CHAPTER 14

Come un Virtuoso

In Circe’s Court

Although our knowledge of the matter is still surprisingly sketchy, it is becoming clearer that ‘educational travel on the continent following a fairly well-established itinerary had become a convention of upper-class English travel by the end of the 1630s’, with France, Italy, and Switzerland the prime destinations. Such travel was not associated only with the cultivation of gentlemen: academics had long sought to travel on humanistic grounds, and were sometimes encouraged by their colleges. An example from the late 1630s is Daniel Vivian, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, who in 1636 was given a leave of absence for a year by his college to travel on the continent. The Caroline ‘boom’ in ‘educational and cultural tourism’ not only continued into the civil war decades, but was to some extent even encouraged by the outbreak of the war. Men who went abroad in the 1640s were not necessarily going into exile, it has been suggested, so much as ‘strategically absenting themselves’ from the conflict by engaging in a ‘well-established educational convention’.¹ Given the increasingly tense and polarized religious and political situation in England, Milton’s decision to leave for a fifteen-month tour of the continent in May 1638 might well be seen as such a case of strategic absence.

At the same time the letter in November 1637 to Diodati expressed his frustration with living in Horton in ‘obscurity and cramped quarters’ and without companionship, and loftily proclaimed his desire to purse the beauty of the divine (or the daemonic) in all its various forms. The letter also outlines his on-going and rigorous course of study in the history of the Italian states. Given his friendship with the Diodati family of Italian Protestant émigrés, the facility with the language evident in his Italian sonnets, his reading in the Italian vernacular poets—Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Tasso; also Della Casa and Varchi, copies of whose verse he had owned since 1629—and of course his deep engagement with the language and literature of classical Rome, the desire to travel to Italy was likely prompted mostly by personal fascination. But the decision to go in the spring of 1638 may have been spurred by the worsening public context not only in England, but throughout the three kingdoms. The Scottish Presbyterians had rejected in 1637 the attempt by Charles and Laud to impose a new liturgy based on the Book of Common Prayer on the country and in February 1638 had issued the National Covenant, by which they bound themselves to maintain, by military force if necessary, the reformed religion as it was practised in the country. These events would lead to the expulsion of the Scottish bishops by the end of the year and subsequently the first ‘Bishops’ War’ in May 1639, when Charles led an army to the border but then agreed to refer all the disputed issues back for discussion in the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk. Milton returned to England in the late summer of 1639, soon after this agreement; known as the Pacification of Berwick, it was widely perceived as a humiliation for the king and his forces.²

At least since the Romantics, there has been a tendency to picture Milton’s tour of Italy as a transformational experience that gave him ‘a new confidence and direction’ in his poetic vocation after his enthusiastic reception by European intellectuals and Italian men of letters— Wordsworth self-consciously followed in Milton’s footsteps in his travels in Italy.³ To a great extent this image of the Italian tour relies on Milton’s own account of his travels in the polemical contexts of the Defensio Secunda in 1654, where he is defending his own character in Latin to a learned European audience, although his extant correspondence with some of these figures and surviving documentary records of his time in Italy tend to confirm his own account. The curious lines that he scribbled on the back of the letter from Henry Lawes that enclosed his passport—‘Fix here, ye overdated spheres / That wing the restless foot of time’—suggest eagerness to embark on a trip that would belatedly see an advancement of his poetic ambitions. ‘Overdated’, a word not previously recorded, has the sense less that the spheres are ‘antiquated, out of date’, as John Carey suggests, than that they are later than they should have been. If the lines register the debt to Lawes, who has enabled Milton to embark on the journey which he thought ‘might end his apprenticeship and make him an artist of European stature’, they are also ‘precipitated by alarm that, as he begins another preparation, he might already have missed his time’.⁴

It is not so often acknowledged that Milton’s retrospective account of his tour in the Defensio Secunda is as concerned with its dangers as its delights. When Milton visited Naples, his host, Giovanni Batista Manso (1561–?1647), ‘gravely apologised because although he had especially wished to show me many more attentions, he would not do so in that city, since I was unwilling to be circumspect in regard to religion’. As Milton was about to return to Rome, some merchants warned ‘that they had learned through letters of plots laid against me by the English Jesuits, should I return to Rome, because of the freedom with which I had spoken about religion’. He nonetheless did go back to Rome and ‘for almost two months, in the very stronghold of the Pope, if anyone attacked the orthodox religion, I openly, as before, defended it’. Milton sought of course to represent himself in retrospect as an implacable and fearless proponent of the Protestant truth, surrounded by its enemies; but also as one who had maintained his chastity in the face of constant temptation: ‘in all these places, where so much licence exists, I lived free and untouched by the slightest sin or reproach, reflecting constantly that although I might hide from the gaze of men, I could not elude the sight of God’.⁵ In the Defensio Secunda Milton was responding in print to the charge made by Pierre Du Moulin in 1652 that he had fled to Italy after being thrown out of Cambridge for sexual libertinism; but even private documents dating from the period exhibit satisfaction in having maintained his virtue on the tour.

