In the tenth canto of the Paradiso, Dante's Thomas Aquinas lists for the benefit of the pilgrim the souls who make up the first circle of the Heaven of the Sun. He describes the fifth of those souls, or "lights", in the following terms {Par. 10.109-111}:

"La quinta luce, ch'e' tra noi piu' bella, spira di tale amor, che tutto 'l mondo la' giu' ne gola di saper novella".

This soul has always been identified as Solomon, primarily because his eternal destiny was such a contentious issue. Augustine, for example, argued that Solomon's immorality and idolatry in his later years would have excluded him from salvation, whereas Jerome was more inclined towards leniency {for a detailed discussion of how Solomon was viewed in the Middle Ages, see now M. Bose, "From Exegesis to Appropriation: The Medieval Solomon", in Medium Aevum 65.2 (1996), 187-210}. Such debate accords well with Dante's description here of the whole world desiring to know his fate. It would appear from the number of times Solomon is quoted in the Convivio that Dante himself had a particular sympathy for the king of Israel; it is not surprising, therefore, to detect a note of criticism in his reference to man's greed for news of him. This impression is confirmed within the space of three cantos, as Aquinas again castigates donna Berta and ser Martino for thinking they could see into God's counsel and for making pronouncements on matters of salvation {Par. 13.130-142} - precisely the activity in which the world is engaged with regard to Solomon.

The term with which the poet expresses his disapproval here is of at least as much interest as the disapproval itself, however. "Gola", according to most manuscripts, is a verb rather than a noun. Whilst some manuscripts have the substantive form {"na gola > n'ha gola > ne ha gola"}, Petrocchi in his critical edition {La Commedia, secondo l'antica vulgata, 4 vols (Milan: Mondadori 1966-67, "Societa Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale"), 4. 167} describes it as a "lectio facilior", and Scartazzini, in his commentary {see DDP, ad loc; also the other commentaries discussed here, unless otherwise stated}, claims it is a correction to the original text. Casini and Barbi suggest that Dante may have invented the verb in the same way as he coins so many in the Commedia, by adding the suffix "-are" to a pre-existent noun {cf. F. Tollemache, "denominali", in ED 6.487-488}. The use of a term relating to hunger would certainly be consonant with the many other metaphors from this semantic field found in the Heaven of the Sun, especially in the tenth canto. Grabher even suggests that Dante's use of this term strengthens the traditional metaphorical idea of "hungering" or "thirsting" for knowledge.

But as these commentators also point out, another verb, "goliare", existed in Old Italian. Generally, the verb is used in the Sicilian love lyric to refer to the poet's (usually sexual) desire for his lady; and as the lyric moved north to Tuscany, the -i- was sometimes dropped, to produce "golare". Confirmation that Dante is using this verb rather than one of his own invention comes from the fact that even some Tuscan manuscripts of the Commedia have "goli'a"; whilst Petrocchi quite rightly excludes this reading on the grounds of scansion {ibid.; cf. also Enrico Malato, "golare", in ED 3.249}, he does list "negolia" as one of the variants. Moreover, the Florentine poet Monte Andrea also uses precisely the same combination of "golare" and "sapere" found in the tenth canto of the Paradiso. Recounting his woes in the area of love to an unnamed 'maestro', Monte beseeches him to help find a way out of his misery {"Omo disvariato tengno", in Le rime, ed. F. F. Minetti (Florence: Crusca 1979), p. 148}:

Dunqua che vale - l'omo per se' solo? Ed io seguire non volglio cotale, Pero' a tale - maestro mene dolo; Che mi traiate d'uno eror mortale, C'Amor e' tale: - altro saver non golo.

Dante's use of the verb "golare", then, is likely to be a Tuscanized form of the more common Sicilian verb, a form that was already current in his day rather than his own creation. But the origin of the Sicilian verb is itself unclear. The compilers of one historical dictionary claim it comes from an Occitan verb golejar {Dizionario etimologico italiano, ed. by Carlo Battisti and Giovanni Alessio (Florence: Olschki 1950-57, 5 vols), 3.1841}. The only two instances of this verb in Occitan are both by Italian hands, however, one of them Sordello's. The troubadour uses the verb in precisely the same way as the Sicilian poets, to signify ardent desire for his beloved, and his editor, Boni, is in little doubt that the verb represents one of Sordello's Italianisms, rather than an authentically Occitan term {Sordello 33, "Dompna valen", lines 13-14: "qar, per ma fe, tan vos am e golei/cum las clartas des oil[z] ab cui eu vei"; cf. Marco Boni, Sordello, Le poesie (Bologna: Antiquaria Palmaverde, 1954), p. 182, and introd. p. clxxvii, n. 246}. It is highly probable that the Sicilian verb was formed from the Latin noun "gula" in the same way that Dante creates so many of his verbs; on this occasion, however, he was not the first.

Instead, he has taken a verb typical of the love-lyric, where it refers to the poet's desire for his lady, and used it to represent the desire of human beings for knowledge which is beyond their remit. In so doing he conflates the cognitive and affective modes of knowing, expressing the desire for "scientia" in the language of "sapientia" - a clear example of what Corti calls "interdiscorsivita'", the form of intertextuality in which Pertile locates the originality of Dante's use of metaphor {see Maria Corti, La felicita' mentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), p. 69, and Percorsi dell'invenzione (Turin: Einaudi 1993), p. 71; Lino Pertile, "'La punta del disio': storia di una metafora dantesca", in Lectura Dantis 7 (1990), 3-28, especially 11}. This deliberate choice on the poet's part has been missed by most of the poem's English translators: some {Fletcher, Musa} maintain the alimentary metaphor, translating "gola" as "hunger"; others {Haselfoot, Shaw, Bickersteth} also keep the notion of excess, by using "greedy"; some {Mackenzie; Sayers-Reynolds} change the metaphor completely to "thirst"; and some remove all trace of metaphor by renderings such as "looks eagerly", "desires vehemently", and "is eager for" {in order: Anderson, Sisson, Ennis}. These last examples are closest to the precise connotations which "golare" and "goliare" had in the lyric tradition.

But equally significant is the fact that, as Grabher had pointed out, Dante's selection of a less common term from one semantic field (hunger and thirst), which had traditionally been exploited as a source of metaphorical terms for a particular referent (the desire to understand), succeeds in renewing the metaphor. This procedure forms part of a general and extensive strategy by the poet, who throughout the Paradiso seeks to renew traditional and dead metaphor by various techniques. There is nothing original about describing the desire to understand in terms of hunger and thirst, nor indeed in terms more appropriate to sexual desire, as the real Thomas Aquinas, for one, had demonstrated {see, for example, Summa theologiae 2a-2ae, q. 166 art. 2}. But Dante, by selecting such a rare term with such specific connotations, creates a new version of the metaphor.