[360] _His brows_: When Dante tells he is of the Alighieri, a Guelf family, Farinata shows some slight displeasure. Or, as a modern Florentine critic interprets the gesture, he has to think a moment before he can remember on which side the Alighieri ranged themselves--they being of the small gentry, while he was a great noble, But this gloss requires Dante to have been more free from pride of family than he really was. [361] _Twice disperse_: The Alighieri shared in the exile of the Guelfs in 1248 and 1260. [362] _You_: See also line 95. Dante never uses the plural form to a single person except when desirous of showing social as distinguished from, or over and above, moral respect. [363] _Guido_: Farinata's companion in the tomb is Cavalcante Cavalcanti, who, although a Guelf, was tainted with the more specially Ghibeline error of Epicureanism. When in order to allay party rancour some of the Guelf and Ghibeline families were forced to intermarry, his son Guido took a daughter of Farinata's to wife. This was in 1267, so that Guido was much older than Dante. Yet they were very intimate, and, intellectually, had much in common. With him Dante exchanged poems of occasion, and he terms him more than once in the _Vita Nuova_ his chief friend. The disdain of Virgil need not mean more than is on the surface. Guido died in 1301. He is the hero of the _Decameron_, vi. 9. [364] _The Lady_: Proserpine; _i.e._ the moon. Ere fifty months from March 1300 were past, Dante was to see the failure of more than one attempt made by the exiles, of whom he was one, to gain entrance to Florence. The great attempt was in the beginning of 1304. [365] _Ruth for my race_: When the Ghibeline power was finally broken in Florence the Uberti were always specially excluded from any amnesty. There is mention of the political execution of at least one descendant of Farinata's. His son when being led to the scaffold said, 'So we pay our fathers' debts!'--It has been so long common to describe Dante as a Ghibeline, though no careful writer does it now, that it may be worth while here to remark that Ghibelinism, as Farinata understood it, was practically extinct in Florence ere Dante entered political life. [366] _The Arbia_: At Montaperti, on the Arbia, a few miles from Siena, was fought in 1260 a great battle between the Guelf Florence and her allies on the one hand, and on the other the Ghibelines of Florence, then in exile, under Farinata; the Sienese and Tuscan Ghibelines in general; and some hundreds of men-at-arms lent by Manfred. Notwithstanding the gallant behaviour of the Florentine burghers, the Guelf defeat was overwhelming, and not only did the Arbia run red with Florentine blood--in a figure--but the battle of Montaperti ruined for a time the cause of popular liberty and general improvement in Florence.