergil in Ausonius’, in Romane memento: Vergil in the Fourth Century, ed. R. Rees, London, 2004, pp. 141-54 (147-8).

  11. See, e.g., S. Reckert, The Matter of Britain and the Praise of Spain, Cardiff, 1967. On the medieval tradition of poems in praise of towns, cities and countries, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask, London, 1953, pp. 157-8.

  12. Among older works see A. Momigliano, ‘L’elegia politica del Petrarca’, Annali della cattedra petrarchesca, 7, 1937, pp. 77-91; T. E. Mommsen, ‘The Date of Petrarch’s canzone Italia mia’, Speculum, 14, 1939, pp. 28-37, with bibliography p. 28 n. 1; and for a more recent treatment see G. Baldassari, Unum in locum: Strategie macrotestuali nel Petrarca politico, Milan, 2006, esp. pp. 219-30.

  13. Note also Fam., XIX.15.3, where Petrarch describes himself as ‘certe ab annis teneris amore quodam italici nominis supra coetaneos meos omnes, quos ipse noverim, estuanti…’ (‘certainly from the years of my youth boiling over with a love of the name of Italy beyond all those of my contemporaries with whom I was personally acquainted…’).

  14. For the text see Francesco Petrarca, Epistulae metricae. Briefe in Versen, ed. O. and E. Schönberger, Würzburg, 2004, p. 284; for discussion see H. M. Richmond, Renaissance Landscapes: English Lyrics in a European Tradition, The Hague and Paris, 1973, pp. 53-5; and for recent studies of the poem, F. Van Dooren, ‘Petrarca en Italie: Epystole metrice III. 24’, Hermeneus, 69, 1997, pp. 196-7; E. Fenzi, ‘I versi Ad Italiam e la traduzione di Tommaso Gargallo’, Per leggere, 2, 2002, pp. 103-37 (repr. in Fenzi, Saggi petrarcheschi, Fiesole, 2003, pp. 589-632). L. Braccesi, Roma bimillenaria: Pietro e Cesare, Rome, 1999, p. 109, comments ‘Qui la carità di patria si somma all’amore per gli autori classici…’

  15. See, e.g., W. J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England, Baltimore and London, 2003; A. Solmi, ‘Francesco Petrarca e l’Italia’, Annali della cattedra petrarchesca, 6, 1935-1936, pp. 1-22; C. Steiner, La fede nell’ impero e il concetto della patria italiana nel Petrarca, Prato and Florence, 1906.

  16. In view of these resemblances, it might be wondered whether the expression ‘agnosco patriam’ in the penultimate line (17) of Petrarch’s poem points to his recognition not only of his beloved homeland but also of the literary prototype on which this acclamation of Italy is modelled.

  17. See Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience (n. 3 above), p. 368: ‘It evokes a complex of ideas: fecundity, moral virtue, national glory, numinousness, the immemorial depths of Italian history, the blessedness and changelessness of country life.’

  18. See S. J. Harrison, Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace, Oxford, 2007, pp. 138-49.

  19. For other adaptations of arma virumque by Petrarch, see Bucolicum carmen, I.89; Epystole Metrice, I.2.56.

  20. For a further Petrarchan eulogy of Italy, see the following poem in the Epystole Metrice, III.25, which catalogues the blessings of Italy before asking ‘quidve deest Italis, nisi pax non deforet una?’ (‘What do the Italians lack, if peace alone were not lacking?’, 82).

  21. D. Stevens, ‘Petrarch’s Greeting to Italy’, Musical Times, 115, 1974, pp. 834-6 (834); for one example of the reception of Petrarch’s poem in the field of literature, see V. Fera, ‘I versi di Giacomo Pizzinga contro la Sicilia’, Margarita amicorum: studi di cultura europea per Agostino Sottili, I, ed. F. Forner et al., Milan, 2005, pp. 283-90.

