Letteratura e Città: Metafore di traslazione e Parnaso urbano fra Quattro e Seicento (review)
Pontano’s subject here is the richly-nuanced desire of an elderly man to summon up a love that is at once novel and a reincarnation of his first love — et sis cura recens amorque primus (line 8). There is an echo here as well of Dido’s response to the sight of Aeneas with his son, rewakening the ashes of an old flame, veteris vestigia flammae (Aen. 4.23): Pontano too wants “to fan those ancient flames” — antiquas volo suscitare flammas (l. 10). The baths of Baiae are invoked as a place where Pontano and his elderly friends can try to find the delights that are still available to them. The hendecasyllable (as distinct, say, from the distich with its summary structure) seems well suited to the extended foreplay, the toying with diminutives that fit so easily into the form (and which Pontano had charmingly employed in his earlier naeniae to his little son [De amore coniugali 2.8–19]), and the parallel display of options to be considered impartially. Those young girls will love you for your gold if not for your white hairs; or you may decide that wine will warm you more effectively. The earthly paradise that Baiae offers to refugees from Rome or Naples has been around for a long time, and it promises no miraculous return to a primeval condition. But it is filled with warmth and laughter, and old Pontano can share in its delights as spectator and as paying participant. The very real pleasures of Baiae derive from this sense of an old-age mode of pastoral where memory and fantasy join in a marriage of convenience. Perhaps the only escape from the jungle of the city is to the zoo of a play-world where, for a price, animals can be petted one hendecasyllabic line at a time. DONALD CHENEY University of Massachusetts, Amherst