Le dieci parti del piacere

Through a close philological and literary analysis, the paper surmises that the title of Boccaccio’s novel may be indebted not only to st. Ambrose’s Hexameron, but also to the Greek phrase deka miron (“of ten parts”), which in a Greek scholium to Homer’s Odyssey indicates the proportion of feminine sexual pleasure as opposed to the masculine one; the scholium may well have been known to Leonzio Pilato, and then handed over by him to Boccaccio himself.