BOOK: Boccaccio, "Genealogy of the Pagan Gods" (Vol. 2)

Giovanni Boccaccio: Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Vol. 2: Books VI–X. Edited and translated by Jon Solomon. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 81. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674975590. vi + 705 pp.

[Continued from vol. 1.]

Book 6

This book is mostly about king Priam of Troy, his ancestry and his descendants. He was descended from Jupiter some six generations back, but what especially surprised me was the amazing number of children he had. Boccaccio says (6.14) he had 50 children, the names of 38 of which are known; 18 or 19 children were by his wife Hecuba (you can supply the obligatory hotdog-down-the-hallway jokes by yourself at this point :]). Of course, many of these children are known only from some passing mention in a line of Homer or some other author.

There is also an interesting section about Anchises, the father of Aeneas, who was descended from king Tros (after whom Troy is named), Priam's great-grandfather. Thus, when Aeneas married Priam's daughter Creusa (6.53.3), they were actually third cousins. I didn't realize until now that Anchises was related to the Trojan royal family by blood and not just by marriage.

Of course, the other even more interesting aspect about Aeneas's ancestry is that his mother was none other than Venus herself. Anchises ostensibly went blind after (or as a result of?) sleeping with her, which Boccaccio tries to explain by saying that “it is most certain that intercourse causes some not only short-sightedness but even utter blindness” (6.52.7)! If we combine this with the well-known belief that masturbaton also causes blindness, it would appear that one is condemned to get blind one way or another :)) Or maybe it's just one of those lame excuses: ‘Oh no, I didn't get blind because of mere old age. I got blind because I had so much sex with Venus herself!’

Anyway, Boccaccio then also follows the descendants of Aeneas, all the way to Ilia, the mother of Romulus and Remus. If I counted right, Aeneas was their (thirteen-times-great)-grandfather. One of the kings about half-way through this line, Tiberinus Silvius, gave his name to the Tiber river after drowning in it; before it was called Albula (6.64). His great-grandson Aventinus Silvius gave his name to the Aventine hill in Rome (6.68). Ilia or Rhea, the mother of Romulus and Remus, got pregnant with them after being violated in a dream by Mars (6.73.1) — a scenario that sounds no less ridiculous in Roman mythology than it does on PornHub... :)))

Boccaccio gives short shrift to the claims of Aeneas' deification: this “is nothing other than the laughable folly of senseless people [. . .] he was [. . .] carried down to the sea, and became food for the Tuscan or Laurentian fishes” (6.53.27).

Apparently Achilles had a son named Pyrrhus, who was also involved in the Trojan war (6.26.2); this surprised me as I didn't think that Achilles was old enough to have a grown-up son — I thought of Achilles as a younger man.

In 6.6.2, we learn that Priam's father, king Laomedon, owned some “horses born from divine seed”. The only way this makes sense is if some god fucked a mare :)))

Apparently the medieval fad for claiming descent from the Trojans was more widespread than I thought. I knew about the British claim to descent from Brutus, grandson of Aeneas (Boccaccio mentions it with... brutal skepticism: “the Britons, desirous I think of ennobling their barbarity [. . .] not even close to genuine”, 6.57.3, 5), but it was knew to me that a similar thing existed in France as well: “Vincent of Beauvais seems to think that the present-day kings of the Franks trace their most ancient oigins to the sons of Hector. [. . .] a certain Francus, a son of Hector, had fled to the borders of Germany” (6.24.8). Boccaccio comments diplomatically: “Although I do not believe this much, I would not gainsay it altogether since all things are possible with God.” (6.24.9)

Two sons of Priam by the nymph Periboea were born because “Priam, as a young man, had secretly had sex with her during a hunting expedition” (6.45.1). Well, I guess it wasn't very secret if we're reading about it here :))

Boccaccio offers high praise for the unfinished epic poem of his friend Petrarch: “Achilles has Homer, and Aeneas, Vergil [. . .] in our era a third has risen, Scipio Africanus, who with no less glory and even greater justice was borne into the heavens by the verse of a most celebrated man, Francesco Petrarch” (6.53.2).

Book 7

Book 7 is about Ocean and his various descendants; of the more well-known ones, we see Triton, Proteus, Nereus, Narcissus; a large number of nymphs, sirens and other such watery creatures; and (the tutelary deities of) various rivers, including the Nile and the Tiber. There are several mythological persons after whom various geographical features were suposedly named: Ethiops (Ethiopia; 7.39), Eridanus (the river Po; 7.41.13), Lygius (Liguria; 7.42). Boccaccio counts the Muses among the nymphs as well (7.14.6), which came as a surprise to me; it seems to be due to their association with the Castalian rill.

