Boccaccio: The Genealogies of MythAuthor(s): Thomas HydeReviewed work(s):Source: PMLA, Vol. 100, No. 5 (Oct., 1985), pp. 737-745Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462094 .Accessed: 08/05/2012 09:07

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THOMAS HYDE

Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

TO WRITE greatly, Boccaccio argues in the defense of poetry that ends the Genealogia deorum, "it is necessary ... .to behold the

monuments of the Ancients, to have in one's memory the histories of the nations, and to be fa- miliar with the geography of various lands, of seas, of rivers, and mountains" (Osgood 40; 14.7).' This description of the learning required of the new doctus poeta reads like a catalog of Boccaccio's own humanistic works. The Genealo- gia deorum, the De claris mulieribus, and the De casibus virorum illustrium provide the required monuments and histories, while Boccaccio's geo- graphical dictionary answers precisely the stated needs in books entitled De nominibus maris, De fluminibus, and De montibus. In all these works, and especially in the Genealogy, Boccaccio dis- plays the learning that justifies his self-coronation as one of the "three Florentine crowns" of the early Renaissance, but his stated purpose is to provide for future poets, who, as they study the memorials and remains of the ancients, will find his work useful (15.1). Useful they did find it, if we can judge by the numbers of Latin manu- scripts and editions and by the vernacular trans- lations that continued to pour from the press long after sixteenth-century mythographies had su- perseded it as a work of scholarship. Allusions and borrowings stud the literature of the next two centuries. Modern scholars too have found the Genealogy useful as a compendium of quaint al- legories, a reference manual to the undermeanings that myths may have in Renaissance poetry.

Its very usefulness as a reference book, however, has blinded us to its other virtues. Utility was not Boccaccio's only aim in the work that occupied him for thirty years and that both he and his con- temporaries regarded as his magnum opus, nor does utility adequately account for its value to Renaissance readers. Unlike a straightforward reference book, the Genealogy is crossed by com- promise and conflict-between utility and unity, reverence and ridicule, guilt and confidence, nostalgia and progressiveness, secularism and or- thodoxy. For its early readers these conflicts

seemed inevitable and the compromises exem- plary. Both emerge precisely in the features of the book that contribute little to, or even hinder, its usefulness as a reference work-namely, in the metaphorical voyaging related in the proems of each book and in the idea of genealogy itself, the scheme that gives order both to the chaos of an- cient mythology and to Boccaccio's book. It is not an overstatement that the Genealogy presents, alongside its mythological material, two plots, two historical itineraries, that struggle toward each other in time but never meet. In these plots, Bo- ccaccio dramatizes his efforts as a mythographer and the historical discontinuity or rupture that both occasions and frustrates them.2

One of the plots-the subject of this essay- traces the posterity of the gods as it runs from pri- mal, chthonic deities through Olympians, demigods, and heroes to the legendary founders of cities and their mortal descendants. As an ac- tion, the genealogical plot is extremely simple, consisting of the single action repeated in the chapter rubrics, like those on the genealogy of Ae- neas in book 6:

L. De Capi filio Assaraci, qui genuit Anchisem LI. De Anchise filio Capis, qui genuit Hyppodamiam

et Eneam LIII. De Enea Anchisis filio, qui genuit Julium As-

canium et Silvium Postumum LIV. De Ascanio Enee filio, qui genuit Julium Silvium

et Rhomam. (319-27, 428; my emphasis)

This repeated begetting produces complex lin- eages, but the lines of genealogical plot begin to run out in antiquity itself and end forever with the advent of Christ. The pagan gods "are not merely dormant or asleep," Boccaccio claims; "they have been buried forever, beyond any possibility of resurrection by the holy teaching of Christ" (Os- good 135; 15.11). The posterity of the gods, the genealogical plot of Boccaccio's book, therefore breaks off without present issue.

The irredeemable death of the gods may ease the author's Christian conscience, but another name for it is the extinction of myth-precisely

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the lack that Boccaccio undertakes to remedy and repeatedly figures as resurrection:

Who in our day can penetrate the hearts of the An- cients? Who can bring to light and life again minds long since removed in death? Who can elicit their mean- ing? A divine task that, not human!

