Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/350

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330
Notes

"To Afric's coast he cuts the foamy way,
Where low the once victorious Carthage lay.
There landing, to the well-known camp he hies,
Where from afar the distant seas he spies;
Where Bagrada's dull waves the sands divide,
And slowly downward roll their sluggish tide.
From thence he seeks the heights renowned by fame,
And hallowed by the great Cornelian name:
The rocks and hills which long, traditions say,
Were held by huge Antæus' horrid sway. ····· But greater deeds this rising mountain grace,
And Scipio's name ennobles much the place,
While, fixing here his famous camp, he calls
Fierce Hannibal from Rome's devoted walls.
As yet the mouldering works remain in view,
Where dreadful once the Latian eagles flew."

124. Æneid, VI.: "Here too you might have seen Tityus, the foster-child of all-bearing earth, whose body is extended over nine whole acres; and a huge vulture, with her hooked beak, pecking at his immortal liver." Also Odyssey, XI., in similar words.

Typhœus was a giant with a hundred heads, like a dragon's, who made war upon the gods as soon as he was born. He was the father of Geryon and Cerberus.

132. The battle between Hercules and Antæus is described by Lucan, Pharsalia, IV.:—

"Bright in Olympic oil Alcides shone,
Antæus with his mother's dust is strown,
And seeks her friendly force to aid his own."

136. One of the leaning towers of Bologna, which Eustace, Classical Tour, I. 167, thinks are "remarkable only for their unmeaning elevation and dangerous deviation from the perpendicular."


CANTO XXXII.

1. In this Canto begins the Ninth and last Circle of the Inferno, where Traitors are punished.

"Hence in the smallest circle, at the point
Of all the Universe, where Dis is seated,
Whoe'er betrays forever is consumed."

3. The word thrust is here used in its architectural sense, as the thrust of a bridge against its abutments, and the like.

9. Still using the babble of childhood.

11. The Muses; the poetic tradition being that Amphion built the walls of Thebes by the sound of his lyre; and the prosaic interpretation, that he did it by his persuasive eloquence.

15. Matthew xxvi. 24: "Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born."

28. Tambernich is a mountain of Sclavonia, and Pietrapana another near Lucca.

55. These two "miserable brothers" are Alessandro and Napoleone, sons of Alberto degli Alberti, lord of Falterona in the valley of the Bisenzio. After their father's death they quar-