  22. See Stevens, ‘Petrarch’s Greeting’ (n. 21 above); id., ‘Petrarch in Renaissance Music’, in Francesco Petrarca, Citizen of the World. Proceedings of the World Petrarch Congress, Washington, D.C., April 6-13 1974, ed. A. S. Bernardo, Padua and Albany NY, 1980, pp. 151-78 (158-60).

  23. See Flavio Biondo, Italy Illuminated, ed. and trans. J. A. White, I, Cambridge MA and London, 2005, p. 10 (I.1).

  24. Girolamo Fracastoro, Latin Poetry, trans. J. Gardner, Cambridge MA and London, 2013, pp. 198-200. Fracastoro draws on the same Virgilian models in his address to Rome at the end of Carmina, XI: ‘Salve, magne Tybri! Salve et tu, maxima rerum | Roma parens! Salvete arces, collesque Latini, | aurea qui primi longo meministis ab aevo | saecula…‘(‘Hail, great Tiber! Hail too, Rome, greatest parent of things! Hail, fortresses and hills of Latium, you who first remember the Golden Age from long ago…’, XI.70-3; see Fracastoro, pp. 244-5).

  25. For the text of the poem see W. Roscoe, The Life and Pontificate of Leo X, 4 vols, Liverpool, 1805, II, Appendix LXIX, pp. 33-8 (34).

  26. Sylva panegyrica ad Guarinum Veronensem praeceptorem suum, Basel, 1518, lines 897-900 (on the poem, see esp. I. Thomson, Humanist pietas: The Panegyric of Janus Pannonius on Guarinus Veronensis, Bloomington, 1988). In this instance the term instaurator (cf. instaurare, Silvae, IV.1.18) might suggest that Statius’s adaptation of the Virgilian original is the primary model here. See also the motet Carminibus festos / O requies populi written by Antonius Romanus for the doge of Venice Francesco Foscari (reigned 1423-1457), line 10: ‘Salve, magne pater, nostri decor unice secli’ (‘Hail, great father, sole glory of our age’; text in J. E. Cumming, ‘Music for the Doge in Early Renaissance Venice’, Speculum, 67, 1992, pp. 324-64 [344]).

  27. A. Fulvio, Carmen in laudem Populi Romani, 1-12, in his De Vrbis antiquitatibus libri quinque, Brescia, 1545, pp. 410-14 (410): ‘Salve rex regum popule insignite triumphis, | et rerum princeps, et moderator ave. | Qui totum propriis superasti viribus orbem, | armis, iusticia, religione, fide, | salve Roma tuis sacris foecunda trophoeis, | clara animi gignens strenuitate viros,| coelicolisque pares superum virtute potentes, | consiliis magnos, artibus atque bonis. | Roma decus mundi, rerum pulcherrima [cf. Georgics, II.534], salve, | qua sol paene videt maius in orbe nihil [cf. Horace, Carm. saec., 9-12] | Salve Roma potens, gentis quae dura rebellis | colla iugo subdis, corda superba domans…’ (‘Hail, king of kings, people distinguished for your triumphs, both prince and governor of things, hail! You who have mastered the whole world by your own strength, by your arms, justice, religion and faith – hail, Rome, fertile in your sacred trophies, glorious in giving birth to men endowed with energy of spirit and equal to the dwellers in heaven, powerful in the valour of the gods above, mighty in counsel, and in the goodly arts. Rome, glory of the world, loveliest of things, than whom the sun sees almost nothing greater on earth, hail! Hail, powerful Rome, you who bring the stubborn necks of the rebellious race beneath the yoke, taming their proud hearts…’). On Fulvio see, e.g., R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, Oxford, 1969, pp. 86-9, 95-6, 178-9.

  28. S. Vitale, Annales Sardiniae, pars prima, Florence, 1639, p. 124; generosa and opulenta might be thought to inject a Petrarchan note (cf. EM, III.24.3, 7), and indeed a later piece in this volume includes the phrase ‘Salve cara Deo tellus’ (p. 131).

