Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

Author(s): Thomas Hyde

Reviewed work(s):
Source: PMLA, Vol. 100, No. 5 (Oct., 1985), pp. 737-745
Published by: Modern Language Association
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THOMAS HYDE

Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

TO

WRITE greatly, Boccaccio argues in the

defense of poetry that ends the Genealogia
deorum, "it is necessary ... .to behold the
monuments of the Ancients, to have in one's
memory the histories of the nations, and to be familiar with the geography of various lands, of
seas, of rivers, and mountains" (Osgood 40;
14.7).' This description of the learning required
of the new doctus poeta reads like a catalog of
Boccaccio's own humanistic works. The Genealogia deorum, the De claris mulieribus, and the De
casibus virorum illustrium provide the required
monuments and histories, while Boccaccio's geographical dictionary answers precisely the stated
needs in books entitled De nominibus maris, De
fluminibus, and De montibus. In all these works,
and especially in the Genealogy, Boccaccio displays the learning that justifies his self-coronation
as one of the "three Florentine crowns" of the
early Renaissance, but his stated purpose is to
provide for future poets, who, as they study the
memorials and remains of the ancients, will find
his work useful (15.1). Useful they did find it, if
we can judge by the numbers of Latin manuscripts and editions and by the vernacular translations that continued to pour from the press long
after sixteenth-century mythographies had superseded it as a work of scholarship. Allusions
and borrowings stud the literatureof the next two
centuries. Modern scholars too have found the
Genealogy useful as a compendium of quaint allegories, a referencemanual to the undermeanings
that myths may have in Renaissance poetry.
Its very usefulness as a referencebook, however,
has blinded us to its other virtues. Utility was not
Boccaccio's only aim in the work that occupied
him for thirty years and that both he and his contemporaries regarded as his magnum opus, nor
does utility adequately account for its value to
Renaissance readers. Unlike a straightforward
reference book, the Genealogy is crossed by compromise and conflict-between utility and unity,
reverence and ridicule, guilt and confidence,
nostalgia and progressiveness, secularism and orthodoxy. For its early readers these conflicts
737

seemed inevitable and the compromises exemplary. Both emerge precisely in the features of the
book that contribute little to, or even hinder, its
usefulness as a reference work-namely, in the
metaphorical voyaging related in the proems of
each book and in the idea of genealogy itself, the
scheme that gives order both to the chaos of ancient mythology and to Boccaccio's book. It is not
an overstatement that the Genealogy presents,
alongside its mythological material, two plots, two
historical itineraries, that struggle toward each
other in time but never meet. In these plots, Boccaccio dramatizes his efforts as a mythographer
and the historical discontinuity or rupture that
both occasions and frustrates them.2
One of the plots-the subject of this essaytraces the posterity of the gods as it runs from primal, chthonic deities through Olympians,
demigods, and heroes to the legendary founders
of cities and their mortal descendants. As an action, the genealogical plot is extremely simple,
consisting of the single action repeated in the
chapter rubrics,like those on the genealogy of Aeneas in book 6:
L. De Capi filio Assaraci,qui genuit Anchisem
LI. De Anchisefilio Capis,qui genuitHyppodamiam
et Eneam
LIII. De Enea Anchisis filio, qui genuit Julium Ascaniumet SilviumPostumum
LIV. De AscanioEneefilio, qui genuitJuliumSilvium
et Rhomam.
(319-27, 428; my emphasis)
This repeated begetting produces complex lineages, but the lines of genealogical plot begin to
run out in antiquity itself and end foreverwith the
advent of Christ. The pagan gods "are not merely
dormant or asleep," Boccaccio claims; "they have
been buried forever, beyond any possibility of
resurrection by the holy teaching of Christ" (Osgood 135; 15.11). The posterity of the gods, the
genealogical plot of Boccaccio's book, therefore
breaks off without present issue.
The irredeemable death of the gods may ease
the author's Christian conscience, but another
name for it is the extinction of myth-precisely

