Pitying Antiochus: Italian Humanism and the Philology of Compassion

ABSTRACT

The study of emotions has been prominent within medieval and early modern studies. However, much remains to be explored, particularly regarding how literature might shed light on broader cultural outlooks and the construction and application of specific emotions in past societies. This article delves into Italian humanist culture’s comprehension and utilisation of a particular emotion: compassion. By closely examining the literary reception of an ancient story – Valerius Maximus’ exemplum of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonica – in the writings of four humanists: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Bruni, and Manetti, the article proposes what might be described as a ‘philology of compassion’. It demonstrates how the various renditions of the tale predominantly revolve around compassion, revealing the debates within the humanist community concerning the nature of this emotion, its ethical and political significance, and those to whom it should be most directed.

KEYWORDS:

• Compassion
• Italian humanism
• emotions in literature
• Auerbach
• Boccaccio

The study of the passions, or emotions, has been at the centre of various disciplines in recent years. This includes fields such as history, philosophy, literature, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences. Broadly speaking, what characterises this ‘emotional turn’ in the humanities is the emerging emphasis, from the 1980s onwards, on the ‘cognitive’ nature of the emotions. Revolting against traditional views that considered the emotions as unreflective drives in need of a discharge, cognitive psychologists and philosophers have contended that emotions are rather products of quick and elaborate value-judgements that determine whether ‘something is likely to be good or harmful, pleasurable or painful, as perceived by each individual’.¹ Physical symptoms such as a palpitating heart or sweaty palms, which are associated with emotions such as anger, fear, or love, are essentially products of such quick cognitive processes of appraisal.² For social constructionists, moreover, these value-judgements are themselves dependent upon language and the structures of meaning that are available in specific societies and that determine the form such value-judgements may take.³

Within this recent ‘emotional turn’ in the humanities, the emotion of compassion has received especially wide attention, yet with scholars being largely divided over its nature and value. Some thinkers – most notably Martha Nussbaum – have stressed compassion’s cognitive nature and insisted on its ethical and political value.⁴ Building upon Aristotle’s Rhetoric II. viii, Nussbaum rejected the tendency to consider compassion an ‘unreflective’ and somatic identification with suffering and insisted instead that the feeling of compassion – the ‘sorrow for the pain of another’ – is based on an elaborate and ‘rational’ thought process. Compassion, according to her, emerges following an evaluative process through which we conclude that the other’s suffering is both considerable and unjust.⁵ Moreover, it is precisely due to compassion’s cognitive nature that Nussbaum also insists on its political value, arguing for humans’ capacity to extend their circle of concern beyond their immediate surroundings by learning that the suffering of those different from them in terms of class, gender, or race is significant and relevant to their own well-being. In facilitating such extension, literature can and should play a crucial educative role in her view, exposing readers to the hardships of others.⁶

Nussbaum’s position, however, is not without its critics. According to an influential line of thought that goes back at least to Hannah Arendt, compassion is an instinctive and uncontrollable sorrow over the pain of another, a fact that makes it inescapably related to negative passions such as cruelty and revenge.⁷ For if we tend to be overwhelmed by pity for those in pain, so the argument goes, then we would also likely seek to take unhinged revenge upon those whom we blame for causing it. For Arendt, in opposition to Nussbaum, there is not really a way to make compassion rational and controlled. Other critics, at the same time, add that compassion is inevitably partial and reserved to those close to us, thus being a perilous impediment to just politics.⁸ As Katherine Ibbett argued in her recent analysis of uses of compassion in early modern France, rather than serving as a catalyst for breaking down barriers between diverse groups, compassion was actually utilised as a tool to perpetuate the separation of ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’, Catholics and Protestants, during this period.⁹

While the study of emotions in general, and compassion in particular, has been prominent in the fields of medieval and early modern studies (as evidenced by Ibbett’s book), the Italian Renaissance has, as Barbara Rosenwein noted, garnered comparatively less attention from scholars of emotions.¹⁰ Furthermore, no study has yet focused specifically on the role of compassion in Italian Renaissance literature and culture at large. In this present article I will therefore turn the attention to the Italian Renaissance, examining the understanding and uses of the emotion of compassion in Italian humanism. To conduct this examination, I will focus my analysis on the literary reception and appropriation of a single ancient tale – Valerius Maximus’ exemplum of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonica – in the writings of four humanists, namely Boccaccio, Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Giannozzo Manetti. As I will argue, the humanists’ appropriations of the tale revolve to a large degree around the emotion of compassion and thus provide us with an invaluable case-study illustrating how Renaissance humanists comprehended and applied this emotion.

By exploring Renaissance humanists’ engagement with compassion through the literary reception of an ancient tale – a mode of analysis that is rarely taken into consideration by historians of emotions – I wish to assert the value of the age-old field of philology to the study of the history of emotions, proposing what might be described as a ‘philology of emotions’. For if we accept the cognitivists’ premise that emotions contain a strong linguistic dimension and are constructed in and through language, then it is through philology, understood in the expansive Auerbachian sense as ‘the set of activities that concern themselves systematically with human language’,¹¹ that we can delve into the way emotions were both understood and constructed in diverse historical periods.

For Auerbach, the objective of philology is nothing less than the excavation of the intricacies of human mentality and ‘spirit’ as they manifest within specific historical periods, a revelation most comprehensively encapsulated in the literary productions of those periods.¹² In his essay ‘Philology and weltliteratur’, in which he sought to account for the value of philology for the ambitious study of ‘world literature’, Auerbach contended that the practice of philology requires locating ‘a point of departure [Ansatzpunkt], a handle, as it were, by which the subject can be seized. The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them’.¹³ This handle, according to him, may be ‘a semantic interpretation, a rhetorical trope, a syntactic sequence, the interpretation of one sentence’.¹⁴ The important thing for him is that such a handle would be highly concrete on the one hand yet with a potential for ‘centrifugal radiation’ on the other,¹⁵ capable of yielding wide ranging interpretive insights (not unlike the emergence of Western realism). Drawing upon Auerbach’s method, I would like to suggest that the literary reception of the tale of Seleucus may serve precisely as such a ‘handle’, whose exploration may offer broad insights into the understanding and uses of compassion in Italian Renaissance literature.

The following analysis will begin with Boccaccio’s appropriation of Valerius Maximus’ exemplum in the Decameron and will then turn to Petrarch’s engagement with the story in his vernacular Triumphi. In the second half of the article, I will move to the Quattrocento to discuss the retellings of two additional humanists – Leonardo Bruni in his Novella di Seleuco and Giannozzo Manetti in his Dialogus in Symposio. In line with the concerns emerging from contemporary discussions of compassion mentioned above, my philological scrutiny will give particular attention to the way these humanists’ engagements with the tale reflect on their understanding of compassion – whether as a somatic or a cognitive emotion; on the ethical and political value they attributed to it; and on the question to whom they primarily reserved their compassion, that is – who was included within their circle of concern and what kind of society they imagined and sought to construct by means of their literary creations. As we will see, in their rewritings of the tale the humanists engaged in dialogue not only with their ancient source, but also with each other’s versions of it, in a manner that established an ongoing debate within Italian humanism on the nature and value of compassion. While historians of emotions such as Rosenwein and William Reddy tend to look for shared communal understandings of emotions – what Rosenwein labels ‘emotional communities’ and Reddy ‘emotional regimes’¹⁶ – the following analysis will demonstrate that emotions are in fact a site of contention and contest that goes to the heart of the very essence of a community’s identity.

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Before turning to Boccaccio, some words on Valerius Maximus’ exemplum are necessary. The tale of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonica first appeared in Book V of Valerius Maximus’ widely diffused first-century compendium of moral exempla Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri (Memorable Doings and Sayings).¹⁷ At the outset of Book V, the author specifies that the exempla in this book aim to illustrate ‘humanitatem et clementiam’ (‘humanity and clemency’, V. i. praef.).¹⁸ Chapter 7 of the same book focuses on examples of ‘pii et placidi adfectus parentium’ (‘pious and dear affection of parents’, V. vii. praef.), and it is within this context that we encounter the exemplum of King Seleucus.

