Virgil

Virgil’s influence is very strong and highly visible in the Furioso as is clear from the beginning of the first verse: ‘Le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori’, explicitly modelled upon the incipit to the Aeneid: ‘Arma virumque cano’. Also attributable to Virgil is the famous episode about Cloridano and Medoro, inspired by Eurialus and Niso’s sortie into the Rutulian camp, described in Aeneid IX, 176 ff. Ariosto also borrowed  the story of Opleo and Dimante from  Stazio’s Tebaide (X, 347, ff.). Whilst he borrows from that same author the idea the two warriors have of going to the battlefield to bury the body of Dardinello, and also Dimante’s prayer to the moon, which derives from Medoro’s very similar prayer. It is again from Virgil that Ariosto takes the idea of the description of the massacre of the Christians caught in their sleep and all the second part of the episode with the arrival of Zerbino, the flight and the wounding of Medoro and the death of Cloridano (XVIII, 188-192; XIX, 3-15). Let us take a closer look at how the work of these two authors are intimately linked. In Furioso, XIX, 166, 1-2: ‘Cloridan, cacciator tutta sua vita, / di robusta persona era et insella’ clearly recalls the Aeneid, IX, 176-178: ‘acerrimus armis, Hyrtacides, comitem Aeneae, quem miserat Ida Venatrix, iaculo celerem levibusque sagittis’, whilst the description of Medoro, XIX, 166, 3-8: ‘Medoro avea la guancia colorita / e bianca e grata ne la età novella; /e fra la gente a quella impresa uscita / non era faccia più gioconda e bella: / occhi avea neri, e chioma crespa d’oro: / angel parea di quei del sommo coro’ takes us to the Aeneid, IX, 179-181: ‘quo pulchior alter non fuit aeneadum troiana neque induit arma, ora puer prima signans intonsa iuventa’.