BOOK: Boccaccio, "Famous Women"

Giovanni Boccaccio: Famous Women. Edited and translated by Virginia Brown. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 1. Harvard University Press, 2001. 0674003470. xxv + 530 pp.

This work consists of about 100 short biographies (on average two or three pages long) of (more or less) famous women. Most of them are from ancient history and classical mythology; as he explains in the preface (p. 13), he deliberately avoided writing about christian women since you can easily find hagiographies of saints elsewhere if you want them, and since they mostly led religious lives and hence weren't likely to do things that would bring them fame the way pagan women could have done.

The biographies in this book are arranged roughly in chronological order; I vaguely remember reading somewhere about efforts like that of Eusebius who tried to place events and characters from Greek mythology, biblical stories, and actual ancient history into a common chronological framework, assigning dates to them etc. Perhaps Boccaccio followed something of that sort when arranging his biographies.

Probably more than half the women in this book are mythological, from Olympian goddesses to legendary Roman matrons from the earlier books of Livy. Only a handful of biographies at the end of the book are about medieval women or Boccaccio's contemporaries; the last of these is the queen of Sicily, which he no doubt added because he was about to move to her capital, Naples, at the invitation of one of her courtiers (p. xii).

As he himself explains in his preface (p. 11), what he means by ‘famous’ is simply that they must be well-known, not necessarily for something good; but even a biography of someone wicked can be instructive, by showing you how not to act. That said, a few of the women in this biography are far from famous even in this shallower sense, being known for nothing beyond one passing anecdote in the work of some ancient encyclopedist (e.g. §53, 86, 91, etc.).

At times his tone is a little too annoyingly didactic, as he is clearly a little too keen to point out moral lessons that his female readership should draw from this or that passage in his biographies. Also, for a book in praise of famous women it has surprisingly many casual misogynistic remarks, though the translator's preface tells us that Boccaccio's attitudes are actually quite progressive relative to his time (p. xix). I liked this passing barb in the biography of Penelope: “Her virtue is the more renowned and praiseworthy in that it is only rarely found” :)) (40.14).

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The first two biographies are something of an exception by being based on biblical rather than Greco-Roman history. We learn that Eve, while in Paradise, “was cloaked in a radiance unknown to us” (1.5); but after being exiled from it, “[t]he gleaming light which clothed them disappeared” (1.7).

An implausible story from the chapter on Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians: after her husband died, leaving behind a son that was still a child, Semiramis herself dressed up as a boy and ruled instead of the son so that the empire would be in competent hands :)) (2.4–6)

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Boccaccio then continues with biographies of several Greco-Roman goddesses. Since, as a christian, he doesn't believe in pagan mythology, he argues that those were really mortal women who got famous for their achievements and inventions and whom the foolish pagans later worshipped as goddesses. For instance, Minerva discovered woolworking and the art of making olive oil (6.3–4); Isis taught Egyptians, those “unskilled, lazy people”, about agriculture! (8.4).

We also see a few silly efforts to explain myths in a quasi-rational way, e.g. Europa was kidnapped in a “ship with a white bull as its standard” (9.2), hence the myth that she was kidnapped by (Zeus in the shape of) a bull — I remember seeing a lot along those lines in Boccaccio's book about ancient mythology, the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, of which we've had two volumes in the ITRL so far (see my posts about them)

A pleasantly salacious custom from Cyprus: “They were long accustomed to send young girls to the beaches to lie with foreigners. In this way the girls seem to have rendered to Venus the first fruits of their future chastity and to have earned dowries for their marriages.” (7.10)

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After goddesses, he moves on to mortal women from ancient mythology, and mostly deals with them by recounting the myths in which they appear, since there's little else that can be said about them. This includes a number of famous and touching ones, like those of Niobe (§15), Arachne (§18), and Pyramus and Thisbe (§13).

One thing that bothered me about Boccaccio's retellings of myths is his insistence on passing cheap moral judgement all the time, as if he were a schoolmaster insisting that each page of his book must be instructive. For instance, there's the grisly tale of king Danaus, who had fifty daughters while his brother had fifty sons. An oracle foretold that Danaus would be killed by one of his nephews. Later, when Danaus's brother wanted his sons to get married to Danaus's daughters, Danaus secretly told these daughters that each should kill her husband on the wedding night, and all but one actually did so. Boccaccio condemns Danaus at great length for instigating these 49 murders: “This vile man thought that the few cold years of his old age should take precedence over the flowering youth of his nephews.” (14.10). But this is insane! What does Boccaccio expect Danaus to do? Simply wait to get murdered and do nothing to defend himself? Just because he is older than his would-be murderer? How exactly would that work, as a general principle? May every younger person murder any older person with impunity, or is there some sort of formula? I can already imagine utilitarianists, economists and other such monsters drooling at the thought of what wonders this would do for the pension system, and touching themselves under the table while mumbling something about ‘quality-adjusted life years’...