The rather brief anecdote tells about the illicit love of Antiochus, prince of Syria in the third century BCE, to his step-mother Stratonica, the young wife of his father King Seleucus. Ashamed of his love, Antiochus does all in his power to conceal it, yet the internal effort inflicts a severe toll on his health, driving him to the brink of death. The cause of his malaise was finally discovered by a wise physician (or an astrologer according to Valerius’ account), who noticed the changes in the youth’s pulse when the queen entered his room. The physician informed the King, who immediately decided to divorce his wife and hand her over to his son. When he concludes his short exemplum, Valerius unequivocally praises the father’s ‘paternal affection’, which averted a certain tragedy: ‘[Seleucus] carissima sibi coniuge filio cedere non dubitavit, quod in amorem incidisset, fortunae acceptum referens, quod dissimulare eum ad mortem usque paratus esset, ipsius pudori inputans; iam patebit quam multa quamque difficilia paterni adfectus indulgentia superav<er>it’ (‘[Seleucus] did not hesitate to turn his wife, who was very dear to him, over to his son, regarding the latter’s falling in love as the work of Fortune but crediting to his modesty his readiness to conceal that love to the point of death; it will soon be plain how many and difficult were the obstacles over which the fondness of a father’s feeling triumphed’, V. vii. ext. 1). While attributing Seleucus’ humane act to his fatherly affection, we should note that this affection has a strong cognitive dimension according to Valerius’ account. This is manifested through the focus on the fact that the King’s affection was dependent upon his understanding that his son’s love was contingent on fortune, as well as his recognition of the son’s virtuous determination to hide it at all costs.

Valerius Maximus’ curious anti-Oedipal anecdote has inaugurated, as Massimo Ciavolella pointed out, an entire tradition of stories that bring together lovesickness and medicine.¹⁹ The story’s popularity reached a peak in the later Middle Ages, particularly in the Italian peninsula, where it was subject to countless commentaries, translations, and re-writings, which concentrated on the theme of love-sickness and the likelihood of the physician’s intervention. Boccaccio’s teacher and Petrarch’s friend and confessor, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro, for example, commented specifically on the likelihood of the pulse test in his widely diffused commentary on the work.²⁰ At the same time, the question of the father’s affection and leniency, as the context of Book V suggests, is also a major concern of the story, and it is on this aspect, I will argue, that Boccaccio, Petrarch and their humanist followers picked upon in their versions.

Boccaccio’s reliance on Valerius Maximus’ compendium of moral exempla is potentially discernible from the very opening aphorism of the Decameron: ‘umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti’ (Proemio. 2).²¹ This initial allusion to ‘umana’ and ‘compassione’ evokes the opening reference to ‘humanitatem et clementiam’ (‘humanity and clemency’, V. i. praef.) in Book V of Valerius Maximus’ work. While Valerius speaks of ‘clementia’, the virtue of clemency,²² Boccaccio shifts the focus squarely to ‘compassione’, literally ‘cum’+‘patior’ – ‘to suffer with’²³ – yet the parallels between the two opening sentences are telling.²⁴

The connection between the Decameron’s opening aphorism and Valerius’ work does not end here, however. In Chapter 1 of Book V, during his narration of the exemplum of Aemilius Paulus’ benevolent treatment of his war prisoner King Perseus, Valerius Maximus declares: ‘nam si egregium est hostem abicere, non minus tamen laudabile infelicis scire misereri’ (‘for though it be a renowned thing to overcome an enemy, yet is it no less praiseworthy to have compassion on him in distress’, V. i. 8).²⁵ This statement is repeated almost verbatim in the opening aphorism of the Decameron – ‘umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti’ – with Boccaccio’s compassione replacing Valerius’ misereri.²⁶ Valerius’ statement may thus have served as source of the Decameron’s opening sentence – a possibility that has not been sufficiently acknowledged by Boccaccio critics.

Regardless of the precise source of the Decameron’s opening aphorism, Boccaccio’s concentration on ‘umana’ and ‘compassione’ at its onset suggests that, akin to Book V of Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium, these terms constitute a central ethical and narrative category of the work as a whole.²⁷ Indeed, in accordance with this opening focus on ‘compassione’, the tales of the Decameron frequently touch upon the theme of compassion and critics have often pointed to the way the stories of the Decameron – particularly those of the tragic Day IV – are meant to cultivate the compassion of its hearers/readers²⁸ – a capacity that was lost in Florentine society during the plague, according to the Introduction to Day I.²⁹ In the beginning of her opening story of Day IV, which is dedicated entirely to tragedies of lovers, the narrator Fiammetta declares: ‘ci convenga raccontar l’altrui lagrime, le quali dir non si possono, che chi le dice e chi l’ode non abbia compassione’ (IV. i. 2). We cannot but be moved by hearing about the suffering of others, according to Fiammetta, and the brigata indeed responds with much compassion to the sorrowful tales of the day. This fact possibly points to Boccaccio’s belief in the capacity of stories to cultivate readers’ compassion and thereby strengthen and cement communal ties.

The assertion of the ethical and social value of compassion is central also to Boccaccio’s various appropriations of the tale of Seleucus within the Decameron. Boccaccio utilises the story on at least three occasions – in novelle II. viii, X. vii, and X. viii – and in his usual fashion much alters it for his own purposes.³⁰ Story II. viii makes the most of the Valerian subtext, and it is on this tale that I will now focus. As I will show, Boccaccio’s appropriation of the tale presents compassion as specifically cognitive in nature and extols its value; at the same time, however, his version also draws the readers’ attention to compassion’s potential drawbacks and its ability to exclude as well as include. Through this focus, I contend, Boccaccio aims to increase the readers’ awareness of compassion’s intricacy and encourage them to strive for making it as inclusive as possible, turning thereby the reading of the tale into an exercise in compassion.

Novella II. viii talks about the vicissitudes of fortune of the Count of Antwerp and his two children. After being falsely accused of sexual misconduct, the count flees his country together with his children and leads a life of beggary. The count’s daughter, Violante (later renamed Giannetta), is taken into a rich household in London by a local lady, who is described as ‘pietosa’ (II. viii. 31), and is raised there as part of the family. When Giannetta grows up, the lady’s only son becomes completely enamoured with her. However, fearing that his parents will not allow him to marry a woman of low-birth, he decides to hide his love at all costs.

As in the case of Antiochus, the efforts of concealment take a severe toll on him – ‘per soverchio di noia egli infermò, e gravemente’ (II. viii. 42) – and he arrives at the brink of death.³¹ Further as in Valerius’ exemplum, the physicians’ efforts to discover the source of his infirmity are initially to no avail, until a young physician discovers by chance the alterations in the youth’s pulse each time Giannetta entered his room: ‘né prima nella camera entrò che ‘l battimento del polso ritornò al giovane e, lei partita, cessò’ (II. viii. 46).

The physician informs the youth’s parents about his discovery, and, as in the case of King Seleucus, the mother’s response to the finding is lenient and humane. She tells her son that God has been compassionate of him by revealing his malaise to her: ‘è avvenuto che Domenedio è stato misericordioso di te piú che tu medesimo’ (II. viii. 50). The mother thus introduces here the term ‘misericordia’ – the virtue of compassion according to Aquinas’ Summa³² – and asserts that while the son lacked self-compassion, God has been pitiful of him by revealing his malaise to her, suggesting that she would be similarly compassionate. She then promises her son that there is nothing that she would not do for him, adding that he should not be ashamed of his love, as it is natural and inevitable among the young: ‘E nel vero di manifestar questo non ti dovevi tu vergognare, per ciò che la tua età il richiede’ (II. viii. 51). She adds that if he would not been in love, she in fact would have considered him base (II. viii. 51). The mother’s lenient attitude towards her son, the story thus specifies, is not an outcome of an instinctive and uncontrolled passion; instead, as in Valerius’ original exemplum, it is the result of a ‘cognitive’ thought-process, the recognition that her son was subject to a natural force beyond his control and is hence worthy of her affection and support.

