• Virgil, Aeneid , VI :⁠— “Forthwith are heard voices, loud wailings, and weeping ghosts of infants, in the first opening of the gate; whom, bereaved of sweet life out of the course of nature, and snatched from the breast, a black day cut off, and buried in an untimely grave.” ↩
• The descent of Christ into Limbo. Neither here nor elsewhere in the Inferno does Dante mention the name of Christ. ↩
• The reader will not fail to observe how Dante makes the word honor , in its various forms, ring and reverberate through these lines⁠— orrevol, onori, orranza, onrata, onorata! ↩
• Dante puts the sword into the hand of Homer as a symbol of his warlike epic, which is a Song of the Sword. ↩
• Upon this line Boccaccio, Comento , says:⁠— “A proper thing it is to honor every man, but especially those who are of one and the same profession, as these were with Virgil.” ↩
• Another assertion of Dante’s consciousness of his own power as a poet. ↩