Canto 34

Canto 34

The commedia is the product of an age of belief. what are we to make of it in a modern secular society, where many of us are unbelievers? We can agree that it is a work of starthng originality and imaginative power; that it is a work of intricate and satisfying formal complexity and perfection, in its overall structure and its moment-by-moment metrical progress; that its author had the linguistic equivalent of perfect pitch.

But what of its content? In particular, the content of the Inferno, where the subject is sin and damnation? We live in a world where in our daily lives we are encouraged not to be judgmental. To modern sensibilities the notion of sin and damnation, minutely dissected and ordered in a strict hierarchy, may seem alien in its moral certainties and censoriousness.

But human behaviour, and how we think about it and judge it, is a subject of enduring fascination. We all spend a great deal of time talking about the behaviour of other people: family members, friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians. Human frailty, vanity, ambition and greed are daily on display in our newspapers and on our television screens. We surely do all agree that some behaviour is evil, some people are wicked. A sense of justice, and our own humanity, require us to acknowledge it.

The Inferno encourages us to engage with the reality of human bad behaviour in all its complexities. Dante is a master psychologist. His insight into human character and motivation, the capacity for self-justification and self-deception, is worthy of a psychoanalyst. It is the human interest of the Inferno that keeps us reading, rather than the theological niceties, or the gruesome inventiveness of the punishments.

The plot of the Inferno is predetermined. We go ever deeper, ever darker, as we circle downwards into the pit. But with unfailing fertility of invention, Dante keeps us interested. The variety never flags, whether it is the infernal landscape, the dramatis personae, the artistic structuring or the linguistic verve.

One thing that instantly commands our attention is that the journey Dante describes is not presented as a dream or vision, as so often happens in medieval narrative poems. (Think of the Roman de la Rose, that runaway bestseller of medieval literature, or of Piers Plowman.) Dante describes what he claims he saw with his own eyes. All this really happened. Naive readers took him at his word. There is a revealing story reported by Boccaccio in his Life of Dante. One day in Verona Dante was walking past some women sitting in a doorway. One of them says to the others: “That’s the man who goes down to hell, and brings back news about the people down there.” “Yes,” replies one of her companions, “I can see that: look at his dark complexion and frizzy hair, from the smoke down there.” Boccaccio tells us that Dante smiled to himself as he walked on.

Another thing that commands our attention is that the protagonist of the poem is not a generic Christian or Everyman. He is a real person, with all a real person’s strong identifying features: his name, his clothes, his accent, his character, his friendships, his interests. These often spark off the encounters with the souls of the dead. His own passionate enthusiasms—politics and poetry, the state of the world and the challenge of writing a poem about it—run like a twin thread through the story and generate some of its most memorable episodes. It is a moment of acute personal crisis in his own life that sets the story in motion.

Two major themes are worked out in parallel across the poem: personal salvation, and the salvation of society. The two are inextricably linked, the one inconceivable without the other. Only in a society at peace can human beings achieve their full potential and find happiness. The turbulent, war-torn state of the late medieval world, and the grandiose, aggressive, greedy, vengeful behaviour of its leaders, whether secular or religious, make that impossible. That explains why so many of the sinners given prominence in the poem are public figures, collectively responsible for the state of the world.

Dante’s overriding concern is justice and the way human conduct affects society. He shows sin for what it is: damaging, destructive, often self-destructive, self-justifying, self-serving. And he teaches us that in spite of the horrifying physicality of many of the punishments he depicts, the true punishment in hell is the state of mind of the sinner. “Hell is oneself,” as T. S. Eliot observed. “Hell is a state, not a place.” We will learn as we go along about the sinners’ state of mind, and the nuances of their mental outlook.

Rare flashes of natural beauty in our real world relieve the gloom as we descend: fireflies down along the valley at dusk in Tuscany, moist, cool streams that flow down in the Casentino, little flowers that open in the morning sun, a peasant who gets up and looks out in dismay at the fields that seem to be covered in snow. T. S. Eliot again: “Dante makes you see things.” The moral message is conveyed through intensely visual images.

There are important aspects of the poem that are hardly mentioned in this “essential” Inferno: allegory, for example. But talking about allegory in an introduction to the Commedia would be like teaching English poetry beginning with hermeneutics and critical theory. Other themes barely touched on include the invocations, the literary sources, the significance of numbers, the Neoplatonic strand in Dante’s thinking about the cosmos. These are themes readers can explore further down the line, when tackling the whole poem. What they will find here are those episodes and even single lines which will draw any lover of poetry into an imagined world of unparalleled intellectual, emotional, imaginative and, yes, spiritual richness.

The opening lines of the commedia are instantly memorable. The poet does not announce his theme, or call on the muses for help. Nor is there a narrative preamble by way of introduction. We are plunged straight into a story recounted in the first person in the past tense (“I found myself in a dark wood . . . ”). But the past tense of action is immediately interwoven with the present tense of memory and the future tense of poetic resolve. We are aware from the outset of the difficulties posed by the telling of this tale.

The story recounted in canto 1 is an adventure story: danger, fear, rescue, hope. Dante, whose name we will not learn for many thousands of lines, found himself lost and afraid in a dark wood. What exactly the wood was is hard to say. Thinking about it now is terrifying. His predicament seems fraught with moral and religious implications. This is a landscape we do not recognise, whose geographical location is not explained. Where exactly are we? How do we get our bearings?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

3ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa duraesta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

6che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,

9dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.

Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai, tant’ era pien di sonno a quel punto

12che la verace via abbandonai.

In the middle of the journey of our life,

I found myself in a dark wood,

3for the straight path was lost.

Ah, how hard a thing it is to say what it was,

that wild, harsh, dense wood;

6just the thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter that death is little more so;

but to tell of the good that I found there,

9I will speak of the other things I saw.

I can’t really say how I entered it,

I was so full of sleep at the point

12at which I abandoned the true path.

Dante does not know how he came to be in the wood, but he was “full of sleep” at the point where he went astray. Mere distraction, or deeper moral failings? He reaches the bottom of a hill, sees its upper slopes lit by the sun—a way out of danger. But his progress is barred by three animals: first a leopard, then a lion, and finally, most terrifying of all, a ravening she-wolf, which drives him back into the sunless wood. A mysterious figure appears. Dante calls out for help: Miserere di me (“have pity on me”).

The scene which now unfolds is a first instance of the entirely joyous surprises that Dante the author springs on his readers. The figure is a shade, not a living man—so this is to be, in modern terms, a ghost story. He is, of all things, a poet; and not just any poet, but Virgil, author of the Aeneid, who in his epic masterpiece told the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome.

Rispuosemi: «Non omo, omo già fui,e li parenti miei furon lombardi,

69mantoani per patrïa ambedui.

Nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi,e vissi a Roma sotto ’l buono Augusto

72nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi.

Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia,

75poi che ’l superbo Ilión fu combusto».

He replied: “I am not a man; I was once a man,

and my parents were from Lombardy,

69both of them born in Mantua.

I was born sub Iulio,* although it was late,

and I lived in Rome under worthy Augustus,

72at the time of the false and lying gods.

* i.e. in the time of Julius Caesar

I was a poet, and I sang of that just

son of Anchises who came from Troy,

75when proud Ilium went up in flames.”

Dante is taken aback; then, momentarily forgetful of the danger he faces, he launches into a passionate declaration of gratitude and affection for Virgil’s work and its influence on his own.

«Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonteche spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?»,

81rispuos’ io lui con vergognosa fronte.

«O de li altri poeti onore e lume vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore

84che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore;tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi

87lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore».

“Are you that Virgil and that wellspring

from which there flows such a broad river of speech?”

81I answered him with forehead bowed in shame.

“O honour and guiding light of other poets,

may my long study and great love avail me,

84that has made me read your book so closely.

You are my master and my author;

you are the only one from whom I have taken

87the fine style which has brought me honour.”

Much later in the poem, Virgil will imply that Dante knows the Aeneid by heart.

We are just over halfway through the opening canto. Let’s pause to consider what we have established so far.

We are in the middle of the journey of life. Dante is thirty-five years old, halfway through the allotted biblical span of three score years and ten. But it is our life as well as his (nostra vita, l. 1); we are implicated in the story. This double focus is present from the beginning. Dante stands for all of us, as a representative of humanity, an everyman figure. But unlike Christian, the hero of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, he is not a generic human being. He is a person with his own strongly marked character and interests. Not the least of these is his passion for poetry.

Many readers will pick up on the biblical echo in the mezzo del cammin (Psalms 90:10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten”). Most will be unaware that the dark wood echoes an image in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, where a wood signifies the sinful world, full of snares and dangers (immensa silva plena insidiarum et periculorum). Very few will be aware of the Aristotelian definition of happiness, filtered through the scholastic commentary of Thomas Aquinas, which is echoed in the description of the sunlit hill. But none of that matters. The symbolic landscape is powerfully evocative: darkness, lostness, danger, fear; light, warmth, elevation, joy. It seems miraculous that the weight of learning and reading that underpins these lines, the richness of reference and allusion, has been distilled into poetry so simple and apparently artless.

There are questions we can’t give precise answers to, but we do not need to. What exactly do the three animals signify? Probably the three sins of lust, pride and greed, though not all commentators agree. In what sense has Dante taken his style from Virgil? His earlier works show no trace of such a stylistic debt, though his general indebtedness to Virgil for the poem he is now writing will become ever clearer as he continues to write it. In Book VI of the Aeneid Virgil had recorded how Aeneas visited the underworld and talked to the shades of the dead.

It is of course astonishing that the figure who comes to Dante’s rescue is a pagan, and a poet, rather than the saint or angel or theologian we might have expected. The Christian context is inescapably established by Dante’s first word, miserere, echoing Psalm 50 (“Have mercy upon me”)—though there is also a Virgilian echo here, since Aeneas entering the underworld addresses the Sybil with just this word (Aeneid VI, 117). Virgil is a guide whose steadfastness and knowledge are invaluable in the short term; his limitations will be revealed only gradually as the story progresses. The contrast between the pagan world of classical antiquity and the Christian world of medieval Europe comes sharply into focus when he refers to the dèi falsi e bugiardi (“the false and lying gods,” l. 72) of the time when he was alive. And his words, as well as reminding us of the story of Aeneas and Anchises, anchor the narrative in historical time: nacqui sub Iulio (“I was born under Julius Caesar,” l. 70). The key role of Rome and the Roman Empire in human history—obliquely touched on here, like the first hint of a musical leitmotif in an overture which will be developed later in an opera—will become a major theme.

Virgil explains that Dante cannot proceed directly to the sunlit hill but must follow another path to escape from the wood. He makes a mysterious prophecy: a hound will chase off the she-wolf, whose rapacity and greed are so damaging to the world, and will restore Italy to health. The broader social implications of Dante’s predicament are now inescapable: not just personal moral failings, then, but a corrupt society. The canto closes as Virgil says he will be Dante’s guide per loco etterno (“through an eternal place”), not this time-bound world, but a world beyond time. There he will see the tormented sinners in hell, and the souls in purgatory, who accept their suffering gladly; a different guide, a woman, will then lead him to the blessed in paradise. Here, at the end of the canto, the theme is at last announced. Dante is to visit the three realms of the afterlife and meet the souls of the dead.

This opening canto offers many delights. There is the graphic immediacy of the animals, which seem like stylised miniatures from a medieval manuscript; the evocative exactness yet fluidity of the time frame (the midpoint of life; the sense of renewal and hope associated with a morning in spring); the richness yet accessibility of the figurative language. Much is established through direct speech. The essentially dramatic character of the poem is already apparent. Words spoken by the protagonist and those he meets, in their encounters and interactions, will be at the heart of the story. Dialogue makes up some 50 percent of the poem.

But Dante is not yet writing at full power. He is feeling his way into a new metre, which he has just invented; he is feeling his way into a new language, using vernacular Italian in a way it has never been used before. We are reading a work of starthng originality, not just in its imaginative conception, but in its formal and linguistic execution.

For now, the canto ends:

Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro.

Then he moved off, and I kept behind him.

The journey has begun.

But in fact it hasn’t quite begun. canto 2 is another introductory canto, which fills in the backstory to Dante’s rescue. It voices his doubts about his fitness to undertake this journey. It articulates the new resolve with which he finally sets out. A moment of radical self-doubt is overcome when he learns that his journey is willed in heaven.

The canto opens with what we will come to recognise as characteristic brilliance. Time has moved on; we do not know what has happened in the interim (much in the opening two cantos of the poem is mysterious, almost dreamlike). It is now dusk, the light is fading. All living creatures cease their labours; only Dante must prepare to do battle with the rigours of the journey and the anguish of his own emotions.

Lo giorno se n’andava, e l’aere brunotoglieva li animai che sono in terra

3da le fatiche loro; e io sol uno

m’apparecchiava a sostener la guerrasì del cammino e sì de la pietate,

6che ritrarrà la mente che non erra.

Day was departing, and the dusky air

was taking the living creatures that are on earth

3away from their toils; and only I

was preparing myself to undergo the battle

both of the journey and of the pity,

6as memory, unerring, shall report.

Dante is troubled by doubts about his worthiness to visit the afterlife. Only two people in human history are known to have done so while still in their mortal bodies: Aeneas, the legendary pagan hero celebrated by Virgil, and Saint Paul, a founding father of the Christian faith. But, Dante says: Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono (“I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul”). This urgent, heartfelt line, resonant in its sudden directness, names these heroic precursors for the first time (hitherto they have been “son of Anchises,” “the chosen Vessel”). Dante is telling us, even as he appears to be denying it, that he is to be a new Aeneas, a new Saint Paul. But is he worthy? Neither he nor others think so: temo che la venuta non sia folle (“I fear the journey may be foolhardy”), he confesses to Virgil.

Virgil explains why he came to Dante’s rescue. A beautiful woman came down from heaven to ask him to intervene to save her friend. Looking down from heaven, Beatrice saw Dante’s plight. In a lovely line, she calls him l’amico mio, e non della ventura, meaning: “a true friend of mine, not a fair-weather friend” who is there only when things are going well. In a linked chain of female concern, played out in heaven, the Virgin Mary (not named) asked Lucy (Saint Lucy, protector of eyes, venerated by scholars and writers) to ask Beatrice to go to Dante’s aid, for he is in mortal danger. In a tantalising snippet of heavenly conversation Lucy asks Beatrice:

ché non soccorri quei che t’amò tanto,

105ch’uscì per te de la volgare schiera?

why don’t you help the man who so loved you,

105that because of you he stood out from the common herd?

Dante stood out from the crowd as a young man because of the love poems he wrote celebrating Beatrice. His status in the eyes of the world came from her. Now she has intervened to save him. The lost midlife traveller has a poetic past. This journey is willed in heaven.

Dante takes heart: Virgil’s account of the tre donne benedette (“three blessed ladies”) and their concern for his well-being has persuaded him. His spirits rise, like flowers opening in the morning sun.

Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo chinati e chiusi, poi che ’l sol li ’mbianca

129si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,

tal mi fec’ io di mia virtude stanca,

Just as little flowers bent and closed

by the night frost, when the sun shines on them,

129grow straight again, all open on their stems,

so did I, in my tired strength,

Dante now formally places himself under Virgil’s guidance: tu duca, tu segnore, e tu maestro (“you are my leader, my lord and my master”). Virgil moves off, Dante follows. Now the journey really does begin.

Two words used in this canto take us to the heart of the moral universe of the poem: pietate and folle. Does pietate mean pity, or something more troubled, closer to emotional turmoil? Many of the great episodes in hell will raise the problem of whether Dante feels pity for the damned, and, if he does so, whether that compassion calls into question the justice of their punishment. Does his emotional response undermine the moral order embodied in the poem’s structure? Or does it rather signal his own vulnerability, the danger of too great an empathy with certain sinners and certain kinds of sin?

Folle is a second key word in Dante’s moral lexicon. When does courage become foolhardiness, folle (“mad”)? Are the protagonist’s fears well founded or a sign of faintheartedness, a lack of courage? Conversely, can greatness be achieved without a high degree of ambitious self-belief, which might seem like madness (follia) to others? This delicate issue lies at the heart of Dante’s psychology and his belief in the use he must make of his talents.

The solemn inscription over the gate of hell announces three things to those who stand before it: where it leads to, the divine attributes of its maker; and its eternal character. Famously it tells those about to enter to abandon hope.

‘Per me si va ne la città dolente,per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

3per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;fecemi la divina podestate,

6la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose createse non etterne, e io etterno duro.

9Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’.

“Through me one goes into the city of woe,

through me one goes into eternal woe,

3through me one goes among the lost people.

Justice moved my maker on high;

divine power made me,

6and supreme wisdom and primal love.

Before me there were no created things

except for eternal ones, and I endure eternally.

9Abandon all hope, you who enter.”

Dante finds these words difficult (il senso lor m’è duro: “their meaning is hard for me”), but their meaning is not explained. The notion of justice lies at the heart of hell and the torments Dante is about to see, but it is not explored at this point in the poem. Virgil tells Dante he must put aside his fear. He takes Dante’s hand and leads him through the gate.

We are now inside, on the upper rim of hell itself (the vestibule, as it is sometimes called). The first impressions are of darkness and noise, weeping and wailing, a tumult of linguistic chaos (Diverse lingue, orribili favelle: “strange languages, horrible accents”). Dante weeps, overwhelmed. He asks who these people are. Virgil explains:

Questi non hanno speranza di morte,e la lor cieca vita è tanto bassa,

48che ’nvidïosi son d’ogne altra sorte.

Fama di loro il mondo esser non lassa;misericordia e giustizia li sdegna:

51non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.

They have no hope of death,

and their blind life is so abject

48that they are envious of every other fate.

The world allows no memory of their names;

pity and justice disdain them:

51let us not speak of them, but look and pass on.

The description, with its magnificently contemptuous final line, is of a category of the damned invented by Dante (it is not envisaged by traditional Christian theology, though there is a scriptural echo). They are those who make no moral commitment at all, but are purely opportunistic in their actions. Stinging wasps and horseflies now goad those who in life had been indifferent to moral issues. They are unworthy of being spoken about or remembered. With them are the angels who did not take sides for or against God when Lucifer rebelled.

Dante makes out shades running behind a swirling banner, enacting in death a parody of the commitment to a cause which they had failed to act out in life. Their number is vast: non averei creduto / che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta (“I would not have thought death had destroyed so many”)—a line famously echoed by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land in his description of the city clerks trooping over London Bridge from the railway station to their offices: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”

Dante does not name the sinners he recognises in the throng. Oblivion is their just reward. And we have a first genuine puzzle: vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui / che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto (“I saw and recognised the shade of the man who out of cowardice made the great refusal”). This is probably Pope Celestine V, the saintly hermit who was elected unwillingly to the papal throne in July 1294. Only five months later he abdicated, an event unprecedented in church history. His abdication led, in Dante’s eyes, to catastrophic political consequences for Italy and Europe. But the sinner, too contemptible to be named, could perhaps be Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands of Christ’s fate and left it to others to decide. We do not know for sure. The fierce energy of Dante’s engagement and contempt is palpable for a man who failed to fulfil the role required of him by history. (For the record, Celestine was beatified in Dante’s lifetime, and is still venerated by the inhabitants of his native Aquila in central Italy.)

Dante looks further, and sees people on the bank of a great river. An angry old man approaches on a boat, white-haired and wild-eyed, gesticulating and shouting. He is Caron dimonio (“Charon the demon”), the infernal boatman who ferries souls across the Acheron, the first of many infernal functionaries Dante borrowed from the Aeneid. The vitality and aggressiveness of this irascible old man, who taunts the shades and beats dawdlers with his oar, is striking. (By comparison, Virgil’s portrayal of him in Aeneid VI, 298–304 seems curiously static.) He yells to Dante to turn back; Virgil tells Charon that Dante’s journey is willed in heaven. The souls curse when they hear Charon’s words about their fate:

Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti,l’umana spezie e ’l loco e ’l tempo e ’l seme

105di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti.