Such distinction between instinct and cognition is central to contemporary discussions of the emotions, particularly within the field of ‘affect studies’. Scholars in the field tend to distinguish between ‘affects’, understood as bodily and instinctive responses to outer stimuli, and ‘emotions’, which are perceived as cognitive and dependent on the intermediation of language.³³ This distinction, at the same time, is also intrinsic to Boccaccio’s own conceptualisation of emotions and that of his scholastic predecessors. In her analysis of Decameron X. vii, in which young Lisa is consumed by passion for the King of Aragon, Maria Pia Ellero has perceptively highlighted the Aristotelian subtext of Boccaccio’s portrayal of love. Within the tale, the love-struck Lisa refers to her passion as one born not out of ‘debita elezione’ (X. vii. 41) but rather of ‘l’appetito e il piacere’ (X. vii. 41). This statement, as Ellero observes, is taken verbatim from Book 8 of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Aquinas’ commentary thereof, where the love of young people is described as an outcome of violent passion instead of deliberate choice: ‘Et dicit quod iuvenes sunt amativi, idest prompti et vehementes in amore, quia scilicet amant non ex electione, sed secundum passionem, et inquantum concupiscunt delectationem’ (‘He says that young people are volatile, i.e., quick and vehement in their love because they love not from rational choice but from passion and inasmuch as they are very desirous of pleasure’ (emphases added)).³⁴ This statement, Ellero points out, establishes a clear opposition between love as an uncontrolled passion and love which is more mature in nature and dependent on an active choice of will.³⁵

This scholastic distinction between ‘instinctive’ and ‘rational’ passion is not reserved solely to love, but is inherent also to Aquinas’ analysis of compassion. In his discussion of the virtue of ‘misericordia’, Aquinas distinguishes between ‘misericordia’ qua passion, that is a movement of the ‘sensitive appetite’ that is unchecked by a higher power, and ‘misericordia’ qua virtue, a movement of the ‘intellective appetite’ governed by reason (ST 2.2.30.3 co.). As an uncontrolled passion, according to Aquinas, ‘misericordia’ may be problematic and lead astray, for example when causing one to act in a manner that contradicts justice. When properly regulated, however, compassion works hand in hand with reason to secure justice.³⁶

This division between ‘instinctive’ and ‘rational’ compassion is further developed in the work of Aquinas’ student, Giles of Rome, especially in his immensely popular mirror of princes De regimine principum, first published in 1280. Listing ‘misericordia’ among the passions, Giles follows Aristotle’s Rhetoric II. viii in defining it as ‘tristitia quaedam super apparenti malo corruptivo, vel contristatio eius, qui indigne patitur malum illud’ (‘sorrow over the apparent corrupting evil, or the sadness of him, who unjustly suffers that evil’).³⁷ Giles thus specifically includes within his definition the cognitive consideration of desert. Following this definition, Giles goes on to describe ‘misericordia’ as the mean between two extremes – ‘softness’ on the one hand, ‘cruelty’ on the other:

Sic etiam misericordia media est inter crudelitatem, et molliciem. Nam qui nulli compatitur, est crudelis, qui omnibus compatitur, est mollis, et muliebris. Qui vero compatitur indigne patientibus, tenet medium, et laudatur, et dicitur misericos. (p. 184)

For misericordia is the middle between cruelty and softness. For those who pity no one are cruel, while those who pity everyone are soft, and woman-like. However, those who pity the ones who suffer unjustly hold the middle position and are compassionate and worthy of praise.

For Giles, cruelty characterises those who pity no one, while ‘softness’ – which is specifically gendered feminine – defines those who pity everyone – regardless of whether they suffer justly or unjustly. ‘Misericordia’, according to him, inheres in-between and involves pitying those who suffer unjustly. For Giles, as a result, compassion – even as passion – has a strong cognitive dimension, reserved for those who suffer not on their own account. Its two extremes – cruelty and softness – obviously lack this cognitive dimension and are characterised by excessive affectivity.

Emphasising in novella II. viii the calculated nature of the mother’s compassion – the fact that it was based on the recognition that her son fell prey to powers beyond his control – the story establishes a clear opposition between the son’s uncontrolled passion, which is similar to that of Lisa’s in X. vii, and the mother’s controlled response, being an outcome of a ‘debita elezione’. In Giles’ categories, the mother’s response moves away from both cruelty on the one hand and mere softness on the other, being a cognitive mean between the two.

The mother’s compassionate response indeed manages to revitalise her son and he soon begins to recover. And yet, while evoking – and endorsing – Seleucus’ humane reaction, Boccaccio’s tale also departs at this point from Vaelrius Maximus’ original exemplum in a significant way. Wishing to avoid giving her son’s hand in marriage to a low-born, the mother tries at first to assist him by persuading Giannetta to become his lover. Giannetta, however, adamantly – and eloquently – refuses: ‘Madama, voi dalla povertà di mio padre togliendomi come figliuola cresciuta m’avete, e per questo ogni vostro piacere far dovrei: ma in questo io non vi piacerò già, credendomi far bene. Se a voi piacerà di donarmi marito, colui intendo io d’amare ma altro no’ (II. viii. 62). Realising that she has no choice but to give her as a bride to her son, the mother reluctantly consents – an outcome in which Giannetta herself is clearly interested. The two are then wedded and live their life in much joy.

The attention Boccaccio awards to Giannetta’s response and the attribution of agency to her amount to a major modification of Valerius Maximus’ original exemplum, with significant ramifications for his treatment of compassion. In the original tale, let us note, Queen Stratonica has no voice and no role other than being transferred between the men; as readers we are left entirely in the dark as to her own view of the entire strange affair. Seleucus’ act of compassion towards his son may thus simultaneously be regarded as one of cruelty towards his young wife. By transforming the tale and giving voice and agency to Giannetta, Boccaccio not only invites his readers to identify – and empathise – with the woman’s position and critiques the mother’s decision to save her son at her expense, but he also makes his informed readers aware of the element of exclusion that is inherent to the original tale, laying bare its blind spots.

In her analysis of Decameron X. viii, which also draws upon the tale of Seleucus and entails a scene of a transference of a woman between two men, Olivia Holmes has argued that by giving voice to the excluded woman Boccaccio calls into question his own ideal of compassion. Situated in antiquity, story X. viii tells about two friends, Gisippus and Titus; when Gisippus discovers that his friend languishes due to his overwhelming passion for his own betrothed Sophronia, he deliberates that ‘la vita dello amico piú che Sofronia dovergli esser cara’ (X. viii. 24). He accordingly devises a bed-trick through which Sophronia unknowingly becomes Titus’ wife. The deception goes on for some time, until finally the two are obliged to reveal the trick. When Sophronia realises what had taken place, she responds with tears and horror: ‘La qual, poi che l’uno e l’altro un poco sdegnosetta ebbe guatato, dirottamente cominciò a piagnere sé dello ‘nganno di Gisippo ramaricando’ (X. viii. 52).

By giving voice to the woman’s horrified response, Holmes contends, the story calls into question Gisippus’ compassion for his friend and thereby the very ideal of compassion with which the Decameron began: ‘The novella even seems to make fun of the Proemio’s initial aphorism that compassion is humanity’s definitive virtue, by showing […] compassion’s absurd effects when wrongly or excessively allocated’.³⁸ However, rather than calling the ideal of compassion itself into question, it might be argued that through their alteration of Valerius Maximus’s original exemplum, both stories II. viii and X. viii seek to direct the readers’ attention to compassion’s capacity to exclude and thus to the need to make it more inclusive, applying it in a less excessive and discriminatory fashion. After all, it is precisely compassion’s cognitive nature – the fact that it is an outcome of a rational process of discernment rather than an uncontrollable instinct – that makes it malleable according to the Decameron’s categories, capable of being implemented and applied in a more discerning and inclusive fashion. Boccaccio’s inter-textual strategies within the Decameron thus assume a clear ethical and democratic dimension, transforming his tale into a type of training in compassion.