  29. V. Zabughin, Vergilio nel rinascimento italiano da Dante a Torquato Tasso, Bologna, 1921-1923 (repr. Trento, 2000), II, p. 148. For an earlier example of inversion, in Alexander Neckam, De laudibus divinae sapientiae, V.325-44, see T. Haye, Das lateinische Lehrgedicht im Mittelalter: Analyse einer Gattung, Leiden, 1997, p. 192. As IJCT’s anonymous reader points out, this use of the laudes motif may owe something to Lucan’s inversion of Virgilian themes of georgic prosperity (see generally E. Paratore, ‘Virgilio georgico e Lucano’, Annali della Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, n. s. 12, 1943, 40-69 [thanks to Katharine Earnshaw for this reference], and with reference to the laudes Italiae see especially Lucan, BC, I.24-9 with Virgil, Georgics, II.155-7).

  30. Fracastoro, Latin Poetry (n. 24 above), p. 28; for discussion see e.g. Zabughin, Vergilio (n. 29 above), II, p. 148 with pp. 174-5 n. 146.

  31. R. Rapin, Hortorum libri IV, Paris, 1665. On Rapin’s use of the Georgics see especially R. Monreal, Flora neolatina, Berlin and New York, 2010, esp. pp. 316, 78 n. 137; Y. Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry, Oxford, 2003, pp. 17-29 (esp. p. 20, ‘Virgil’s “Praises of Italy” (Georgics 2) are predictably and straightforwardly converted into a “Praises of France”’); B. Effe, ‘Zur Rezeption von Vergils Lehrdichtung in der karolingischen “Renaissance” und im französischen Klassizismus: Walahfrid Strabo und René Rapin’, Antike und Abendland, 21, 1975, pp. 140-63; Wilkinson, The Georgics (n. 1 above), pp. 298-9, 301.

  32. Cf. Haskell, Loyola’s Bees (n. 31 above), p. 22: ‘Rapin’s France takes the place of Virgil’s Italy as the land of the golden mean, the centre of the world.’.

  33. Rapin, Hortorum libri IV (n. 31 above), pp. 74-5; see also La lyre jésuite. Anthologie de poèmes latins (1620-1730), ed. A. Thill and G. Banderier, Geneva, 1999, pp. 194-7.

  34. See H. K. Riikonen, ‘Laus Urbis in Seventeenth-Century Finland: Georg Haveman’s Oratio de Wiburgo and Olof Hermelin’s Viburgum’, in Rhetoric and Literature in Finland and Sweden, 1600-1900, ed. P. Harsting and J. Viklund, Copenhagen, 2008, pp. 1-19.

  35. G. Haveman, Oratio de celeberrima Carelorum civitate, Wiburgo, Turku, 1694, p. 20; for the text see Riikonen, ‘Laus Urbis’ (n. 34 above), p. 13 n. 29.

  36. Theophanes Prokopovich, De arte poetica libri III, Kiev, 1705, pp. 61-2, quoted in J. IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, Leuven, 1990, p. 255. An edition of this treatise is currently being prepared by Albert R. Baca.

  37. On the reception of the Virgilian subject of the temperate climate in early modern English literature, see especially J. Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, Princeton, 2002, pp. 79-110 (esp. pp. 92-100, on Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion as a response to Virgil’s laudes Italiae).

  38. J. Dyer, The Fleece, London, 1757, p. 12. For discussion of Dyer’s poem, see (in addition to the items cited in the following notes) L. Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature, Pittsburgh, 1977, pp. 43-58; J. C. Pellicer, ‘Pastoral and Georgic’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, III: 1660-1790, ed. D. Hopkins and C. Martindale, Oxford, 2012, pp. 287-322 (292-3, 306-9).

  39. See J. Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form, London, 1969, pp. 51-5.

  40. J. Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, Cambridge, 1995, p. 123.

  41. See Thomson’s Summer, lines 1478-1578: Dyer’s Edwards and Henrys in I.162 echo Thomson’s at 1483, while Locke and Newton make an appearance in Thomson’s catalogue at 1557-8 and 1559-62 respectively.