A curious factoid about Doris, daughter of Ocean, from 7.8.2: “she signifies bitterness and is therefore married to the sea god Nereus because the sea is bitter [. . .] bitterness is produced by the sun acting upon the water of the ocean”. And here I thought it was produced by all the whales ejaculating into the seawater!

Melantho, daughter of Proteus, “found favor with Neptune, who changed into a dolphin, [. . .] carried her off and violated her” (7.10.1). Nowadays the idea of rapist dolphins (not to be confused with dolphin rapists) is a well-established meme on the internet, but I didn't know it was already a thing in Greek mythology :))

A very bizarre interpretation of the sirens: “from the navel down they are fish so that we might recognize” that a woman's body is “beutiful and seemly only up to the point that it presents a human aspect. But it is widely believed that all the lustful desire of women resides in the navel, which alone the rest of the body further down serves. In light of this they are not preposterously likened to fish” (7.20.11).

Why be content with casual misogyny, when you can have casual classism as well! Some of the nymphs “were actual women [. . .] noble, unwed girls who, inhabiting the shade of bedrooms, are called nymphs because of their phlegmatic complexion, because of how they live, since they are moist, soft, delicate, and tender [. . .] But peasant women quite fatigued by their labors and moist from the heat of the sun are hairy and have hard skin, and so they have deservedly lost the name of nymphs.” (7.14.11)

Io was said to have been changed by Jupiter into a cow to conceal that he had been cheating with her on his wife. Boccaccio makes this whole story into a metaphor for the human reproduction cycle, crowning his interpretation with this gloriously silly idea: “it is said that a human is transformed into a cow because as a cow is a laboring and productive animal, so too is a human” (7.22.5).

On the other extreme, sometimes his interpretations struck me as a bit lazy, as if he were just phoning them in. Someone was said to be the son of the Nile; Boccaccio explains that this must have been some ruler who was called the son of the Nile because his territory lay next to that river (7.38.1). Someone else was called Sun, the child of Ocean, perhaps because he “the local inhabitants called [him] Sun to extol his name and his family, and whom they said was the son of Ocean, through which he had come perchance by ship” (7.65.1).

Book 8

This book is about Saturn and his descendants (except those who are covered elsewhere: Juno, Neptune and Jupiter): Ceres and Proserpina; Pluto; Faunus (and, from him, the fauns, satyrs and other goat-like beings); and to my surprise, king Latinus from the Aeneid, the distant ancestor of Romulus and Remos, was also the son of Faunus.

Saturn was the first to introduce money in Italy: “up to that time money consisted of sheep skin hardened by fire, he was the first to stamp bronze” (8.1.25).

An interesting interpretation of Proserpina's story: she represents “the abundance of crops” (8.4.13), and her spending half a year in the underworld and half above ground corresponds to winter and to the growing season.

A hilarious story about how Chiron the centaur came about: Saturn was cheating on his wife with some other woman and “while he was in the process of intercourse, his wife Ops interrupted, and so he immediately turned himself into a horse, so he would not be caught in the act” (8.8.1) So I guess that Ops got treated to the gruesome scene of that poor woman getting screwed by a horse? :)) Anyway, she got pregnant and, obviously, the baby was a centaur.

It's always nice to see Boccaccio give up from time to time in his efforts to explain every myth, no matter how silly. “In fact I detest these riddles and ambiguities and gladly lay them aside” (8.12.4)

Book 9

Book 9 is about Juno and her descendants. Actually Boccaccio starts with a nice little rant (pp. 347–51) addressed to the king of Cyprus (who commissioned this book): he describes the impressive ruins of a temple of Juno and wonders why the christians don't put in the same amount of effort into glorifying their god as the pagans did into theirs; such as, say, by doing something about all those Saracens occupying the holy land (hint, hint) :)))

Among Juno's descendants, we see Hebe, Mars, Cupid, Tereus (from the gruesome story about Philomela and Procne), Deianeira (wife of Hercules, whom she inadvertently poisoned with a bloody shirt), Aesculapius, Ixion (father of the Centaurs, of which Boccaccio lists more than 50 in 9.32, apparently from Ovid's Metamorphoses), and even Romulus and Remus (children of Mars).

It is said that Juno “conceived a daughter Hebe by eating wild lettuce, so also Mars by being touched by a flower” (9.1.4). If Jupiter fell for these excuses, he must have been even more idiotic than I usually imagine ancient Greco-Roman gods to have been... In 9.2.1, we learn more about the lettuce story: “Apollo had prepared a banquet for his stepmother Juno in the house of his father Jupiter, and to her he served, among other things, wild lettuces, and when she had eagerly eaten them, Juno, to that point barren, immediately became pregnant”. I've seen enough stepmom-themed pr0n to know what must have *really* happened at that banquet...

