1. the deep sleep: Echoing 3.136, and recalling also 1.2 and 1.11.
2. a heavy thunder-clap: Perhaps the sound of the lightning flash of 3.134. Except for line 67, no further reference is made to either passage.
8. valley of the abyss: The expression “pit of the abyss” (the “abyss” is literally the “bottomless”) is biblical (Apoc. 9.1–2).
11. I probed with my sight: According to Plato, vision results from the joining of light emitted by the eye with external light. Aristotle conclusively refuted this view, as Dante noted in Convivio 3.9, but his terminology regularly reflects it.
14–21. all pale … you perceive as fear: Virgil’s pity seems restricted to the souls in Limbo. Though it is not fear that causes his pallor here, it does cause it later (see 9.1–3).
24. the first circle: The existence of a Limbo (the term means “edge” or “fringe”) for unbaptized children and for the faithful waiting for Christ was asserted by the fathers of the Church; Aquinas placed it underground, below Purgatory (also underground) but above Hell itself (Summa theol. Suppl., q. 94). Dante’s placing unbaptized adults and virtuous pagans there is original with him and contrary to Church doctrine. The best discussion is Padoan 1970.
29–30. the crowds … and of men: There is an echo here of Vergil’s description of the dead crowding the shores of Styx (Aen. 6.306–8), which Dante also drew on in 3.70–78:
matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum
[mothers and men and the bodies reft of life
of great-souled heroes, boys and unwedded girls,
youths placed on the pyre before the eyes of their parents]
34–42. they did not sin … live in desire: For Dante, beatitude cannot be earned but is the result of a free gift by God predicated on faith in Christ (strictly speaking, faith itself is a gift of grace), though faith alone, without works, is insufficient (Dante will give numerous instances of late repentants who are saved, however). “Merits” refers to deserving acquired by works; Virgil may seem to imply that those who lived before Christ were saved if they “adored” God (or “prayed” to him) rightly; in Paradiso 19, in a passage about the salvation of a Trojan from the time of the Trojan War, the pilgrim is told that no one has ever been saved without believing in Christ. Dante’s theory of salvation, thoroughly orthodox in medieval terms (unlike his Limbo), is set forth in Paradiso 7.
35–36. baptism, which is the gateway: This is a traditional metaphor; as Dante writes in Par. 25.10–11, by baptism he “entered into the faith”. See also Inferno 19, especially lines 16–21.
39. and of this kind am I myself: Virgil identifies himself as one who, living before Christianity, “did not adore God as was needful”; since he has explicitly stated that the souls in Limbo “did not sin” (line 34), his account here really does not explain his statement (1.123) that he was “a rebel” against God’s law. This question hovers over Dante’s entire portrayal of Virgil (see, with notes, Cantos 8 and 9 and Purgatorio 21, 22, and 30).
42. without hope we live in desire: They desire the beatific vision of God but cannot hope to reach it; compare with Augustine, Confessions 1.1: “you have made us for yourself and our heart is unquiet until it rest in you”.
47–50. assured of that faith … to become blessed: Lines 47–48 can be taken to mean that the pilgrim desires a high degree of certainty or that he desires clarification of his Christian belief. Chiavacci Leonardi suggests that his question reflects Dante’s awareness that Christ’s descent into Hell (between his death and resurrection) had been made an article of faith only in 1215 (reasserted in 1274); he is obviously asserting it as correct.
52–63. I was still new … no human spirits were saved: Virgil’s account refers to the so-called Harrowing of Hell, narrated in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus (third century A.D.), itself based on scattered biblical passages (e.g., Eph. 4.9) and no doubt founded on earlier beliefs: Christ was supposed to have descended into the underworld, violently breaking down its outer gate (cf. 3.1–12) against the opposition of the devils, and to have led to Heaven in triumph the souls of all those who had believed the prophecies of his future coming. This theme became one of the most widely represented in the Middle Ages, in poems, mosaics, sculptures, paintings, and plays. The Byzantine anastasis, the earliest type of pictorial representation of the triumphant Christ, showed him trampling the shattered gates of Hell (and, underneath them, Satan) while taking by the hand Adam at the head of a line of Old Testament figures; good examples are the apse mosaic at Torcello and the internal mosaic at San Marco in Venice (reproduced in Singleton, plate 2).
