• This line and line 11 of Canto XXIX are cited by Gabrielle Rossetti in confirmation of his theory of the “Principal Allegory of the Inferno,” that the city of Dis is Rome. He says, Spirito Antipapale , I 62, Miss Ward’s Tr. :⁠— “This well is surrounded by a high wall, and the wall by a vast trench; the circuit of the trench is twenty-two miles, and that of the wall eleven miles. Now the outward trench of the walls of Rome (whether real or imaginary we say not) was reckoned by Dante’s contemporaries to be exactly twenty-two miles; and the walls of the city were then, and still are, eleven miles round. Hence it is clear, that the wicked time which looks into Rome, as into a mirror, sees there the corrupt place which is the final goal to its waters or people, that is, the figurative Rome, ‘dread seat of Dis.’ ” The trench here spoken of is the last trench of Malebolge. Dante mentions no wall about the well; only giants standing round it like towers. ↩
• Potiphar’s wife. ↩