Commentary Par XVII 46

Chiarenza (Chia.1966.1 [and see also Chia.1983.3]) was perhaps the first to examine the import to Dante of the rest of the tale of Hippolytus: his restoration from death and his ensuing life in exile from Athens under the name 'Virbius.'  She argues that Dante could have known this part of Hippolytus's tale from Virgil (Aen. VII.777) and from Ovid (Metam. XV.497-546 [a connection first observed by Jacopo della Lana (DDP Lana.Par.XVII.46-48), if without naming Virbius]).  (Dante might not have required the authority of Servius [alluded to by Chiarenza] who etymologizes Hippolytus's posthumous name as 'bis vir' [twice a man], but simply seen these obvious Latin roots himself.)  Chiarenza's conclusion is that the Virbius tradition gives Dante much more than a political self-justification, namely, a sense of his own spiritual second life.  On the other hand, it does limn in precise parallel the Florentine's escape from the political dangers of the world of 'Thebes' (in Inferno an insistent stand-in for the ailing and divided city of man on earth, the city of destruction that surely reminded the poet of the internecine woes of Florence [see [Inf XIV 69]; [Inf XX 32]; [Inf XXV 15]; [Inf XXX 2]; [Inf XXX 22]; [Inf XXXII 11]; [Inf XXXIII 89]; there are three references to the Greek city in Purgatorio, but these are rather more neutral in tone]).  See also Schnapp (Schn.1991.2), pp. 220-23, for the strategic implications of Dante's use of Ovid's exiled (and eventually 'redeemed') Hippolytus.  He concludes with this surmise: Dante's own choice of first-person confessional narrative may have provoked his 'special emphasis' on Glaucus (in Par. I) and here, at the midpoint of this canticle, on Hippolytus.  Ovid's tellings of their doings 'are tales of deification narrated by the deified mortals themselves, whereas the great majority of Ovid's tales are recounted by third parties' (p. 293).