The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

face the blush of shame, which covers it here. ↩

The Neri were banished from Pistoia in 1301; the Bianchi, from Florence in 1302. ↩

This vapor or lightning flash from Val di Magra is the Marquis Malaspini, and the “turbid clouds” are the banished Neri of Pistoia, whom he is to gather about him to defeat the Bianchi at Campo Piceno, the old battlefield of Catiline. As Dante was of the Bianchi party, this prophecy of impending disaster and overthrow could only give him pain. See Note 95. ↩

The subject of the preceding Canto is continued in this. ↩

This vulgar gesture of contempt consists in thrusting the thumb between the first and middle fingers. It is the same that the ass-driver made at Dante in the street; Sacchetti, Nov. CXV:⁠—

“When he was a little way off, he turned round to Dante, and, thrusting out his tongue and making a fig at him with his hand, said, ‘Take that.’ ”

Villani, VI 5, says:⁠—

“On the Rock of Carmignano there was a tower seventy yards high, and upon it two marble arms, the hands of which were making the figs at Florence.”

Others say these hands were on a finger-post by the roadside.

In the Merry Wives of Windsor, I 3, Pistol says:⁠—

“Convey, the wise it call; Steal! foh; a fico for the phrase!”

And Martino, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Widow, V I:⁠—

“The fig of everlasting obloquy
Go with him.”

↩

Pistoia is supposed to have been founded by the soldiers of Catiline. Brunetto Latini, Tresor, I i 37, says:⁠—

“They found Catiline at the foot of the mountains and he had his army and his people in that place where is now the city of Pestoire. There was Catiline conquered in battle, and he and his were slain; also a great part of the Romans were killed. And on account of the pestilence of that great slaughter the city was called Pestoire.”

The Italian proverb says, Pistoia la ferrigna, iron Pistoia, or Pistoia the pitiless. ↩

Capaneus, Canto XIV 44. ↩

See Note 181. ↩

Cacus was the classic Giant Despair, who had his cave in Mount Aventine, and stole a part of the herd of Geryon, which Hercules had brought to Italy. Virgil, Aeneid, VIII, Dryden’s Tr.:⁠—

“See yon huge cavern, yawning wide around,
Where still the shattered mountain spreads the ground:
That spacious hold grim Cacus once possessed,
Tremendous fiend! half human, half a beast:
Deep, deep as hell, the dismal dungeon lay,
Dark and impervious to the beams of day.
With copious slaughter smoked the purple floor,
Pale heads hung horrid on the lofty door,
Dreadful to view! and dropped with crimson gore.”

↩

Dante makes a Centaur of Cacus, and separates him from the others because he was fraudulent as well as violent. Virgil calls him only a monster, a half-man, Semihominis Caci facies. ↩

Agnello Brunelleschi, Buoso degli Abati, and Puccio Sciancato. ↩

The story of Cacus, which Virgil was telling. ↩

Cianfa Donati, a Florentine nobleman. He appears immediately, as a serpent with six feet, and fastens upon Agnello Brunelleschi. ↩

Some commentators contend that in this line papiro does not mean paper, but a lamp-wick made of papyrus. This destroys the beauty and aptness of the image, and rather degrades

“The leaf of the reed,
Which has grown through the clefts in the ruins of ages.”

↩

These four lists, or hands, are the fore feet of the serpent and the arms of Agnello. ↩

Shakespeare, in the “Additional Poems to Chester’s Love’s Martyrs,” Knight’s Shakespeare, VII 193, speaks of “Two distincts, division none”; and continues:⁠—

“Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same,
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.

“Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded.”

↩

This black serpent is Guercio Cavalcanti, who changes form with Buoso degli Abati. ↩

Lucan, Pharsalia, IX, Rowe’s Tr.:⁠—

“But soon a fate more sad with new surprise
From the first object turns their wondering eyes.
Wretched Sabellus by a Seps was stung:
Fixed on his leg with deadly teeth it hung.
Sudden the soldier shook it from the wound,
Transfixed and nailed it to the barren ground.
Of all the dire, destructive serpent race,
None have so much of death, though none are less.
For straight around the part the skin withdrew,
The flesh and shrinking sinews backward flew.
And left the naked bones exposed to view.
The spreading poisons all the parts confound,
And the whole body sinks within the wound.
⋮
Small relics of the mouldering mass were left,
At once of substance as of form bereft;
Dissolved, the whole in liquid poison ran,
And to a nauseous puddle shrunk the man.
⋮
So snows dissolved by southern breezes run,
So melts the wax before the noonday sun.
Nor ends the wonder here; though flames are known
To waste the flesh, yet still they spare the bone:
Here none were left, no least remains were seen,
No marks to show that once the man had been.
⋮
A fate of different kind Nasidius found⁠—
A burning Prcster gave the deadly wound,
And straight a sudden flame began to spread,
And paint his visage with a glowing red.
With swift expansion swells the bloated skin⁠—
Naught but an undistinguished mass is seen,
While the fair human form lies lost within;
The puffy poison spreads and heaves around,
Till all the man is in the monster drowned.
No more the steely plate his breast can stay,
But yields, and gives the bursting poison way.
Not waters so, when fire the rage supplies,
Bubbling on heaps, in boiling cauldrons rise;
Nor swells the stretching canvas half so fast,
When the sails gather all the driving blast,
Strain the tough yards, and bow the lofty mast.
The various parts no longer now are known,
One headless,