I was impressed by the tale of Medea's many crimes. She eloped from home with Jason, and murdered her little brother on the way to slow down her pursuers; she bore Jason two sons, but then murdered them when he took an interest in another woman; despite all this, old king Aegeas (father of Theseus) was willing to marry her, and she promptly tried to murder Theseus but failed; and after all this, she was somehow reconciled to Jason afterwards (15.6, 9). What else can you say but that that woman must have had a magical pussy? If you saw this stuff in a soap opera you'd dismiss it for being too melodramatic and implausible, but clearly the ancient Greeks had no such scruples :)

A Sybil named Erythraea, who lived “some time before the Trojan war” (21.3), foretold not only the outcome of that war, but described the future history of the Roman Empire and the emergence of christianity! You can't help but admire the zeal of whatever early church author came up with that particular tall tale :)

There's an interesting story about how the Latin alphabet was invented by one Carmenta, a daughter of the king of Arcadia who later moved to Italy (27.6). Boccaccio cannot help entering into a long log-rolling session in praise not only of the Latin alphabet but of various other blessings and accomplishments of Roman civilization (27.16). You can't help feeling that the purpose of such passages was to let the author and his Italian contemporaries feel better about themselves at a time when Italy was politically divided and weak, and often enough had foreigners interfering in her affairs.

Supposedly Mantua was named after Manto, a daughter of the famous seer Teiresias, who is well-known from Sophocles' Theban plays. Manto later settled in northern Italy and her son founded a city there and named it after her (30.6).

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There's quite a few biographies of women involved in the Trojan War and its aftermath, characters from the Illiad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, etc. The chapter on Helen (§37) is particularly interesting for its background on the Trojan War; and I was surprised that in his account of the fall of Troy, Boccaccio doesn't mention the Trojan horse at all. In his version (37.15), Helen actually betrayed the Trojans: after the Greeks feigned a retreat, the Trojans had a big celebration and when they were all drunk, Helen opened the city gates and let the Greeks in; her reward was that Menelaus took her back as his wife. Not very commendable; but then few characters from the Trojan war come across as commendable.

In the chapter on Circe, Boccaccio of course can't resist moralizing and pointing out that her changing men into pigs is a metaphor for enticing them into “wantonness” or “robbery and piracy” or even: “others she induced with her tricks to cast all honor aside and take up commerce and trading” (38.5) :))) I have to say that I love this olympian contempt for commerce and trading, and I wish there were more of this attitude in the world nowadays. There is indeed no honour in these activities; you cannot afford to have any principles, you have to lie to people and ingratiate yourself with them, and at any point they are free to refuse to deal with you. A warrior coming on a campaign of conquest does not labour under these constraints, and so can afford to have honour where the trader can't.

Boccaccio's story of Dido of Carthage is quite different than what I remember (vaguely) from the Aeneid. In his version she doesn't meet Aeneas at all; a neighbouring king threatens to attack her city if she doesn't marry him, and her people press her to do it; she promises she would go to her husband on a certain date — and she does, to her late husband, by comitting suicide on his grave (42.13–15). A very touching story, more so than Virgil's version, but Boccaccio immediately ruins it by two pages of extremely heavy-handed moralizing where he uses Dido's example to rant against widows who remarry. But I'm surprised that Dido's suicide would have solved the political problem she was facing; the neighbouring king could still attack Carthage in anger, even if she was dead. (I also wonder where Boccaccio got his version of the story from. The translator's note (p. 490) says that his version is different from Virgil's, but doesn't say where it's from; does that mean that Boccaccio boldly made the whole thing up himself, out of whole cloth?)

There's a chapter on the queen of Sheba, but Boccaccio says that she was originally named Nicaula, of Ethiopia (43.1, 3); according to the wikipedia, this originally comes from Josephus. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that the queen of Sheba's name was Bilqis or something like that; this apparently comes from Muslim sources.

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Gradually Boccaccio moves on to women from early Roman history, where it's hard to say where exactly myth ends and actual history begins. There's a chapter on Rhea Ilia, the mother of Romulus and Remus; she was forced to become a vestal virgin against her will (well, evidently the virginity part didn't quite work out :]), and Boccaccio includes a fine rant against the practice of pressuring young women to become nuns, which apparently some parents did so they wouldn't have to provide dowries for them; as a result of this, he says, most nuns don't actually want to be there, have illicit sex etc. (45.5–8).

There's a chapter on Sappho, but it doesn't say anything about her lesbianism, only that she was unhappily in love with a young man (47.4).

At one point, the translation refers to Porsenna as “king of Chiusi” (52.2), rather than Clusium — such a conspicuously Italian form of the name in such a conspicuously ancient context struct me as very anachronistic.

