The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri [best thriller novels of all time TXT] 📗
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- Author: Dante Alighieri
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Those within the fat lagoon, the Irascible, Canto VII, VIII. ↩
Whom the wind drives, the Wanton, Canto V, and whom the rain doth beat, the Gluttonous, Canto VI. ↩
And who encounter with such bitter tongues, the Prodigal and Avaricious, Canto VII. ↩
The Ethics of Aristotle, VII i:—
“After these things, making another beginning, it must be observed by us that there are three species of things which are to be avoided in manners, viz. Malice, Incontinence, and Bestiality.”
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The Physics of Aristotle, Book II. ↩
Genesis 1:28:—
“And God said unto them. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”
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Gabrielle Rossetti, in the “Comento Analitico” of his edition of the Divina Commedia, quotes here the lines of Florian:—
“Nous ne recevons l’existence
Qu’afin de travailler pour nous, ou pour autrui:
De ce devoir sacre quiconque se dispense
Est puni par la Providence,
Par le besoin, ou par l’ennui.”
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The constellation Pisces precedes Aries, in which the sun now is. This indicates the time to be a little before sunrise. It is Saturday morning. ↩
The Wain is the constellation Charles’s Wain, or Bootes; and Caurus is the Northwest, indicated by the Latin name of the northwest wind. ↩
With this Canto begins the Seventh Circle of the Inferno, in which the Violent are punished. In the first Girone or round are the Violent against their neighbors, plunged more or less deeply in the river of boiling blood. ↩
Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III 242, has the following remarks upon Dante’s idea of rocks and mountains:—
“At the top of the abyss of the seventh circle, appointed for the ‘violent,’ or souls who had done evil by force, we are told, first, that the edge of it was composed of ‘great broken stones in a circle’; then, that the place was ‘Alpine’; and, becoming hereupon attentive, in order to hear what an Alpine place is like, we find that it was ‘like the place beyond Trent, where the rock, either by earthquake, or failure of support, has broken down to the plain, so that it gives any one at the top some means of getting down to the bottom.’ This is not a very elevated or enthusiastic description of an Alpine scene; and it is far from mended by the following verses, in which we are told that Dante ‘began to go down by this great unloading of stones,’ and that they moved often under his feet by reason of the new weight. The fact is that Dante, by many expressions throughout the poem, shows himself to have been a notably bad climber; and being fond of sitting in the sun, looking at his fair Baptistery, or walking in a dignified manner on flat pavement in a long robe, it puts him seriously out of his way when he has to take to his hands and knees, or look to his feet; so that the first strong impression made upon him by any Alpine scene whatever is, clearly, that it is bad walking. When he is in a fright and hurry, and has a very steep place to go down, Virgil has to carry him altogether.”
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Speaking of the region to which Dante here alludes, Eustace, Classical Tour, I 71, says:—
“The descent becomes more rapid between Roveredo and Ala; the river, which glided gently through the valley of Trent, assumes the roughness of a torrent; the defiles become narrower; and the mountains break into rocks and precipices, which occasionally approach the road, sometimes rise perpendicular from it, and now and then hang over it in terrible majesty.”
In a note he adds:—
“Amid these wilds the traveller cannot fail to notice a vast tract called the Slavini di Marco, covered with fragments of rock torn from the sides of the neighboring mountains by an earthquake, or perhaps by their own unsupported weight, and hurled down into the plains below. They spread over the whole valley, and in some places contract the road to a very narrow space. A few firs and cypresses scattered in the intervals, or sometimes rising out of the crevices of the rocks, cast a partial and melancholy shade amid the surrounding nakedness and desolation. This scene of ruin seems to have made a deep impression upon the wild imagination of Dante, as he has introduced it into the twelfth canto of the Inferno, in order to give the reader an adequate idea of one of his infernal ramparts.”
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The Minotaur, half bull, half man. See the infamous story in all the classical dictionaries. ↩
The Duke of Athens is Theseus. Chaucer gives him the same title in “The Knightes Tale”:—
“Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duk that highte Theseus.
Of Athenes he was lord and governour,
That greter was ther non under the sonne.
Ful many a rich contree had he wonne.
What with his wisdom and his chevalrie,
He conquerd all the regne of Feminie,
That whilom was ycleped Scythia;
And wedded the freshe quene Ipolita,
And brought hire home with him to his contree
With mochel glorie and great solempnitee,
And eke hire yonge suster Emelie.
And thus with victorie and with melodic
Let I this worthy duk to Athenes ride,
And all his host, in armes him beside.”
Shakespeare also, in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, calls him the Duke of Athens. ↩
Ariadne, who gave Theseus the silken thread to guide him back through the Cretan labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. Hawthorne has beautifully told the old story in his Tanglewood Tales:—
“Ah, the bullheaded villain!” he says. “And O my good little people, you will perhaps see, one of these days, as I do now, that every human being who suffers
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