It might seem melodramatic to identify this chaste Milton, retaining his virginity against the blandishments of foreign libertines, with his own theatrical creation, the Lady lost in the wood—if Milton hadn’t done so himself. He wrote the final lines of his Maske—‘Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her’—in the visitors’ album of Camillo Cerdogni in Geneva on 10 June 1639, along with a motto adapted from Horace’s Epistulae: ‘Caelum non animu[m] muto du[m] trans mare curro’ (I change my sky but not my mind when I cross the sea).⁶ The Neapolitan Protestant Cerdogni was a religious refugee in Calvinist Geneva: the line from Horace marks Milton’s own recent, arduous journey across the Pennine Alps on his journey back to England and proclaims him morally and spiritually untainted by his travels in the heartland of Catholicism. The lines from the Maske invoke the Neoplatonic soteriology dramatized in that work, in which grace is dependent on virtue rather than the reverse: divine grace will respond to, and assist, those who display consistent virtue, such as Milton evidently believed himself to have displayed in his travels through Italy.

Milton’s travels to France and Italy are interestingly paralleled in the life of a man whom Milton would later come to know when he was employed by the Commonwealth government, and whom he may have first encountered on the continent in 1638. John Cook (bap. 1608, d. 1660) would act as the chief prosecutor at the trial of Charles I in 1648–9, and was eventually executed as a regicide in 1660. In the later 1630s, Cook travelled widely on the continent and particularly in France and Italy as he sought to gain knowledge about the history and institutions of Counter-Reformation Europe. Cook dined at the English College in Rome in April 1638, as Milton would do six months later, along with Patrick Carey, the fourteen-year-old son of Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland; Cook then lodged in Geneva with Jean Diodati, signing Cerdogni’s album amicorum in August 1638, as Milton would do just over a year later. According to Edmund Ludlow, his close friend, when Cook was in Rome he behaved in the same defiant manner that Milton claimed characterized his time in the city, speaking ‘freely on the behalfe of the Reformed Religion, and so farr discovered his zeale and abillityes therein that no endeavours were wanting for the drawing him to owne the popish interest’.⁷ The complaint that Protestant English visitors were subject to attempts to convert them to Catholicism was common to travellers’ tales in the period.

Milton’s identification of his own journey through Catholic Italy with that of the Lady through Comus’s forest echoes accounts of the dangers of travelling in Italy in early modern England. In the closing section of the first book of The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham lamented the fashion for young English gentlemen to visit Italy, a practice that he thought ‘to be mervelous dangerous’. Ascham protested his love for the Italian language, which he placed next to Latin and Greek, and asserted his self-evident respect for classical Roman culture; but language and history could be studied without actually visiting a country that was in sad decline:

tyme was, whan Italie and Rome, have bene, to the greate good of us that now live, the best breeders and bringers up, of the worthiest men, not onelie for wise speakinge, but also for well doing, in all Civill affaires, that ever was in the worlde. But now, that tyme is gone, and though the place remayne, yet the olde and present maners, do differ as farre, as blacke and white, as vertue and vice. Vertue once made that contrie Mistres over all the worlde. Vice now maketh that contrie slave to them, that before, were glad to serve it . . . Italie now, is not that Italie, that it was wont to be[.]⁸

Ascham goes on to add that ‘if a gentleman will needs travel to Italy’, he should follow the example of Odysseus, ‘the wisest traveler, that ever traveled thether’. This leads him into a surprisingly extended account of Italy as a modern version of Circe’s court, from which the English traveller will return transformed and degraded: ‘Some Circes shall make him, of a plaine English man, a right Italian’, if he does not follow the practice of Odysseus and ‘feede dayly, upon that swete herbe Moly with the blake roote and white floore, given unto hym by Mercurie, to avoide all the inchantmentes of Circes’. Homeric ‘moly’ signifies for Christians ‘the feare of God, and love of honestie’. Ascham’s polemic culminates in a vision of the ‘English man Italianated’ as one who ‘by living, & traveling in Italie, bringeth home into England out of Italie the Religion, the learning, the policie, the experience, the maners of Italie’. One of the particular marks of Italian irreligion according to Ascham, for all his dedication to the Christian virtue instilled by a humanist education in rhetoric and poetry, is their elevation of pagan and secular literature over the Scriptures, both in Latin and the vernacular: ‘they have in more reverence, the triumphes of Petrarche: than the Genesis of Moses: They make more accounte of Tullies [Cicero] offices, than S. Paules epistles: of a tale in Bocace [Boccaccio], than a storie of the Bible’.⁹

Milton quoted Euripides to Diodati to convey his belief that the beauty of divine wisdom could be found in many shapes—in pagan Greek tragedy, presumably, as well as the Bible—and Milton, at least at this stage of his life, was not so willing to oppose secular and sacred texts. Milton’s interest in the literary example of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was surely one of the motivations for his decision to visit Italy. Writing (in Latin) from Florence on 10 September 1638 to Benedetto Buonmattei, an eminent member of the literary clubs or academies with which Milton associated in Florence and an authority on the Tuscan language, Milton insisted that despite having immersed himself in classical literature ‘as much as anyone of my years’, he was ‘nevertheless glad to go for a feast to Dante and Petrarch, and a good many of your other authors’.¹⁰ Yet, as both the commonplace book and ‘Lycidas’ show, Milton had also been paying particular attention to the censorship and suppression to which these writers’ works had been subjected by the Catholic Church and to the anti-clericalism that could be found in their poetry. The Italian writers offered examples not only of literary achievement but of the fraught interactions between poets and ecclesiastical and political authority.

