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

gives this extract from the “Sibylline Oracles”:⁠—

“But wlicn the judgments of the Almighty God
Were ripe for execution; when the Tower
Rose to the skies upon Assyria’s plain,
And all mankind one language only knew;
A dread commission from on high was given
To the fell whirlwinds, which with dire alarms
Beat on the Tower, and to its lowest base
Shook it convulsed. And now all intercourse,
By some occult and overruling power,
Ceased among men: by utterance they strove
Perplexed and anxious to disclose their mind;
But their lip failed them, and in lieu of words
Produced a painful babbling sound: the place
Was thence called Babel; by th’ apostate crew
Named from the event. Then severed far away
They sped uncertain into realms unknown;
Thus kingdoms rose, and the glad world was filled.”

↩

Odyssey, XI, Buckley’s Tr.:⁠—

“Godlike Otus and far-famed Ephialtes; whom the faithful earth nourished, the tallest and far the most beautiful, at least after illustrious Orion. For at nine years old they were also nine cubits in width, and in height they were nine fathoms. Who even threatened the immortals that thev would set up a strife of impetuous war in Olympus. They attempted to place Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa leafy Pelion, that heaven might be accessible. And they would have accomplished it, if they had reached the measure of youth; but the son of Jove, whom fair-haired Latona bore, destroyed them both, before the down flowered under their temples and thickened upon their cheeks with a flowering beard.”

↩

The giant with a hundred hands. Aeneid, X:⁠—

“Aegaeon, who, they say, had a hundred arms and a hundred hands, and flashed fire from fifty mouths and breasts; when against the thunderbolts of Jove he on so many equal bucklers clashed; unsheathed so many swords.”

He is supposed to have been a famous pirate, and the fable of the hundred hands arose from the hundred sailors that manned his ship. ↩

The giant Antaeus is here unbound, because he had not been at “the mighty war” against the gods. ↩

The valley of the Bagrada, one of whose branches flows bv Zama, the scene of Scipio’s great victory over Hannibal, by which he gained his greatest renown and his title of Africanus.

Among the neighboring hills, according to Lucan, Pharsalia, IV, the giant Antaeus had his cave. Speaking of Curio’s voyage, he says:⁠—

“To Afric’s coast he cuts the foamy way,
Where low the once victorious Carthage lay.
There landing, to the well-known camp he hies,
Where from afar the distant seas he spies;
Where Bagrada’s dull waves the sands divide,
And slowly downward roll their sluggish tide.
From thence he seeks the heights renowned by fame,
And hallowed by the great Cornelian name:
The rocks and hills which long, traditions say,
Were held by huge Antaeus’ horrid sway.
⋮
But greater deeds this rising mountain grace,
And Scipio’s name ennobles much the place,
While, fixing here his famous camp, he calls
Fierce Hannibal from Rome’s devoted walls.
As yet the mouldering works remain in view,
Where dreadful once the Latian eagles flew.”

↩

Aeneid, VI:⁠—

“Here too you might have seen Tityus, the fosterchild of all-bearing earth, whose body is extended over nine whole acres; and a huge vulture, with her hooked beak, pecking at his immortal liver.”

Also Odyssey, XI, in similar words.

Typhoeus was a giant with a hundred heads, like a dragon’s, who made war upon the gods as soon as he was born. He was the father of Geryon and Cerberus. ↩

The battle between Hercules and Antaeus is described by Lucan, Pharsalia, IV:⁠—

“Bright in Olympic oil Alcides shone,
Antaeus with his mother’s dust is strown,
And seeks her friendly force to aid his own.”

↩

One of the leaning towers of Bologna, which Eustace, Classical Tour, I 167, thinks are “remarkable only for their unmeaning elevation and dangerous deviation from the perpendicular.” ↩

In this Canto begins the Ninth and last Circle of the Inferno, where Traitors are punished.

“Hence in the smallest circle, at the point
Of all the Universe, where Dis is seated,
Whoe’er betrays forever is consumed.”

↩

The word thrust is here used in its architectural sense, as the thrust of a bridge against its abutments, and the like. ↩

Still using the babble of childhood. ↩

The Muses; the poetic tradition being that Amphion built the walls of Thebes by the sound of his lyre; and the prosaic interpretation, that he did it by his persuasive eloquence. ↩

Matthew 26:24:⁠—

“Woeunto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.”

↩

Tambernich is a mountain of Sclavonia, and Pietrapana another near Lucca. ↩

These two “miserable brothers” are Alessandro and Napoleone, sons of Alberto degli Alberti, lord of Falterona in the valley of the Bisenzio. After their father’s death they quarrelied, and one treacherously slew the other. ↩

Caina is the first of the four divisions of this Circle, and takes its name from the first fratricide. ↩

Sir Mordred, son of King Arthur. See Le Mort d’Arthure, III ch. 167:⁠—

“And there King Arthur smote Sir Mordred under the shield with a foine of his speare throughout the body more than a fadom.”

Nothing is said here of the sun’s shining through the wound, so as to break the shadow on the ground, but that incident is mentioned in the Italian version of the Romance of Launcelot of the Lake, L’ illustre e famosa istoria di Lancillotto del Lago, III ch. 162:⁠—

“Behind the opening made by the lance there passed through the wound a ray of the sun so manifestly, that Girflet saw it.”

↩

Focaccia was one of the Cancellieri Bianchi, of Pistoia, and was engaged in the affair of cutting