ABSTRACT
Of all the real or imagined cities Spenser draws upon, it is Rome that he refers to most often, no doubt because of its rich diversity of associations both for the writers of antiquity and for the civic humanists of the Renaissance. From Complaints, we can see the extent to which his notion of the city was formed by du Bellay’s meditations on its ruins in his Antiquitez and Songe, works which Spenser both translated and used as models for his own Ruines poems and Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. Du Bellay’s great exemplum of decayed grandeur presented Spenser with a wide variety of attitudes toward the city: awe over its glorious past, pathos for its present dereliction, and somber consideration of the causes of its decline, namely, the overweening pride that went before its fall and the penchant for civil discord which seemed to precipitate it.
