While Dante portrays Virgil as having learned truths from
future generations, he presents himself as having gained knowledge
from Virgil, commenting that the ancient poet taught him “the graceful style”
that has brought him fame (I.67). The “graceful
style” denotes the tragic style of the ancients, the style of epic
poems—the Odyssey, the Iliad,
the Aeneid. And Dante was indeed capable of commanding
this high style; at the beginning of Canto II, his invocation of
the Muses—the traditional way to begin a classical epic—echoes Virgil’s
call for the Muses’ inspiration in the opening of the Aeneid.
However, one may question the statement that it is this particular
style that brought Dante fame: the poet elsewhere employs many other
styles with equal skill. Dante clearly respects tradition but is
not beholden to it, as is made clear by the way that he follows but
also breaks from traditional uses of allegory, the trope of the Everyman,
and intertemporality. As the remainder of the poem will make clear,
his goal is not simply to mimic Virgil.
Indeed, Dante’s awareness of the differences between himself and
Virgil may have contributed to his decision to name his work The
Comedy: rather than employing exclusively high rhetoric,
it frequently employs the simple, vernacular idiom of its time;
and rather than using Latin, the traditional language of a grand
epic, it is written in Italian, the language of the people, and
a language that Dante hoped every man could understand.
