Petrarch and Chaucer on Fame
17
human nature to court fame, and to Petrarch it is Cicero who most
vividly conveys the essence of this desire: “There is hardly anyone
who after the completion of a laborious task or the meeting of
perils does not desire glory as a reward for what he has
accomplished” (
De Offices
XIX; as cited in Petrarch, 1953: 1245).
For Petrarch, desire for praise or glory alone will suffice to
motivate the poet to write: “The thought of the listener excites the
toiling writer; excellence grows when it is praised; and the thought
of glory is a powerful spur” (1245).
To Petrarch the poet’s reward is bipartite: “To be more
precise, this immortality is itself twofold, for it includes both the
immortality of the poet’s own name and the immortality of the
names of those whom he celebrates” (1953: 1247). Regarding the
first aspect of immortality, Petrarch, citing Ovid, implies that a
poet can be immortalized by his work as long as it reaches
excellence: “And now I have finished my work, which neither the
Wrath of Jove nor fire nor sword nor the ravages of time can
destroy” (as cited in Petrarch, 1953: 1947). Petrarch then proceeds
to illustrate the second dimension of fame, wherein the poet plays
a decidedly pivotal role. Invoking three ancient authorities
—
Virgil,
Statius, and Lucan
—
Petrarch avers that but for the poet’s work
even those who have accomplished towering achievements by
intrepidly overcoming seemingly intractable hurdles in their
lifetime will be consigned to oblivion soon after death.
16
In this
sense, it is regrettable that people meriting eternal memory have no
capable writers to chronicle their deservedly memorable deeds.
17
16
“You too, now consecrate, shall survive the unforgetting years, even though my
songs rise from a less lofty lyre”
(Statius, 2008: 273). “the future will read you
and me: our Pharsalia / will live, not condemned to shadows in any age”
(Lucan,
2012: 286). It should be noted that the
Pharsalia
is Lucan’s account of the civil
war between Pompey and Caesar in 8,000 lines, and that the title
Pharsalia
derives from the place where the most decisive battle occurs—“the plains of
Pharsalus of Thessaly”
(Fox & Adams, 2012: xix).
17
Here the authority cited to underpin Petrarch’s argument is Horace, who in his
Odes
writes, “Many mighty men lived before Agamemnon, but all are buried in a
