by Dante
106. The line has caused difficulty. The early commentators thought it referred to the thirteenth-century Florentine luxurious living in the early Renaissance equivalent of McMansions, showier houses than family life required; later ones believed that Dante was referring to marriages that were only for show, allowing the couple to lead dissolute lives. Scartazzini (comm. to this verse), reviewing the dispute, sides with the older view, because it better accords with the context, which is unnecessary luxury, as the following two lines demonstrate. [return to English / Italian]
107–108. “Sardanapalus, last legendary king of the Assyrian empire of Ninus, noted for his luxury, licentiousness, and effeminacy. He spent his days in his palace, unseen by any of his subjects, dressed in female apparel, and surrounded by concubines. The satrap of Media, having determined to renounce allegiance to such a worthless monarch, rebelled against him, and for two years besieged him in Nineveh, until Sardanapalus, unable to hold out any longer, collected all his treasures, wives, and concubines, and placed them on an immense funeral pile, to which he set fire destroying himself at the same time” (T). The identity of Dante’s source here is debated; those most commonly proposed are Juvenal (Satires X.362), Cicero (Tuscul. V), Justinus (Hist. 1.3), Orosius (Hist. contra paganos I.xix.1), and Aegidius Colonna (De regimine principum II.xvii), this last favored by Toynbee (in the entry from which the opening passage is cited) because it specifically refers to Sardanapalus’s nefariously luxurious activity as being confined to a single room. For discussion of the likely sources of Dante’s Sardanapalus, see Brugnoli (Brug.1999.1). [return to English / Italian]
109–111. The thought here is that Florence after Cacciaguida’s day rapidly eclipsed Rome in urban splendor, but its fall from supremacy will be even more swift. In synecdoche, Monte Mario and Uccellatoio represent Rome and Florence, respectively. Explaining these lines, Carroll has this to say (comm. to vv. 97–120): “Montemalo (now Monte Mario) is the hill on the way from Viterbo from which the splendour of the Eternal City is first seen; and Uccellatoio is the point on the road from Bologna from which the first flash of the greater splendour of Florence breaks on the traveller’s view.” [return to English / Italian]
112–113. Bellincion Berti is exemplary of the citizenry of “the good old days” of Florence. Giovanni Villani (Cronica IV.1) speaks of him in similar terms. He was father of the “good Gualdrada” of Inferno XVI.37. While males, with the exception of the effeminate Sardanapalus and the corrupt Lapo (see verse 128), are not used to exemplify improper municipal behavior, they surely are present in the rest of the canto as representatives of Florentine virtue. [return to English / Italian]
114. A good woman, as we would expect in this context, eschews facial cosmetics. [return to English / Italian]
115–117. The heads of noble Florentine families (the Nerli and the Vecchietti) are, like Bellincion Berti, content with simple clothing, without adornment; their wives exhibit their virtue by what they take pleasure in doing: household chores. [return to English / Italian]
118–120. Two different sort of ills befalling Florentine wives are referred to here: Some were taken along by their husbands when they were exiled and eventually died in foreign lands; others, married to men who took themselves off to a life of trade in France (cf. the first story in Boccaccio’s Decameron), led lonely lives at home. [return to English / Italian]
121–123. This vignette from “Scenes from Florentine Family Life, ca. 1125,” by Dante Alighieri, features baby talk (see Hollander [Holl.1980.2], p. 127), a phenomenon that Dante is (perhaps surprisingly) most interested in. Florentine babies, goo-gooing in their cribs, are represented as teaching their mommies (and daddies, too) to speak in that “idiom.” That word, which first appears here and then will be used only once more in the poem (Par. XXVI.114), where it is used to delineate Adam’s first speech, is unmistakably “vernacular” Hebrew. And thus the word idïoma, here, may offer an insight into Dante’s theory of the history of language: Each infant recapitulates the primal linguistic moment, speaking a version of Adamic vernacular, until, in the push and pull of maternal and paternal instruction and the infant’s response, that vernacular takes on a local flavor, in this case Florentine. See Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 121–126): “scilicet, maternum linguagium, scilicet, la ninna nanna.” It is perhaps useful to know that Vellutello regularly uses the word idioma to refer to various Italian vernaculars. [return to English / Italian]
