The old Roman Empire was viewed by Dante with a truly religious veneration, as is clear not only from many a passage in the _Divina Commedia_ (e.g. _Par._ vi), but from the whole argument of the _De Monarchia_.[168] This veneration, which shed lustre and dignity upon a “Holy Roman Empire” which even in Dante’s day had become actually, though not technically, German, is characteristic especially of the Italian mind; and Dante was Italian as well as mediaeval. The Italians even of to-day are proud to regard themselves as the direct successors of the old Romans of the Republic and of the Caesars: in Dante’s time they were prepared to trace their ancestry to the divinely guided companions of Aeneas of Troy. Rome looms large in the providential ordering of human history: Dante’s conception of her sovereign place is drawn from the author of the princely _Aeneid_, whose function in the _Divine Comedy_ is guarantee of the affectionate reverence which Dante bore to him. But it is not only Roman history, but classical mythology that weaves itself into the texture of Dante’s religious thought. If he quotes Virgil some two hundred times, he quotes Ovid about one hundred. The tendency to mingle together examples from Scripture and from pagan mythology is characteristically mediaeval. In Dante it is a well known feature, most typically represented perhaps in the sculptures, visions and voices of the Purgatorio. He who is bold enough in _Purg._ xxx. to blend together the Scriptural _Benedictus qui venis_ with Virgil’s _Manibus o date lilia plenis_ is not afraid to invoke the Muses and Apollo (mystically interpreted) as he begins a new _cantica_.[169] He does not hesitate to apostrophise the Saviour of the world in terms which blend the Christian with the antique pagan tradition—[170] ... O Sommo Giove, Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso! This is well explained by Mr. Taylor. “With Dante,” he says,[171] “the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters[172] symbolised, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.” This principle may be regarded as being, in a way, the mediaeval analogue of our broad modern conceptions derived from a comparative study of religions. (4) But supreme among the influences derived by the Middle Ages from classical antiquity is the philosophy of Aristotle, which holds the next place to Scripture alike in the “Summa” of Thomas Aquinas, and in the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante. Mediaeval Christianity drew its knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy from Mohammedan sources. The great Arab scientists and philosophers of mediaeval times, represented in the _Commedia_ by Avicenna and— Averroìs che il gran comento feo[173]