They cursed God and their parents,

the human race, and the place and the time

105and the seed of their sowing and of their birth.

But they are nonetheless eager to embrace their destiny (a paradox not explored here), and they crowd towards the river bank.

Dante borrows Charon and the Acheron from the Aeneid, but it is not just for the dramatis personae and the geography of hell that he is indebted to Virgil. He also borrows images, like the one he uses to suggest the vast multitude of thronging souls on the bank of the river:

Come d’autunno si levan le fogliel’una appresso de l’altra, fin che ’l ramo

114vede a la terra tutte le sue spoglie,

similemente il mal seme d’Adamogittansi di quel lito ad una ad una,

117per cenni come augel per suo richiamo.

As the leaves in autumn fall

one after another, until the branch

114sees all its spoils on the ground,

in just this way the bad seed of Adam

throw themselves from that bank one by one,

117at his signals, like a falcon summoned by its master.

Così sen vanno su per l’onda bruna,e avanti che sien di là discese,

120anche di qua nuova schiera s’auna

Thus they go across the dark water,

and before they get off on the other side

120a new crowd is already gathering on this side.

Milton liked Dante’s description so much he used the image of the falling autumn leaves in Paradise Lost to describe the vast numbers of Satan’s forces as he marshals them for battle: “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa. . . . ” There is an earthquake, and Dante faints.

The whole canto after the initial inscription over the gate is extraordinarily animated. Dante is a dismayed observer, his senses assaulted by the linguistic confusion, as he confronts for the first time what damnation looks like and tries to understand what he is witnessing. But there are also delicate psychological touches in the interactions between Virgil and Dante, Virgil curbing Dante’s eager questioning, Dante abashed at Virgil’s rebuke. The canto is saturated in Virgilian echoes. It is full of quotable lines. Dante the poet is hitting his stride.

Dante echoes Virgil, and is in his turn echoed by Milton and Eliot. The network of allusions and echoes between one poet’s work and another creates a web of interconnections between poets across the ages. Recognising the echoes and allusions gives an added dimension, an additional source of pleasure for the reader, something to savour and explore.

A thunderclap awakens dante, who finds himself on the edge of a dark abyss. Mysteriously, he is now on the other side of the Acheron. We are never told how he got there. We are in the first circle of hell, called limbo, limbo being Italian for “edge” or “border.”

There is a striking contrast with the vestibule, a dramatic change of pace and mood. There are crowds of men, women and children here, but the only sound is of sighing. Virgil volunteers an explanation: these shades did not sin, but they were not baptised. Thus they are excluded forever from the vision of God: sanza speme vivemo in disio (“without hope we live in desire”). The inclusive first person plural indicates that Virgil is one of their number. They are the virtuous pagans, who led blameless lives before the coming of Christ; with them are unbaptised children. Virgil tells Dante of the harrowing of hell, when Christ liberated the patriarchs (Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, among others) and carried them up to heaven.

Virgil and Dante continue through the throng of spirits and soon come to a hemisphere of light, a place of special privilege for people of great renown. A voice hails Virgil in greeting: Onorate l’altissimo poeta (“honour the loftiest poet”). Four figures approach, a kind of welcoming committee. They are the great poets of antiquity: Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan.

Lo buon maestro cominciò a dire:«Mira colui con quella spada in mano,

87che vien dinanzi ai tre sì come sire:

quelli è Omero poeta sovrano;l’altro è Orazio satiro che vene;

90Ovidio è ’l terzo, e l’ultimo Lucano.

Però che ciascun meco si convenenel nome che sonò la voce sola,

93fannomi onore, e di ciò fanno bene».

Così vid’ i’ adunar la bella scoladi quel segnor de l’altissimo canto

96che sovra li altri com’ aquila vola.

My good master began to speak:

“Look at the one with that sword in his hand,

87who comes ahead of the other three as their lord:

that is Homer, supreme poet;

next comes Horace the satirist;

90Ovid is the third, and the last is Lucan.

Because each of them shares with me

the name the lone voice called out,*

93they do me honour, and they do well to do so.”

* i.e. poet

Thus I saw assemble the fine school

of that lord of the loftiest song

96who flies above the others like an eagle.

After talking among themselves, the poets turn to Dante.

Da ch’ebber ragionato insieme alquanto,volsersi a me con salutevol cenno,

99e ’l mio maestro sorrise di tanto;

When they had talked a little among themselves,

they turned to me with a sign of greeting,

99and my master smiled at that;

e più d’onore ancora assai mi fenno,ch’e’ sì mi fecer de la loro schiera,

102sì ch’io fui sesto tra cotanto senno.

and they did me an even greater honour,

for they made me one of their company,

102so that I was the sixth among such great wisdom.

The great poets of antiquity welcome Dante as one of their number. Dante, who knows Homer only by repute, is intimately familiar with the works of the other three, and they will all leave their mark on his poem. They walk on together, talking of things Dante does not report—a tantalising hint of shoptalk among the world’s great poets. There is a strong sense of being part of a privileged inner circle, a literary clique.

The poets come to a castle, encircled by seven walls, with seven gates. They enter, and find a grassy meadow, full of people of great authority in their bearing. Dante records his exaltation at having seen them. First are great figures from ancient history, among them Hector, Aeneas, Caesar. Quite unexpectedly, standing apart from the others on his own, is the medieval Muslim leader Saladin, the enemy of the Christians in the Third Crusade. Though Saladin was famed in his day for acts of generosity and courage, his presence here, recorded without comment, is a challenge to orthodox thinking. Muslims, in the medieval world view, are heretics; they belong lower down in hell. Then come the great philosophers and thinkers of the ancient world: Aristotle (so famous he doesn’t need to be named, he is ’l maestro di color che sanno: “the master of those who know”), Socrates, Plato, and many others. Once again there are two unexpected names, Avicenna and Averroes, the Muslim scholars whose translations and commentaries in Arabic transmitted the thought of ancient Greece to the medieval world. Dante bends the rules to honour Muslims of outstanding moral and intellectual stature. Then Virgil and Dante leave their companions and go back into the darkness.

Dante’s conviction that he is the equal of the great poets of antiquity is not asserted but enacted in canto 4: they greet him as their equal. (To his contemporaries, this might indeed have seemed folle, an act of deranged grandiosity.) In contrast with the widely held view that in the real world poets are marginal and ineffectual, a core belief for Dante is a sense of the dignity and importance of the profession of poet. The word onore (“honour”) and variants on it are used no fewer than six times in the thirty lines that describe the central encounter. Poetry and honour go hand in hand. And on the matter of poetic stature, Dante is about to show us that he is indeed the equal of the ancient poets he so reveres.

Dante and virgil descend into the second circle, where Minos (another infernal functionary borrowed from the Aeneid) stands at the entrance and assigns sinners to their place in hell. He, too, tries to repel Dante, and once again Virgil must explain that the journey is willed in heaven.

Dante sees sinners blown about on a fierce wind, and does not need Virgil to explain who they are. The appropriateness of the punishment to the sin is obvious. These are the carnal sinners, che la ragion sommettono al talento (“who submit reason to desire”). The wind which buffets them represents the powerful driving force and turbulence of their own unrestrained passion. Virgil points out famous lovers from history and legend (Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and many others). Dante is intensely moved by their fate: pietà mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito (“pity came upon me, and I was almost lost”). The word smarrito (“lost”) in the rhyme position, harking back to the via . . . smarrita of the opening lines of the poem, seems to sound a note of warning.

Dante’s attention is caught by a couple borne together on the wind. Virgil tells him to call to them in the name of their love; they respond by flying over to talk to him. The woman speaks (her companion is silent throughout). This is not a literary heroine from the remote past, like those named earlier (Cleopatra, Helen of Troy), but a local and a contemporary, someone indeed that Dante recognises, and whose scandalous story his early readers would have known well.

The exquisite courtesy and concern of her opening words to Dante is a classic example of captatio benevolentiae, the technique for winning the goodwill of your interlocutor by the manner in which you address them. It is a striking example of Dante’s ability to convey character directly through spoken words.

«O animal grazïoso e benignoche visitando vai per l’aere perso

90noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno,

se fosse amico il re de l’universo,noi pregheremmo lui de la tua pace,

93poi c’hai pietà del nostro mal perverso.

Di quel che udire e che parlar vi piace,noi udiremo e parleremo a voi,

96mentre che ’l vento, come fa, ci tace.

“O gracious and kindly living soul

who through the murky air goes visiting

90us who stained the world with blood,

if the king of the universe were our friend,

we would pray to him for your peace,

93since you have pity on our cruel plight.

What you wish to hear and speak about,

we will hear and speak about with you,

96while the wind is silent, as it is.

She launches into her story, told with great feeling and eloquence.

Siede la terra dove nata fuisu la marina dove ’l Po discende

99per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.

The city where I was born is situated

on the shore where the Po flows down

99to find peace with its tributaries.

Love, operating with its inexorable laws, was responsible for her tragic fate.

Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,prese costui de la bella persona

102che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,

105che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.

Amor condusse noi ad una morte.Caina attende chi a vita ci spense».

108Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.

Love, which quickly takes hold of the noble heart,

made him fall in love with the beautiful body

102which was taken from me; and the manner of it still offends me.

Love, which spares no one who is loved from loving in return,

made me fall in love with his pleasing form so strongly

105that, as you see, it still does not abandon me.

Love led us to one death.

Caina* awaits the man who took our lives.”

108These words were borne from them to us.

* a zone in the depths of hell reserved for traitors

She and her companion died for love. Their killer will end up lower down in hell with the traitors in Caina. Dante is so moved by her story that he bows his head, lost in thought. He is thinking about the deliciously sweet moments which led to their undoing.

Quand’ io intesi quell’ anime offense,china’ il viso, e tanto il tenni basso,

111fin che ’l poeta mi disse: «Che pense?».

Quando rispuosi, cominciai: «Oh lasso,quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio

114menò costoro al doloroso passo!».

When I heard those tortured souls,

I lowered my gaze and held it down so long

111that the poet said to me: “What are you thinking?”

When I replied, I began: “Oh alas,

how many sweet thoughts, how much desire

114led them to the painful pass.”

Then he turns to Francesca, addressing her by name (he evidently knows who she is). He tells her that her story moves him to tears, and that he wants to know how she and her companion became aware of their feelings for each other.

Poi mi rivolsi a loro e parla’ io,e cominciai: «Francesca, i tuoi martìri

117a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio.

Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri,a che e come concedette amore

120che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?».

Then I turned to them, and I spoke,

and I began: “Francesca, your suffering

117makes me sad and compassionate to the point of tears.

But tell me: at the time of sweet sighs,

by what signs and how did love allow you

120to become aware of your uncertain desires?”

Francesca’s reply is an unexpected (and complimentary) echo of the opening of Book II of the Aeneid, where Aeneas tells Dido of the fall of Troy. It reveals a side of her character that will prove to be important. She is a reader, and one who remembers what she reads.

E quella a me: «Nessun maggior doloreche ricordarsi del tempo felice

123ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.

And she replied: “There is no greater sorrow

than to remember the happy time

123in wretchedness; and your teacher knows that.

Ma s’a conoscer la prima radicedel nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,

126dirò come colui che piange e dice.

But if you have so great a desire

to know the first root of our love,

126I will speak as one who weeps and speaks.

So she tells the story. They were reading together one day about Lancelot, and when they reached the point in the story where Lancelot kissed Guinevere, her lover kissed her.

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per dilettodi Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;

129soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinsequella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;

132ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato risoesser basciato da cotanto amante,

135questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:

138quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante».

We were reading one day for pleasure

about Lancelot, how love bound him;

129we were alone and had no suspicion.

On several occasions that reading caused our eyes

to meet, and took the colour from our faces;

132but it was just one point that overcame us.

When we read that the longed-for smile

was kissed by such a great lover,

135this man, who will never be separated from me,

kissed my mouth all trembling.

The book was a Galahad,* and so was the man who wrote it;

138that day we read no further.”

* a go-between1

As she recounts this story, her companion weeps. Dante is so moved he faints dead away.

Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,l’altro piangëa; sì che di pietade

141io venni men così com’ io morisse.

E caddi come corpo morto cade.

While one spirit said this,

the other wept; so that out of pity

141I fainted as though I were dying.

And I fell as a dead body falls.

Here are some points to ponder. We are in the circle of lust, but this is not an example of unbridled lust or sex, let alone promiscuity or pornography. (The sin of lust was often depicted in contemporary paintings and sermons with graphic and salacious anatomical detail.) The tact and delicacy of the portrayal are remarkable. Dante has deliberately chosen a difficult case—one very close to home, and one where it is easy to empathise with a sinner as seductively eloquent as Francesca.

But her account is slanted and selective. The allusiveness of her reference to their bloody death—her husband caught them in flagrante, and killed them on the spot—glosses over the tabloid journalism aspect of the story, which was a contemporary scandal. Nor does she mention that her lover was her brother-in-law (we learn this only at the beginning of the next canto). Love between brother- and sister-in-law was considered incestuous in medieval theology, so doubly sinful.

Denial of her own responsibility for the action which led to her damnation is at the centre of her story as she tells it. She blames the laws of love, which operate with inexorable force; she blames the book they were reading, which provided a romantic template for their behaviour. Her telling of the story is intensely literary, summoning up a whole literary tradition in its two key aspects (Italian lyric poetry, inherited from the troubadours; French prose romance). It draws on and reaffirms with great persuasiveness the tenets of the courtly love ethos celebrated in those traditions. Francesca has internalised the value system her reading embodies. We are at the meeting point between literature and life.

But there is more to the encounter than this: Dante has skin in the game. In Francesca’s words there are verbal echoes of his own early love poems, with their insistence on the unique susceptibility of the noble-hearted to love. (“Love and the noble heart are one and the same thing,” he says in one sonnet, written perhaps twenty years earlier.) Francesca frames her story as unfolding in an emotional and moral universe endorsed and celebrated in his own poetry. Small wonder that he faints dead away when her story finishes.

There is no moralising here, nothing explicitly condemnatory, no analysis or explanation. There is just the stark fact of her damnation, set alongside the exquisite delicacy and accomplished rhetoric of her telling of the tale, which makes her blameless for her fate, thus by implication calling into question the justice of her punishment. Small wonder that many readers have considered her a heroine, and that over the centuries her fate has inspired poets, composers, painters and opera librettists. Nineteenth-century critics, seeking to explain why a damned soul should arouse such a strong response in readers, drew a distinction between Dante the moralist and Dante the man, arguing that the man’s natural human sympathies in this instance undermine the rigid moral order of the moralist’s otherworld. A more sophisticated version of this distinction is sometimes made between Dante the moralist and Dante the poet: on this view it is his creative energies that are at odds with his moralising intention, so that in spite of himself he has created in Francesca a sinner to whom it is impossible not to respond with sympathy and admiration. Dante is sometimes portrayed as a writer full of spite and rancour. His delicate, nuanced portrayal of Francesca and the moral quandary of her thought-provoking fate shows the absurdity of such a view.

When dante comes to, he finds himself in the third circle, the circle of gluttony. The sinners lie on the stinking earth, pelted by icy rain, hail and snow. Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed dog (another Virgilian custodian), tears at the prostrate sinners, who turn constantly to protect themselves from the icy downpour. Virgil throws earth into Cerberus’s jaws to appease him. Virgil and Dante walk on, trampling on the shadow bodies of the sinners, which look like people but have no solidity or substance: sovra lor vanità che par persona (“on their emptiness that seems like a real body”).

One sinner abruptly sits up and addresses Dante, asking if he recognises him. Dante doesn’t. The sinner identifies himself as Ciacco, a fellow citizen of Florence, the first of many Dante will meet on his journey through hell.

Florence has been called the sinister heroine of hell. More than thirty of her citizens will appear in Inferno. Dante’s deeply ambivalent feelings about his native city are one of the driving forces of the narrative. The encounter with Ciacco is the first to touch on the degraded state of Florence, torn apart by rival factions batthng for political control. What the future holds in store for the city is an abiding source of concern for Dante. Here too for the first time the theme of political exile is touched on, though there is no hint as yet that this will be Dante’s fate.

Dante has a question for Ciacco: Why has the “divided” city which is their birthplace come to be in the ruinous state it is in, and what will become of it?

Io li rispuosi: «Ciacco, il tuo affannomi pesa sì, ch’a lagrimar mi ’nvita;

60ma dimmi, se tu sai, a che verranno

li cittadin de la città partita;s’alcun v’è giusto; e dimmi la cagione

63per che l’ha tanta discordia assalita».

I replied: “Ciacco, your distress

weighs on me so heavily that it moves me to tears;

60but tell me, if you know, what will become of

the citizens of the divided city;

is there any just man there; and tell me the reason

63why so much discord has assailed it.”

Ciacco’s answer is deeply dispiriting. Florence will be torn apart by internecine strife between the factions that seek political power in the city. First one party, then the other, will be exiled. The city’s troubled state can be directly attributed to its citizens’ moral failings.

E quelli a me: «Dopo lunga tencioneverranno al sangue, e la parte selvaggia

66caccerà l’altra con molta offensione.

Poi appresso convien che questa caggiainfra tre soli, e che l’altra sormonti

69con la forza di tal che testé piaggia.

And he said to me: “After a long struggle

they will come to bloodshed, and the uncouth* party

66will chase out the other one, inflicting much damage.

* i.e. from the country

Then afterwards within three years that party must fall,

and the other one rise again with the support

69of a man who for now does not declare his hand.

Alte terrà lungo tempo le fronti,tenendo l’altra sotto gravi pesi,

72come che di ciò pianga o che n’aonti.

Giusti son due, e non vi sono intesi;superbia, invidia e avarizia sono

75le tre faville c’hanno i cuori accesi».

They will hold their heads high for a long time,

keeping the other party under heavy burdens,

72no matter how they weep or grow indignant about it.

There are two just men, and they are not listened to;

pride, envy and greed are

75the three sparks which have set hearts on fire.”

The responsibility for the city’s state is unequivocally located in the moral failings of its citizens: their pride, their envy, their greed. The indictment is all the more telling because it is in the mouth of a Florentine, not an outsider. Dante asks after prominent citizens from the city’s recent past, and learns that they are deeper down in hell.

Dante and Virgil continue on the path that circles around the edge of the abyss, and come to another infernal guardian, Pluto.

The canto opens with pluto’s hostile but unintelligible and untranslatable greeting (Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe), countered by Virgil’s now familiar formula that the journey is willed in heaven. Dante and Virgil make their way down to the fourth circle, where they find sinners rolling huge stones in opposite directions towards each other, clashing together, then turning back. This is the circle of avarice and its polar opposite, prodigality. The frenzied but pointless activity mirrors the untiring efforts human beings expend on avidly accumulating or recklessly spending material wealth. Many of the sinners are men of the church, popes and cardinals, but no individuals are recognisable. The two opposing groups will come to blows for eternity.

Rising above the spectacle of this never-ending, futile, combative activity, Virgil explains the role of Fortuna in human life. Fortuna—fortune, good or bad—governs the rise and fall of individuals, dynasties and nations, in a ceaseless unfolding of changing fortunes played out over the course of human history, oltre la difension d’i senni umani (“beyond the power of human wit to prevent,” l. 81). This is the familiar medieval theme of fortune’s wheel, but seen not from the point of view of those who are its hapless victims (rising and falling as the wheel turns), nor as a pretext for easy moralising, but in a cosmic perspective which transcends human endeavour, and embraces changing personal or public fortunes as an essential element in the divine ordering of the world. We should praise Fortuna and not speak ill of her, Virgil says; she in any case is serenely indifferent to human concerns.

