It can hardly be said, then, that Beatrice is the heroine of his poem, unless Helen of Troy is the heroine of the _Iliad_. Neither poem could have existed without the woman; the action of each turns entirely upon her; but the appearance of each is infrequent until, in Beatrice’s case, she appears as the pervading spirit of the _Paradiso_. Yet, had we merely known her from the _Divina Commedia_, their opinion who regard her as a mere symbol would not have appeared so groundless as it must in the light of the transparent autobiography of the _Vita Nuova_. If the great epic has given her her world-wide fame, she is indebted for her personality to the brief lyrics and snatches of impassioned prose. The old love, though not extinct, had been transformed into something far more expansive, as alchemists are said to revive a glowing rose from the ashes of a faded one. When Dante himself essays to give Can Grande some insight into the purpose of his poem, he does not mention Beatrice, but says: “The object of the whole work is to make those who live in this life leave their state of misery, and to lead them to a state of happiness.” By this, as Symonds points out, is not to be understood that the purpose of the poem was the admonition of individuals. “It was both moral and political. The _status miseriæ_ was the discord of divided Christendom as well as of the unregenerate will; the _status felicitatis_ was the pacification of the world under the coequal sway of Emperor and Pope in Rome, as well as the restoration of the human soul to faith.” The conception, therefore, was essentially mediæval. It expressed the beliefs and aspirations of the Middle Age. It was in poetry what the work of another of the greatest of the Italians, St. Thomas Aquinas, had been in theology and philosophy--an endeavour to stereotype the dominant convictions of the age. And therefore, although not among the only genuine epics in the highest sense--those which the nations have written for themselves--the _Divina Commedia_ approaches these more nearly than any other epic of the second class; for, although the utterance of a single voice, it says what the average mediæval man would have said had he known how. The nearest parallel is Milton’s epic, which sets forth the view of divine things which had commended itself to a large portion of the Christian world, but still only to a portion, and therefore a less memorable deliverance than Dante’s. One needs only to consider how much lower the Middle Ages would stand in our estimation if their great interpreter had never written, to appreciate the enormous importance of Dante’s work for history and culture.