Conversations: Classical and Renaissance intertextuality

By Manchester University Press

For educated poets and readers in the Renaissance, classical literature was as familiar and accessible as the work of their compatriots and contemporaries – often more so. This volume seeks to recapture that sense of intimacy and immediacy, as scholars from both sides of the modern disciplinary divide come together to eavesdrop on the conversations conducted through allusion and intertextual play in works from Petrarch to Milton and beyond. The essays include discussions of Ariosto, Spenser, Du Bellay, Marlowe, the anonymous drama Caesars Revenge, Shakespeare and Marvell, and look forward to the grand retrospect of Shelley’s Adonais. Together, they help us to understand how poets across the ages have thought about their relation to their predecessors, and about their own contributions to what Shelley would call ‘that great poem, which all poets…have built up since the beginning of the world’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526152664

Book preview

Introduction

Syrithe Pugh

This volume had its origin in a small interdisciplinary symposium which took place at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of 2015, bringing together a group of classicists and Renaissance specialists to discuss their shared fascination with the practice of allusion, imitation and intertextuality in poetry of both periods. Our title, ‘Conversations’, is chosen in part to commemorate the animated and illuminating conversation enjoyed at the original symposium, and long into the evening, between those represented here and other friends now absent. It also has several other intended connotations. Firstly, it is meant to convey a sense of literary imitation as a lively process of give and take, as the poets discussed here read and respond to one another’s words, and the allusive text takes on the character of an interplay of voices, with memories and echoes of the old heard afresh and given a new turn, like a kind of reply or series of replies both from and through the later writer. Secondly, beyond the individual poets, it evokes the broader conversation between ages, cultures, world-views and languages, as poets self-consciously adapt an ancient original and adjust its meaning, reflecting on the different conditions which pertain to their own time and circumstances, and sometimes drawing on the voices and values of the past in an attempt to change the present. Finally, it refers to the lively conversation now under way in the wider world of academia between the disciplines of Classics and Renaissance Studies, which can be overheard in an increasing number of conferences, publications and even journals devoted to classical reception, and which is attracting ever more participants from both sides of the traditional disciplinary divide. The symposium and this volume set out to foster and contribute to that wider conversation, which promises to bring a wealth of new understanding to our study of the texts of both periods.

One thing, indeed, which is shared by all the contributors represented here, is a sense that the separation of Classics and Renaissance Studies into different specialized disciplines and departments in modern universities has sometimes been a barrier to our understanding of what ought to be considered, at a deep level, a single object of study.¹ A word often used to try to capture this singularity is ‘tradition’, but this is perhaps not an ideal description: the term may suggest something handed down to be preserved unchanged, bringing in its train unwelcome and inappropriate connotations of ideological conservatism or reverential obedience to elders. This would not be a true reflection of the kinds of continuity traced here. Rather, the body of literature which demands the attention of classicists and Renaissance scholars alike is open-ended, evolving, polyvocal, fractured, dynamic; marked by play, contradiction, dispute and innovation; but also bound together by the intricate interconnections and responsiveness between its separate parts. It is in fact more like a very long conversation, in which, for instance, a speaker in seventeenth-century England brings his or her peculiar concerns and ideas to bear, but may still be replying to another speaker who entered the conversation seventeen centuries earlier in Rome, and doing so in the light of contributions from others, early or late. Dividing the constituent parts of that conversation into different specialisms for study, along the lines of language or of periodization, impedes our ability to listen properly to it, and distorts our sense of what Renaissance culture was like. To those who enjoyed a formal education in the Renaissance, classical Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) literature was as familiar as the most widely known modern vernacular works: indeed, in what was effectively their bilingual culture, the language of Virgil and Cicero was the medium not only for much official business but also for many new literary works – the large body of neo-Latin literature which is still only beginning to be catalogued and studied. Moreover, in the age of humanist scholarship and the early days of print, classical texts newly ‘discovered’, amended by the efforts of editors, or appearing in their first printed editions, could themselves come with the shock of the new. Latin and vernacular, ancient and modern existed side by side in the literary culture in which Renaissance authors were participating, as they did on the ever-expanding library shelves. Our very disciplines have grown out of the interactive simultaneity of that culture, as Renaissance writers interpreted and responded to their classical predecessors, and the methods and concerns of Renaissance scholars contributed to the evolution of our current view of classical literature and approaches to studying it.

