From Public Duty to Private Pleasures

Abstract

Abstract Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata contains both an Iliad and an Odyssey—integrated not sequentially, as in the Aeneid, but concurrently, into a poem whose unity thereby encompasses and surpasses the achievements of both Homer and Virgil. This chapter re-examines the Odyssey’s role in defining epic and romance in sixteenth-century genre criticism and shows that Tasso’s practice extends readings of the Odyssey as a viable, vibrant epic code model. The Odyssey provides the narrative and ethical spine of Rinaldo’s journey throughout the Liberata, and the ethics that it promotes supersede those of the Virgilian epic settlement. Rinaldo’s reunion with Armida not only resolves the Odyssean strand woven into the Iliadic narrative of the crusade but successfully integrates that strand into the Liberata, not as an isolated episode or digressive romance but as an integral part of the epic. Tasso explores the possibility that the Odyssey can provide a model for the subordination—not the sacrifice—of private desire to public duty and thus enable a successful, though not easy, return to private life after public service. This Odyssean model allows Tasso to integrate homecoming and reconciliation into the epic telos of the Liberata and so to offer an alternative to a Virgilian ethics of conquest and of individual submission to imperial demands. Tasso proposes nothing less than a double overgoing of Virgil, at once ethical and poetic: a new and more complex way of weaving Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic poem.