DANTE. 
HIS QUOTATIONS AND HIS ORIGINALITY: THE GREATEST 
IMITATOR AND THE GREATEST ORIGINAL. 
JAMES DAVIE BUTLER, LL. D. 
Dante was above all poets the heir of the ages. He tells us 
that life beyond life is partly of bliss, and partly of a bale which 
is sometimes hopeful and sometimes beyond hope. This view 
has nothing of novelty. It has prevailed for milleniums from 
the Elysian fields of the most ancient Greek even to the most 
recent aboriginal stories about the happy hunting-ground. The 
idea of purgatory has its analogon in Plato. Among early 
Christians it was defended by Origen, and before the year 600 
A. D. it had been fully formulated by Gregory the Great. 
In describing the physical universe Dante copies Ptolemy, 
whose system dates from our second century. From Ptolemy he 
learned to view the cosmos as geocentric, — seven planets, one 
of them the sun, revolving round the earth,— the whole hemmed 
in by the stellar sphere and around that the empyrean. This 
Ptolemaic hypothesis had pre-determined the whole plan of 
Dante’s paradise, and many details in its nine spheres. More¬ 
over, Greek planetary names, older not only than Ptolemy but 
than history itself, constrained Dante to place the heaven of or¬ 
ators in Mercury, of lovers in Venus, of poets in the sun, of 
warriors in Mars, of judges in Jupiter, and of mystics in Sat¬ 
urn. 
The last judgment he localized in the valley of Jehoshaphat. 
All Christendom, and Moslemdom too. had done so before him, 
because it is written in Joel; “ I will gather all nations, and 
I will bring them into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will 
plead with them there”. 
