Chapter 6 surveys all of the dozen passages in which Pseudo-Hegesippus mentions King David within his narrative. This chapter shows how David is both a classical and a Christian construct within De Excidio and explores the many semantic and rhetorical functions that David performs within the narrative.

The second chapter explores diverse forms of mediation in pre-Christian civilisations, from the Israelite to the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian and Greek monarchies, and the symbolic meanings connected with the idea of ‘consecration without mediation’. Based on textual, epigraphic and iconographical evidence, it privileges the analysis of the royal investiture ceremony in Achaemenid and Sassanid Persia, since the practice of self-coronation decisively influenced subsequent periods, reaching Islamic and even contemporary Persia (including the self-coronations of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1926 and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1967) and expanding beyond its borders, in Byzantium and central Asia.The objective of this chapter is try to find proof of the growing presence of the investiture and coronation ceremony in the images and narrations that have been preserved from antiquity, such as cave reliefs, coins, murals and historical texts. A natural consequence of the consolidation of this ceremony among the monarchies of the ancient civilisations was the multiplication of the ritual forms in which it appeared, and the consequent images that preserved the ceremony or imagined it. These images necessarily imply, regardless of whether they had a ceremonial reality, the unequivocal message of consecration-without-mediation of the sovereign, a resistance to priestly mediation.

Dante explicitly associates himself with the sin of pride (Purg. xiii, 133–38), and scholars have emphasised, in particular, the temptation to pride in the composition of the Commedia itself. By contrast, Dante makes no such explicit association between himself and the sin of sloth. Sloth might seem a strange sin to ascribe to the poet whose magnum opus, he informs us, had made him for many years lean (Par. xxv, 3).The terrace of sloth, nonetheless, is privileged by Dante: structurally, it is at the literal centre of Purgatorio and thus of the poem as a whole; narratively, it is midway (nel mezzo del cammin) both through Purgatory (the fourth of seven terraces) and through the afterlife (the fourth day on the pilgrim’s seven-day journey); thematically, it includes the discourses on ordered and disordered love as the Christian principles of moral good and evil respectively. Moreover, the very first group of souls whom Dante encounters on his journey through Hell (the ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii, 35) are partly characterised by sloth, as are the ‘sad souls’ (tristi) who emit the ‘accidioso fumo’ of Inferno viii. Sloth dominates the moral colour of Ante-Purgatory (Purgatorio i–viii), a region invented by Dante and occupied specifically by those who delayed, albeit in different ways, their conversions to the path of Christian holiness and penitence. Likewise, sloth is associated with the very first group of blessed souls whom Dante-character encounters in Paradise, the ‘slowest sphere’ of the Moon (Par. iii, 30). In each of the three canticles, therefore, the first group of souls is characterised – at least in part – by the vice of sloth. Moreover, after his Christian conversion, sloth was the dominant sin – we learn in Purgatory – of the poet Statius, one of the important autobiographical ‘cyphers’ for Dante in the Commedia. Most significantly, there is good reason to believe, as I shall argue, that sloth is Dante-character’s first sin in the dark wood of Inferno i, and a key to his dramatic confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.