en known by his Christian rather than
surname (partly owing to the Italian predilection for Christian names,
and partly to the unsettled state of patronymics in his time), was the
son of a lawyer of good family in Florence, and was born in that city on
the 14th of May 1265 (sixty-three years before the birth of Chaucer).
The stock is said to have been of Roman origin, of the race of the
Frangipani; but the only certain trace of it is to Cacciaguida, a
Florentine cavalier of the house of the Elisei, who died in the
Crusades. Dante gives an account of him in his _Paradiso_.[2]
Cacciaguida married a lady of the Alighieri family of the Valdipado;
and, giving the name to one of his children, they subsequently retained
it as a patronymic in preference to their own. It would appear, from the
same poem, not only that the Alighieri were the more important house,
but that some blot had darkened the scutcheon of the Elisei; perhaps
their having been poor, and transplanted (as he seems to imply) from
some disreputable district. Perhaps they were known to have been of
ignoble origin; for, in the course of one of his most philosophical
treatises, he bursts into an extraordinary ebullition of ferocity
against such as adduce a knowledge of that kind as an argument against a
family's acquired nobility; affirming that such brutal stuff should be
answered not with words, but with the dagger.[3]

The Elisei, however, must have been of some standing; for Macchiavelli,
in his History of Florence, mentions them in his list of the early
Guelph and Ghibelline parties, where the side which they take is
different from that of the poet's immediate progenitors.[4] The arms of
the Alighieri (probably occasioned by the change in that name, for it
was previously written Aldighieri) are interesting on account of their
poetical and aspiring character. They are a golden wing on a field
azure.[5]

It is generally supposed that the name Dante is an abbreviation of
Durante; but this is not certain, though the poet had a nephew so
called. Dante is the name he goes by in the gravest records, in
law-proceedings, in his epitaph, in the mention of him put by himself
into the mouth of a blessed spirit. Boccaccio intimates that he was
christened Dante, and derives the name from the ablative case of _dans_
(giving)--a probable etymology, especially for a Christian appellation.
As an abbreviation of Durante, it would correspond in familiarity with
the Ben of Ben J