


































 
Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 4.1 (2015) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3584 
 

 

 

 
 

Digital Readers of Allusive Texts: Ovidian Intertextuality in the Commedia and the Digital 

Concordance on Intertextual Dante 

 

Julie Van Peteghem 

 

Abstract: This essay introduces the notion of a digital concordance as a reading and 

research tool to explore intertextual passages online, and illustrates how a digital 

concordance of highly allusive texts can change how we read and research such texts. I 

take as example the digital concordance on Intertextual Dante, a project on Digital Dante 

(digitaldante.columbia.edu) developed in collaboration with the Center for Digital 

Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, which in the first phase highlights the 

Ovidian intertextuality in Dante’s Divina Commedia. The essay traces the history of the 

scholarship on Dante’s Ovid, identifying its strengths and limitations, especially of the 

concordances in print. Since the intertextual passages in the Commedia require a reading 

not restricted to the obviously corresponding verses, but attentive to the broader textual 

contexts, I show how the digital concordance on Intertextual Dante greatly facilitates 

such a contextualized reading. The visualization of the corresponding passages (side by 

side, highlighted, within context) and the search options (by category of text reuse or by 

canto/book/poem) help the study of (Ovidian) intertextuality in the Commedia, as 

illustrated with examples from the site.   

 

Readers of Dante’s Divina Commedia have often felt the need to provide glosses and notes to the 

poem for fellow and future readers. The commentary tradition on the Commedia started just a 

few years after the completion of Dante’s poem and is still ongoing. One sort of additional 

information these commentaries include is the clarification of where and how Dante uses 

theological, classical, and vernacular sources in the Commedia. Sometimes this information is 

collected in separate concordances, which list passages in Dante’s Commedia and the 

corresponding source texts. Now that the contemporary reader can easily access the text of the 

Commedia and the commentaries online, the concordance is to follow.1 

 

This essay introduces the concept of a digital concordance through the example of Intertextual 

Dante, a reading and research tool to explore intertextual passages in Dante’s Commedia online, 

which I developed in collaboration with the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at 

Columbia University and is part of the renewed Digital Dante website 

(digitaldante.columbia.edu). I place this notion of a digital concordance within the history of 

studying intertextuality in Dante’s Commedia, from the first mentions in the commentaries to the 

existing concordances in print, and illustrate how technology can be used to incorporate the 

strengths of that long tradition and overcome its limitations. As the first phase of Intertextual 

Dante highlights Ovidian intertextuality in the Commedia, this will be the focus of this essay.  

 

 

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Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Van Peteghem 
 

4.1 (2015)  40 
 

Studying Ovidian Intertextuality in Dante’s Commedia 

 

In the most general formulation, intertextuality is concerned with the reuse of a passage from one 

text in another. Quotations, imitations, reminiscences, echoes, allusions are all specific kinds of 

text reuse, but some of these are more easily defined than others. Quotations, for instance, are 

easily understood as the verbatim repetitions of phrases or sentences, while the difficulty of 

precisely defining allusions (broadly, instances where the reuse is not direct or explicit) goes to 

the heart of the theoretical questions of what intertextuality exactly is and does. Are these 

similarities between texts just an inevitable feature of literature, as some theorists of 

intertextuality have it, or are they the result of an intentional reuse by the author, who had 

another text on his or her mind while writing? Or is intertextuality solely created by the reader 

who notices the connection and gives meaning to the reuse of an old passage in a new context 

(Coffee et al. 419)? There is no critical consensus on these issues other than a shared concern 

that this kind of research needs to go beyond the detection of instances of intertextuality, and 

mainly focus on the new meanings the text reuse creates. In this essay, I use “intertextuality” and 

“text reuse” interchangeably to indicate the general phenomenon, and “allusion” for any instance 

in which the text reuse is not made explicit by exact word repetition or by the author’s 

mentioning the source.  

 

Dante’s Divina Commedia is a highly allusive text: Dante works with nearly fifty different 

sources (but only identifies a few), and more than a tenth of the entire poem features text reuse of 

some sort.2 Among Dante’s source texts, the work of the Latin poet Ovid occupies a distinct 

position. As Teodolinda Barolini pointed out, “Ovid is one of the poets Dante most uses, but—

with respect to other major poets—least acknowledges” (Dante’s Poets 196). Vergil is the only 

Latin author Dante works with more than Ovid, but while Vergil became the pilgrim’s guide 

Virgilio for almost two canticles of the Commedia and Dante calls his work a model (for himself 

in Inf. 1.82-87, and for Statius in Purg. 21.94-102), Ovid only briefly appears as a character in 

Inf. 4.90 and Dante tells him in Inf. 25.97-102 that his own work is better.3 We know Dante had 

direct knowledge of Ovid’s writings: in his treatises and letters he often quotes Ovid and several 

Italian phrases from the Commedia come close to being literal translations of Ovid’s Latin. But 

while at times Dante borrows Ovid’s language and characters in an explicit and straightforward 

manner, far more often the text reuse takes the form of allusions tucked away into the text of the 

Commedia. Not surprisingly, then, readers of the Commedia have often wanted to identify, 

organize, and define this vast amount of Ovidian material.  

