6 Inferno 12–16
CHAPTER 6
Inferno 12–16
From Canto 12 to Canto 16 we are still in the middle region of Hell. We are in the area of violence, or as Dante also calls it, of bestiality, between the area of incontinence, the subject of the last few chapters, and that of malice. What I want to draw your attention to first is the fact that Dante’s presiding symbols in this area are all hybrid figures: the Minotaur and the Centaurs in Canto 12; the Harpies, the filthy, foul monsters with the faces of women devouring the foliage and the trees, in Canto 13; and there are other emblems of doubleness as well in this part of the Inferno.
What is the importance of these figures? They are Neoplatonic images understood to signify the doubleness of human beings, our capacity to join within ourselves both the human and the bestial. In Neoplatonic thinking, the whole idea is that human beings are copular or neutral entities who have the potential of this doubleness within them. We can become fully rational or we can descend into bestiality. Our position in the ladder of being is one of utter indeterminacy. In the twelfth century, this is not the view most commonly held, however. Rather, it is still believed that there are creatures forever fixed who contain within themselves these dual impulses and natures simultaneously. Dante, though, seems to be aware that these symbols do not completely characterize what human beings truly are, that we can redeem ourselves, we can free ourselves from a certain state, or we can plunge into the opposite state. For Dante there’s a difference between the symbols and actual human beings.
In Canto 12, we see where Dante places tyrants. It’s really (and the irony is overt) a canto without outstanding and overwhelming characters. There are no great personalities here. Dante does name many of the tyrants past and present: Dionysius of Syracuse, Alexander, the Ezzolino of his own time in Padua, and so on. These are clear figures of tyranny, but he places them next to educators like Chiron. This is a slightly ironic move because it comes straight after Dante’s exemplary representation of Virgil’s own teaching in Canto 11. Here now a reversal occurs: over and against the exemplariness of Virgil’s teaching, as he usually does in the economy of the poem, Dante takes on the other perspective, that which he views now as the tyranny of teaching, that is to say, a sort of teaching that does not allow freedom, the freedom that the presiding figures of this canto also seem to deny: these creatures who are forever man and beast. Dante claims that teaching has to allow the freedom to move, either in the direction of rationality or in the opposite direction. This is the substance of Canto 12.
And now we come to Canto 13, which is one of the most remarkable cantos of Inferno. It’s the canto of the suicides, and Dante encounters here a very well-known poet of the middle part of the thirteenth century named Pier delle Vigne. Throughout the canto, Dante puns on both parts of that name. The soul thinks of himself as a figure of Peter, one who holds the two keys of the kingdom, the keys of power, but there is also the last name, delle Vigne, meaning “of the vineyards.” We are going to witness the metamorphosis of a human being into a vegetable, a plant. He is one of the souls who have been punished for their sins of violence against the self in the story of the suicides that unfolds in this canto.
The canto begins in “a wood which was not marked by any path.” Here, there seem to be no directions at all, almost as if Dante were revisiting Canto 1 of Inferno. We find the same idea of a sense of loss of self, adumbrating what suicide may also be at some level: a loss of some idea of one’s own being, of what one is or should be. Then Dante shifts to a description of the natural landscape, the world of nature; he highlights a peculiar stylistic move and I want to emphasize this style, this figuration of style. First of all, he uses a series of antitheses, but also negative anaphoras: “No green leaves, but of dusky hue; no smooth boughs, but gnarled and warped,” antithetical but at the same time, with the repetition of this “no,” anaphoric. “No fruits were there, but thorns with poison. These wild beasts that hate tilled lands between Cecina and Corneto do not have thickets so rough or dense.”1 There is a technical term for the rhetoric Dante deploys in his description of this place; it’s called privatio, which simply means a privation. It’s a means of emphasizing that there’s nothing positive in the scene, but it’s also a way of representing, not in terms of positive substances, but in terms of what is missing in the landscape, what should be there rather than what is there. It involves repeatedly taking away from any substantial description of the landscape, making us think about how the world might be, rather than how it is.
Who inhabits this barren land? “Here [are] the foul Harpies”—hybrid figures “who drove the Trojans from the Strophades with dismal announcement of future ill; they have broad wings, and human necks and faces, feet with claws, and their great bellies are feathered; they make lament on the strange trees.”2 We are in a world of negation and privation, a world of monstrosities. What is happening to human beings here? The whole scene recasts an important episode in book 3 of The Aeneid and dramatizes a major confrontation between Dante and Virgil about some of these issues. What is a metamorphosis? What is nature? What is the place of human beings within nature? Dante and Virgil think in sharply different ways about these concerns.
