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While there is little that is distinctly bucolic about the Ameto, the atmosphere is eminently pastoral in the wider sense. Nymphs and shepherds, foresters and fauns meet at the temple of Venus; the limpid fountains and shady laurels belong essentially to the conventional landscape, whether of Sicily, of Arcadia, or of the hills overlooking the valley of the Arno.
The advance in style that marks the transition from the Ameto to the Arcadia must be largely accredited to Boccaccio himself. The language of the Decameron became the model of cinquecento prose. Sannazzaro, however, wrote in evident imitation not of the structural method only, but of the actual style of the Ameto.
In his pastoral romance, 'Ameto, ovvero Commedia delie ninfe fiorentine, Boccaccio set a fashion in literature, namely the intermingling for purposes of narration of prose and verse , in which he was followed a century and a half later by Pietro Bembo, the Socrates of Castiglione's renaissance Symposium, in his dialogue on love entitled Gli Asolani, and by Jacopo Sannazzaro in his still more famous Arcadia.
It is sufficient for our present purpose if we recognize in the Ameto something of the same triple intention which, not to put too fine a metaphysical point upon the parallel, we meet with in Dante and in the Faery Queen.
But the fourteenth-century school of Petrarch had not been entirely without its representative in Italian. At least one poem included by Boccaccio in his Ameto is a strict eclogue, composed throughout in terza rima, which was destined to become the standard verse-form for 'pastoral, as ottava rima for 'rustic, composition.
This peculiarity, which we have already met with in Boccaccio's eclogues, and in his Ninfale fiesolano, was indeed one of the most persistent as it was one of the least admirable characteristics of pastoral composition. Francesco Sansovino, who edited the Ameto in 1545, discovered real personages underlying the characters of the romance.
In this company Lia proposes that each of the nymphs present, seven in number, shall narrate the story of her love. This they in turn do, each ending with a song of praise to the gods; and Ameto feels his love burn for each in turn as he listens to their tales.
It is not unfairly characterized by Symonds as 'a tissue of pastoral tales, descriptions, and versified interludes, prolix in style and affected with pedantic erudition. It is, however, possible to underrate its merits, and it would be easy to overlook its historical importance. Ameto is a rude hunter of the neighbourhood of Florence.
So much as this Boccaccio has himself told us, under a transparent veil of allegory, in his Ameto. Of his mother we would fain know more, for his wit has in it a quality, especially noticeable in the Tenth Novel of the Sixth Day of the Decameron, which marks him out as the forerunner of Rabelais, and prompts us to ask how much more his genius may have owed to his French ancestry.
She continues for pages in the same strain with illustrative allusions to Caius Julius, Claudius, and Britannicus. At the risk of devoting to the Ameto an altogether disproportionate amount of the space at my disposai I must before passing on attempt to give some notion of the kind of narrative contained in the romance, all the more so as it is little known except to students.
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