Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

I don't know if Dante meant to be, the notes that Robert Durling gives in this, I think are really interesting.

We have in Caccia Guida's speech, which is one of the longest in the comedy, we have a mixture of Latin, Italian, Florentine dialect, and kind of low and high, like it's all over the place.

And so are we to take Cacioguita as kind of a severe ancient ancestor or someone who's like the grandfather maybe that you yucked it up with at Easter dinner or something like that?

It's hard to tell.

But what we do know is that Cacioguita had been a crusader.

He had fought in the Second Crusade and was a part, it sounds, like the emergence of the Florentine ruling family.

Now, as far as I've understood from the biographies that I've read of Dante, he was from an important family, but not a wealthy family by the time he was writing and existing.

And so something about this encounter, why do you bring an ancestor forward?

And I think the text helps us here.

So let's read a little bit of it just so that we have a sense of this.

let me pick this up actually in Canto 60.

He shows up in 15, but let me pick it up in 16 because this is where, sorry, no, I do want 15.

That's the one that, yeah, okay.

So this is Canto 15, starting at lines 25 and following.

And the picture here, Dante has seen a star in the constellation of Mars, which is a cross.

And it's a fascinating, remember that Constantine kind of turns

Christianity, the Roman Empire into a Christian empire kind of through the sign of the cross.

We've got that kind of intertext playing.

And at the same time, this light falls out of that constellation that is the cross.

And so Dante says to us, so did the shade of Anchises reach out devotedly, if our greatest muse deserves belief, when in Elysium he perceived his son,