The scene that Dante is recalling is the scene in book 3 of The Aeneid where Polydorus, a cousin of Aeneas, has been killed. Aeneas arrives in Thracia, which is Asia Minor, and he thinks that this must be the place that the gods have assigned to him, and he does that which he knows has to be done, wherever and whenever one wants to build a city. He has to consecrate the ground by building an altar and by purifying the ground through fire. As he tries to do this, he’s plucking a bough and he hears a mysterious voice. He shudders, he’s scared, and the voice comes again. It’s Polydorus, his cousin, in the form of a talking tree, who tells the story that he has been killed because of sacrileges that have been committed. The consecration, Virgil wants us to believe, cannot be carried out because a sacrilege has occurred: the killing of Polydorus on account of the gold that he carried. Polydorus simply asks that a proper burial be given to him so that he can descend peacefully into Hades. Aeneas complies and leaves that place in the knowledge that it is not the place assigned to him after all. He cannot found a city on the place of such an atrocious crime.
The good master, Virgil, the creator of that scene, encourages Dante to study his surroundings: “Before you enter farther, know that you are in the second ring, and shall be, until you come to the horrible sand. Look well, therefore, and you shall see things that would make my words incredible.”3 In a sense, this is the reason why Virgil is the authority and why he is guiding Dante through this infernal landscape. He has seen, imaginatively at least, some of the things that Dante is experiencing, and what Dante will see, the reality of it all, will exceed Virgil’s own abilities to tell of it. Virgil is adopting a stance of humility on the part of the teacher. Therefore, we get a mild correction of the claims about teaching in Canto 12.
Dante begins to describe his experience in this part of Hell, saying, “I heard wailings uttered on every side, and saw no one who made them; wherefore, all bewildered, I stopped.” And then we get another conceit, to which we shall return: “I believe that he believed that I believed.” We call it amplification, a way of playing with one verb but also inferring what the belief of the other would be. It’s a descent into the boundaries of one’s own mind, a way in which Dante dramatizes the fact that there’s no real conversation going on between him and Virgil at this moment. We find ourselves within the loneliness of Dante’s own thoughts. “I believe that he believed that I believed,” he writes, “that all those voices from amid the trunks came from people who were hidden from us. Therefore the master said, ‘If you break off a little branch from one of these plants, the thoughts you have will all be cut short.’ Then I stretched my hand a little forward and plucked a twig from a great thornbush, and its stub cried.” This is nearly identical to the way that book 3 of The Aeneid begins, so Virgil is forced to intervene in a scene much like the one he created: “If he, O wounded spirit, had been able to believe before . . . what he had never seen save in my verses”—The Aeneid—“he would not have stretched forth his hand against you, but the incredible thing made me prompt him to a deed that grieves me. But tell him who you were, so that by way of some amends he may refresh your fame in the world above, whither it is allowed him to return.”4 Virgil is ironic here, suggesting a revival of fame in a place where there is no possibility of revival, where the natural world is not capable of behaving naturally, where there is no real growth, no real change. A shadow of unnaturalness is cast over the scene.
In a sense, we already get the confrontation between Virgil and Dante in these lines: “if he had been able to believe before what he had never seen save in my verses.” It is as if Dante wants to test the truth value of what he had read in his guide’s text. He had read the scene in The Aeneid, and he finds out that what he witnesses is entirely different from Virgil’s account. In a way he is really drawing our attention to the act of reading. How do we read? What do we believe when we read the story? When we read a story we yield, in many ways, to the story. We want the story that we read to read us as much as we want to read it. We want the story to explain us to ourselves, to hold a mirror up to us to see who we are, but Dante is implying the need to violate the letter of The Aeneid. Whatever Virgil described exceeded credibility, and Dante must test the reality of that scene.
The trunk responds to Virgil with a captatio benevolentiae: “You so allure me with your sweet words.”5 It’s a great rhetorical trick. Whenever people speak to you in public, or even privately, they can engage in this way of capturing your benevolence by telling a story, by implying something about their modesty. With “allure,” the tree suggests that Virgil’s rhetorical powers are extremely effective. We are dealing with rhetoric, first of all, with style, and with the language of the exchange. It is as if the suicide has a lot to do with this characteristic of language.