  42. S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, II, London, 1755, p. 1197 s.v. ‘Lich’. In view of the examples of modification to Virgil’s lines cited below, it may be of interest that in the preface to his edition of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, 3rd ed., London, 1796, G. Strahan appends to his remarks on Johnson’s use of the tag the ‘quotation’ ‘Salve, magna parens frugum, Staffordia tellus, | magna virum’ (p. x, original emph.).

  43. W. Stukeley, Itinerarium curiosum, I, London, 1724, p. 71. The same alteration is made to Virgil’s Saturnia tellus in a poem by John Sargent, later a Member of Parliament, entitled Silvae filia nobilis (dated 1766) in the 1817 edition of Musae Etonenses: ‘Salve magna parens nemorum, Britannica tellus, | magna virum! frondes nutrit tibi fagus opacas, | alta tibi surgit pinus, reginaque silvae | Tercentum totos quercus dominatur in annos’ (‘Hail, great mother of groves, Britannic land, great mother of men! For you the beech tree nourishes shady foliage, for you the lofty pine rises up, and the oak, queen of the wood, holds sway for full three hundred years’). See Musae Etonenses seu carminum Etonae conditorum delectus, ed. W. Herbert, 2nd ed., I, Eton, 1817, pp. 317-20 (319).

  44. T. Foisset, ‘Plan d’une histoire littéraire de Bourgogne, projetée par l’Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon’, Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon, 1832, pp. 5-16 (5). On Foisset see G. A. Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 121, 174-5.

  45. See, e.g., W. H. Breen, Walter Breen’s Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins, New York, 1988, pp. 105-6; V. Morin, ‘Castorland’, The Numismatist, 55, 1942, pp. 717-20. On the settlement of Castorland, see S. Desjardins and P. Pharoux, Castorland Journal: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Northern New York State by French Émigrés in the Years 1793 to 1797, ed. and trans. J. A. Gallucci, Ithaca NY, 2010.

  46. For an excellent reproduction, see p. 86 of the following catalogue: http://www.moruzzi.it/download/2006_pdf/85–88.pdf (accessed 18 February 2015).

  47. Virgil, Georgics, ed. Mynors (n. 4 above), p. 124 on II.173; Virgil, Georgica, ed. M. Erren, II, Kommentar, Heidelberg, 2003, pp. 381-5, esp. p. 381 (‘Vergil schließt sein Lob Italiens wie einen homerischen Hymnos…’). If Wagenvoort’s theory that the words ‘salve, sancte parens’ at Aeneid, V.80 evoke a formula employed in the Roman ritual of parentatio (see H. Wagenvoort, Studies in Roman Literature, Culture and Religion, Leiden, 1956, pp. 293-4) is correct, then perhaps we should read back into Virgil’s previous variation on the formula at Georgics, II.173 a suggestion of liturgical language.

  48. See e.g. K. Strecker, ‘“Iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto”’, Studi medievali, n.s. 5, 1932, pp. 167-86; S. Benko, ‘Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.31.1, 1980, pp. 646-705; P. Courcelle, Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de l'Énéide, 2 vols, Paris, 1984-1989; J. M. Ziolkowski and M. C. J. Putnam (eds.), The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, New Haven and London, 2008, pp. 453-7, 487-503; M. Wifstrand Schiebe, ‘Virgilius de uno deo aperte loquitur. Eklogendeutung und Laktanzanlehnung bei Hugo de Folieto (12. Jahrhundert)’, in Von Homer bis Landino: Beiträge zur Antike und Spätantike sowie zu deren Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte. Festgabe für Antonie Wlosok zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. B. R. Suchla, Berlin, 2011, pp. 435-64; D. Hadas, ‘Christians, Sibyls and Eclogue 4’, Recherches augustiniennes et patristiques, 37, 2013, pp. 51-129; P. Hardie, The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, London, 2014, pp. 127-47.