Colui lo cui saver tutto trascende,fece li cieli e diè lor chi conduce

75sì, ch’ogne parte ad ogne parte splende,

distribuendo igualmente la luce.Similemente a li splendor mondani

78ordinò general ministra e duce

che permutasse a tempo li ben vanidi gente in gente e d’uno in altro sangue,

81oltre la difension d’i senni umani;

per ch’una gente impera e l’altra langue,seguendo lo giudicio di costei,

84che è occulto come in erba l’angue.

He whose wisdom transcends all things

made the heavens and gave them guides,*

75so that each part shines to each part,

* i.e. the angelic intelligences

distributing God’s light equally.

In similar fashion he ordered a general

78minister and guide for worldly splendours,

who would at the right time redistribute worldly goods

from one race and one family to another,

81beyond the power of human wit to defend against it;

so one people rules and another languishes,

in accordance with her judgment,

84that is hidden like a snake in the grass.

It is pointless for human beings to complain of Fortune’s mutability.

Vostro saver non ha contasto a lei:questa provede, giudica, e persegue

87suo regno come il loro li altri dèi.

Your wisdom cannot fight against her:

she foresees, judges, and rules over her kingdom,

87just as the other gods* do theirs.

* i.e. angels

Le sue permutazion non hanno triegue:necessità la fa esser veloce;

90sì spesso vien chi vicenda consegue.

Quest’ è colei ch’è tanto posta in crocepur da color che le dovrien dar lode,

93dandole biasmo a torto e mala voce;

ma ella s’è beata e ciò non ode:con l’altre prime creature lieta

96volve sua spera e beata si gode.

Her mutability is unceasing:

necessity causes her to be swift;

90so it often comes about that a person’s state changes.

She is the one who is so reviled

by just those people who should praise her,

93unjustly blaming her and speaking ill of her;

but she is blessed and does not hear it:

happy with the other primal creatures,*

96she turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness.

* i.e. angels

Dante’s joyous celebration of Fortuna, over whose operations human beings have no control at all, has its roots in texts of Augustine and Boethius; it soars above the squalid spectacle which has prompted the digression. A later Italian genius saw the role of Fortuna in human affairs very differently. For Machiavelli, Fortuna is a capricious and fickle woman, who must be subjugated and bent to the will of any prince hoping to grasp and hold on to power. Nothing could be further from Dante’s joyful affirmation of Fortuna’s providentially ordained role in the terrestrial world.

Dante and Virgil cross over the circular path, following a watercourse that flows into the Styx, a marsh where they see people immersed in the muddy water. Virgil explains that these are the wrathful, and that there are other sinners submerged beneath the surface. Dante and Virgil circle around the swamp until they come to the base of a tower.

Before virgil and dante reach the tower, they see flames signalling. A little boat skims across the water towards them. The boatman, Flegyas, mistakenly thinks Dante is a new damned soul. Virgil corrects him, and steps down into the boat, getting Dante to follow him:

Lo duca mio discese ne la barca,e poi mi fece intrare appresso lui;

27e sol quand’ io fui dentro parve carca.

My guide stepped down into the boat,

and then made me get in behind him;

27and only when I was in it did it seem laden.

The tercet is a fine example of narrative economy and graphic realism. The boat sinks under Dante’s weight, reminding us that he is the only living man in hell. All the others, including Virgil, are weightless spirits with shadow bodies: when they get into the boat, it does not sink into the water.

There is a violent encounter with a mud-encrusted sinner called Filippo Argenti, who reaches out towards the boat but is repelled by Virgil, then set upon by the other sinners, just as Dante hopes will happen. Virgil praises Dante for his disdain for Argenti, a Florentine sinner Dante has recognised: benedetta colei che ’n te s’incinse! (“blessed is she who bore you!”). This remarkable line, echoing Luke 11:27, where it is addressed to Jesus, is the only reference in the poem to Dante’s mother. His father is never referred to—in striking contrast to the Aeneid, where Aeneas’s meeting with his father Anchises in the Elysian Fields of the underworld in Book VI is a moving and climactic episode.

Virgil explains that they are approaching the city of Dis, or lower hell. They reach the moats that surround the city, circle round the walls, and when they reach the entrance are told by the bad-tempered Flegyas to get out of the boat. The whole canto has been violent, angry, confrontational. And things are about to get worse.

Over the gates appear devils, who signal that Virgil should come and talk to them. Dante asks Virgil not to leave him, but Virgil reassures him and goes anyway. Dante can’t hear the conversation, but the devils run back into the city and shut the gates in Virgil’s face. He returns disconsolate, but says a saviour is on the way. For the first time Virgil’s powers have proved insufficient. Outside assistance—assistance from heaven, as it transpires—is required to enable them to continue the journey down into lower hell.

Virgil, normally confident, is hesitant and doubtful in the face of the devils’ recalcitrance, breaking off in mid-sentence. Dante is fearful because of what remains unspoken. Virgil reassures him that he has been here before, and knows the way. But Dante is distracted by the sight of three Furies who have appeared over the gate, and shrinks closer to Virgil. The Furies are terrifying: blood-stained female figures, with asps and horned vipers for hair and bright green water snakes as girdles. They call on Medusa, threatening to turn Dante to stone. It is evidently not an idle threat. Virgil tells Dante to turn around and cover his eyes, and in a touching protective gesture covers them as well with his own hands. For the first time in the poem our attention is explicitly drawn to a deeper, hidden meaning to the events recounted.

O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani,mirate la dottrina che s’asconde

63sotto ’l velame de li versi strani.

O you who have sound understanding,

look at the teaching that is hidden

63beneath the veil of the strange verses.

And already help is on the way: a saviour figure arrives, a messo celeste, or “heavenly messenger.” Dante doesn’t use the word “angel” here, but etymologically an angel is a messenger, and this is certainly an angel. It is understandable that some commentators have thought otherwise, making suggestions as improbable as Mercury, Moses, or even Jesus, since the normal accoutrements of an angel are missing: no wings, no halo, no white robe. In an extraordinary feat of evocative summoning up of a powerful and mysterious presence, the messo celeste is described not directly but in terms of sound and wind, of the dramatic effect he has on his surroundings as he crosses the Styx coming towards them:

E già venìa su per le torbide ondeun fracasso d’un suon, pien di spavento,

66per cui tremavano amendue le sponde,

And already across the murky waters there came

a thunderous sound, fear-inspiring,

66which caused both banks to shake,

non altrimenti fatto che d’un ventoimpetüoso per li avversi ardori,

69che fier la selva e sanz’ alcun rattento

li rami schianta, abbatte e porta fori;dinanzi polveroso va superbo,

72e fa fuggir le fiere e li pastori.

like the sound of a wind

made violent by conflicting hot currents of air,

69that strikes the wood and with nothing to keep it in check

cracks the branches, hurls them down and carries them off;

it drives forward dusty and proud,

72and makes animals and shepherds flee.

Virgil takes his hands off Dante’s eyes and tells him he can look. What Dante sees is again described in terms of the effect created on bystanders: the shades of the sinners scatter like frogs in the presence of a snake as the new arrival crosses the Styx dry-shod, “with dry feet,” skimming over the water.

Come le rane innanzi a la nimicabiscia per l’acqua si dileguan tutte,

78fin ch’a la terra ciascuna s’abbica,

vid’ io più di mille anime distruttefuggir così dinanzi ad un ch’al passo

81passava Stige con le piante asciutte.

Dal volto rimovea quell’ aere grasso,menando la sinistra innanzi spesso;

84e sol di quell’ angoscia parea lasso.

Just as frogs all scatter through the water

ahead of the enemy snake,

78until each one huddles down on the bank,

I saw more than a thousand damned souls

scatter ahead of one who

81crossed the Styx dry-shod.

He brushed aside that heavy air from his face,

often moving his left hand in front of it;

84that annoyance alone seemed to bother him.

Only now can the reader be sure, as Dante himself takes it on board, that this is indeed help from on high, da ciel messo, a “messenger from heaven”:

Ben m’accorsi ch’elli era da ciel messo,e volsimi al maestro; e quei fé segno

87ch’i’ stessi queto ed inchinassi ad esso.

I realised full well that he was a messenger from heaven,

and I turned to my master; and he made a sign

87that I should remain silent, and bow down to him.

Ahi quanto mi parea pien di disdegno!Venne a la porta e con una verghetta

90l’aperse, che non v’ebbe alcun ritegno.

Ah how full of disdain he appeared to me!

He came to the gate and with a wand

90opened it, for there was no resistance.

The great German critic Erich Auerbach wrote eloquently about the majestic, epic quality of this scene, arguing that Dante here equals, and perhaps even surpasses, the sublimity of Homer describing the arrival of Poseidon. We might be tempted to call the scene cinematic, so intensely aural and visual is it, but cinema with no need whatsoever for CGI effects. Dante creates his stunning sense of movement just through words, summoning up the dramatic arrival of an imperious and powerful being of whose physical appearance we know next to nothing: just the repeated gesture of the left hand brushing aside the gross air rising from the swamp; dry feet; disdainful contempt for the devils.

The messo celeste opens the gate merely by touching it with a wand, rebuking the devils for their pointless recalcitrance. He says nothing at all to Virgil and Dante, who pass through without opposition. They find themselves in a landscape strewn with tombs. The lids are open, flames lick around them. Virgil explains that the tombs contain every kind of heretic. They turn to the right, and set off between the walls of the city and the tombs.

To find ourselves directly urged to pay attention to a hidden meaning when we are already so deep into the poem—so far down in the pit of hell—pulls us up short. Until now we have been allowed to work things out for ourselves. What is the dottrina, the teaching, hidden beneath the velo, the veil, the surface meaning of the words? What exactly are we being urged to understand? The broad pattern of meaning is clear: this is a moment of acute crisis and danger, when the journey risks being aborted because of opposition to the traveller’s progress. As for assigning specific meanings to the obstacles in his path, commentators have offered widely differing suggestions. One persuasive interpretation of the three Furies, made by Dante’s own son Pietro in his commentary, identifies them with wickedness of thought, word and deed. Medusa represents paralysing fear, or religious doubt, or even despair. The messo celeste is divine grace, a gift freely given. The key point is that Virgil, who stands for human reason (but up to this point it hasn’t been necessary to spell this out), is unable to resolve this crisis on his own.

As they walk along the narrow path around the inner edge of the wall, Dante asks Virgil if it might be possible to see the sinners lying in the tombs. Their conversation is interrupted by a voice that booms out:

«O Tosco che per la città del focovivo ten vai così parlando onesto,

24piacciati di restare in questo loco.

La tua loquela ti fa manifestodi quella nobil patrïa natio

27a la qual forse fui troppo molesto».

“O Tuscan who goes through the city of fire

while still alive, speaking so courteously,

24may it please you to stop in this place.

Your speech clearly shows you to be

a native of that noble birthplace

27to which perhaps I caused too much harm.”

Dante has been recognised as a Tuscan, indeed as a Florentine, by his accent. The voice which resounds from one of the tombs causes him to shrink closer to Virgil, who reproaches him and urges him to turn around and look at the speaker:

Subitamente questo suono uscìod’una de l’arche; però m’accostai,

30temendo, un poco più al duca mio.

Ed el mi disse: «Volgiti! Che fai?Vedi là Farinata che s’è dritto:

33da la cintola in sù tutto ’l vedrai».

Suddenly this sound came forth

from one of the tombs; and so I drew,

30fearfully, a little closer to my guide.

And he said to me: “Turn around! What are you doing?

Look at Farinata over there, he’s got to his feet:

33you’ll see all of him from his waist up.”

Farinata degh Uberti was a famous Florentine political leader of an earlier generation who had played a key role in the city’s history—someone Dante had good cause both to admire and distrust. At the mere mention of his name Dante is already gazing at him. The sinner holds himself sternly erect and unbending, seemingly indifferent to the torments of hell.

Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;ed el s’ergea col petto e con la fronte

36com’ avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto.

I already had my gaze fixed on his face;

and he stood tall with his chest and with his brow

36as though he held hell in great scorn.

Virgil pushes Dante towards Farinata—a figure made unforgettable by this perfect last line—but urges him to watch his words. The shade haughtily questions him about his ancestors; Dante tells him what he wants to know.

Com’ io al piè de la sua tomba fui,guardommi un poco, e poi, quasi sdegnoso,

42mi dimandò: «Chi fuor li maggior tui?».

Io ch’era d’ubidir disideroso,non gliel celai, ma tutto gliel’ apersi;

45ond’ ei levò le ciglia un poco in suso;

When I had reached the foot of his tomb,

he looked at me a little, and then, almost disdainfully,

42he asked me: “Who were your ancestors?”

I who was eager to obey

didn’t conceal it, but told him everything;

45wherupon he raised his eyebrows a little;

The shade’s minimal physical response—he raises his eyebrows—indicates his displeasure at what he hears. Then we learn why:

poi disse: «Fieramente furo avversia me e a miei primi e a mia parte,

48sì che per due fïate li dispersi».

«S’ei fur cacciati, ei tornar d’ogne parte»,rispuos’ io lui, «l’una e l’altra fïata;

51ma i vostri non appreser ben quell’arte».

then he said: “They were fiercely hostile

to me and to my ancestors and to my party,

48so that twice I scattered them.”*

* i.e. sent them into exile

“If they were chased out, they came back from everywhere,”

I replied to him, “on both occasions;

51but your people didn’t master that art.”

The wary conversation between fellow citizens who share a love of their birthplace has turned awkward and boastful: We kicked your lot out; yes, but we came back, and your lot didn’t. Just as the conversation is turning rancorous, there is a sudden interruption. A second shade appears in the tomb, alongside Farinata, apparently on his knees: only his head is visible. He gazes anxiously around, urgently questioning Dante.

Allor surse a la vista scoperchiataun’ombra, lungo questa, infino al mento:

54credo che s’era in ginocchie levata.

Dintorno mi guardò, come talentoavesse di veder s’altri era meco;

57e poi che ’l sospecciar fu tutto spento,

piangendo disse: «Se per questo ciecocarcere vai per altezza d’ingegno,

60mio figlio ov’ è? e perché non è teco?».

Then in the open tomb there rose

a shade, alongside this one, visible as far as his chin:

54I think he had got up on his knees.

He looked around me, as though eager

to see if someone else was with me;

57and when his hopes were completely dashed,

he said weeping: “If you go through this blind

prison because of your high genius,

60where is my son? and why isn’t he with you?”

The sinner’s words and his punishment have revealed his identity to Dante: he is Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, the father of Dante’s friend Guido. Father and son were famously unbelievers; both denied the immortality of the soul. Guido, a little older than Dante, was also a gifted poet, a mentor to his younger friend in his youth. An early commentator said of these two brilliant young men: Erant duo oculi Florentiae (“They were Florence’s two eyes”). Dante’s answer to his friend’s father is enigmatic (and indeed will be misinterpreted). He says he is being taken to someone whom Guido despised.

E io a lui: «Da me stesso non vegno:colui ch’attende là, per qui mi mena

63forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno».

Le sue parole e ’l modo de la penam’avean di costui già letto il nome;

66però fu la risposta così piena.

I said to him: “I do not come on my own;

the man who is waiting there is taking me

63to someone your Guido perhaps held in contempt.”

His words and the manner of his punishment

had revealed his name to me;

66that’s why my reply was so detailed.

Cavalcante’s reaction is as anguished and volatile as Farinata’s was stoical and unbending.

Di sùbito drizzato gridò: «Comedicesti ‘elli ebbe’? non viv’ elli ancora?

69non fiere li occhi suoi lo dolce lume?».

Quando s’accorse d’alcuna dimorach’io facëa dinanzi a la risposta,

72supin ricadde e più non parve fora.

Straightaway he leapt up and cried out: “What

did you say? he held? isn’t he still alive?

69doesn’t the sweet light strike his eyes?”

When he realised that I was hesitating

a little before replying,

72he fell back down and wasn’t seen again.

Cavalcante falls back into the tomb in despair. Dante’s answer to his questions, in particular his use of the past tense ebbe (“had”), seems to imply that Guido is dead (in fact he was still alive but was to die just a few months later, in the summer of 1300). The conversation with Farinata resumes exactly where it had broken off, as though this emotional and despairing interlude had not taken place.

Ma quell’ altro magnanimo, a cui postarestato m’era, non mutò aspetto,

75né mosse collo, né piegò sua costa;

e sé continüando al primo detto,«S’elli han quell’ arte», disse, «male appresa,

78ciò mi tormenta più che questo letto.

But that other great soul, at whose request

I had stopped, did not change his expression,

75his neck unbowed, his body straight;

and carrying on from what he was saying earlier,

“If they have failed to learn that art,” he said,

78“that torments me more than this bed.

The mental torment of knowing his side have been defeated and are in exile causes Farinata greater pain than the physical torment of his punishment in hell. But, he says, Dante will experience the same pain, and in the not-too-distant future: in just fifty months he will himself learn how difficult it is to return to the city when one has been exiled from it. Why, Farinata asks, changing tack, are the Florentines so cruel to his family in their defeat? (The Uberti houses in the centre of the city had all been destroyed by the victorious Guelfs. No other family had been treated so harshly.)

Ma non cinquanta volte fia raccesala faccia de la donna che qui regge,

81che tu saprai quanto quell’ arte pesa.

But the face of the woman who reigns here*

will not be lit up fifty times**

81before you will learn how difficult that art is.

* the moon** i.e. less than fifty months will pass

E se tu mai nel dolce mondo regge,dimmi: perché quel popolo è sì empio

84incontr’ a’ miei in ciascuna sua legge?».

But if you ever go back to the sweet world,

tell me: Why is that people so pitiless

84against my family in all its laws?”

Dante’s answer to this question invokes the great Battle of Montaperti, where the Sienese Ghibellines, led by Farinata, had defeated the Florentine Guelfs in 1260, five years before Dante’s birth. The carnage was so great that the river Arbia flowed red with the blood of the slain. Farinata counters with a bitter reminder that when the victorious troops planned to destroy Florence and raze it to the ground, he alone had stood firm in the city’s defence and prevented its destruction.

Ond’ io a lui: «Lo strazio e ’l grande scempioche fece l’Arbia colorata in rosso,

87tal orazion fa far nel nostro tempio».

Poi ch’ebbe sospirando il capo mosso,«A ciò non fu’ io sol», disse, «né certo

90sanza cagion con li altri sarei mosso.

Ma fu’ io solo, là dove soffertofu per ciascun di tòrre via Fiorenza,

93colui che la difesi a viso aperto».

Wherupon I said to him: “The slaughter and the great carnage

which coloured the Arbia red

87causes such prayers to be said in our temple.”

When he had shaken his head sighing,

he said: “I was not alone in that, and certainly I would

90not have taken action with the others without good reason.

But I was alone, where everyone agreed

that Florence must be destroyed—

93I was the only one who openly defended her.”

The conversation takes a gentler turn as Dante asks about the ability of the shades to foresee the future. Cavalcante’s ignorance of his son’s fate seems to contradict that law. Farinata explains that they see clearly only things that are far off; as events draw closer, that knowledge is lost; they know nothing at all of the present. Dante, feeling guilty for the misunderstanding about Guido which has caused his father such pain, asks Farinata to explain to Cavalcante that his son is still alive.

Virgil is calling. Dante hurriedly asks Farinata who is with him in this circle. In a throwaway line which even today seems shockingly casual, Farinata mentions one of the most famous people in recent history, the emperor Frederick II, a renowned figure on the world stage (as we have seen, in terms of stature and recognisability a modern equivalent might be Churchill). He was a well-known atheist. Dante is disturbed by Farinata’s prophecy that he too will learn how hard it is to be banished from Florence. Virgil says an explanation will come later in the journey.

The contrast between the two figures Dante meets in this circle could not be greater. They differ in every possible way: their physical bearing, their speech patterns, their reaction to bad news (stoical immobility versus volatile weeping). Yet spiritually there is nothing to choose between them. Both placed all their hopes and aspirations in their earthly life and passions, whether those passions centred on the fate of a political party or of a beloved son. Both thought life ended in the grave, and, fittingly, they will spend eternity in a tomb, their punishment reflecting with gruesome appropriateness their lack of belief in an afterlife. And they share a tomb, perhaps because in life there had been a family connection. Farinata’s daughter had been betrothed to Cavalcante’s son Guido.

