[845] _That he betrayed, etc._: Dante seems here to throw doubt on the charge. At the height of her power Pisa was possessed of many hundreds of fortified stations in Italy and scattered over the Mediterranean coasts. The charge was one easy to make and difficult to refute. It seems hard on Ugo that he should get the benefit of the doubt only after he has been, for poetical ends, buried raging in Cocytus. [846] _Modern Thebes_: As Thebes was to the race of Cadmus, so was Pisa to that of Ugolino. [847] _Another crew_: They are in Ptolomæa, the third division of the circle, and that assigned to those treacherous to their friends, allies, or guests. Here only the faces of the shades are free of the ice. [848] _Is any vapour_: Has the sun, so low down as this, any influence upon the temperature, producing vapours and wind? In Dante's time wind was believed to be the exhalation of a vapour. [849] _To the bottom, etc._: Dante is going there in any case, and his promise is nothing but a quibble. [850] _Friar Alberic_: Alberigo of the Manfredi, a gentleman of Faenza, who late in life became one of the Merry Friars. See _Inf._ xxiii. 103. In the course of a dispute with his relative Manfred he got a hearty box on the ear from him. Feigning to have forgiven the insult he invited Manfred with a youthful son to dinner in his house, having first arranged that when they had finished their meat, and he called for fruit, armed men should fall on his guests. 'The fruit of Friar Alberigo' passed into a proverb. Here he is repaid with a date for a fig--gets more than he bargained for. [851] _Ptolomæa_: This division is named from the Hebrew Ptolemy, who slew his relatives at a banquet, they being then his guests (1 Maccab. xvi.). [852] _Atropos_: The Fate who cuts the thread of life and sets the soul free from the body.