738

Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

the lack that Boccaccio undertakesto remedy and

repeatedly figures as resurrection:
Who in our day can penetratethe hearts of the Ancients? Who can bring to light and life again minds
long sinceremovedin death?Who can elicittheirmeaning? A divine task that, not human!
(Osgood 11; 1.proem)
These dead are not the gods but the antique poets,
whom Boccaccio would revive in order to revive
poetry itself, to reestablish and legitimize a line of
poetry descending from the classics. He intends
the abortive genealogy of the gods to serve the ongoing genealogy of poets, but the relation of the
means to the end remains uneasy. Boccaccio never
completely convinces even himself that he can reclaim the patrimony of myth without reviving the
false gods. The danger of apostasy is implicit
within the genealogical plot of his book.
In the other plot, the mythographerundertakes
an epistemological quest, voyaging the seas of fact
and fiction to seek relics of the ancient gods. Patterned on ancient and medieval epic voyages, his
quest self-consciously inaugurates a heroic age of
scholarship and forms a prototype for the fantastic voyages of later Renaissance fictions. But because its object is antiquity itself, the quest too
breaks off unfulfilled. "A divine task that, not
human!"
The metaphorical voyaging of the proems at
once mythologizes the dusty work of scholarship
and makes possible a direct encounter with the
object of the quest, if only in imagination. But
that direct encounter, invoked or hinted at repeatedly, never occurs. Tracing the wanderings of his
genealogical plot, Boccaccio beholds only illusory
spectacles, "half-consumed corpses" (4.proem),
and "ruins" (5.proem). The blocked rhetoric of a
sentence from the proem to book 5 describes the
fate of the whole quest: "I looked toward I will
not say Athens, but a small trace of it almost consumed as I looked" 'aspexi non dicam Athinas,
sed earum dum fere consumptum parvumque vestigium intuerer.' The syntax hints at causality, as
if looking produced the ruins, while the anacoluthon imitates Boccaccio's regular attention to extant ruins, whatever glorious original state might
be preserved in literature or depicted in imagination. Without the plot of the mythographer's
quest, Boccaccio could not have immediately
measured these modern ruins against ancient

glories, and he could not have presented that

measurement as a species of heroism.
Though the Genealogy's two plots occasionally
seem to intersect, they never join. Unlike the narrators of the Decameron, the De viris, or the De
claris mulieribus, Boccaccio's heroic mythographer cannot venture beyond the frame of his
proems to mingle with his material. Similarly, his
material breaks off at the frontier between legend
and history, with a chapter explaining why Alexander and Scipio are not included among the sons
of Jove. In the mythological chapters, Boccaccio
does offer judgments in the first person, but his
voice remains detached, and what narrativeoccurs
is surprisingly routinized for the author of the
Decameron. The two plots of the Genealogy present, then, two versions of the mythographer-one
heroic, engaged, and imperiled; the other studious, detached, and safe. The two versions remain
unreconciled throughout the book. In their unstable relation, and the relation of the two plots from
which they emerge, the Genealogy presents itself
and characterizes the conflicts and compromises
that make it not merely a compendium of mythology but a literary enactment of what one scholar
has called "the romance of early humanism"
(Giamatti).

Although Boccaccio's genealogy of the gods

was far from the first, earlier compilations were
mere lists, and it is worth emphasizing the oddity of using genealogy to structure a vast encyclopedia.3 The Genealogy is divided into books,
each treating a branch of the divine family and
each subdivided into chapters that treat members
of the branch individually. After the work had
taken shape, Boccaccio continued to add information in the margins, and the many chapters that
merely record a name and parentage seem to invite such annotation in the future. Both facts suggest Boccaccio's belief that the book's data might
be supplemented or corrected but that its genealogical structure would stand. In the manuscripts,
this structure occurs twice more-in the trees that
preface each book and diagram its contents and
again in the table of rubrics, which assembles all
the chapter headings.
Boccaccio commended the thrice-repeated
genealogical structure as "convenient both for
finding what you seek and for remembering better what you wish" (l.proem), but he must have