(Osgood 11; 1.proem)

These dead are not the gods but the antique poets, whom Boccaccio would revive in order to revive poetry itself, to reestablish and legitimize a line of poetry descending from the classics. He intends the abortive genealogy of the gods to serve the on- going genealogy of poets, but the relation of the means to the end remains uneasy. Boccaccio never completely convinces even himself that he can re- claim the patrimony of myth without reviving the false gods. The danger of apostasy is implicit within the genealogical plot of his book.

In the other plot, the mythographer undertakes an epistemological quest, voyaging the seas of fact and fiction to seek relics of the ancient gods. Pat- terned on ancient and medieval epic voyages, his quest self-consciously inaugurates a heroic age of scholarship and forms a prototype for the fantas- tic voyages of later Renaissance fictions. But be- cause its object is antiquity itself, the quest too breaks off unfulfilled. "A divine task that, not human!"

The metaphorical voyaging of the proems at once mythologizes the dusty work of scholarship and makes possible a direct encounter with the object of the quest, if only in imagination. But that direct encounter, invoked or hinted at repeat- edly, never occurs. Tracing the wanderings of his genealogical plot, Boccaccio beholds only illusory spectacles, "half-consumed corpses" (4.proem), and "ruins" (5.proem). The blocked rhetoric of a sentence from the proem to book 5 describes the fate of the whole quest: "I looked toward I will not say Athens, but a small trace of it almost con- sumed as I looked" 'aspexi non dicam Athinas, sed earum dum fere consumptum parvumque ves- tigium intuerer.' The syntax hints at causality, as if looking produced the ruins, while the anacolu- thon imitates Boccaccio's regular attention to ex- tant ruins, whatever glorious original state might be preserved in literature or depicted in imagina- tion. Without the plot of the mythographer's quest, Boccaccio could not have immediately measured these modern ruins against ancient

glories, and he could not have presented that measurement as a species of heroism.

Though the Genealogy's two plots occasionally seem to intersect, they never join. Unlike the nar- rators of the Decameron, the De viris, or the De claris mulieribus, Boccaccio's heroic mythogra- pher cannot venture beyond the frame of his proems to mingle with his material. Similarly, his material breaks off at the frontier between legend and history, with a chapter explaining why Alex- ander and Scipio are not included among the sons of Jove. In the mythological chapters, Boccaccio does offer judgments in the first person, but his voice remains detached, and what narrative occurs is surprisingly routinized for the author of the Decameron. The two plots of the Genealogy pres- ent, then, two versions of the mythographer-one heroic, engaged, and imperiled; the other studi- ous, detached, and safe. The two versions remain unreconciled throughout the book. In their unsta- ble relation, and the relation of the two plots from which they emerge, the Genealogy presents itself and characterizes the conflicts and compromises that make it not merely a compendium of mythol- ogy but a literary enactment of what one scholar has called "the romance of early humanism" (Giamatti).

Although Boccaccio's genealogy of the gods was far from the first, earlier compilations were mere lists, and it is worth emphasizing the odd- ity of using genealogy to structure a vast ency- clopedia.3 The Genealogy is divided into books, each treating a branch of the divine family and each subdivided into chapters that treat members of the branch individually. After the work had taken shape, Boccaccio continued to add informa- tion in the margins, and the many chapters that merely record a name and parentage seem to in- vite such annotation in the future. Both facts sug- gest Boccaccio's belief that the book's data might be supplemented or corrected but that its genea- logical structure would stand. In the manuscripts, this structure occurs twice more-in the trees that preface each book and diagram its contents and again in the table of rubrics, which assembles all the chapter headings.

Boccaccio commended the thrice-repeated genealogical structure as "convenient both for finding what you seek and for remembering bet- ter what you wish" (l.proem), but he must have

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recognized its inconvenience for purposes of refer- ence as well as the obvious remedy. His geographi- cal dictionary is alphabetical, but the Genealogy lacked an alphabetical index until, at the urging of Salutati, Domenico Bandini compiled the in- dex that appears in several manuscripts and in the first seven printed editions. Justifying his labors, Bandini cited the work's inconvenient structure ("prolixitate infinitarumque rerum structure"), but the preface to the index in the printed editions makes the point more revealingly. "It is extremely difficult for anyone wishing to find a history or fable even in the rubrics, unless he reads almost all of them" (Wilkins, University 24). Boccaccio chose to provide, however, not an alphabetical in- dex, but rather a table of rubrics, which simply catalogs the book's contents. To use the rubrics or the trees was to reread the book and find its unifying structure summarized, rather than reduced to some more convenient alternative. For Boccaccio, unity must have been worth the price of inconvenience.

