[669] Toward the morning, etc.: There was a widespread belief in the greater truthfulness of dreams dreamed as the night wears away. See Purg. ix. 13. The dream is Dante’s foreboding of what is to happen to Florence. Of its truth he has no doubt, and the only question is how soon will it be answered by the fact. Soon, he says, if it is near to the morning that we dream true dreams—morning being the season of waking reality in which dreams are accomplished.

[670] Even Prato: A small neighbouring city, much under the influence of Florence, and somewhat oppressed by it. The commentators reckon up the disasters that afflicted Florence in the first years of the fourteenth century, between the date of Dante’s journey and the time he wrote—fires, falls of bridges, and civil strife. But such misfortunes were too much in keeping with the usual course of Florentine history to move Dante thus deeply in the retrospect; and as he speaks here in his own person the ‘soon’ is more naturally counted from the time at which he writes than from the date assigned by him to his pilgrimage. He is looking forward to the period when his own return in triumph to Florence was to be prepared by grievous national reverses; and, as a patriot, he feels that he cannot be wholly reconciled by his private advantage to the public misfortune. But it was all only a dream.

[671] Some while ago: See note, Inf. xxiv. 79.

[672] ’Mong splinters, etc.: They cross the wall or barrier between the Seventh and Eighth Bolgias. From Inf. xxiv. 63 we have learned that the rib of rock, on the line of which they are now proceeding, with its arches which overhang the various Bolgias, is rougher and worse to follow than that by which they began their passage towards the centre of Malebolge.

[673] Happy star: See note, Inf. xv. 55. Dante seems to have been uncertain what credence to give to the claims of astrology. In a passage of the Purgatorio (xvi. 67) he tries to establish that whatever influence the stars may possess over us we can never, except with our own consent, be influenced by them to evil.—His sorrow here, as elsewhere, is not wholly a feeling of pity for the suffering shades, but is largely mingled with misgivings for himself. The punishment of those to whose sins he feels no inclination he always beholds with equanimity. Here, as he looks down upon the false counsellors and considers what temptations there are to misapply intellectual gifts, he is smitten with dread lest his lot should one day be cast in that dismal valley and he find cause to regret that the talent of genius was ever committed to him. The memory even of what he saw makes him recollect himself and resolve to be wary. Then, as if to justify the claim to superior powers thus clearly implied, there comes a passage which in the original is of uncommon beauty.

[674] Field and vineyard: These lines, redolent of the sweet Tuscan midsummer gloaming, give us amid the horrors of Malebolge something like the breath of fresh air the peasant lingers to enjoy. It may be noted that in Italy the village is often found perched above the more fertile land, on a site originally chosen with a view to security from attack. So that here the peasant is at home from his labour.

[675] And yet a sinner, etc.: The false counsellors who for selfish ends hid their true minds and misused their intellectual light to lead others astray are for ever hidden each in his own wandering flame.

[676] Eteocles: Son of Œdipus and twin brother of Polynices. The brothers slew one another, and were placed on the same funeral pile, the flame of which clove into two as if to image the discord that had existed between them (Theb. xii.).

[677] And Diomedes: The two are associated in deeds of blood and guile at the siege of Troy.

[678] The Romans’ noble seed: The trick of the wooden horse led to the capture of Troy, and that led Æneas to wander forth on the adventures that ended in the settlement of the Trojans in Italy.

[679] DeÏdamia: That Achilles might be kept from joining the Greek expedition to Troy he was sent by his mother to the court of Lycomedes, father of DeÏdamia. Ulysses lured him away from his hiding-place and from DeÏdamia, whom he had made a mother.

[680] The Palladium: The Trojan sacred image of Pallas, stolen by Ulysses and Diomed (Æn. ii.). Ulysses is here upon his own ground.

[681] They were Greek: Some find here an allusion to Dante’s ignorance of the Greek language and literature. But Virgil addresses them in the Lombard dialect of Italian (Inf. xxvii. 21). He acts as spokesman because those ancient Greeks were all so haughty that to a common modern mortal they would have nothing to say. He, as the author of the Æneid, has a special claim on their good-nature. It is but seldom that the shades are told who Virgil is, and never directly. Here Ulysses may infer it from the mention of the ‘lofty verse.’

[682] From Circe: It is Ulysses that speaks.

[683] The open main: The Mediterranean as distinguished from the Ægean.

[684] Which ne’er deserted me: There seems no reason for supposing, with Philalethes, that Ulysses is here represented as sailing on his last voyage from the island of Circe and not from Ithaca. Ulysses, on the contrary, represents himself as breaking away afresh from all the ties of home. According to Homer, Ulysses had lost all his companions ere he returned to Ithaca; and in the Odyssey Tiresias prophesies to him that his last wanderings are to be inland. But any acquaintance that Dante had with Homer can only have been vague and fragmentary. He may have founded his narrative of how Ulysses ended his days upon some floating legend; or, eager to fill up what he took to be a blank in the world of imagination, he may have drawn wholly on his own creative power. In any case it is his Ulysses who, through the version of him given by a living poet, is most familiar to the English reader.

[685] The mighty main: The Atlantic Ocean. They bear to the left as they sail, till their course is due south, and crossing the Equator, they find themselves under the strange skies of the southern hemisphere. For months they have seen no land.

[686] A lofty mountain: This is the Mountain of Purgatory, according to Dante’s geography antipodal to Jerusalem, and the only land in the southern hemisphere.

[687] As pleased Another: Ulysses is proudly resigned to the failure of his enterprise, ‘for he was Greek.’