By her the Deity had created the angels: the angels, enamored of her, had inextricably entangled her in that polluting bondage, in order to prevent her return to heaven. To fly from their embraces she had passed from body to body. Connecting this fiction with the Grecian mythology, she was Minerva, or impersonated Wisdom; perhaps, also, Helena, or embodied Beauty.” ↩

• Pope Boniface VIII , a native of Alagna, now Anagni. See note 270 , and note 925 . Dante has already his punishment prepared. He is to be thrust head downward into a narrow hole in the rock of Malebolge, and to be driven down still lower when Clement V shall follow him. ↩
• The White Rose of Paradise. ↩
• Iliad , II 86, Anon. Tr. :⁠— “And the troops thronged together, as swarms of crowding bees, which come ever in fresh numbers from the hollow rock, and fly in clusters over the vernal flowers, and thickly some fly in this direction, and some in that.” ↩
• The nymph Callisto, or Helice, was changed by Jupiter into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son into that of the Little Bear. See note 1036 . ↩
• Rome and her superb edifices, before the removal of the Papal See to Avignon. ↩