Unity must also have been worth a greater price, for the genealogies that Boccaccio untir- ingly pursues have the effect-paradoxical in a work dedicated to collecting the disjecta membra of mythology-of breaking up individual myths and dispersing their characters among various lineages. Can a narrative artist of Boccaccio's skill have failed to share our sense of dismemberment when, for example, he divided the tale of Dido and Aeneas between two chapters five books apart or when he dispersed Medusa, Perseus, and Pega- sus, cited as a sample myth in 1.3, among three chapters in two books? Apollodorus, Fulgentius, Hyginus, the Vatican mythographers all had cast their mythological material into discrete units, but all had also preserved the integrity of their myths as narratives. These two clear disadvantages- inconvenience of reference and fragmentation of material-bring out the oddity of choosing genealogy to order a huge encyclopedia. If geneal- ogy unifies the body of ancient myth, what kind of unity does it offer? How can that unity be worth its costs?

In using genealogy to reunite the mythical pan- theon, Boccaccio was returning to the principle that had unified it in the first place. Hesiod used genealogy to conflate the Homeric gods with a chaotic mingle of local cults and traditions and to add his own speculative mythmaking. Later Greeks recognized the result as the quasi-

systematic Olympian pantheon. Homer and Hesiod "taught the Greeks the generations of the gods," according to Herodotus, "and gave them their names, determined their functions and arts, and depicted their shapes" (Historiae 2.53).4 Hesiod's genealogies organize the gods into both a hierarchy and a history, but unlike the Works and Days, with its myth of the four ages, the The- ogony does not stress historical degeneration. In neither poem does historical decline or genealog- ical attenuation demythologize the gods or call their divinity into question. For Hesiod, hierarchy and pedigree metaphorically express the single and integral order of the cosmos.

While Boccaccio's genealogies also organize and unify the pantheon, they otherwise work quite counter to Hesiod's. Boccaccio treats the geneal- ogy of the gods, not as a figure for the divine or- der, but as historical fact; their divinity becomes metaphorical. Euhemerism-the ancient rationali- zation of the gods as great mortals deified by poets-is not only a regular tactic in individual chapters, it is implicit in the way Boccaccio uses genealogy to structure the whole work. Once demythologized as poetic fictions referring to great men or to truths of physical nature or moral philosophy, the gods can be subsumed and even affirmed within history conceived as human and secular.

Boccaccio's twin concerns for reunifying the pantheon and revealing it as a human artifact are imaged, indeed incorporated, in several passages that develop the metaphor of the book as a body. As the scriptural metaphor for the church's unity, corpus strongly implies a unified whole with many members. In antiquity, corpus routinely meant a comprehensive collection, compendium, or ency- clopedia, but Boccaccio resurrects the metaphor buried in this routine usage. The idea of the book as a body first emerges in the preface when Bo- ccaccio asserts the impossibility of surveying all varieties of paganism and defends limiting him- self to Greece and Rome. The narrowing of scope is justified, he argues, because the monster that was paganism contained two bodies, one barbar- ian, one Greek and Roman ("sunt monstro sint huic corpora duo, barbaricum unum et grecum at- que latinum reliquum" [5]). Boccaccio's labor, though still heroic, will no longer be futile, and he sets forth to seek everywhere for relics of the gen- tile gods, dispersed like fragments of a mighty wreck:

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Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

These relics, scattered through almost infinite volumes, shrunk with age, half consumed, well-nigh a blank, I will bring into such single genealogical order [in unum genelogie corpus] as I can. . . . (Osgood 11)

