ABSTRACT
Dante Alighieri, known to history quite simply by his given name, Dante, was the native son of an expanding urban center, Florence, at the time when it had begun to assert its long-lasting cultural hegemony in Europe of the late Middle Ages. Dante's poem itself bespeaks his own awareness of a new energy and variety in life, at the same time that it shows the destructive powers of time. Already in Dante, time has acquired implements of destruction against which humankind must take strong measures of response. If the Inferno is monochromatic, peopled by souls who are driven, obsessed, and single-minded, Dante's Purgatorio is the realm of time, where change is possible and where hope revives. Dante's poem is another in the many repeated attempts within Western culture to bring the intensely realized world of time and history into some integration and coordination with the unchanging, the mythic, and the eternal.
