One consideration gives us some help, however. We know from _Inf._
xxi. 112-114 that the first day was either March 25, which was believed
in the Middle Ages to be the true anniversary of the Crucifixion, or
Good Friday, which was kept by the Church as such. March 25 is four
days after the date which the Church still kept as the day of the
Equinox (March 21), and 13 days after the true equinox, which at this
time fell on March 12. Good Friday also almost inevitably must fall
after the equinox, since Easter follows the full moon which follows
the equinox. It is true that some of Dante’s readers may still have
regarded the old traditional date of March 25 as the true day of the
equinox, and possibly it was to suit all shades of knowledge that he
left the sun’s position vague; but he himself certainly knew better,
and probably had March 12 in his mind. Then those who held to March 25
might consider the sun as exactly at the equinox on the first day of
the Vision, but all better-informed readers and Dante himself must have
regarded it as somewhat past this point. If we take it that, _e.g._,
it was a week past the equinox, the sun was in about 7° of Aries, and
this position agrees with the four crucial passages mentioned above.
The stress laid on the equinox seems to demand that the sun should be
at least as near it as this on the first day; and a week later it would
have reached the middle of Aries, which is the position we assigned to
it from a discussion of _Par._ xxvii. 86, 87.
This also agrees well with the course of the moon in the zodiac, which
must depend upon the sun’s. We have seen that she was opposite the
sun on the first morning, that her light paled the first-risen stars
of Scorpio while she was yet beneath the eastern horizon three days
later, and that she was proceeding south on the following night. If
the sun was in the 7th degree of Aries on the first morning, the moon
must have been in the 7th degree of Libra; her mean daily motion of 13°
would bring her to the 16th degree of Scorpio three days later and to
the last degree on the day following; so even if we allow a deviation
of a few degrees from the average, she was just where she should have
been on each occasion. We have assumed for convenience that she became
full and was opposite the sun just as she set on the first morning, but
this may have happened at any time during the previous night (in the
Forest): Dante has not specified the hour, and it is of no consequence,
since the indications of time by the moon must necessarily be vague.
The time of sunrise will still differ little from 6 o’clock, a week
after the equinox. In London it is a quarter of an hour earlier, but
the difference is less in Italy, and still less in the latitude of
Jerusalem.
Besides the sun and moon, two of the planets are mentioned as in a
particular place among the stars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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