“I say that the sun, in circling round the world, _ne’er beholdeth aught so noble as this lady_, from which it follows that she is, as the words affirm, the most noble of all the things on which the sun shines. And I say _in that hour_, etc. Wherefore we must know that the _hour_ is understood in two senses by astrologers. One sense is employed when they assign twenty-four hours to the day and night, that is, twelve to the day and twelve to the night, however long or short the day may be. And these hours become short or long in the day and in the night, according as the day and night wax and wane. And the Church uses hours in this sense when she speaks of Prime, Tierce, Sext, and None; and these are called temporal hours. The other sense is employed when, of the twenty-four hours alloted to the day and night, the day has sometimes fifteen and the night nine, and sometimes the night has sixteen and the day eight assigned to it, according as the day and the night wax and wane; and these are called equal hours. And at the equinox these latter are always one and the same with those which are called temporal; for it must needs be so when the day and the night are of the same length.”[435] The choice of these two examples of unequal days and nights seems to be another instance of Dante’s dependence upon Alfraganus, for in Chapter VIII. of the _Elementa Astronomica_ we read that the middle of the seventh climate (in which the inequality is greatest) has a longest day of 16 hours, and the middle of the fifth, of 15 hours; and in chapter IX. we find that Magna Roma is situated in the fifth climate. In the fourth treatise of the _Convivio_, Dante returns to the same subject, and enters into further detail about Church hours and divisions of the day.[436] Our lives, like the arch of heaven which is always above us, consist of a rise and a decline, with a culminating point, and this point he fixes as normally reached at a man’s 35th year, as Ristoro had also done.[437] In the same way the day rises and declines, and culminates at the sixth hour; and it is the most noble hour of the day and the most virtuous (in the old Latin sense of virtue as strength, efficacy). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [435] _Conv._ III. vi. 7-32. [436] _Conv._ IV. xxiii. 50 to end. [437] _Comp. del Mondo_, I. xxii. “La sesta ora, cioè il mezzo del dì, è la più nobile di tutto il dì, e la più vertuosa.”[438] [438] “The sixth hour, that is, the middle of the day, is the most noble of all the day, and the most virtuous.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------