Thomas Hyde
recognized its inconvenience for purposes of reference as well as the obvious remedy.His geographical dictionary is alphabetical, but the Genealogy
lacked an alphabetical index until, at the urging
of Salutati, Domenico Bandini compiled the index that appears in several manuscripts and in the
first seven printed editions. Justifying his labors,
Bandini cited the work's inconvenient structure
("prolixitateinfinitarumque rerum structure"),but
the preface to the index in the printed editions
makes the point more revealingly. "It is extremely
difficult for anyone wishing to find a history or
fable even in the rubrics, unless he reads almost
all of them" (Wilkins, University 24). Boccaccio
chose to provide, however,not an alphabetical index, but rather a table of rubrics, which simply
catalogs the book's contents. To use the rubrics or
the trees was to reread the book and find its
unifying structure summarized, rather than
reduced to some more convenient alternative. For
Boccaccio, unity must have been worth the price
of inconvenience.
Unity must also have been worth a greater
price, for the genealogies that Boccaccio untiringly pursues have the effect-paradoxical in a
work dedicated to collecting the disjecta membra
of mythology-of breaking up individual myths
and dispersing their characters among various
lineages. Can a narrativeartist of Boccaccio's skill
have failed to share our sense of dismemberment
when, for example, he divided the tale of Dido
and Aeneas between two chapters five books apart
or when he dispersed Medusa, Perseus, and Pegasus, cited as a sample myth in 1.3, among three
chapters in two books? Apollodorus, Fulgentius,
Hyginus, the Vatican mythographers all had cast
their mythological material into discrete units, but
all had also preserved the integrity of their myths
as narratives. These two clear disadvantagesinconvenience of reference and fragmentation of
material-bring out the oddity of choosing
genealogy to order a huge encyclopedia. If genealogy unifies the body of ancient myth, what kind
of unity does it offer? How can that unity be
worth its costs?
In using genealogy to reunite the mythical pantheon, Boccaccio was returning to the principle
that had unified it in the first place. Hesiod used
genealogy to conflate the Homeric gods with a
chaotic mingle of local cults and traditions and to
add his own speculative mythmaking. Later
Greeks recognized the result as the quasi-

739

systematic Olympian pantheon. Homer and

Hesiod "taught the Greeks the generations of the
gods," according to Herodotus, "and gave them
their names, determined their functions and arts,
and depicted their shapes" (Historiae 2.53).4
Hesiod's genealogies organize the gods into both
a hierarchy and a history, but unlike the Works
and Days, with its myth of the four ages, the Theogony does not stress historical degeneration. In
neither poem does historical decline or genealogical attenuation demythologize the gods or call
their divinity into question. For Hesiod, hierarchy
and pedigree metaphoricallyexpressthe single and
integral order of the cosmos.
While Boccaccio's genealogies also organize and
unify the pantheon, they otherwise work quite
counter to Hesiod's. Boccaccio treats the genealogy of the gods, not as a figure for the divine order, but as historical fact; their divinity becomes
metaphorical. Euhemerism-the ancient rationalization of the gods as great mortals deified by
poets-is not only a regular tactic in individual
chapters, it is implicit in the way Boccaccio uses
genealogy to structure the whole work. Once
demythologized as poetic fictions referring to
great men or to truths of physical nature or moral
philosophy, the gods can be subsumed and even
affirmed within history conceived as human and
secular.
Boccaccio's twin concerns for reunifying the
pantheon and revealing it as a human artifact are
imaged, indeed incorporated, in several passages
that develop the metaphor of the book as a body.
As the scriptural metaphor for the church's unity,
corpus strongly implies a unified whole with many
members. In antiquity, corpus routinely meant a
comprehensive collection, compendium, or encyclopedia, but Boccaccio resurrects the metaphor
buried in this routine usage. The idea of the book
as a body first emerges in the preface when Boccaccio asserts the impossibility of surveying all
varieties of paganism and defends limiting himself to Greece and Rome. The narrowing of scope
is justified, he argues, because the monster that
was paganism contained two bodies, one barbarian, one Greek and Roman ("sunt monstro sint
huic corpora duo, barbaricumunum et grecum atque latinum reliquum" [5]). Boccaccio's labor,
though still heroic, will no longer be futile, and he
sets forth to seek everywherefor relics of the gentile gods, dispersed like fragments of a mighty
wreck:

740

Boccaccio:

The Genealogies of Myth

Theserelics,scatteredthroughalmostinfinitevolumes,
shrunkwith age, half consumed,well-nigha blank, I
will bringinto such singlegenealogicalorder[in unum
genelogie corpus] as I can. . . .

