Note 606 — Chapter III
Reading edition
Trollope notes (History of the Commonwealth of Florence, i, 31) how Dante and Villani caught at the theory of an intermixture of alien blood as an explanation of the strifes which in Florence, as elsewhere, grew out of the primordial and universal passions of men in an expanding society. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 73) endorses the old theory without asking how civil strifes came about in the cities of early Greece and in those of the Netherlands.