Then this soul begins to tell its tale: “You so allure me with your sweet words that I cannot keep silent; and may it not burden you that I am enticed to talk a little. I am he who held both the keys of Frederick’s heart, and turned them, locking and unlocking, so softly that from his secrets I kept almost every one.”6 Here is the aforementioned pun on Peter; it’s as if he were a St. Peter who holds the two keys to the kingdom of Frederick’s heart. All the language of belief, of faith, that has been going around in the previous lines of the canto seems to be gravitating around the figure of Frederick, the emperor who is a kind of god of the city, because that’s what his name means. In Italian, you say Federico, which contains the idea of faith within it, as if all faith, all beliefs, have to converge and go toward this emperor of Sicily.
Pier delle Vigne, instead, was the chancellor of the empire, and he conceived the first state university in Europe, the University of Naples, because Frederick wanted a university that would prepare lawyers, diplomats, people who could go on state missions and write papers for the state. And it would not be one of the schools in the vein of the universities that were under the aegis of the canon lawyers or the theologians. This, then, was the first lay secular school in Europe. Pier delle Vigne was a poet, and he also compiled the so-called institutes of justice for the kingdom, all of which are inspired by the language of moderation, the idealistic language of order, and the natural law that could be used to organize the state. The reality clearly is that, by his suicide, an act that violates the fundamental premise of natural law, Pier delle Vigne shows that he doesn’t believe in what he claims to be the principle underlying the legal organization of the state, namely, natural law. Finally, he is the secretary of the emperor, a role that becomes crucial throughout the Renaissance. He’s a counselor, but secretary comes from the Latin for “to secrete.” He’s the figure who distills—secretes—that which the emperor keeps hidden in his heart. Through this distillation, he also knows what has to be shared and what has to be kept concealed from all others. Quite a figure of prestige, he views himself as, and he was, a strict collaborator of the emperor.
So, that’s who the man was, but what does Pier delle Vigne say about his time in Federico’s employ? He says, “So faithful was I to the glorious office that for it I lost both sleep and life.” Now the question of fidelity in how we read the text, how we believe what we read, is brought into a sort of refracted loyalty as faithfulness to the emperor. The cause of Pier delle Vigne’s tragic downfall and suicide is going to be compared to a harlot, the personification of envy, the sin that Aquinas, for one, views as the worst possible sin because it is really very close to hatred in the sense that it has nothing positive about it. Almost all sins have some positivity to them. If you are a glutton, it’s because that piece of cake, there’s something about it that lures you to it. If you are proud, it’s because you really have some sense of your own excellence. It’s not so much that you look at yourself as stretching the hand toward the divinity, the pride of Lucifer. The real sin is that you kick around those individuals whom you perceive as below you. So, all sins have some kind of positivity except for one, envy, because envy only likes nothing. It’s not jealousy. When somebody can’t stand the idea that the other guy is happy, that’s envy. Jealousy is the fear of losing. Now the court, this microcosm of political order and idealism, has been poisoned by what Pier delle Vigne’s class envies, “the harlot that never turned her whorish eyes.”7
Pier delle Vigne is aware of the tragic nature of his downfall, of his fate as tragic: “My mind, in scornful temper, thinking by dying to escape from scorn, made me unjust against my just self.”8 Once again through the style of repetitions—anaphora—Pier delle Vigne constitutes himself into a closed circuit, and the doubling of language reflects the self-babbling. When you read the sentence: “My mind . . . made me unjust against my just self,” the obvious question that I think we should ask is: how many selves are there in him? How many figures are there in this one Pier delle Vigne?
The text that best glosses this scene appears in book 1 of St. Augustine’s City of God, where Augustine is telling the story of Rome, the end of the period of the monarchy, and the rape of Lucretia. Augustine is fierce about the fact that she commits suicide as a result of the guilt and shame that she experiences after Brutus violates her. And Augustine asks how she dares to take her own life, because here is the chaste Lucretia who is embarrassed about the unchaste Lucretia, and this is a sin of false transcendence. She believes that she does not coincide fully with who she is, so that she has to double herself. She has to see herself as different from what she is. She can do justice against herself. The doubling of Pier delle Vigne is a similar sin of false transcendence, inasmuch as suicide is playing God to oneself and punishing oneself for wrongs that the suicide perceives in himself or herself. This parallels the doubleness that Dante renders through his style in this scene.
