If our poet did not love moonlight, there is no doubt that starlight was very dear to him. Never are stars spoken of as cold, or placed in antithesis to the sun. Rather are they classed together, as in the pathetic letter, written when he heard of the possibility that the Florentines might receive him again if he would consent to return as a disgraced but pardoned criminal. If this is the only path to Florence, never will he re-enter the beloved city. “What then?” he cries. “Can he not see the mirrors of the sun and of the stars, wherever he may be? can he not meditate on precious truths under any sky?”[238]

He describes the Inferno as bereft of stars as well as of sun;[239] he hopes to escape those dark abysses to see the beautiful stars again,[240] and the terror of the sounds of weeping and crying is heightened indescribably by the simple words:—“risonavan per l’aer senza stelle.”[241] When he does at length come forth to see “le cose belle che porta il ciel”[242] how eagerly he gazes, not only at Venus, but at the new stars in the south! how his “greedy eyes”[243] seek the same region as soon as dusk begins to fall! and how radiantly the stars look down upon him on that last night on the rocky slopes of the Mountain, near the summit![244]

This is all allegorical, no doubt, but it is because of Dante’s feeling for the real “belle stelle”[245] that he uses them as symbols of truth and holiness, and concludes each Cantica of the Divine Comedy with their name:—

Here “stelle” has the wider meaning of the French “astres,” for which we have no equivalent in English except the clumsy “heavenly bodies;” but most of Dante’s hundred references are to stars in the more special sense, and often to particular stars or constellations. Over eighty occur in the Divine Comedy.

Stars are jewels, torches, flames, immortal nymphs adorning every region of the sky.[249] Heaven is made beautiful by their light, and the joy of the angels is expressed in their shining, as mortal joy shines forth in human eyes.[250] If the spirits in the fourth heaven are described as glowing suns,[251] the “splendours” that descend upon the golden ladder in the seventh, make Dante think that all the stars in the sky are gathered together there.[252]

The eyes of Beatrice shone brighter than stars;[253] light comes as from many stars in reading the sacred books;[254] faith gleams like a star in the sky;[255] and truth appears in a mind cleared of falsehood and error like the radiance of stars in a sky which has been wholly swept of cloud and mist by a north wind.

Stars, as well as the sun, are used as symbols for the objects of Dante’s deepest reverence; for the Blessed Virgin is called “la viva stella,”[257] and the Final Vision in which the redeemed find their ultimate bliss is a Trinal Light seen as a single star:—

The diurnal motion of the stars is referred to many times. As Dante watched the mystical procession in the Earthly Paradise, and saw one group follow in the footsteps of another across the flowers and the grass, he thought of the stately procession of stars which we see here by night, star following star across the sky.[259] Their movement marks for him the passage of time, as we see in the first sonnet of the Vita Nuova:—

and in the Inferno, where Virgil hastens Dante, saying that all the stars are sinking which were rising when he started on his long journey.[261]

The motion of those stars which neither rise nor set, but are always seen circling round the pole, is clearly described. In the heaven of the sun, spirits gather round Dante and Beatrice, and circle round them, “Come stelle vicine ai fermi poli;”[262] and the motion of the stars near the pole is said to be slow, like the part of a wheel which is near the axle.[263] We may compare these descriptions with the statement of Alfraganus:—“Eæ stellæ (i.e. the northern circumpolar) vertuntur omnes circa idem punctum. Et quei ex iis puncto huic est vicinior, minorem conficit circulum: motusque ejus appâret lentior.”[264] Dante assumes that his readers understand this motion when he describes himself as seeing unknown stars near the South Pole. The Mount of Purgatory is supposed to be situated in the southern hemisphere, and at his first arrival, before dawn, he turns to the right, after looking at Venus in the east, therefore to the south, and sees near the pole four stars so brilliant that the whole sky seems to rejoice in their radiance, and he pities the “widowed” northern hemisphere because they are invisible there.[265] In the evening, as soon as it begins to grow dark, although he is engaged in an interesting discourse with a friend with whom he had exchanged warm greetings, he looks eagerly once more towards the pole (note the intensity expressed by the repeated “pure”)—

He now sees three bright stars which make this pole glow with light, and Virgil says that the stars he saw in the morning are low, while those now visible have risen higher to take their place.

