The Odes of Damianus Benessa: Introductory Considerations about the Metrical Organisation

Sa？etak The poetry of Damianus Benessa (1476-1539) became quite recently accessible to the general reading public in its full extent, after the printed publication of his second autograph codex, which contains minor poetic works brought together under the title Poemata. The poems of this manuscript – there are 185 of them, comprising something fewer than eight thousand lines – were classified by the author himself, in terms of their contents, style and meter, into a number of separate units. He put those of a pastoral mood and composed in hexameters into the book of eclogues (Bucholicon liber / Aeglogae); a book of satires (Sermonum liber / Satyrae) consisting of hexameters in colloquial style and a tone in principle critical; a large number, diverse in contents, but linked mainly by the form of the elegiac couplet were distributed in three books of epigrams (Epigrammatum libri tres). Finally, the poet put thirty six poems that were diverse in contents but close to each other by being composed in meters traditionally considered lyrical into the remaining two books of his manuscript, calling the poems odes (Carminum lyricorum libri duo / Odae). The fairly wide range of topics of this collection, which put under a common title the author’s views on life and poetry, his sorrow for the death of loved ones, as well as the celebration of Christ, and inducements to Christian rulers to make joint resistance to the menace of the Ottomans, a plaint over the schism within the Catholic Church, and a sound censure of the want of Christian solidarity, is not in itself a problem, for the humanist tradition actually made the formal element – the use of Horatian meters – the crucial generic determinant of lyrical poetry. What is, however, striking and exceptional in this collection of odes, not only within the framework of humanist poetry on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, is that Benessa ？reined in？ these almost two thousand lines with as many as fifteen different models of versification, on the whole those used by Horace, but some that we can find in Catullus, in a range from the usual and expected Asclepiadean or Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas, the somewhat rarer Alcmanian and Archilochian, to the very exotic, the Hipponactean stanza, combinations of Glyconic and Pherecratean and finally even Galliambics. Such a diversity of versification is not shown even by the poetry of the most highly praised local humanist master of verse, Benessa’s teacher, Aelius Lampridius Cervinus, and it is not typical even of the poetry of Italian humanism. The question arises then as to