Schevill — Studies in Cervantes. 501 



1). The Indebtedness of Cervantes. 



After this rather lengthy excursion, let us examine the Persiles 

 and investigate the extent of its indebtedness to Virgil. What has 

 been stated was necessary to show that while Cervantes may have 

 gone on his own initiative to the Aeneid for suggestions, still, imi- 

 tations of well-known episodes or mere references to them were suffi- 

 ciently traditional and common to prompt his taking the Aeneid as a 

 kind of Renaissance roman d'aventure and using it, as he had done 

 Heliodorus's Theagenes and ChariMea, wherever he saw fit to do so. 



The story of the Aeneid may he divided into five main groups of 

 episodes; the first three hooks are of the adventure type, with the 

 flight of Aeneas, his wanderings and hardships; the fourth is a 

 romance, the fifth is unique in its celebration of the games in honor 

 of Anchises, the sixth relates the descent into the lower world, and 

 finally, the last six books, which concern us little, consist chiefly 

 of warfare attendant on the conquest of Italy by the Trojans. The 

 most direct imitations in the Persiles are taken from the fourth and 

 fifth books. The borrowing from the former may have been sug- 

 gested by the popularity of that kind of love story, but there was a 

 serious obstacle to incorporating successfully the tragedy of Dido. 

 Owing to the high moral tone which Cervantes was bound to main- 

 tain in his romance because of the unimpeachable chastity of his 

 hero and heroine — patterned, as we have seen, after Heliodorus — 

 the opportunity to depict a real, living passion had to be eliminated 

 throughout. It is moreover questionable whether Cervantes or any 

 other Spanish writer of fiction of those days could have portrayed 

 one. As a result, the mere skeleton of the Dido episode remains. 

 Periandro, the hero, reaches the Kingdom of Policarpo in the course 

 of his wanderings, in time to participate in some games. The prin- 

 cess Sinforosa — with a sister Policarpa, whose raison d'etre seems to 

 be Dido's having a sister Anna^ — falls in love Avith the handsome 

 guest. There is, to be sure, no chance of any requital of her love 

 and a parvulus Aeneas would be wholly out of keeping with the kind 

 of unions celebrated in this story. ]^ot long after the meeting of 



(i todos la boca abierta pendientes de las hazauas que nos iba contando," 

 p. 397, col. 1; cf. p. .503, n. 1; the line: "Que a osados favorece la Fortuna," 

 Eneida, Vol. II, p. 115, is in Don Quixote, first poem with unfinished verse 

 ends, line 19. Cf. also Appendix III, p. 522. 



' In giving Dido a sister Anna, Virgil may have been influenced by the 

 Argonautica, in which Medea has a sister, cf. Benoist, Virgile, Eneide, p. 191. 



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