Various interpretations have been suggested for this work, with its preposterous mixture of pagan and Christian motives.  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.  Fiammetta is introduced by name, and her lover Caleone can hardly be other than Boccaccio.  More recent commentators are probably right in detecting an allegorical intention.  The seven nymphs, according to them, represent the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and their stories are to be interpreted symbolically.  This view derives support from the baptismal ceremony, in which after the public lustration one of the nymphs removes the scales from Ameto’s eyes, while another, ’breathing between his lips, kindled within him a flame such as he had never felt before.’  In these ministrants it is not difficult to recognize the virtues respectively of faith and love.  Ameto may be taken as typical of humanity, tamed of its savage nature by love, and through the service of the virtues led to the knowledge of the divine essence.  The conception of love as a civilizing and humanizing power already underlay the sensuous stanzas of the Ninfale fiesolano, while the later part of the romance was not uninfluenced by recollections of the Divine Comedy[51].  It is true that a modern mind will with difficulty be able to reconcile the amorous confessions of the nymphs with the characteristics of the virtues, but in Boccaccio’s day the tradition of the Gesta Romanorum was still strong, and the age that mysticized Vergil, and moralized Ovid, was capable of much in the way of allegorical interpretation[52].

The point to which this allegorical interpretation can legitimately be carried need not trouble us here.  Having set himself to characterize the virtues, it is moreover likely enough that Boccaccio sought at the same time to connect his figures more or less definitely with actual persons.  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.  Having fashioned in accordance with these motives the framework of his book, Boccaccio further concerned himself but little with this philosophical intention, and the allegorical setting having served its artistic purpose of linking them together into one connected whole, it was upon the detail of the narratives themselves that the author’s attention was concentrated.  It is, however, just in this artistic purpose of the setting that one of the chief interests of the Ameto lies; for if in the mingling of verse and prose it is the forerunner of the Arcadia, in the linking together of a series of isolated stories it anticipates Boccaccio’s own Decameron.