spent a good deal of time seeking patrons for himself, James Joyce, Eliot and a string of little magazines and small presses, the role of the patron was a crucial cultural question, and Malatesta is the first in a line of ruler-patrons to appear in The Cantos. Canto XII consists of three moral tales on the subject of profit. The first and third of these treat of the creation of profit ex nihilo by exploiting the money supply, comparing this activity with "unnatural" fertility. The central parable contrasts this with wealth-creation based on the creation of useful goods. Canto XIII then introduces Confucius, or Kung, who is presented as the embodiment of the ideal of social order based on ethics. This section of The Cantos concludes with a vision of hell. Cantos XIV and XV use the convention of the Divine Comedy to present Pound/Dante moving through a hell populated by bankers, newspaper editors, hack writers and other 'perverters of language' and the social order. In Canto XV, Plotinus takes the role of guide played by Virgil in Dante's poem. In Canto XVI, Pound emerges from Hell and into an earthly paradise where he sees some of the personages encountered in earlier cantos. The poem then moves to recollections of World War I, and of Pound's writer and artist friends who fought in it. These include Richard Aldington, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and Fernand Léger, whose war memories the poem includes a passage from (in French). Finally, there is a transcript of Lincoln Steffens' account of the Russian Revolution. These two events, the war and revolution, mark a decisive break with the historic past, including the early modernist period when these writers and artists formed a more-or-less coherent movement. XVII–XXX XVII–XXVII published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris. Cantos I–XXX published in 1930 in A Draft of XXX Cantos by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press. Originally, Pound conceived of Cantos XVII–XXVII as a group that would follow the first volume by starting with the Renaissance and ending with the Russian Revolution. He then added a further three cantos and the whole eventually appeared as A Draft of XXX Cantos in an edition of 200 copies. The major locus of these cantos is the city of Venice. Canto XVII opens with the words "So that", echoing the end of Canto I,