‘Flattery and Fustian’

Ascham admitted that ‘I was once in Italie my selfe; but I thank God my Venice abode there, was but ix dayes’.¹¹ Milton looked rather to the experience of Henry Wotton, who had served on three occasions as ambassador to Venice during a long and distinguished diplomatic career and to whom Milton wrote to ask for advice about travelling in April 1638, enclosing a copy of the edition of the Maske that had been put into print a few months earlier. Milton’s pride in the letter he received in return from Wotton is evident in his inclusion of it in the 1645 Poems and he referred to the letter in the Defensio Secunda as proof of Wotton’s ‘single esteem for me’ and as containing ‘precepts of no little value to one going abroad’. Wotton provided Milton with an introduction to the English ambassador at Paris, the Anglo-Irish nobleman Thomas Scuda-more, who in turn gave Milton ‘letters to English merchants along my projected route’ to Florence. The ‘precepts’ to which Milton refers in the final paragraph of Wotton’s letter are concerned, however, with how to stay safe among the dangers of Rome. Wotton recounts the advice he received from Alberto Scipioni, ‘an old Roman courtier in dangerous times’, who had once managed to escape with his life when the Duke to whom he was steward ‘with all his Family were strangled’: ‘Signor Arrigo mio (sayes he) I pensieri stretti, & il viso sciolto’ (My Lord Harry . . . close thoughts, and an open countenance).¹²

Wotton knew all about the need for subterfuge and discretion in Italy, having been involved in smuggling the manuscript of Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Inquisition to London—a work that became increasingly important to Milton’s thinking in the early 1640s about the pernicious effects of religious censorship on the intellectual health of a nation. For all the pride that Milton took from his acceptance by the literary academies in Florence, the main use to which he put his Italian experience in the prose works was as a salutary example of what would happen to English learning and culture under what he regarded as popish forms of clerical domination. The meeting that Milton had with Galileo, placed under house arrest in Florence since 1633 for the heretical belief that the earth moved around the sun, is invoked in a key moment in the argument that he would make in Areopagitica about how learning and literature decline in a nation under conditions of clerical tyranny, which breed only a servility inimical to intellectual and literary achievement:

I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.¹³

The picture that Milton paints here is of a nation that had fallen from the heights of intellectual and artistic creativity as a consequence of an encroachment of clerical upon civil power that had suppressed wit, learning, and poetry.

Milton tapped here into what has been called ‘the ideological significance for early modern English readers of the discourse of Italian humiliation’, which had been influentially articulated by figures such as Ascham.¹⁴ The history of the decline of the Italian states from the fifteenth century and of the division of the Italian peninsula by French, Spanish, and Papal forces, which had been recounted most powerfully by Francesco Guicciardini in his Storia d’Italia (c. 1537–40), was held up as a cautionary example to the English. For example, William Thomas had presented his Historie of Italie (1549) as a collection of examples of ‘tyranny and ill governance’; in giving travel advice to his brother Robert in 1578, Sir Philip Sidney declared that, apart from the republic of Venice, ‘whose laws and customs we can hardly proportion to our selves, because they are quite of a contrary government, there is little but tyrannous oppression and servile yielding to them that have little or no rule over them’.¹⁵ Sidney echoes Ascham in suggesting the model of Odysseus and his avoidance of temptation for any traveller to Italy. As we know from his letter to Diodati at the end of 1637, Milton had been reading intensively about the fortunes of the Italians, and was moving on to read separately about the history of each state; the commonplace book records his reading after 1640 in the 1636 Florentine edition of Guicciardini, likely one of the books that he bought on his tour and, he tells us in the Defensio Secunda, had shipped home in chests from Venice. The literary and cultural influence of Italy was thus at odds with English perceptions of the nation as weak, degenerate, and subject to both political and religious tyranny: that double perspective shapes the representation of Italy in Milton’s early prose works as the Italians’ humiliation is offered as an example of what could happen to England under similar forms of clerical domination.

The account in Areopagitica is the only occasion on which Milton mentioned his meeting with Galileo, which has led some to doubt that it ever really happened. But there were a number of avenues by which Milton could have got his introduction: through Élie Diodati, Galileo’s translator and the relative of Charles Diodati, or Milton’s Florentine friend and correspondent Carlo Dati, who had been taught by Galileo, or by Galileo’s son Vincenzo, whom Dati included in a list of Italian friends sending Milton their greetings in a letter of December 1648. The other major European intellectual figure to whom Milton was introduced at the beginning of his travels had also been subject to state persecution over religious matters. Milton tells us that when he arrived in Paris, Thomas Scudamore arranged an audience with the ‘most erudite’ Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and renowned general scholar, whom he ‘ardently desired to meet’ and who ‘at that time was [was] ambassador from the Queen of Sweden to the French court’. Grotius had originally escaped to France in 1621 from his sentence of life imprisonment in the Dutch republic—he was smuggled out in a book chest—after the Calvinist ‘Contra-Remonstrants’ had taken power in the country and removed the Arminian ‘Remonstrants’ from any positions of authority. Although Grotius had briefly returned to his homeland, he was forced to flee again in 1632 and was never able to return. John Hales had witnessed Grotius argue with the Calvinists at the Synod of Dort, and Hales subsequently became a great admirer, reputedly keeping a portrait of Grotius in his study at Eton. Grotius was a key influence more generally on figures involved in the Great Tew circle in the 1630s, offering men such as Hales and William Chillingworth ways of thinking about ‘the broader implications of their own insistence on freedom, choice, and effort as the basis of Christianity’, as well as how to align liberty of conscience in religion with obedience in political and civil matters.¹⁶ If Milton did discuss his tour with Hales as well as Wotton, then Hales would likely have urged Milton to try and meet with Grotius.