When Dante began working on the Commedia in around 1308, he left unfinished two prose works, one in Italian, one in Latin (this second one abandoned in mid-sentence). Both are groundbreaking works of starthng originality. The Convivio was an extended commentary on some of his own longer, early poems, novel in its form and encyclopedic in its aspirations. The De vulgari eloquentia was a study of the kind of language that should be used by vernacular poets who aspire to write with distinction. Why did he put them aside? Perhaps because he had had the idea for the poem which was to be his masterpiece. It has been convincingly suggested that a key factor is likely to have been a rereading of Book VI of the Aeneid. That book records how in the underworld Aeneas talks to the shades of his father Anchises, his wife Creusa, his lover Dido, and his companion in arms Palinurus. Re-engaging with this narrative could have struck Dante with the force of a revelation.

By creating a poem about visiting the afterlife, he would be able to meet and talk to key figures in his own personal history, just as Aeneas does. But—and this is the imaginative leap which carries him far beyond anything to be found in Virgil—he could also meet people he didn’t know but knew about, figures from the recent or remote past, people whose personalities and stories compelled his imagination, and could be used to give flesh and bones to the ethical dilemmas he would confront on the spiritual journey that would provide the plot. He could meet these people, and he could talk to them. Through these encounters he could recalibrate his sense of his own personal history (just as Aeneas in the underworld learns of his fate). He could also explore his emerging sense of the meaning of the unfolding of human history (just as Aeneas learns of Rome’s destined greatness).

The encounter with Farinata recorded here in Inferno 10, one of the great cantos of the poem, is an early example of the richness of dramatic and human potential that is opened up by engaging with figures from the past. Note the essentially dramatic character of the encounter: there is no exposition, everything is done through interaction and dialogue.

In canto 10 Dante is revealed to be a man of strong political convictions and allegiances. In the course of the poem, he will receive a political education: this is only the first piece in that mosaic. Politics is a passion in his life.

But so too is poetry. Guido Cavalcanti is a key figure (the key figure) in his emotional and poetic history. Dante can’t meet Guido in the afterlife—Guido is still alive—but the father’s passionate concern for his son’s talent and fate (If you’re here because of your high intelligence, why isn’t he with you?) introduces Guido’s presence in a powerfully charged and ambivalent way. This theme too—Dante’s poetic talents, and the use to be made of them—is one that will be developed over the course of the whole poem.

The two themes—politics and poetry—are inextricably interwoven, just as the encounters with Farinata and Cavalcante are in canto 10. Note the exquisite structure and perfect symmetrical balance of the canto—which could be represented alphabetically with the palindromic sequence a-b-c-b-a: Dante and Virgil, Dante and Farinata, Dante and Cavalcante, Dante and Farinata, Dante and Virgil—which contains and frames the emotionally fraught exchanges with the souls of the dead. Cavalcante’s anguished questions about his son are at the very centre of the canto.

A foul smell rises up from the abyss. dante and virgil take refuge behind the lid of a tomb which houses a heretical pope. They need to take time to get used to the stench. Virgil takes advantage of the enforced delay to enlighten Dante about the topography of hell, explaining to him how the various regions are ordered. His explanation covers both theology and geography: the hierarchy of sins and how they relate to one another, and the layout of the vast funnel-shaped abyss that houses the sinners. At last we get to grips with the organisational principle of hell, which we, like Dante, have been piecing together somewhat haphazardly, he as he travels, we as we read. Virgil now lays out both the physical ground plan of hell, and the conceptual underpinning which accounts for it. Surprisingly, that conceptual underpinning is firmly rooted in Roman law and ancient philosophy rather than in the Bible.

First, the geography of lower hell, within the city of Dis. Lower hell comprises three circles:

«Figliuol mio, dentro da cotesti sassi»,cominciò poi a dir, «son tre cerchietti

18di grado in grado, come que’ che lassi.

Tutti son pien di spirti maladetti;ma perché poi ti basti pur la vista,

21intendi come e perché son costretti.

“My son,” he then began to say,

“within these stones there are three circles,

18of decreasing size, like the one you are leaving.

They are all full of cursed spirits; but so that from now on

it will be enough for you just to see them,

21listen to how and why they are constrained.

A fundamental organisational principle, enunciated with incisive clarity, is the distinction between sins of violence and sins of fraud. The distinction echoes Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher (De officiis I, 13).

D’ogne malizia, ch’odio in cielo acquista,ingiuria è ’l fine, ed ogne fin cotale

24o con forza o con frode altrui contrista.

The goal of every sin which gains hatred in heaven

is injustice, and every such goal harms another person

24either through violence or through fraud.

Ma perché frode è de l’uom proprio male,più spiace a Dio; e però stan di sotto

27li frodolenti, e più dolor li assale.

But because fraud is an evil particular to man,

it is more displeasing to God; and therefore

27the fraudulent are lower down, and suffer greater pain.

Sins of fraud are more serious—and are therefore further down in hell—than sins of violence, because fraud perverts human intelligence and uses it for an evil end. Violence is merely animal-like and involves no perversion of the quintessential human quality, reason. The circle they are about to enter is the circle of violence, which subdivides into three categories, according to whom the violence is inflicted on.

Di vïolenti il primo cerchio è tutto;ma perché si fa forza a tre persone,

30in tre gironi è distinto e costrutto.

A Dio, a sé, al prossimo si pònefar forza, dico in loro e in lor cose,

33come udirai con aperta ragione.

The first circle is wholly for the violent;

but because violence can be directed against three persons,

30it is divided and constructed in three subcircles.

One can do violence against God, against oneself, and against one’s fellow man,

I mean in themselves or in their possessions,

33as you will hear with clear reasoning.

Virgil now describes these three in inverse order. First, violence inflicted on one’s fellow man or his possessions will include murder, assault and grievous bodily harm, pillage, arson and plunder.

Morte per forza e ferute dogliosenel prossimo si danno, e nel suo avere

36ruine, incendi e tollette dannose;

onde omicide e ciascun che mal fiere,guastatori e predon, tutti tormenta

39lo giron primo per diverse schiere.

Violent death and painful wounds

can be inflicted on one’s fellow man,

36and destruction, arson and pillage on his possessions;

so murderers and all those who viciously attack others,

and those who lay waste and plunder, all these

39the first subcircle torments in different groups.

Second, violence against the self takes the form of ending one’s own life, or of wasting one’s own possessions. That is, suicides and wastrels.

Puote omo avere in sé man vïolentae ne’ suoi beni; e però nel secondo

42giron convien che sanza pro si penta

qualunque priva sé del vostro mondo,biscazza e fonde la sua facultade,

45e piange là dov’ esser de’ giocondo.

A man can turn a violent hand against himself

and against his possessions; and so in the second

42subcircle must repent to no avail

whoever removes himself from your world,

squanders and wastes his own possessions,

45and weeps where he should be happy.

Third, violence against the deity takes three forms: blasphemy, sodomy and usury. This classification, so strange to modern eyes, will be clarified later as the exposition continues.

Puossi far forza nella deïtade,col cor negando e bestemmiando quella,

48e spregiando natura e sua bontade;

e però lo minor giron suggelladel segno suo e Soddoma e Caorsa

51e chi, spregiando Dio col cor, favella.

One can use violence against the Godhead,

denying him in one’s heart and cursing him,

48and scorning nature and its goodness;

and so the smallest subcircle seals

with its sign Sodom and Cahors

51and whoever speaks despising God in his heart.

Cahors, a city in southern France, was famous in the Middle Ages for the high interest rates charged by its bankers, and had become a byword for usury.

Fraud subdivides into two main categories, depending on whom it is perpetrated against. Where there is no special bond of trust between perpetrator and victim, we have simple fraud, subdivided into ten categories. Such fraud offends only against the natural bond of solidarity any individual should have with his fellow man.

La frode, ond’ ogne coscïenza è morsa,può l’omo usare in colui che ’n lui fida

54e in quel che fidanza non imborsa.

Fraud, by which every conscience is bitten,

can be used against someone who trusts you,

54or against someone who has no special reason to trust you.

Questo modo di retro par ch’incidapur lo vinco d’amor che fa natura;

57onde nel cerchio secondo s’annida

ipocresia, lusinghe e chi affattura,falsità, ladroneccio e simonia,

60ruffian, baratti e simile lordura.

This latter mode seems to break

only the bond of love that nature makes;

57so that in the second circle are nested

hypocrisy, flattery and sorcerers,

falsifiers, theft and simony,

60panders, barrators* and similar filth.

* corrupt public officials

The final tercet scrambles the order and, for reasons of space, lists only eight of the ten categories punished in the eighth circle, the missing two covered by the final, generic “similar filth.” The complete list, in the order in which Dante will encounter them, is: pimping, flattery, simony (the buying and selling of church offices and sacraments), sorcery, corruption in public office, hypocrisy, thieving, fraudulent counselling, sowing of discord (these last two not mentioned here) and falsifying (which covers lying, impersonation, alchemy and counterfeiting).

Where the fraud is perpetrated against someone who has a special reason to trust the perpetrator, we have treachery. The traitors occupy the last, ninth circle of hell, at the very bottom of the pit.

Per l’altro modo quell’ amor s’obliache fa natura, e quel ch’è poi aggiunto,

63di che la fede spezïal si cria;

onde nel cerchio minore, ov’ è ’l puntode l’universo in su che Dite siede,

66qualunque trade in etterno è consunto».

In the former mode the love that nature makes

is forgotten, as well as the love that is then added to it,

63from which special trust is created;

and so in the smallest circle, at the point

in the universe where Dis sits,

66whoever betrays is eternally consumed.

This is all perfectly clear. But Dante has a question about the upper circles, the ones they passed through before they reached the city of Dis. Virgil reminds him of a key text by Aristotle, the Ethics:

Non ti rimembra di quelle parolecon le quai la tua Etica pertratta

81le tre disposizion che ’l ciel non vole,

Don’t you remember those words

in which your Ethics expounds

81the three dispositions that heaven rejects,

incontenenza, malizia e la mattabestialitade? e come incontenenza

84men Dio offende e men biasimo accatta?

incontinence, malice and mad

brutishness? and how incontinence

84offends God less and attracts less blame?

If Dante thinks about this text and the sinners they saw in the upper circles, he will appreciate that theirs were sins of incontinence, of excess, of failure to control an appetite: lust, gluttony, avarice, anger.

Se tu riguardi ben questa sentenza,e rechiti a la mente chi son quelli

87che sù di fuor sostegnon penitenza,

tu vedrai ben perché da questi fellisien dipartiti, e perché men crucciata

90la divina vendetta li martelli».

If you think carefully about this statement,

and call to mind who those people are

87who suffer their punishment up there, outside,*

* outside the city of Dis

you’ll see clearly why they are set apart

from these miscreants, and why divine vengeance

90smites them less wrathfully.”

Dante asks Virgil to go back a little and explain about usury, and why it is to be understood as violence against God. Virgil cites another text of Aristotle’s, the Physics, backing it up with a reference to Genesis. The Physics explains that God, nature and art stand in a family relationship to one another. The natural world is God’s creation or child. Art, meaning human endeavour (honest toil or labour), uses the natural world. It is thus, in a manner of speaking, God’s grandchild.

«Filosofia», mi disse, «a chi la ’ntende,nota, non pure in una sola parte,

99come natura lo suo corso prende

dal divino ’ntelletto e da sua arte;e se tu ben la tua Fisica note,

102tu troverai, non dopo molte carte,

“Philosophy,” he said, “to those who understand it,

explains—and in more than one place—

99how nature takes its course

from the divine intellect and its art;

and if you read your Physics attentively,

102you will find, quite near the beginning,

che l’arte vostra quella, quanto pote,segue, come ’l maestro fa ’l discente;

105sì che vostr’ arte a Dio quasi è nepote.»

that your human art follows her* as closely

as it can, as a pupil follows a teacher,

105so that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.”

* nature

Genesis says that man must live by the sweat of his brow. The usurer, by making money breed money, spurns that path, showing contempt for both nature and art, and therefore for God.

Virgil’s exposition is, literally, magisterial. He is a magister, a teacher (maestro, as he is so often called in the Italian of the poem), talking a keen pupil through an intricate and theoretically taxing subject, referring where necessary to recognised experts, citing authoritative texts, answering questions, clarifying where necessary. The sustained argument seems to unfold effortlessly, occupying an entire canto. The teacher is entirely in command of his material.

Dante has combined Aristotle and Cicero to create a plan for hell which does not map exactly onto traditional Christian ways of thinking. (The seven deadly sins will provide the ground plan for the structure of purgatory.) Virgil’s account is comprehensive, but he has not mentioned heresy, which occupies the sixth circle, the buffer zone between upper and lower hell where Virgil and Dante are now sheltering from the stench behind the tomb of the heretical pope. Scholarly ingenuity has failed to deliver a consensus on what area of hell, if any, Aristotle’s matta bestialitate refers to.

The narrative strategy by which we learn of the overall plan of hell only when we are deep inside the abyss is typical of Dante; the poem, we remember, started in medias res. Until now, Dante has had to learn as he goes, building up a picture in his mind from his practical negotiation of the terrain and the challenges it presents. Note the exquisite clarity and control of the verses, how naturally and easily the conceptual content falls into lines of eleven syllables (hendecasyllables) arranged in groups of three with a complicated interlinking rhyme scheme. This intricate metrical structure, so perfectly suited to narrative, now proves also to be an ideal medium for the exposition of complex ideas. The formal pattern seems to unleash while yet containing the verbal energy with which the categories of sin are defined and described. There are lines of memorable incisiveness, perfectly turned to expound a value system firmly based in ancient philosophy.

Fig. 1 the layout of hell

Virgil and dante reach a steep rocky descent, where they find their path blocked by the minotaur. Virgil placates the minotaur, and they are able to descend. They see a river of boiling blood, with sinners immersed in it to varying degrees; the banks are patrolled by centaurs whose task it is to ensure that the sinners stay submerged. Virgil negotiates with the centaurs, and one of them, Nessus, is assigned to accompany them and carry Dante across the river. As they walk along the bank towards a shallow crossing point, Nessus explains that the sinners most deeply immersed in the blood are tyrants; the others are murderers, robbers, highwaymen. All used violence against their fellow-man. Dante recognises many people in this circle, but talks to no one. We don’t see Dante and Virgil crossing the river. At the beginning of the next canto, Nessus is already on his way back.

Even before nessus reaches the far bank of the river, Virgil and Dante enter a sinister wood, a wood of negation. No green leaves, no smooth branches, no fruits; only dark foliage, twisted, knotted branches and poisonous thorns.

Non era ancor di là Nesso arrivato,quando noi ci mettemmo per un bosco

3che da neun sentiero era segnato.

Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco;non rami schietti, ma nodosi e ’nvolti;

6non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco.

Non han sì aspri sterpi né sì foltiquelle fiere selvagge che ’n odio hanno

9tra Cecina e Corneto i luoghi cólti.

Nessus had not yet reached the far bank

when we entered a wood

3which was marked by no track.

No green leaves, but dark in colour;

no smooth branches, but knotted and twisted;

6no fruits were there, but poisonous thorns.

The wild animals who hate

the cultivated places between Cecina and Corneto

9don’t have such harsh dense thickets.

Cecina and Corneto mark the northern and southern limits of the Maremma, a region between Florence and Rome notorious for its wildness.

Harpies (huge monstrous birds with the faces of women) nest in the branches, their strange wailing providing an unsetthng soundtrack.

Quivi le brutte Arpie lor nidi fanno,che cacciar de le Strofade i Troiani

12con tristo annunzio di futuro danno.

Ali hanno late, e colli e visi umani,piè con artigh, e pennuto ’l gran ventre;

15fanno lamenti in su li alberi strani.

Here the ugly Harpies make their nests,

who drove the Trojans from the Strophades

12with doomy forecast of troubles to come.

They have broad wings, and human necks and faces,

feet with claws, and feathers on their great bellies;

15they utter lamentations on the strange trees.

We are in the second girone, or subcircle, of the circle of violence, the region reserved for suicides and wastrels. Nobody is visible, though cries can be heard. Virgil tells Dante to break off a twig from one of the branches. The deeply disturbing scene which follows is worthy of a horror film.

Però disse ’l maestro: «Se tu tronchiqualche fraschetta d’una d’este piante,

30li pensier c’hai si faran tutti monchi».

Allor porsi la mano un poco avantee colsi un ramicel da un gran pruno;

33e ’l tronco suo gridò: «Perché mi schiante?».

And so my master said: “If you break off

a small twig from one of these plants,

30your thoughts will all be cut short.”

Then I stretched out my hand a little in front of me

and plucked a twig from a large thorn bush;

33and its trunk cried out: “Why are you tearing me?”

The broken branch repeats the reproachful question as blood oozes from its end:

Da che fatto fu poi di sangue bruno,ricominciò a dir: «Perché mi scerpi?

36non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?

When it had then become dark with blood,

it began to speak again: “Why do you break me?

36have you no spirit of pity?

Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi:ben dovrebb’ esser la tua man più pia,

39se state fossimo anime di serpi».

We were once men, now we have become thorn trees;

your hand should have been more compassionate

39if we had been the souls of serpents.”

These thorn bushes were once human beings. The oozing of blood and words from the broken-off twig is captured in an arresting image. Seemingly based on direct observation of the natural world, in fact it also draws on Dante’s scientific reading of Aristotle:

Come d’un stizzo verde ch’arso siada l’un de’ capi, che da l’altro geme

42e cigola per vento che va via,

sì de la scheggia rotta usciva insiemeparole e sangue; ond’ io lasciai la cima

45cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme.

As when a green log is burning at one end,

and from the other it oozes

42and hisses with the escaping air,

just so from the broken branch words and blood

came out together; whereupon I dropped

45the twig, and stood like a man afraid.

In the face of Dante’s dismay and incomprehension, Virgil explains why he told him to break off the twig: Dante simply would not have believed what he now experiences directly if he had merely been told about it. Virgil urges the speaking bush to tell Dante who he is. The speaker responds in lofty rhetorical mode, showcasing difficult rhymes (adeschi, inveschi). He is Pier delle Vigne, never named in the canto, but instantly recognisable when he explains, as he now goes on to do, that he was the emperor Frederick II’s confidante and adviser.

E ’l tronco: «Sì col dolce dir m’adeschi,ch’i’ non posso tacere; e voi non gravi

57perch’ ïo un poco a ragionar m’inveschi.

Io son colui che tenni ambo le chiavidel cor di Federigo, e che le volsi,

60serrando e diserrando, sì soavi,

And the trunk: “You so allure me with your sweet words,

that I cannot stay silent; and may it not displease you

57if I am drawn into conversation a little with you.

I am the man who held both the keys

to Frederick’s heart, and who turned them,

60locking and unlocking, so gently,

che dal secreto suo quasi ogn’ uom tolsi;fede portai al glorïoso offizio,

63tanto ch’i’ ne perde’ li sonni e ’ polsi.

that I shut out almost everyone else from his secret affairs;

I was loyal to my glorious office,

63so much so that I lost my sleep and my health.

The elevated language matches the speaker’s exalted position in the court hierarchy, where he was chancellor. His command of rhetoric was well suited to his roles as protonotary (in charge of government publications) and logothete (official spokesman). He also wrote letters and poetry. Words were the instrument he used to mark his position in the world. But that position of power at the emperor’s side aroused the envy of other courtiers.

La meretrice che mai da l’ospiziodi Cesare non torse li occhi putti,

66morte comune e de le corti vizio,

infiammò contra me li animi tutti;e li ’nfiammati infiammar sì Augusto,

69che ’ lieti onor tornaro in tristi lutti.