This single corpus will comprise one of the origi- nal monster's two bodies, and it will have a body's unity, though Boccaccio warns his patron, Hugo the King of Cyprus, not to expect too much. "Why, if another Prometheus [Prometheus alter] should rise again and appear, or the man himself who, as poets say, once made men from clay, I hardly think they would be equal to this task, let alone me" (Osgood 11). Therefore, Hugo should not expect a finished work, a "corpus . . . per- fectum." Finally, toward the end of the preface, the maimed but single body of the book becomes both mythological and human. Invoking God's help, Boccaccio reflects on his task:

I can quite realize this labor to which I am committed-this huge body of gentile gods and their offspring [corpus deorum procerumque gentilium], torn limb from limb and scattered among the rough and des- ert places of Antiquity and the thorns of hate, wasted away, sunk almost to ashes; and here am I setting forth to collect these fragments, hither and yon, and fit them together, like another Aesculapius restoring Hippolytus.

(Osgood 13)

In Prometheus and Aesculapius, both mortals punished for infringing divine prerogatives, Bo- ccaccio shadows the goals and dangers of his en- terprise and the efforts of later humanists (Giamatti 6-8; Marino). Furthermore, as Bocca- ccio moves from denying that he is a Prometheus alter to presenting himself as an Aesculapius al- ter, the body of antique myth emerges as no longer monstrous but human-maimed and im- perfect at first but finally restored in the shape of Hippolytus. In the emerging human shape of the corpus mythicarum, Boccaccio's preface figures the book's double goals of restoring the unity of the ancient myths and of revealing the human, secular truths within them.

But has the human shape of his material been too easily achieved? This question promptly arises in a further prefatory section entitled "Who among the Gentiles Was Held to Be the First God?" Using the same sort of revived metaphor that unified the old gods into a single body, Bo- ccaccio now represents the first of them as its head. But because the ancients had diverse ideas

about the first god, "not only did they make this beast [paganism] in the likeness of three-headed Cerberus but, worse, they tried to describe it as a monster [monstrum] of many heads" (11).5 Con- flict among ancient authorities threatens to make the mythological corpus monstrous again and also to deform the shape of Boccaccio's book. In seek- ing the first god, Boccaccio is also seeking his book's beginning, the origin or source of its genealogies, the root of its trees-all senses within the lexical range of caput. When, after canvass- ing ancient authorities, he finally settles on the mysterious Theodontius and his primal deity Demogorgon, Boccaccio returns to the figure of the many-headed monster:

So therefore, once all these things have been considered and all these other, or rather superfluous, heads have been cut off and made once again only limbs, and imagining that we have found the beginning of our journey, . . . we shall enter on the rugged way, descending into the earth's entrails at Tainaron or Etna.

(12)

The body has again one head, the book one be- ginning, and at the same time Boccaccio subtly associates himself with the greatest of mythical heroes, Hercules, victor over many-headed Hydra, tamer of Cerberus, who entered the underworld at Tainaron, precisely where Boccaccio now pro- poses to begin his genealogical quest (see 9.33). Hercules will later become a more ambivalent model for Boccaccio's labors; here, as mon- struosarum domitor 'tamer of monsters' (13.proem), he complements the earlier models Prometheus and Aesculapius. The mythographer must not only shape his dusty and dismembered material to human form but overcome its mon- strosity, bind it in adamantine chains, and bring it once more to light.

The figure of the Genealogy as a body returns once more in the fifteenth, and final, book when Boccaccio anticipates criticism of the work's form. Some readers "will above all point to a de- fect of construction-a broad chest protruding from the pate, legs from the chest, and feet from where the head ought to be" (Osgood 107; 15.3). Boccaccio may be like a collector of ancient statu- ary who assembles the right number of human fragments but still produces only a grotesque. In defense, he claims only that he has done his best to discover "the most ancient head" and join it

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successively to the chest and other members. "If other genealogies are truer or better arranged," he does not know them. Though he has turned over many volumes, he does not know a better order in which to combine the members of "so vast a body." In this passage, Boccaccio is adapting the first lines of Horace's Ars poetica, which urge ar- tistic unity by mocking a painter who might join a human head to the neck of a horse and spread many colored feathers over limbs picked up here and there ("undique collatis membris"). By both argument and allusion, then, this last appearance of the book as a body insists both on the unity of its myths and on their human shape and scale.