  49. See esp. Lactantius, Div. inst., I.5.13, where after quoting Aeneid, VI.724-7 and Georgics, IV.221-4, the author remarks: ‘Ovidius quoque in principio praeclari operis, sine ulla nominis dissimulatione, a Deo, quem fabricatorem mundi, quem rerum opificem vocat, mundum fatetur instructum’ (‘Ovid too at the start of his famous work, without any disguising of the name, declares that the world was put together by God, whom he calls creator of the world and universal craftsman’). On the Christianizing interpretation of this Ovidian passage in the Middle Ages, see esp. F. T. Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the School Tradition of France, 1180-1400: Texts, Manuscript Traditions, Manuscript Settings’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. J. G. Clark et al., Cambridge, 2011, pp. 48-82 (72, 80); also A. Pairet, ‘Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé’, ibid., pp. 83-107 (91-2).

  50. Michael Marullus, Poems, trans. C. Fantazzi, Cambridge MA and London, 2012, p. xix.

  51. Ibid., p. 200.

  52. The expression ‘pater optime’ is also directed towards Aeneas himself, at Aeneid, I.555, and he is described as ‘pater optimus’ at Aeneid, V.358. Note also the later use of ‘rerum pater optime’ to refer to God by George Buchanan in his Psalm paraphrases (Psalms LXXXIX.1, CIX.67, CXVI.61), and of the shorter address ‘pater optime’ frequently elsewhere in this work – clearly Buchanan, at least, felt that this expression could appropriately be used of the Judaeo-Christian deity.

  53. To give just one example, we might compare Marco Girolamo Vida’s repeated alteration of ‘cara deum soboles’ from Virgil, Eclogues, IV.49 to ‘vera dei soboles’ in his Christiad (see II.168, II.893, IV.142, V.213; a similar modification had already been made by Giles of Viterbo in his second eclogue, De ortu domini, line 140, ‘vera Dei hic soboles‘), with the insinuation that the description ‘deum soboles’ cannot truly be applied to the child celebrated by Virgil -- Christ himself is the only worthy claimant to such a title. For a classical model for such formulae, see however Aeneid, VIII.301 (quoted below, n. 73).

  54. The assimilation of the Christian God to the pagan Jupiter was also commonplace by this date (a striking example is Dante, Purgatorio, VI.118-19, ‘sommo Giove | che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso’), so the dedication of the poem to Jupiter Optimus Maximus is no barrier to seeing a Christianizing tendency: see, e.g., H. D. Brumble, Classical Myths and Legends in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: A Dictionary of Allegorical Meanings, London and Chicago, 1998, s.v. ‘Jupiter’. For a further possible Christian resonance in this hymn, see N. Thurn, ‘Anmerkungen zum Verständnis der Hymni Naturales von Michael Marullus’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 47, 1998, pp. 15-27 (19).

  55. For vocabulary relating to memory as a signpost for literary allusion, see e.g. S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Cambridge, 1998; A. M. Seider, Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid: Creating the Past, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 6-13.

  56. Marullus, Poems, trans. Fantazzi (n. 50 above), p. 212; see also Musae Reduces. Anthologie de la poésie latine dans l’Europe de la Renaissance, ed. P. Laurens and C. Balavoine, I, Leiden, 1975, pp. 116-19.

  57. See Erasmus, Ciceronianus, LB I.1019-20, in his Literary and Educational Writings 6: Ciceronianus, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Complete Works of Erasmus, XXVIII), Toronto, Buffalo NY and London, 1986, pp. 437-9; Erasmus’s criticisms were challenged by Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Modern Poets, ed. J. N. Grant, Cambridge MA and London, 2011, pp. 38-9 (I.45).

  58. Divus is a standard term, however, for ‘saint’ in Christian Latin; the same defence cannot be made for Marullus’s deum – but Sannazaro’s shepherds nonetheless have no qualms about using this terminology, appropriating it directly from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue at De partu Virginis, III.211: ‘tu ne deum vitam accipies’ (see also III.450: ‘deum rex’). For a Renaissance discussion of the issue, see Zabughin, Vergilio (n. 29 above), I, pp. 126-7.