The story of Pier delle Vigne exemplifies or dramatizes the story of the tragic experience of suicide: “By the new roots of this tree I swear to you that I never broke faith with my lord, who was so worthy of honor. And if one of you returns to the world, let him comfort my memory which still lies prostrate from the blow that envy gave it.”9 Dante here provides a precise theological account of suicide, considered from an Augustinian point of view. Of course, Lucretia herself can be found in Limbo, and Cato, another famous suicide, will make his appearance in Canto 1 of Purgatory, so Dante is making some crucial decisions and distinctions in his depiction of suicide. Dante knows well that the phenomenology of various acts is vast and cannot ever be reduced to one common element.
In another memorable canto, Canto 15, we encounter another man associated with the world of education, Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, a translator into the vernacular who adapted and commented upon Cicero’s rhetorical works, and a teacher of the Florentines. He stands for the great values of the rhetorical humanistic, or Ciceronian, tradition. At one point he was sent on an embassy to France, and while he was gone, his political party and he were banned from Florence. He eventually returned to his city, but he’s a figure that Dante takes as a model. Effectively, it’s the teaching of Brunetto that guides him in the initial phase of his political concerns, though other intellectual experiences will later intervene and radically change Dante’s thinking. Some extraordinary encounters that he had with theologians and philosophers in Florence gave him a completely different view from the one that Brunetto Latini instilled in him.
But what happens between the two of them in the text? We are once again in the area of violence, this time violence against nature, and Brunetto Latini is condemned to this area for the sin of sodomy. There is no evidence at all from any other sources that he committed such an act. And Dante also has a different understanding of sodomy (which appears as a form of violence against nature), and is more clearly understood when he comes to Purgatory. At any rate, though, that’s not quite the stated reason for Brunetto’s appearance in this particular region of the infernal topography.
The focus of the canto is once again the natural world: “Now one of the hard margins bears us on, and the vapor from the stream overshades, so that it shelters the water and the banks from fire.” This natural world is one of sheer chaos and violence. Dante continues this description with a comparison to the Netherlands, so called because the surface of the land there is lower than that of the water, leading to the need for dikes in order to protect the land from the violence of the water: “As the Flemings between Wissant and Bruges, fearing the tide that rushes in on them, make the bulwark to drive back the sea; and as the Paduans do along the Brenta, to protect their towns and castles before Carentana feels the heat; in like fashion were these banks made, except that the builder, whoever he was, made them neither so high nor so thick.”10 So, the natural world can hardly be contained. The natural world is always going to overwhelm all efforts to impede its violence.
Then Dante gives us the background of this encounter: “We were already so far removed from the wood that I should not have seen where it was had I turned to look back, when we met a troop of souls that were coming alongside the bank, and each looked at us as men look at one another under a new moon at dusk.” Dante seems to create a strange world of the night. “And they knit their brows at us as the old tailor does at the eye of his needle.” What an extraordinary image. Dante will use something like this, not quite the same image, but an image of a tailor when he has to describe his vision of Paradise. It is as if the humblest experience in the city, with all its artists, is the only thing he can think about as he’s approaching the most sublime of experiences, in Canto 33 of Paradiso. The tailor is an artisan who, in order to fit you properly, has to have your measurements, an idea of who you are. Notice the immediate familiarity in Dante’s encounter with Brunetto: “Eyed thus by that company, I was recognized by one who took me by the hem, and cried, ‘What a marvel!’ And I, when he reached out his arm to me, fixed my eyes on his scorched face, so that the baked features did not prevent my knowing him, and reaching down my hand toward his face, I answered, ‘Are you here, ser Brunetto?’”11 This is a scene of recognition. In Inferno there are more scenes of recognition than first encounters. It is as if recognizing means knowing people that you thought you knew and giving them a kind of understanding—recognizing in that broader sense as well.
Brunetto responds, “O my son, let it not displease you if Brunetto Latini turns back a little with you, and lets the train go on.” Twice Brunetto will refer to Dante as “my son.” It’s acknowledged in this affiliation that they share a kind of familiarity that goes beyond any form of discipleship. Dante will resist that affectionate solicitation, that familiarity, but he will nearly always refer to him as the image of a father. Dante answers in kind, “I beg it of you with all my heart . . . and if you wish me to sit with you, I will, if it please him there with whom I go.”12 Dante means Virgil but leaves him unmentioned, as if concealing from Brunetto Latini, pro forma to be sure, the shifted loyalty from one teacher to another. But in any case, the two decide to converse.