52. I was still new: Vergil died in 19 b.c.; by Dante’s reckoning he would have been dead for about fifty-two years when Christ died.
53. a powerful one: Virgil does not seem to have recognized Christ as anything more than a man; Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos, 48.1.5) expressed the view that at the Last Judgment the damned would not be able to see Christ’s divinity (see the note to 34.115).
54. crowned … victory: Virgil probably saw a classical laurel wreath rather than the cruciform nimbus, a sign of divinity, which crowns the triumphant Christ in the anastasis and later images (see previous note); the line may echo Hebrews 2.9: “But we see Jesus … crowned with glory and honor”.
59–60. Israel … did so much: Jacob (named Israel after his struggle with the angel, Gen. 32.28), his father Isaac, his twelve sons (the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel), and his wife Rachel (see the note to 2.100).
69. a fire … shadows: The hemisphere of light is a symbol both of the enlightenment achieved by classical civilization and of the knowledge (the memory) of the classical world possessed by Dante and his contemporaries (the “honorable mention”, or fame, of line 76). Although Dante realized that his time possessed only fragmentary knowledge of antiquity, he could not have foreseen that the generation ofPetrarch (1304–1374) and Boccaccio (1308–1375) would double the number of ancient texts accessible to readers and consequently further revolutionize European conceptions of history.
88. Homer: Dante had no direct knowledge of Homer or any other Greek poets; his ideas were derived from Aristotle, Cicero, Vergil, and other Latin authors. He apparently knew nothing of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, or Sappho, to mention only a few (Euripides and several others are mentioned in Purg. 22.106–7).
89. Horace the satirist: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 b.c.) was, with Vergil, the leading poet of the Augustan age. Dante refers to the Ars poetica, which circulated separately, in De vulgari eloquentia 2.4.4 but never mentions the other Epistles or the Odes.
90. Ovid … Lucan: Publius Ovidius Naso (43 b.c.-ca. a.d. 17) and Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (a.d. 39–65). Dante knew all or most of Ovid’s works, of which he most frequently cites the Metamorphoses; Lucan is the author of the Pharsalia, an epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. The only major Latin epic poet omitted here is Statius, whom we meet in Purgatory; Dante does not seem to have known Propertius.
98–105. they turned to me … there where I was: A transparent autobiographical allegory, referring to Dante’s learning the craft of poetry by studying the ancients and his conviction that he is worthy of their company (no false modesty here).
102. so that I was sixth: The phrase seems to echo Ovid’s naming of himself as fourth in the line of elegiac poets in Tristia 4.10.54: “fourth of these in the succession of time was I myself”. There is, no doubt, a numerological significance in the pilgrim’s being sixth; in the Purgatorio, with the addition of Statius, he becomes seventh (for the significance in the poem of the number seven, see the notes to Purgatorio 17).
106. a noble castle: Like the hemisphere of light, this is another symbol of classical civilization, usually identified as the castle of wisdom, the seven walls symbolizing the seven classical virtues (four moral, the so-called cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice; three intellectual: understanding, knowledge, and, again, prudence), the seven gates symbolizing the seven liberal arts (the Trivium [triple path], arts of language: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; and the Quadrivium [fourfold path], sciences of the cosmos: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy), also inherited from antiquity (see Curtius 1953). The stream is often glossed as representing eloquence; several early commentators take it to refer to worldly temptations which must be shunned for the sake of learning. As the early commentators point out, the green meadow derives from Vergil’s Elysian Fields (Aen. 6.637–892).
115–17. Therefore we drew … could be seen: The elevation from which the group contemplate the great souls of antiquity seems to echo the hill from which Aeneas and Anchises see the future heroes of Rome (Aen. 6.754–55).
118–20. There opposite … at the sight: At the autobiographical level of the allegory, the entire episode of the hemisphere of light must of course refer to Dante’s reading of classical writers and his acquisition of classical lore. Along with lines 97–102, this is a clear expression of the excitement he felt.
121. Electra: Not the daughter of Agamemnon but of Atlas; she was the mother of Dardanus, a founder of Troy (Aen. 8.134–35; Dante refers to her again in Monarchia 2.3.2). She is appropriately grouped with the Trojans Hector and Aeneas and with Julius Caesar (descended, according to Vergil, from Aeneas).