This democratic aspect and aspiration for inclusivity are also evident, after all, in Boccaccio’s choice to compose the Decameron in the vernacular and address it to women – those who were usually excluded in the period from the literary community. In the Decameron’s Proemio, this decision is presented specifically as an act of ‘compassione’, emerging out of the author’s wish to assist women who suffer from love and have no other mode of respite other than reading literature (Proemio. 13). For Boccaccio, compassion is not only the mark of humanity but also the means of forming an inclusive and egalitarian society in so far as possible, and it is to this task that he dedicates many of the tales of the Decameron – including his various dialogues with Valerius Maximus’ tale of Seleucus.

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A few years before Boccaccio engaged with the story of Seleucus in the Decameron, Petrarch utilised it as the backdrop for his own reflections on the compassion of authority figures in his vernacular poem Triumphi, written in the early 1340s in Dantean terza-rima and in clear dialogue with the Commedia.³⁹ Petrarch narrates the tale in the first Triumphus cupidinis, which describes the poet’s encounter with an array of figures who were captured by Amore and walk behind him in a triumphal procession. It is in the second part of the triumph that he beholds a threesome walking side by side, conversing about their ‘dolci affetti’ (Trium. cup. II. 101).⁴⁰ Petrarch begins to converse with the father, King Seleucus, who stresses the deep love that connects the three together and their willingness to sacrifice what is dearest to them for the sake of one another. As he declares:

[S]i vede il nostro amor tenace e forte;

ch’è contenta costei lasciar me e ‘l regno,

io il mio diletto, e questi la sua vita,

per far, vie piú che sé, l’un l’altro degno (Trium. cup. II. 117–20).

In Petrarch’s version, the story becomes one about self-sacrifice for the sake of the other, not unlike that of Gisippus and Titus in Decameron X. viii.⁴¹ Stratonica, according to Seleucus, was willing to sacrifice her love and her Queenship; he was willing to dispense with his ‘diletto’, and Antiochus with his life so as not to harm his father. In Petrarch’s version, there is thus an element of parity between the three, as Stratonica’s own sacrifice and worthiness is acknowledged.

At the end of his brief account, Seleucus describes his sacrifice specifically as an act of compassion: ‘la mia, vera pietà, ch’a lui soccorse’ (Trium. cup. II. 124–25). In ancient Roman culture, ‘pietas’ of course indicated dutiful loyalty to gods, family, and country, and this notion may certainly be present behind Petrarch’s allusion to Seleucus’ ‘vera pietà’. Yet we should remember that for Petrarch pietà entails further connotations beyond ‘dutiful loyalty’, primarily that of compassion, in the literal sense of ‘sorrow for the pain of another’. This is evident, for example, from the opening sonnet of the Canzoniere, where the poet invites his readers to show him ‘pietà, non che perdono’ (I. 8),⁴² that is to understand and share in his amorous pain.

As in Valerius Maximus’ exemplum, the description of Seleucus’ pietà in the statement quoted above has a strong cognitive dimension. In the words of Seleucus, love was a force that imposed itself on his son (‘l’amar forza’), while his effort to conceal it was a mark of ‘vertute’ (Trium. cup. II. 125). Antiochus, according to Petrarch’s Seleucus, was both a victim of a higher power and a hero, both passive and active, in a manner that rendered him worthy of compassion. Recalling Decameron II. viii, Petrarch’s appropriation of the tale advances a cognitive approach to compassion and exalts its moral value.

Yet, while Petrarch’s Ttiumphi laud Seleucus’ compassion, we should pay attention to the story’s positioning within the narrative poem and the way this placement reflects on its meaning. The poet-protagonist’s encounter with Seleucus in Triumphus cupidinis II takes place immediately following his exchange with the doomed lovers Massinissa and Sophonisba, the two ancient Africans whose tragic story is told by Livy in Book XXX. xii–xv of Ab urbe condita. Situated within the Second Punic War, the story tells of the Numidian King Massinissa, an ally of Scipio Africanus – Petrarch’s ultimate hero, the embodiment of virtuous chastity and self-control.⁴³ Upon conquering the African city of Queen Sophonisba, Massinissa fell madly in love with her and decided to marry her on the spot, wishing thereby to save her from being sent to Rome as a war prisoner. Yet when news of the marriage reached Scipio, he ordered Massinissa to annul the marriage and hand Sophonisba to him as his rightful prisoner. Torn between his loyalty to Scipio and love for Sophonisba, Massinissa decided to send her a cup of poison through which she took her own life.

In the scene in the Triumphi, the Petrarch-figure engages in dialogue with Massinissa, who tells him of the way he was tragically torn between two conflicting ‘affetti’ (Trium. cup. II. 18) – on the one hand to his ally Scipio, in whom, as he declares, ‘chiara vertute accesa’ (Trium. cup. II. 50),⁴⁴ and on the other to his beloved Sophonisba. Massinissa’s use of the term ‘affetti’ anticipates the ‘dolci affetti’ that open the tale of Seleucus. However, unlike Seleucus, Scipio, according to Massinissa’s account, had no compassion for his amorous plight – ‘di nostri sospir nulla gli calse’ (Trium. cup. II. 48) – as he ordered Massinissa to dissolve the marriage and send Sophonisba to him as his prisoner, thus leading to her death. Towards the end of his account, Massinissa declares that ‘Gran giustizia a gli amanti è grave offesa’ (Trium. cup. II. 52), pointing thereby to the way in which the passion of love inevitably runs counter to ‘justice’. From the perspective of Scipio, showing compassion to those consumed by love is inevitably a misguided weakness.

By placing the example of the compassionate Seleucus immediately following that of the Stoic and rigid Scipio, Petrarch creates a dialogue over compassion between two opposing perspectives. While the first considers love as a compulsion, a tragic necessity, and establishes compassion as the proper and virtuous reaction to those afflicted by it, the second suggests that there is always a choice in love and that transgressions to law and custom on its account should not be tolerated. Compassion, from this latter perspective, is not a virtue but a perilous passione – not unlike love itself. And in Petrarch’s usual fashion – just as in the Canzoniere or Secretum – the conflict between these two perspectives in the Triumphi ends without a clear resolution.⁴⁵ In opposition to Boccaccio, for whom the value of showing compassion and being lenient in such cases is not in doubt, Petrarch leaves the question open as to whether Stoic severity and self-control is in fact the more appropriate response in such situations.

In addition to his ambivalent attitude towards the ethical merits of the father’s compassion, we should note that Petrarch – like Vaelrius Maximus and unlike Boccaccio – dedicates most of his attention to the male figures. Although he does assert, as we have seen, that all three, including Stratonica, demonstrated their liberality in the affair, Petrarch’s concentration is still primarily on the predicament of the male figures. This fact becomes especially apparent when we consider Petrarch’s subversive dialogue in this section with another important subtext behind his retelling – Dante’s own encounters with stories of troubled lovers in Inferno v and especially his celebrated meeting with Francesca and Paolo.⁴⁶ Whereas in his encounter with the pair of doomed lovers Dante the pilgrim converses with the woman – Francesca – and becomes filled with compassion (‘pietade’, Inferno v, 140) for her plight,⁴⁷ in the Triumphi the Petrarch-figure holds his dialogue with the men – Massinissa and then Seleucus – and is filled with ‘pietate’ (Trium. cup. II. 73) for their masculine quandary; furthermore, whereas Dante holds his dialogue with near contemporaries like Paolo and Francesca, Petrarch converses exclusively with ancient figures whose story is drawn from venerable ancient sources (namely Livy and Valerius Maximus). While composing the Triumphi in the vernacular and in Dantean terza rima, Petrarch’s aim appears to be both to ‘classicize’ and to ‘masculinize’ Dante’s poem.

