Simonides, and many a Grecian else
Ingarlanded with laurel. Of thy train
Antigone is there, and Deïphile,
Argia, and, as sorrowful as erst,
Ismene, and who showed Langia’s wave;
Deidamia with her sisters there,
And blind Tiresias’ daughter, and the bride,
Sea-born of Peleus.[267]
Every one of the names here named are Greek, and it is clear that Dante was well acquainted with the stories of the Greek poets; but was he also acquainted with their language? This is a question fiercely debated by his commentators, and considered to be still an unresolved problem. In his prose work, the “Convito,” he has criticised an erroneous translation from Aristotle, and in one of the finest passages of the “Purgatorio” introduces a Greek word, which alone has furnished matter for a voluminous controversy.[268] These and other passages have led many to give him credit for being possessed of Greek scholarship. The point is not decided, but the probability appears to be that his knowledge of the language was at any rate not very profound. In the same way he may be said to have been not totally unacquainted with Hebrew and Arabic, for several explanations of Hebrew words occur in his works, and the mysterious words which he places with so tremendous and dramatic an effect in the mouth of Nimrod,[269] are declared by one critic to be Arabic, and by another to be Syriac; but are more probably, as Bianchi observes, a jumble of sounds chosen from the Oriental dialects, and intended to convey a notion of the confusion of tongues, and to startle the ear with their uncouth cabalistic sound. Without claiming for our poet the merit of Hebrew and Oriental learning, we may at least gather from such passages that he had studied in schools where these tongues were not entirely unknown, where the decree of Clement V. was probably carried out, and professors were to be found who could furnish him with enough of Eastern erudition to serve his purpose. On other points his acquirements were, however, far less superficial. The trivium and quadrivium in all their branches are easy enough to be traced through his writings. He is known to have been a proficient in music. He refers to the quadrature of the circle and other problems of geometry, but astronomy was evidently his science of predilection, and occupies a very considerable place in his poem. He wrote at a time when the Pythagorean system was the only accepted theory, and his scientific allusions can of course only be explained according to its supposed laws. But he did not draw all his ideas from the books of the ancients. In his “Convito,” after giving the various explanations of the Milky-way furnished by Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and others, some of them sufficiently absurd, he decides in favour of the opinion that there is a multitude of fixed stars in that part of the heavens, so small (or, as we should now say, so distant), that we cannot separately distinguish them, but which cause the appearance of whiteness. The other views, he observes, seem devoid of reason. The astronomer, Ideler, was the first to point out that Dante’s description in the opening canto of the “Purgatorio” of the four stars,[270] which he makes symbolic of the four cardinal virtues, betrays a knowledge of the constellation of the Southern Cross, of which he may have heard from the Genoese and Pisan mariners who had visited Cape Comorin, and which he may even have seen depicted on that curious globe constructed by the Arabs in 1225, where it was distinctly marked. He had attentively studied geography, and notices many such points as find a place in our manuals of the globes, such as the intersection of the great circles, as they are exhibited on the armillary sphere; and reminds us that within the torrid zone at certain seasons no shadows fall, on account of the sun being then directly overhead.[271] Tiraboschi gives him credit for anticipating a supposed discovery of Galileo’s, that wine is nothing but the heat of the sun mingled with the juice of the grape; and Maffei comments on the “marvellous felicity” with which he expresses his scientific ideas. The theory of the attraction of gravitation[272] is stated as distinctly in his pages as in those of Vincent de Beauvais; and his allusions to the nature of plants and the habits of animals, and particularly of birds, seem to evince, not merely a familiarity with the works of Albert the Great, but the observant eye of a real naturalist.[273] His artistic feeling appears in a thousand passages, which were afterwards given a visible shape by Orcagna, and so many other painters of the early Florentine school; as well as in some wonderful landscape-painting in words, which, as Humboldt says, “manifest profound sensibility to the aspect of external nature.” Such is his description, imitated by so many later Italian poets, of the birds beginning their morning songs in the pine forest of Chiassi, of the dawning light trembling on the distant sea, of the goatherd watching his flocks among the hills, and of the flowery meadow illuminated by a sudden ray of sunlight darting through the broken clouds.[274] He never directly alludes to those grand creations of Christian art, the cathedrals, most of which were coeval in their rise with the European universities. Yet he continually reminds us that he lived when religious artists were carving the sacred sculptures on their walls, or filling their windows with a mystic splendour, and that he had felt the power of those vaulted aisles, which he had, perhaps, visited as a pilgrim.[275]