[383] “The star.”
[384] As this is the value given by Alfraganus, we must here understand Arabian miles. The distances from Rome to the north and south pole are therefore probably equal to 3500 to 9750 English miles, and both are a little too large, because the half circumference of Earth is too large. The proportion is about right, however, for Rome is nearly three times as far from the south pole as the north, her latitude being 42° N. Alfraganus placed her in the fifth climate, at the northern boundary of which he said the pole was elevated 43½°.
[385] Qu. xix. 36.
[386] Adopting the reading of Dr. Moore: “nella mezza terra, alla mezza terza,” that is, “at the equator at middle-tierce.” See Studies in Dante III. 107, 108.
[387] “For now, after what has already been said, the rest may be understood by whomsoever has a noble mind, to which it is well to leave a little labour.” (Cf. Par. x. 22-25).
[388] Purg. xiv. 148-151.
[389] “O unspeakable Wisdom who hast thus ordained, how poor is our intellect to understand Thee! And you, for whose benefit and pleasure I am writing, in what blindness you live, not lifting up your eyes to these things, but keeping them fixed on the slough of your folly.”
[390] “And the sky revolves like a mill-stone.” El. Ast. ch. vii.
[391]
“There the sky will revolve, with all its stars,
mill-stone fashion.” Comp. del Mondo. I. xxiii.
[392] “It follows that Maria must see this sun ‘circling the world’ like a mill.” Conv. III. v. 142-147.
[393] “A winding path, which the learned call a spiral.”
[394] “Lucan, who was well known to Dante, had observed that shadows cast by the sun in the southern hemisphere travel to the right instead of to the left, and fall southwards when with us they fall to the north.” Moore, Studies in Dante i. p. 239.
[397] Thus Petrarch: “Le stelle vaghe e lor viaggio torto.” (“The wandering stars and their winding way.”) Sonetto de Morte di Madonna Laura.
[398] Cf. Conv. III. v. 76, 191.
[400] Studies in Dante iii. p. 166.
[401] Purg. xxi. 46-48; Purg. xix. 38.
[402] Purg. xxviii. 143.
[403] “The land where shadows are lost.” Purg. xxx. 89.
[404] “The great dry land.” Inf. xxxiv. 113.
[405] “The unpeopled world.” Inf. xxvi. 117.
[406] “Behind the sun.” Ibid.
[407] Conv. III. v. 117, 118.
[408] Refraction makes the pole visible a little before one reaches the equator, but such refinements need not be considered in dealing with a popular work like the Convivio.
[410] “Now heats it.”
[411] “This hemisphere.”
[412] Just as in Par. xxviii. 80.
[413] Qu. xix. 53-57, and repeated in xxi. 36-40.
[414] Luke xxiii. 44.
[415] Par. xxix. 97-102.
[416] Dante believed the death of Christ to have taken place when it was noon in Jerusalem. Conv. IV. xxiii. 105-106.
[417] Purg. iv. 137-139.
[418] Purg. xxvii. 1-5.
[419] Orosius says: “Europæ in Hispania occidentalis oceanus termino est, maxime ubi apud Gades insulas Herculis columnæ visuntur.... Asia ad mediam frontem orientis habet in oceano Eoo ostia fluminis Gangis.”
[420] Qu. xix. 38-52.
[421] Moore, Studies in Dante iii. p. 124.
[423] Inf. xxvi. 106-142.
[424] Ptolemy’s Geography, Bk. I.
[426] Esdras II. vi. 42.
[427] Beazley, Dawn of Geography iii. 28, 29.
[428] Corvino and Marco Polo made the voyage in the same year, 1292, but in reverse directions.
[429] Purg. iii. 25.
[430] Purg. xv. 1-6.
[431] Purg. iv. 68-71; xxvii. 1-5.
