The Adone strikes us at first sight as the supreme poem of epicene voluptuousness.  Its smooth-chinned hero, beautiful as a girl, soft as a girl, sentimental as a girl, with nothing of the man about him—­except that ’Nature, as she wrought him, fell adoting,’—­threads a labyrinth of suggestive adventures, in each of which he is more the patient than the agent of desire.  Mercury introduces him to our attention in a series of those fables (tales of Narcissus, Ganymede, Cyparissus, Hylas, Atys) by which antiquity figured the seductiveness of adolescence.  Venus woos him, and Falserina tries to force him.  Captured in feminine attire by brigands, he is detained in a cave as the mistress of their chief, and doted on by the effeminate companion of his prison.  Finally, he contends for the throne of Cyprus with a band of luxurious youths—­

    Bardassonacci, paggi da taverna.

The crown is destined for the physically fairest.  The rival charms of the competitors are minutely noted, their personal blemishes sagaciously detected, by a council of pleasure-sated worldlings.  In his death Adonis succumbs to the assault of a boar, fatally inflamed with lust, who wounds the young man in his groin, dealing destruction where the beast meant only amorous caresses.  Gods and godesses console Venus in her sorrow for his loss, each of whom relates the tale of similar disasters.  Among these legends Apollo’s love for Hyacinth and Phoebus’ love for Pampinus figure conspicuously.  Thus Marino’s Adonis excites unhealthy interest by the spectacle of boyhood exposed to the caprices and allurements of both sexes doting on unfledged virility.

What contributes to this effect, in the central motive of the poem, is that Venus herself is no artless virgin, no innocent Chloe, corresponding to a rustic Daphnis.  She is already wife, mother, adulteress, femme entretenue, before she meets the lad.  Her method of treating him is that of a licentious queen, who, after seducing page or groom, keeps the instrument of her pleasures in seclusion for occasional indulgence during intervals of public business.  Vulcan and Mars, her husband and her cicisbeo, contest the woman’s right to this caprice; and when the god of war compels, she yields him the crapulous fruition of her charms before the eye of her disconsolate boy-paramour.  Her pre-occupation with Court affairs in Cythera—­balls, pageants, sacrifices, and a people’s homage—­brings about the catastrophe.  Through her temporary neglect, Adonis falls victim to a conspiracy of the gods.  Thus the part which the female plays in this amorous epic is that of an accomplished courtesan, highly placed in society.  All the pathos, all the attraction of beauty and of sentiment, is reserved for the adolescent male.

This fact, though disagreeable, has to be noted.  It is too characteristic of the wave of feeling at that time passing over Europe, to be ignored.  The morbid strain which touched the Courts alike of Valois, Medici and Stuarts; which infected the poetry of Marlowe and of Shakespeare; which cast a sickly pallor even over sainthood and over painting in the school of Bologna, cannot be neglected.  In Marino’s Adone it reaches its artistic climax.[188]