Like Dante, Omar Khayyam (c. 1048-c. 1131) was a poet, but Khayyam established an equally great reputation as a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. Khayyam, who lived in Persia (now Iran), wrote a paper on algebra that is considered one of the most significant works on that subject from medieval times.
He is most famous to Western readers, however, from the Rubaiyat, a collection of verses first translated into English in 1859 by the English poet and scholar Edward FitzGerald. Among the most famous lines from the Rubaiyat as translated by FitzGerald is "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a loaf of bread— and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness— / Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!" The last word is a poetic version of enough, and the line means, in effect, "with you even a wilderness is paradise."
Little is known about Khayyam's life, except that he was commissioned by Malik Shah, sultan of the Seljuk Turks, to work on reforming the calendar. He also helped plan an observatory in Persia, and spent his later years teaching mathematics and astrology. Seven centuries after his death, the rediscovery of his work by FitzGerald brought on an explosion of interest in Khayyam, who became perhaps more famous in the modern West than he had been in the medieval Middle East.
In exile, he wrote another collection of poetry, II con-vivio (The Banquet; 1304-7); and two significant prose works. The first of these was De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vernacular Tongue; 1303-7), a defense of Italian literature. Ironically, De vulgari was in Latin, as was De monarchia (On Monarchy; c. 1313), an examination of Dante's political views. By far the greatest of his works, however, was the Divine Comedy, which he began in 1308 and completed just before his death thirteen years later.
The Divine Comedy
The term "divine" is a reference to God, an abiding presence throughout the narrative. As for the "comedy" part, it is not a comedy in the traditional sense; rather, the term refers to the fact that the story, told in a series of 100 "chap-
Ters" called cantos, has a happy ending. Dante placed the events of the Divine Comedy at Easter Weekend 1300, when he was—as he wrote in the opening lines of Canto I—"Midway upon the journey of our life" (thirty-five years old).
This fifteenth-century illustration from the manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy shows Virgil and Dante with the Condemned Souls in Eternal Ice. Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation.
The Divine Comedy depicts Dante's journey into the depths of the Inferno or Hell, guided by the departed soul of the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B. C.). At the end of the Inferno, he is forced to leave Virgil behind as he travels into Purgatory, a place of punishment for people working out their salvation and earning their way into Heaven or Paradise. In these two sections, his guide is Beatrice.
The Divine Comedy is not meant to be understood as a literal story; rather, it is an allegory or symbolic tale. It concerns such spiritual matters as faith, revelation, and eternity; it also addresses the political issues of Dante's time. Clearly, however, there is something eternal and universal in the Divine Comedy, and this helps to explain the continued appreciation for this work.
In 1373, more than half a century after Dante died, Florence—the city that had once rejected him—honored his memory by commissioning Petrarch (PEE-trark; 1304-1374) to deliver a series of lectures on the Divine Comedy. Since that time, Dante has been in and out of favor, depending on the attitudes of the era; but overall his reputation continues to grow with the passage of time.
World History