This sense of a paradoxical contemporaneity between classical and Renaissance literature was also reflected in the title of the original symposium, ‘Reviving the Dead’, chosen to evoke the trope by which Renaissance writers commonly present themselves as bringing authors of the past back to life through their reading and their own imitative work – a rhetorical expression of what Thomas Greene calls ‘the necromantic superstition at the heart of the humanist enlightenment’.² A late and attractively light-hearted example is Robert Herrick’s ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’, where Herrick invites his musician friends to join him for an evening of poetry, music and merry-making, in which they will not only ‘Sing o’re Horace’ but ‘Rouze Anacreon from the dead’ so effectively that he becomes one of the revellers: at the end of the party they will have to ‘return him drunk to bed’. On the surface this is a piece of elegant whimsy, and indeed it is intrinsic to the poem’s style that it gives little hint of hidden depths. But if we peer through its translucent surface, it has much to tell us about how Herrick and his contemporaries view their relation to antiquity. We should notice first that this is not simply a statement that Anacreon’s verse is immortal. The revival imagined here happens not merely through reading and recital, but also through imitation, both in the behaviour being pictured, and in the literary form it is given. Herrick’s poem is designed to recall the many symposiastic lyrics in the Anacreontea (a collection of verse which he and his contemporaries attributed to Anacreon, though it is now believed to be itself an assemblage of later imitations of Anacreon’s poems), first-person poems in which the poet enjoys a symposium – a party at which respectable male citizens meet to drink wine, but also to listen to poetry and music, and to enjoy refined conversation (such as that recorded in Plato’s Symposium) – and which seem to have been composed for performance at symposia.³ It is one of many such poems scattered through the Hesperides, to the extent that the symposiastic scene of alcohol-fuelled and convivial song becomes not only a recurrent motif but an implicit metaphor for Herrick’s volume. Some of these poems describe habitual or future gatherings with living friends, some look back nostalgically to ‘lyrick feasts’ hosted by Ben Jonson, now dead, many involve the recitation of Anacreon or Horace (whose Odes also contain anacreontic and symposiastic songs) as well as newly made verse, and in some – as here – it is hard to distinguish the living guests from the dead. In ‘To Live Merrily and Trust to Good Verses’, we realize only gradually that Herrick is drinking alone, in a room which feels crowded by the ghostly presences of the catalogue of classical poets to whom he raises a glass. In ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium’, there is even an uncanny moment when, during a catalogue of the poets of the past whose shades Herrick is told he will meet there, the speaker promises

Ile bring thee Herrick to Anacreon,

Quaffing his full-crown’d bowles of burning Wine,

And in his Raptures speaking Lines of Thine.    (32–4)

Mere temporal distinctions and questions of life or death have become so insignificant that it no longer matters which poet is considered the original and which the imitator. Herrick and his contemporaries seem to exist in the same time as long-dead poets of Greece and Rome.