 

In the commentaries on the Commedia, the main focus was for a long time on the identification 

of Dante’s source texts. I illustrate this by looking at the commentaries on one of the two cantos 

that mentions Ovid by name, canto 25 of the Inferno. In this canto, Dante tells Ovid to be silent 

about his characters Cadmus and Arethusa: his descriptions of transformation in the Commedia 

outdo those of the Latin poet (Inf. 25.97-102).4 It is now well understood that Dante used several 

Ovidian stories to shape the transformations in this canto, which creates tensions with Dante’s 

claims of originality and authority over Ovid.5 The first commentators, however, focused on the 

identification of the Ovidian characters mentioned by Dante (Cadmus and Arethusa) and other 

passages that showed similarities with Ovidian verses. Their comments demonstrate a good 

knowledge of Ovid’s writings: they include the precise book and verse numbers of Cadmus’s and 

Arethusa’s stories in the Metamorphoses, paraphrase their stories often at great length, and 



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4.1 (2015)  41 
 

mention other works by the Latin poet. For instance, one of the earliest commentators, Guido da 

Pisa (1327-28) refers to or cites passages from Ovid’s Fasti (in his note on 25.25-27) and the 

Heroides (in his note on Inf. 25.58-60). That last reference is also the first time a commentator on 

Inf. 25 establishes a connection between Dante’s language in the Commedia and his Ovidian 

source text. Many commentators will do that after him, bit by bit revealing how much the images 

of Dante’s metamorphoses described in this canto are similar to Ovid’s transformation stories of 

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (first noted in 1440 by Guiniforto delli Bargigi, comment on Inf. 

25.46-57) and Cadmus and Harmonia (first noted in the commentary by Giovan Battista Gelli 

[1541-63] on Inf. 25.136-41). While some commentators further explore the connections 

between the two texts in more depth,6 the general tendency is to write about intertextuality in the 

shortest possible way: the identification of the corresponding passages without much more 

explanation. 

 

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a series of studies marked the growing interest in 

identifying and organizing Dante’s sources in a much more systematic way: for instance, Luigi 

Venturi’s Le similitudini dantesche (1874) organizes Dante’s similes in the Commedia 

thematically and identifies Dante’s sources; Gioachino Szombathely’s Dante e Ovidio (1888) 

goes through the Metamorphoses book by book, listing and discussing all corresponding 

passages in the Commedia; Edward Moore’s Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante (1896) 

dedicates individual chapters to the influence of Scripture, classical texts, and Christian authors 

from Late Antiquity on Dante’s writings, and includes indexes of quotations for each source text. 

These works, especially Moore’s, became at their turn frequently mentioned in the 

commentaries, and provided later scholars with extensive materials for a more focused and 

reflective approach to the study of intertextuality in the Commedia. 

 

Before turning to the scholarly writings that resulted from this initial work of identification and 

organization, a short note on methodology. After all, the work of scholars such as Venturi, 

Szombathely, and Moore is one of interpretation as well, the result of their choices of what and 

what not to include, according to their own definition of intertextuality. Unfortunately, in these 

early works this definition is not always clearly specified: only Moore explicitly explains the 

rationale behind his system used for the indexes of quotations. (While Moore uses the word 

“quotations” to describe the content of his lists, it would be more precise to call them 

concordances – lists of corresponding passages in Dante’s writings and his source texts – of 

which quotations are only a part.)7 For these concordances, he divided the pairs of passages into 

three categories: “direct citations,” “obvious references or imitations,” and “allusions and 

reminiscences” (4, 45-46). At the same time, Moore is the first to temper the importance of this 

system of classification, admitting that he himself had often hesitated when classifying an entry 

(46). For his study of Ovid’s influence on Dante’s Commedia, the added value of these 

categories is limited: with hardly any direct citations, about two out of three Ovid-inspired lines 

in Moore’s concordance fall under the category of “obvious references or imitations,” a broad 

definition that covers many different uses of Ovid’s texts.8  

 

More than a century after Moore’s impressive study, Steno Vazzana’s Dante e la “bella scola” 

(2002) includes a new “indice di concordanze,” lists of corresponding passages in Dante’s 

Commedia and the works of several Latin authors. In his concordance the majority of the 

Ovidian lines come from the Metamorphoses, but it also includes many new passages from all of 



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4.1 (2015)  42 
 

Ovid’s other works. Unlike Moore, Vazzana does not categorize the entries or explain his criteria 

for inclusion. Only in the introduction, does he point out – and then only briefly -- that his focus 

will be mainly on language (10). Between the publication of Moore’s and Vazzana’s 

concordances, scholars had proposed to structure the Ovidian material in the Commedia 

according to principles of organization other than verbal similarities. For instance, Michelangelo 

Picone took a thematic approach, characterizing Ovidian myths in the Commedia as “objective” 

(i.e., explaining historical facts) or “subjective” (i.e., explaining the experience of the pilgrim) 

(“L’Ovidio di Dante” 126); Madison U. Sowell found Ovidian myths that run “horizontally” 

through the cantos and “vertically” through the canticles of the Commedia (10); Kevin Brownlee 

proposed to distinguish between Ovid-inspired characters, similes, and similes regarding the 

pilgrim (“Dante and the Classical Poets” 113). Picone, Sowell, and Brownlee did not 

systematically apply their proposed categories to the Ovidian material in the Commedia, but their 

writings nevertheless show a continued interest in giving structure to it. 

 

Picone’s and Sowell’s essays belong to a distinct group of writings that give short general 

overviews of Dante’s use of Ovid’s oeuvre: introductory essays, book chapters, and dictionary 

entries, often with the title “Dante’s Ovid” or a variant of it.9 Not all of these essays propose 

categories to structure the Ovidian material in Dante’s writings, as Picone’s and Sowell’s essays 

did. But most of them share a focus on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Inferno. A clear 

exception is the most recent essay of this type, Warren Ginsberg’s “Dante’s Ovids” (2011), 

which calls attention to the different phases in both Ovid’s and Dante’s literary careers.  

