Fortunately he had been absent and had stayed away; but from early in 1302 his voluntary absence became exile under penalty of being burned alive.

We know even less of the remaining 19 years except that they were spent largely with a series of patrons in various courts of Italy. The exile had no funds, no reputation as yet, no powerful friends. He stayed at various times with the Scala family, then with the Malaspinas; tradition has it that he studied at Paris, and even at Oxford. As time passed and his reputation grew, his way became easier and his last years were spent in relative comfort at Ravenna as the honored guest of Guido Novello da Polenta, nephew of Francesca da Rimini. On the way back from a diplomatic mission to Venice he fell ill and died soon after his return. In Paradise XVII he left one of the most poignant descriptions of life in exile ever written: “Thou shalt prove how salty tastes another’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another’s stairs.”

That Dante had ample reason to feel that the political chaos of his day was a prime menace to man’s pursuit of happiness should be quite apparent. It should also be understandable that he used the Comedy to protest this evil and to suggest a remedy. His analysis and conclusions took years of reading and meditation, during which he denounced all existing parties, Whites, Blacks, Guelfs, and Ghibellines, in order to “make a party by himself.” As his compatriot Machiavelli was to do two hundred years later and from very similar motives, he sought his material in the literature of Ancient Rome, with the difference that the later scholar had the advantage of the humanistic revival and the free inquiry of the Renaissance, whereas Dante was a pioneer circumscribed by scholasticism. He had already begun his study of ancient philosophy a few years after the Vita Nuova and before his political disaster. In his next work, the Convivio or Banquet, he tells how difficult he had found it: the Latin he had learned proved quite different from that of Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy. Cicero’s urbane and complex style was much harder and, more confusing still, his whole mode of thought, his concepts, viewpoints, allusions were as if from a different world. The young explorer from medieval Christendom went doggedly on from one work to another which he had seen mentioned, without adequate teachers, courses, reference works, or indeed, the works themselves, except as he could beg or borrow the manuscripts. Eventually he mastered and assimilated all the learning available in Latin or Latin translations, from the Timaeus of Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Statius and Lucan through St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church, to Averröes, St. Thomas and the great mystics. But the wastefulness, the needless difficulties, the groping aroused his indignation, as injustice always did. He had been “educated” but how much had it helped him in the pursuit of real learning? He knew that there were others, too, who longed for such knowledge but lacked his extraordinary mental equipment (he allowed himself no false modesty) and thus failed to win through. What was lacking were real schools with competent teachers and high standards, available to all who had the talent and the desire to learn. But what agency would set them up and maintain them? Not the Church; for, though it was no longer ignorant of philosophy, the Church was suspicious of it and not inclined to grant it that primacy in the conduct of human affairs which Dante assigned to it. This was another problem, to be studied along with that of political instability and strife. In the meantime he, Dante Alighieri, could contribute the fruits of his own efforts in the form of an encyclopaedia or compendium of knowledge which would at the same time earn for him badly needed prestige. Not only would it gather together the knowledge which he had found scattered piecemeal in many works and in different forms, it would make that knowledge accessible by use of the vernacular instead of Latin. Such a thing was revolutionary in the first decade of the fourteenth century and called for an explanation which Dante gave in the form of an impassioned defense of what we call Italian. He concluded with the following prophetic words, referring to the new language as

“... a new light, a new sun, which shall rise whereas the accustomed one (Latin) shall set, and which shall give light to those who are in darkness because the accustomed sun does not give them light.”

The Banquet was to consist of fifteen sections: an introduction and fourteen of Dante’s longer philosophical lyrics, each followed by an expository prose passage. Only four sections were completed. Among the possible reasons for its abandonment, two in particular seem valid. First, the work is a failure in organization and style, typically medieval in its discursive rambling. Second, it was written to exalt philosophy, “most noble daughter of the Emperor of the Universe,” and thus constituted a perilous deviation for a medieval Christian. It is at least possible that this frame of mind was included in the “Dark Wood” in which the Comedy begins, and it almost certainly inspired the repeated warnings against over-dependence on philosophy and human wisdom which the poem contains.

Evidence that Dante had already begun to formulate his solution to the evils of his day may be found in the Banquet, but it is in the De Monarchia, last of his more important minor works, that we find the full statement of his theories. This is the best organized and most complete of his treatises.