“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”

Some commentators suppose that Dante’s mystic tree is not only the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but also a symbol of the Roman Empire. ↩

Virgil, Georgics , II 123:⁠—

“The groves which India, nearer the ocean, the utmost skirts of the globe, produces, where no arrows by their flight have been able to surmount the airy summit of the tree; and yet that nation is not slow at archery.”