 

In addition to these short overviews that describe the general traits of Dante’s use of Ovid, the 

scholarship includes a much larger corpus of essays that break down this subject into very 

specific topics, such as Dante’s reuse of a particular Ovidian story, or Ovid’s influence on a 

canto or series of cantos. In the early 1990s, two collections of such essays (Jacoff and Schnapp; 

Sowell) shifted the focus from studying Ovidian intertextuality in Dante’s Inferno to the other 

two canticles, arguing that Ovid’s influence is equally present in Purgatorio and Paradiso – if 

not more. While this was an important new direction in the scholarship, the majority of the close 

readings still focus on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Commedia, and not their other 

writings. One of the Intertextual Dante project’s goals is to further broaden the scope of this 

analysis and eventually feature the complete oeuvres of Dante and of the authors he reuses in his 

writings. 

 

Another important common thread through these close readings is the attention given to the 

larger context of the Ovidian episodes that Dante selected (instead of focusing only on the 

corresponding passages, which, as we saw before, was the way most commentators wrote about 

the subject). In an essay on Dantean intertextuality, Christopher Kleinhenz convincingly argues 

that Dante intended his citations in the Commedia to be interpreted with attention to the broader 

textual context (184-85). He illustrates this with a passage in Purg. 2: when a boat of souls 

approaches mount Purgatory, Dante notes that they were singing the psalm In exitu Israel de 

Aegypto “con quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto” (“with what is written after of that psalm” 

[Purg. 2.48]). In other words, Dante is telling us that not only the quoted opening words but the 

entire text of the psalm are relevant for the understanding of the citation in this canto. This 

example features a citation, the most direct form of including source texts, but we should also 

look at what is “written after” for the more obscure intertextual passages in the Commedia, 



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4.1 (2015)  43 
 

where Dante does not cite his sources. As we will see later in the discussion of Intertextual 

Dante, it is one of the main features of the digital concordance to facilitate this kind of 

contextualized reading of Dante’s source materials. 

 

These two short forms of writing – the general overviews and the close readings of specific 

passages – together with the concordances and the notes on Ovidian source passages in the 

commentaries make up the current state of the scholarship on Dante’s Ovid. The topic has clearly 

received plenty of scholarly attention, but ultimately the literature still remains somewhat 

fragmented, probably because of the lack of a comprehensive study on the subject. The 

specificity of certain contributions (the notes in commentaries, and, to some extent, the close 

readings) usually leaves little room to reflect on the general traits of Dante’s use of Ovid; the 

general overview essays are often too partial to Dante’s use of the Metamorphoses and their 

short format at times leads to inevitable overgeneralizations; the concordances offer 

completeness but little to no interpretation. Rooted in this tradition of studying Dante’s Ovid, the 

digital concordance on Intertextual Dante builds on the scholarship’s strengths and uses the 

advantages of a digital approach to reading and researching texts to address its shortcomings.  

 

Intertextuality and the Digital Humanities 

 

Digital Humanities research on intertextuality continues to study how texts are reused in other 

texts, but now with the prospect of exploring much larger corpora than previously possible. 

Projects focus on the detection of (new) instances of intertextuality, and the visualization and 

searchability of the results, both those obtained by human compilation and those obtained 

through computational models. The switch from traditional to digital approaches to the study of 

intertextuality comes with new questions about definition and methodology. Where it is possible 

to compile a print concordance of corresponding passages or write an essay on an intertextual 

passage without defining what is precisely understood by “intertextuality,” technology cannot be 

involved to detect instances of intertextuality without a clear definition of what such an instance 

should look like. As we saw before in the first section of this essay, text reuse takes different 

forms: it ranges from the obvious to the oblique, from quotations (the literal reuse of words or 

phrases from one text into another) to allusions (the more obscure instances where the reuse is 

not direct or explicit). Different digital approaches are needed to detect them. 

 

Within the digital framework, it has become possible to search large text corpora for the precise 

recurrence of words and phrases, and use the results to make observations and interpretations of 

various aspects of text reuse: the new context in which the copied passage is inserted, the 

distribution of borrowed quotations within a text, tracking how a certain word or phrase is reused 

over time – to name a few of the aspects that tools such as PhiloLogic, eTRACES, and AntConc 

can explore. Allusions, on the other hand, are much more difficult to discover in both the 

traditional and digital setting: for human readers it requires an extensive and thorough 

understanding of all the texts involved, and the difficulty of formulating what counts as an 

allusion (a problem the quotations do not pose) is one that the researcher writing the 

computational model to detect such instances cannot avoid. Nevertheless, even models for this 

more difficult form of digital detection have yielded promising results: the method to detect 

allusions in Latin poetry developed by Coffee et al. for the Tesserae project searches for at least 

two-word phrases with the same lemmas at the sentence level (adhering to the “traditional 



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4.1 (2015)  44 
 

scholarly identification of loci similes, which takes two-word pairs as the most basic and 

common form of intertextuality” [386]); the method proposed by Bamman and Crane focuses on 

the use of identical words, word order, syntactic similarity, metrical and phonetic similarity, 

semantic similarity (“Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion”). 

 

An additional difficulty for the automated detection of text reuse arises when the source and 

target texts are not written in the same language. Again, literal translations of phrases and 

sentences from one language into another will be easier to discover than instances where an 

author writing in one language just alludes to a sentence originally written in another. Not 

surprisingly, models addressing multilingual text reuse have been more successful in detecting 

the former than the latter (Bamman and Crane, “Discovering Multilingual Text Reuse”).10 

 

When thinking about intertextuality in Dante’s Commedia within a digital context, two 

interconnected issues immediately arise. In short, these are that the majority of instances of 

intertextuality in the Commedia are cross-language quotations and allusions. As pointed out 

before, Dante rarely quotes from his Latin or vernacular sources, and rarely literally translates 

any of his non-Italian source texts. Most of the time, he transforms his Latin sources in his Italian 

poem in a rather oblique way, and often his text reuse runs over more than one sentence. Thus, 

the instances that we would expect a computational model to detect are actually the ones that are 

the hardest to discover by human or machine reading. To work with the two languages in this 

case would require a digital translation lexicon (Latin-modern Italian for the Latin sources, and 

medieval Italian-modern Italian for the Commedia) and a strong computational model that can 

address all these difficulties. For the moment, these resources are not available. Looking 

forward, with those elements in place, the Commedia would be a good text for testing new 

models of text reuse detection: as we saw in the first section of this essay, there already exists a 

significant amount of research on the topic with which to compare the automatically obtained 

results. But for the reasons here listed, Intertextual Dante is a digital project that right now solely 

works on searching and visualizing the intertextual passages that I compiled.  