The whore who never turned

her shameless eyes from Caesar’s abode,

66common death and special vice of courts,

inflamed all minds against me,

and those inflamed so inflamed Augustus,

69that joyful honours turned into sorrowful mourning.

These dense lines, with their virtuoso verbal patterning, tell us that he was accused of betraying his master, the emperor. Frederick believed the charge of treachery. In despair Pier delle Vigne, after being imprisoned and blinded, took his own life, reportedly by dashing his brains out against a wall. He describes his suicide in a tortuous tercet of exquisitely balanced wordplay, invoking notions of disdain and justice.

L’animo mio, per disdegnoso gusto,credendo col morir fuggir disdegno,

72ingiusto fece me contra me giusto.

My mind, taking disdainful pleasure,

thinking by dying to escape disdain,

72made me unjust against my just self.

But when Pier declares his innocence of the charge of treachery, the rhetoric is cast aside, and he speaks with a new urgency and simplicity. He appeals to Dante to clear his name—to defend his reputation in the world of the living.

Per le nove radici d’esto legnovi giuro che già mai non ruppi fede

75al mio segnor, che fu d’onor sì degno.

E se di voi alcun nel mondo riede,conforti la memoria mia, che giace

78ancor del colpo che ’nvidia le diede».

By the new roots of this tree,

I swear that I never broke faith

75with my lord, who was so worthy of honour.

And if either one of you goes back to the world,

let him restore my good name, which still lies low

78from the blow that envy gave it.”

Dante is too moved to speak (tanta pietà m’accora: “so much pity holds my heart”). Virgil asks two questions on Dante’s behalf: How do the souls come to be in the thorn bushes? And what will become of them at the Last Judgment, when the souls of human beings are reunited with their earthly bodies? Pier explains that the souls of suicides drop into the wood, where they take root and sprout, and grow into thorn bushes, on whose leaves the Harpies feed (the monstrous birds fanno dolore, e al dolor fenestra: they “cause pain, and a vent for the pain”). On the day of Last Judgment the souls will retrieve their bodies and each body will hang from its bush, since soul and body, deliberately severed in the act of suicide, cannot be reunited in the afterlife. Pier’s final words evoke this macabre spectacle—a wood of hanged bodies, no thorn bush without its own corpse.

Is Pier lying when he says he was a true servant to his master? Is Dante’s pity misplaced? Are the damned always untrustworthy? The historical record leaves the question unresolved. The stylistic switch from highly wrought artifice to heartfelt directness seems to support the view that he isn’t lying, and that his fate is doubly a tragedy, the false accusation compounded by the act of self-destruction. But scholars who say he must be lying might argue that such calculating control of linguistic register and tone is precisely what he was master of. A powerful argument in favour of the hawkish view (that he cannot be trusted) draws on the iconography of medieval art, where the hanged man (the mental image of him we are left with as Pier finishes speaking) always recalls Judas, the arch-traitor, who killed himself by hanging from a tree.

There is a Virgilian model for the man who speaks through a bush. In Aeneid III, not long after leaving Troy, Aeneas tries to pluck myrtle branches to decorate a sacrificial altar. The branches bleed and the voice of Polydorus, who lies buried in the earth below, explains that the spears that killed him took root and sprouted as a plant. Aeneas, initially terrified, is able to give him proper funeral rites, and order is restored to the world. Dante’s version of this gruesome scenario is more shocking, and more troubling, because there is no resolution. Polydorus’s body lies buried beneath the bush he speaks through; Dante’s sinners by contrast have become plants, they are plants, their souls forever separated from the bodies they inhabited while alive. Human beings are embodied souls. Without a body these sinners are less than human, merely a macabre species of vegetation in the landscape of hell. Body and soul, wilfully sundered, will never be reunited.

Suddenly there are souls running past, pursued by hounds. They are wastrels, who squat down behind a thorn bush; but to no avail. They are dismembered by the dogs. Virgil and Dante go over to the bush, whose torn branches lie scattered on the ground at its feet. The bush reveals itself to be an anonymous Florentine who hanged himself in his own house. The sombre closing line to an extraordinary canto records this stark fact: Io fei gibetto a me de le mie case (“I made a gibbet for myself of my own house”).

Poi che la carità del natio locomi strinse, raunai le fronde sparte

3e rende’le a colui, ch’era già fioco.

Since love of my birth place moved me,

I gathered the scattered fronds

3and gave them back to him, who was already silent.

Love of Florence moves Dante to act charitably towards the anonymous suicide. He collects the scattered branches and lays them at the base of the bush.

Virgil and Dante now come to the third and final subcircle of violence, a vast and desolate sandy plain, on which fall flakes of fire. There are sinners in different postures: some lie flat on their backs, some sit in a crouched position, others walk around. The flakes of fire fall evenly on all of them. They try to fend off the flakes with their hands. One huge prostrate figure seems uncaring of the fire. Dante asks Virgil about him, but the sinner himself, who has registered Dante’s interest, volunteers an answer, shouting: Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto (“What I was alive, so I am dead”). There follows a torrent of aggressive abuse directed at Jove, whose thunderbolts, he says, will never tame him. Violence against the deity is enacted before our eyes: blasphemy in action.

This is Capaneus, a figure from classical mythology, one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes, whose opposition to Jove is no less violent now in hell than it was when he was alive. His enraged defiance embodies a crucial notion: it is the sinners’ states of mind which is their true punishment, rather than the physical torments to which they are subjected. The point is underlined in Virgil’s forceful rejoinder to the sinner’s ranting:

Allora il duca mio parlò di forzatanto, ch’i’ non l’avea sì forte udito:

63«O Capaneo, in ciò che non s’ammorza

la tua superbia, se’ tu più punito;nullo martiro, fuor che la tua rabbia,

66sarebbe al tuo furor dolor compito».

Then my guide spoke with a vehemence

I had never heard him use before:

63“O Capaneus, in the very fact that your pride

is unabated, you are the more punished;

no torment, except your own rage,

66would be a fitting punishment for your fury.”

This is a key definition of the state of mind of the damned: persistence in the obdurate state of mind which caused them to sin is the punishment. There is no possibility of repentance or a change of heart after death. Right up to the moment of death, yes; but afterwards, no. The obduracy expressed here with such rebellious self-aggrandisement by Capaneus marks all the inhabitants of hell. Logically, defiance of a pagan god ought to be a matter of indifference in a Christian world. But Dante, with a cultural syncretism which is typical of him, takes elements of classical culture and incorporates them into his medieval Christian poem, choosing a pagan blasphemer and an episode celebrated in classical poetry (the Thebaid of Statius) as emblematic of human arrogance which rejects and rages against the divine.

Taking care not to walk on the sand, and still keeping close to the edge of the forest, Virgil and Dante come upon a stream whose water flows red. Virgil satisfies Dante’s curiosity by explaining the origin of the infernal rivers. On the island of Crete, within a mountain cavern, there stands the gigantic statue of an old man, head made of gold, chest and arms of silver, the remainder of his torso brass, his legs iron, except for his right foot, which is made of terracotta. All but the head are cracked, and down the fissure run tears, which pierce through the floor of the cavern and form the infernal rivers—the Acheron, the Styx and the Phlegethon (the river of blood we have just encountered)—and, at the bottom of hell, the frozen lake, Cocytus. The old man of Crete seems to be a symbolic representation of the history of humanity, from a golden age of innocence to the present state of decadence and corruption. The rivers of hell it feeds are a byproduct of that compromised human history. Biblical and classical sources (the book of Daniel 2:31–33 and Ovid’s Metamorphoses I, 89f) are here blended and reimagined and given a uniquely Dantean twist: the tears and the rivers, which account for the topography of hell and link it to human history, are not in his sources.

Virgil and Dante have now reached a point where they can leave the wood of the suicides behind them. They have been skirting its edge as they circle around the plain. The stream crosses the sandy plain, its raised edges forming a path they can follow, protected from the falling flakes of fire by the rising vapours.

As they walk along the embankment, virgil and dante gaze down at the sinners. A group walks towards them, peering intently at them, as people do at evening when there is a new moon, or like an old tailor straining to see the eye of his needle. (The graphic immediacy of this second image has delighted readers across the centuries.) The images draw on the daily shared experiences of a medieval city dweller. They mark a distancing from the remote and mythical aura of the previous canto, preparing us for an encounter which is directly autobiographical, deeply rooted in Dante’s own personal history.

Dante is recognised by a sinner who is astounded to see him.

Così adocchiato da cotal famiglia,fui conosciuto da un, che mi prese

24per lo lembo e gridò: «Qual maraviglia!».

Scrutinised in this way by this company,

I was recognised by one of them, who seized me

24by the hem and cried out: “What a marvel!”

The recognition is mutual, though at first, in the ravaged face he sees before him, Dante struggles to read the familiar features of someone he knows. His astonishment at coming upon this person in this place is equal to the shade’s amazement at seeing him.

E io, quando ’l suo braccio a me distese,ficcaï li occhi per lo cotto aspetto,

27sì che ’l viso abbrusciato non difese

la conoscenza süa al mio ’ntelletto;e chinando la mano a la sua faccia,

30rispuosi: «Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?».

And I, when he held his arm out to me,

gazed intently at his baked features,

27so that his scorched face did not prevent

my intellect from recognising him;

and reaching my hand down towards his face,

30I replied: “Are you here, ser Brunetto?”

This is one of the great recognition scenes in the poem. It will unfold as powerfully, and movingly, as it begins. Brunetto will address Dante as figliuol mio, “my son,” and use the intimate tu form of address. Dante has used the more deferential voi, and the honorific title ser, as befits the notary that Brunetto was. In a few brief words this opening exchange conveys rich and complex emotions: astonishment and sorrow, reciprocal affection and reserve, dignity and humiliation—themes that will play out across the canto.

Brunetto Latini was a prominent figure in Florentine intellectual and public life in the closing decades of the thirteenth century, an eminent statesman and a respected author of many works, in verse and prose, including translations of Cicero. A contemporary chronicler records that Brunetto had been the first to civilise and educate the Florentines. He was an ideal role model for a younger man aspiring to distinction both in the public forum of politics and in the more private sphere of writerly ambition. In his life those two very different professions came into balance, albeit precariously.

There are some things we do not know about Brunetto. We don’t know the exact nature of his relationship with Dante (was he a teacher? a mentor? an older friend?). Though he was probably not a teacher in any formal sense, this is clearly a relationship between a maestro and his most gifted pupil. Even the precise nature of his sin has been queried, but we are certainly in the circle of the sodomites.

Brunetto’s surprise at seeing Dante is understandable (he is a living man in hell); but why is Dante surprised to see Brunetto here? The simplest explanation is that Dante did not know that Brunetto was a homosexual and learns it now on the sandy plain of violence against nature. But this is not spelled out; and some scholars have argued that Brunetto’s sin against nature is not homosexuality at all. It could, they say, be the sin of writing in a language not native to him: his masterpiece the Trésor, a vernacular encyclopedia which drew on Aristotle, was written in French in his six years of exile from Italy, between 1260 and 1266. Or it could be the spiritual sin of adhering to an “unnatural” belief: the Cathars had many followers in Florence in the late 1200s. Or it could be the political sin of supporting an “unnatural” form of government, in opposition to the Holy Roman Empire. There is no historical evidence that Brunetto was a homosexual: if he was, Dante has “outed” him. Whatever Brunetto’s sin, Dante is profoundly shocked and moved to encounter him here.

Dante’s body language expresses intimacy, affection and respect. He reaches down towards Brunetto’s face, reciprocating Brunetto’s gesture of reaching out towards him; he bows his head. His words will articulate strong feelings of admiration and indebtedness. Brunetto’s words, conversely, are a statement of faith in the younger man’s exceptional gifts, an endorsement from beyond the grave of Dante’s own powerful self-belief. But those words of affirmation are immediately counterbalanced by a prediction that he will face fierce opposition in living out his destiny.

Dante offers to stay and talk, but Brunetto tells him they must move on. If a sinner stops he is punished by one hundred years under the flakes of fire without shielding himself. Dante does not dare to leave the protected raised bank, but walks along it in parallel, head bowed as a sign of reverence. Their respective positions, Dante high on the bank, Brunetto walking along below him, embody the painful reversal of their roles on earth.

Brunetto says he was aware of Dante’s extraordinary promise as a young man, and foretells that Dante will have a glorious future. He, Brunetto, would have helped him achieve that future if he had not died too soon.

Ed elli a me: «Se tu segui tua stella,non puoi fallire a glorïoso porto,

57se ben m’accorsi ne la vita bella;

e s’io non fossi sì per tempo morto,veggendo il cielo a te così benigno,

60dato t’avrei a l’opera conforto.

And he said to me: “If you follow your star,

you cannot fail to reach a glorious harbour,

57if I understood aright when I was in the world of the living;

and if I had not died so early,

seeing heaven so kindly disposed towards you,

60I would have given you encouragement in your work.

But now he predicts that Dante’s path will not be easy. Some Florentines will become his enemies. This is not a generic prophecy of exile like Farinata’s but a specific and devastating prediction of determined opposition by those hostile to him, firmly located in the civic unrest and turbulence caused by warring factions within the city, and by the character failings of its greedy, envious, arrogant citizens. Brunetto’s harshness of tone reflects his own direct experience in the world of Florentine politics.

Ma quello ingrato popolo malignoche discese di Fiesoleab antico,

63e tiene ancor del monte e del macigno,

ti si farà, per tuo ben far, nimico;ed è ragion, ché tra li lazzi sorbi

66si disconvien fruttare al dolce fico.

Vecchia fama nel mondo li chiama orbi;gent’ è avara, invidiosa e superba:

69dai lor costumi fa che tu ti forbi.

But that ungrateful, wicked people,

who came down from Fiesole of old,

63and who still smack of mountain and of granite,

will become your enemy, because of your good works;

and it is right, because the sweet fig

66should not bear fruit among bitter sorbs.

Ancient reputation in the world calls them blind;

they are a greedy, envious, arrogant people:

69take care that you are not tainted by their ways.

Brunetto is drawing on a Florentine foundation myth to explain the notorious quarrelsomeness and divisiveness of its citizens. According to this myth, the city can never be at peace because of a damaging mingling of Roman and Fiesolan blood in its origins. The violence of the party animosities within the city is explicable in terms of this mixed heritage, ultimately going back to Caesar (the Florentines) and Catiline (the Fiesolans). Dante is a true Roman (and thus ultimately a Trojan) by descent. A great future lies in store for him. He must take care to stay clear of both these hostile opposed forces within the city. Both parties, the Whites and the Blacks, will wish to have him under their power—the Blacks to carry out their death sentence, the Whites to avenge themselves for his perceived abandonment of their cause early in the years of exile.

La tua fortuna tanto onor ti serba,che l’una parte e l’altra avranno fame

72di te; ma lungi fia dal becco l’erba.

Faccian le bestie fiesolane stramedi lor medesme, e non tocchin la pianta,

75s’alcuna surge ancora in lor letame,

in cui riviva la sementa santadi que’ Roman che vi rimaser quando

78fu fatto il nido di malizia tanta».

Your fortune keeps in store for you such great honour

that both parties will hunger for you;

72but the grass will be far from the goat.

Let the Fiesolan beasts consume

themselves, and let them not touch the plant,

75if one should still grow in their dung,

in which may still live on the holy seed

of those Romans who remained there when

78it became a nest of such wickedness.”

Dante expresses his regret that Brunetto is dead and pays moving tribute to his influence, which he will bear witness to and celebrate as long as he is alive.

«Se fosse tutto pieno il mio dimando»,rispuos’ io lui, «voi non sareste ancora

81de l’umana natura posto in bando;

ché ’n la mente m’è fitta, e or m’accora,la cara e buona imagine paterna

84di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora

“If I’d been granted all that I might ask,”

I answered him, “you would not yet be

81banished from human kind;

for in my mind is fixed, and it now saddens me,

the dear, good, fatherly image of you

84when in the world from time to time

m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna:e quant’ io l’abbia in grado, mentr’ io vivo

87convien che ne la mia lingua si scerna.

you taught me how man becomes eternal:

and while I am alive it is right that my words

87bear witness to how grateful I am for that.

Brunetto’s first words to Dante, O figliuol mio, are now mirrored in Dante’s cara e buona imagine paterna (l. 83): the tender acknowledgement of a profoundly important formative influence, of a substitute father figure (as we have seen, Dante never mentions his biological father in the poem). A debt of gratitude is fully acknowledged and repaid. More than seven hundred years after his death, Brunetto’s name lives on in these moving lines.

Dante says he will take note of the prediction and will wait to have it glossed later in the journey. He asks who Brunetto’s companions are: they are all men of the church and famous men of letters. But a new group approaches, and Brunetto must run off. His final words urge Dante not to forget his book, the Trésor:

Gente vien con la quale esser non deggio.Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro

120nel qual io vivo ancora, e più non cheggio».

People are coming that I mustn’t be with.

Let me commend my Trésor to you,

120in which I still live; that’s all I ask.”

As he turns and speeds off to rejoin his group, he looks like a competitor in the famous race run every year in Verona at the beginning of Lent; and he looks like the winner, not the loser. This final image—Brunetto trails the field, hastening to catch up with his companions, yet he looks like the winner—perfectly encapsulates the ambivalence which informs his portrayal.

What did Brunetto teach Dante? We do not know. What do we know of Dante’s education? Very little. We know that he learned Latin, well enough to write several strikingly original works in that language. He tells us that after the death of Beatrice he found consolation in studying philosophy, and that he frequented the two great monastic teaching institutions of medieval Florence, the Franciscans at Santa Croce and the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella, where laymen were allowed to sit in on lectures. He says he took great comfort in reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Did he own copies? We don’t know. He may have studied in Bologna. The vast reading reflected and distilled in the Commedia seems in large part to be that of a passionate autodidact.

When Dante says to Brunetto m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna, the verb s’etterna (“makes himself eternal”) reads oddly as a tribute to a sinner damned and suffering in hell, whose present painful and humiliating state, emphasised at the beginning of the canto and again at the end, is so at odds with the dignity and status of a maestro. Perhaps Brunetto’s teaching was not so much by instruction as by example. In his life he directed his literary and intellectual endeavour to a civic and ethical end. That example served Dante well in exile, when his own high political hopes in his native city had come to nothing. As will be spelled out with increasing explicitness as we move forward, the goal of Dante’s poem is the good of humanity.

Brunetto says he “lives on” in his work. What is the value of literary fame, a literary afterlife? Do literary works achieve immortality for their creators? In the modern world, as in the classical world, the answer is an unequivocal yes. In the medieval Christian world, the answer is perhaps more ambiguous. The glorioso porto (“glorious harbour”) Dante is heading for surely includes paradise as well as literary fame. But for modern secular readers who have no religious faith, the future glory so confidently and accurately predicted by Brunetto for Dante is precisely literary fame, his poem perhaps the greatest that any poet has produced.

The powerful and affecting episode recounted in Inferno 15 is a recognition scene not just in the sense that the sinner and the traveller recognise each other, but in the broader sense that Brunetto recognises and endorses Dante’s promise and exceptional gifts. Dante repays the debt of his teacher’s belief in him by immortalising Brunetto in his poem: la cara e buona imagine paterna is a line whose simplicity and warmth no one who has read it will easily forget.

T. S. Eliot echoes this encounter in the haunting lines of “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, where he describes a hallucinated scene after an air raid:

In the uncertain hour before the morning

Near the ending of interminable night

At the recurrent end of the unending . . .

We are still in the circle of the sodomites. three shades detach themselves from a passing group and run towards Dante, whom they have recognised as a Florentine by what he is wearing. (Florentines of Dante’s generation wore a distinctive long cloak or gown, Boccaccio tells us: only a generation later, in Boccaccio’s own day, this was no longer the case.) These are eminent Florentines of an earlier generation, horribly disfigured by the fire, certainly homosexuals. They now form a circle and wheel around, but continue to gaze at Dante as they do so. They ask him to identify himself, and introduce themselves by name: Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi and Jacopo Rusticucci, all high-profile figures in Florentine history, famous for their good works. Dante’s response is extraordinary:

S’i’ fossi stato dal foco coperto,gittato mi sarei tra lor di sotto,

48e credo che ’l dottor l’avrìa sofferto;

ma perch’ io mi sarei brusciato e cotto,vinse paura la mia buona voglia

51che di loro abbracciar mi facea ghiotto.

