[793] _The fortune-haunted dell_: The valley of the Bagrada near Utica, where Scipio defeated Hannibal and won the surname of Africanus. The giant Antæus had, according to the legend, lived in that neighbourhood, with the flesh of lions for his food and his dwelling in a cave. He was son of the Earth, and could not be vanquished so long as he was able to touch the ground; and thus ere Hercules could give him a mortal hug he needed to swing him aloft. In the _Monarchia_, ii. 10, Dante refers to the combat between Hercules and Antæus as an instance of the wager of battle corresponding to that between David and Goliath. Lucan's _Pharsalia_, a favourite authority with Dante, supplies him with these references to Scipio and Antæus. [794] _Cocytus_: The frozen lake fed by the waters of Phlegethon. See Canto xiv. at the end. [795] _Tityus, etc._: These were other giants, stated by Lucan to be less strong than Antæus. This introduction of their names is therefore a piece of flattery to the monster. A light contemptuous turn is given by Virgil to his flattery when in the following sentence he bids Antæus not curl his snout, but at once comply with the demand for aid. There is something genuinely Italian in the picture given of the giants in this Canto, as of creatures whose intellect bears no proportion to their bulk and brute strength. Mighty hunters like Nimrod, skilled in sounding the horn but feeble in reasoned speech, Frisians with great thews and long of limb, and German men-at-arms who traded in their rude valour, to the subtle Florentine in whom the ferment of the Renaissance was beginning to work were all specimens of Nature's handicraft that had better have been left unmade, were it not that wiser people could use them as tools. [796] _Carisenda_: A tower still standing in Bologna, built at the beginning of the twelfth century, and, like many others of its kind in the city, erected not for strength but merely in order to dignify the family to whom it belonged. By way of further distinction to their owners, some of these towers were so constructed as to lean from the perpendicular. Carisenda, like its taller neighbour the Asinelli, still supplies a striking feature to the near and distant views of Bologna. What is left of it hangs for more than two yards off the plumb. In the half-century after Dante's time it had, according to Benvenuto, lost something of its height. It would therefore as the poet saw it seem to be bending down even more than it now does to any one standing under it on the side it slopes to, when a cloud is drifting over it in the other direction. CANTO XXXII.