 

The Digital Concordance on Intertextual Dante 

 

The Intertextual Dante project is part of the renewed Digital Dante website  

(digitaldante.columbia.edu). In the early 1990s, Jennifer Hogan developed one of the first online 

Dante resources together with Columbia University’s Institute for Learning Technology. The 

new iteration of Digital Dante under the editorship of Teodolinda Barolini is a collaboration 

between the Department of Italian at Columbia University and the Center for Digital Research 

and Scholarship (CDRS) and the Humanities and History Division at Columbia University 

Libraries/Information Services. Intertextual Dante, which I developed together with CDRS, is 

one of the new digital projects on the site.11  

 

Intertextual Dante features a reading and research tool – a digital concordance – that offers new 

ways to explore Dante’s reuse of other texts in the Commedia. The ultimate goal is to create 

digital editions of the Divina Commedia and Dante’s other works that offer the most complete 

overview of Dante’s reuse of his source texts, when at the same time also allowing for very 

specific searches and attention to the textual context. While the site will of course become more 

powerful and insightful as more texts are added, the first phase of the project focuses on Ovidian 

http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/


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4.1 (2015)  45 
 

intertextuality in the Commedia. At its core, Intertextual Dante still contains lists of 

corresponding passages in Dante’s Commedia and his source texts, just like a concordance in 

print. But on Intertextual Dante these corresponding passages, the entries of the concordance, are 

visually represented side by side and can be searched in various ways. In what follows, I describe 

how the digital concordance on Intertextual Dante addresses the limitations of concordances in 

print and functions as a research tool. 

 

On the opening page of Intertextual Dante two columns feature the complete text of Dante’s 

Commedia (left column) and of his sources (right column). These text columns are scrollable and 

the clickable tables of contents (far left and right side) allow users to jump to specific passages 

within the texts (see fig. 1). In the Intertextual Dante editions of the Commedia and Dante’s 

source texts each entry of the concordance is marked with the icon of a manicule, a nod to the 

drawings of a hand with pointing finger indicating noteworthy passages in medieval and 

Renaissance manuscripts. Clicking on this icon will highlight the entire passage in one text and 

scroll up or down in the other text column to the corresponding passage, which will be 

highlighted as well (see fig. 2). 

 

 
Figure 1. Current opening page of Intertextual Dante. In the center, the two scrollable 

columns contain the text of Dante’s Commedia, starting with the Inferno (left column), 

and Ovid’s works, starting with the Amores (right column). The clickable tables of 

contents (far left and right side) are the first way in which the entries on Intertextual 

Dante can be searched: one can look for intertextual passages in a specific canto of the 

Commedia or book, poem, letter, or story by Ovid. At the bottom of the page, the drop-

down or drop-up menus (depending on the browser) contain all entries belonging to the 

different categories of text reuse: word choice, character, event, place, and simile. 



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4.1 (2015)  46 
 

 
Figure 2. View after the icon of the manicule next to Inf. 1.4 is clicked. The two 

corresponding passages (Inf. 1.4-6 and Tr. 3.6.29-30) are highlighted and aligned. The 

tables of contents indicate the canto number (Dante’s Inferno 1) and the precise book, 

poem, letter, or story by Ovid (Tristia 3.6). In the text box on top of the page, a comment 

explains the connection between the two texts and contexts and specifies to which 

category of text reuse the entry belongs. One can scroll up or down to read Dante’s canto 

and Ovid’s letter in their entirety.  

 

On Intertextual Dante the Commedia and Dante’s source texts can thus be read side by side in 

the order desired. In contrast, concordances in print need to commit to one order and as a result 

can only highlight one direction of the intertextuality: they first list the passages from Ovid in the 

order they appear in his texts and then all corresponding passages in Dante’s works (which 

highlights the popular Ovidian passages), or the other way around (which makes it easy to see 

where Dante works with Ovid the most).12 The digital concordance, on the other hand, gives the 

option to decide on the starting point of the search: for instance, one can start reading the text of 

Dante’s Inferno, easily see where the intertextual passages are (all indicated in the texts with the 

icon of a manicule), and look up the corresponding passages in Ovid’s works, or start with 

Ovid’s texts and search for passages Dante reused. This gives the reader more complete 

information about the distribution of Ovidian material in the Commedia: the changing presence 

or absence of manicules indicates which are the “Ovidian” cantos in the Commedia and which 

Ovidian texts appealed more or less to Dante. The two-column organization on Intertextual 

Dante makes it possible to move back and forth efficiently between the Commedia and Dante’s 

source texts. 

 



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4.1 (2015)  47 
 

Once a manicule has been clicked and the corresponding passages appear side by side on the 

screen, this presentation greatly facilitates the kind of contextualized reading that, as I argued 

earlier, the discussion of Dante’s text reuse requires. The digital concordance on Intertextual 

Dante indicates precisely where the corresponding passages are found in both works: it gives the 

larger Ovidian textual context from which Dante excerpted the passage as well as the entire 

episode of the Commedia in which the Ovidian passage is reused. In other words, the 

corresponding passages are literally placed into context. By scrolling up and down in both text 

columns, one can immediately read what came before and after the highlighted passages in both 

texts and determine how much of this surrounding text is relevant to the interpretation of the text 

reuse. In the text box on top of the page a brief comment explains the connection between the 

two texts and contexts (see fig. 2). These are remarkable departures from the concordances in 

print, which only give the references to the two corresponding passages and, in contrast to the 

digital concordance, exist completely outside of the textual context. 