[432] Purg. xxviii. 142. Opinions differed as to its exact site, and some placed it in the ocean beyond the eastern limit of the habitable earth. In V. E. I. viii. 6-10, Dante says that the root of the human race was planted in eastern lands, but this refers to Adam’s home after the expulsion from Paradise.
[433] Par. xxx. 1-3.
[434] Par. ix. 82-87.
[435] Conv. III. vi. 7-32.
[436] Conv. IV. xxiii. 50 to end.
[437] Comp. del Mondo, I. xxii.
[438] “The sixth hour, that is, the middle of the day, is the most noble of all the day, and the most virtuous.”
[439] Luke xxiii. 44-46. Dante understands this to mean that death took place at about the sixth hour, not the ninth.
[441] It is easily seen that this is correct, if we divide the 360° of the moon’s path through the zodiac by the 27 days and eight hours in which she traverses it, and returns to the same star. Brunetto Latini says “La lune s’esloigne dou Soleil chascun jor xiii degrez po s’en faut,” but he is wrong, having apparently forgotten that the sun is also moving in the same direction, at the average rate of nearly 1° daily.
[442] Inf. xxix. 11.
[443] Purg. xxiii. 5, 6.
[444] Par. xxxii. 139.
[445] “Midway in the journey of our life.” Inf. i. 1.
[446] “The sweet season.” Inf. i. 43.
[448] “Those stars.”
[449] Purg. xi. 108; Conv. II. xv. 12-14.
[450] Conv. III. vi. 28-30.
[451] On the day of the spring equinox the sun rises and sets a few minutes after six o’clock, because we set our clocks not by the real sun but the more convenient “mean sun.”
[452] The clock-hours in this column are not to be regarded as if taken from a railway time-table! Sunrise is at 6 a.m. within a few minutes only, for the reasons above stated, viz.: our clocks are regulated by the “mean” sun, and it is not necessarily the exact day of the equinox when the vision begins.
[453] Or “almost at late midnight.”
[454] Or “nigh me:” “presso” may mean either.
[455] “The Lady who rules here.” Inf. x. 80.
[456] “Lower Hell.” Inf. viii. 75.
[457] Cf. Par. ii. 48-51.
[458] The retardation is not likely to be more than the average of 50 minutes, and may be less, because the moon is in Libra, and therefore going south. This tends to diminish the interval between one moonset and the next in the northern hemisphere, just as the days get shorter when the sun goes south in autumn.
[459] Some think the interval between this reference and the last almost too short, but the words do not indicate that Malacoda spoke on the stroke of seven! and the moon may have set at about 6.30.
[460] “Darkness of Hell.” Purg. xvi. 1.
[461] “The fair planet which kindles love.”
[462] “Departed, as he came, swiftly.”
[463] If the meaning is that the sun is now 50° above the horizon, this would indicate a later hour, nearing midday, for the sun does not rise vertically in this latitude, and reaches only 58° at noon at the time of the equinox. But the first explanation is the more probable.
[464] “The shore.”
[466] “We must not assume, as some commentators have done, that the signs rise at equal intervals of two hours, although each circles the star sphere in 24 hours. See fig. 46, where the dotted line shows how e.g. Cancer, circling parallel with the celestial equator, will rise at a point considerably north of east, and having had to traverse more than 90 degrees since Aries rose due east, will not rise until about 7 hours later, i.e. 1 p.m. Conversely Scorpio, following Libra, will rise south of east, and a little less than 2 hours later. The moon’s retardation, therefore, is less in this part of the zodiac than it would otherwise be, and the hour is probably nearer eight than nine.”
[467] “Superlatively obscure.”
[468] “Out of the arms of her lover.”
[469] “Cold creature.”
[470] “The climax of the day.”
[471] See Moore, Studies in Dante iii. pp. 75-84, for a detailed discussion of this passage. Several commentators have held that lines 1 to 6 describe the dawn of day elsewhere; and it is true that it would be nearly 6 a.m. and Pisces would be on the horizon in Italy when the hour was nearly 9 p.m. in Purgatory.
