ABSTRACT
This chapter explains one of the tales of the Decameron recounts the history of a young Greek nicknamed Cimone, a nickname that signifies, says Boccaccio, 'Brute Beast'. The first half of the tale recounts Cimone's sudden rise from the depths of bestiality to the heights of human perfection. He has become a metaphysician, one who 'deems divine things more worthy of reverence than worldly ones'. In the tradition exemplified by the Lai d'Aristote, animality is an ethical failure. Aristotle knows what a perfect human should do, knows what is morally right, yet he is unable to act in accord with this knowledge. The restricted sense of animality is established in Aristotle's tripartite hierarchy of the faculties of soul. There are, for Aristotle, three faculties of soul: the vegetative or nutritive; the sensitive or imaginative; the rational or intellective. Boccaccio's inherited idea of philosophy was shaped by his reading of Dante's philosophical treatises, the Convivio and De Monarchia.