 

To facilitate a reading that is even more attentive to the context, all works displayed in the 

columns are broken down into textual divisions: Dante’s Commedia into canticles and cantos; 

Ovid’s Fasti and Ars amatoria into books, his Amores into the individual poems, the Heroides, 

Tristia, and the Epistulae ex Ponto into the individual letters, and his Metamorphoses into books 

and stories. As pointed out before, the clickable tables of contents make it possible to search 

specifically for these divisions (see figs. 1 and 2).  

 

Further search options are available in the menus on the bottom of the page, addressing the 

different kinds of text reuse in the Commedia (see fig. 1). The scope is to highlight the distinctive 

traits of how Dante works with his source texts throughout the three canticles: not all instances of 

text reuse are equal, and sheer numbers easily mask significant differences among them. 

Intertextual Dante categorizes the entries of the concordance, using a new system to do so. 

Language remains the overarching criterion: verbal similarities between the passages in Dante’s 

Commedia and his source texts. In that respect, this approach does not differ too much from 

Moore’s, which tries to indicate how certain it is that Dante had Ovid in mind, or Vazzana’s, 

which also focuses on linguistic similarities. But instead of further dividing the entries based on 

the degree of closeness between the corresponding passages (which, as we have seen in the 

discussion of Moore’s concordance, yields limited results for an author such as Ovid), I work 

with three categories that illuminate specific stylistic, structural, and rhetorical aspects of Dante’s 

text: word choice, characters/place/events, and similes. Working with these criteria, I collected 

and evaluated the entries from the works on Ovidian intertextuality in the Commedia by 

Szombathely, Moore, Paratore (“Ovidio e Dante”), and Vazzana, and complemented them with 

own findings. 

 

Whereas Dante’s more obvious reuse of Ovid’s works includes names of characters, places, or 

events, the “word choice” category contains the more obscure instances that are tucked away into 

the text of the Commedia. In most cases, there are at least two verbal connections (literal 

translations or synonyms in Italian) between Ovid’s and Dante’s texts (in that respect, this 

approach resembles Coffee et al.’s, whose algorithm searches for at least two matches of 

dictionary headwords in both source and target texts, with the difference that I do not limit the 

text reuse to the sentence level as they did), but sometimes it can be just one word that 

establishes the connection. However, this concordance does not include the literal translation of 



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4.1 (2015)  48 
 

one Latin word into Dante’s Italian, if that word is found in other Latin authors besides Ovid. For 

instance, when Dante writes, “Sì come neve tra le vive travi / per lo dosso d’Italia si congela” 

(“Even as snow among the sap-filled trees / along the spine of Italy will freeze” [Purg. 30.85-

86]), his use of the word “travi” stands out because it is a hapax in the Commedia and clearly a 

Latinism. But these verses should not be included in a concordance merely because Ovid uses 

the original Latin word “trabs” in a passage for which no connection to Dante is found – 

especially since the word is found in other Latin writers.13  

 

Characters/events/places is the second category; the reader can look for their recurrence 

throughout the Commedia. The criteria for inclusion are the same as for the word choice 

category: for instance, the shared mention of a classical character’s name is not sufficient to 

establish a connection between Ovid’s and Dante’s texts; Dante needs to include particular 

words or details to indicate that Ovid’s Latin text, and not another version of the story, was his 

source of inspiration. For example, despite the fact that the giant Cacus is mentioned in texts by 

Livy, Horace, Vergil, and Ovid, Dante includes particular details about Cacus’s death (Inf. 

25.25-33) that allow us to identify Ovid’s Fasti as his source text. Of course Dante often 

combines different sources in a single passage; but at this point, the concordance only indicates 

his Ovidian sources. 

 

Similes are the third and last category. Also here only those instances are included where Dante’s 

language indicates his knowledge of the source texts. Given that the simile is a highly 

distinguishing feature of Dante’s writing, it is informative to dedicate a separate category to 

them.14 In fact, while the strongest presence of Ovid’s texts is found in Inferno (i.e., the highest 

total number of instances), Dante uses Ovid-inspired similes constantly throughout the 

Commedia, inserting a similar amount in all three canticles. This is the sort of nuance that gets 

lost when just looking at the general numbers of intertextual passages, while on Intertextual 

Dante it is possible to carry out more specific searches within those entries of the concordance.  

 

In sum, these are the search options on the current site: users of the digital concordance can 

explore the different categories of text reuse (in the menus on the bottom of the page) or look up 

specific parts of Dante’s or Ovid’s works (in the text columns or in the tables of contents); by 

clicking an entry they can display on the screen any two corresponding passages side by side, 

highlighted, and within context. (In a later phase of the project, a separate search page will be 

added.) Now let us look at some concrete examples of the kind of reading and interpretation this 

digital concordance facilitates and favors.  

 

On Intertextual Dante, the first instance of Ovidian intertextuality in the Commedia is already 

found in the second tercet of the Inferno (see fig. 2). After the opening tercet, where we find the 

pilgrim lost in the dark wood, Dante the author writes how difficult it is to describe that moment: 

“Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura / esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte / che nel pensier 

rinova la paura!” (“Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, / that savage forest, dense and difficult, 

/ which even in recall renews my fear” [Inf. 1.4-6]). The corresponding passage in Ovid’s 

writings (from the “word choice” category) is: “mensque reformidat, veluti sua vulnera, tempus / 

illud, et admonitu fit novus ipse pudor” (“my mind shrinks from those days as from wounds, at 

the mere reminder / my shame flares up afresh” [Tr. 3.6.29-30]).15 In print the concordance (first 

included in Vazzana 147) reveals only this bit of information, the similar language at the 



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4.1 (2015)  49 
 

sentence level: in both excerpts the authors look back at a moment in the past and retelling that 

memory renews the feeling they then experienced. 