(Osgood 11)

This single corpus will comprise one of the original monster's two bodies, and it will have a body's
unity, though Boccaccio warns his patron, Hugo
the King of Cyprus, not to expect too much.
"Why, if another Prometheus [Prometheus alter]
should rise again and appear, or the man himself
who, as poets say, once made men from clay, I
hardly think they would be equal to this task, let
alone me" (Osgood 11). Therefore, Hugo should
not expect a finished work, a "corpus . . . per-

fectum." Finally, toward the end of the preface,

the maimed but single body of the book becomes
both mythological and human. Invoking God's
help, Boccaccio reflects on his task:
I can quite realize this labor to which I am
committed-this huge body of gentile gods and their
offspring[corpusdeorumprocerumque
gentilium],torn
limbfromlimband scatteredamongthe roughand desert placesof Antiquityand the thornsof hate, wasted
away,sunkalmostto ashes;and heream I settingforth
to collectthesefragments,hitherand yon, and fit them
together,like anotherAesculapiusrestoringHippolytus.
(Osgood 13)
In Prometheus and Aesculapius, both mortals
punished for infringing divine prerogatives, Boccaccio shadows the goals and dangers of his enterprise and the efforts of later humanists
(Giamatti 6-8; Marino). Furthermore, as Boccaccio moves from denying that he is a Prometheus
alter to presenting himself as an Aesculapius alter, the body of antique myth emerges as no
longer monstrous but human-maimed and imperfect at first but finally restored in the shape of
Hippolytus. In the emerging human shape of the
corpus mythicarum, Boccaccio's preface figures
the book's double goals of restoring the unity of
the ancient myths and of revealing the human,
secular truths within them.
But has the human shape of his material been
too easily achieved? This question promptly arises
in a further prefatory section entitled "Who
among the Gentiles Was Held to Be the First
God?" Using the same sort of revived metaphor
that unified the old gods into a single body, Boccaccio now represents the first of them as its
head. But because the ancients had diverse ideas

about the first god, "not only did they make this
beast [paganism] in the likeness of three-headed
Cerberus but, worse, they tried to describe it as a
monster [monstrum] of many heads" (11).5Conflict among ancient authorities threatens to make
the mythological corpus monstrous again and also
to deform the shape of Boccaccio's book. In seeking the first god, Boccaccio is also seeking his
book's beginning, the origin or source of its
genealogies, the root of its trees-all senses within
the lexical range of caput. When, after canvassing ancient authorities, he finally settles on the
mysterious Theodontius and his primal deity
Demogorgon, Boccaccio returns to the figure of
the many-headed monster:
So therefore,once all thesethingshavebeenconsidered
and all these other,or rathersuperfluous,heads have
been cut off and made once again only limbs, and
imaginingthat we have found the beginningof our
journey, . . . we shall enter on the rugged way,
descendinginto the earth'sentrailsat Tainaronor Etna.
(12)
The body has again one head, the book one beginning, and at the same time Boccaccio subtly
associates himself with the greatest of mythical
heroes, Hercules, victor over many-headed Hydra,
tamer of Cerberus, who entered the underworld
at Tainaron, precisely where Boccaccio now proposes to begin his genealogical quest (see 9.33).
Hercules will later become a more ambivalent
model for Boccaccio's labors; here, as monstruosarum domitor 'tamer of monsters'
(13.proem), he complements the earlier models
Prometheus and Aesculapius. The mythographer
must not only shape his dusty and dismembered
material to human form but overcome its monstrosity, bind it in adamantine chains, and bring
it once more to light.
The figure of the Genealogy as a body returns
once more in the fifteenth, and final, book when
Boccaccio anticipates criticism of the work's
form. Some readers "will above all point to a defect of construction-a broad chest protruding
from the pate, legs from the chest, and feet from
where the head ought to be" (Osgood 107; 15.3).
Boccaccio may be like a collector of ancient statuary who assembles the right number of human
fragments but still produces only a grotesque. In
defense, he claims only that he has done his best
to discover "the most ancient head" and join it