[472] “Vespers there.”
[473] “Here.”
[474] See for instance the “Carte Pisane,“ and the Central Mediterranean map of Vesconte, dating from about 1300 and 1311 respectively, in Beazley’s Dawn of Geography, iii. Latitudes and longitudes are not given, but from certain centres lines radiate to all points of the compass, like great spiders’ webs.
[475] De Mon. II. iii. 87-90. etc.
[476] “It is bounded on the east and north by the Tyrrhenian sea, which lies towards the port of Rome,” Moore, Studies in Dante iii. p. 72.
[477] Purg. xxxii. 56, 57.
[479] Purg. xxi. 20-27.
[480] Purg. xiii. 22-23.
[481] On an Astronomical Point in Dante’s Purgatorio, by P. H. Cowell, F.R.A.S., The Observatory, December 1906.
[482] “That circles opposite to him.” Purg. ii. 4.
[483] The signs follow one another on the meridian at intervals of exactly 2 hrs.
[484] “At the hour.”
[485] “I turned to the east.”
[486] “Pure and ready to rise to the stars.” Purg. last line.
[487] “The climax of the day.”
[488] It has been suggested to read the line Par. i. 44. “Tal foce; e quasi tutto là era bianco,” transferring the “quasi” (almost) so that the meaning should be “almost was wholly white that hemisphere,” and to interpret that it is now morning of the day following the events in the last Canto of the Purgatorio. But if so, Dante would have spent a whole night in the Earthly Paradise without mentioning it, or explaining this long delay after he had become “pure and ready to rise to the stars.” (For the meaning of “foce,” the “passage,” see later, p. 400).
[489] Par. i. 46, 47.
[491] “Turned her eyes again towards heaven.”
[492] “Beatrice gazed upwards, and I at her.”
[494] Inf. i. 38-40.
[495] Conv. II. iv. 52-62.
[496] “That part.”
[497] “He who is father of all mortal life.” Par. xxii. 116; see also De Mon. I. ix. 6, 7.
[498] See Par. x. 7-21.
[499] Longfellow says:—“Looking down from the terrace of Monte Cassino upon the circular threshing-floor of stone in a farm lying below, I first felt the aptness of Dante’s phrase. This very scene may have suggested it to him.”
[501] See Par. iv. 34-39.
[502] Purg. xxix. 12 and 34.
[503] “Region.”
[504] Par. xxiii. 29, 30.
[505] Par. xxvii. 64-66.
[506] Compare Purg. xv. 1-5, where the course the sun still has to run between vespers and sunset is described as equal to the space between the third hour and sunrise.
[508] Della Valle boldly assumes that they were over the same meridian, by a poetical licence, although at the same time the sun was in a different sign. Dante only mentions the latter fact, he thinks, in order to show that he was a few degrees north of the sun (Gemini being more northerly than Aries); therefore he could see over the edge, as it were, of the sun-lighted hemisphere of Earth. This is desperately subtle.
It is, however, the only way in which the passages can be reconciled with his further assumption, shared by some other commentators, that Dante, in his flight through the spheres, simply ascended without any movement in longitude except that he was carried round by the daily revolution of the spheres. All the planets, therefore, were ranged one above the other, in the sign of Gemini, and it was always noon on the earth below his feet, since that was the hour at which he ascended from the Earthly Paradise, and his movement was the same as the sun’s. (Here Della Valle is inconsistent, however, for he maintains that the ascent was made in the early morning.) But this is a very artificial conceit, and not indicated by Dante. He implies that Beatrice, in leading him to each sphere, chose the part of it which he was to enter (see Par. xxvii. 102), and he tells us that Saturn was in Leo, Venus in Pisces, and the sun in Aries.
[509] Il Paradiso di Dante dichiarato ai giovani, by Angelo de Gubernatis.
[510] “From the hills to the river-mouths.”
[511] “Love which moves the sun and the other stars.” Par. last line.