  59. Jacopo Sannazaro, Latin Poetry, ed. and trans. M. C. J. Putnam, Cambridge MA and London, 2009, pp. 76-8.

  60. See Basilio Zanchi, De horto Sophiae, II.370-4, in his Poemata quae extant omnia, Bergamo, 1747, p. 31: ‘Salve magne parens mundi, qui secula solus | instauras, vitamque piis, promissaque caeli | regna paras, nigramque Erebo demittere mortem | morte tua: servata tibi quae dona rependet | gens hominum? quas et laudes et templa dicabit?’ (‘Hail, great parent of the universe, you who alone restore the ages, and prepare life and the promised realms of heaven for the faithful, and to dispatch by your own death black death down to Hell: what gifts shall the human race, saved by you, give you in return? What praises and temples shall it dedicate?’).

  61. Ibid., pp. 73, 202. See also the following address to St John Chrysostom in a poem by Zanchi on a portrait of the saint, p. 98 (In imaginem Divi Joannis Chrysostomi, 5-6): ‘Salve magne parens, caeli decus, aurea fandi | copia cui meritum nomen et ora dedit’ (‘Hail, great parent, glory of heaven, to whom your golden fund of speech and your mouth have given a name well deserved’).

  62. Petrus Francius, Psalmus XVIII (in Silvae Book I), in his Poëmata, editio altera, Amsterdam, 1697, pp. 365-7 (367).

  63. See, e.g., Joan Baptista Anyés/Agnesio, Egloga in Nativitate Christi, 168, in J. Alonso Asenjo, ‘Optimates lætificare: la Egloga in Nativitate Christi de Joan Baptista Anyés o Agnesio’, Criticón, 66-67, 1996, pp. 307-68); Sebastian Castellio, Sirillus, 59 (note also Zanchi, De horto Sophiae, II.136). On the nativity eclogue, see esp. W. L. Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral, Chapel Hill, 1965, pp. 103-4, 258-73 (revised from W. L. Grant, ‘Neo-Latin Biblical Pastorals’, Studies in Philology, 58, 1961, pp. 25-43); L. Mundt, ‘Die sizilischen Musen in Wittenberg – Zur religiösen Funktionalisierung der neulateinischen Bukolik in deutschen Protestantismus des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Die Musen im Reformationszeitalter, ed. W. Ludwig, Leipzig, 2001, pp. 265-88 (281-8).

  64. On this passage see C. P. E. Springer, ‘The Biblical Epic in Late Antiquity and the Early Modern Period: The Poetics of Tradition’, in Antiquity Renewed: Late Classical and Early Modern Themes, ed. Z. von Martels and V. M. Schmidt, Leuven, Paris and Dudley MA, 2003, pp. 103-26 (122-3); on Sedulius, see generally C. P. E. Springer, The Gospel as Epic in Late Antiquity: The Paschale carmen of Sedulius, Leiden, 1988, and R. P. H. Green, Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, Oxford, 2006, esp. pp. 135-250.

  65. See, e.g., T. B. Husband, The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, New Haven and London, 2008, pp. 250-1.

  66. Euricius Cordus, In natalem Christi Hymnus, in his Opera poetica, Frankfurt, 1564, fols 36v-38v at 38r.

  67. On Mauri’s Franciscias, see especially V. Placella, ‘S. Francesco e il francescanismo in un poema epico in latino del Cinquecento’, in San Francesco e il francescanesimo nella letteratura italiana dal Rinascimento al Romanticismo. Atti del Convegno Nazionale (Assisi, 18-20 maggio 1989), ed. S. Pasquazi, Rome, 1990, pp. 115-62; H. Wiegand, ‘Laudes Francisci poeticae. Der Poverello in neulateinischen Dichtungen’, in Scripturus vitam: Lateinische Biographie von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart. Festgabe für Walter Berschin zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. D. Walz, Heidelberg, 2002, pp. 553-65 (557-60). In addition to the Virgilian formula of salutation, note the use of the verb recludis in XI.551, recalling the Roman poet’s recludere in Georgics, II.175. Shortly before the lines quoted here, the praise of country life in the Georgics has been recalled in the praise of poverty at Franciscias, XI.521-37.