There's a chapter about Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus. Now, a cultured person would say that he knows this story from Shakespeare, or perhaps from Livy, but I have to admit that I only knew it from Ralph Fiennes' film (which is based on Shakespeare's play but places it in a vaguely modern-day setting). Apparently Rome was in a very dire position after Coriolanus had joined their enemies, the Volscians, but his mother successfully persuaded him to send his armies away from Rome. In gratitude for her deed, the Roman senate improved the social status of women in various ways, such as by allowing them to wear jewellry and to inherit property; Boccaccio rants against this in an overwrought manner that you rarely encounter nowadays outside of the incel movement: “Thanks to feminine ornaments, masculine wealth has been depleted while women parade about in royal finery; [. . .] All this has brought many disadvantages to men and many advantages to women. [. . .] This is a woman's world, and men have become womanish.” (60.12, 14) So I guess that men have been complaining about those emasculating gold-diggers since time pretermemorial :)))

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By now we've come to women about whose historicity there seems no reason to doubt, e.g. Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great (§61); Tertia, the wife of Scipio Africanus, who in his old age was apparently cheating on her with a slave-girl (74.2); and Sempronia, Scipio's granddaughter and the sister of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (76.1 — it seems that the Roman elite was smaller than I thought, and everyone was related to everyone else :)).

But even in this period some of the biographies seem to be pure myth, e.g. the bizarre tale of a woman named Flora who grew rich as a prostitute and left her wealth to the people of Rome; they set up annual games in her honour and invented the claim that she was a goddess... (64.8–12)

Much as in his Genalogy of the Pagan Gods, Boccaccio is at his best when he stops merely compiling factoids or preaching his cheap moral lessons and instead allows himself to be seduced into a storytelling mode. There's a touching scene when Theoxena, a Thessalian princess, prefers to commit suicide with her husband and children rather than fall into the hands of their enemies (71.10–12). Nowadays people seem to have a very low opinion of suicide, and are likely to disparage those who commit it as having taken the easy way out; but I disagree, and prefer the ancient view that held suicide in such circumstances to be honourable and praiseworthy, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Boccaccio praised Theoxena here as well; I thought that his commitments to christianity would lead him to object to suicide.

While praising a woman for her constancy, Boccaccio tempers this with the observation that “women are instinctively obstinate and unbending in their opinions about everything” anyway :)) (76.6).

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It is only when we get to the period of the late Roman republic that the mythological entries really come to an end. We get biographies of Caesar's daughter Julia (§81); of Portia, the daughter of Cato the Younger (§82); and, continuing into the early empire, of Agrippina, the mother of Caligula (§90), and of another Agrippina who was the mother of Nero (§92); and of various less well-known women of the same period.

There's a long biography of Cleopatra, and I guess that we shouldn't be surprised that Boccaccio disapproves, noisily and at length, of her grasping for power as well as of her efforts to seduce various important Romans (“She became, so to speak, the whore of the Eastern kings: greedy for gold and jewels”, etc.; 88.9). He gives a second version of her death, in addition to the better-known one where she commits suicide; in this other version, Antony began to distrust her and eventually killed her, fearing that she could poison him (88.30).

There's a bizarre story of a woman named Paulina who lived in the time of Tiberius. She was zealously devoted to Anubis and at one point actually agreed to sleep with this god; but of course it was only a man wearing a costume. When his imposture came to light, he was exiled by Tiberius, and the priests who had aided him were executed (91.12).

I was interested to learn that Nero had a friend named Otho (95.5); I was wondering if his name has any relation to Otto, which we know from various medieval German emperors, but according to the wikipedia Otto is in fact a German name, so I guess it isn't related to the Roman Otho.

A 4th-century woman named Proba “put into verse the history of the Old and New Testaments” (97.5), but what is more, she did it entirely by reassembling fragments of verse taken from the works of Virgil! According to the translator's note (p. 500), this work is still extant.

There is a biography of Symiamira, the mother of Elagabalus, who was called Varius “because he looked as if he had been conceived in the course of his mother's incessant copulations with ‘various’ men” (99.2) :)) Elagabalus seems to have appreciated her help in gaining him the throne, and even went so far as to appoint her to the senate. Boccaccio, of course, fulminates in shock at the idea of a woman senator (99.9), but that's just silly — by then, the senate had been powerless for centuries, mostly doing nothing except rubberstamping the emperors' decisions; no further shame, no further dishonour could be visited upon the senate by appointing a woman, or for that matter a horse, to it, because the senate had already deprived itself of all honour centuries before when it allowed the emperors to seize power.

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The book ends with a tiny handful of medieval biographies: pope Joan (§101), whom he describes as an Englishwoman, but she seems to have been from Germany, though she lived in England for a number of years (I was disappointed to learn, in the wikipedia, that Joan's very existence seems to be a fiction originating no earlier than the 13th century); Irene, an 8th-century Byzantine empress (§102); one or two other near-contemporaries of Boccaccio; and finally Joanna, the “queen of Jerusalem and Sicily” (§106), the former in title only, of course (alas!). Boccaccio was invited to move to Naples by an old friend who had risen to a prominent position at Joanna's court, and so probably included this biography at the end to make a more favourable impression upon arriving there (pp. xii, xiv–xv). But I was a bit disappointed that he didn't include some more women from his own time; surely with some effort he could have dug up a few that had e.g. painted something or written some books?

In any case, regardless of the minor downsides I've mentioned here and there, I found Boccaccio's biographies to be pleasant enough to read in moderate doses, especially since they are short and thus don't have the time to get boring. In this way they are similar to his Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, which I guess is not surprising as both of these books are basically about extracting infomation from classical sources and rearranging it in a more systematic and easily digestible format.