The spatial configuration of the scene is particularly significant. The disciple is above, the teacher below, so that the disciple has to bow in order to be able to speak to the teacher, which could be a sign of his reverence for the authority of the master, but at the same time, it indicates that the hierarchy between them goes in both directions. The hierarchy has been completely altered from the days when they were in the streets of Florence.
Brunetto’s first question is quite telling: “What chance or destiny,” he asks, “brings you down here before your last day, and who is this that shows the way?” Chance? Destiny? Brunetto has no understanding of the trajectory of Dante’s life and adventure. This is the beginning of a series of misunderstandings between the teacher and the disciple. Two different value systems are being deployed, and they are going to collide with each other. Brunetto speaks like a true humanist, a man who espouses Ciceronian ethics, for whom the world is indeed one of chance encounters, of an overarching and even providential destiny that takes us one way or the other, with nothing providential in the Christian sense of the concept about any of it. Dante responds with a pithy summary of his experience in the past few hours, “There above, in the bright life . . . I went astray in a valley, before my age was at the full. Only yesterday morning I turned my back on it. He appeared to me, as I was returning into it, and by this path he leads me home.”13 These are extraordinary words because what home means for the politically minded, Florence-centered, sense of existence of Brunetto, is not the idea of what home means for Dante. For Dante, home is the place of the soul, and the place where the soul is at its most distended. For Brunetto, home can only be the city of Florence. One has a political frame of reference, the other one has a theological frame of reference, and the two are coming up against each other.
Next Brunetto offers some astrological advice that continues his emphasis on chance and destiny: “If you follow your star you cannot fail of a glorious port.”14 Again Dante is dramatizing the radical ambiguity of words that seem to be so bland, like “glorious”: what “glorious” means to a humanist is not what it means to a theologically minded thinker. In theology, one thinks of nature, grace, and glory. Dante begins Canto 1 of Paradiso with the glory of Him who moves all things, while glory for Brunetto means happy endings and fame. From Brunetto’s point of view, the source of Dante’s whole spiritual crisis, the loss of self he experiences, can only be political. Brunetto makes the incredible mistake of believing that Dante’s experience is a precise replica of his own. He lost the city, and now this is exactly what he thinks is happening to the pilgrim as well.
He prophesies Dante’s exile: “Old report in the world calls them blind; it is a people avaricious, envious and proud. Your fortune holds for you such honor that the one party and the other shall be ravenous against you.” In other words, the two parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, will both turn against him. And Dante answers, “If my prayer were all fulfilled, . . . you would not yet be banished from human nature, for in my memory is fixed, and now saddens my heart, the dear, kind, paternal image of you, when in the world hour by hour you taught me how man makes himself eternal; and how much I hold it in gratitude it behooves me, while I live, to declare it in my speech. That which you tell me of my course I write, and keep with a text to be glossed by a lady who will know how, if I reach her.”15
Clearly, he is making an allusion to Beatrice, but it will not be Beatrice who will make another prophecy of Dante’s exile; rather, it will be Dante’s grandfather Cacciaguida who does so, in the symmetrically connected cantos 15 and 16 of Paradiso. Thus the distinction between this fictional figure of a self-claimed spiritual father, Brunetto, and the heroic grandfather, Cacciaguida, offers a marked antithesis. In the acknowledgment that Dante gives of Brunetto’s teaching there is also a little bit of a critique, a little distance that Dante establishes between himself and Brunetto. For the true poetry of Dante’s experience is that man does not make himself immortal. Of course, when a bold stroke works, maybe there are many other forms of achieving some degree of immortality: for example, one can make children, build a fortune, erect a monument to oneself to become immortal (at least in a provisional sense), but from Dante’s point of view, immortality is not manmade. It can only come about through the salvation of the soul.
