DATES AND EPOCH.--Although the vision is poetically placed in the spring of 1300, during the Pope’s jubilee and shortly before Dante’s election to the priorate, the actual date of composition of the poem--as far as concerns the first two parts--is still uncertain and disputed. There are at present two principal theories. According to the one (very strongly held by Parodi), the _Inferno_ was composed shortly before the advent of Henry of Luxemburg, the _Purgatorio_ during his Italian enterprise. According to the other, not only the _Paradiso_, but the whole poem was written after the death of the Emperor, and must therefore be regarded as the work of the closing years of the poet’s life. On the former hypothesis, the allusion to the death of Clement V., in _Inf._ xix., must be taken as an indefinite prediction or a later insertion. It is possible to adopt a compromise between the two views. The poem may have been begun some time between 1306 and 1308, and portions of the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ composed before the catastrophe of 1313. After the death of the Emperor, Dante may well have revised and completed these two canticles. Boccaccio tells us--and the statement is confirmed (for the _Paradiso_) by a sonnet of Giovanni Quirino--that the poet was wont to send his work in instalments to Can Grande before any copies were made for others. There is no evidence of any circulation before 1317, when some lines from _Inf._ iii. appear among the papers of a notary at Bologna.[30] The first Eclogue shows that, by 1319, the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ had been, so to speak, published, and the _Paradiso_ was in preparation; Boccaccio’s story of the finding of the last thirteen cantos confirms the belief that this final canticle, which crowns the poet’s whole life-work, was only completed shortly before Dante’s death. Dante is in the position of a man who is now relating to the world the vision vouchsafed to him many years before. Hence everything that happened after April 1300 is spoken of as future and by way of prophecy, beginning with Ciacco’s account in _Inf._ vi. of the famous faction fight of May Day in that year. With two exceptions--Frate Alberigo and Branca d’Oria (_Inf._ xxxiii.), whose souls went down to Hell before their bodies died--every spirit met with in the ecstatic pilgrimage is represented as having died before April 1300. But Dante anticipates the certain damnation of some who, though living in 1300, were dead when he wrote the poem; Corso Donati, Popes Boniface and Clement, and a few less notorious sinners as Carlino de’ Pazzi. In one instance, that of Venedico Caccianemico (_Inf._ xviii.), he seems to have supposed a man dead in 1300 who in reality lived a few years later.