Thomas Hyde
successively to the chest and other members. "If
other genealogies are truer or better arranged,"he
does not know them. Though he has turned over
many volumes, he does not know a better order
in which to combine the members of "so vast a
body." In this passage, Boccaccio is adapting the
first lines of Horace's Ars poetica, which urge artistic unity by mocking a painter who might join
a human head to the neck of a horse and spread
many colored feathers over limbs picked up here
and there ("undique collatis membris"). By both
argument and allusion, then, this last appearance
of the book as a body insists both on the unity
of its myths and on their human shape and scale.
Petrarchwrote a verse from the Vulgate'spsalm
95 in the margin of the Latin Iliad he received
from Boccaccio. "Omnes dei gentium demonia"
'All the gods of the nations are idols.'6 Boccaccio's humanism in the Genealogy sets itself
against this discouraging orthodoxy but also
against the occasional tendency in the late Middle Ages to believe that all fables might conceal,
or at least convey, the truths of Christian doctrine.
Anagogic interpretations are extremely rare in the
Genealogy, and allegorical readings reveal truths
of ethical or natural philosophy rather than doctrines specific to Christianity. But, at the same
time, Boccaccio detaches mythology from pagan
religion by avoiding any mention of cults. Thus
disinfected of belief and euhemeristically reduced
to human history, myths appear as poetic records
of a secular civilization.
This secularization of myths was nothing new;
Fulgentius had done almost the same thing. Boccaccio's innovation was structural; what sets the
Genealogy apart from earlier mythographiesis the
way that its structure enacts an engagement with
its material-enacts, in fact, the sense of historical rupture that defines the early Renaissance.
Where the Saturnalia, with its dialogues of the
dead, enacts continuity and revival to counter
Macrobius's sense of belatedness and decline
(Kasler), the Genealogy, with its severed plots and
closed-off lineage, enacts Boccaccio's sense of discontinuity, of the impossibility of dialogue with
antiquity. But the import of the book's structure
emerges most clearly from contrast with Ovid's
two encyclopedic poems. The contrast may have
been deliberate, since Boccaccio probably saw
himself as a new Ovid, just as he saw in Dante a

741

new Vergil.7 Boccaccio owned a manuscript of

the Fasti and cited it some thirty-five times in the
Genealogy, but it must have served him as a negative model. It subordinates mythology to the rites
of Roman religion, which Boccaccio needed to ignore in the interests of secularization, and its
calendrical structure, reckoning time by the cycle
of the seasons, offered him no acceptable means
of relating himself to his material.
The Metamorphoses provided a closer model,
especially since so much medieval mythography
took the form of Ovidian commentary. Like
Ovid's poem, Boccaccio's work has fifteen books,
the last of which are more discursive or
philosophical than the others. Like the Genealogy,
the Metamorphoses is encyclopedic, assembling
individual myths into a carmenperpetuum, a continuous and historically organized whole. The
historical structure of the Metamorphoses runs
from the beginning of the world to the Augustan
present, which it purports, however ironically, to
charter as the culmination of its mythologized
history. In structure, Boccaccio's encyclopedia
reinforcesboth the historical and the charter functions of Ovid's poem, but only to emphasize a
departure from them. Where Ovid contrives a
narrativeunity that is historical only in semblance,
Boccaccio sacrifices the unity of his narrativesto
a genealogical structure that is essentially historical. Furthermore, since at least the sixth century
BC prose genealogies have been used to link national dynasties or aristocratic families to their
supposed founders in an earlier, heroic age and
thus to charter present dispositions of power,
property, and prestige. Italian princes in Boccaccio's time flatteredthemselves too with heroic ancestries, as did communes-Padua, for instance,
which claimed Antenor as its founder. By contrast
with Ovid's merely narrative continuity, Boccaccio's genealogical structure makes clear the failure of antiquity to charter anything in modern
culture. Where Ovid ends by describing the deification of Julius Caesar and anticipating that of
Augustus, Boccaccio ends by denying the divine
ancestry of Alexander and Scipio. Boccaccio finds
no legendary and exemplaryancestor for Hugo of
Cyprus, as Vergil had done for Augustus and as
Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and others would later do
for their patrons. The continuity built into the
Genealogy's structureemphasizes all the more the
discontinuity of its close, the historical rupture
that divides antique myths from modern readers.