Such a thought might seem naïvely a-historicist, at the opposite pole from, and therefore of little interest to, the rigorous historicism which has enriched our understanding of the period in so much recent criticism. But in fact historical context is needed to see what is really at stake here. Though many of the poems it contains had originally been composed for private manuscript circulation as early as the 1610s and 1620s, the Hesperides was collected for print publication in 1648, at the end of the Civil Wars. Bearing a large crown on its title-page, and dedicated to Prince Charles, it is an unabashedly royalist publication, forming part of a ‘rush to print’ in the late 1640s by royalist poets who, having previously scorned the medium as socially beneath them because of its associations with paid work and trade, look to it now as ‘a safe haven for their work and a sign of political resistance to the authority of those who had defeated the king’s forces’.⁴ Herrick’s symposium poems take on a new significance in this context. Not only does convivial drinking, and especially the drinking of wine, take on a distinctly anti-Puritan edge and connotations of defiant Cavalier culture (at a time when ale-houses and traditional festivities were being suppressed, public morals becoming a focus of legislation and the dispersal of the royal court and the elite social networks associated with it making such convivial gatherings harder to arrange), but imitation of Anacreon specifically carries a complex freight of contemporary cultural and political meaning.⁵ It is particularly associated with the Order of the Black Riband, a literary fraternity formed by Thomas Stanley at the Middle Temple, in or by 1646. Stanley extended patronage mainly to royalist poets impoverished by the disbanding of the court and by the war, possibly including Herrick after he had been deprived of his ecclesiastical living for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant; its sign, the black riband, apparently symbolizes mourning for the Caroline age.⁶ The central activity of Stanley’s Order, like that of Ben Jonson’s ‘Tribe’ in the 1620s, was the reading, composition, exchange and appreciation of poetry; looking back on this period after the Restoration of monarchy, in a poem he never published, ‘A Register of Friends’, Stanley remembers their meetings as symposia where, ‘withdrawne from the dull ears of those / Who licens’t nothing but rebellious Prose,’ they ‘Love and Loyalty did … sing’, in defiance of ‘th’Usurpers’ and without the acquiescent ‘caution of that guilty Multitude’.⁷ But the Order of the Black Riband focussed especially on the translation of classical, modern European vernacular and neo-Latin poetry. Stanley was in particular a Greek scholar. In 1663 he would publish an edition of Aeschylus, with Greek text, Latin translation, textual notes and commentary, but at this time he was working on Anacreon: the expanded 1651 edition of his Poems and Translations would include the first complete English translation of the Anacreontea; John Hall already praises the first edition in 1647 as ‘breath[ing] new life into the Teian Lyre’. In the late 1640s and 1650s, imitations and translations of Anacreon were also produced by several other royalist poets whom we can confidently place in Stanley’s group (Richard Lovelace, Edward Sherburne and Alexander Brome), as well as others identified as ‘on its fringes’ (Robert Herrick, Charles Cotton the younger).⁸ These poems frequently seem to respond to one another, as for instance when Stanley titles his translation of Anacreontea 43 ‘The Grasse-hopper’, in an apparent nod to Lovelace’s poem, which adapts the same poem more loosely and in combination with an Horatian ode: as Revard suggests, à propos of a similar plurality of translations of a neo-Latin poem by Secundus, it seems that ‘poets of the circle were serving as audience and respondents to one another’, perhaps in ‘some kind of poetic competition’.⁹

The elegant and humorous gesture in Herrick’s ‘Lyrick to Mirth’, then, needs to be read against the background of a cultural moment in which a flowering of anacreontic verse emerges out of serious humanist scholarship and mutually responsive poetic composition, within a community of contemporaries self-consciously convened to preserve and revive both the politics and the literary culture of the Caroline age. Across Herrick’s volume, translations from and imitations of Anacreon and other classical poets alternate with invitations to named contemporaries to join him for an evening of wine and song, or simply to take up their place in the virtual space of Herrick’s Hesperides and be immortalized there. A sense emerges that the uncanny revival of Anacreon symbolizes a community’s successful defiance of time, change and death by its persistence in a set of social practices centred on the reading, performance and composition of poetry. The dispersed and threatened community of those loyal to the king are assured of their ultimate immunity to physical separation and adverse fortune by being placed on a transcendent plane, where they can exist outside normal time and space along with the immortal poets of the past.¹⁰ It is the technology of writing, and the attendant technology of print, which enable this transcendence, of course. As Diodorus Siculus puts it, ‘men widely separated in space have conversations through written communications with those who are at the farthest distance from them, as if they were standing nearby’.¹¹ It is this idea of epistolary writing overcoming physical distance which Herrick exploits at the end of his ‘Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew’ (another invitation to join him for symposiastic merry-making), where he explains that sending a few verses will do just as well as physical attendance:

Take Horse, and come; or be so kind,

To send your mind

(Though but in Numbers few)

And I shall think I have the heart,

Or part

Of Clipseby Crew.

