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

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Some editions read in this line, instead of nostra amico⁠—nostra antico, our ancient Terence; but the epithet would be more appropriate to Plautus, who was the earlier writer. ↩

Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, the three principal Latin dramatists; Varro, “the most learned of the Romans,” the friend of Cicero, and author of some five hundred volumes, which made St. Augustine wonder how he who wrote so many books could find time to read so many; and how he who read so many could find time to write so many. ↩

Persius, the Latin satirist. ↩

Homer. ↩

Mrs. Browning, “Wine of Cyprus”:⁠—

“Our Euripides, the human⁠—
With his droppings of warm tears;
And his touches of things common,
Till they rose to touch the spheres.”

But why does Dante make no mention here of “Aeschylus the thunderous” and “Sophocles the royal”?

Antiphon was a tragic and epic poet of Attica, who was put to death by Dionysius because he would not praise the tyrant’s writings. Some editions read Anacreon for Antiphon. ↩

Simonides, the poet of Cos, who won a poetic prize at the age of eighty, and is said to be the first poet who wrote for money.

Agatho was an Athenian dramatist, of whom nothing remains but the name and a few passages quoted in other writers. ↩

Some of the people that Statius introduces into his poems. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus; Deiphile, wife of Tideus; Argìa, her sister, wife of Polynices; Ismene, another daughter of Oedipus, who is here represented as still lamenting the death of Atys, her betrothed. ↩

Hypsipile, who pointed out to Adrastus the fountain of Langìa, when his soldiers were perishing with thirst on their march against Thebes. ↩

Of the three daughters of Tiresias only Manto is mentioned by Statius in the Thebaid. But Dante places Manto among the Soothsayers, Inferno XX 55, and not in Limbo. Had he forgotten this? ↩

Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and Deidamia, the daughter of Lycomedes. They are among the personages in the Achilleid of Statius. ↩

Four hours of the day were already passed. ↩

Cowley, “The Tree of Knowledge”:⁠—

“The sacred tree ’midst the fair orchard grew,
The phoenix Truth did on it rest
And built his perfumed nest,
That right Porphyrian tree which did true Logic show;
Each leaf did learned notions give
And th’ apples were demonstrative;
So clear their color and divine
The very shade they cast did other lights outshine.”

This tree of Temptation, however, is hardly the tree of Knowledge, though sprung from it, as Dante says of the next, in Canto XXIV 117. It is meant only to increase the torment of the starving souls beneath it, by holding its fresh and dewy fruit beyond their reach. ↩

John 2:3:⁠—

“And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.”

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Daniel 1:12:⁠—

“Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat and water to drink.⁠ ⁠… And Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.”

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Compare the description of the Golden Age in Ovid, Metamorphoses, I:⁠—

“The golden age was first; when man, yet new,
No rule but uncorrupted reason knew,
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforced by punishment, unawed by fear,
His words were simple, and his soul sincere;
Needless was written law, where none opprest:
The law of man was written in his breast:
No suppliant crowds before the judge appeared,
No court erected yet, nor cause was heard:
But all was safe, for conscience was their guard.
The mountain-trees in distant prospect please,
Ere yet the pine descended to the seas;
Ere sails were spread, new oceans to explore;
And happy mortals, unconcerned for more,
Confined their wishes to their native shore.
No walls were yet: nor fence, nor mote, nor mound,
Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet’s angry sound:
Nor swords were forged; but, void of care and crime,
The soft creation slept away their time.
The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow:
Content with food, which nature freely bred,
On wildings and on strawberries they fed;
Cornels and bramble-berries gave the rest,
And falling acorns furnished out a feast.
The flowers unsown in fields and meadows reigned;
And western winds immortal spring maintained.
In following years, the bearded corn ensued
From earth unasked, nor was that earth renewed.
From veins of valleys milk and nectar broke,
And honey sweating through the pores of oak.”

Also Boethius, Book II Met. 5, and the Ode in Tasso’s Aminta, Leigh Hunt’s Tr., beginning:⁠—

“O lovely age of gold!
Not that the rivers rolled
With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew;
Not that the ready ground
Produced without a wound,
Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew;
Not that a cloudless blue
Forever was in sight,
Or that the heaven which burns,
And now is cold by turns,
Looked out in glad and everlasting light;
No, nor that even the insolent ships from far
Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war:

“But solely that that vain
And breath-invented pain,
That idol of mistake, that worshipped cheat,
That Honor⁠—since so called
By vulgar minds appalled⁠—
Played not the tyrant with our nature yet.
It had not come to fret
The sweet and happy fold
Of gentle human-kind;
Nor did its hard law bind
Souls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold,
That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,
Which Nature’s own hand wrote⁠—What pleases, is permitted.”

Also Don Quixote’s address to the goatherds, Don Quixote, Book II Ch. 3, Jarvis’s Tr.:⁠—

“After Don Quixote had satisfied his hunger, he took up an handful of acorns, and, looking on them attentively, gave utterance to expressions like these:⁠—

“ ‘Happy times, and happy ages! those to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because gold (which, in this our iron age, is so much esteemed) was to be had, in that fortunate period, without