If I had been protected from the fire,

I would have thrown myself down among them,

48and I think my teacher would have allowed it;

but because I would have been burned and cooked,

fear overcame my goodwill,

51which made me eager to embrace them.

Not only is Dante’s portrayal of these sinners uncensorious and unsalacious—there is no expression of revulsion at their sin, and no prurient sexual detail—but he says he would have thrown himself down to join them if he had been protected from the fire; and (still more remarkable) he believes Virgil would not have objected had he done so. Seeing their suffering, Dante feels not scorn but sorrow. A modern liberal reader, for whom homosexuality is not a perversion of nature but a part of nature, might see this scene as an enactment of cognitive dissonance. Virgil, as representative of human reason, would have allowed Dante to embrace these great men; but there is a religious proscription, made concrete in the falling flakes of fire, which makes him afraid to do so. Dante’s attitude to homosexuality is that the inclination (the urge or attraction to someone of the same sex) is not sinful, but acting on it is. This view, formalised in the thirteenth century by the great theologian Thomas Aquinas, who draws on the natural science of Aristotle, is still the attitude of the catholic church in the modern world. Religion trumps reason.

Dante pays tribute to the good works of these remarkable men of an earlier generation:

Di vostra terra sono, e sempre mail’ovra di voi e li onorati nomi

60con affezion ritrassi e ascoltai.

I am from your city, and I have always

heard of your works, and your honoured names,

60and spoken of them with affection.

The Florentines, all men of distinction in public life, question Dante urgently about the current state of the city, and whether the old courtly values still prevail there. (Like all the shades of the dead, they know nothing of the present, but a recent arrival has told them bad things.)

cortesia e valor dì se dimorane la nostra città sì come suole,

69o se del tutto se n’è gita fora;

tell us if courtesy and valour are still to be

found in our city as they once were,

69or if they have utterly abandoned her;

Dante’s reply is damning. In an outburst addressed to the city itself, he accuses Florence of arrogance and excess, caused by the influx of migrants to the city and the quick profits that can be made in business (an eloquent reaction to the unrestrained greed of early capitalism). Since the minting of the florin in 1252, the city had enjoyed an economic boom based on the flourishing wool and silk industries, which supplied luxury goods all across Europe. These twin manifestations of Florence’s mercantile and banking prosperity—immigration from the surrounding countryside, and the quick profits to be made by entrepreneurs—are seen by Dante as inseparable from the moral degeneration of her citizens:

«La gente nuova e i sùbiti guadagniorgoglio e dismisura han generata,

75Fiorenza, in te, sì che tu già ten piagni».

“New people and quick profits

have generated arrogance and excess

75in you, Florence, so that you already weep for it.”

La gente nuova e i sùbiti guadagni: the line, in its contemptuous dismissal of those who live only for aggressive profit-making, is as powerful and as pertinent in the light of recent banking scandals as it was when Dante wrote it. The three sinners ask to be remembered in the world of the living, and run off.

Virgil and Dante hear a thundering waterfall. Dante removes his girdle and gives it to Virgil, who lowers it down into the abyss. (The symbolic significance of Dante’s girdle is famously difficult to determine. The vast number of interpretations offered by commentators includes pity, justice, lust, pride, temperance, chastity, law and self-reliance. Take your pick.) Dante waits expectantly. Then a strange figure comes up into view through the murky air, just like a swimmer who has gone down to untangle an anchor snagged on a rock, and now comes back into view. The canto closes on a note of suspense: the creature’s movements of extending and retracting its limbs are beautifully captured in the image of the diver returning to the surface, but who or what this figure is, is not explained.

The monstrous creature that now arrives is identified by Virgil as Geryon, the sozza imagine di froda (“the filthy image of fraud”), che tutto ’l mondo appuzza (“who makes the whole world stink”). Only by riding on this beast’s back in a terrifying downward spiral through the murky gloom will Dante and Virgil be able to reach the last two circles, where fraud is punished in the depths of hell. In the classical world Geryon was one of the monsters slain by Hercules. Dante has reimagined his triple-hybrid nature to embody the essence of fraud. This creature has a benevolent, kindly face (indeed, the face of a just man), but its body is that of a serpent with two sinister hairy forepaws; its back, chest and flanks are decorated with coloured patterns like a Turkish or Tartar tapestry. Attractive in facial appearance and outward aspect, a lure to draw in and deceive victims, the monster is repellent and brutish in other bodily parts, reflecting its true dangerous and destructive nature. Like a boat drawn up so that it rests partly on shore, or a beaver whose head is on the bank, the monster comes to rest its upper body on the stony edge to the sandy plain, while its venomous forked tail, just like a scorpion’s, waves in the void.

As they make their way down towards the monster, Dante spots another group of sinners seated on the ground. Virgil urges him to go over and talk to them briefly, while he negotiates a passage with Geryon. Dante recognises no one, but around their necks these sinners wear money purses with distinctive emblems on them in bright colours: a lion, a goose, a sow. These are the heraldic emblems of banking families, of moneylenders. The wearers of the purses, crouched on the sand, are described with extreme distaste; they are likened to dogs bitten by insects, and to an ox that licks its nose. They are the usurers. (There is no trace of the common medieval stereotype that identifies usurers as Jewish.) The emblems are those of identifiable, for the most part Florentine, families. Dante does not talk to them, though one of them addresses him. There is some evidence that Dante’s father was a small-time moneylender.

When Dante returns, Virgil is already seated on Geryon, and he urges Dante to climb up in front of him. Dante does so, and without being asked to, Virgil protectively puts his arms around him. Virgil urges Geryon to move slowly and in wide circles as he descends, bearing in mind the unusual weight he is carrying. The monster pulls out from the bank, like a ship reversing from the shore. When free of the land, he propels himself by using his tail and forepaws.

Come la navicella esce di locoin dietro in dietro, sì quindi si tolse;

102e poi ch’al tutto si sentì a gioco,

là ’v’ era ’l petto, la coda rivolse,e quella tesa, come anguilla, mosse,

105e con le branche l’aere a sé raccolse.

As a little boat pulls out backwards

from its mooring, so it moved off,

102and when it felt completely free,

it turned its tail to where its chest had been,

and stretching it out, moved it like an eel,

105and drew the air towards itself with its paws.

Dante is terrified as they descend into the dark air. Geryon proceeds with caution, circling downwards so slowly that, in a brilliantly imagined detail, Dante is aware of the downward movement only because of the upward feel of the wind on his face.

Ella sen va notando lenta lenta:rota e discende, ma non me n’ accorgo

117se non che al viso e di sotto mi venta.

Io sentia già da la man destra il gorgofar sotto noi un orribile scroscio,

120per che con li occhi ’n giù la testa sporgo.

Allor fu’ io più timido a lo stoscio,però ch’ i’ vidi fuochi e senti’ pianti;

123ond’ io tremando tutto mi raccoscio.

E vidi poi, ché nol vedea davanti,lo scendere e ’l girar per li gran mali

126che s’appressavan da diversi canti.

It sets off swimming slowly, slowly:

it circles and descends, but I’m not aware of it,

117except that a breeze blows on my face from below.

I could already hear on my right the torrent

which made a horrible roar below us,

120and so I stick my head out looking downwards.

Then I was more fearful of falling,

because I saw fires and I heard wailing;

123and so shivering I huddle right down.

And then I saw, for I couldn’t see it earlier,

our descending and circling among the great torments

126which were pressing close on various sides.

As they come in to land, Dante can make out sins and sinners. When Geryon has set them down at the bottom of the rocky cliff face he speeds off like an arrow shot from a bow.

This tour de force description of a helicopter-like flight on a fantastical beast down into the lower depths of hell—a wild flight of fancy, quite beyond anything Dante’s readers could have experienced or imagined in the real world—is notable for the high number of realistic and down-to-earth similes which anchor the mysterious and unknown in the familiar realities of everyday life: the diver who surfaces, the boat moored at the water’s edge, the beaver, the boat pulling out from shore, the eel, the slow circling of a falcon, the arrow shot. Dante’s matchless skill at making the utterly fantastical seem entirely concrete and believable is especially evident here. The sense of immediacy comes too from the fluid switching between past and present tenses, with the phrases in the present tense (la testa sporgo: “I stick my head out”; tutto mi raccoscio: “I huddle right down”) characteristically coming in the clinching position at the end of the tercet.

Up to this point, Dante has observed the infernal guardians from a distance, but not touched them. As Virgil points out, the ride on Geryon’s back signals that in lower hell things will be different.

We are now in the eighth circle, the circle of simple fraud. The opening lines of the canto describe this new landscape with the precision of a surveyor mapping out an unfamiliar terrain.

Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge,tutto di pietra di color ferrigno,

3come la cerchia che dintorno il volge.

Nel dritto mezzo del campo malignovaneggia un pozzo assai largo e profondo,

6di cui suo loco dicerò l’ordigno.

Quel cinghio che rimane adunque è tondotra ’l pozzo e ’l piè de l’alta ripa dura,

9e ha distinto in dieci valli il fondo.

There is a place in hell called Malebolge,

all of iron-coloured stone,

3like the rocky cliff face which encircles it.

Right in the middle of the wicked plain

a pit sinks down, very wide and deep,

6whose structure I will explain in due course.

The circle of rock that remains, then, is round,

between the pit and the foot of the high hard bank,

9and its base is divided into ten ditches.

Malebolge translates literally as “evil pouches” or ditches. The ten bolge or ditches are arranged like moats around a castle, except that at their centre is an abyss which plunges downwards. Bridges arch across one ditch to the next. After Geryon sets them down, Virgil moves off to the left, and Dante follows.

There are sinners circling in two directions in the first ditch, whipped by horned demons as they run. Dante talks with a sinner who is unhappy at being recognised: Venedico Caccianemico, a powerful political figure from Bologna who pimped his own sister to a marquis for money. As they cross the bridge, Virgil encourages Dante to look back and see the sinners moving in the opposite direction: he points out Jason, the Argonaut, the heartless seducer of Hypsipyle and Medea, as recounted by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. This is the circle of the panders and seducers.

Dante and Virgil cross over the bridge and look down into the second ditch, where they see sinners immersed in human excrement. These are the flatterers. Why human excrement? Cristoforo Landino in his 1481 commentary offers a neat explanation: just as the body digests food and the part which has no nutritional value is excreted, so flattery is a part of language that has no value, in that it does not fulfil the purpose of speech, which is to tell the truth and enable healthy human communication. Dante recognises Alessio Interminei from Lucca, evidently a notorious flatterer, though the historical record tells us nothing of him, and the harlot Thaïs, a character in a classical comedy by Terence, who was legendary for her shameless flattery.

Virgil and dante are now in the third bolgia, that of simony. The sin takes its name from Simon Magus, a magician who, as recounted in the New Testament, attempted to acquire spiritual powers from the disciples John and Peter in exchange for money (Acts 8:9–24). Simony is the sin of buying or selling holy offices or sacraments, a sin which by definition only churchmen can commit.

As they look down, Virgil and Dante see that the dark rock floor is perforated with holes. Sinners are upended in them, head downwards, just their legs protruding, flames licking over their feet. This is as undignified a position for a human being as it is possible to imagine. Botticelli’s marvellous drawing for this canto shows a rich panorama of splayed legs, buttocks and testicles. Dante’s attention is caught by one pair of legs kicking out more wildly than the others, with redder flames. He asks who the sinner is; Virgil accompanies him down into the ditch so that he can put that question to the sinner himself.

«O qual che se’ che ’l di sù tien di sotto,anima trista come pal commessa»,

48comincia’ io a dir, «se puoi, fa motto».

Io stava come ’l frate che confessalo perfido assessin, che, poi ch’è fitto,

51richiama lui per che la morte cessa.

“O you, whoever you are, who are upside down,

wretched soul planted like a stake,”

48I began to say, “if you can, speak.”

I stood like a friar who shrives

a treacherous murderer who, when he’s stuck in the earth,

51calls the friar back so as to put off his death.

Dante underlines the ironic inversion of roles: he, a layman, adopts perforce the posture of a father confessor, standing by the hole in which a convicted criminal is about to be executed. (A barbarous method of execution in medieval Florence buried the victim alive head downwards in a hole.) The man whose confession he is going to hear will turn out to be nothing less than a pope. But there is a misunderstanding that needs to be clarified first, before identities are revealed. The sinner asks tetchily:

Ed el gridò: «Se’ tu già costì ritto,se’ tu già costì ritto, Bonifazio?

54Di parecchi anni mi mentì lo scritto.

Se’ tu sì tosto di quell’ aver sazioper lo qual non temesti tòrre a ’nganno

57la bella donna, e poi di farne strazio?».

And he cried out: “Is that you standing there already,

Boniface, is that you standing there already?

54The prediction lied to me by several years.

Are you so soon glutted with that wealth

for which you did not fear to take the fair woman

57by deception, and then ravage her?”

The irascible speaker, head down in the hole, has assumed that the new arrival is the person who is to take his place and push him further down into the rock. But this new arrival was not expected yet; he has come early. There is a little drama of misunderstanding. Virgil tells Dante to explain that he is not Boniface. In response the upturned sinner grudgingly reveals his own identity: he wore the “great mantle”—that is, he was a pope.

Se di saper ch’i’ sia ti cal cotanto,che tu abbi però la ripa corsa,

69sappi ch’i’ fui vestito del gran manto;

e veramente fui figliuol de l’orsa,cupido sì per avanzar li orsatti,

72che sù l’avere e qui me misi in borsa.

If you are so keen to know who I am,

that you have come down the bank just for that,

69know that I wore the great mantle;

and truly I was a son of the bear,*

so eager to advance the bear cubs,

72that up there I put money and down here, myself, into a purse.

* i.e. a member of the Orsini family

This is pope Nicholas III, whose family name (Orsini) prompts the play on words with which he describes himself and his relatives (orsa is “she-bear” in Italian; orsatti are “little bears”). So eager was he to advance family interests that in the world of the living he filled his purse with money, and now, in the afterlife, with a grim play on words, he is himself stuffed into a “purse,” the hole in the rocky floor of the ditch. Below him in the rock are other popes who committed this same sin of simony.

Di sotto al capo mio son li altri trattiche precedetter me simoneggiando,

75per le fessure de la pietra piatti.

Là giù cascherò io altresì quandoverrà colui ch’i’ credea che tu fossi,

78allor ch’i’ feci ’l sùbito dimando.

Beneath my head the others are drawn down

who preceded me committing simony,

75squeezed into the fissures in the rock.

Down there I too will fall when

the person I thought you were arrives,

78when I asked my over-hasty question.

But he predicts that an even more wicked pope will follow Boniface and he, Nicholas, will be pushed even further down into the rock. We are invited to imagine a kind of sinister, inverted apostolic succession, as pope pushes avaricious pope deeper into the rock. The rock of Peter (Matthew 16:18: “You are rock [petrus], and upon this rock [petram] I will build my church”) is riddled with corrupt clergy, undermined from within by the greed and nepotism of degenerate priests.

Ma più è ’l tempo già che i piè mi cossie ch’i’ son stato così sottosopra,

81ch’el non starà piantato coi piè rossi:

ché dopo lui verrà di più laida opra,di ver’ ponente, un pastor sanza legge,

84tal che convien che lui e me ricuopra.

But already more time has passed since my feet have been cooking

and I’ve been upside down like this,

81than he will be planted with his feet red:*

* from the fire

for after him, there will come from the west

a lawless pastor, of even fouler deeds;

84a fitting cover for both him and me.

The pastor sanza legge is Clement V, a pope especially reviled by Dante because he moved the papacy to Avignon, where the college of cardinals was dominated by Frenchmen. In an age of emergent nationalism they protected their country’s and their own interests, with no thought for the greater good of the church or of humanity. Dante’s reproach appeals to the example of Jesus, who asked for no money when giving the keys to Peter. Nor did the disciples ask for payment from Matthias when he was chosen to replace Judas after his betrayal.

Io non so s’i’ mi fui qui troppo folle,ch’i’ pur rispuosi lui a questo metro:

90«Deh, or mi dì: quanto tesoro volle

Nostro Segnore in prima da san Pietroch’ei ponesse le chiavi in sua balìa?

93Certo non chiese se non ‘Viemmi retro’.

Né Pier né li altri tolsero a Matiaoro od argento, quando fu sortito

96al loco che perdé l’anima ria.

I don’t know if here I was too rash,

for I answered him in these words:

90“Now just tell me: How much money

did Our Lord want from Saint Peter

before he placed the keys in his keeping?

93Certainly he asked nothing, except ‘Follow me.’

Nor did Peter and the others take gold or silver

from Matthias, when he was chosen by lot

96for the place lost by the wicked soul.*

* Judas

It is right that the pope should suffer this punishment. With harsh sarcasm Dante urges him to keep tight hold of the money his simony brought him.

Però ti sta, ché tu se’ ben punito;e guarda ben la mal tolta moneta

99ch’esser ti fece contra Carlo ardito.

So stay right there, for you are justly punished;

and take good care of the ill-gotten money

99that made you take a bold stand against Charles.

Charles is Charles I of Anjou, king of Sicily, so well known that his dynastic connection does not need to be spelled out. His given name is enough to identify him. The ill-gotten gains of simony had enabled Boniface to take a stand against the Angevin dynasty in Naples, always a threat to papal political ambitions. The terse allusiveness of these lines must have struck contemporary readers with great polemical force. They are quoted as a space filler in a Bolognese legal document dating from 1321, one of the very earliest pieces of evidence we have about the circulation of the Infernobefore Dante’s death.

Dante would use even harsher words, were it not for his reverence for the holy office. The distinction between office and incumbent is crucial in Dante’s thinking.

E se non fosse ch’ancor lo mi vietala reverenza de le somme chiavi

102che tu tenesti ne la vita lieta,

io userei parole ancor più gravi;ché la vostra avarizia il mondo attrista,

105calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi.

And if I were not still restrained

by my reverence for the supreme keys

102which you held in your earthly life,

I would use even harsher words:

for your greed is a blight on the world,

105trampling on the good and raising up the wicked.

The words which follow are damning in their simplicity and directness:

Fatto v’avete dio d’oro e d’argento;e che altro è da voi a l’idolatre,

114se non ch’elli uno, e voi ne orate cento?

You have made yourselves a god of gold and silver;

and what difference is there between you and idolaters,

114except that they worship one god, and you a hundred?

The problem of papal corruption in Dante’s view can be traced back to the misguided donation of Constantine, the gift supposedly made by the emperor Constantine when he converted to Christianity in the fourth century. He was believed to have made a gift to the church of territory and material possessions, setting the papacy and the clergy on a disastrous path.

Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre,non la tua conversion, ma quella dote

117che da te prese il primo ricco patre!».

E mentr’ io li cantava cotai note,o ira o coscïenza che ’l mordesse,

120forte spingava con ambo le piote.

Ah, Constantine, what evil was brought into the world,

not by your conversion, but by that dowry

117which the first rich father had from you!”

And while I was intoning these words,

whether it was anger or conscience that bit him,

120he kicked out hard with both his feet.

In this brilliantly imagined drama of misunderstanding and reproach, all done through animated dialogue which vividly characterises the speakers, Dante has encapsulated another, and very polemical, dimension of his political vision. We learn here for the first time in the poem of the compromised role of the papacy in contemporary politics and in human history. Papal aspirations to power and political dominance have brought the world to the sorry state it is in. The proper ordering of the world requires the pope to abjure secular power. Constantine’s misguided donation, which Dante believed to be a genuine historical event—it was not proved until a hundred years after Dante’s death that the story was invented, a fraud based on a fake document—is a key event in his sense of unfolding human history, and why things have gone so terribly wrong in the world of his time.

