“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639the vein of the Lesbian poets Sappho and Alcaeus. The speaker asks the goddess
Health and especially Apollo, the god both of poetry and of healing, to cure Salzilli,
and points to his own case as a hopeful example of heavenly aid to poets. Like
Aeneas and unlike Lycidas/King, Milton had endured on the seas the fiercest of
raging winds, but he avoided shipwreck and made his way to the “fertile soil of
Italy” as to his cultural home. So he can hope that Salzilli, “restored once more to
his dear Muses,” will again take up the poet’s mission to delight and to civilize.
Then he will again “soothe the neighboring meadows with his sweet song,”^39 and,
like another Orpheus, his song will calm the flood-swollen Tiber which would
otherwise threaten both the harvests of farmers and the monuments of ancient
kings.
On October 20/30 Milton accepted a dinner invitation from the English Jesuit
College in Rome. The Travellers’ Book of the college records that “On the 30 of
October [1638] dined in our College, the illustrious Mr. N. Cary brother of the
Baron Falkland, Dr. Holding of Lancaster, Mr. N. Fortescue, and Mr. Milton, with
his servant, English nobles, and they were magnificently received” (LR I, 393).
Cary was Patrick Cary, the 14-year-old son of Viscount Falkland and brother of
Lucius; Holding was the secular priest Henry Holden; Fortescue was either Sir
John or Sir Nicholas.^40 Such invitations were customarily extended to Englishmen
of rank and education, Catholic or Protestant, who were passing through Rome.
Milton was clearly willing to rise to this occasion and take his own measure of the
hated Jesuits. When Evelyn later dined in that college he was much impressed by its
facade of rich marble, its “noble Portico and Court,” and “two noble Libraries.”^41
Milton also met and received from one Selvaggi a poetic tribute that he also
published in the 1645 Poems, evidently taking him for a native Roman on the basis
of his associations and his splendid Italian. In fact he was an English Benedictine,
David Codner, who used the alias Matthew Savage or Matteo Selvaggio.^42 His
epigrammatic tribute also likens Milton to the great epic poets:
Greece may exult in her Homer, Rome may exult in her Virgil;
England exults in one equalling either of these.
Selvaggi^43Anthony à Wood reports (on dubious evidence) that Milton sometimes met an-
other traveling Englishman, one Thomas Gawen (1610?–84), a fellow of New
College, Oxford.^44 With his passionate interest in music, Milton found occasions
during both visits to sample the richness of Roman musical life. Much was avail-
able: oratorios, street ballads, vocal concerts, new musical dramas called melodrammas,
and early operas by Monteverdi, based on recitative and arias.^45
Late in November, 1638 (probably), Milton set out for Naples, a journey of over
a hundred miles. He stayed about a month. Naples was the center of Spanish rule
and influence in Italy and the headquarters of the Spanish army. A Spanish province