742

Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

Boccaccio, however, is profoundly ambivalent

about this historical rupture. If it disinherits
moderns from the cultural wealth of antiquity, it
also saves them from damnation. It demystifies
and dismembers the myths, but it also justifies
them as poetic theology and thus makes possible
Boccaccio's defense of poetry by analogy with
Christian theology and Scripture. This analogy
too is implicit within the literary history of Boccaccio's genealogical structure,which owes less to
pagan than to Christian forebears, whom it
regards with the mixed aggression and guilt of an
illegitimate and disinherited descendant.
The Genealogy owes its structure ultimately to
the Bible. Its mythical generations, as recorded in
the chapter headings and table of rubrics, echo,
and allude to, genealogical passages in the vulgate
of both testaments. For example, in the genealogy
of Aeneas quoted above, compare the formula "X
genuit Y" with Genesis 4.18: "Porro Enoch genuit
Irad et Irad genuit Maviahel et Maviahel genuit
Matusahel et Matusahel genuit Lamech" and so
forth.8 Both the Old Testament and the New begin with books presenting themselves as genealogies, Genesis as "the book of the generations of
Adam" (5.1), Matthew as "the book of the generations of Jesus Christ" (1.1). In ancient Hebrew,
the same word, toledot, means both generation
and history, so that the Bible passes on to Eusebius, Jerome, and their medieval followers an essentially genealogical mode of universal history
(Bloch 37-39). Boccaccio is usually said to have
unconsciously assimilated this standard mode of
Christian historiography to his pagan material
and so marked himself "as a child of the Middle
Ages."9 But in fact his use of the genealogical
mode realizes an analogy with the Bible in many
other ways. The trees that preface each book, for
example, derive from the Jesse trees that often
preface the gospel of Matthew, and Boccaccio's
are the earliest nonbiblical examples of genealogical trees (Wilkins, "Genealogy" 61). Like the Bible, the Genealogy represents an entire literature
collapsed into a single canonical book, a fact that
may help to account for the lack of critical sense
that has disturbed scholars.10Traditional Christianity has always resisted critical discrimination
among the books and authors of the Bible. Finally, the Genealogy, with its highly articulated
structure and its departure from the commentary
form, somewhat resembles the scholastic
summa. "

This sustained analogy with Christian Scripture

and theology suggests that the Genealogy's structure carries out the terms of Boccaccio's defense
of poetry, or that the defense of poetry makes explicit some implications of the structure: the pagan poets were theologi (15.8), and their fables
and metaphors can be justified by analogy with
biblical fables and metaphors. Augustine's comments on biblical obscurities can be used to justify
obscurities in the poets (14.12). And there are
other ways-some playful, some guilty-in which
Boccaccio extends the analogy. For example, he
borrows the Pauline terminology of conversion to
urge the detractors of poetry "to put off the old
mind and to put on the new . . ." (14.12). And
his defense of poetry in the last two books not
only engages contemporary (often Dominican)
enemies of poetry but resumes a millennium-old
debate in which his opponents are the likes of
Lactantius, who is turned against himself by Boccaccio, the apologist for poetry, just as the ancient poets were turned against paganism by
Christian apologists. These sorts of ambivalent
impulse or bad conscience can best be explored in
connection with the second plot of the
Genealogy-Boccaccio's voyaging the Mediterranean world as if he were another Paul, an apostle not to, but from, the gentiles-but that is
another essay.
Here we need to trace one last implication of
Boccaccio's genealogical structure-the way that
genealogy constitutes authority. Biblical genealogies serve in part to guarantee the chain of transmission by which authority descends to the
present writer (Speiser xxiv). But the lineages of
the gods do not include or place Boccaccio. His
authority as mythographer does not descend institutionally from them, and this too helps to account for his "lack of critical sense." His sense of
historical isolation precludes a fully explicit and
scholarly genealogy of his own authorities. The
poet he can call "father" is Dante or Petrarch,not
Vergil.
These issues-both
the genealogical urge
toward defining origins from which authority derives and the freedom as well as the frustration of
being cut off from any line of authority-crystallize at the end of Boccaccio's preface, which begins the book by searching for its proper
beginning, for the first of the gods, the beginning
of the line. Boccaccio's first god, mocked by later
scholars but imitated by poets, was Demogorgon,