This combination of ardent classicism and focus on men evokes the elitist and masculinist tendencies that are often – if not always – apparent in Petrarch’s Latin humanism.⁴⁸ Whereas Boccaccio’s appropriation of the tale of Seleucus asserts the ethical value of compassion (while stressing the need to make it as inclusive as possible) and forms part of his efforts to rebuild the civic cohesiveness of his city following the devastation of the plague, Petrarch’s rewriting of the story is conflicted over the ethical merits of compassion and is clearly not interested in its local civic dimensions, forming rather part of his classicised project of fashioning a global community of individuals who share in his classical predilections.⁴⁹ In their engagement with compassion vis-à-vis their appropriation of Valerius Maximus’ tale, Boccaccio and Petrarch thus construct two distinct visions of humanism – one that is local, civic, and open to (cognitive) passions and another which is global, masculine, and conflicted over the merits of emotion.

***

Let us move now to the Quattrocento to examine the reception of the tale of Seleucus by two important humanist followers of Petrarch and Boccaccio: the Florentines Leonardo Bruni and Giannozzo Manetti. In the case of both, the dialogue is not only with the ancient tale of Valerius Maximus, but also with Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s own appropriations of it, in a manner that continues – and extends – the dialogue over compassion within Italian humanism.

Bruni wrote his Novella di Seleuco relatively late in his life, probably in 1438, about six years before his death in 1444. During this later period, as James Hankins noted, Bruni’s attitude towards vernacular composition significantly altered and he became much more appreciative of its ethical and civic importance.⁵⁰ The Novella di Seleuco was composed as a companion piece to Bruni’s translation into Latin of Boccaccio’s novella of Tancredi and Ghismonda (Decameron IV. i) – a translation he had undertaken following the model of Petrarch’s own translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron X. x, the story of Griselda.⁵¹

In the beginning of his Novella di Seleuco, Bruni provides a Boccaccian-like cornice, in which the narrator describes a group of young Florentine men and women who gather at a villa near Florence. To pass the time pleasantly, they engage in various pleasurable activities, until at one point a woman from the group decides to read aloud a story from the Decameron she chooses at random. The story turns out to be the tragic tale of Tancredi and Ghismonda, in which Prince Tancredi, after discovering his daughter Ghismonda’s secret affair with his valet Guiscardo, cruelly executes the valet and thereby precipitates her own suicide. When the woman completes her tale of woe, another member of the group – a man ‘di grande studio e greco e Latino e molto curioso delle antiche storie’ (§6) (clearly Bruni himself)⁵² – decides to uplift the spirits of the brigata by telling a counter-tale, one with a happy ending – the story of Antiochus, Seleucus, and Stratonica. To his classicised Latin version of Boccaccio’s modern story, Bruni thus playfully adds a modernised vernacular version of an ancient tale.

The narrative strategy of offsetting a tragic story with a narration of a comic one closely recalls Petrarch’s own strategic choice in the Triumphi to follow the tragic story of Massinissa and Sophonisba with the comic tale of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonica, as we have seen above.⁵³ At the same time, Bruni’s decision to counter the story of Tancredi and Ghismonda with that of Seleucus and Antiochus is likely based also on Boccaccio’s own implicit contrast between the two stories in the Decameron, evident in the opposition established between Tancredi’s failure to acknowledge his daughter’s natural amorous urges and ensuing cruelty in IV. i and the mother’s compassionate and lenient disposition towards her son’s love in II. viii.⁵⁴ Bruni’s literary experiment is thus evidently in dialogue with both Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s versions.

Like his two predecessors, Bruni’s appropriation of the story gives particular attention to the question of compassion. Already in his description of the reaction of the group of listeners to the tale of Tancredi and Ghismonda, Bruni’s narrator stresses how it elicited compassion and tears from all present, both men and women: ‘E furonvi donne e giovani assai che non poteron celare lo ‘mbambolar degli occhi e le cadenti lagrime per pietà e commiseratione di sí acerbo e doloroso caso’ (§5; emphasis added). This description of course evokes the responses of the brigata to the tales of the tragic Day IV of the Decameron. It is as an outcome of this pitiful reaction that Bruni’s narrator declares that he decided to narrate a counter-tale, which will offer a counter example ‘d’umanità e di gentilezza di cuore’ (§8) – traits in which ‘gli antichi Grechi’, according to him, much in contrast to ‘i nostri Taliani’ (§8), excelled. To the cruel modern example of Tancredi, the narrator opposes an ancient example of humanity and gentleness of heart, declaring that the ancient Greeks were particularly known for their benevolent nature.

Bruni’s story itself then much amplifies Vaelrius Maximus’ – and Petrarch’s – accounts, by drawing upon Greek sources that were not familiar to Petrarch and Boccaccio – namely Appian, Plutarch, and Lucian – as well as by Bruni’s own unique contributions.⁵⁵ One such addition involves the physician’s speech to Antiochus following his discovery of the source of the youth’s malaise through the pulse-test. Closely echoing the mother’s speech to her son in Decameron II. viii, the physician tells Antiochus:

Sappi adunque che la radice della tua infirmità, la quale per vergogna celare hai voluto, è a me nota e manifesta, sí che e per che cagione e per cui non m’è nascoso. Né son sì inumano che io non cognosca la giovanile età essere sottoposta agli accidenti d’amore, né essere in nostra podestà chi noi amiamo. Ma datti buon conforto, che per certo la medicina mia troverrà ancor rimedio a questo tuo malore. (§28–29)

Declaring that he is not ‘sì inumano’ so as not to realise the insurmountable power of love – especially among the young – the physician promises Antiochus that he will find a way to cure his disease. The allusion to ‘umano’ of course evokes not only the emphasis on ‘umanità e gentilezza di cuore’ in the narrator’s introduction but also the opening aphorism of the Decameron, which associates ‘umana’ and ‘compassione’. This humane response is presented as strongly ‘cognitive’ in nature, as it is motivated – as in Decameron II. viii – by the physician’s recognition of the inescapable ‘podestà’ of amore.

Following his promise, Bruni’s physician devises a clever ‘trick’ through which he manipulates the King to come to the aid of his son. Building on a plot detail that was mentioned in all of his three Greek sources, Bruni’s physician tells the King that his son suffers from a malaise of love, which ‘non ha rimedio’ (§35), adding however that the object of the son’s unrequited passion is the physician’s wife, not Stratonica. Hearing this, the King begins to sermonise on the nobility and necessity of giving up on one’s wife for the sake of saving the life of another, telling the physician that he would easily find other women no less well-born and beautiful than his wife and that he would be cruel sacrificing the ‘unica speranza mia e di tutto il reame’ (§37). The physician’s ‘trick’ thus consists of manipulating the King into realising his situation through putting himself in the shoes of another.

When the King finishes his speech, the physician reveals the true object of the prince’s passion, leaving the King little choice but to comply with his own admonitions. Although the clever trick indeed does its job, we should note that Bruni’s narrator specifies that the King is moved not only by his own arguments, but also by the compassion that the revelation elicits in him:

Il re, sentendo [che] […] il giovane, per vergogna e riverenza del padre, prima aver voluto morire che palesare la disonesta fiamma, mosso da compassione e non potendo alle sue proprie ragioni assegnate al medico contradire, diliberò con perfetto consiglio e per conservation del figliuolo, lasciar la sua donna. (§42)

The emotional upheaval of ‘compassione’ – of course a strongly Boccaccian word – is thus presented as an essential cause of the father’s benevolent decision, which prevents tragedy. This upheaval, as the text makes clear, depends on the King’s dual acknowledgement of the insurmountable power of love (as communicated by the physician) and the fact that his son preferred to die rather than act upon his ‘shameful’ passion. The construction of the sentence makes clear that this consideration – much as in Valerius Maximus’ exemplum – came first and moved the father to ‘compassione’. As in the earlier description of the physician’s umanità, the emotion of compassion has a clear cognitive dimension, being an outcome of a thought process that convinces the King that the son’s passion was beyond his control and that he acted virtuously in concealing it. In line with the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition as well as Decameron II. viii, Bruni’s compassione is presented not as a somatic, uncontrollable affect, but rather as a product of a cognitive thought-process. In clear opposition to the son’s uncontrollable passion, the father’s compassion is rational, controlled, and ultimately justified.

