On the whole, it is easier to accept a round-about expression in the first lines than an inaccurate one later. The former is quite characteristic of Dante, and we have already met some like it in the _Divina Commedia_ in descriptions of the positions of heavenly bodies.[506] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [506] Compare _Purg._ xv. 1-5, where the course the sun still has to run between vespers and sunset is described as equal to the space between the third hour and sunrise. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Looking back to the earlier position, as described in Canto xxii., we find no light thrown on the question; for here he does not mention any particular place as visible, nor say where the terminator lay. His words are:— “L’aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci, Volgendom’ io con gli eterni Gemelli, Tutta m’apparve dai colli alle foci.”[507] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [507] “The threshing-floor that maketh us so proud, To me revolving with the eternal Twins, Was all apparent made from hill to harbour.” _Par._ xxii. 151-3. (_Longfellow_). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This seems to express simply a bird’s eye view of Earth, as it lay stretched out like a map below the observer. It is, however, often taken to mean that the whole habitable earth was visible. This could never be unless the sun, as well as Dante, was over the meridian of Jerusalem, which is obviously impossible while one is in Aries and the other in Gemini; and as he refers back to the first passage from the second he cannot have forgotten this.[508] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [508] Della Valle boldly assumes that they _were_ over the same meridian, by a poetical licence, although at the same time the sun was in a different sign. Dante only mentions the latter fact, he thinks, in order to show that he was a few degrees north of the sun (Gemini being more northerly than Aries); therefore he could see over the edge, as it were, of the sun-lighted hemisphere of Earth. This is desperately subtle. ------------------------------------------------------------------------