But by this measure, Anacreon and Horace will also be essentially present, as Herrick himself will be present to any reader of his volume – then or now. Herrick emphasizes the materiality of writing and reading in poem after poem, addressing no fewer than thirteen poems ‘To his Booke’, and continually imagining how it will be received and used by its readers.¹² Elsewhere he refers to it repeatedly through metaphors such as ‘this sacred grove’ (H–265), ‘my rich Plantation’ (H–392), ‘the Poets Endlesse Kalendar’ (H–444), imagining it as a virtual space, transcending the misfortunes afflicting the real world and unaffected by the predations of time. For it is a commonplace from earliest antiquity to the present (and one endlessly reiterated in Herrick’s volume) that good poetry is immortal and, like the golden fruit in the garden for which the volume is named, has the power to immortalize those it names or praises.

For a more serious example of the trope of imitative writing as reviving the dead, and one which foregrounds the notion of epistolary writing as a paradigm of literature’s capacity to bridge not only spatial but temporal distance, we may look to a famous moment often seen as marking the birth of the Renaissance. In 1345, Petrarch visited the cathedral library at Verona and discovered, lying buried in obscurity there, a collection of hundreds of Cicero’s private letters to his friend Atticus, with some to his brother Quintus and to Brutus. Moved by the freshness and immediacy of Cicero’s voice in these letters, and taken aback by the human character flaws they reveal in a writer famed for his moral teachings in the orations and philosophical works whose wide currency and canonical status had never lapsed, Petrarch was prompted to write his own letter back to Cicero, ‘as to a contemporary friend, with the familiarity of long acquaintance, as if forgetting the passage of time’ (tamquam coaetaneo amico, familiaritate quae mihi cum illius ingenio est, quasi temporum oblitus).¹³ This was followed in later years by a letter to Seneca prompted by his rereading of Octavia, another to Cicero, and more to other classical authors. When, inspired by the examples of Cicero and Seneca, he finally compiled a collection of his own letters to friends and contemporaries, giving it the title Familiarium rerum libri (‘books of familiar matters’), Petrarch included ten of these letters to the ancients, grouped together in the twenty-fourth and final volume. The explanation quoted above of how they had come to be written appears in the prefatory letter to the whole collection, since they ‘might much surprise the reader, if he were not forewarned’ (quae nisi praemonitum lectorem subita possent admiratione perfundere). The effect when we come to them is indeed quite uncanny, as Petrarch addresses the dead writers in the same familiar style which characterized the letters to his contemporaries in the previous books, and we are almost lulled into the feeling that Petrarch expects a response, and into expecting one ourselves. This is achieved in part by the way in which many of the letters are replete with echoes of the addressees’ own works: the verse letter to Horace (24.10), especially, reads almost like a ‘cento’ – a kind of patchwork of quotations from Horace’s poems.¹⁴ Petrarch gives the impression that he is so familiar with his addressees’ works that he has absorbed and internalized their words and thought, and can now converse with them in their own terms, and his allusions make us remember the original texts and hear them again as though it were their part in the conversation – what they have said to Petrarch a moment ago, just before we began to listen in, or as though they are interjecting now. The traditional trope of letter-writing as virtual conversation (as in the quotation from Diodorus above) is exploited to the full: as Petrarch says in the letter to Seneca,

I derive great enjoyment from speaking with you (vobiscum colloqui), O illustrious characters of antiquity…I daily listen to your words (vos loquentes audio) with more attention than can be believed; and so, perchance, I shall not be considered impertinent in desiring you in your turn to listen to me once (a vobis semel audiar).¹⁵

The illusion of immediacy is such that it comes as a shock when, at the end of each letter, we encounter some variation on this theme (this is from the first letter to Cicero, 24.3):

Written in the land of the living, on the right bank of the river Adige, in Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy, on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of Quintilis (June 16), in the thirteen hundred and forty-fifth year from the birth of that God whom thou never knewest.

