translated into Italian the Rettorica and three Orations by Cicero. The Italian translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is often misattributed to Brunetto Latini: it is a work of Taddeo Alderotti instead. Publications The Divine Comedy Latini was Dante’s guardian after the death of his father. Early Dante commentators spoke of Brunetto as his teacher, as does Dante himself. Vittorio Imbriani took issue with that concept, saying Brunetto was far too busy a man to have been a mere teacher. Dante immortalized him in the Divine Comedy (see Inferno, XV. 22-87). It is also believed that there was an intellectual and affectionate bond between the elderly man and the young poet. It was perhaps Latini who induced Dante to read Cicero and Boethius, after the death of Beatrice. Many of the characters in Dante's Inferno are also mentioned in the legal and diplomatic documents Brunetto Latini wrote in Latin. There is a portrait of Latini in the Bargello in Florence, once reputed to be by Giotto, next but one to the side of Dante (between them is Corso Donati). In a wood engraving, Gustave Doré envisages the same scene from Inferno XV, 1861. Canto XV Dante places Latini within the third ring of the Seventh Circle, the Circle of the Violent against God, nature and art, with the blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers. Dante writes of the "clerks and great and famous scholars, defiled in the world by one and the same sin". Dante's treatment of Latini, however, is commendatory beyond almost any other figure in the 'Inferno'. He calls the poet a radiance among men and speaks with gratitude of that sweet image, gentle and paternal, / you were to me in the world when hour by hour / you taught me how man makes himself eternal. Dante addresses Latini with the respectful pronoun voi; Latini uses the informal tu, as perhaps was their custom when they spoke together in Florence. The portrait is drawn with love, pathos and a dignity that is more compelling given the squalor of the punishment. Latini asks first, humbly, if he may keep Dante company, letting his group run on. Dante offers to sit down with him but that would only increase Latini’s penalty; he and the other souls are doomed to keep moving aimlessly around the arena. Latini proceeds in obscure imagery to foretell Dante's future. The malicious ingrates who of old descended from