 

The digital concordance, on the other hand, presents the texts side by side and situates both 

passages within the narrative units from which they were excerpted. It is already interesting that 

the first Ovidian source text Dante works with in the Commedia is not the expected, much more 

used Metamorphoses. That he selected a passage from Ovid’s Tristia, the letters written during 

his exile in Tomis near the Black Sea, is quite a meaningful choice. Even though in the narrative 

of the Commedia (set in 1300) the pilgrim’s exile is presented as a future event, it was a harsh 

reality for Dante composing his poem (from 1308 on). The prophecies of his future exile in the 

Commedia are Dante’s direct way of incorporating this event in his poem; the reuse of Ovid’s 

exile writings is indirect. In Tristia 3.6, the letter from which Dante selected a passage, the exiled 

Ovid writes to a dear friend about his mistake (“error” [Tr. 3.6.26]) that forced him to leave 

Rome, if it can be called a mistake – “stultitia” or foolishness would be a better word (Tr. 

3.6.35). Ovid even asks if “every good and advantageous path” is closed (“Omne bonae claudent 

utilitatis iter?” [Tr. 3.6.16]), which brings Dante’s “diritta via . . . smarrita” (“lost the path that 

does not stray” [Inf. 1.3]) in mind. This is one of the letters in which Ovid addresses, be it in 

vague terms, the reason for his exile, the extreme harshness of his punishment, and the despair it 

caused him. 

 

The user of the concordance on Intertextual Dante finds this content by scrolling up and down in 

the text of Ovid’s letter on the site. For the interpretation of the verbal similarities between 

Dante’s Inf. 1.4-6 and Ovid’s Tr. 3.6.29-30, the themes of this Ovidian letter need to be taken 

into consideration as well. By reusing those Ovidian verses, I argue, Dante also evoked the 

broader themes of Ovid’s letter: immediately at the opening of the Commedia, he identifies 

himself with Ovid as a fellow undeserved exile. Dante explicitly calls himself an “exul 

immeritus” in the salutations of several letters written in exile (Epistles III, V, VI, and VII); a 

contextualized reading of Dante’s reuse of verses from one of Ovid’s exile letters reveals how in 

a subtle but powerful manner he does the same at the very opening of his poem. 

 

Besides providing the opportunity to read the corresponding passages in context, the digital 

concordance also has the option to search for specific divisions in the source texts (e.g., a poem 

from the Amores, a letter from the Heroides, a book of the Fasti), and see where they reappear in 

Dante’s Commedia, or the other way around. To illustrate the potential of such searches, we 

return to canto 25 of the Inferno, the example in the discussion of the commentaries on the 

Commedia in the first section of this essay. There we already saw that Dante mainly worked with 

two Ovidian stories to structure the metamorphoses in his canto: the story of Salmacis and 

Hermaphroditus (Met. 4.274-388) for the transformation described in Inf. 25.49-93, and the story 

of Cadmus and Harmonia (Met. 4.563-603) for the one described in Inf. 25.103-41.16 Searching 

the concordance for these passages in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one finds this information, but 

also that Dante uses the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in three more passages in the 

Inferno. We will focus here on the first two instances, which are found toward the end of the 

same canto 25, where we note the similarities between Inf. 25.94-102 and Met. 4.276 (see fig. 3), 

and between Inf. 25.142-44 and Met. 4.284 (see fig. 4). 



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4.1 (2015)  50 
 

 
Figure 3. The corresponding passages Inf. 25.94-102 and Met. 4.276. 

 

 
Figure 4. The corresponding passages Inf. 25.142-44 and Met. 4.284. 



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Once again, the full scope of Dante’s text reuse only becomes clear when reading the Ovidian 

verses in context. Met. 4.276 and Met. 4.284 are the first and last verses of the introduction to the 

story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, told by Alcithoë, one of the three daughters of Minyas or 

Minyades (Met. 4.276-84). Refusing to participate in the festivities for Bacchus in their town, the 

Minyades stay at home, weaving and telling stories instead. In this frame story of the storytelling 

sisters, Ovid introduces the theme of poetic novelty: before telling their tales, the Minyades 

openly discuss the requirements of a good story, turning the passage into a metanarrative 

reflection. Defining what constitutes good storytelling in the Metamorphoses, the sisters 

repeatedly stress the importance of originality. The first sister goes through a list of possible 

stories she could tell (Met. 4.43-52) and eventually picks the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, 

“quoniam uulgaris fabula non est” (Met. 4.53), because it is not well-known. Similarly, the 

second sister Alcithoë rejects “uulgatos” or “common” stories (Met. 4.276) and selects the story 

of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus based on the criterion of novelty (Met. 4.276-84).17 In these 

passages, Ovid is obviously alluding to the Callimachean trope of novelty –the view that a poet 

should always walk untrodden paths (Anderson 417). According to Callimachus, short writings 

should strive for innovation; Ovid, however, applies Callimachus’s principle in a fifteen book-

long epic composed of more than one hundred stories skillfully woven together. The passage of 

the storytelling Minyades is one of the metanarrative moments in the Metamorphoses where 

Ovid through the voice of his characters addresses this poetics of novelty. 

 

The metanarrative tone of the Ovidian passage resonated with Dante, who in Inf. 25 also makes 

the case for a new and novel way of writing about transformation, different from the traditional 

metamorphosis stories by Lucan and Ovid. From Alcithoë’s introductory remarks to the story of 

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Dante selected two key words that allowed him to evoke the same 

tone and connect each reuse from this Ovidian story to his own poetic message in the Commedia. 