Thomas Hyde
who, far from being a founding father, was in fact
a belated bastard, a deified scribal error in a commentary on Statius.'2Boccaccio attributes Demogorgon to Theodontius, a favorite authority but
one otherwise unknown to scholarship. Some have
suspected that Boccaccio made up this mysterious
source, just as later Renaissance fabulists would
make up Bishop Turpin and Cid Hamete.
Unless a manuscript should come to light, however, Theodontius's authenticity will remain a futile question. The commentator on fabulous
stories, as Quintillian argues, "has such full scope
for invention, that he can tell lies to his heart's
content about whole books and authors without
fear of detection: for what has never existed can
obviously never be found" (1.8.21). What is at issue in the Genealogy, moreover, is not really Theodontius's authenticity but rather his authority
and the ways in which, at the outset of the book,
his authority or lack of it enacts the paradoxes of
Boccaccio's genealogical structure. Boccaccio valued Theodontius as a source of information, especially genealogical information, unavailable
elsewhere (Hortis 468). For Boccaccio, in other
words, Theodontius's authority derives from the
very lack of corroboration that later scholars like
Giraldi would mock. Whether, as he claims, Boccaccio found Theodontius in Paul of Perugia'slibrary or made him up, Theodontius's authority
remains a case of make-believe, like Demogorgon
himself. In the fictive world of Boccaccio's book,
the distinction between historia and fabula lapses
even while it is insisted on as a postulate of interpretation.
This claim is paradoxical, and I shall end by
showing how it is borne out in Boccaccio's prologue scene, his search for the first god. It turns
out to be a double search, among competing
authorities as well as among competing gods, and
it arrives at the mythical origin only by way of the
origin of myth. The real origin of the gods, Boccaccio argues, was credulity-the credulity of
rustics and poets who explained the first cause of
things by calling it the first god, father and
founder of all the rest. The gods are fictions, in
other words, but Boccaccio counters this exposure
of fiction by fictionalizing his own activity. Everywhere else in the Genealogy, he cites authorities
as dryly as a scholastic, but here he engages them
in dialogue: "I asked [Thales] to tell me who he
thought was the first of the gods. He immediately
replied . .." (11). But Thales and those who

743

follow-Anaximenes, Chrisippus, Alcmaeus, Macrobius, and Theodontius-do not answer Boccaccio's question. They answer as if he had asked,
"What do you take to be the first cause?" showing that they do not mistake poetic figures for deities and thus do not share the credulity that,
according to Boccaccio's argument, produced
paganism.
Boccaccio runs through his sequence of
authorities again, making explicit the genealogy
of mythical genealogy. The poets who followed
Thales, for example, "gave the element water the
name Oceanus and called him the father of all
things and of men and gods, and from this
genealogy they derived the first of the gods" (12).
These genealogies are backward, then, regressive;
they do not derive from an origin but create it;
they generate what will be called their progenitors.
Once this process of backward genealogy is understood, then we too can use it. "Thus we could
have imagined [fecisse] that some would have
thought Oceanus to be the son of Caelus," even
if we had not discovered("invenissemus")the kinship in any source. Boccaccio diagrams the same
process in each of his genealogical trees, which are
upside down ("versa in caelum radice"), as he
notes in the rubrics to both 1 and 2, calling attention at the outset to the backwardness of these
genealogies. The same process is at work in
hundreds of individual chapters that move from
recounting a fable to disclosing its sensus, which
Boccaccio presents both as something prior to the
fable, its origin, and as something added later. Finally, Boccaccio arrives at the second object of
the prologue quest, the authority to follow in
deciding on the first god, by precisely this kind of
backward progression. He runs through his sequence of authorities twice and clearly marks its
chronological order-from antiquissimus Thales
through Macrobius,juniorem omnium, and then,
in another era, Theodontius, identified as a novus homo. To Boccaccio this characteristicallyambivalent phrase means both a modern man and,
from Pauline usage, a redeemed Christian, but to
Cicero it meant a new-made man, an upstart, a
parvenu. Theodontius is all these things. Theodontius names Demogorgon, of course, so that
Boccaccio's double search ends with a kind of
paradox-the newest author identifying the oldest god.
The search for the beginning that begins the
Genealogy includes one other reflection on the