The reality check, reminding us of the gulf separating Petrarch from his classical addressees, is poignant. Petrarch has been called the first Renaissance man because this acute sense of historical distance and difference is felt to be something new and un-mediaeval. Often quoted to illustrate Petrarch’s sense that this distance is ultimately insuperable is a moment from the letter to Homer (24.12), referring to the excerpts in Latin translation which are all he has been able to read of the great Greek poet, ‘wherein I beheld thee as one sees, from a distance, the doubtful and rapid look of a wished-for friend, or perhaps, catches a glimpse of his streaming hair’. But this is a special case, for Petrarch dwells on his long-frustrated attempts to learn Greek, and so to encounter Homer more directly: it is the language barrier rather than the passage of time which comes between them. When the letters to familiar Latin writers are signed off ‘from the land of the living’, the moment is poignant because the sense of immediacy, presence and communion has first been established so convincingly, and we should not downplay its importance.

In fact, the idea of corresponding with the dead is not exactly Petrarch’s invention, but rather his striking extrapolation from something he has found in Seneca’s letters, along with much else which impressed him deeply. Of the two great classical exemplars for published collections of prose letters, Cicero and Seneca, the influence of Cicero tends to get more critical attention. This is partly at the prompting of Petrarch, who says in the prefatory epistle that he follows Cicero’s manner much more than Seneca’s, but the context of the remark is important. Petrarch has been talking about how he has edited the collection:

Also I cut out much about everyday concerns, which was worth while when it was written, but would now bore the most curious reader. I remembered that Seneca derided Cicero on that score; though in these letters I follow Cicero’s manner much more than Seneca’s. For Seneca crammed into his letters almost all the moral system of his books, while Cicero treats philosophical matters in his books and puts domestic news and timely gossip in his letters. What Seneca may think of Cicero’s letters is his own affair. For me, I confess, they are delightful reading.

Petrarch is talking about subject-matter, and implicitly purpose. Seneca’s epistles to Lucilius are everywhere concerned with philosophy: though they include personal and anecdotal matter, it is always used to make a philosophical point, and Seneca is quite explicit about the didactic purpose of the correspondence. He chooses the epistolary form for two reasons: firstly, because letters are equivalent to the conversational exchange which is a more effective teaching method than lecturing;¹⁶ and secondly because friendship – the bond of familiaritas sustained through conversation and personal correspondence – itself plays a central role in his moral philosophy.¹⁷ For Cicero, there is a real generic difference between his letters and his philosophical writings: though they contain philosophy, the letters are also concerned with sustaining a wider social network, and with discussing news and current affairs – as Seneca puts it in Epistles 118.2, ‘what candidate is in difficulties, who is striving on borrowed resources and who on his own; who is a candidate for the consulship relying on Caesar, or on Pompey…’¹⁸ Such questions were important to Cicero the statesman, but Seneca insists throughout that the philosopher must withdraw from public life, for it can only distract him from his quest for wisdom and knowledge of the summum bonum (the highest good) with its deceptive lures of wealth and advancement, which are subject to Fortune and so devoid of true worth. Wisdom consists, for Seneca, in learning to despise such things, thus liberating ourselves from servitude to the body, to our own misdirected passions and to Fortune. Petrarch echoes Seneca’s sentiments on all these things constantly throughout his writings. Here, he is telling us that he enjoys reading Cicero’s gossipy letters, and that his own as originally written may have resembled them more closely than they resembled Seneca’s, but he is also telling us that the editing process has taken him in a Senecan direction, cutting ‘much about everyday concerns’. Petrarch’s peculiar closeness to Seneca was recognized by the early commentator Squarzafico, who observes that Petrarch ‘imitates the density of Seneca rather than the fullness of Cicero, whence very often, because of this, I have called him the new Seneca’ (ille qui magis Senecae densitatem, quam Ciceronis amplitudinem imitatur, unde persaepe ex hoc recentiorem Senecam ipsum appellauerim), and Ronald Witt more recently argues: ‘the attitudes and sententious tone of Petrarch’s letters shows the overwhelming influence of Seneca’s Ad Lucilium epistulae morales’.¹⁹ As in Seneca, Petrarch’s famous fascination with observing and writing about his self, in all its vagaries and struggles, is always intimately bound up with such moral concerns, with an implied exemplary role in helping others to engage in morally salutary selfreflection. The prefatory letter describes the collection as ‘a sort of effigy of my mind, a simulacrum of my character’ (qualemcumque animi mei effigiem, atque ingenii simulachrum) which he is sending to his ‘Socrates’ (his friend Lodewyck Heyliger), recalling the way in which, according to Tacitus, Seneca before his suicide bequeathed to his friends ‘his one remaining, but most beautiful possession, the pattern of his life’ (unum iam et tamen pulcherrimum habeat, imaginem vitae suae, Tacitus, Annals 15.62).

