[240] Saladin: Died 1193. To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries he supplied the ideal of a just Mohammedan ruler. Here are no other such. ‘He sits apart, because not of gentle birth,’ says Boccaccio; which shows what even a man of genius risks when he becomes a commentator.
[241] The Master: Aristotle, often spoken of by Dante as the Philosopher, and reverenced by him as the genius to whom the secrets of nature lay most open.
[242] Democritus, etc.: According to whom the world owes its form to a chance arrangement of atoms.
[243] Linus: Not Livy, into which some have changed it. Linus is mentioned by Virgil along with Orpheus, Egl. iv.
[244] Ptolemy: Greek geographer of the beginning of the second century, and author of the system of the world believed in by Dante, and freely used by him throughout the poem.
[245] Avicenna: A physician, born in Bokhara, and died at Ispahan, 1037. His Medical Canon was for centuries used as a text-book in Europe.
[246] Averroes: A Mohammedan philosopher of Cordova, died 1198. In his great Commentary on Aristotle he gives and explains every sentence of that philosopher’s works. He was himself ignorant of Greek, and made use of Arabic versions. Out of his Arabic the Commentary was translated into Hebrew, and thence into Latin. The presence of the three Mohammedans in this honourable place greatly puzzles the early commentators.
[247] A part, etc.: He passes into the darkness of the Limbo out of the brightly-lit, fortified enclosure. It is worth remarking, as one reads, how vividly he describes his first impression of a new scene, while when he comes to leave it a word is all he speaks.