Virgil carries Dante back up the slope, and they look down into the next valley.

Gazing down, dante sees distorted bodies, with heads twisted backwards through 180 degrees, so that faces are directly over buttocks. The sinners—soothsayers and diviners—are forced to walk backwards since they can see only behind them, a fitting punishment for those who sought to foretell the future. Dante weeps at the sight of such severe human disfigurement. Virgil reprimands him for his tears, which mirror the tears of the shades that flow down over their buttock clefts.

Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender fruttodi tua lezione, or pensa per te stesso

21com’ io potea tener lo viso asciutto,

quando la nostra imagine di pressovidi sì torta, che ’l pianto de li occhi

24le natiche bagnava per lo fesso.

If God may allow you, reader, to benefit

from your reading, just think for yourself

21if I could keep my face dry of tears,

when I saw close up our human image

so contorted that the tears from their eyes

24bathed their buttocks down the cleft.

Certo io piangea, poggiato a un de’ rocchidel duro scoglio, sì che la mia scorta

27mi disse: «Ancor se’ tu de li altri sciocchi?

Qui vive la pietà quand’ è ben morta;chi è più scellerato che colui

30che al giudicio divin passion comporta?

Certainly I wept, leaning against one of the rocks

of the hard cliff face, so that my guide

27said to me: “Are you still like the other fools?

Here pity lives when it is quite dead;

who is more wicked than the person

30who questions divine judgment?

Pity is out of place here; to feel pity is to question divine judgment. That is, true pity is not to have pity. When Dante feels pity for a sinner, as he did for Pier delle Vigne, there can be a troubling sense of unresolved contradiction, but here the point is made categorically clear. These sinners deserved their punishment. One early commentator suggests that Dante’s tears may reflect an uneasy awareness that he himself is predicting the future for the people he writes about in the Commedia. The tension between imaginative licence in a work of the creative imagination and the sin of soothsaying is not something the poem explores. By contrast the medieval astrologers, whose names are listed after those of the classical soothsayers, raise the problem of free will, an issue which lies at the heart of the poem; and that is an issue Dante will tackle directly at its very centre, in the middle of purgatory.

The soothsayers from the classical world pointed out by Virgil include Manto, who founded the city of Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace. Her story offers a pretext for a description of the countryside “up there in fair Italy,” where the waters of streams and rivers originating in the Alps flow together to form Lake Garda (Dante uses the Latin name of the lake: Benaco). The geographical coordinates of the story are sketched in with lyrical precision—Garda is to the east, Val Camonica to the west, and Pennino is the alpine range to the north.

Suso in Italia bella giace un laco,a piè de l’Alpe che serra Lamagna

63sovra Tiralli, c’ha nome Benaco.

Up there in fair Italy lies a lake,

at the foot of the Alps that border Germany,

63above the Tyrol, and its name is Benaco.

Per mille fonti, credo, e più si bagnatra Garda e Val Camonica e Pennino

66de l’acqua che nel detto laco stagna.

From a thousand sources, I think, and more,

the land between Garda and Val Camonica and Pennino

66is bathed by the waters that collect in that lake.

At the southern point of Lake Garda lies the fortress of Peschiera, and here the waters of the lake flow out to form the river Mincio, which then flows into the Po.

Siede Peschiera, bello e forte arneseda fronteggiar Bresciani e Bergamaschi,

72ove la riva ’ntorno più discese.

Ivi convien che tutto quanto caschiciò che ’n grembo a Benaco star non può,

75e fassi fiume giù per verdi paschi.

Tosto che l’acqua a correr mette co,non più Benaco, ma Mencio si chiama

78fino a Governol, dove cade in Po.

Peschiera, a fine, strong fortress,

to take on the Brescians and the Bergamese,

72is situated where the shore is at its lowest point.

There all the water that Benaco can’t hold

perforce flows down and becomes a river

75running through the verdant pastures.

As soon as the water begins to flow,

it isn’t called Benaco anymore, but Mincio,

78as far as Governolo, where it falls into the Po.

Virgil points out the figure of a soothsayer he wrote of in the Aeneid, suggesting in passing that Dante knows the whole poem by heart.

Euripilo ebbe nome, e così ’l cantal’alta mia tragedìa in alcun loco:

114ben lo sai tu che la sai tutta quanta.

Eurypilus was his name, and so

my lofty tragedy celebrates him at one point:

114you’re well aware of that, you know it all.

The authentic colloquial cadence of this last line is striking. Virgil’s epic is a tragedìa, and Dante knew it all; Dante’s poem by contrast is a comedìa, as he tells us in the opening lines of the next canto.

Così di ponte in ponte, altro parlandoche la mia comedìa cantar non cura,

3venimmo;

So we came from bridge to bridge, talking

of other things that my Commedia

3is not concerned to record;

This is an intriguingly throwaway canto opening: What were Virgil and Dante talking about? Perhaps this very question of the difference between tragedy and comedy? We remember the shoptalk among the poets of antiquity in canto 4, also not shared with the reader. Dante never explains why his poem is a comedìa. Later, in Paradiso, he will call it a poema sacro or sacrato poema. The word “divine,” as we know, was added to the poem’s title by editors of early printed editions long after Dante’s death.

We must put aside our modern understanding of “comedy” as connoting “comical” or “amusing.” A traditional definition sees comedy in terms of plot: a comedy must start unhappily and end well, as this one does. But a more useful way of thinking about the title of the poem is in linguistic and stylistic terms. It is written in the vernacular, in contrast to the elevated (alta: “lofty”) Latin of Virgil. Furthermore, within the vernacular, it exploits every stylistic register, from intimate, colloquial and (as we are about to see) vulgar to profound, learned and philosophical. No kind of language is excluded from Dante’s poem; no kind of language can be, if it is to cover all aspects of reality, from the most abject to the sublime. This linguistic inclusiveness, which jettisons the traditional notion of stylistic levels being matched to subject matter (low, middle or high), is exploited by Dante in ways that never cease to astound and delight.

Dante now looks down onto a new landscape: e vidila mirabilmente oscura (“and I saw it wondrously dark”). An animated description of the Venetian arsenale, or shipbuilding yard, in winter, where pitch is boiled to caulk new vessels and repair old ones, provides an arresting comparison for the landscape he now witnesses. It is a darkly ominous setting for the violent, energetic, threatening scene—very different from the sense of purposeful industry in the arsenale—that will unfold through the next two cantos, which are as grimly humorous as the poem ever gets (though actually very frightening).

Quale ne l’arzanà de’ Vinizianibolle l’inverno la tenace pece

9a rimpalmare i legni lor non sani,

ché navicar non ponno—in quella vecechi fa suo legno novo e chi ristoppa

12le coste a quel che più vïaggi fece;

chi ribatte da proda e chi da poppa;altri fa remi e altri volge sarte;

15chi terzeruolo e artimon rintoppa—:

tal, non per foco, ma per divin’ arte,bollia là giuso una pegola spessa,

18che ’nviscava la ripa d’ogne parte.

I’ vedea lei, ma non vedëa in essamai che le bolle che ’l bollor levava,

21e gonfiar tutta, e riseder compressa.

Just as in the arsenal of the Venetians,

the sticky pitch boils in winter,

9for recaulking their unsound boats,

because they cannot put to sea—instead

one man rebuilds his boat, one plugs the sides

12of a boat that has made many journeys;

another hammers at the prow and another at the stern;

others make oars, and others twist ropes for the rigging;

15another patches the jib and the mainsail—

just so, not with fire, but by divine art,

down there was boiling a thick pitch,

18which stuck to the shore all around.

I saw it, but I saw nothing in it

except the bubbles which the boiling sent up,

21and all swelling up, and then setthng back down.

Gazing down, Dante sees nothing above the pitch-dark surface. Virgil shouts a warning, Dante turns and sees a black devil running up the cliff towards them, with a sinner slung across his shoulder, gripped by the ankles. The devil summons his companion devils, urging them to shove the sinner under the surface, while he goes back up to Lucca for more sinners—the city is well stocked with corrupt civil servants. We are in the circle of barratry: bribery or corruption in public office, a secular equivalent of simony. The devil hurls the sinner down into the pitch; when he surfaces, the devils poke him back down under, just as cooks poke meat down in a cooking pot so that it stays submerged:

Non altrimenti i cuoci a’ lor vassallifanno attuffare in mezzo la caldaia

57la carne con li uncin, perché non galli.

Just so cooks make their kitchen lads

poke the meat back down in the cauldron

57with a hook, so that it doesn’t float to the surface.

Virgil tells Dante to squat down behind a rock. He will go to deal with the devils, who emerge menacingly from beneath the bridge. He talks with the devils’ leader Malacoda, telling him that the journey has divine backing. Malacoda tells his troops to hold off. Virgil tells Dante to come out from where he is hiding, and Dante does so, but fearfully: judging by the look of the devils, he doesn’t think they will keep their word. His wariness is that of frightened soldiers emerging after the signing of a truce. Dante has seen this with his own eyes: it is one of the few reflections in the poem of his own experience of military service.

così vid’ ïo già temer li fantich’uscivan patteggiati di Caprona,

96veggendo sé tra nemici cotanti.

I’ m’accostai con tutta la personalungo ’l mio duca, e non torceva li occhi

99da la sembianza lor ch’era non buona.

I saw foot soldiers fearful like this when they came out

with a guarantee of safe conduct at Caprona,

96seeing themselves among so many enemies.

I drew my whole body closer

to my guide, and I didn’t take my eyes off

99their demeanour, which didn’t look good.

Malacoda explains that they cannot continue on this path because the bridge at the bottom of it has collapsed in ruins; but he will provide an escort to take them to an intact bridge. He summons a troop of ten devils to accompany them. Dante is nervous, but Virgil is confident. The canto ends with the vulgar clarion call with which the appointed team leader summons his troops: ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta (“and he had made a trumpet of his arse”). Botticelli did a series of drawings to illustrate the Commedia: the graphic energy of his drawing of the farting devil exactly matches Dante’s verbal élan, just as its placement on the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet echoes the last line of the canto.

A virtuoso opening riff tells us that dante has heard troops summoned to battle, or competitors to jousts, by many different instruments—trumpets, bells, drums, bugles, instruments native and foreign—but never one like this.

The sinners immersed in the pitch appear intermittently above the surface to gain some relief from the pain, but instantly withdraw at the approach of danger:

Come i dalfini, quando fanno segnoa’ marinar con l’arco de la schiena

21che s’argomentin di campar lor legno,

talor così, ad alleggiar la pena,mostrav’ alcun de’ peccatori ’l dosso

24e nascondea in men che non balena.

E come a l’orlo de l’acqua d’un fossostanno i ranocchi pur col muso fuori,

27sì che celano i piedi e l’altro grosso,

sì stavan d’ogne parte i peccatori;ma come s’appressava Barbariccia,

30così si ritraén sotto i bollori.

Like dolphins when they signal

to sailors by arching their backs

21that they should look to saving their boats,

just so, from time to time, to ease the pain,

one of the sinners would show his back

24and hide it quicker than lightning.

And just as at the edge of the water in a ditch

frogs sit with only their snouts poking out,

27hiding their feet and the rest of their bodies,

so the sinners were, on both sides;

but when Barbariccia* drew close,

30they withdrew beneath the boiling.

* one of the devils

But the devils are always on the lookout for sinners who poke their heads up out of the pitch. Suddenly there is action:

I’ vidi, e anco il cor me n’accapriccia,uno aspettar così, com’ elli ’ncontra

33ch’una rana rimane e l’altra spiccia;

e Graffiacan, che li era più di contra,li arruncighò le ’mpegolate chiome

36e trassel sù, che mi parve una lontra.

I saw, and my heart still shudders at it,

one sinner waiting like that, as it can happen

33that one frog stays put and another jumps;

and Graffiacan,* who was closest to him,

put a hook through his pitchy locks

36and dragged him up, so he looked like an otter.

* another devil

The devils play with the sinner like cats with a mouse, but he manages to trick them into allowing him to jump back in, and two of the devils fall into the pitch in pursuit. The skirmish between devils and sinner is depicted with extraordinary energy and vitality. Other devils come to join in. In the confusion Virgil and Dante are able to make a quick escape.

The crime of which Dante the author was accused—the trumped-up charge which served as pretext for his banishment from Florence—was bribery and corruption in public office. His sense of outrage at the injustice of the accusation is perhaps reflected in the extreme distaste with which he portrays these sinners, all of whose actions are based on deceit and betrayal, as are those of the devils who torment them.

There is an abrupt change of pace and mood.

Taciti, soli, sanza compagnian’andavam l’un dinanzi e l’altro dopo,

3come frati minor vanno per via.

Silent, alone, with no company

we walked along, one of us ahead and the other behind,

3like friars minor walking along the road.

But the devils are still on the case. Virgil takes Dante to safety by physically carrying him. A simile seemingly drawn directly from life (no literary source has been identified) stresses the urgency of the predicament, and Virgil’s instinctive reaction:

Lo duca mio di sùbito mi prese,come la madre ch’al romore è desta

39e vede presso a sé le fiamme accese,

che prende il figlio e fugge e non s’arresta,avendo più di lui che di sé cura,

42tanto che solo una camiscia vesta;

My guide at once seized me,

like a mother who is woken by a noise

39and sees flames burning close by,

who picks up her son and flees,

more concerned for him than for herself,

42and doesn’t stop, not even to put on a shift;

The bond between revered master and deferential pupil has gradually metamorphosed into the strong affection between protective parent and child in danger. In a few short lines, Virgil is both mother and father to Dante: sliding down the rocky slope into the next ditch, he carries him come suo figlio, non come compagno (“like his son, not like a companion”).

After this narrow escape, and now in the sixth bolgia, they find a new kind of sinner, whose apparel—golden cloaks lined with lead—reflects the nature of their sin, hypocrisy.

Là giù trovammo una gente dipintache giva intorno assai con lenti passi,

60piangendo e nel sembiante stanca e vinta.

Elli avean cappe con cappucci bassidinanzi a li occhi, fatte de la taglia

63che in Clugnì per li monaci fassi.

Di fuor dorate son, sì ch’elli abbaglia;ma dentro tutte piombo, e gravi tanto,

66che Federigo le mettea di paglia.

Down there we found a painted people

who moved around with very slow steps,

60weeping and looking tired and defeated.

They wore cloaks with cowls pulled low

over their eyes, fashioned like the ones

63they make in Cluny for the monks.

On the outside they are golden, so that they dazzle;

but inside they’re all lead, and they’re so heavy

66that those that Frederick used seemed made of straw.

The emperor Frederick II had, according to report, devised an ingenious form of execution for those he believed guilty of lèse-majesté. The condemned were enclosed in leaden tunics and then lowered into a cauldron over a fire, until the lead melted on them and killed them. The early commentators report this as a fact, though there is no documentary evidence for it. The cloaks worn by the sinners mean they walk so slowly that Dante and Virgil are continually overtaking them.

Oh in etterno faticoso manto!Noi ci volgemmo ancor pur a man manca

69con loro insieme, intenti al tristo pianto;

Oh eternally heavy mantle!

We turned yet once again to the left,

69together with them, attentive to their wretched weeping;

ma per lo peso quella gente stancavenìa sì pian, che noi eravam nuovi

72di compagnia ad ogne mover d’anca.

but because of the weight, those weary people

walked so slowly that with every step

72we had new companions at our side.

One sinner is anxious to speak to Dante on hearing his Tuscan accent, but his eagerness is thwarted by the great weight of the leaden cape he wears, which allows him to move only very slowly. He and his companion are Frati Godenti (“Jovial Friars,” a disparaging nickname for a lay order with a reputation for corruption). They had been sent in an official capacity from Bologna to Florence to act jointly as mayor. In some Italian cities, important public offices were filled by outsiders in order to guarantee impartiality in the execution of their duties. These two were famously corrupt.

Dante starts to reproach them: O frati, i vostri mali (“O brothers, your evil deeds”), but he stops mid-sentence because he has seen a crucified figure lying across the path, impaled on three stakes. All those who walk along the path in their leaden capes tread him underfoot. He is Caiaphas, the high priest who counselled that one man, Jesus, should be martyred for the people. The other Pharisees on the council which decided on Jesus’s fate are crucified at intervals on the floor of the ditch. The Pharisees, whose professed concern for public welfare masked their own political self-interest, were a byword for hypocrisy.

Virgil takes advice about the best way forward, and learns that the devils misled them about the difficulties of the terrain. The Bolognese friar makes an ironic comment on Virgil’s gullibility: fancy the devil’s advice proving untrustworthy!

E ’l frate: «Io udi’ già dire a Bolognadel diavol vizi assai, tra ’ quali udi’

144ch’elli è bugiardo, e padre di menzogna».

And the friar said: “I once heard tell in Bologna

of the devil’s many vices, and among them I heard

144that he’s a liar, and the father of lying.”

Virgil, mortified at his own naivety, strides off; Dante follows dietro a le poste de le care piante (“in his dear footsteps”), a line that beautifully catches the affection he feels for Virgil in the face of the friar’s taunting.

The opening of the new canto takes us by surprise. a country landscape in very early spring, the fields covered in deep frost: a peasant comes to his door and, looking out, mistakes the frost for snow, and retreats disheartened; then, coming out again a little while later, he finds that the sun’s rays have cleared the frost, and that he can after all take his sheep to pasture.

In quella parte del giovanetto annoche ’l sole i crin sotto l’Aquario tempra

3e già le notti al mezzo dì sen vanno,

quando la brina in su la terra assempral’imagine di sua sorella bianca,

6ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra,

lo villanello a cui la roba manca,si leva, e guarda, e vede la campagna

9biancheggiar tutta; ond’ ei si batte l’anca,

ritorna in casa, e qua e là si lagna,come ’l tapin che non sa che si faccia;

12poi riede, e la speranza ringavagna,

veggendo ’l mondo aver cangiata facciain poco d’ora, e prende suo vincastro,

15e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia.

In that season early in the year,

when the sun tempers its rays beneath Aquarius,

3and nights are already set to become as short as days,

when on the ground the hoarfrost copies

the appearance of its white sister,*

6but its pen does not stay sharp for long,

* snow

the peasant who is short of fodder

gets up, and looks out, and sees the countryside

9all white; at which he slaps his thigh,

goes back inside, and grumbles as he moves about,

like a poor wretch who doesn’t know what to do;

12then he goes outside again, and his hope returns,

seeing that the world has changed its face

in that short time, and he picks up his staff,

15and drives the sheep out to pasture.

This delightful vignette of peasant life is like a manuscript illumination from a medieval book of hours, a perfect, exquisite miniature. The use of affectionate diminutives (giovanetto, villanello, pecorelle) underscores the effect. But why the lengthy digression? Fifteen lines serve to describe a simple psychological shift, the change in Virgil’s mood as it can be read in the expression on his face. His discomfiture at the devil’s sarcastic put-down evaporates as quickly as the frost melts in the early morning sun. And just as the peasant’s initial dismay turns to hopefulness, so Dante’s mood changes when he sees Virgil restored to good humour.

For all its freshness and charm, some critics dismiss this vignette of peasant life as merely decorative, a self-indulgent embellishment of the narrative line. Others point out in the poet’s defence that it introduces the theme of metamorphosis: the landscape changes before our eyes. Metamorphoses—changing weather and seasons—are a natural part of human experience. But we are about to witness metamorphoses that are quite unlike anything in the natural world, deeply disturbing and surreal. On the one hand they represent a direct challenge to the two classical poets renowned for writing about metamorphoses (Ovid and Lucan); on the other, the challenge is to Dante’s own expressive powers as he seeks to body forth the unsetthng contents of his febrile imagination.