124. A second female presence is probably the husband’s mother, also doing useful chores, working at her loom. [return to English / Italian]
125–126. This grandmother narrates for the children in the family (but heard by all) the prehistory of Florence, with its roots in Troy, Rome, and Fiesole. Torraca (comm. to vv. 121–126) explains the details, common to many chronicles of the time, as follows: “The Florentines told of the origins of their city in the following way. After the linguistic division made as a result of the attempt to construct the tower of Babel, Atlas built the first city, which thus fu sola [stood alone] and was therefore called Fiesole. Another of Atlas’s sons, Dardanus, traveling in the East, built Troy there. From Troy Aeneas came to Italy. One of his descendants founded Rome. The Romans destroyed Fiesole. Romans and Fiesolans founded Florence.” [return to English / Italian]
127–129. Dante alludes to two of his Florentine contemporaries, first Cianghella, daughter of Arrigo della Tosa. She married a man from Imola, after whose death she returned to her birthplace and behaved in such fashion as customarily gave widows a very bad name (cf. Boccaccio’s Corbaccio), leading a life marked by lust and luxury. The profile of Lapo Salterello sounds a good bit like that of Dante (to what must have been the poet’s dismay). He was a jurist and poet who, in 1294, represented his city to the papacy, and was then elected prior of Florence; further, in 1300 he denounced several of his cocitizens for collaborating with Pope Boniface VIII; in 1302 he, like Dante, was sent into exile (for fomenting discord and for barratry) by the victorious Black Guelphs. In chiastic order, Cianghella and Lapo are compared with two virtuous figures from the era of the Roman republic, Cincinnatus and Cornelia (see Inf. IV.128), the mother of the Gracchi. For Dante’s overwhelming admiration of the Romans of those days, see Hollander and Rossi (Holl.1986.1). And for a revisionist (and convincing) analysis of the republican roots of Dante’s imperialist views, see Armour (Armo.1997.2) [return to English / Italian]
130–148. Cacciaguida’s self-narrative, the longest in Paradiso, nonetheless seems brief when compared to some of the epic autobiographical performances of characters in Inferno, e.g., Ulysses (53 lines), Ugolino (72 lines). For discussion of the nature of speeches in Paradiso, see the fourth section of the introduction.
For a global study of these three canti dedicated to Dante’s ancestor, see Figurelli (Figu.1965.1). [return to English / Italian]
130–132. This terzina repeats a theme that we have encountered before (the “good old days”), but does so with such emphasis and fluidity (both lines are enjambed, so that the entire tercet has the feeling of a single line of thought, with four iterations of the adverb così upping the emotional effect), as to leave us in suspense, wondering about the subject and predicate that it introduces.
Dante’s radical notion of the responsibility of the citizen, based on ethics more than on politics, may have been shaped by the “radical corporationalism” of Remigio de’ Girolami; the characterization is that of Ernst Kantorowicz (Kant. 1957.1), p. 478, cited by Claire Honess (Hone.1997.2), p. 104. For an overview of the still underinvestigated question of Remigio’s possible influence on Dante, with bibliography (including three important essays in English by Charles Till Davis), see Ovidio Capitani, “Girolami, Remigio dei,” ED III (1971). [return to English / Italian]
133–135. The first three words of the line offer subject, verb, and object: “Mary gave me.” The tercet is based on the moments of birth and baptism, the crusader’s mother calling out for the aid of Mary in the pain of parturition and the cerem
