Tityre, quid Mopsus? – Dante and the resumption of the bucolic genre: a reading of the first Dantesque eclogue

Abstract

This paper aims to present a reading of the bucolic correspondence between Giovanni del Virgilio and Dante Alighieri that occurred between 1319 and 1321. Exhorting the poet to write the Divine Comedy in latin, the professor sends him a missive in dactylic hexameters, offering the possibility of poetic coronation in Bologna. Dante responds by using the same meter, but in the bucolic genre, thus resuming the tradition that went back to Virgil. With these poems, Dante declines the professor's invitation, reaffirming the choice to write the Divine Comedy in vernacular, which would lead him to be crowned in Florence, as he wished.