More specifically, in her introduction Alcithoë says that she will keep silent (“taceo”) about 

well-known stories (Met. 4.276), just as Dante tells Lucan and Ovid to be silent (“taccia”) about 

their common and ordinary stories of transformation (Inf. 25.94-102) (see fig. 3). Instead of the 

same old love stories, Alcithoë promises a story with “dulci nouitate” (“sweet newness” [Met. 

4.284]);18 at the end of canto 25 Dante uses “newness” as the excuse if his pen had wandered off: 

“qui mi scusi / la novità se fior la penna abborra” (Inf. 25.143-44) (see fig. 4).19 

 

These are two instances where the text reuse is established on the basis of just one repeated 

word: novelty (Ovid’s “nouitate” and Dante’s “novità”) and silence (Ovid’s “taceo” and Dante’s 

“taccia”). There is of course a grammatical difference between Alcithoë’s simple present “I keep 

silent” and Dante’s exhortative subjunctive “let [Lucan / Ovid] keep silent.” At a first reading, 

each passage represents a different rhetorical trope: the Ovidian “taceo” together with “non 

loquor” (Met. 4.279) and “praetereo” (Met. 4.284) turn Alcithoë’s introduction into a praeteritio, 

the rhetorical trope of mentioning without mentioning; Dante’s repeated “taccia” is the Italian 

version of the Latin taceat topos, a formula used to express poetic superiority over predecessors 

(Curtius 162-65). But taking all Ovidian elements in this canto into consideration, we see that 

Dante’s passage functions exactly like Alcithoë’s praeteritio. While mentioning the stories she 

will not tell, Alcithoë gives a short summary of each of these stories (Met. 4.277-83). Similarly, 

by silencing the poets Lucan and Ovid and their characters he will surpass, Dante names the very 

stories and authors that turn out to be fundamental to the shaping of his own metamorphoses in 

the Commedia (Inf. 25.94-102): as mentioned before, Dante based the transformations in this 



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canto on the Ovidian stories of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus and Cadmus and Harmonia (and 

also Lucan was a source text). Dante’s repeated reuse of elements from the story of Salmacis and 

Hermaphroditus, highlighted by the digital concordance, suggests that Dante selected this 

Ovidian story not only for its imagery, but also for its metapoetic reflections on tradition and 

innovation. 

 

The digital concordance on Intertextual Dante also indicates where Dante uses two or more 

Ovidian sources for the same passage in the Commedia. This gives interesting insights into 

Dante’s technique of working with his sources. Take for instance canto 30 of the Inferno, which 

opens with two long similes based on Ovidian stories. In the first simile (Inf. 30.1-12), Dante 

compares the rage of the falsifiers found in this canto to the rage of king Athamas. Turned insane 

by Juno, Athamas killed his son Learchus (thinking he was a lion cub); his wife Ino saved their 

other son by jumping together off a cliff. The concordance shows that Dante works with two 

Ovidian source texts here: the story of Athamas as told in the Metamorphoses (4.416-562) and 

the version in the Fasti (6.485-500).20 

 

By looking at the two source texts, we can see how Dante took over elements from both to create 

his simile in the Commedia. From the version in the Metamorphoses (see fig. 5), he reused 

Athamas’s words: “io, comites, his retia tendite siluis! / hic modo cum gemina uisa est mihi prole 

leaena” (“Huntsmen, your nets! And spread them over these woods here! / Look! I’ve sighted a 

lioness, there with two of her cubs!” [Met. 4.513-14]), which in the Commedia became: 

“Tendiam le reti, sì ch’io pigli / la leonessa e ’ leoncini al varco” (“Let’s spread the nets, to take 

the lioness / together with her cubs along the pass” [Inf. 30.7-8]). This is one of the instances 

where Dante comes close to translating Ovid’s Latin verses into the Italian of the Commedia.  

 

 



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Figure 5. The corresponding passages Inf. 30.1-12 and Met. 4.512-30. 

 

The passage in the Fasti does not show such close verbal similarities with Dante’s text, but it 

was undoubtedly a source text for Dante. Looking at the passages side by side, we notice that 

Dante structured his simile in exactly the same way as Ovid’s account in the Fasti (see fig. 6). 

Ovid first gives the reason for Juno’s anger (Jupiter’s love affair with Semele, Ino’s sister and 

Athamas’s sister-in-law, and the fact Ino took care of Semele’s and Jupiter’s son Bacchus 

[6.485-88]); he then describes Athamas’s madness and the murder of their son Learchus (6.489-

92); and narrates how Ino saved herself and their other son Melicertes by jumping in the sea 

(6.493-98). In almost the same amount of verses (14 verses in Ovid’s Fasti, 12 verses in Dante’s 

Commedia), Dante follows the same narrative outline: Juno’s anger because of Semele (Inf. 30.1-

3), Athamas’s madness and the killing of Learchus (Inf. 30.4-11), the unnamed Ino who saves 

the second child (Inf. 30.12). From this example we learn that Dante is as familiar with Ovid’s 

Fasti as with the Metamorphoses, and that this familiarity is not only seen in verbal similarities 

but also in the reuse of the narrative structure and sequence of events. It will be interesting to 

further explore Dante’s technique of combining sources, when more texts will be added to 

Intertextual Dante.  



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4.1 (2015)  54 
 

 
Figure 6. The corresponding passages Inf. 30.1-12 and Fasti 6.485-98. 

