By drawing on the Virgilian journey of Aeneas from his origins to his descent into the underworld in the first six books of the Aeneid, recast as an allegorization of the stages of existence as birth, life, and death, Salutati overlays Hercules’s life with a Neoplatonic allegorization found in medieval Virgilian commentaries. Reacting to the newly-rediscovered versions of Seneca’s plays about the violent and wife-murdering hero Hercules in Hercules furens and Hercules oetatis and to commentaries on them by Nicholas Trivet, Salutati constructs two versions of his De laboribus, the latter, heavily allegorized, to exonerate his subject. Coluccio Salutati “Virgilizes” his Boethian hero Hercules in De laboribus Herculis by focusing on his allegorical underworld descents.
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