The diurnal movement of the starry heaven is also alluded to in the Convivio, and contrasted with that immensely slow movement which was discovered by Hipparchus, and is called by us Precession. The starry heaven, says Dante, displays one of its poles to us, and keeps the other hidden; and in like manner it displays only one movement to us, and keeps the other almost hidden. By the first, it revolves once in every day from east to west; the other is nearly insensible, being only one degree in a hundred years, and it is from west to east.[268] This is the value of precession as given by Alfraganus, following Ptolemy.

It was this stupendous and mysterious cycle which was used by Dante to measure the age of Beatrice, though for his own he used (as we saw) the ordinary measure of the sun’s period. When he first saw “la gloriosa donna”[269] she had only been in this life so long that the starry heaven had moved towards the east one-twelfth part of a degree. Therefore, she was one-twelfth of a hundred years old, or 8 years 4 months, “so that it was near the beginning of her ninth year that she appeared to me, and I saw her nearly at the end of my ninth.”[270]

Dante tells us how many stars had been counted by “the sages of Egypt,” by whom he means Ptolemy and the other Alexandrians: he did not know that the star catalogue of the Almagest was originally made by Hipparchus of Rhodes.

“Dico ch’ il cielo stellato ci mostra molto stelle; chè, secondochè li savi d’Egitto hanno veduto, infino all’ultima stella che appare loro in meridie, mille ventidue corpora di stelle pongono, di cui io parlo.”[271]

It will be noted that he carefully avoids saying that this is the number of all the stars visible from the whole earth. Had he, like Ristoro, run away with the idea that a blank space on the globe meant a blank in the sky, his night sky seen from Purgatory would have been strangely bare and dull! Yet both writers used the same text-book. Dante is here following Alfraganus closely, for he had written in his nineteenth chapter:—

“Sciendum itaque sapientes inivisse mensuram stellarum fixarum omnium, quoad instrumentis observari eæ potuerunt, extremam usque meridiei partem, in tertio climate ipsis conspicuam.... Stellæ universae quarum agi mensura potuit sunt mille viginti duæ.”[272]

Both in the Quæstio and the Paradiso Dante notes how stars differ, not only in their brightness or “magnitude,” but also in the quality of their light, by which he probably means their colour:—

“Videmus in eo [sc. cœlum stellatum] differentiam in magnitudine stellarum et in luce.”[273]

It seems as if it were the beauty and the movement of the starry sky as a whole which appealed to Dante, rather than the distinguishing of special stars and constellations. Those which he mentions are almost all either in the zodiac, and used to denote the hour, the season, or the position of one of the seven planets; or else they are near one of the poles and illustrate the circumpolar motion.

All the zodiacal constellations are mentioned except Virgo and Sagittarius. Besides the ordinary names of “Ariete,” “Libra,” etc., Aries is called “il Montone;”[275] Gemini “il segno che segue il Tauro,” “gli eterni Gemelli,” and “il bel nido di Leda,”[276] in reference to the mother of Castor and Pollux, its two brightest stars; Libra is “le Bilance”;[277] Scorpio “il freddo animale”;[278] Capricornus is “il Capra del ciel”;[279] and Pisces “la celeste Lasca.”[280]

In one place Castor and Pollux are mentioned, but merely as a synonym for the whole constellation of Gemini.[281] “Il petto del Leone ardente”[282] is perhaps Cor Leonis, the Heart of the Lion, for this is the name given to Regulus by both Ptolemy and Alfraganus. The “Maggior Fortuna”[283] of Purg. xix. 4, is a group of stars belonging to the two constellations of Aquarius and Pisces, in which the geomancers, who told fortunes by means of certain points traced at random, thought they saw a special series of these points,-:::..

It is generally agreed that the “gemme” of Purg. ix. 4, “poste in figura del freddo animale, Che con la coda percote la gente,”[284] are some stars of Scorpio which were shining on the eastern horizon just before the moon rose on the first night in the Island of Purgatory.