  68. Harrison, Generic Enrichment (n. 18 above), pp. 145-6.

  69. On this phenomenon see especially E. Klecker, Dichtung über Dichtung. Homer und Vergil in lateinischen Gedichten italienischer Humanisten des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 1994.

  70. Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, On Married Love; Eridanus, trans. L. Roman, Cambridge MA and London, 2014, p. 194.

  71. Ibid., p. 355 n. 59 for discussion; see also Klecker, Dichtung (n. 69 above), p. 170.

  72. On De hortis Hesperidum see esp. I. Nuovo, ‘Mito e natura nel De hortis Hesperidum di Giovanni Pontano’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Bari 29 August to 3 September 1994, ed. R. Schnur et al., Tempe AZ, 1998, pp. 453-60, with bibliography pp. 459-60; G. M. Müller, ‘Ein Lehrgedicht nach neoterischer Poetik: Pontanos De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum und seine Beziehung zu Catull’, in Pontano und Catull, ed. T. Baier, Tübingen, 2003, pp. 265-88.

  73. For ‘decus addite silvis’, see Aeneid, VIII.301: ‘salve vera Iovis proles, decus addite divis’ (cf. also Statius, Thebaid, I.22), which suggests a different Virgilian model for the initial salve here. The third line of the passage is modelled on Aeneid, VIII.2, ‘rauco strepuerunt cornua cantu’, while lines 537-8 closely reproduce material from Aeneid, VII.516-18. It would perhaps be stretching a point to argue the likelihood that the laudes Italiae was in the poet’s mind at this point from the fact that just over twenty lines later in Pontano’s poem, at II.561, we find the line ‘quodque mare Italiam supra quodque alluit infra’ (‘and the sea that washes Italy above and that which washes below’; cf. Georgics, II.158). Pontano himself was later praised by Joachim Camerarius in his Phaenomena in terms very similar to those we see applied to Virgil by Pontano and others, here explicitly linked to Virgil’s celebration of Italy: ‘Italiae decus o, patria dignissimus illa, | Virgilio prius est quae celebrata suo…Salve, erepte senex terris coeloque locate, | salve iterum, o Latii gloria prima soli!’ (‘O glory of Italy, most worthy of that country which was previously celebrated by her own Virgil…. Hail, old man snatched from the earth and placed in heaven, hail once more, o leading glory of the Latin land’) – see W. Ludwig, ‘Pontani amatores: Joachim Camerarius und Eobanus Hessus in Nürnberg’, in Baier, Pontano und Catull (n. 72 above), pp. 11-45 (39).

  74. Marco Girolamo Vida, De arte poetica/Art poétique, ed. and trans. J. Pappe, Geneva, 2013, p. 230; see also Marco Girolamo Vida, The De arte poetica, trans. R. G. Williams, New York, 1976, pp. 122-5; Renaissance Latin Verse. An Anthology, ed. A. Perosa and J. Sparrow, London, 1979, p. 251. The laudes Italiae are specifically evoked at III.558, which describes Virgil as ‘Argolicum resonans Romana per oppida carmen’ (‘sounding the Argolic song through Roman towns’; cf. Georgics, II.176).

  75. On the Sarca see esp. Sarca: Poema del XVI secolo, ed. and trans. G. B. Pighi and K. Ziegler, Arco, 1974; Pietro Bembo, Sarca. Integra princeps editio, ed. and trans. O. Schönberger, Würzburg, 1994; Klecker, Dichtung (n. 69 above), pp. 180-5.