onial pronouncing of the child’s name at his baptism (in the Florentine Baptistery, where Dante himself would also receive his Christian identity and name); the last word of the tercet, reflecting its first word, also a name (Maria), is Cacciaguida. (He has delayed Dante’s gratification for some time now; Dante asked to know who he was at verse 87.) [return to English / Italian]
136. Cacciaguida now names his brothers, Moronto and Eliseo, of whom we know absolutely nothing. There has been some dispute over the years about the exact content of the line and some speculation that Dante means to associate himself with the great Florentine Ghibelline family, the Elisei, but with no convincing result to the process. [return to English / Italian]
137–138. Cacciaguida’s wife came, he says, from the valley of the Po (over the years, Ferrara remains perhaps the favorite location among the discussants, but, since there is a lot at stake [as, for some Americans, there is with regard to George Washington’s dining and sleeping habits], the debate goes on). It was from her, he continues, that Dante got his surname, Alaghieri or Alighieri. Since one of her and Cacciaguida’s sons was named Alighiero, it seems more than likely that he was named for his mother. [return to English / Italian]
139–144. He follows the emperor, Conrad III, on the (disastrous) Second Crusade (in 1147) against Islam, against which the popes even now in Dante’s day fail to take up arms (not even preaching crusade, much less fighting one). There still remains some debate over the question of which emperor Dante really means, Conrad II or III. But see Carroll (comm. to vv. 130–148): “Some doubt has been thrown on the commonly accepted view that the Emperor whom Cacciaguida followed to the Crusades was Conrad III of Suabia, but without reason. Founding on a passage in Villani (IV.9), Cassini suggests Conrad II, the Salic, who was Emperor from 1024 to 1039. According to Villani, this Emperor (whom he calls Conrad I and misdates) visited Florence frequently and knighted many of its citizens. The only crusade he undertook was against the Saracens in Calabria, so that on this view Cacciaguida never was in the Holy Land, and his birth must be pushed back at least a century before the generally received time. It is obviously impossible that he could in that case be the father of the Alighiero whom he calls his son, who died more than a hundred and sixty years later. There is no reason for giving up the ordinary view that the Emperor referred to is Conrad III, who in 1147, with Louis VII of France, undertook the disastrous Second Crusade, so enthusiastically preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. (Bernard’s defence for the failure of this Crusade which roused all Europe against him is that it was due to the sins of the Crusaders themselves. They fell as the Israelites fell in the wilderness, and from the same cause. His remedy is—faith and a third Crusade [De Consideratione, II.1].)” [return to English / Italian]
145–148. He died in the Holy Land and came from martyrdom to this peace (cf. the words for Boethius’s similar journey, Par. X.128–129). While some twentieth-century commentators seem to be open to the idea, no one before Chimenz (comm. to vv. 145–148) states clearly that the text surely accommodates the view of medieval clergy that those who died on crusade in the Holy Land went straight to Heaven, bypassing Purgatory.
Botterill’s entry “Martyrdom” (Lans.2000.1, p. 596) offers reflections on Dante’s daring in making Cacciaguida one among the otherwise canonical martyrs of the Church. [return to English / Italian]
PARADISO XVI
* * *
1–9. Dante, in the course of celebrating his noble birthright, uses the occasion to condemn any such self-aggrandizing sentiments. The appeal of noble bloodlines is so great, the poet explains, that he took pride in his ancestry even now in the heavens, where he assuredly should have known better. For a meditation on the problematical nature of Dante’s ideas about nobility, see Borsellino (Bors.1995.1), pp. 39–41.
Boethius (Cons. III.6[pr]) proclaims the emptiness of a noble name in a passage also probably echoed by Dante in Convivio (IV.xx.5). See also Monarchia (II.iii.4), words that sound much like Francesco da Buti’s gloss to these verses, citing Boethius in distinguishing nobility of soul from “corporeal” nobility (i.e., that established by bloodline).