The zodiacal constellations in general are spoken of as “all the lights of his [the sun’s] path:” “Tutti i lumi della sua strada.” (Par. xxvi. 121, 122).

The pole star is described as the point of the axle round which the first sphere revolves.[285] The first sphere (or wheel, as it is called, with reference to its circling motion) is here the Primum Mobile, which was thought to cause the diurnal motion. This unique position gains for the pole star the name of “the star,” as for instance in Conv. III. v. 84, 85, where Dante says that a man standing at the north pole would have “la stella” directly over his head. And in Paradise he hears a voice among the spirits which makes him turn in its direction as the needle turns to the star—

This property of the magnet was known in Dante’s day, as well as its power of attracting iron, though only the latter had been known to Ptolemy and the classical world. Whether the discovery came from China, where it is said that some form of compass has been used since the second century a.d., or whether it had been discovered independently by Arab or Italian navigators, we do not know: but scholars and poets in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries write of the “ugly brown stone” used by sailors to make an instrument that cannot lie. For a needle, rubbed by it and run through a straw, when floated on water turns so surely to “the star” that one need never doubt its guidance. Thus writes Guyot, the poet of Languedoc, about 1200:—

And thus Ristoro:—

“L’angola, che guidi li marinari, chè per la virtu del cielo è tratta e rivolta alla stella la quale è chiamata tramontana.”[287]

Albertus Magnus speaks of it in the same way, as something well known to mariners.

It seems strange to us how Dante and his contemporaries failed to see the importance of this discovery; Brunetto Latini, when the ugly stone was shown to him on his visit to Roger Bacon at Oxford, even professing to regard it as a mere toy, of no practical use. Dante discusses the number of the stars known to Ptolemy, and describes the last mad voyage of Ulysses, who saw all the stars of the other pole, while ours sank low on the ocean floor;[288] but he does not seem to guess that the new toy would make possible even longer voyages than these, and that in time the blank in his celestial globe would be filled.

Yet even in his own life-time plucky little Genoa fitted out two galleys which ventured through the forbidden Straits, with intent to circumnavigate Africa and find a new route to India. And meanwhile, travelling by old overland or coasting routes, Italian missionary monks, and Italian traders, were visiting southern countries and describing southern skies. Friar Giovanni de Monte Corvino, who was in South India with Nicolo of Pistoia, writes home in 1291, telling of his disappointment that he had never been able to see “the other pole star” (l’altra tramontana), though he saw new stars moving round and evidently near to it, close to the southern horizon. A few years later Marco Polo the Venetian was dictating the story of his travels to a Pisan in Genoa: he had been further south than the missionaries, for in a certain island (probably Sumatra) he had seen the south pole “a spear’s length” above the horizon; and in the land of Zinzi (Zanzibar?) he had seen a marvellous star as big as a sack (which was evidently the Greater Magellanic Cloud). This he drew a picture of with his own hand.

Dante’s silence, and probable incredulity, regarding these experiences of his own countrymen and contemporaries is characteristic of his age; for scholars were too eager to explore the precious classical lore lately recovered from oblivion, to realize that they were on the threshold of a new era in knowledge, of which these men were pioneers.

It is sometimes thought, however, that Dante made use of contemporary observations of southern skies in his description of the stars he feigned himself to have seen when the Wain disappeared under his northern horizon.[289] Quite correctly, he does not place any single bright star to mark the south pole; his two constellations, one of four bright stars seen above the pole in the morning,[290] one of three which takes its place after sunset,[291] are these real or fictitious?

It is a fact that there are four bright stars in the form of a cross, lying between 56° and 63° south: are these Dante’s “quattro chiare stelle,” “quattro luci sante?”[292] They were not recognized as a separate constellation until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Amerigo Vespucci described them in his letters about his southern voyages, and the Florentine Andrea Corsali wrote about the marvellous Cross which was so beautiful that in his opinion no other constellation in the sky was worthy to be compared with it. This, he believed, was the very cross of which Dante had spoken in a prophecy.

