Abstract
This chapter features the personification of thirteenth-century noteworthy pride and destructive arrogance, Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline warrior who both conquered Florence and singlehandedly shielded the city from utter annihilation. Farinata embodies admirable virtue and formidable vice, partisan patriotism, and zealous hedonism, as well as familial loyalty and divisive individualism. We also meet Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, the father of Dante’s onetime best friend, Guido Cavalcanti. By closely examining and evaluating Dante’s character sketches of the two protagonists, this chapter explores the relationship between good and evil; the nuances of Epicurean hedonism; the structure of community and its tensions with individualism and narrow tribalism; and Dante’s understanding of salutary love, filtered through Platonic philosophy, Cicero’s pagan argument for the immortality of the human soul, and Christian theology.
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