“Even Children and the Uneducated Know Them” The Medieval Trojan Legends in Dante’s Commedia

This paper aims to demonstrate that Dante knew the medieval corpus of legends derived from the Latin “Trojan chronicles” of Dictys Cretensis and Dares the Phrygian, texts of immense success and circulation in Dante’s age and in fact the only source for centuries for the Western knowledge of Trojan history. De- spite common belief that Dante was at best simply unaware of them, the analysis of relevant passages in the Commedia and other works, combined with the first commentaries on the poem, show Dante knew them. However, it is true that he deliberately chose to suppress them whenever their version of the Trojan myth did not comply with his Virgilian-based eschatological view of the translatio impe- rii. In the end, restoring these texts to Dante’s knowledge gives us a new chance to appreciate his complete independence from even the most pervasive sources in favor of consistent artistic and ideological creation.