If Milton was later in the polemical prose to present his time in Italy as illustrative of how clerical domination of civil power bred servility in a nation and deformed its intellectual and literary culture, it is also clear that Milton greatly enjoyed his association with the Florentine literary academies, of which there was no comparable model in England beyond the loose communities in which verse circulated scribally in the universities and Inns of Court. Buonmattei was a leading member of a number of these academies, including the Svogliati (‘The Will-less’), before whom Milton performed some of his Latin poems in March and September 1639, and the Apatisti (‘The Unruffled’), in a list of whose members Milton was named.¹⁷ Antonio Malatesti (1610–72), a member of the Apatisti, even dedicated the manuscript of his sequence of fifty sonnets, La Tina: equivoci rusticali, to ‘il Signor Giovanni Milton Nobil’Inghilese’ in 1638—the bawdy nature of the sonnets hardly fits with the image of the chaste Virgilian vates with which Milton had liked to identify himself at Cambridge, so Malatesti was perhaps gently poking fun at his new English friend.¹⁸ The Florentine academies seem to have offered Milton an example of the ideal community of learned men, engaging in poetic display, competition, and tribute; his pride in his acceptance by the academies is evident in the Defensio Secunda, where he refers to them as deserving ‘great praise not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse’.¹⁹

The kind of conversation in which Milton engaged in the academies is suggested by one of the extant letters that Carlo Dati wrote to Milton in November 1647, nearly a decade after Milton had first met Dati, then aged only eighteen but already hailed as an intellectual prodigy in Florence. Dati wrote in Tuscan because Milton was so gifted ‘for making dead languages live again and making foreign languages your own’. He asked if Milton would write an elegy for a recently deceased Florentine poet, Francesco Rovai, and disclosed ‘those most excellent patrons and men of letters of our age’, Nicholas Heinsius and Isaac Vossius, had already agreed to do so.²⁰ Dati’s reference to Heinsius (1620–81) and Vossius (1618–89), both renowned Dutch humanists and textual scholars, indicates how Milton’s contact with the Florentine academies gave him insights into the workings of the ‘republic of letters’ in seventeenth-century Europe—a loose community of scholars joined by correspondence and personal affection who freely exchanged books, news, and ideas across national boundaries. Given Milton’s vigorous anti-Catholicism, it has often been thought startling that he wrote in such fulsome terms from Florence in March 1639 to the Vatican librarian, Lukas Holste (1596–1661), who had shown him around the library and recommended him to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), the Prime Minister of Rome and chief advisor to Pope Urban VIII. When Milton attended the performance of a comic opera in the theatre of the newly constructed Palazzo Barberini in February 1639, the cardinal apparently ‘singled me out in so great a throng and, almost seizing me by the hand, welcomed me in an exceedingly honourable manner’. The New College Fellow, Daniel Vivian, also met with Barberini during his tour, and was similarly keen in his (unpublished) travel narrative to emphasize how friendly Barberini was towards him and the other Protestants with whom he was travelling.²¹

It has become increasingly clear that it is a misrepresentation of the seventeenth-century republic of letters to regard its ‘citizens’ as standing above confessional divisions, dedicated to the ‘higher’ truths of scholarship. For example, the Stuarts’ Royal Librarian Patrick Young, who may have tutored Milton, and to whom Milton made a gift of a collection of his prose works in the later 1640s, found that his friendship with Holste was not enough to surmount confessional barriers when he asked about any manuscripts in the Vatican or Barberini libraries that would help him with his work on a new edition of the Septuagint. Holste and Barberini were both anxious not to assist an enterprise that could assert the superiority of Protestant biblical scholarship.²² But Holste was apparently happy to show Milton around the Vatican Library: ‘I was permitted to browse through the invaluable collection of Books, and also the numerous Greek Authors in manuscript.’²³ If issues of biblical criticism could reveal the limits of inter-confessional collaboration, poetry and the textual emendation of literary texts were the focus of Milton’s communications with Italian men of letters. Dati’s 1647 letter turns into a dizzying list of poetic citations and comparisons that encompass a range of classical and vernacular literary works, beginning with how the Italian literary theorist Castelvetro—whose commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics is recommended by Milton in Of Education—had noted an Horatian echo in a tercet in Petrarch’s Triumph of Love (c. 1340; the very work that Ascham had bemoaned Italians preferred to Genesis). This leads Dati into consideration of whether a line in one of Tibullus’s elegies that describes the ‘whirling [rapido] sea’ should be emended to rabido (furious, fierce), by way of reference to Homer, Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Valerius Flaccus, and Tasso, among others.²⁴ This is the sort of textual scholarship on classical and literary texts that Milton can be seen engaged upon in the emendations that he made to the copy of Euripides that he bought in 1634. These emendations and the correspondence with men such as Dati show Milton dabbling in the textual criticism of classical literature that was an important part of the republic of letters, and for which men such as Nicholas Heinsius and Vossius had earned European renown. Yet this kind of supra-confessional philological scholarship had never really become a feature of the English intellectual landscape, where textual scholarship had more usually been put to polemical and confessional uses. Milton would himself soon put his scholarship to polemical use in the prose works that he began publishing in 1641. Even in Dati’s intensely literary letter, however, the pressures of confessional allegiance are felt. In response to Milton’s request that in reading the anti-papal satire of several of the verses in the 1645 Poems, he show ‘the same indulgence to freedom of speech’ that was shown to Dante and Petrarch in the past, Dati’s tone becomes suddenly more guarded: any of Milton’s poems ‘which are in dispraise of my religion . . . although coming from the lips of a friend, can only be excused, not praised’.²⁵

