Neo-Stoic Correctives to Neo-Platonic Love Affairs: Subversive Imitation of the Eclogues of Garcilaso de la Vega in Francisco de Sá de Miranda’s Alexo, Celia, and Andrés

Abstract

Abstract This article explores Francisco de Sá de Miranda’s imitation of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Égloga primera, Égloga segunda, and Égloga tercera, evidencing how the Portuguese seizes upon the neo-Platonic love affairs of the Spaniard’s poems and corrects them, with recourse to neo-Stoic thought, in three of his own eclogues — Alexo, Celia, and Andrés —, which respectively explore the maddening and lustful love suffered by a shepherd, whose infatuation echoes that of Albanio in Garcilaso’s Égloga segunda, for a nymph, who, on love’s command, perversely enchants the waters of a fountain to inebriate his shepherd companions; a shepherd’s hopeless longing for his deceased Celia, a counterpart to the Elisa of Garcilaso’s Égloga primera, who offers a cutting, but prudent, neo-Stoic reproach of her lover’s attempts to envisage a spiritual reunion; and a shepherd’s deception by the cruellest of women Pascuala, who is likened to several ‘perverted women’ of the classical and biblical worlds — Pasiphae, Eriphyle, and Delilah — in a series of descriptions that recall the ekphrases of the Égloga tercera.