The ethical dimensions of compassion in Bruni’s version are in turn accompanied by political and civic ones, again in a manner that recalls the Decameron. As Bruni’s narrator specifies, the father’s compassion and decision to give up on his wife prevented not only a personal tragedy, but brought much prosperity to the entire realm by securing succession: ‘Il padre, vedendo il figliuolo essere scampato di sí pericolosa infermità e, subsequente mente, vedendo i piccoli nipoti certissima successione della sua progenie, visse contentissimo e di bonissima volontà’ (§44). Highlighting the issue of progeny and succession, Bruni thus adds a strong political dimension to the tale.

In his analysis of Bruni’s version, James Hankins has elaborated upon its civic dimensions, arguing that Bruni uses the tale to deliver in the vernacular similar civic lessons to those that dominated his earlier Latin works. While Boccaccio’s Tancredi, according to Hankins, adheres to chivalric values of individual honour – which bring about disaster – Bruni’s Seleucus gives up on his personal honour and pleasure for the greater good of the state.⁵⁶ The story thus forms part of what Hankins calls ‘virtue politics’ – the humanists’ attempt to instil virtuous behaviour among the ruling elite.⁵⁷ What should be added in my view to Hankins’ analysis is the crucial role of the emotion of compassion within such ‘virtue politics’ – the fact that the father’s benevolent actions were based on his compassionate reaction to his son’s malaise. Rather than chiding Antiochus for his illicit passion, the father – in opposition not only to Boccaccio’s Tancredi but also to Petrarch’s Scipio – acknowledges and understands his son’s vulnerability to passion, becomes filled with compassion towards his plight, and ultimately finds a way to come to his aid and relieve him of his sorrows, to the benefit of all. Bruni’s appropriation of the ancient tale of Seleucus thus serves as a means of forming cognitive compassion as a crucial civic emotion and an important aspect of his civic project.

The civic dimensions of Seleucus’ compassion in turn complement Bruni’s emphasis on the ‘pietà e commiseratione’ (§5) that governed the group of Florentine men and women in the cornice. As in the Decameron, the Brunian brigata forms an egalitarian civic community, which consists of both men and women, both learned humanists and common Florentines, who come together through their shared compassion. This inclusive dimension is reflected also in Bruni’s stylistic choice of placing side by side Latin and vernacular, and ancient and modern, novelle. Although Bruni, in opposition to Boccaccio, does not develop the perspective of Stratonica (who remains entirely voiceless in his version), still the egalitarian dimensions of his cornice are significant and highlight how – as in the case of the Decameron – the diegetic focus on compassione is accompanied by the work’s inclusive and democratic spirit. Both in his unswerving validation of the ethical and civic value of (cognitive) compassion and in his egalitarian civic spirit, Bruni’s appropriation of the Seleucus’ tale is ideologically much closer to Boccaccio’s Decameron than to Petrarch’s Triumphi, developing further the local, emotional, and relatively egalitarian humanism of Boccaccio.

***

The ideological aspects that undergirded Bruni’s literary experiment were not lost on his younger Florentine follower Giannozzo Manetti. About a decade after Bruni’s version, in 1448, Manetti incorporated Bruni’s two tales – that of Seleucus and that of Tancredi – into his Latin Dialogus in Symposio.⁵⁸ Manetti’s dialogue portrays a gathering of ten notable Florentine men, which takes place in Venice while Manetti was on an embassy there. Placed in the context of the plague that ravaged Venice at the time (exactly a century after the one depicted in the opening of the Decameron), the ten men engage in an after-dinner conversation, in which the figure of Manetti’s son, Bernardo, proposes that they occupy themselves in a moral discussion on the actions of the two fathers from Bruni’s novelle – Tancredi and Seleucus (a discussion that is then followed by a debate over the animal most useful to man). The question of the proper response of authority figures to human vulnerability thus inheres once again at the centre of the humanists’ concern.

Manetti’s departure from Bruni is already apparent from these details: while Bruni brought together in his diptych Latin and vernacular and men and women, Manetti’s group consists solely of men and is composed entirely in an elevated Ciceronian Latin. As David Marsh pointed out, whereas Boccaccio and Bruni address their tales to ‘pietose donne’ (Boccaccio) or ‘gentili uomini e donne’ (Bruni), Bernardo Manetti appeals to ‘optimi viri’ (‘most excellent men’, §31),⁵⁹ thus replacing the egalitarian and emotional context of Bruni’s version with a ‘moralistic’ and manly one. Women, the vernacular, and the emotions are all simultaneously sidelined in Manetti’s version.

In accordance with this transformation, Manetti’s dialogue also makes significant alterations to Bruni’s tales themselves (much reducing the role of Ghismonda in the first tale, for example), and ultimately completely alters the moral evaluation of the two fathers’ actions. In his summary of Bruni’s tale of Seleucus, Bernardo Manetti retains at first Bruni’s emphasis on Seleucus’ compassion. He describes how after the physician revealed to Seleucus the source of his son’s malaise, the King considered his son as helplessly and tragically torn between ‘summam cupiditatem’ (‘highest cupidity’) and ‘maximam verecundiam’ (‘greatest shame’, §103). This recognition causes the King to become ‘commiseratione commotus’ (‘moved by commiseration’, §102, clearly a translation of Bruni’s ‘mosso da compassione’), and to decide to give up his wife so as to save his son.

When he finishes his summary of the two tales, Bernardo invites the participants to evaluate the actions of the two fathers, asking them to determine which of the two is to be praised more. The group is split in two over the question, yet both sides initially agree that both fathers acted in a praiseworthy manner given the circumstances. Tancredi had to punish Ghismonda and Guiscardo given their transgression in order to preserve justice.⁶⁰ Seleucus, for his part, is to be praised for finding a judicious way – divorce (which was permitted in ancient times) – to save his son.

Yet this initial verdict is not the final word on the fathers’ actions. Following the debate, two older men enter the scene – Gabriele Bello and Michele Rondinelli – and are called upon by the participants to pass judgment on the dispute. After hours of deliberation, Rondinelli offers an authoritative conclusion to the entire exchange, in which he asserts that both fathers are to be criticised rather than praised for their actions. His critique revolves at its core on the two fathers’ submission to passions, and particularly on their ‘softness’. Tancredi, according to Rondinelli, is to be criticised for allowing his emotions for his daughter to spare her initially from punishment, which she in fact deserved more than Guiscardo due to her role as the mastermind of their entire affair. Seleucus, at the same time, is not to be praised for his compassion for his son, but rather criticised for the way this compassion led him to condone incest – a vice that contradicts both sacred and natural law. Instead of excusing his son’s illicit passion for his step-mother, Seleucus should have been more severe and critical of it (§271–§293). Failing to do so, Seleucus, Rondinelli concludes, left a particularly negative and ‘effeminate’ example to future generations: ‘preter violata comunis nature iura, molle quoddam ac muliebre et pessimum exemplum posteris adolescentibus reliquit’ (‘having violated the common law of nature, Seleucus left future generations with a soft, effeminate, and terrible example’, §277).

In a manner that strongly recalls Petrarch’s Scipio, the figure of Rondinelli, who clearly serves as the voice of the author Manetti, entirely reverses Bruni’s approach and presents an ethical vision that is strongly critical of passions in general and compassion in particular, seeing it as both unmanly and perilous. Taking Petrarch’s position to the extreme, Manetti’s use of the tale of Seleucus advances a moral and political vision that is strongly masculinist and elitist, and which depends at its core on the rejection of the emotion of compassion as a guide for ethical and political action. For Manetti, as for Petrarch’s Scipio (and, mutatis mutandis, Hannah Arendt), the emotion of compassion cannot be made rational and is better left-out of such ethical deliberations.

In conclusion, the humanist reception of the ancient tale of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonica provides a rich resource through which to evaluate the ethical, political, and stylistic attitudes to and uses of compassion in the early Italian Renaissance. Utilising the reception of the tale as a type of Auerbachian ‘handle’, the article has elucidated the innovative ways in which Italian humanists probed Seleucus’ compassion for his love-stricken son and the broad implications of their literary explorations of the issue. In their various versions, the humanists engage in dialogue not only with their ancient sources but also with each other’s renditions of the tale, in a manner that brings to light the common assumptions, as well as the tensions, that surrounded the emotion of compassion in early Italian humanism. While Boccaccio and Bruni affirm the moral value of the sharing in the suffering of another – understood in a markedly Aristotelian-cognitive manner – posit compassion as a foundation of a local and relatively egalitarian civic community, and utilise literature as a means of ideally developing this emotion in readers, Petrarch and especially Manetti are suspicious of the emotional upheaval involved in compassion, generally opt for a Stoic approach to passions, and envision – and seek to construct – a globalised, and essentially masculine, community of men who come together through shared ideals of reason and self-control. The humanist community, the reception of the tale of Seleucus shows, is divided between two distinct emotional ‘regimes’ and two divergent ‘virtue politics’ – a division that began with Boccaccio and Petrarch and continued well into the Quattrocento. In uncovering past emotionalities, considerations of literary reception and intertextuality are of utmost importance and should be central components of any investigation within the field of the history of emotions.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, and at the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Binghamton University. I am grateful to Elisa Brilli, Olivia Holmes, and the faculty and students of both centres for their hospitality and insightful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant no. 1587/19].

Notes

¹ Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107.3 (2002), pp. 821–45 (pp. 836–37).

² Ibid., p. 836. As is widely acknowledged, the term ‘emotion’ originated in early modern France, making it a relatively recent concept. In the case of the Italian humanists, as we will see later in this article, the corresponding general term is passione (or affetto). Nevertheless, considering the prevailing usage of the word ‘emotion’ in contemporary discourse, I will predominantly employ this term throughout this article. On this problem in general and Dante’s use of the term affetto, see Heather Webb, ‘Culture visive e teorie degli affetti nella lettura di Dante’, Letture classensi, 50 (2022), pp. 7–28 (pp. 15–7). On the origins of the term ‘emotion,’ see Nicole Hochner, ‘Le corps social à l’origine de l’invention du mot “émotion”’, L’Atelier du CRH (2016), http://doi.org/10.4000/acrh.7357.

³ As the historian Katie Barclay has remarked recently with respect to love: ‘the experience of love is not a biological universal, but something that must be named in order to exist within a particular culture, and which is shaped by ideas of love that direct our physical sensations and feelings and how we understand, evaluate and respond to such sensations.’ See Katie Barclay, ‘State of the Field: The History of Emotions’, History, 106.3 (2021), pp. 456–66 (pp. 458–59) and Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions’, p. 836.

⁴ Martha Nussbaum, ‘Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 13.1 (1996), pp. 27–58 and Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2013), pp. 257–312. See also Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking 2011), pp. 175–88, 571–92.

⁵ See especially Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 304–27. Nussbaum, following Aristotle, also discusses in this section a third precondition – that of ‘similar possibilities’ between the one experiencing the emotion and the sufferer.

⁶ See Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 401–54; and Nussbaum, Political Emotions, pp. 257–312.

⁷ On Arendt’s critique, see the important discussion in Michael Ure and Mervyn Frost, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of Compassion, ed. by Michael Ure and Mervyn Frost (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 2–9. On compassion as uncontrollable drive, see Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), p. 14.

⁸ See Roger Crisp, ‘Compassion and Beyond’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 11.3 (2008), pp. 233–46 (p. 245). On the ancient critiques of compassion’s partiality, see the discussion in Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 386–92.

⁹ Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

¹⁰ Barbara Rosenwein, ‘The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions’, in Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy, Proceedings of the International Conference Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze, 5–8 May 2012, ed. by Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 15–30 (p. 15).

¹¹ Erich Auerbach, Introduction aux études de philologie romane (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1949). See also the discussion in Seth Lerer, ‘Introduction’, in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. by Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–10.

¹² See James J. Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. by James J. Porter, trans. by Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. xii–xiii.

¹³ Erich Auerbach, ‘Philology and “Weltliteratur”’, trans. by Maire Said and Edward Said, The Centennial Review, 13.1 (1969), pp. 1–17 (p. 14).

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 15.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ See Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 24–6; and William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 124–26.

¹⁷ On the wide diffusion of the work, see Clive Skidmore, Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius Maximus (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. xi.

¹⁸ Edition and translation: Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, ed. and trans. by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

¹⁹ Massimo Ciavolella, La ‘malattia d’amore’ dall’antichità al medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976), pp. 22–5.

²⁰ See Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 18.

²¹ Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. by Vittore Branca, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1992). I have also consulted Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. by Amadeo Quondam, Maurizio Fiorilla, and Giancarlo Alfano (Milan: Bur, 2013).

²² Seneca defines ‘clementia’ as ‘restraint’ and ‘mildness’ in exacting punishment: ‘Clementia est temperantia animi in potestate ulciscendi vel lenitas superioris adversus inferiorem in constituendis poenis’ (‘Clemency means restraining the mind from vengeance when it has the power to take it, or the leniency of a superior towards an inferior in fixing punishment,’ II. iii. 1). Seneca, ‘On Mercy’, in Moral Essays, trans. by John W. Basore, 3 vols, I, p. 434 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

²³ According to Michael Papio, ‘compassione,’ a word with strong patristic roots, became popular in Italian via the Decameron. See Michael Papio, ‘“Non meno di compassion piena che dilettevole”: Notes on Compassion in Boccaccio’, Italian Quarterly, 37 (2000), pp. 107–25 (p. 107).

²⁴ It is significant that in the Trecento volgarizzamento of Valerius’ work, with which Boccaccio was certainly familiar, the opening rubric was translated as ‘De la umanitade e pietade,’ thus bringing us even closer to the opening of the Decameron. For the text of the volgarizzamento, see Valerius Maximus, De’ fatti e detti degni di memoria della città di Roma e delle stranie genti, ed. by Roberto de Visiani (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1867). The Trecento volgarizzamento of Valerius Maximus was attributed in the past to Boccaccio, yet this attribution is now mostly rejected. See Gabriella Pomaro, ‘Ancora, ma non solo, sul volgarizzamento di Valerio Massimo’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 36 (1993), pp. 199–232. On Boccaccio’s knowledge of Valerius Maximus and use of his work already in his early Filocolo, see Antonio Enzo Quaglio, ‘Valerio Massimo e il Filocolo di Giovanni Boccaccio’, Cultura Neolatina, 20 (1960), pp. 45–77. On Boccaccio’s dialogue with Valerius Maximus in the Decameron, see Olivia Holmes, Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 161–73.

²⁵ In the volgarizzamento, this line is translated as follows: ‘se nobile et alta cosa è cacciare di campo il nemico, non è meno laudabile sapere avere misericordia dello infelice.’

²⁶ The noun ‘misericordia,’ from which the verb ‘misereri’ is derived, is defined by Cicero and Seneca as ‘tristitia ex alienis malis contracta’ (‘sadness caused by the ills of others’). Seneca, On Mercy (De clementia), II. v. 4. Seneca critiques ‘misericordia’ in this passage as an irrational and perilous ‘aegritudo animi.’

²⁷ On ‘compassione’ as a central narrative category of the Decameron, see also Holmes, p. 1.

²⁸ Teodolinda Barolini, ‘The Wheel of the Decameron’, Romance Philology, 36.4 (1983), pp. 521–38 (pp. 526–27); Papio, p. 107.

