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.
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/
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http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/
http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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