Nonetheless Milton evidently believed that the unusual honour accorded to him as an English visitor in the Italian academies trumped any concern about being associated in public with Catholic men of letters. In the preliminary material of the Poemata, the non-English half of the 1645 Poems, Milton tried to recreate in print the community of the academies by including commendatory verses and tributes from his Italian acquaintances: Latin epigrams by Manso, Giovanni Salzilli, and Matteo Selvaggio (probably the Italian pseudonym of an English Benedictine monk, David Codner), a lengthy Italian poem by Antonio Francini and a Latin letter by Dati. Milton included his own Latin poems to Salzilli and Manso in the Poemata, as well as three epigrams on the heavenly voice of Leonora Baroni—Milton had presumably not encountered a professional female singer before. (In the first epigram, Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem, Milton once more returned to his favourite poetic topics of the guardian angel—‘Each individual (believe this, you nations) has been allotted a winged angel from the heavenly ranks’—and the Neoplatonic notion of the music of the spheres, speculating that Leonora’s voice transmits ‘the third mind [mens tertia] of a now empty heaven to earthly ears’ (lines 1–2, 5). Milton would later prefer to remain aloof from the attempts by Samuel Hartlib and others in England in the 1640s to establish new forms of intellectual association and cultural patronage in the aftermath of the dissolution of the patronage structures of the Stuart court. The Italian academies, however, seem to have embodied for him an ideal community of poetic endeavour and intellectual support. In his first major prose work, Of Reformation, Milton repeatedly invokes his recent experiences in Italy, and cannot resist an Italian phrase that is straight out of the literary conversation of the academicians but sits oddly in a work of polemical religion: explaining why a friend of the fourth-century bishop, Athanasius, read religious works other than Scripture, Milton suggests ‘it was but . . . come un virtuoso, (as the Italians say,) as a lover of elegance’.²⁶ Yet the elegance of thought and expression that he encountered in the pockets of light of the academies only cast into starker relief the dark age of Italian intellectual culture under the repression and intolerance of a nation dominated by the Counter-Reformation Church. The long-term consequences of life in such a condition of servitude, Milton maintained by the time he wrote Areopagitica, was a falling away from the heights of Dante and Petrarch and the production of writing that could not rise beyond ‘flattery and fustian’.

Non Angli, Sed Angeli

Milton had presented himself to the students and Fellows of Christ’s College as a Virgilian epic poet in the making, who had adopted a chaste lifestyle that mirrored the life of Virgil, nicknamed Parthenias or ‘Virgin’, as described by Donatus. It is striking how the Italian academicians treat Milton as an epic poet in their testimonials, despite him not having (yet) written an epic poem, and how they habitually emphasize his identity as an Englishman or Londoner.²⁷ The most conspicuous example is Selvaggi’s two-line epigram: ‘Let Greece boast of Homer, let Rome boast of Virgil; England boasts of Milton equal to both.’ Francini’s Italian tribute represents Milton in precisely the terms of daemonic hero and Ciceronian magnus animus in which Milton had envisaged himself in his Cambridge exercises: Milton is the prime example of how England ‘begets heroes [Eroi] who are rightly regarded by us as superhuman’ (lines 17–18); in his travels he has sought out ‘the best from the better in order to forge the Idea [l’ Idea] of every virtue’ (lines 47–8) and to draw ‘from the most beautiful forms [belle Idee] what was rarest in each’ (line 30); the ‘most profound mysteries’ in both heaven and earth, which nature sometimes even ‘bars to superhuman geniuses [Ingegni sovrumani]’, Milton has ‘clearly understood’ (lines 62–4). Dati represents Milton as one who has achieved the goal of universal learning already, who ‘with constant reading of authors as his companion explores, restores, traverses the hiding-places of antiquity, the ruins of the distant past, the intricacies of learning [eruditionis ambages]’ (lines 12–13). All the tributes make much of Milton’s polyglottism—Francini even ascribes Milton fluency in Spanish, for which there is little evidence otherwise.²⁸

Milton had evidently been reading about the lives of the great Italian poets beyond Boccaccio’s life of Dante. In the second epigram on Leonora Baroni, he alludes to the story in Manso’s Vita di Torquato Tasso (Venice, 1621) of how Tasso fell into melancholy over his love for ‘another Leonora’. Manso, the founder of the Academy of the Oziosi (‘The Idlers’) in Naples, had been a patron of Tasso, as well as his biographer, and so embodied for Milton a connection to the tradition of European vernacular epic. Tasso had followed the Virgilian career path, proceeding from pastoral drama in Aminta (1573) to heroic verse in Gerusalemme libertata (1581); in Of Education, Milton recommended Tasso’s work on the theory of epic, Discorsi del poema eroico (Naples, 1594). In the 1645 Poems, Milton prefaced the hundred-line Latin poem he wrote to Manso in December 1638 by pointing out that Manso had been both an ‘extremely good friend’ to Tasso and a gracious host to Milton. Mansus has much in common with Ad Patrem in its address to an older patron by a poet expressing his ambitions to achieve literary fame, but it is also a somewhat disconcerting poem in that it concludes with Milton imagining his own post-mortem existence after he has achieved the fame to which he aspires.