One of the things Petrarch learns from Seneca is the very idea of literature as correspondence with the dead, transcending time.²⁰ Seneca takes from Cicero the idea of epistolary exchange as conversation, bringing distant correspondents into each other’s presence (e.g. Cicero, Ad Att. 7.15.1, ut loquerer tecum absens), and expands it to suggest that authors are present in their books, and that to read them is to commune with them: Cum libellis mihi plurimus sermo est. Si quando intervenerunt epistulae tuae, tecum esse mihi videor et sic afficior animo tamquam tibi non rescribam sed respondeam. (‘Most of my conversation is with books. Whenever your letters intervene, it seems to me that I am with you, and I feel as though I were about to speak my answer, not to write it.’) (Seneca, Epistles 67.2) Thus Seneca can choose the best and wisest as friends who will help him in his arduous journey to wisdom, rather than distracting him from it as living acquaintances so often do: ‘I spend my time in the company of all the best; no matter in what lands they may have lived, or in what age, I let my thoughts fly to them’. (62.2; cp. 52.7) Again, ‘We ought to spend our time in study, and to cultivate those who are masters of wisdom, learning something which has been investigated but not settled; by this means the mind can be relieved of a most wretched serfdom, and won over to freedom’. (104.16) Since Seneca, as Lucilius’ true friend, wishes to help him attain wisdom, Lucilius should live always as though Seneca were with him and watching, a kind of internal judge and guide (32.1); and in the same way, he should choose from among the ancients someone he particularly admires – a Cato or a Laelius – to be another internal guardian, another ever-present friend (11.10, 25.6, 104.21–22). He will benefit from their guidance, but add his own discoveries to theirs, because the attainment of wisdom is always a work in progress and a communal effort, in which what has already been learned is common property (33). He will bequeath his writings in turn to posterity, and thus all that Seneca has said of the living presence of ancient authors in their texts applies also to his texts as they are read in the future. Seneca’s immediate addressee is Lucilius, but he is also ‘working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them’, (posterorum negotium ago; illis aliqua, quae possint prodesse, conscribo, 8.2) and thus conversing with posterity (cum posteris loquor, 8.6) – with future readers of his epistles, including us. And just as Seneca’s letters always expect a reply from Lucilius – and just as philosophers are expected to add their discoveries to what they have found in the works of others – so the implication is that he expects a kind of reply from us.

Epistle 64 furnishes a beautiful illustration of Seneca on reading. He is describing to Lucilius a convivial conversation he enjoyed with guests the previous evening:

Lectus est deinde liber Quinti Sextii patris, magni, si quid mihi credis, viri et, licet neget, Stoici. Quantus in illo, di boni, vigor est, quantum animi! Hoc non in omnibus philosophis invenies; quorundam scripta clarum habentium nomen exanguia sunt. Instituunt, disputant, cavillantur, non faciunt animum, quia non habent; cum legeris Sextium, dices: ‘Vivit, viget, liber est, supra hominem est, dimittit me plenum ingentis fiduciae’. In qua positione mentis sim, cum hunc lego, fatebor tibi: libet omnis casus provocare, libet exclamare: ‘Quid cessas, fortuna? Congredere; paratum vides.’