Where at the close of Canto XIV Dante claims that he was not wrong in not praising Beatrice there, here he states that it was wrong indeed to feel himself glorified in his ancestry. [return to English / Italian]
7–9. This apostrophe of nobility of blood employs a metaphor, in which the mantle (or cloak) of nobility of blood grows shorter each generation that fails to ornament its reputation by earning further genuine honors (as did Cacciaguida, dying a martyr’s death on crusade). [return to English / Italian]
10–12. Dante, finally knowing who it is whom he addresses, used the honorific voi to hail his ancestor, the “You” that was first given to Julius Caesar, according to Lucan (Phars. V.383–386), but is now little used by the contemporary Romans, descended into a state approaching barbarism in Dante’s eyes (see Dve I.xi.2). (Perhaps the first to observe the Lucanian source was Pietro di Dante [comm. to this tercet].) Lucan, prompted by his hatred of Julius (and of Nero, for whom Julius occasionally stands in), has invented this particular in his True History of Authoritarian Language, a fabrication that eventually came to light. According to him, since Julius, assuming his role as dictator, also assumed the many roles of those Romans who had previously held positions of responsibility in republican Rome, he needed to be addressed in a way that represented the plurality of his roles. Gabriele (comm. to verse 10) was perhaps the first to express some doubt about Lucan’s observation; Lombardi spiked it through the heart (comm. to vv. 10–15). The “honorific You” actually came into use, explains Scartazzini (comm. to verse 10), only in the third century. [return to English / Italian]
13–15. This tercet returns to a scene that had been focal to the pivotal moment in the adulterous passion between Francesca and Paolo in Inferno V, the kiss exchanged by Lancelot and Guinevere in the twelfth-century Old French prose romance Lancelot du lac. “During [Gallehault’s] residence at King Arthur’s court a warm friendship sprang up between him and Lancelot, who confided to him his love for Queen Guenever. The latter, who secretly loved Lancelot, was easily persuaded by Gallehault to meet the knight privately. In the course of the interview Gallehault urged the queen to give Lancelot a kiss, which was the beginning of their guilty love.… [Dante here] alludes to the cough given by the Lady of Malehault, one of the queen’s companions, on perceiving the familiarity between them (she herself being in love with Lancelot, who was aware of the fact, and was in great anxiety lest it should injure him with the queen)” (T). Umberto Carpi (Carp.2004.1), vol. I, pp. 24–25 and 256, refines the general appreciation of the reference, pointing out (and crediting Pietro Beltrami for the observation leading to his insight) that Guinevere’s handmaid did not cough when the queen and Lancelot kissed, but before that, when she revealed to her admirer that she was aware of his name and of his lofty lineage. Her words cause the lady-in-waiting to cough as a way of informing Lancelot that she finally knows his identity and nobility of blood. Thus Beatrice, hearing Dante’s response to his own genealogical distinction, the voi with which he addresses his ancestor, smiles in knowing response to that. That she does so as a warning against such pride seems clear, even if some commentators insist on a friendlier, less critical attitude at this height in the heavens. [return to English / Italian]
16–18. The poet again contorts the order of events for his narrative purposes; the words that the protagonist speaks precede, naturally, Beatrice’s reaction to them (vv. 13–15). Indeed, we may realize that the preceding terzina (vv. 10–12) also reflects what he has said just now.
These three parallel uses of the honorific voi for Cacciaguida, emotive anaphora (see Francesca’s Amor … Amor … Amor in Inf. V.100–106), offer an outpouring of ancestral affection, but more than tinged with vainglory, the sin we saw corrected on the terrace of Pride in Purgatory.
This program (of honorific address uttered by the protagonist) began in Inferno X, with
Farinata and Cavalcante. It had one more appearance in the first cantica, with Brunetto Latini. In Purgatorio, Currado Malaspina, Pope Adrian V, Guinizzelli, and Beatrice all received the respectful voi in salutation. In this concluding canticle, Beatrice receives it three times (Par. IV.122–134), and Cacciaguida also three times, all in this tercet, in a final “explosion” that lays it to rest. (See the notes to Inf. X.49–51 and to Purg. XIX.131; also to Par. XXXI.79–90.) [return to English / Italian]
16. The protagonist addresses seven beings as “father” in the poem: first of all Virgil, a total of seven times (between Purg. IV.44 and XXIII.13); then God (in the guise of Apollo) in Paradiso I.28; Cacciaguida (here and in Par. XVII.106); St. Benedict (Par. XXII.58); St. Peter (Par. XXIV.62 and XXIV.124); Adam (Par. XXVI.92); and finally St. Bernard (Par. XXXII.100). Dante the poet refers to five others as being his “fathers”: Brunetto Latini (Inf. XV.83); Cato (Purg. I.33); Guido Guinizzelli (Purg. XXVI.97); St. Francis (Par. XI.85); and the Sun (Par. XXII.116). [return to English / Italian]
17. For baldezza (here translated “bold assurance”), see Vallone (Vall.1967.1). [return to English / Italian]
19. These “rivers” are, resolved from metaphor, the sources of the protagonist’s pleasure in the knowledge of his lineage and in his election to join Cacciaguida among the saved souls here and, eventually, in the Empyrean. [return to English / Italian]