 

As we have seen in these examples, the digital concordance on Intertextual Dante makes it 

possible to carry out very specific searches and pay close attention to the broader textual context 

of the Ovidian passages Dante selected in the Commedia, just as Dante himself did. Throughout 

his works, Dante reveals himself to be a very attentive reader of the Latin poet: his text reuse of 

Ovid is not an act of anthology – plucking meaningful but isolated words and phrases – but 

rather a careful process of responding to larger passages and stories within Ovid’s texts. A 

simple comparison between the obviously corresponding passages in Ovid and Dante is thus not 

sufficient to describe Dante’s close engagement with Ovidian material. As the Ovid scholar 

Charles Segal wrote, “context is an important clue to Ovid’s mood and meaning” (262) – 

something Dante realized centuries earlier. The digital concordance on Intertextual Dante allows 

us to focus precisely on that. 

  



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Notes

 The Intertextual Dante project was conceived while I was working on my dissertation (2013), 

and is first outlined in its conclusion. The lists of the Ovidian passages in the Commedia, 

included in appendix, were the basis for the entries of the digital concordance on Intertextual 

Dante. Parts of this essay are based on that study, such as the system to categorize the different 

kinds of text reuse, which are also used on the site. I developed Intertextual Dante in 

collaboration with the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University 

(2014). 
1 The text of the Commedia can be consulted online on several websites, including the Digital 

Dante site to which the Intertextual Dante project belongs. The Dartmouth Dante Project 

includes over seventy-five commentaries on the Commedia, which also can be consulted at their 

Dante Lab digital workspace. The most recent commentary on the Commedia, Teodolinda 

Barolini’s Commento Baroliniano, is published on Digital Dante.  
2 These broad calculations are based on the concordance in Moore 342-94 (discussed later in this 

essay), which are still the most complete lists of intertextual passages in Dante’s works.  
3 All quotations from the Commedia refer to the text established by Petrocchi. The English 

translations are by Mandelbaum, which are also available on Digital Dante. 
4 I reviewed all the commentaries included in the Dartmouth Dante Project. 
5 On this issue, see especially Cioffi.   
6 Only from the twentieth century on, commentators seem more interested in providing longer 

and more detailed notes on intertextual passages. A notable earlier exception is the commentary 

by Castelvetro (1570). 
7 Moore used the term “concordance” twice to describe Fay’s work, the alphabetical list of all 

words used in the Commedia with references to where they appear in the text (45, 130).  
8 Almost all of the “direct citations” are found in Dante’s treatises, especially the Convivio. 

Moore lists only two direct citations in the Commedia: Inf. 25.97 and Inf. 25.98 – the moment 

where Dante tells Ovid to be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa – correspond to Met. 4.570-88 

and to Met 5.572ff. – the passages in the Metamorphoses where Ovid tells these stories (Moore 

349, 350, 363). Moore’s category of “allusions and reminiscences” seems the perfect label for 

cases of doubt, where Ovid’s text is but one of the sources featuring a certain classical character 

or motif. 
9 In chronological order, the “Dante’s Ovid” essays are: Szombathely; Moore 206-28; Palgen; 

Settineri; Paratore, “Ovidio”; Paratore, “Ovidio e Dante”; Hawkins, “Dante’s Ovid”; Sowell 1-

15, Hawkins, “The Metamorphosis of Dante”; Picone, “L’Ovidio di Dante”; Brugnoli; Picone, 

“Dante e i miti”; Clay; Brownlee, “Ovid”; Vazzana 123-47; Ginsberg, “Dante’s Ovids: 

Allegory”; Wetherbee; Ginsberg, “Dante’s Ovids.” 
10 For all projects involving computational models, it is important to stress that this kind of 

research does not take the human out of literary studies, in the sense of neglecting “the 

significance of gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and history” (as Clement par. 1 has it), or 

in the sense that the role of the researcher would drastically diminish. As many articles on 

Digital Humanities research stress, the computer technology does not replace but rather 

supplements, modifies, redefines traditional research (see, for instance, Cooney, Roe, and Olsen 

par. 39). Researchers construct the computational models, determine which results are 

meaningful and valid, and so on.  

                                                



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11 On the history and relaunch of the Digital Dante website, see the Note from the Editor 

Teodolinda Barolini: http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/about-us/.  
12 Szombathely, Moore 349-51, and Vazzana 146-51 are examples of the first approach and 

follow the order of Ovid’s texts, my own print concordance (“Italian Readers of Ovid,” 

appendix) lists the passages in the order they appear in Dante’s Commedia.  
13 For other instances where the word is used in Latin literature, see “trabs” in Lewis and Short, 

which includes passages by Vergil, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus, among others.  
14 See Brownlee, “Dante and the Classical Poets” 113, which inspired the inclusion of this 

category.  
15 All quotations from Ovid’s Tristia refer to the Oxford Classical Texts edition by Owen, and 

the English translations are by Green. Some editions, for instance the Loeb edition, have “dolor” 

instead of “pudor” at v. 30. While these are different sentiments, it should be pointed out that 

Ovid (re)mentions the feeling of shame – “pudorem” – at the following v. 31.  
16 All quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses refer to the Oxford Classical Texts edition by 

Tarrant, and the English translations are by Raeburn.  
17 In contrast to the other two Minyades, the third sister Leuconoë simply announces the topic of 

her story and starts narrating (Met. 4.169-70). 
18 This is not an intertextual passage commonly included in the concordances and commentaries. 

I have only seen it briefly mentioned in Ferrero and Chimenz 32, note 21.  
19 The verb “abborrare” (i.e., working with “borra,” inferior pieces of wool, and therefore to err, 

wander) is an interesting choice that can be seen as another connection with the Ovidian passage. 

As pointed out before, the Minyades pass their time at home weaving and telling stories – two 

activities that have been traditionally used as each other’s proxies. To talk about the act of writing, 

Dante used a verb that is linked with weaving as well.  
20 All quotations from Ovid’s Fasti refer to the Loeb edition by Henderson and Goold. 

http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/about-us/


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