Cacciaguida, therefore, at the time of the Second Crusade, was in his fifty-seventh year.” Pietro di Dante (the poet’s son and commentator, and who, as Biagioli, with rather gratuitous harshness, says, was “smaller compared to his father than a point is to the universe”) assumed two years as a revolution of Mars; but as this made Cacciaguida born in 1160, twelve years after his death, he suggested the reading of “three,” instead of “thirty,” in the text, which reading was adopted by the Cruscan Academy, and makes the year of Cacciaguida’s birth 1106. But that Dante computed the revolution of Mars at less than two years is evident from a passage in the Convito , II 15, referred to by Philalethes, where he speaks of half a revolution of this planet as un anno quasi , almost a year. The common reading of “thirty” is undoubtedly then the true one. In Astrology, the Lion is the House of the Sun; but Mars, as well as the Sun and Jupiter, is a Lord of the Lion; and hence Dante says “its Lion.” ↩