Even among Dante’s most enthusiastic admirers, I suppose none will be found to-day to support this view; but many think that he must have heard of the Cross from travellers. True, these stars are visible during at least part of the year in all places south of 34° north, and therefore in North Africa, and they had been catalogued by Ptolemy as part of the Centaur, so that no astronomer could take them to be a newly-found constellation, but might not some unscientific traveller like Marco Polo have brought a vague report of their position?

To this we might reply that Dante never says his four stars were in the form of a Cross; that there had to be four to represent the four Pagan virtues, the other constellation of three representing the three Christian virtues (compare the group of four handmaidens who sing, “Noi siam qui ninfe, e nel ciel siamo stelle,”[293] and are followed by a group of three);[294] and that this other constellation was certainly imaginary, since there is no group of three bright stars anywhere near the south pole.

But the fact is that conjectures and arguments are unnecessary, since Dante has expressly said that his four stars had never been seen before by anyone except the first people—“non viste mai fuor che alla prima gente,” (Purg. i. 24)—that is, our first parents, in that Eden of his imagining which was in the southern hemisphere, and on the island where he was then standing in his vision.

As a matter of curiosity I have included a map showing what stars would have been really visible to Dante at the supposed latitude of Purgatory, when Pisces was on the eastern horizon, as described in Purg. i. It will be seen that the Southern Cross is low, and would have been hidden behind the Mountain of Purgatory at five o’clock in the morning.[295]

Among northern constellations, Ursa Major is frequently spoken of by Dante, under different names, but always with reference to its high northern latitude. As the Wain, “il Carro,” it is said to be lying in the north-west when Pisces is on the eastern horizon, and to have disappeared from view in the southern hemisphere.[296] The wain-pole or shaft is pictured as sweeping round in the diurnal revolution, but always remaining above our horizon day and night, throughout its turning:

The same idea is expressed in the Midwinter Ode, where the constellation is called the Seven Frosty Stars, never lost to sight in Europe:—

This is a reminiscence of some lines of Boëthius quoted by Dante in De Monarchia, in which the northern nations are described as under the sway of the “septem gelidi triones.”[299] The Septem Triones, the Seven Ploughing Oxen, was one of the Latin names for Ursa Major, whence comes “septentrional” for North. This name also is used by Dante in Purg. xxx. 1, where the Seven Candlesticks of the mystic procession seen in the Garden of Eden are likened to these seven stars, and are named the Septentrion of the First Heaven (the Empyrean). This divine Septentrion was guiding the Procession, as the starry Septentrion of a lower heaven guides the mariner into port:

Like the seven stars, also, the heavenly Septentrion is said figuratively to know neither setting nor rising, but unlike them it knows no cloud except of sin.[301] Because it is spoken of as guiding mariners, some commentators have taken the above to refer rather to Septentrio Minor (Ursa Minor), which also has seven chief stars, and is a better guide because nearer the Pole, as Thales taught; but the comparatively faint stars of the Little Bear would not be so apt a comparison with the celestial lights.

By the name of the Bears, both Ursa Major and Minor are referred to as guides at sea in Par. ii. 9. In the strange new seas on which Dante warns his readers he is about to enter, Minerva will blow a favouring wind, Apollo will steer the barque, and the nine Muses will guide his course by the Bears. They are also spoken of together in Purg. iv. 65, to indicate the northern part of the sky.

A fifth name for Ursa Major is derived from the fable (known to Dante probably from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) of the nymph Helice, who was turned into a she-bear by Juno, and was hunted by her own son, Orcas. Jupiter transformed them into Ursa Major and Boötes.

Here we have the same idea as of the Wain wheeling round but never setting, with the addition of a neighbouring constellation describing a circle in the same time.

The Barbarians who lived in a region always dominated by Ursa Major, and came to marvel at the mighty buildings of ancient Rome, are probably the races of northern Europe in general; and this reminds us again of the lines of Boëthius quoted above, for it is among the peoples ruled by Rome that he mentions “quos premunt septem gelidi triones.”[303] If, however, Dante meant a country where the seven stars pass exactly overhead, the barbarians must have inhabited Scotland, or southern Scandinavia, or central Russia. If he means that Boötes also remained always above the horizon, they must have come from within the Arctic Circle, but this is not likely.