744

Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth

paradoxes of its own endeavor. All the ancients

that Boccaccio cites speak on their own authority
and record their own beliefs about the first cause.
But Theodontius reports the opinion of "the most
ancient Arcadians." As a novus homo, he holds
beliefs that differ from those of the ancients he
studies. Unlike them, he cannot speak firsthand;
yet-and Boccaccio footnotes the omissionTheodontius reports the ancient Arcadian belief
without citing his authority: naming no one
("neminem nominando"). This no one, the
authority of "no one," returns when Boccaccio
comes to declare his own opinion: Demogorgon
"I truly hold to be the father and the first of all
the gentile gods, because I have found no one
[neminem] to have been his father according to
the poetic fictions" (12). Theodontius names no
one; Boccaccio finds no one named as Demogorgon's father. Though distinct in their contexts,
these two citations of "no one" reflect the
paradoxes of both authority and genealogy in
Boccaccio's book. The origin is precisely the
vanishing point of authority, and so it is as much
made as found. Boccaccio had claimed that understanding the regressivenessof mythical genealogy allows us to hypothesize or make up a
genealogy even if we have not found it in our
authorities. Now, in concluding, he returns to the
same pair of terms:facio 'make' and invenio 'find
or discover' (though invenio itself includes the
ambivalence I am discussing, since it also means
"invent" or "contrive"). After considering all
these things and lopping off all these superfluous
heads, Boccaccio concludes, "Imagining that we
have found [adinvenisse] the beginning of our
journey and making [facientes] Demogorgon the
father, not of things, but of the gentile gods, we

shall enter on the rugged way . . ." (12).

Boccaccio's steady aim in the Genealogy is to
reestablish the line of poets and to authorize their
fictions. But his claim to authority for fiction
verges on the claim only to fictive authority.
Authority does not descend to him as a poet's institutional inheritance; he must re-createit. In the
midst of the modern world, cut off from the origins he values, he must make his claim, make it
good, perhaps make it up.
I want to end with an afterthought that I hope
will clinch my argument. The retrograde generation, the backward remaking of genealogy, whose
paradoxes I have been trying to describe, would
have had a personal application for Giovanni Boccaccio. He was himself illegitimate, and in 1360
he applied for and received a papal dispensation
"super defectu natalium" 'for illegitimate birth'
(Branca 119). Boccaccio's vernacular poems tell
again and again the tale of foundlings recognized
and restored to their birthrights, and he himself
liked to pretend to be descended through his unknown mother from the kings of France and thus
from Hector and Dardanus. Perhaps we ought to
see the genealogical structure of his great encyclopedia, then, as a final generalizationof his personal burden into an image for the new age he
helped to inaugurate. An illegitimate and upstart
age, cast loose from historical succession, at sea,
attempting with an uneasy combination of aggression and filial piety to adopt a foster parent, wishing for legitimacy but unwilling to accept its
imaginative restraints, struggling greedily and
guiltily to inherit.
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Notes
1 cite
Romano's edition of Boccaccio's autograph manuI
script by book and chapter numbers for convenience of reference to other editions. Translations not attributed to Osgood
are my own.
2 For the ideas of historical itinerary and rupture, see
Greene 66-72, 81-93.
3 Earlier genealogies of the gods include Hyginus 1-5; the
first Vatican mythographer (Bode 63); Paul of Perugia; and
Forese da Donati and Franceschino degli Albizzi, both
reprinted by Hortis as apps. 1 and 2.
4 Hesiod's use of genealogy
might have been known to Boccaccio through Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 1.5. In Bo-

ccaccio's generation, after long neglect, Hesiod had begun to

be paired with Homer. See, for example, Petrarch'srequest to
Nicola Sygeros for a manuscript (Familiari 18.2, 13).
5 Hecker omitted this section of the
preface from his edition of the preface, proems, and books 14 and 15. Osgood,
who used Hecker's text, also omitted it.
6 See Nolhac 2: 178. Boccaccio quotes this verse in 15.9.
For the Latin Iliad, see Branca 115-17.
7 For Boccaccio's associations with Ovid, see Hollander 112
and Hortis 400.
8 For other genealogies in Scripture,see Gen. 5.10, 11.10-32;
1 Chron. 1-9; Matt. 1.1-17; and Luke 3.23-38. On biblical

ThomasHyde
genealogies see Wilson; for early pagan genealogies and their
affiliations with the Bible, see van Seters.
9 This judgment by Coulter (323) is quoted by Seznec with
only slight reservations (220).
10See Seznec 220-24 and, for the Bible as a
collapsed liter-

745

ature, Nohrnberg 14-15.

11On the form of the summa see
Panofsky 30-36 and
Chenu 291-300.
12 For
Demogorgon, see Landi; Castelain; and Quint
202-03.

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