Therefore, the scene offers us a sense of a difference between these two men, and misunderstandings will, in fact, be the defining trait of this encounter. But there is still the matter of Brunetto’s sodomy that we ought to try to understand. First, it’s linked to violence, for we’re in the world of violence, and so Dante wants to know who the other sinners are. Brunetto says that they’re all clerks and great and famous scholars. And he mentions them all, “in the world defiled by one same sin,” Priscian, a famous grammarian, Francesco d’Accorso, “such scurf.” But then he comes to an abrupt conclusion: “I would say more, but my going and my speech must not be longer, for I see yonder a new smoke rising from the sand: people are coming with whom I must not be. Let my Treasure, in which I yet live, be commended to you, and I ask no more.” He’s not quite done, for like a true teacher, he gives a bibliography at the end of his discourse. He says that Dante should go and read his book, not just anybody’s book, but specifically his Trésor, or Treasure, “in which I yet live.” Finally, though, he departs: “He turned back, and seemed like one of those who run for the green cloth in the field at Verona”—a ludic image, an image of a race which is run in Verona—“and of them seemed he who wins, not he who loses.”16 He leaves with the illusion that he is a precursor, as it were. He is in a race, and he seems to be ahead of them, but really he’s behind them by one lap. That’s the telling image with which Dante ends this encounter.
So, Brunetto recommends this Trea sure, which is a French text that he wrote. It’s one of the most important encyclopedias in the vernacular, and yet it is lacking in comparison to the poetic encyclopedia that we are reading. Dante is in the middle of a learning process, so his text is an encyclopedia with a path toward learning, unlike the abstract one that Brunetto had written. Furthermore, Brunetto wrote in French. In one of his philosophical reflections, Dante explains that we are all bound by natural affection for our own language, and because of that claim, there are those who have put forth the interpretation that Brunetto is in this part of Hell for violating the natural bonds of affection that human beings have with regard to their own natural language, to their “mother tongue,” as it were. Regardless, Brunetto’s bibliography undeniably dramatizes an incredible self-delusion on his part. Here he is, dead. Here he is, circling around under the reign of fire, and he still thinks he lives in his own text. He mistakes for reality the symbolic life that he has within a text. The language of images, the language of seeming that pervades this canto, has to be understood in terms of this confusion on the part of Brunetto. The bigger mistake that Brunetto makes here, though, is to believe that Dante’s own life is a replica of his own: read my text because whatever it is that you have to know, it’s already available to you in my own book. He never faces the difference between Dante and himself. He refuses to see that Dante’s life can have its own development and its own destiny, a destiny which he cannot understand at all. Canto 15 ends with this idea, therefore, that the sin of sodomy can also be seen as a confusion between the real and the imaginary, a way of drawing the real world into one of fictions and imaginations.
As we approach Canto 16, we are reaching the end of the intermediate area, the realm of violence. I presume that some of you may be surprised that these sins fall in the middle of Hell’s schema. Our culture seems to view violence in all of its forms and expressions as the worst possible crime. For Dante, instead, the worst crimes are the crimes of fraud, and he is about to encounter a strange figure, a monster who will grant him access to the even lower depths, the area of fraud.
This is the figure of Geryon, first seen at the end of Canto 16. Dante will climb onto Geryon, Virgil will sit behind him, and they will descend. It’s an experience of wonder in Hell, an infernal sublime. Dante writes, “To that truth which has the face of a lie a man should always close his lips so far as he can”—that’s fraud, a mixture of truth and deception, which can also be seen as what literature does. He continues, “For through no fault of his it brings reproach; but here I cannot be silent; and, reader, I swear to you by the strains of this Comedy . . . that I saw, through that thick and murky air, come swimming upwards a figure amazing to every steadfast heart, even as he returns who sometimes goes to down to loose the anchor that is caught on a reef or something else hidden in the sea, who stretches upward his arms and draws in his feet.”17 Here, then, we find the second address to the reader; you may remember that we saw one in Canto 9, and I explained it as part of Dante’s strategy of authority. He wants us to trust his account of the approach of Geryon.
What I want to point out here are several metaphors. First, this is an aerial journey; Geryon is flapping his wings and going through the murky air, but Dante describes it as if it were a journey by sea. The metaphor he uses is swimming: “I saw, through that thick and murky air, come swimming upwards a figure,” and he does this because for Dante it doesn’t matter how you are traveling. All journeys are journeys to the same destination. All journeys are really journeys to the absolute. Here, Geryon seems only to play a ministerial function, serving Dante and his guide, but at the same time Dante acknowledges that there is still a plan, something of the absolute that he has to see. The second metaphor derives from the rotatory movement of Geryon through the air, for as I have previously noted, the circle and the spiral constitute all motion in Inferno. Finally, we have this idea of swearing by Dante’s own text, which is thus given the value of a sacred object. Ultimately, then, we began this section of Hell with a violation of The Aeneid, and now Dante is fully opposing The Aeneid. He replaces it with a new text: the Comedy that we are currently reading.