It is the function “of Venus to join the husband and virgin in coitus” (9.1.19). Why on earth do they need a goddess to help with that? I can't help getting a mental image of that glorious story of the morbidly obese couple who required the assistance of the mother-in-law and a broom handle to accomplish the deed :))

Boccaccio reproduces a bizarre list of supposed effects of menstrual blood by Isidore of Seville: in contact with it, among other things, “dogs become rabid no matter what they eat“ and “sticky asphalt, which can be dissolved by neither iron nor water, dissolves when polluted with this blood” (9.3.7)...

An odd belief from 9.3.15: “Albericus says that grass is sacred to him [i.e. Mars] because this plant, according to Pliny, procreates from human blood, and therein, as he again says, the Romans when making war used to build a grassy altar for a sacrifice to Mars.” The amazing thing is that the Romans could be simultaneously such a practical people in so many spheres of life and yet also believe in arrant nonsense like this.

“The astrologers say [. . .] that when, during the birth of someone, Mars happens to be found in the house of Venus [. . .] he who is born under that sign will be luxuriant, a fornicator, and abusive of all things venereal, and a man wicked in this regard.” (9.4.6.) It just crossed my mind how monstrous it would be if some totalitarian regime took astrology really seriously. Why, you'd feel compelled to set up an official astrologer in every maternity ward, standing by with a stopwatch and an astrology app on his phone, ready to strangle the little shit if he crawls out into the world at the wrong second and thus ends up destined to become a wicked fornicator and all that...

I think we've discovered the ancient Greek equivalent of the anime body pillow: Ixion “dared to proposition Juno sexually. She complained to Jupiter, so he ordered a cloud to be fashioned in her likeness and given to Ixion in her place. He impregnated this and thereby fathered the Centaurs.” (9.27.1.) And if you thought that's ridiculous, Boccaccio's interpretation is even more so; he makes the whole thing into a metaphor for an unjustified “hope of kingship” (9.27.7).

Some nice dirty laundry from early Roman history: Romulus and Remus “were nursed by a wolf because they were nursed by Acca Laurentia [. . .] They caled her ‘the wolf’ (lupa) because she was a respected prostitute, and such women are called ‘wolves’ (lupe) on account of their avarice [. . .] That they were fathered by Mars was invented to conceal the disreputable origin of the founders of such a renowned nation, with the behavior of the youths befitting the invented story, for they were rapacious thieves with arrogant spirits, and bellicose.” (9.40.5–6.) That's music to the ears of an old Roman-hater like me :))

Book 10

This book is about Neptune and his descendants. Among the better-known of these we find Scylla (of Scylla and Charybdis), Medusa (“daughter of Phorcys by herself”, 2.11 — another marvel of ancient medical science!), the Cyclopes (especially Polyphemus — Boccaccio has a nice summary of the story of his blinding by Odysseus), the winged horse Pegasus (I *don't* want to know what happened there :P), Nestor (the old Achaean chief from the Trojan war; grandson of Neptune).

King Aegeus of Athens (father of the better-known Theseus), after whom the Aegean sea is named, was apparently also a son of Neptune (10.48). He was a widower and later married Medea after the latter had been abandoned by Jason (10.48.1) — an interesting factoid that was quite new to me. Aegeus and Medea had a sun named Medus, after whom the region of Media is named (10.54.2) — implausible, but a nice story anyway.

The early Roman poet, Ennius, also traced his ancestry to one Mesappus, son of Neptune (10.25.2).

A fine contribution to the science of zoology: “a whale is a marine monster [. . .] when it opens its mouth, the area around it is filled with such an odor that all the fish come close, and it takes what it wants until it has satisfied its hunger” (10.10.3). There must be a ‘your mom’ joke in there somewhere...

Medea “persuaded Pelias' gullible daughters to drain all the cold, old blood from the trembling body of the elderly Pelias with knives so that she could insert new and vibrant blood into his veins.” (10.33.1) A more sober interpretation is that she “sowed discord between Pelias and his daughters”, inducing them to kill him (10.33.2).

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In my post about vol. 1 I expressed some skepticism as to whether Boccaccio's idea of organizing all of ancient mythology into a huge genealogical tree is a worthwhile effort, but now I'm really starting to warm up to it. This approach often draws your attention to connections between otherwise quite disparate parts of ancient mythology, jumping easily and suddenly from Greece to Rome and back, from one author to another, and giving you a sense that everything really is deeply linked in all sorts of unexpected ways.