We then had read to us the book of Quintus Sextius the Elder. He is a great man, if you have any confidence in my opinion, and a real Stoic, though he himself denies it. Ye Gods, what strength and spirit one finds in him! This is not the case with all philosophers; there are some men of illustrious name whose writings are anaemic. They lay down rules, they argue and they quibble; they do not infuse spirit simply because they have no spirit. But when you come to read Sextius, you will say: ‘He is alive; he is strong; he is free; he is more than a man; he sends me away filled with a mighty confidence’. I shall acknowledge to you the state of mind I am in when I read him: I want to challenge every hazard; I want to cry ‘Why keep me waiting, Fortune? Enter the lists! Behold, I am ready for you!’ (64.2–4)

Though Sextius is long dead (he lived in the time of Julius Caesar), he is ‘alive’ and ‘free’ in several senses. As a ‘real Stoic’, who knows the true value of things, he is free from subjection to Fortune and the body, and to enjoy such mental freedom is to be most alive. Since he has actually died, he has been liberated from the trammels of the body in a more literal and Platonic sense, too. As Seneca explains in the very next letter (65), while pondering the thoughts of different schools of philosophy about the nature of the First Cause, the freedom of philosophy is a foretaste of such post mortem freedom:²¹

these questions…elevate and lighten the soul, which is weighted down by a heavy burden and desires to be freed and to return to the elements of which it was once a part. For this body of ours is a weight upon the soul and its penance; as the load presses down the soul is crushed and is in bondage, unless philosophy has come to its assistance and has bid it take fresh courage by contemplating the universe, and has turned it from things earthly to things divine. There it has its liberty, there it can roam abroad; meantime it escapes the custody in which it is bound, and renews its life in heaven. (65.16)

Most suggestively, Sextius is equated with his writings, and these are full of strength and spirit (vigor, animi) because of their rhetorical enargeia, their vivid and rousing style. Where the writings of many others are anaemic in their dull, dry argumentation – literally ‘bloodless’ (exanguia), like sickly men – and cannot infuse (literally ‘make’ or ‘bring forth’, faciunt) spirit because they have none, Sextius vividly shows you the grandeur of the happy life (ostendet tibi beatae vitae magnitudinem, 65.5) and inspires you with the courage to attain it, to enter the lists against Fortune. Sextius’ animus is alive and free because it is supra hominem and detached from his mortal body in all these ways, and can both ‘roam abroad’ through the heavens and flow through new readers. There is a hidden pun in Seneca’s exclamatory liber est: he is free (līber) in part because he is a book (l˘ber), and one with the rhetorical energy and moral truth to liberate the receptive and responsive reader.²²

Petrarch shares a great deal with Seneca throughout his writings, frequently quoting him, and even more frequently repeating his thoughts in different words (a process he declares at Fam. 23.19 the more artful form of imitation, citing Seneca’s epistle 84 as authority).²³ Fundamental in both is the focus on the brevity of life, the worthlessness of the gifts of fortune and the things of the body, scorn for the pettiness and corruption of contemporary society, and the desire to retreat from the bustling city into a peaceful setting to commune with their books and pursue the care of the self which leads to wisdom and the happy life. Other classical writers were also important to Petrarch, of course – especially Cicero, and, in his poetic career, Virgil –but his relationship with books, and thus with all these writers, is deeply and consciously informed by Seneca’s ideas about reading, about his own place as a writer in the continuum of written philosophy, and about his participation in a ‘counter-society of philosophers’, a ‘society of the imagination’, an intellectual community which transcends space and time.²⁴ Like Seneca, Petrarch spends his jealously guarded time ‘in the company of all the best’ (Seneca 62.2). Writing of his retreat at Vaucluse, for instance:

Escaping lately, as is my custom, the noise of this hateful city, I took refuge in my transalpine Helicon, and with me came your Cicero. He was amazed by the place, which was new to him, and confessed that he had never been more at home in his Arpinate, ringed with chilly streams (I quote him directly),²⁵ than he was with me at the fountain of Vaucluse…Cicero and I spent ten tranquil, leisurely days together; and I think he enjoyed his stay and liked my company. Cicero was accompanied by many eminent, superior men… (Familiares 12.8)

He goes on to list a host of classical figures, who form part of the company because Petrarch is reading about them