Landino, Vergil, and Plato John Stevens T he long line of late antique, medieval, and early Renaissance commentators on the Aeneid, from Macrobius and Fulgen- tius to Bernardus Silvestris and Dante, interpret Vergil’s epic as an evolving tale of the hero’s moral progress from metaphorical infancy to mature responsibility, particularly in the first six books in which Aeneas gives up his adolescent love affair with Dido, accepts the duty to lead his people, and turns toward a contemplation of the virtues and vices of the immortal soul. 1 Their belief that the Aeneid demonstrates moral progress is an inheritance of Neopla- tonic modes of interpretation derived ultimately from Plato’s theo- ries of moral progress. Cristoforo Landino’s Platonic allegory 2 of Aeneas’s moral progress in the Disputationes Camaldulenses of 1474 represents the culmination of this mode of criticism by directly applying Plato’s original doctrines, unlike the earlier tradition of Vergilian commen- tary, which assumed moral progress with little reference to Plato. 3 ________________________________ 1 Craig Kallendorf, “Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,” Renaissance Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1983): 527; In Praise of Aeneas (Univ. Press of New England: Hanover, NH, 1977), 159. 2 Landino calls his mode allegorical, Disp. Cam. 120.10ff. All citations are to the edition of Peter Lohe, Cristoforo Landino. Disputationes Camald- ulenses, Studi e testi (Istituto nazionale di studi nel Rinascimento) 6 (Flor- ence: Sansoni editore, 1980). 3 For a survey of the commentary tradition on Vergil, see Thomas Her- bert Stahel, S.J., Cristoforo Landino’s Allegorization of the “Aeneid”: Books III and IV of the “Camaldolese Disputations” (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1968), 6–21.