[168] A lion: Pride or arrogance; to be taken in its widest sense of violent opposition to all that is good.
[169] A she-wolf: Used elsewhere in the Comedy to represent avarice. Dante may have had specially in his mind the greed and worldly ambition of the Pope and the Court of Rome, but it is plain from line 110 that the wolf stands primarily for a sin, and not for a person or corporate body.
[170] No man: Brunetto Latini, the friend and master of Dante, says ‘the soul is the life of man, but without the body is not man.’
[171] Sub Julio: Julius was not even consul when Virgil was born. But Dante reckoned Julius as the founder of the Empire, and therefore makes the time in which he flourished his. Virgil was only twenty-five years of age when Cæsar was slain; and thus it was under Augustus that his maturer life was spent.
[172] Author: Dante defines an author as ‘one worthy to be believed and obeyed’ (Convito iv. 6). For a guide and companion on his great pilgrimage he chooses Virgil, not only because of his fame as a poet, but also because he had himself described a descent to the Shades—had been already there. The vulgar conception of Virgil was that of a virtuous great magician.
[173] The style, etc.: Some at least of Dante’s minor works had been given to the world before 1300, certainly the Vita Nuova and others of his poems. To his study of Virgil he may have felt himself indebted for the purity of taste that kept him superior to the frigid and artificial style of his contemporaries, He prided himself on suiting his language to his theme, as well as on writing straight from the heart.
[174] Many a creature, etc.: Great men and states, infected with avarice in its extended sense of encroachment on the rights of others.
[175] Feltro and Feltro, etc.: Who the deliverer was that Dante prophesies the coming of is not known, and perhaps never can be. Against the claims of Can Grande of Verona the objection is that, at any date which can reasonably be assigned for the publication of the Inferno, he had done nothing to justify such bright hopes of his future career. There seems proof, too, that till the Paradiso was written Dante entertained no great respect for the Scala family (Purg. xvi. 118, xviii. 121). Neither is Verona, or the widest territory over which Can Grande ever ruled, at all described by saying it lay between Feltro and Feltro.—I have preferred to translate nazi-one as birth rather than as nation or people. ‘The birth of the deliverer will be found to have been between feltro and feltro.’ Feltro, as Dante wrote it, would have no capital letter; and according to an old gloss the deliverer is to be of humble birth; feltro being the name of a poor sort of cloth. This interpretation I give as a curiosity more than anything else; for the most competent critics have decided against it, or ignored it.—Henry of Luxemburg, chosen Emperor in November 1308, is an old claimant for the post of the allegorical veltro or greyhound. On him Dante’s hopes were long set as the man who should ‘save Italy;’ and it seems not out of place to draw attention to what is said of him by John Villani, the contemporary and fellow-townsman of Dante: ‘He was of a magnanimous nature, though, as regarded his family, of poor extraction’ (Cronica, ix. 1). Whatever may be made of the Feltros, the description in the text of the deliverer as one superior to all personal ambition certainly answers better to Dante’s ideal of a righteous Emperor than to the character of a partisan leader like Uguccione della Faggiuola, or an ambitious prince like Can Grande.
[176] Camilla, etc.: All persons of the Æneid.
[177] Envy: That of Satan.