[46] Defensor Pacis written c. 1324 (three years after Dante’s death) to support the claims of the Emperor Lewis IX (of Bavaria) against Pope John XXII, starts, as Dante does, from Aristotle and Holy Scripture, but carries the relentless exposure of papal pretensions much further, and strikes the note of appeal to a General Council which was one of the watchwords of the Reformation.
[47] This theme he took up earlier in the Fourth Treatise of the Convivio, chaps. iv. and v.
[48] Cf. especially his quotations from the Aeneid in Conv. IV, iv. (Bemp., 252) and Mon. II, vii. 70 sqq. (Bemp., 381); the Divine injunction is taken by Dante, almost as though the Aeneid were ‘Scripture’!
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, momento,
Hae tibi erunt artes, pacique imponere morem;
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
—Aen. vi. 852-4.
[49] Inf. i. 82.
[50] vi. 34-96.
[51] W. W. Vernon, Readings on the Paradiso, Vol. I, p. 199.