Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/293

Rh by an inundation of the Arno in 1333. See Canto XV. Note 62.

149. Florence was destroyed by in 450, and never by. In Dante's time the two seem to have been pretty generally confounded. The Ottimo Cornento remarks upon this point, "Some say that Totila was one person and Attila another; and some say that he was one and the same man."

150. Dante does not mention the name of this suicide; Boccaccio thinks, for one of two reasons; "either out of regard to his surviving relatives, who peradventure are honorable men, and therefore he did not wish to stain them with the infamy of so dishonest a death, or else (as in those times, as if by a malediction sent by God upon our city, many hanged themselves) that each one might apply it to either he pleased of these many."

1. In this third round of the seventh circle are punished the Violent against God,

15. When he retreated across the Libyan desert with the remnant of 's army after the. Lucan, Pharsalia, Book IX.:—

31. Boccaccio confesses that he does not know where Dante found this tradition of. Benvenuto da Imola says it is in a letter which Alexander wrote to Aristotle. He quotes the passage as follows: "In India ignited vapors fell from heaven like snow. I commanded my soldiers to trample them under foot."

Dante perhaps took the incident from the old metrical Romance of Alexander, which in some form or other was current in his time. In the English version of it, published by the Roxburghe Club, we find the rain of fire, and a fall of snow; but it is the snow, and not the fire, that the soldiers trample down. So likewise in the French version. The English runs as follows, line 4164:—

45. Canto VIII. 83.

56., under which, with his Cyclops, Vulcan forged the thunderbolts of Jove.