(3) When Dante rises to the sun (on the same day) he directs our attention once more to this point where “the one motion strikes the other,” that is, where the ecliptic—the oblique circle which bears the planets—branches off from the equator, and he reminds us of the supreme importance of this divergence. The sun, he says, was in this place. He does not mean at the exact point of intersection, or this passage would be in flat contradiction to the last: “quella parte”[517] is no more precise than “quelle stelle,”[518] and means only this part of the sky, or the constellation of Aries. The words which follow not only specify that it was the spring equinox, but suggest that the sun had already traversed several of those spirals which bring him to us earlier each morning, _i.e._ it was several days after the equinox.[519] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [517] “That part.” [518] “Those stars.” [519] _Par._ x. 7-33. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (4) On the same day the sun was “one sign and more” removed from some point in Gemini.[520] This is very vague, but at least the sun cannot now have been at the first point of Aries, or it would have been two whole signs from even the first degree of Gemini. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [520] _Par._ xxvii. 86, 87. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ It seems, then, that we cannot possibly agree that the sun was at the equinox throughout the poem. It is clear that it was past the equinox towards the end; but from these four passages we cannot be sure whether it was there on the first morning, or whether it moved through some undefined part of Aries during the Vision.