²⁹ The Introduction to Day 1 lingers on the disappearance of compassion and mutual care from the city of Florence due to the plague, describing how even the most basic natural ties were broken: ‘E lasciamo stare che l’uno cittadino l’altro schifasse e quasi niuno vicino avesse dell’altro cura e i parenti insieme rade volte o non mai si visitassero e di lontano’ (I. Intro. 27). Funeral rites, in which it was common to shed tears of compassion for the deceased, disappeared: ‘ma assai n’eran di quelli che di questa vita senza testimonio trapassavano: e pochissimi erano coloro a’ quali I pietosi pianti e l’amare lagrime de’ suoi congiunti fossero concedute’ (I. Intro. 34).

³⁰ On Boccaccio’s intertextual strategies and ‘recombintaory poetics,’ see especially Holmes.

³¹ Maria Pia Ellero notes that whereas Valerius Maximus’ Antiochus is torn by the internal struggle between love and shame, the malaise of the youth in II. viii is externalised and is caused by the struggle between love and social convention – the thought that his parents will not approve of it. See Maria Pia Ellero, ‘Lisa e l’aegritudo amoris. Desiderio, virtù e fortuna in Decameron, II 8 e X 7’, in Boccaccio 1313–2013, ed. by Francesco Ciabattoni, Elsa Filosa, and Kristina Olson (Ravenna: Longo, 2015), pp. 187–201 (pp. 193–94).

³² Drawing upon both Aristotle’s Rhetoric II. viii and Augustine’s City of God IX. v, Aquinas defines ‘misericordia’ as ‘alienae miseriae in nostro corde compassio, qua utique, si possumus subvenire compellimur’ (‘a heartfelt sorrow for another’s misery, impelling us to do what we can to help him,’ Summa Theologiae 2-2.30.1 co., translation modified). For Aquinas, as this definition implies, ‘misericordia’ and ‘compassio’ are almost synonymous. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter ST), in Opera omnia, ed. by Roberto Busa (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), pp. ii, 184–945; ‘The Summa theologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London; New York: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1922–37).

³³ See Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique, 31 (1995), pp. 83–109 (p. 88), and the discussion in Alex Houen, ‘Introduction: Affect and Literature’, in Affect and Literature, ed. by Alex Houen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 1–30 (p. 3).

³⁴ Sententia Ethic., lib. 8 l. 3 n. 12, 74277 (Book 8 lecture 3, 1573). Thomas Aquinas, In decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum expositio, ed. by Raymund Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1964); Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by C.I. Litzinger (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964).

³⁵ Ellero, pp. 194–96.

³⁶ ‘[I]ste motus animi […] servit rationi quando ita praebetur […] ut iustitia conservetur, sive cum indigenti tribuitur, sive cum ignoscitur poenitenti’ (‘this “movement of the mind”, obeys reason, when […] vouchsafed in such a way that justice is safeguarded, whether we give to the needy or forgive the repentant,’ ST 2.2.30.3 co.).

³⁷ Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus), De regimine principum, in Aegidii Columnae Romani, 3 vols (Rome: apud Bartholomaeum Zannettum, 1607), i, p. 183. Translations are mine.

³⁸ Holmes, p. 50.

³⁹ On the dating of the Triumphi, see Francesco Petrarch, ‘Triumphi’, ed. by Vinicio Pacca, in Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli Abbozzi, ed. by Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), p. 44.

⁴⁰ Petrarch, ‘Triumphi’, ed. Pacca.

⁴¹ Within the tale, after Gisippus gives up on his wife for his friend, Titus is willing to sacrifice his life for saving Gisippus’.

⁴² Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

⁴³ Scipio is one of the two central heroes of the following Triumphus pudicitie (Triumph of Chastity), the other one being Laura.

⁴⁴ Scipio’s own remarkable chastity and self-control is celebrated in both Livy’s Ab urbe condita XXVI. l and Valerius Maximus’ Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium IV. iii. Both sections tell the story of Scipio’s decision to return a beautiful young captive girl, who became his prisoner after he defeated the Carthaginians in Spain, to her family unviolated. The obvious parallels between this story and Massinissa’s own enamourment suggest that virtue may indeed conquer love.

⁴⁵ On the dialogic and open-ended nature of Petrarch’s Secretum, see Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 145–84, and Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 71–85.

⁴⁶ On this dialogue, see also Johannes Bartuschat, ‘Sofonisba e Massinissa: Dall’Africa e dal De viris ai Trionfi’, in Petrarca e i suoi lettori, ed. by Vittorio Caratozzolo and Georges Güntert (Ravenna: Longo, 2000), pp. 109–41 (pp. 128–29).

⁴⁷ Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, 4 vols (Florence: Le lettere, 1994).

⁴⁸ On this aspect, see Gur Zak, ‘“Soft hearts”: virtue, vulnerability, and community in Petrarch’s letter-collections’, Petrarchesca, 9 (2021), pp. 125–36.

⁴⁹ This tendency, however, is not total, as is attested by the fact that he writes the Triumphi in the vernacular.

⁵⁰ James Hankins, ‘Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni’, in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Ronald G. Witt, ed. by Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 9–29 (p. 14). On Bruni’s humanism, see also Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 392–442.

⁵¹ Bruni declares that he follows the model of Petrarch’s own translation of Decameron X. x in the introductory letter to his translation of Decameron IV. i, addressed to the Florentine nobleman Bindaccio de’ Ricasoli. The letter and Bruni’s translation of Decameron IV. i are available in Maria Luisa Doglio, L’‘exemplum’ nella novella latina del ‘400 (Turin: Giappichelli Editore, 1975), pp. 150–60.

⁵² Edition of the tale is from Nicoletta Marcelli, Eros, politica e religione nel quattrocento fiorentino (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2010), pp. 114–31 (paragraph numbers refer to Marcelli’s edition). Marcelli also provides a detailed survey of the manuscript tradition. On the manuscript tradition, see also Anna Strowe, ‘Narrative Cohesion Through Text and Material: Texts, Co-Texts and the Manuscript Tradition Surrounding Leonardo Bruni’s Seleuco’, Italian Studies, 74.1 (2018), pp. 10–28.

⁵³ Marcelli points to Bruni’s debt to Valerius Maximus, who also contrasts tragic and comic exempla. See Marcelli, p. 26. The model of the Triumphi, however, must also be taken into consideration in my view.

⁵⁴ In the course of her elaborate speech in front of her father in Decameron IV. i, Ghismonda accuses him specifically of failing to recognise that she is ‘di carne’ (IV. i. 34) and hence bound for love. The mother in II. viii, by contrast, acknowledges, as we have seen above, that as a young man her son is inescapably bound for love.

⁵⁵ For the texts of Bruni’s Greek sources, see Marcelli, pp. 17–20.

⁵⁶ Hankins, ‘Humanism in the Vernacular’, pp. 16–17. See also James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soul-Craft and State-Craft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), pp. 376–77. Timothy Kircher concentrates in his analysis on Bruni’s concern with the ideal nature of paternal authority in the tale. See Timothy Kircher, ‘Alberti in Boccaccio’s Garden: After-Dinner Thoughts on Moral Philosophy’, in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance, pp. 169–95 (p. 178).

⁵⁷ See Hankins, Virtue Politics.

⁵⁸ Edition of the work is from: Gabriella Albanese and Bruno Figliuolo, Giannozzo Manetti a Venezia 1448–1450. Con l’edizione della corrispondenza e del ‘Dialogus in symposio’ (Venice: Ist. Veneto di Scienze, 2014), pp. 349–405. Paragraph numbers refer to this edition. On Manetti’s life and works, see especially David Marsh, Giannozzo Manetti: The Life of a Florentine Humanist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

⁵⁹ David Marsh, ‘Boccaccio in the Quattrocento: Manetti’s Dialogus in Symposio’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33.3 (1980), pp. 337–50 (p. 344).

⁶⁰ ‘[N]am si ambos impunitos dimisisset, nempe iustitiam, cunctarum virtutum perclarissimam, violasset’ (‘for if he had dismissed both of them unpunished, he would have violated justice, the most distinguished of all virtues,’ §113). Bruni’s concentration on Tancredi’s inhumanity and cruelty is thus completely inverted here.