I saw Nimrod at the foot of his great toil, as if bewildered, and
gazing at the people who in Shinar had with him been proud.

O Niobe! with what grieving eyes did I see thee portrayed upon
the road between thy seven and seven children slain!

O Saul! how on thine own sword here didst thou appear dead on
Gilboa, that after felt not rain or dew![1]

[1] I Samuel, xxxi. 4, and 2 Samuel, i. 24.


O mad Arachne,[1] so I saw thee already half spider, wretched on
the shreds of the work that to thy harm by thee was made!

[1] Changed to a spider by Athena, whom she had challenged to a
trial of skill at the loom.


O Rehoboam! here thine image seems not now to threaten, but full
of fear, a chariot bears it away before any one pursues it.[1]

[1] 1 Kings, xii. 13-18.


The hard pavement showed also how Alcmaeon made the ill-fated
ornament seem costly to his mother.[1]

[1] Amphiaraus, the soothsayer, foreseeing his own death if he
went to the Theban war, hid himself to avoid being forced to go.
His wife, Eriphyle, bribed by a golden necklace, betrayed his
hiding-place, and was killed by her son Alcmaeon, for thus
bringing about his father's death.


It showed how his sons threw themselves upon Sennacherib within
the temple, and how they left him there dead.[1]

[1] 2 Kings, xix. 37.


It showed the ruin and the cruel slaughter that Tomyris wrought,
when she said to Cyrus, "For blood thou hast thirsted, and with
blood I fill thee."

[1] Herodotus (i. 214) tells how Tomyris, Queen of the
Massagetae, having defeated and slain Cyrus, filled a skin full
of human blood, and plunged his head in it with words such as
Dante reports, and which he derived from Orosius, Histor. ii. 7.


It showed how the Assyrians fled in rout after Holofernes was
killed, and also the remainder of the punishment.[1]

[1] Judith, xv. 1.


I saw Troy in ashes, and in caverns. O Ilion! how cast down and
abject the image which is there discerned showed thee!

What master has there been of pencil or of style that could draw
the shadows and the lines which there would make every subtile
genius wonder? Dead the dead, and the living seemed alive. He who
saw the truth saw not better than I all that I trod on while I
went bent down.--Now be ye proud, and go with haughty look, ye
sons of Eve, and bend not down your face so that ye may see your
evil path!

More of the mountain had now been circled by us, and of the sun's
course far more spent, than my mind, not disengaged, was aware,
when he, who always in advance attent was going on, began, "Lift
up thy head; there is no more time for going thus abstracted. See
there an Angel, who is hastening to come toward us: see how from
the service of the day the sixth hand-maiden returns.[1] With
reverence adorn thine acts and thy face so that he may delight to
direct us upward. Think that this day never dawns again."

[1] The sixth hour of the day is coming to its end, near noon.


I was well used to his admonition ever to lose no time, so that
on that theme he could not speak to me obscurely.

To us came the beautiful creature, clothed in white, and in his
face such as seems the tremulous morning star. Its arms it
opened, and then it opened its wings; it said, "Come: here at
hand are the steps, and easily henceforth one ascends. To this
invitation very few come. O human race, born to fly upward, why
before a little wind dost thou so fall?"

He led us to where the rock was cut; here he struck his wings
across my forehead,[1] then promised me secure progress.

[1] Removing the first P that the Angel of the Gate had incised
on Dante's brow.


As on the right hand, in going up the mountain,[1] where sits the


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