155 CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF THE SELF • (Buccolicum carmen) David Lummus T he Buccolicum carmen, the single major poetic work in Latin by Boc- caccio, is arguably also the most ambitious poetic work in his corpus. 1 Boccaccio himself seems to claim as much in the Genealogia deorum gentilium when he defends the opinion that poets often hide meanings beneath the veil of stories, citing himself along with Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch. 2 Pe- trarch’s pastoral poem, he tells us, gives readers more than enough evidence in its gravitas and exquisite elegance to deduce that the fantastical names of the characters have allegorical meanings in consonance with the moral phi- losophy of his De vita solitaria and other writings. With typical understate- ment, Boccaccio mentions that he could also offer as evidence of a philo- sophical poetry his own Buccolicum carmen, but that he is not yet important enough to be considered among such a distinguished crowd; besides, it is proper to leave the commentary on one’s own works to others. Despite the apparent modesty of Boccaccio’s self-mention, the parallel with Petrarch places him among the ranks of the modern philosophical poets descended from Virgil. Perhaps it is even an invitation to his contemporaries to write a commentary on his poem, such as those Servius and Nicholas of Trevet had written on Virgil’s Bucolica and those on Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen by Donato degli Albanzani, Benvenuto da Imola, and Francesco Piendibeni da Montepulciano. 3 Such commentaries on Boccaccio’s Buccolicum carmen, however, were never written, and in the history of criticism on the pastoral, Boccaccio’s poetry remains a footnote to Petrarch’s better-known endeavor to revive the bucolic genre. Composed between 1346 and 1367, 4 the story recounted by the Buccolicum carmen follows Boccaccio’s life from his initial infatuation with love poetry to the political, ethical, and theological issues of his later life. It may seem at first glance that Boccaccio restructures the arc of his life to coincide with the ideal of the Christian conversion story, familiar from