Virgilian Katabasis and Trojan Genealogy in Early Modern Italian Poetry

This paper explores the Early Modern Italian reception of Aeneid VI, by way of examining the specific thread of the genealogical-encomiastic reworking of Aeneas’ descent to the afterworld in the works of Neo-Latin and vernacular poets of XV and XVI centuries. In Early modern Italian poetry, the “descent to the afterworld” of Virgilian mould had become a veritable topos: by the early Cinquecento, in Italy, Aeneid VI had already had a long and heterogeneous record of imitations, where the Virgilian model had intersected other strands of tradition. What is more, by that date Aeneid VI had also known other levels of circulation (oral, popular), and had been manipulated to pursue different issues. Of these, the genealogical issue was especially crucial: the encomiastic device in Aeneid VI had long since spurred dynasts all over Europe to compete for the title of legitimate heir to Troy, in an attempt to to challenge on equal grounds Rome’s boasting of being the sole and legitimate heir to universal empire. Thus, as they each picked their own Trojan founder, early modern Italian dynasts also strove to discredit Rome as natural siege of the Empire and Aeneas as its founder. To do this, they could rely on a wealth of ancient tradition that blamed Troy’s fall on the betrayal of Aeneas and gave an overall reversed narrative of all Troy-related events as we have since learned to know them from Homeric poems.