The Oblique Glance of the Muse: Invidious Rivalry, Culture Wars, and Disputed Epic Authority in Petrarch’s Africa

Abstract

FROM ITS INITIAL PRESENTATION as the cause of the war between Rome and Carthage, envy, invidia, plays a pervasive and wide-ranging role with respect to Petrarch’s unfinished Africa. This reading of Petrarch’s epic charts the workings within and around the poem of invidious rivalries among military chiefs, geopolitical entities, and poets. In the first category, primarily between the adversaries in the Second Punic War, Hannibal and Scipio, but not without a glance at Alexander, the iconic world conqueror. In the second category the rivalry is between Rome and Carthage and their successive geopolitical antagonists, Christianity and Islam. For in the view of history narrated in the poem, envy and related vices figure in the representation of the military, ideological, and cultural war between East and West— perhaps the subject of early modern European epic narrative. In the last category,