Dante's a weird one. Forgotten in his own time, Inferno was found concealed IN A JAR when a cathedral was being remodeled about a hundred years after his death or so.
Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
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Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? Italy has a lot of historical continuity. If you go to Rome, the manhole covers read SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). IIRC the government of Florence still works from the buildings of the Uffizi.
>Italy has a lot of historical continuity. It doesn't. Italy was one of the most ravaged parts of the Western Roman Empire, it has less historical continuity than Spain or France. Only Britain does worse. >If you go to Rome, the manhole covers read SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). That's propaganda. The link between the Roman state and Italy was something pushed by the fascists and it stayed behind in the popular m…
> Italy was one of the most ravaged parts of the Western Roman Empire, it has less historical continuity than Spain or France. Only Britain does worse.
Well, Erdogan would probably be okay with pardoning Dante.
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#73Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#74Is this necessary? This article from 2008 seems to indicate that his sentence had been rescinded. https://web.archive.org/web/20111230060902/http://www.telegr... Also, it looks like he was convicted under the Holy Roman Empire, which doesn't really exist anymore. I'm not sure who there is to overturn his conviction.
Holy Roman Empire is not a factor - Dante was found guilty and exiled under the laws of the Republic of Florence. Ultimately Italy has jurisdiction as the successor state of Florence -> Tuscany -> Sardinia -> Italy after 1861...
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which also implies everyone is a descendant of Dante.
Not necessarily. If you are descended from historically insular communities (like Ashkenazi Jews, for example) or geographically distant communities (take Native Americans for a clear example) it is unlikely you have Dante as a direct ancestor. You are right that in the infinite time limit, assuming nonzero mixing, either everybody or nobody will be Dante’s descendant.
Ashkenazi Jews are an insular community but I don’t think they’re insular enough not to have Dante among their ancestors. They have Polish/Slavic mitochondrial DNA among many other lines, and the explosion of that population was still in progress in Dante’s time. It’s entirely possible there’s no trace of Dante’s actual DNA because an ancestry share that small can just disappear by chance. But if he has living descendants he has living Ashkenazi descendants.
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we do a lot of things in our society for their symbolic value to formalize moral values and to demonstrate that we recognize past wrongs. In that regard I don't see anything wrong with this undertaking.
That's not what I asked though. I'm not asking whether or not Dante should have his conviction overturned. Though on that note, I'm not convinced it should be, because it seems his crimes were for actual corruption while in public office, and waging war against the government. But no, I'm pointing out that it seems like his conviction was already overturned, so what exactly is the complaint?
Under current laws, city council of Florence does not have extraordinary power of pardon and clemency - President of the Republic of Italy does.
The declaration you linked is symbolic only - and the Italian sources [0] indicate the plan this time is to look if the case can be re-tried in light of some new evidence.
[0] https://www.corriere.it/cronache/21_gennaio_31/contro-mio-av...
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#771302 to today, that's 36 generations. 2 to the 36th means his descendants today have 1 / 70,000,000,000 of his genetic contribution. I'd say they don't have legal standing.
Since DNA is inherited as discrete molecules, it's most likely he has 0% identical-by-descent. (Except if he's a direct male-line descendant.)
But I don't think genetics has anything to say about legal standing.
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#781302 to today, that's 36 generations. 2 to the 36th means his descendants today have 1 / 70,000,000,000 of his genetic contribution. I'd say they don't have legal standing.
Since DNA is inherited as discrete molecules, it's most likely he has 0% identical-by-descent. (Except if he's a direct male-line descendant.) But I don't think genetics has anything to say about legal standing.
> Except if he's a direct male-line descendant
Would direct male descendants have more common DNA? Why is that?
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean they did this: https://apnews.com/article/9b6f6f5ba5be2408ff0502c7fb8abd5b Seems silly. Should they overturn Jesus' conviction too? At a certain point the conviction is part of their story.
This causes some interesting questions about continuity of accountability for governments. I wonder how long you can hold a government accountable for the actions of its previous administrations. How many years can you go back? How many iterations of a state can you hold accountable too?
If we had a statute of limitations like this, treaties with other countries would cease to hold all meaning.
Humanity has already walked down this path before: The kings of England would routinely invalidate treaties made by predecessors.
Let’s not retread our steps, yes? The world is much calmer and safer for it.
Re: Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
A direct paternal-line descendent of Dante, which Sperello Alighieri might very well be, would essentially share a copy of Dante's Y-DNA, which is about 2% of the human genome. This is comparable to something between 2nd cousin (3.13%) and 3rd cousin (1.5%).
Would you care to elaborate? You're talking about the Y of the XY chromosomes?
In general you can say that on average a child has 25% of their genes from each grandparent. But in the case of the sex chromosomes, we know that a male has 50% of their paternal grandfather's sex chromosomes and 0% of their paternal grandmother's sex chromosomes (and vice versa for a female); the Y chromosome is passed on whole or not at all (you can't get half of it from your mother).