  76. Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry, Etna, ed. and trans. M. P. Chatfield, Cambridge MA and London, 2005, pp. 170-2; also Klecker, Dichtung (n. 69 above), p. 329. Cf. also lines 304-6 of Giorgio Anselmi’s Sosthyrides, a birthday poem on Virgil in Latin hendecasyllables (on which see Klecker, Dichtung [n. 69 above], pp. 146-63 with text pp. 310-18): ‘salve, magne puer, genus deorum | magna[e]que altera spesque luxque Romae, | vates Aonidum decus sororum’ (‘Hail, great boy, offspring of gods and second hope and light of mighty Rome, poet, glory of the Aonian sisters’; for the second line see the story about Cicero recorded by Servius on Eclogue, VI.11 and recycled by humanist biographers [see The Virgilian Tradition, ed. Ziolkowski and Putnam (n. 48 above), pp. 326, 338, 348, 360]).

  77. Homer, Ilias Latinis versibus expressa a Raymundo Cunichio Ragusino, Rome, 1776, p. xiii (lines 185-91 of introductory elegia).

  78. Early American Latin Verse, 1625-1825: An Anthology, ed. L. M. Kaiser, Wauconda IL, 1984, pp. 67-74 (71); on Gardner see also D. S. Shields, ‘Nathaniel Gardner, Jr. and the Literary Culture of Boston in the 1750s’, Early American Literature, 24, 1989, pp. 196-216.

  79. See Augurelli, Chrysopoeia, II.455-6: ‘Salve hominum praesens simul et gratissima cura | ars gravium…’ (‘Hail art, present and at the same time most welcome care of serious men…’); II.462-3: ‘Salve, magna parens iterum, foecunda virorum | atque operum…’ (‘Hail, great parent, again, fertile in men and in works…’). On Augurelli’s Chrysopoeia, see generally Z. von Martels, ‘Augurello’s Chrysopoeia (1515) – A Turning Point in the Literary Tradition of Alchemical Texts’, Early Science and Medicine, 5, 2000, pp. 178-95.

  80. Georgius Tilenus, Iohanni Scharfenbergio, Typographo et Magdalenae Schromianae, 41-4, in J. C. Wolf, Monumenta typographica, quae artis hujus praestantissimae originem, laudem et abusam posteris produnt, I, Hamburg, 1740, p. 998: ‘Salve, magna parens librorum, ars Daedala salve, | a nostris monstrata viris, primumque reperta, | orsu humili, sed dein annis labentibus aucta, | invidia flagrante Italo…’ (‘Hail, great parent of books, art of Daedalus, hail, exhibited and first discovered by our men, of lowly origin but later increased over the course of the years, as the Italian burned with envy…’).

  81. See Wilkinson, The Georgics (n. 1 above), pp. 274-5, 288, 294-5; C. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer, Cambridge, 1995, p. 5; Wilson-Okamura, Virgil (n. 3 above), p. 77; C. Kallendorf, ‘Renaissance Literature’, in The Virgil Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas and Ziolkowski (n. 1 above), III, pp. 1072-4 (‘there are fewer tangible signs of influence than one might expect, and they often prove to have only limited importance once they are investigated’, p. 1073).

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Parts of this study were first presented at the ‘New Perspectives on Virgil’s Georgics’ conference held at University College London in April 2014. I am grateful to the conference organizers, Nicholas Freer, Fiachra Mac Góráin and Bobby Xinyue, for the opportunity to give this material an airing, and to fellow participants -- especially Stephen Harrison, Stephen Heyworth, Fiachra Mac Góráin, Gesine Manuwald, Damien Nelis and Maria Wyke -- for helpful comments on that occasion. Thanks too to colleagues at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck (especially Nienke Tjoelker and Katherine East), where much of the initial research for this paper was carried out. As always, the article could not have been written without the incomparable resources of the libraries of the Warburg Institute and the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Any errors and questionable interpretations are of course my own.

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Houghton, L.B.T. Salve, Magna Parens: Virgil’s Laudes Italiae in Renaissance Italy and Beyond. Int class trad 22, 180–208 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-015-0375-1

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