may have heard him utter similar self-accusations while living, and seen on his face the blush of shame, which covers it here.
143. The Neri were banished from Pistoia in 1301; the Bianchi, from Florence in 1302.
145. This vapor or lightning flash from Val di Magra is the Marquis Malaspini, and the "turbid clouds" are the banished Neri of Pistoia, whom he is to gather about him to defeat the Bianchi at Campo Piceno, the old battle-field of Catiline. As Dante was of the Bianchi party, this prophecy of impending disaster and overthrow could only give him pain. See Canto VI. Note 65.
CANTO XXV.
1. The subject of the preceding Canto is continued in this.
2. This vulgar gesture of contempt consists in thrusting the thumb between the first and middle fingers. It is the same that the ass-driver made at Dante in the street; Sacchetti, Nov. CXV.: "When he was a little way off, he turned round to Dante, and, thrusting out his tongue and making a fig at him with his hand, said, 'Take that.'"
Villani, VI. 5, says: "On the Rock of Carmignano there was a tower seventy yards high, and upon it two marble arms, the hands of which were making the figs at Florence." Others say these hands were on a finger-post by the road-side.
In the Merry Wives of Windsor, I. 3, Pistol says: "Convey, the wise it call; Steal! foh; a fico for the phrase!" And Martino, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Widow, V. 1:—
"The fig of everlasting obloquy
Go with him."
10. Pistoia is supposed to have been founded by the soldiers of Catiline. Brunetto Latini, Tresor, I. i. 37, says: "They found Catiline at the foot of the mountains and he had his army and his people in that place where is now the city of Pestoire. There was Catiline conquered in battle, and he and his were slain; also a great part of the Romans were killed. And on account of the pestilence of that great slaughter the city was called Pestoire."
The Italian proverb says, Pistoia la ferrigna, iron Pistoia, or Pistoia the pitiless.
15. Capaneus, Canto XIV. 44.
19. See Canto XIII. Note 9.
25. Cacus was the classic Giant Despair, who had his cave in Mount Aventine, and stole a part of the herd of Geryon, which Hercules had brought to Italy. Virgil, Æneid, VIII., Dryden's Tr.:—
"See yon huge cavern, yawning wide around,
Where still the shattered mountain spreads the ground:
That spacious hold grim Cacus once possessed,
Tremendous fiend! half human, half a beast:
