Eclogue 14 of Boccaccio's Buccolicum Carmen relates how Silvius (Boccaccio) is awakened by a strange conflagration to find before him, "matura viro" and descended from heaven, his daughter Olympia (Violante), who had died in childhood. Olympia introduces her brothers and sisters, similarly elevated to posthumous adulthood, who sing with unrivalled sweetness, better than Virgil and Homer (14.125-127). The dialogue which then ensues between Olympia and Silvius is a fascinating and moving exploration of the differences between the classical conception of Elysium (largely Virgilian) held by Silvius and Olympia's Christian iconography of the abode of the blessed (essentially a synthesis of Dante's earthly paradise, including the mystic procession, and the celestial rose), almost as if Boccaccio, rising as usual to Dante's challenge, had decided to dramatise and amplify the fleeting suggestion contained in Purgatorio 28.139-141:

[...] Quelli ch'anticamente poetaro
l'eta' de l'oro e suo stato felice,
forse in Parnaso esto loco sognaro.

Virginibus nivee dentur mea cura columbe
ast pueris fortes dederat quos Yschiros arcus.

To complicate matters, sometimes Boccaccio gets Chiron right, but not in a pattern that observes a post and an ante: Sagittarius is a regular "Chyron" in the intervening epistola 4 , "Sacre famis" (1339) {G. B. Tutte le opere 5.1, pp. 526-41}. Likewise, Genealogia in its revised form (1373) 12.52 successfully separates Chiron from Schyros, and in Esposizioni 12 litt. (post 1373) the commentary to line 72, though significantly almost a word-for-word re-deployment of the old Teseida gloss to 5.29, reduces "Chiron Aschiro" to plain "Chirone." The etymological fudge "Yschiros" for Sagittarius in eclogue 14 (circa 1367), may, therefore, represent a moment of transition, where Boccaccio is at least partly aware of his earlier misreading, or may just show 'memoriam labilem' confronted with a strongly hellenising context.

But why does the passage from Purgatorio 9 resurface at all in Boccaccio's eclogue (given that the earthly paradise provides nearly all the iconography he needs)? The context of the Purgatorio 9 episode is an important indicator: in the last hours of the night, a propitious time for visions, Dante dreams that he is seized by a golden-plumed eagle (9.20) which bears him aloft to a fire (9.30). This is not real fire, but a "foco imaginato" (9.32). Virgil explains that Lucy has come in his sleep to carry him to the Gate of Purgatory. Boccaccio's eclogue 14, contravening the daytime conventions of the genre, also takes place just before dawn. Silvius, too, experiences an "ignis" (14.18 and 27) which, like Dante's "foco imaginato," does not consume (clearly a reference to Moses's burning bush, Exodus 3. 2-4, portent of deliverance to the land of milk and honey). Again, Silvius will be visited by a female figure who will indicate the way to salvation. If Dante's Lucy is Latin for light, then Boccaccio's Olympia can now be seen as her faithful hellenisation: Boccaccio tells fra Martino: "Olympia dicitur ab olympos grece, quod splendidum seu lucidum latine sonat." Even Petrarch, in his own eleventh eclogue, Galathea, which deals with a similar topic, falls into the same pattern, luminously naming his heavenly visitor Fulgida.

Not even the golden plumes of Dante's "aguglia" are wasted: Olympia's heaven is replete with gilded fauna, including "auro volucres picte" (14.81ff.), and the dialogue between father and daughter will finally turn to what wings will carry him aloft to the blessed (for further use of this neoplatonic image in the wake of Dante, see also Boccaccio's Rime 97-99). Whilst Silvius, seeking the "pennas agiles" of Daedalus (14.272-74), persists in believing in a pagan form of altezza d'ingegno, Olympia, in a reprise of Purgatorio 9.20 with its echo of Exodus 19.4 and Isaia 40.31, declares that only the works of Christian charity "aquile volucres prestabunt [...] pennas" (14.278).

Eclogue 14 gives, tantalisingly, a glimpse of what Boccaccio might have written on Purgatory 9 for the Esposizioni, had illness not stopped him half way through Inferno. However, his wavering practice as interpreter of Dante's line does not assure us that even such knowledge would resolve this little enigma.