Passage meaning. Dante's inferno, canto 1.

[Zaphod]

And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound
Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.
He shall not feed on either earth or pelf,
But upon wisdom, and on love and virtue;
'Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be;
Of that low Italy shall he be the saviour,
On whose account the maid Camilla died,
Euryalus, Turnus, Nisus, of their wounds;
Through every city shall he hunt her down,
Until he shall have driven her back to Hell,

I can't quite understand this part of Dante's Inferno. My best guess is that Virgil is referring to Aeneas. Bad guess, but the best I have :patriot: .
Can someone explain this to me? Thanks in advance.

[Wilde woman]

Yes, the latter part of the passage is a direct reference to the Aeneid. But the most interesting question is: who is this Greyhound? I've heard all sorts of theories on that one.

[mal4mac]

Mandelbaum just makes the vague suggestion that the greyhound is some future movement or person that will defeat the she-wolf of avarice. (Others suggest he may be referring to a hoped for good Pope. - keep on waiting :)

Mandelbaum says that Camilla and Nisus are two Italic tribal leaders, and the other two are Trojan soliders. All were killed during Aeneas' campaign in Latium. Their names occur in the last books of Virgil's Aenied and symbolise the bloodshed which, providentially, led to the founding of Rome.

Mandelbaum translates "Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be;" as "his place of birth shall be between two felts" - where "felt" is a simple clothing material and refers, as pointed out in the notes, metaphorically to the temporal, earthly domain and the spiritual domain. The notes provide a longer explanation of this, and explains the geographical sense of "Twixt Feltro and Feltro "...

I'd have been lost without Mandelbaum's notes in the Everyman edition, which are uniformly superb!

[Il Dante]

Some scholars believe that Dante left the image of the greyhound intentionally ambiguous, that there are several possible meanings (spiritual and political), and that there really isn't any way to know for sure what he meant.

Many scholars agree that this is one of the most enigmatic passages from the entire Commedia, and Dante probably made it that way on purpose.

[Wilde woman]

mal4mac, I love Mandelbaum's translations and notes too!

Whether the Greyhound is Christ or Cangrande della Scala or Henry VII is fascinating, but ultimately - I think - unanswerable. What I'm more interested is why did Dante choose the image of a greyhound? Is it simply because a greyhound would pursue (and ultimately kill) wolves, lions, and leopards in a formal hunt?