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

them.”

↩

Among the monks of the Middle Ages there were certain salutations, which had their customary replies or countersigns. Thus one would say, “Peace be with thee!” and the answer would be, “And with thy spirit!” Or, “Praised be the Lord!” and the answer, “World without end!” ↩

The letters upon Dante’s forehead. ↩

Lachesis. Of the three Fates, Clotho prepared and held the distaff, Lachesis spun the thread, and Atropos cut it.

“These,” says Plato, Republic, X, “are the daughters of Necessity, the Fates, Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos; who, clothed in white robes, with garlands on their heads, chant to the music of the Sirens; Lachesis the events of the Past, Clotho those of the Present, Atropos those of the Future.” ↩

See Canto XVIII 46:⁠—

“What reason seeth here,
Myself can tell thee; beyond that await
For Beatrice, since ’tis a work of faith.”

So also Cowley, in his poem on the “Use of Reason in Divine Matters”:⁠—

“Though Reason cannot through Faith’s mysteries see,
It sees that there and such they be;
Leads to heaven’s door, and there does humbly keep,
And there through chinks and keyholes peep;
Though it, like Moses, by a sad command
Must not come into the Holy Land,
Yet thither it infallibly does guide,
And from afar ’tis all descried.”

↩

Nothing unusual ever disturbs the religio loci, the sacredness of the mountain. ↩

This happens only when the soul, that came from heaven, is received back into heaven; not from any natural causes affecting earth or air. ↩

The gate of Purgatory, which is also the gate of Heaven. ↩

Iris, one of the Oceanides, the daughter of Thaumas and Electra; the rainbow. ↩

The soul in Purgatory feels as great a desire to be punished for a sin, as it had to commit it. ↩

The siege of Jerusalem under Titus, surnamed the “Delight of Mankind,” took place in the year 70. Statius, who is here speaking, was born at Naples in the reign of Claudius, and had already become famous “under the name that most endures and honors,” that is, as a poet. His works are the Silvae, or miscellaneous poems; the Thebaid, an epic in twelve books; and the Achilleid, left unfinished. He wrote also a tragedy, Agave, which is lost.

Juvenal says of him, Satire VII, Dryden’s Tr.:⁠—

“All Rome is pleased when Statius will rehearse,
And longing crowds expect the promised verse;
His lofty numbers with so great a gust
They hear, and swallow with such eager lust:
But while the common suffrage crowned his cause,
And broke the benches with their loud applause,
His Muse had starved, had not a piece unread,
And by a player bought, supplied her bread.”

Dante shows his admiration of him by placing him here. ↩

Statius was not born in Toulouse, as Dante supposes, but in Naples, as he himself states in his Silvae, which work was not discovered till after Dante’s death. The passage occurs in Book III Eclogue V, To Claudia his Wife, where he describes the beauties of Parthenope, and calls her the mother and nurse of both, amborum genetrix altrixque.

Landino thinks that Dante’s error may be traced to Placidus Lactantius, a commentator of the Thebaid, who confounded Statius the poet of Naples with Statius the rhetorician of Toulouse. ↩

Would be willing to remain another year in Purgatory. ↩

Petrarca uses the same expression⁠—the lightning of the angelic smile, il lampeggiar dell’ angelica riso. ↩

See Canto XIX 133. ↩

The ascent to the Sixth Circle, where the sin of Gluttony is punished. ↩

Matthew 5:6:⁠—

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.”

↩

The satirist Juvenal, who flourished at Rome during the last half of the first century of the Christian era, and died at the beginning of the second, aged eighty. He was a contemporary of Statius, and survived him some thirty years. ↩

Aeneid, III 56:⁠—

“O cursed hunger of gold, to what dost thou not drive the hearts of men.”

↩

The punishment of the Avaricious and Prodigal. Inferno VII 26:⁠—

“With great howls
Rolling weights forward by main force of chest.”

↩

Dante says of the Avaricious and Prodigal, Inferno VII 56:⁠—

“These from the sepulchre shall rise again
With the fist closed, and these with tresses shorn.”

↩

Her two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, of whom Statius sings in the Thebaid, and to whom Dante alludes by way of illustration. Inferno XXVI 54. See also Note 383. ↩

Statius begins the Thebaid with an invocation to Clio, the Muse of History, whose office it was to record the heroic actions of brave men, I 55:⁠—

“What first, O Clio, shall adorn thy page,
The expiring prophet, or Aetolian’s rage?
Say, wilt thou sing how, grim with hostile blood,
Hippomedon repelled the rushing flood,
Lament the Arcadian youth’s untimely fate,
Or Jove, opposed by Capaneus, relate?”

Skelton, “Elegy on the Earl of Northumberland”:⁠—

“Of hevenly poems, O Clyo calde by name
In the college of musis goddess hystoriale.”

↩

Saint Peter. ↩

70, Virgil’s Bucolics, Ecl. IV, 5, a passage supposed to foretell the birth of Christ:⁠—

“The last era of Cumaean song is now arrived; the great series of ages begins anew; now the Virgin returns, returns the Saturnian reign; now a new progeny is sent down from the high heaven.”

↩

The Fourth Circle of Purgatory, where Sloth is punished. Canto XVII 85:⁠—

“The love of good, remiss
In what it should have done, is here restored;
Here plied again