Commentary Purg IX 1-9

Like Inferno IX, this ninth canto is both liminal, marking the boundary between two large areas, and filled with classical reference.  And it is the first entire canto devoted to the transition from one poetic zone to another since Inferno XXXI.  This sort of self-conscious poetic behavior puts us on notice, from the very outset, that we need to pay particular attention here.

      Its reference to Aurora, surprisingly enough, has made this passage among the most hotly debated of the poem.  In the 'orthodox' version of the classical myth, Aurora, goddess of the dawn, arose from her couch, where she slept with her aged husband, Tithonus, to rise in the sky on her chariot, announcing the coming of day.  A brief and incomplete summary of the debate yields the following (for a summary of the essential arguments over the passage and an attempt to restore Benvenuto da Imola's central and daring reading of it see Hollander [Holl.2001.2]): Moore (Moor.1903.1), pp. 74-85, essentially solved this problem almost a century ago, but in fact the early commentators (to whom Moore pays little attention) had already done so.  (Spillenger  [Spil.1993.1], who devotes all but two pages of his 'lectura' of this canto to the opening tercet, is a rare discussant to revisit the glosses of Jacopo della Lana and Benvenuto, only then to deny their applicability.)  Nearly all of them are quite sure that Dante has invented a second myth, one in which Tithonus is married to Aurora 1 (of the sun) but has a 'relationship' with Aurora 2 (of the moon).  The poetic facts are simple, according to Moore.  The time is between 8:30 and 9pm, the cold animal is the constellation Scorpio (and certainly not that belated other candidate, Pisces, arguments for which identification Moore competently dismantles), and thus the aurora we deal with is that of the moon.

      For a review of these tormented verses and their tormentors (up to 1975) see Vazzana (Vazz.1981.1), pp. 180-85.  And for one of the most interesting discussions of their meaning see Raimondi (Raim.1968.1), pp. 95-98.  See also Casagrande (Casa.1989.1) and Cornish (Corn.2000.2), pp. 68-77.  A late 14th-c. Italian MS of Virgil, written by Astolfino Marinoni at Pavia in 1393-94, states that Dante had cited Aeneid IV.585 here: 'And now early Dawn, leaving her saffron bed of Tithonus....'   For this and other citations of Dante in early Renaissance commentaries to the Latin classics see Alessio (Ales.1996.1).