Petrarch wrote a verse from the Vulgate's psalm 95 in the margin of the Latin Iliad he received from Boccaccio. "Omnes dei gentium demonia" 'All the gods of the nations are idols.'6 Bo- ccaccio's humanism in the Genealogy sets itself against this discouraging orthodoxy but also against the occasional tendency in the late Mid- dle Ages to believe that all fables might conceal, or at least convey, the truths of Christian doctrine. Anagogic interpretations are extremely rare in the Genealogy, and allegorical readings reveal truths of ethical or natural philosophy rather than doc- trines specific to Christianity. But, at the same time, Boccaccio detaches mythology from pagan religion by avoiding any mention of cults. Thus disinfected of belief and euhemeristically reduced to human history, myths appear as poetic records of a secular civilization.

This secularization of myths was nothing new; Fulgentius had done almost the same thing. Bo- ccaccio's innovation was structural; what sets the Genealogy apart from earlier mythographies is the way that its structure enacts an engagement with its material-enacts, in fact, the sense of histori- cal rupture that defines the early Renaissance. Where the Saturnalia, with its dialogues of the dead, enacts continuity and revival to counter Macrobius's sense of belatedness and decline (Kasler), the Genealogy, with its severed plots and closed-off lineage, enacts Boccaccio's sense of dis- continuity, of the impossibility of dialogue with antiquity. But the import of the book's structure emerges most clearly from contrast with Ovid's two encyclopedic poems. The contrast may have been deliberate, since Boccaccio probably saw himself as a new Ovid, just as he saw in Dante a

new Vergil.7 Boccaccio owned a manuscript of the Fasti and cited it some thirty-five times in the Genealogy, but it must have served him as a nega- tive model. It subordinates mythology to the rites of Roman religion, which Boccaccio needed to ig- nore in the interests of secularization, and its calendrical structure, reckoning time by the cycle of the seasons, offered him no acceptable means of relating himself to his material.

The Metamorphoses provided a closer model, especially since so much medieval mythography took the form of Ovidian commentary. Like Ovid's poem, Boccaccio's work has fifteen books, the last of which are more discursive or philosophical than the others. Like the Genealogy, the Metamorphoses is encyclopedic, assembling individual myths into a carmen perpetuum, a con- tinuous and historically organized whole. The historical structure of the Metamorphoses runs from the beginning of the world to the Augustan present, which it purports, however ironically, to charter as the culmination of its mythologized history. In structure, Boccaccio's encyclopedia reinforces both the historical and the charter func- tions of Ovid's poem, but only to emphasize a departure from them. Where Ovid contrives a narrative unity that is historical only in semblance, Boccaccio sacrifices the unity of his narratives to a genealogical structure that is essentially histor- ical. Furthermore, since at least the sixth century BC prose genealogies have been used to link na- tional dynasties or aristocratic families to their supposed founders in an earlier, heroic age and thus to charter present dispositions of power, property, and prestige. Italian princes in Bocca- ccio's time flattered themselves too with heroic an- cestries, as did communes-Padua, for instance, which claimed Antenor as its founder. By contrast with Ovid's merely narrative continuity, Bocca- ccio's genealogical structure makes clear the fail- ure of antiquity to charter anything in modern culture. Where Ovid ends by describing the deifi- cation of Julius Caesar and anticipating that of Augustus, Boccaccio ends by denying the divine ancestry of Alexander and Scipio. Boccaccio finds no legendary and exemplary ancestor for Hugo of Cyprus, as Vergil had done for Augustus and as Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and others would later do for their patrons. The continuity built into the Genealogy's structure emphasizes all the more the discontinuity of its close, the historical rupture that divides antique myths from modern readers.

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Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

Boccaccio, however, is profoundly ambivalent about this historical rupture. If it disinherits moderns from the cultural wealth of antiquity, it also saves them from damnation. It demystifies and dismembers the myths, but it also justifies them as poetic theology and thus makes possible Boccaccio's defense of poetry by analogy with Christian theology and Scripture. This analogy too is implicit within the literary history of Bo- ccaccio's genealogical structure, which owes less to pagan than to Christian forebears, whom it regards with the mixed aggression and guilt of an illegitimate and disinherited descendant.

