• Dante, Convito , I 11:⁠— “These should be called sheep, and not men; for if one sheep should throw itself down a precipice of a thousand feet, all the others would follow, and if one sheep, in passing along the road, leaps from any cause, all the others leap, though seeing no cause for it. And I once saw several leap into a well, on account of one that had leaped in, thinking perhaps it was leaping over a wall; notwithstanding that the shepherd, weeping and wailing, opposed them with arms and breast.” ↩
• Lucretius, Nature of Things , II 324, Good’s Tr. :⁠— “The fleecy flocks, o’er yonder hill that browse, From glebe to glebe, where’er, impearled with dew, The jocund clover call them, and the lambs That round them gambol, saturate with milk, Proving their frontlets in the mimic fray.” ↩
• Towards the Sun, where the heaven is brightest. ↩
• The Heaven of Mercury. ↩
• Brunetto Latini, Tresor , I , Ch. 3, says, the planet Mercury “is easily moved according to the goodness or malice of the planets to which it is joined.” Dante here represents himself as being of a peculiarly mercurial temperament. ↩