Boccaccio's testimony. The range of Dante's study and acquirement would
be encyclopedic in any age, but at that time it was literally possible to
master the _omne scibile_, and he seems to have accomplished it. How
lofty his theory of science was, is plain from this passage in the
_Convito_: "He is not to be called a true lover of wisdom (_filosofo_)
who loves it for the sake of gain, as do lawyers, physicians, and almost
all churchmen (_li religiosi_), who study, not in order to know, but to
acquire riches or advancement, and who would not persevere in study
should you give them what they desire to gain by it.... And it may be
said that (as true friendship between men consists in each wholly loving
the other) the true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom
every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and
allows no one of his thoughts to wander to other things."[17] The
_Convito_ gives us a glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle (whom
he calls the philosopher, the master) cited seventy-six times; Cicero,
eighteen; Albertus Magnus, seven; Boethius, six; Plato (at second-hand),
four; Aquinas, Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, Lucan, and Ovid, three
each; Virgil, Juvenal, Statius, Seneca, and Horace, twice each; and
Algazzali, Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and Homer (at
second-hand), once. Of Greek he seems to have understood little; of
Hebrew and Arabic, a few words. But it was not only in the closet and
from books that Dante received his education. He acquired, perhaps, the
better part of it in the streets of Florence, and later, in those
homeless wanderings which led him (as he says) wherever the Italian
tongue was spoken. His were the only open eyes of that century, and, as
nothing escaped them, so there is nothing that was not photographed upon
his sensitive brain, to be afterward fixed forever in the _Commedia_.
What Florence was during his youth and manhood, with its Guelphs and
Ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its
kaleidoscopic revolutions, "all parties loving liberty and doing their