Milton looks forward to ‘the rewards for the righteous’ in the afterlife, obtained through ‘toil, purity of heart [mens pura], and fiery virtue’, and imagines himself, as so often in the early verse, ‘removed into the ethereal regions of the heaven-dwelling gods’; but this time he gazes not upon the magnificence of the heavens but looks back down on his own poetic achievements, which he hopes shall be commemorated by a patron such as Manso has been to Tasso, and who would ‘depict my countenance too in marble, binding my hair in Paphian marble or in the leaf of Parnassian laurel’ (lines 91–3, 95–6). In an echo of the description of Lancelot Andrewes in heaven in Elegia tertia, such a happy fate will see Milton’s daemonic face ‘suffused with blushing radiance’ as—and these are the final words of the poem—‘I applaud myself on Mount Olympus’ (lines 99–100).²⁹ These lines are usually mocked for their egregious egotism but the tone is light, with a knowing echo of the miser in Horace’s first satire: ‘The people, they hiss me, but I, I applaud myself at home, as soon as I contemplate my coins in my chest.’³⁰ Yet the Italian academicians seem to have wholly bought into Milton’s vision of his career as epic poet who not yet written an epic poem—unless Malatesti’s dedication of his bawdy sonnets to Milton does indeed strike an ironic note. Writing in Virgilian hexameters in Mansus, Milton turns to the nature of the work that would secure him such eternal fame: a national epic for the British, depicting ‘our native kings and Arthur waging wars even beneath the earth; or if I tell of great-souled heroes of a table rendered invincible by the bond of friendship and (if only the breath of inspiration be present) I shatter the Saxon phalanxes in a British war’ (lines 80–4).

Manso’s awareness that Milton was considering writing an epic about British history is suggested in his epigram that crowns the collection of Italian tributes in the 1645 Poems: ‘If your religious devotion were as your mind, beauty, charm, appearance, character, you would not be an Angle, but by Hercules a very Angel.’ Manso makes an interesting allusion to British history that illustrates the ways in which confessional disputes were always latent in the treatment of historical topics. In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Bede recounts Pope Gregory I’s comment on discovering that boys for sale at a slave market were English: if they were Christians, they would be Non Angli, sed angeli; according to Bede, this moment inspired Gregory subsequently to send Augustine to convert the English to Christianity. Manso thus jokes— perhaps half-seriously—that Milton’s perfection would be complete if he only converted to Catholicism. Counter-Reformation polemicists looked to Bede’s history as evidence for the Catholic origins of the primitive Christian faith in England; Protestants such as Matthew Parker, in his De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae (1572), responded by claiming that pre-Saxon inhabitants of ancient Britain had been converted directly by the Apostles.³¹ In envisaging an anti-Saxon, Arthurian British history for his epic theme, Milton may thus be invoking debates that he had with Manso about the historical priority of the Catholic Church in England; such debates would also have a bearing on the growing crisis in Caroline England over the authority and antiquity of episcopacy, given Augustine was the first Archbishop of Canterbury. It would be hard to judge on the basis of Mansus alone whether Milton was serious about writing an Arthurian epic that would, presumably, have owed a considerable debt to Spenser’s Faerie Queene. While some of the details in Mansus suggest Milton had been reading Geoffrey of Monmouth on ancient Britain—such as the depiction of a land where druids sing verses about Loxo, daughter of Corineus, a Trojan who came to Britain with Brutus and became king of Cornwall—the source of other details, such as Arthur waging war ‘even beneath the earth’ are hard to trace.³² But Milton would return to the topic in the first poem that he wrote on his return to England, his Latin epitaph for his best friend, Charles Diodati.

After Milton arrived in Geneva in June 1639 on his return journey from Italy, he stayed for a period and ‘conversed daily with John [Jean] Diodati, the learned professor of theology’ at the Calvinist Academy of Geneva and Charles’s uncle. Jean / Giovanni Diodati had been involved with Henry Wotton and Paolo Sarpi in a short-lived attempt to win Venice over to Protestantism in 1606, when the republic had been placed under the Papal interdict for the way its government had asserted political authority over the clergy. Diodati had later translated Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, a work that Milton’s commonplace book shows him to have been reading closely on his return to England, into French in 1621, probably on the prompting of his cousin Élie Diodati, who went on to play a key role in the publication of Galileo’s works. Jean and Élie Diodati were seemingly both involved as well in the publication in Geneva in 1624 of Sarpi’s History of the Inquisition.³³ Through his friendship with Charles, Milton had links to a family who were involved in the republic of letters but who transmitted books and manuscripts to confessional ends, in defiance of the Inquisition. It may well have been the conversations that he had with Jean Diodati in Geneva in early summer 1639 that prompted Milton to become such an avid reader of Sarpi. It may also have been from Jean Diodati that Milton discovered that Charles had died in August 1638, having not yet reached his twenty-ninth birthday; although in April Milton had visited Lucca, the birthplace of the Diodati clan, and it may alternatively be the case that the visit to Jean Diodati was made out of respect for his late friend.

Be Our Daemon

Milton returned to the mode of pastoral funeral elegy to commemorate the early death of Diodati in Epitaphium Damonis, and it is with this poem that he chose to close the Poemata in 1645, as he had closed the English half of the volume with ‘Lycidas’. By placing the neo-Latin pastoral of Epitaphium Damonis at the end of the Poemata, the close of the non-English part of the collection reflects its opening, the first elegy being addressed ad Carolum Diodatum. Milton and Diodati had always communicated in Greek or Latin, invoking and displaying to each other their shared humanist education at St Paul’s School—a display characterized, as Milton recalled in his epitaph, by ‘Cecropian’, or Attic, wit (line 56). But if Epitaphium Damonis was not a public funeral elegy in the manner of ‘Lycidas’, it was not kept entirely private either before its publication in 1645. Milton seems to have had a small number of copies of the poem printed that he could send to friends and perhaps relatives of Diodati, such as his uncle Jean in Geneva. Milton refers to having sent a copy to Carlo Dati ‘long since’ in his letter of 21 April 1647, as he named Dati (as well Manso and Francini) in the poem in recalling the poetic competitions that he had witnessed in the academies, and in which he had participated, when in Diodati’s homeland of Tuscany: ‘I had it sent purposely so that it might be, however small a proof of talent, by no means an obscure proof of my love for you, at least in those few little verses inserted—as it were inlaid—there.’³⁴

An undated copy of Epitaphium Damonis, in a single quarto sheet, survives in the British Library: entitled simply Damon, it is unsigned and without details of the printer or bookseller, but was printed in London, presumably in late 1639 or early 1640. If Milton personally gave or sent out copies of the elegy, recalling the exchange of poetic gifts that characterized his friendship with Diodati, there was presumably no need to acknowledge authorship of the printed text. Nonetheless the printed text of Epitaphium Damonis continues the curious tension in early Milton between anonymity and the pronouncement of poetic ambition. When Milton’s elegy for Shakespeare was reprinted in John Benson’s 1640 volume, Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare—a volume that sought to claim Shakespeare’s poetry for an emerging ‘Cavalier’ mode of epigrammatic wit—it was now signed ‘J. M.’, the same signature placed below ‘Lycidas’ in 1638, whereas in 1632 it had been entirely anonymous.³⁵ The inclusion of the initials suggests Milton knew that his poem was being reprinted; he was unlikely to have been consulted about the inclusion of his second poem on the death of Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, in an anthology of witty verse entitled A Banquet of Jests. Or a collection of Court. Camp. Colledge. Citie. Country, also published in 1640. Yet the printing of three of Milton’s poems within a year in three different forms of publication, following on from ‘Lycidas’ in 1638, is a reminder that there was a degree of circulation of his verse in print before 1645.

Milton engages more directly and notably more confidently in Epitaphium Damonis with the theme of his own Virgilian ambition that he had broached obliquely in ‘Lycidas’, perhaps liberated by writing in Latin for an audience of readers whom he knew personally, and for Italian acquaintances who encouraged his ambition. Epitaphium Damonis also recalls Elegia sexta, the verse epistle to Diodati on the different qualities of character and behaviour required of the epic and elegiac poets, in first displaying Milton’s mastery of a neo-Latin lyric genre—in this case pastoral elegy rather than love elegy—and then declaring his intention to move beyond it. The pastoral pipes on which the poet has played his lament for Damon ‘burst asunder, their fastenings broken, and were unable to bear the deep tones any longer’. He now attempts to render the song again, hesitating ‘to seem rather high-flown’ (lines 158–9), and proceeds to give a potted summary of British history from the mythical landing of Brutus and the Trojans to the time of King Arthur:

Give way, you woods.

Go home unfed, lambs, your master has no time for you now. I will proclaim Dardanian [Trojan] ships over the Rutupian seas [Kentish coast] and the ancient realm of Inogen, daughter of Pandrasus, the leaders of Brennus and Arvigarus and Belinus the old, and Armorican settlers at last under British law; next Igerne pregnant with Arthur through a fatal deception when the lying countenance and weapons of Gorlois were assumed—Merlin’s trick. Oh if life remains for me, you my pipe, will hang far away upon an age-old pine, very much forgotten by me, or else transformed by native muses, you will rasp out a British theme. (lines 160–71)

‘Give way, you woods’, vos cedite silvæ, alludes to Gallus’s farewell to pastoral life in Virgil’s tenth eclogue, while the image of the pastoral pipe or fistula is taken from Corydon’s renunciation of pastoral verse in the seventh eclogue: ‘The prise of artful numbers I resign, / And hang my pipe upon the sacred pine’.³⁶ Milton’s vision of an Arthurian subject for his future epic, with the outline of ancient British history derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, suggests again the immediate vernacular model of Spenser and his Virgilian progress from The Shepheardes Calender to The Faerie Queene. The envisaged shift here is linguistic as well as generic: in the moment of his most consummate Latin poem, Milton declares not only his movement beyond pastoral lyric— explicitly, whereas in ‘Lycidas’ the anticipated development remains implicit, signalled by allusion—but beyond Latin as the language of his poetry. Epitaphium Damonis follows the sixth Elegy and ‘Lycidas’ in its use of classical poetic tradition—pastoral, love elegy—‘not merely as a passive container for the poem but as an active metaphor’.³⁷

If Epitaphium Damonis articulates, more clearly than in ‘Lycidas’ or the earlier writing, Milton’s ambition to compose a vernacular epic on the topic of British history—and he accepts that such a poem may mean he will be ‘forever unknown and utterly without fame in foreign regions of the world’—then the close of the poem returns to some familiar concerns about virtue on earth and its rewards in the afterlife (lines 173–4). ‘Damon’ is, as with ‘Lycidas’, a name borrowed from classical pastoral convention; but it becomes clear by the end of the elegy that Diodati is also named ‘Damon’ because the poet believes that he has in death become a daemon—indeed that he might, just as ‘Lycidas’ became the ‘genius of the shore’ guarding over the Cornish coast, become the poet’s tutelary spirit. The poet addresses the spirit of his friend, who has now ‘received your due in heaven’, and asks him ‘whether you will be our Damon [Seu tu noster eris Damon] or whether you are more fittingly to be addressed as Diodati’ (lines 209–10). The lines pun on Diodati / deodatus, or god-given, but also on the poet’s request that Diodati be ‘our daemon’ as well as ‘our Damon’: the spirit of Diodati has turned daemonic in reward for his earthly virtue. The heavenly apotheosis of Damon / Diodati is then revealed to be a consequence of, and implicitly compensation for, his sexual purity:

Because blushing modesty and a stainless youthfulness [et sine labe juventus] were pleasing to you, because you never tasted the pleasures of the marriage-bed [quod nulla tori libata voluptas], behold, even now virginal honours are reserved for you. You yourself, your shining head girt with a gleaming crown and wearing the joyful branches of leafy palm, will enact for all eternity immortal marriage rites where there is singing and where the lyre, mingled with the dances of the blessed, sounds ecstatically, and the festive revels rave in bacchic frenzy under the thyrsus of Zion. (lines 212–19)

‘[B]lush of modesty’ (purpureus pudor) is taken from the third elegy of the first book of Ovid’s Amores, in which the speaker vows fidelity to his mistress and suggests (quite disingenuously, as we soon discover as we read on) that the reasons she should respond include (as Marlowe has it in the first and rather free English translation): ‘My spotless life, which but to gods gives place, / Naked simplicity, and modest grace’ (lines 13–14). In a manner reminiscent of the disconcerting depiction of the golden-ankled Lancelot Andrewes as an Ovidian mistress in Elegia tertia, in Epitaphium Damonis the very physical terms of Ovidian love elegy animate the allegorical language of Revelation and its promise to the 144,000 virgins of the marriage feast with the Lamb: ‘These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’ (Revelation 14: 4).

The poem enacts linguistically the incorporation into Christian soteriology of a pagan eroticism that, it transpires, was anyway never more for Diodati than a literary motif. [E]t sine labe juventus recalls, surely deliberately, et sine labe manus from the character of the vates in Elegia sexta. The distinction made in the sixth Elegy between Milton the epic, priestly poet and Diodati the elegiac poet is collapsed as Milton and Diodati are revealed as equally untainted by earthly sexuality (though the latter’s purity is only apparent in death). Diodati’s transient lyric feasts are translated to the eternity of the heavens precisely because, as with Edward King / Lycidas, he has never ‘tasted the pleasures (voluptas) of the marriage-bed’. Torus, the term rendered as ‘marriage-bed’, is used frequently by Ovid in the Amores to refer simply to the bed or couch in which sex, of a more or less illicit nature, takes place, as in the opening lines of one of Marlowe’s most successfully erotic renderings of the Amores, the fifth elegy of the first book, that Milton had previously echoed in the daring final line of Elegia tertia (‘may such dreams often come upon me’): ‘In summer’s heat and mid-time of the day / To rest my limbes upon a bed I lay’ (‘Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam; / adposui medio membra levanda toro’). Diodati finds eternal reward, it seems, for virtuously containing his attraction to Ovidian eroticism to poetic images.

The conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis indicates that the belief in the power of earthly virginity to obtain daemonic or angelic status that had directed Milton’s revisions to the Maske in 1637, and which is implicit in ‘Lycidas’, continued to hold sway over his imagination after his return from his European tour and his successful navigation of the sensual, as well as religious, temptations for which Italy was notorious: that he wrote the concluding lines from the Maske in Cerdogni’s album amicorum in June 1639 already suggested as much. Soon after he returned to England in 1639, Milton made a note from the Church Father Chrysostom that encapsulates his sense in this period that virtuous behaviour can raise a man to angelic status, and may render such a man even more worthy of salvation, given the internal conflict with a body inclined to sin: ‘The good man in some sense seems to surpass even the angels, and that because he, wrapped in a feeble and mortal body, wrestling always with his desires, nevertheless aspires to live his life like those in heaven.’³⁸ It may be the case that he was under the influence of his recent reading in the Church Fathers, in particular Jerome, who had argued in the Ad-versus Jovinianum for the superiority of virginity to marriage and indeed for the prophetic, or apocalyptic, powers of virginity. St John’s account in Revelation of the celestial song that only the 144,000 virgins can hear illustrates how ‘the virgin writer expounded mysteries which the married could not’, for John ‘was a virgin when he embraced Christianity, remained a virgin, and on that account was more beloved by our Lord’.³⁹ Milton would have found in Erasmus’s commentary on the Adversus Jovinianum some scepticism about the way Jerome manipulated Scripture to make his argument, although Milton’s divorce writings are notable for their own freedom with biblical interpretation.⁴⁰ But Milton’s literal interpretation of virginity in Revelation 14: 4 was flatly in opposition to Calvin’s reading of Revelation 14: 4 as metaphorical, distinguishing the chastely married from ‘whoremongers, and adulterers’. John Donne, for example, followed the orthodox Calvinist interpretation in maintaining that ‘not defiled by women’ means not bodily virginity but that ‘every holy soule is a virgin’.⁴¹ The literal reading of Revelation 14: 4 was favoured by some notable anti-Calvinist figures, such as the formidable Jeremy Taylor (bap. 1613, d. 1667), who served as Laud’s chaplain but also held a host of unorthodox religious views that place him closer to the Great Tew circle in terms of his interest in scepticism and religious toleration.⁴² The conclusion to Epitaphium Damonis marks, however, the high point of Milton’s fascination with the soteriological significance of virginity: by 1642, the year of his marriage, he was proposing the more conventional Calvinist interpretation of virginity in Revelation as encompassing chaste marriage.