124–26. Camilla … Lavinia his daughter: Figures from the Aeneid (cf. 1.107–8): Camilla and Penthesilea are virgin warriors: Camilla, an invention of Vergil’s, is an ally of the Latins (Aen. 7.803–17, 11.648–835), and Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, was an ally of Troy according to a Greek tradition mentioned by Vergil (Aen. 1.490–93). King Latinus, the king of the Latins, betrothed his daughter to Aeneas before hostilities broke out; from the union of Trojans and Latians sprang the Romans.
127–29. Brutus … Cornelia: Figures from Roman history, known to Dante from Livy, Lucan, and others. Tarquin, according to Roman tradition, was the last of the kings; his son’s rape of Lucretia resulted in their expulsion and the founding of the republic, which Dante notes in Convivio 4.5.12 as lasting from Brutus, its first consul, to Julius Caesar. Cornelia was Julius Caesar’s wife and the mother ofjulia, who was married to Pompey the Great. Marcia was the wife of Cato the Younger, whom we meet in Purgatorio 1.
129. Saladdin: Saladdin (Salah ad-Din, 1137–1193) was the sultan of Egypt who drove the Crusaders entirely out of the Holy Land, except for the fortress of Acre, which fell in Dante’s day. Many stories and legends gathered about this impressive figure; Dante mentions him in Convivio 4.11.14 as an example of liberality.
130. When I lifted my brow a little higher: The heroes of the contemplative life-philosophers, poets, and scientists-are placed higher than those of the active life.
131. the master of those who know: Aristotle (384–322 b.c.), widely known simply as “the philosopher”, all of whose surviving works had by Dante’s time been translated into Latin. One of the most impressive achievements of the Middle Ages was the assimilation and mastery during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of all the works of Aristotle.
134. Socrates and Plato: Dante knew Plato only indirectly, mainly through Augustine’s adaptation of Neoplatonic lore, except for the incomplete translation of the Timaeus by the fourth- or fifth-century Christian bishop Calcidius, who also wrote a commentary on it. Although Dante makes Plato subordinate to Aristotle, the “Aristotle” he knew was more Platonic than not, since, in common with his time, Dante ascribed to him several works by late followers of Plato and read him in a Neoplatonic key.
136–38. Democritus … Zeno: Diogenes and Zeno Dante had read of in manuals; the others are pre-Socratics discussed by Aristotle in his Physics in order to refute their views.
139. Dioscorides: The traditional author of the most widely used collection of works on materia medica; the qualities referred to are those of plants.
140–42. Orpheus … Seneca: Orpheus and Linus are legendary poets mentioned in Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics; Tullius is Marcus Tullius Cicero (106- 46 b.c.); Seneca the moralist is Lucius Annaeus Seneca the younger (4 b.c.-a.d. 65), also the author of tragedies. Some works by both Cicero and Seneca were known to Dante. The inclusion of poets among philosophers reflects the Ciceronian tradition of identifying poetry with wisdom, as well as the fact that many of the pre-Socratics wrote in verse.
142–44. Euclid … Averroes: Scientists and philosophers, all translated into Latin. Euclid’s (third century b.c.) Elements and Optics were widely studied in Dante’s time. Ptolemy’s (second century a.d.) Almagest was the leading astronomical textbook, as his Tetrabiblos was the dominant influence in astrology. Hippocrates (fifth century b.c.) was the most famous physician of ancient Greece, to whom works by many authors were ascribed. Galen (second century a.d.) was the founder of experimental medicine; his influence dominated European medicine from the late Middle Ages into the seventeenth century.
Dante treats the Muslim philosophers almost as extensions of Greco-Roman civilization. Avicenna (Ibn-Sina, d. 1036) was the leading Muslim Neoplatonic philosopher and the author of an influential handbook of medicine that Dante probably knew. The Spanish Arab Averroes (Ibn-Rushd, d. 1198), who suffered persecution from the Islamic fundamentalists of his day, was the greatest of the medieval commentators on Aristotle, widely known simply as “the Commentator” (the “great commentary” refers to his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima); the extent to which Dante accepted his influential doctrine of the unity of the intellect (combatted by Aquinas) has been hotly debated.