The Genealogy owes its structure ultimately to the Bible. Its mythical generations, as recorded in the chapter headings and table of rubrics, echo, and allude to, genealogical passages in the vulgate of both testaments. For example, in the genealogy of Aeneas quoted above, compare the formula "X genuit Y" with Genesis 4.18: "Porro Enoch genuit Irad et Irad genuit Maviahel et Maviahel genuit Matusahel et Matusahel genuit Lamech" and so forth.8 Both the Old Testament and the New be- gin with books presenting themselves as genealo- gies, Genesis as "the book of the generations of Adam" (5.1), Matthew as "the book of the gener- ations of Jesus Christ" (1.1). In ancient Hebrew, the same word, toledot, means both generation and history, so that the Bible passes on to Euse- bius, Jerome, and their medieval followers an es- sentially genealogical mode of universal history (Bloch 37-39). Boccaccio is usually said to have unconsciously assimilated this standard mode of Christian historiography to his pagan material and so marked himself "as a child of the Middle Ages."9 But in fact his use of the genealogical mode realizes an analogy with the Bible in many other ways. The trees that preface each book, for example, derive from the Jesse trees that often preface the gospel of Matthew, and Boccaccio's are the earliest nonbiblical examples of genealog- ical trees (Wilkins, "Genealogy" 61). Like the Bi- ble, the Genealogy represents an entire literature collapsed into a single canonical book, a fact that may help to account for the lack of critical sense that has disturbed scholars.10 Traditional Chris- tianity has always resisted critical discrimination among the books and authors of the Bible. Fi- nally, the Genealogy, with its highly articulated structure and its departure from the commentary form, somewhat resembles the scholastic summa. "

This sustained analogy with Christian Scripture and theology suggests that the Genealogy's struc- ture carries out the terms of Boccaccio's defense of poetry, or that the defense of poetry makes ex- plicit some implications of the structure: the pa- gan poets were theologi (15.8), and their fables and metaphors can be justified by analogy with biblical fables and metaphors. Augustine's com- ments on biblical obscurities can be used to justify obscurities in the poets (14.12). And there are other ways-some playful, some guilty-in which Boccaccio extends the analogy. For example, he borrows the Pauline terminology of conversion to urge the detractors of poetry "to put off the old mind and to put on the new . . ." (14.12). And his defense of poetry in the last two books not only engages contemporary (often Dominican) enemies of poetry but resumes a millennium-old debate in which his opponents are the likes of Lactantius, who is turned against himself by Bo- ccaccio, the apologist for poetry, just as the an- cient poets were turned against paganism by Christian apologists. These sorts of ambivalent impulse or bad conscience can best be explored in connection with the second plot of the Genealogy-Boccaccio's voyaging the Mediterra- nean world as if he were another Paul, an apos- tle not to, but from, the gentiles-but that is another essay.

Here we need to trace one last implication of Boccaccio's genealogical structure-the way that genealogy constitutes authority. Biblical genealo- gies serve in part to guarantee the chain of trans- mission by which authority descends to the present writer (Speiser xxiv). But the lineages of the gods do not include or place Boccaccio. His authority as mythographer does not descend in- stitutionally from them, and this too helps to ac- count for his "lack of critical sense." His sense of historical isolation precludes a fully explicit and scholarly genealogy of his own authorities. The poet he can call "father" is Dante or Petrarch, not Vergil.

These issues-both the genealogical urge toward defining origins from which authority de- rives and the freedom as well as the frustration of being cut off from any line of authority-crystal- lize at the end of Boccaccio's preface, which be- gins the book by searching for its proper beginning, for the first of the gods, the beginning of the line. Boccaccio's first god, mocked by later scholars but imitated by poets, was Demogorgon,

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who, far from being a founding father, was in fact a belated bastard, a deified scribal error in a com- mentary on Statius.'2 Boccaccio attributes Demo- gorgon to Theodontius, a favorite authority but one otherwise unknown to scholarship. Some have suspected that Boccaccio made up this mysterious source, just as later Renaissance fabulists would make up Bishop Turpin and Cid Hamete.