In one of the passages just quoted other constellations and stars are mentioned together with Ursa Major. In Par. xii. Dante has compared the two circles of spirits which surround Beatrice and himself to a double rainbow, and to two garlands of immortal roses. In the next canto he finds a new simile: in imagination he takes some of the brightest and most familiar stars from our sky, and makes of them two new constellations in the form of two crowns. The stars are these: fifteen from different parts of the sky, which are so brilliant that they shine through air dense enough to quench lesser orbs; the Wain, which never sets in our sky; and the mouth of the horn whose tip is the axis on which the Primum Mobile revolves. That is to say, as we have before remarked, Dante takes the fifteen first-magnitude stars and the stars instanced by Alfraganus as of second magnitude. Ursa Minor is aptly compared to a horn, the wide mouth of which is formed by its two bright stars Beta and Gamma,[304] while the narrow end is Alpha, the Pole Star. These twenty-four bright stars we must then imagine to group themselves into two constellations like that into which Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, was changed when she died; this is Corona Borealis or the Northern Crown, otherwise called Ariadne’s Crown, which suggests a circle, though it is not a perfect one. Dante uses the word “segni” for any constellations, a custom we find in Ristoro also, although the modern usage is to restrict “signs” to mean only divisions of the zodiac.

The star-like spirits, thus grouped into a surpassingly brilliant double constellation, begin to sing their ineffable heavenly song, and to circle round the centre where Dante stands, in a marvellous dance, whose swiftness, when compared with anything known on earth, is as the movement of that swift heaven which carries with it all the rest, when compared with the flowing of the sluggish river Chiana.[305]

This passage helps us to understand expressions which often strike one as very strange, describing the circling movements of the spirits in Paradise. For the likeness to stars is clear throughout. Their brightness is an expression of their happiness,[306] and increases in each succeeding heaven. Only in the lowest can Dante see the forms and features of Piccarda and the other blessed spirits; in the next they clothe themselves in light, and although at first the radiant eyes of Justinian are seen, the first words addressed to him cause him to shine more brilliantly than before, and as the sun conceals himself by his own light, so the spirit conceals himself by the splendour which grows with his joy.[307] In the third heaven the spirits shine in the star of Venus like sparks seen in flame;[308] in the fourth they are called suns, and surpass the sun in brilliancy;[309] in the fifth they are compared with the Galaxy[310] and with shooting stars,[311] in the seventh and eighth with stars[312] and with spheres of light, turning on fixed poles and flaming like comets.[313]

In like manner the swiftness of their motion increases in proportion to the clearness with which each beholds eternal truth.[314] The almost incredible speed with which Dante himself soars from sphere to sphere, and with which the spirits move—whether in coming towards him, impelled by Divine charity, in returning to the heaven of heavens, or in circling with one another in mystic dance—is frequently dwelt upon, and illustrated by many striking similes. The dance is always a circling or wheeling movement (“il giro,” “la rota,” Par. viii. 20 and 26; ix. 65). And besides this, individual spirits turn with a rapid motion, remaining on the same spot. Descending the celestial Ladder in the heaven of Saturn, step by step, they revolve:—

Now these two things, their light and their movements, were all the facts concerning the stars which mediæval astronomers could observe; and the movements were thought to be in circles and inconceivably rapid. Motion in circles, and especially the movement of rotation on an axis, remaining in the same place, had been said by Aristotle to be the most noble form of motion, and the fittest for celestial bodies. Therefore, when Dante represents the redeemed and the angels as expressing their bliss by radiance and marvellously rapid motion in circles, he makes them resemble the heavenly spheres and stars among which they manifest themselves to him. The motions are directly compared with those of stars in the passage already quoted:—

Remembering this significance of circular motion we shall feel a little less strange the similes of a mill and a top applied to the spirits of Paradise.[317]

A third way in which the spirits express their joy is by the sweetness of their song,[318] and here also they resemble the heavenly bodies, which make sweet music as they circle. This doctrine of Pythagoras was very popular throughout the Middle Ages.