Unless a manuscript should come to light, how- ever, Theodontius's authenticity will remain a fu- tile question. The commentator on fabulous stories, as Quintillian argues, "has such full scope for invention, that he can tell lies to his heart's content about whole books and authors without fear of detection: for what has never existed can obviously never be found" (1.8.21). What is at is- sue in the Genealogy, moreover, is not really The- odontius's authenticity but rather his authority and the ways in which, at the outset of the book, his authority or lack of it enacts the paradoxes of Boccaccio's genealogical structure. Boccaccio val- ued Theodontius as a source of information, es- pecially genealogical information, unavailable elsewhere (Hortis 468). For Boccaccio, in other words, Theodontius's authority derives from the very lack of corroboration that later scholars like Giraldi would mock. Whether, as he claims, Bo- ccaccio found Theodontius in Paul of Perugia's li- brary or made him up, Theodontius's authority remains a case of make-believe, like Demogorgon himself. In the fictive world of Boccaccio's book, the distinction between historia and fabula lapses even while it is insisted on as a postulate of in- terpretation.

This claim is paradoxical, and I shall end by showing how it is borne out in Boccaccio's pro- logue scene, his search for the first god. It turns out to be a double search, among competing authorities as well as among competing gods, and it arrives at the mythical origin only by way of the origin of myth. The real origin of the gods, Bo- ccaccio argues, was credulity-the credulity of rustics and poets who explained the first cause of things by calling it the first god, father and founder of all the rest. The gods are fictions, in other words, but Boccaccio counters this exposure of fiction by fictionalizing his own activity. Every- where else in the Genealogy, he cites authorities as dryly as a scholastic, but here he engages them in dialogue: "I asked [Thales] to tell me who he thought was the first of the gods. He immediately replied . .." (11). But Thales and those who

follow-Anaximenes, Chrisippus, Alcmaeus, Mac- robius, and Theodontius-do not answer Bocca- ccio's question. They answer as if he had asked, "What do you take to be the first cause?" show- ing that they do not mistake poetic figures for dei- ties and thus do not share the credulity that, according to Boccaccio's argument, produced paganism.

Boccaccio runs through his sequence of authorities again, making explicit the genealogy of mythical genealogy. The poets who followed Thales, for example, "gave the element water the name Oceanus and called him the father of all things and of men and gods, and from this genealogy they derived the first of the gods" (12). These genealogies are backward, then, regressive; they do not derive from an origin but create it; they generate what will be called their progenitors. Once this process of backward genealogy is un- derstood, then we too can use it. "Thus we could have imagined [fecisse] that some would have thought Oceanus to be the son of Caelus," even if we had not discovered ("invenissemus") the kin- ship in any source. Boccaccio diagrams the same process in each of his genealogical trees, which are upside down ("versa in caelum radice"), as he notes in the rubrics to both 1 and 2, calling atten- tion at the outset to the backwardness of these genealogies. The same process is at work in hundreds of individual chapters that move from recounting a fable to disclosing its sensus, which Boccaccio presents both as something prior to the fable, its origin, and as something added later. Fi- nally, Boccaccio arrives at the second object of the prologue quest, the authority to follow in deciding on the first god, by precisely this kind of backward progression. He runs through his se- quence of authorities twice and clearly marks its chronological order-from antiquissimus Thales through Macrobius, juniorem omnium, and then, in another era, Theodontius, identified as a nov- us homo. To Boccaccio this characteristically am- bivalent phrase means both a modern man and, from Pauline usage, a redeemed Christian, but to Cicero it meant a new-made man, an upstart, a parvenu. Theodontius is all these things. The- odontius names Demogorgon, of course, so that Boccaccio's double search ends with a kind of paradox-the newest author identifying the old- est god.

The search for the beginning that begins the Genealogy includes one other reflection on the

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paradoxes of its own endeavor. All the ancients that Boccaccio cites speak on their own authority and record their own beliefs about the first cause. But Theodontius reports the opinion of "the most ancient Arcadians." As a novus homo, he holds beliefs that differ from those of the ancients he studies. Unlike them, he cannot speak firsthand; yet-and Boccaccio footnotes the omission- Theodontius reports the ancient Arcadian belief without citing his authority: naming no one ("neminem nominando"). This no one, the authority of "no one," returns when Boccaccio comes to declare his own opinion: Demogorgon "I truly hold to be the father and the first of all the gentile gods, because I have found no one [neminem] to have been his father according to the poetic fictions" (12). Theodontius names no one; Boccaccio finds no one named as Demogor- gon's father. Though distinct in their contexts, these two citations of "no one" reflect the paradoxes of both authority and genealogy in Boccaccio's book. The origin is precisely the vanishing point of authority, and so it is as much made as found. Boccaccio had claimed that un- derstanding the regressiveness of mythical geneal- ogy allows us to hypothesize or make up a genealogy even if we have not found it in our authorities. Now, in concluding, he returns to the same pair of terms: facio 'make' and invenio 'find or discover' (though invenio itself includes the ambivalence I am discussing, since it also means "invent" or "contrive"). After considering all these things and lopping off all these superfluous heads, Boccaccio concludes, "Imagining that we have found [adinvenisse] the beginning of our journey and making [facientes] Demogorgon the father, not of things, but of the gentile gods, we

shall enter on the rugged way . . ." (12). Boccaccio's steady aim in the Genealogy is to

reestablish the line of poets and to authorize their fictions. But his claim to authority for fiction verges on the claim only to fictive authority. Authority does not descend to him as a poet's in- stitutional inheritance; he must re-create it. In the midst of the modern world, cut off from the ori- gins he values, he must make his claim, make it good, perhaps make it up.

I want to end with an afterthought that I hope will clinch my argument. The retrograde genera- tion, the backward remaking of genealogy, whose paradoxes I have been trying to describe, would have had a personal application for Giovanni Bo- ccaccio. He was himself illegitimate, and in 1360 he applied for and received a papal dispensation "super defectu natalium" 'for illegitimate birth' (Branca 119). Boccaccio's vernacular poems tell again and again the tale of foundlings recognized and restored to their birthrights, and he himself liked to pretend to be descended through his un- known mother from the kings of France and thus from Hector and Dardanus. Perhaps we ought to see the genealogical structure of his great ency- clopedia, then, as a final generalization of his per- sonal burden into an image for the new age he helped to inaugurate. An illegitimate and upstart age, cast loose from historical succession, at sea, attempting with an uneasy combination of aggres- sion and filial piety to adopt a foster parent, wish- ing for legitimacy but unwilling to accept its imaginative restraints, struggling greedily and guiltily to inherit.

Yale University New Haven, Connecticut

Notes 1 I cite Romano's edition of Boccaccio's autograph manu-

script by book and chapter numbers for convenience of refer- ence to other editions. Translations not attributed to Osgood are my own.

2 For the ideas of historical itinerary and rupture, see Greene 66-72, 81-93.

3 Earlier genealogies of the gods include Hyginus 1-5; the first Vatican mythographer (Bode 63); Paul of Perugia; and Forese da Donati and Franceschino degli Albizzi, both reprinted by Hortis as apps. 1 and 2.

4 Hesiod's use of genealogy might have been known to Bo- ccaccio through Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 1.5. In Bo-

ccaccio's generation, after long neglect, Hesiod had begun to be paired with Homer. See, for example, Petrarch's request to Nicola Sygeros for a manuscript (Familiari 18.2, 13).

5 Hecker omitted this section of the preface from his edi- tion of the preface, proems, and books 14 and 15. Osgood, who used Hecker's text, also omitted it.

6 See Nolhac 2: 178. Boccaccio quotes this verse in 15.9. For the Latin Iliad, see Branca 115-17.

7 For Boccaccio's associations with Ovid, see Hollander 112 and Hortis 400.

8 For other genealogies in Scripture, see Gen. 5.10, 11.10-32; 1 Chron. 1-9; Matt. 1.1-17; and Luke 3.23-38. On biblical

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genealogies see Wilson; for early pagan genealogies and their affiliations with the Bible, see van Seters.

9 This judgment by Coulter (323) is quoted by Seznec with only slight reservations (220).

10 See Seznec 220-24 and, for the Bible as a collapsed liter-

ature, Nohrnberg 14-15. 11 On the form of the summa see Panofsky 30-36 and

Chenu 291-300. 12 For Demogorgon, see Landi; Castelain; and Quint

202-03.

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Chenu, M.-D. Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Cen- tury. Trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.

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