Virgil encourages Dante on the steep climb necessary to leave the ditch, advising him which rocks to hold on to (but only after testing that they will take his weight). Dante is not “a notably bad climber,” as John Ruskin deduced from these lines; unlike Virgil, he has a physical body and feels the force of gravity. He is so out of breath when he reaches the top that he sits down, but Virgil urges him to stand up and carry on. Dante forces himself to talk so as not to seem weak. He hears a voice from the next ditch but cannot make out the words.

They climb down to a point where the bottom of the ditch is clearly visible. In it Dante sees a dreadful swarm of snakes, of a very strange kind. The memory of it still chills his blood.

Noi discendemmo il ponte da la testadove s’aggiugne con l’ottava ripa,

81e poi mi fu la bolgia manifesta:

We went down the bridge from the end

where it joins the eighth bank,

81and then the ditch came clearly into view:

e vidivi entro terribile stipadi serpenti, e di sì diversa mena

84che la memoria il sangue ancor mi scipa.

and in it I saw a terrible mass

of serpents, and of such different kinds

84that my blood still runs cold at the memory.

There are naked people running among the snakes. The linguistic exuberance of the naming of types of snake to be found in Libya shows Dante’s evident pleasure in arcane lexical items (some ostentatiously in rhyme position), borrowed in this case from Lucan’s Pharsalia.

Più non si vanti Libia con sua rena;ché se chelidri, iaculi e faree

87produce, e cencri con anfisibena,

né tante pestilenzie né sì reemostrò già mai con tutta l’Etïopia

90né con ciò che di sopra al Mar Rosso èe.

Tra questa cruda e tristissima copiacorrëan genti nude e spaventate,

93sanza sperar pertugio o elitropia:

Let Libya no longer boast of its sands;

for if it produces chelydri, iaculi and phareae,

87and cenchres, and amphisbaenae,

even with the whole of Ethiopia

and the lands beyond the Red Sea, it never showed

90so many poisonous and destructive pests.

In among this cruel and wretched throng

were running naked and terrified people,

93with no hope of a hole to hide in or a magic stone.*

* to make them invisible

Dante sees a sinner, bitten on the neck by a snake, reduced to ashes and reborn, phoenix-like: the first of a series of metamorphoses. He asks Virgil to ask the sinner who he is.

Lo duca il domandò poi chi ello era;per ch’ei rispuose: «Io piovvi di Toscana,

123poco tempo è, in questa gola fiera.

Vita bestial mi piacque e non umana,sì come a mul ch’i’ fui; son Vanni Fucci

126bestia, e Pistoia mi fu degna tana».

My guide asked him then who he was;

and he replied: “I plummeted down, from Tuscany,

123not long ago, into this wild ditch.

The life of a beast pleased me, not that of a human being,

as befitted the mule that I was; I am Vanni Fucci,

126beast, and Pistoia was a fitting lair for me.”

Pistoia was where the Guelfs had first split into Blacks and Whites, and was a traditional bitter enemy of Florence. Vanni Fucci was a violent, quarrelsome Black Guelf. Bestia, “beast,” one early commentator tells us, was his nickname. Dante knew him as an omo di sangue e di crucci (“a man of blood and rages”). So why is he down here and not in the circle of the violent? It is not his violence which has determined his place in hell, he is forced to admit, but thieving sacred objects from the cathedral sacristy in Pistoia, a crime for which someone else was punished.

Io non posso negar quel che tu chiedi;in giù son messo tanto perch’ io fui

138ladro a la sagrestia d’i belli arredi,

e falsamente già fu apposto altrui.Ma perché di tal vista tu non godi,

141se mai sarai di fuor da’ luoghi bui,

apri li orecchi al mio annunzio, e odi.

I cannot deny you what you are asking for;

I am thrust so far down because I stole

138the precious furnishings from the sacristy,

and the theft was falsely pinned on someone else.

But so you may take no joy in this sight,

141if ever you leave behind these dark regions,

open your ears to what I declare, and listen.

In a vengeful tit-for-tat response to being forced to name and shame himself, Vanni Fucci gloatingly “announces” that things will not go well for Dante’s party in Florence or for Dante himself. The fierce pleasure he takes in the pain his prediction will cause is captured in the explosive force of the repeated consonants in the last line of his tirade, which is the final line of the canto: E detto l’ho perché doler ti debbia! (“And I said it so that it should cause you pain!”).

But this is not vanni fucci’s parting shot, it turns out; his true parting shot is directed not at Dante but at God. The new canto opens with the sinner making an obscene gesture (le fiche: “the figs”) in the direction of heaven: Togh, Dio, ch’a te le squadro! (“Take that, God, it’s you I’m aiming them at!”). The gesture and taunt stand in high relief in these arresting opening lines. The usual clear narrative break from one canto to the next is here abandoned to powerful effect.

The sign of the figs is a notorious obscenity. It imitates the sexual act: with thumb projected between index and middle fingers, the fist strikes upwards. Two fists, doubly offensive. In Prato, Florence’s close neighbour, legislation was passed against it in 1297: anyone making the gesture, or baring his buttocks (mooning, in modern parlance), in the direction of heaven or towards an image of God or the Virgin was to be fined ten lire or whipped. The gesture may have a special connection with Pistoia: her citizens, the chronicler Giovanni Villani tells us, had placed on a high tower in their territory two marble arms with hands making the “figs” pointing in the direction of Florence. The gesture, in all its vigour and plebeian vulgarity, marks Vanni Fucci off from Capaneus, who in the circle of blasphemy had also defied and challenged God. Vanni Fucci has no vestige of the pagan blasphemer’s residual dignity or stature. He is a modern, squalid, morally degraded, shameless criminal embroiled in party politics—one of the most repellent figures in the whole of hell. Two serpents seize him to incapacitate him, one encircling his neck to prevent speech, the other binding his arms, reducing him to silence and immobility.

More sinners, more snakes. In a kind of medieval horror movie, sinners and snakes start metamorphosing into one another. The snakes, it transpires, are in fact sinners who have earlier been turned into serpents. There are some bravura special effects here, all done without benefit of CGI. A six-footed serpent attaches itself to a sinner and bites his head from the front. The two turn into a new kind of creature, part man, part snake. Three striking comparisons (ivy on a tree, the blending of hot waxes, the burning of a sheet of paper) relate the outlandish transformation to experiences the reader will recognise.

Ellera abbarbicata mai non fuead alber sì, come l’orribil fiera

60per l’altrui membra avviticchiò le sue.

Ivy never clung so tightly

to a tree, as the horrible beast

60entwined his own limbs around the other’s limbs.

Poi s’appiccar, come di calda cerafossero stati, e mischiar lor colore,

63né l’un né l’altro già parea quel ch’era:

come procede innanzi da l’ardore,per lo papiro suso, un color bruno

66che non è nero ancora e ’l bianco more.

Then they stuck to one another, as though they were made

of hot wax, and mixed their colour,

63and neither seemed what he had been before:

just as, ahead of the flame,

across a piece of paper a dark colour moves,

66not yet black but the white is dying.

Dante is consciously setting himself up in competition with the classical poets, especially Lucan and Ovid, who described astounding metamorphoses. But where they turned one thing into another (a man into an animal, a person into a fountain), Dante will now go one better and describe a snake and a man turning into each other.

Taccia Lucano ormai là dov’ e’ toccadel misero Sabello e di Nasidio,

96e attenda a udir quel ch’or si scocca.

Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio,ché se quello in serpente e quella in fonte

99converte poetando, io non lo ’nvidio;

ché due nature mai a fronte a frontenon trasmutò sì ch’amendue le forme

102a cambiar lor matera fosser pronte.

Let Lucan now fall silent where he writes

of wretched Sabellus and Nasidius,

96and listen carefully to what is now loosed from my bow.

Let Ovid fall silent about Cadmus and Arethusa,

for if in his poem he changed him into a snake

99and her into a fountain, I do not envy him;

for he never changed two natures

face to face, so that both their forms

102were ready to exchange their matter.

A four-footed reptile bites the belly of a sinner: this initiates another metamorphosis. There is a meticulous charting of every stage of this transformation in all its disturbing weirdness. The lengthy description is quasi-scientific in its detail and its detachment. A sixteenth-century commentator (Lodovico Castelvetro) helpfully identifies seven stages by which the serpent becomes a man: his tail becomes legs; his front paws become arms; his rear legs become a penis; his hide becomes skin; his posture changes from prone to erect; his snout becomes a face; his serpentine hiss becomes a voice. All this happens simultaneously in reverse for the man becoming a snake. When the metamorphosis is complete:

L’anima ch’era fiera divenuta,suffolando si fugge per la valle,

138e l’altro dietro a lui parlando sputa.

The soul that had become a snake

flees hissing along the valley floor,

138and the other one following him spits as he speaks.

There is no dialogue with the sinners in this canto, unlike in the aggressive exchange with Vanni Fucci: just fragmentary phrases they shout at one another, and a deeply bizarre and unsetthng spectacle. All five sinners involved in these grotesque transformations are from noble Florentine families, but we learn that only at the beginning of the next canto.

An assiduous reader has counted no fewer than sixty-three body parts named in this canto. The extreme physicality of bodies and their penetrations of one another’s orifices is far more sexually suggestive than anything in the circle of sodomy. Why is the sin of fraudulent thievery punished in this viscerally repellent way, involving violent physical violation? Commentators link the punishment with the “primal scene” of theft in the Garden of Eden, where a serpent played a key role. A thought-provoking explanation is that “the thieves are here in their turn robbed of their most intimate and inalienable property, their own human bodies” (Sapegno, 1957). This canto, with its lack of any redeeming humanity, might not appeal to many readers, but they can scarcely fail to admire the verbal bravura of this virtuoso description of shape changing.

An inscription dating from 1255, still visible today on the Palazzo del Bargello in Florence—the medieval seat of government for the city, now a national museum—proclaims with pride that Florence possesses the sea and the land and the whole world (que mare, que terram, que totum possidet orbem). The entrepreneurial skills of her citizens have successfully extended their banking and mercantile interests across the globe. Dante now pays a savagely ironic compliment to the city: her fame spreads not just over land and sea, but through hell as well.

Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grandeche per mare e per terra batti l’ali,

3e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande!

Tra li ladron trovai cinque cotalituoi cittadini onde mi ven vergogna,

6e tu in grande orranza non ne sali.

Rejoice, Florence, since you are so great

that you beat your wings over sea and over land,

3and your fame extends throughout hell!

Among the thieves I found five

of your citizens, and I feel shame at that,

6and no great honour reflects from that on you.

All the sinners whose monstrous transformations we witnessed in the previous canto were, it turns out, Florentines—Florentines from elite Black Guelf families, whose shameless thieving exacerbates the political instability of the city state. Virgil and Dante climb up the rocky slope out of the seventh bolgia.

We are now given a warning, unprecedented in the poem, which alerts us to the importance of the scene that is to follow.

Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglioquando drizzo la mente a ciò ch’io vidi,

21e più lo ’ngegno affreno ch’i’ non soglio,

perché non corra che virtù nol guidi;sì che, se stella bona o miglior cosa

24m’ha dato ’l ben, ch’io stessi nol m’invidi.

Then I grieved, and now I grieve again

when I turn my mind to what I saw,

21and I rein in my intellect more than I’m accustomed to,

lest it run without being guided by virtue;

so that, if a favourable star or some better thing

24has given me this good, I may not deprive myself of it.

Dante’s own intellect, his mind and the use he makes of it, are in play here. It would seem that there is a danger in giving free rein to his mental powers. The episode we are about to read celebrates and explores one of the great themes of the poem, human intelligence and the thirst for knowledge. Wherein lies the danger?

First we have the setting of the scene. Dante looks down from the stone bridge into the deep circular trench that contains the sinners of the eighth bolgia, and sees not people but moving tongues of flame. The beautiful evocation of a Tuscan summer evening at dusk, with fireflies down along the valley, takes us far away from the moral squalor of the metamorphosing reptiles.

Quante ’l villan ch’al poggio si riposa,nel tempo che colui che ’l mondo schiara

27la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,

come la mosca cede a la zanzara,vede lucciole giù per la vallea,

30forse colà dov’ e’ vendemmia e ara:

di tante fiamme tutta risplendeal’ottava bolgia, sì com’ io m’accorsi

33tosto che fui là ’ve ’l fondo parea.

When the sun that lights up the world

keeps his face least hidden from us,*

27a peasant resting on a hillside,

* i.e. in summertime

when the fly is giving way to the mosquito,*

sees fireflies down along the valley,

30perhaps where he harvests the grapes and ploughs his fields:

* i.e. at dusk

with just so many flames the whole

of the eighth ditch was glowing, as I became aware

33as soon as I was where the bottom was visible.

Each tongue of flame envelops a sinner. Dante’s vulnerability is again underlined, this time in concrete physical terms: he was so eager to see that if he hadn’t held on to the rock, he would have fallen in. The physical danger mirrors the psychological danger, the allure of the passion for knowledge of which we are about to hear.

Io stava sovra ’l ponte a veder surto,sì che s’io non avessi un ronchion preso,

45caduto sarei giù sanz’ esser urto.

I was standing on the bridge to see,

so that if I hadn’t grasped a jutting rock,

45I would have fallen in without being pushed.

One flame catches Dante’s attention because it has a double tip, two flickering tongues of fire arising from the same base; not for the first time, sinners who suffer a linked destiny excite his interest. Virgil explains that inside it are Ulysses and his partner in guile, Diomedes, punished together because of the stratagems they jointly devised in the course of the Trojan War, most famously the wooden horse which enabled the Greeks to breach the city walls. Dante’s eagerness to speak to them is countered by Virgil, who says he will do the talking: Greeks being notoriously haughty, they might not take kindly to being addressed in the vernacular. There is a heightening and distancing in the narrative. We are being taken back to the world of Greek legendary heroes.

In the name of his own alti versi, his “lofty verses,” Virgil appeals to Ulysses to tell how he came to die. In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses returns to Penelope in Ithaca at the end of his adventures, but the medieval accounts Dante knew did not tell of his death. What became of him? How did his story end? Virgil has intuited that this is what Dante wants to know. There is no known source for the story we are about to hear.

The flame flickers as though in the wind, murmuring, just as though it were a tongue talking. When it finally manages to articulate speech, the mesmerising flow of eloquence will continue uninterrupted for the whole second half of the canto.

Lo maggior corno de la fiamma anticacominciò a crollarsi mormorando,

87pur come quella cui vento affatica;

indi la cima qua e là menando,come fosse la lingua che parlasse,

90gittò voce di fuori e disse:

The larger horn of the ancient flame

began to flicker, murmuring,

87just like a flame that is troubled by the wind;

then moving its tip back and forth,

as though it were a tongue speaking,

90it cast forth a voice and said:

Ulysses tells of his unconquerable desire for experience, for knowledge of the world and human vice and worth, which no family ties or obligations could constrain.

90«Quando

mi diparti’ da Circe, che sottrasseme più d’un anno là presso a Gaeta,

93prima che sì Enëa la nomasse,

90“When

I left Circe, who beguiled me

for more than a year there near Gaeta,

93before Aeneas gave it that name,

né dolcezza di figlio, né la pietadel vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore

96lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,

vincer potero dentro a me l’ardorech’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto

99e de li vizi umani e del valore;

neither the sweetness of a son, nor the sense of duty

to an elderly father, nor the love I owed her

96which should have made Penelope happy,

could conquer within me the passion I had

for gaining experience of the world

99and of human vices and worth;

With his small band of comrades and just one boat he sets out:

ma misi me per l’alto mare apertosol con un legno e con quella compagna

102picciola da la qual non fui diserto.

but I set out on the deep open sea

with just one boat and with the small group

102of companions who had not deserted me.

He describes the journey within the Mediterranean, travelling westwards, passing familiar landmarks: Morocco and Sardinia, then Seville on the right and Ceuta on the left, as far as the Strait of Gibraltar. There the Pillars of Hercules mark the narrow point at which the Mediterranean flows into the Atlantic. The gods in ancient times had set the Pillars—Gibraltar on the north side, Mount Abyla in North Africa on the south—to mark the limits of the known world, with an injunction that no one should sail beyond them.

L’un lito e l’altro vidi infin la Spagna,fin nel Morrocco, e l’isola d’i Sardi,

105e l’altre che quel mare intorno bagna.

Io e ’ compagni eravam vecchi e tardiquando venimmo a quella foce stretta

108dov’ Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi

acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta;da la man destra mi lasciai Sibilia,

111da l’altra già m’avea lasciata Setta.

I saw one coast and the other as far as Spain,

as far as Morocco, and Sardinia,

105and the other islands bathed by that sea.

I and my companions were old and slow

when we came to that narrow strait

108where Hercules set his signposts

so that man should go no further;

on my right hand I left Seville behind,

111on the left I had already left Ceuta.

Without preamble, Ulysses reports the speech he made to his men, urging them to continue sailing out into the open sea. He and his companions were by now old and tired. He appeals to them in the name of the thing that sets them above the animals: that desire for knowledge which is innate in human beings, creatures who have minds.

‘O frati’, dissi, ‘che per cento miliaperigh siete giunti a l’occidente,

114a questa tanto picciola vigilia

d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanentenon vogliate negar l’esperïenza,

117di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.

Considerate la vostra semenza:fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

120ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’.

‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred

thousand dangers have reached the west,

114to this so brief vigil

of our senses that is left us,

do not choose to deny experience,

117following the sun, of the world without people.

Consider your origin:

you were not made to live like beasts,

120but to follow virtue and knowledge.’

This “little speech” within a speech is an appeal in the name of their humanity. In the opening sentence of his earlier Convivio, Dante states it as axiomatic that, as Aristotle tells us: “All men naturally desire to possess knowledge.” The desire for knowledge is the defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, the distinctively human attribute. Satisfying this desire brings happiness; the Convivio again: “Knowledge is the highest perfection of our soul, in which our supreme happiness is to be found.” Ulysses’ companions respond unhesitatingly to his appeal; indeed, he says, after this he could hardly have held them back. Turning the stern of the boat to the rising sun, they set out, bearing southwest, into the Atlantic and across the ocean, into the unknown.

Li miei compagni fec’ io sì aguti,con questa orazion picciola, al cammino,

123che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti;

With this little speech I made my companions

so eager for the voyage that afterwards

123I could scarcely have held them back;

e volta nostra poppa nel mattino,de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo,

126sempre acquistando dal lato mancino.

and having turned our stern to the east,

we made wings of our oars for the mad flight,

126always gaining on the left-hand side.

They carry on for five months, always veering to the south, across the Atlantic ocean, until they reach the southern hemisphere. There in the distance they make out a dark mountain, higher than any they have ever seen.

Tutte le stelle già de l’altro polovedea la notte, e ’l nostro tanto basso,

129che non surgëa fuor del marin suolo.

Cinque volte racceso e tante cassolo lume era di sotto da la luna,

132poi che ’ntrati eravam ne l’alto passo,

quando n’apparve una montagna, brunaper la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

135quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.

Night already saw all the stars

of the other pole,* and our pole so low

129that it did not rise above the sea’s horizon.

* i.e. the south pole

Five times the light beneath the moon

was rekindled, and five times extinguished,*

132since we had set out on our arduous journey,

* i.e. five months had passed

when a mountain appeared to us, dark

in the distance, and it seemed higher

135than any I had ever seen.

They rejoice at the sight, but their joy quickly turns to tears; a whirlwind arises, strikes the boat, spins it around three times, and upends it. It disappears beneath the waves. In the last line of Ulysses’ speech, the last line of the canto, the sea closes with a terrible finality over the shipwrecked vessel and its occupants.

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque

138e percosse del legno il primo canto.

We rejoiced, and quickly it turned to weeping;

for from the new land was born a whirlwind

138and it struck the front part of the boat.

Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l’acque;a la quarta levar la poppa in suso

141e la prora ire in giù, com’ altrui piacque,

infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso».

Three times it spun it around with all the waters;

at the fourth it raised the stern up

141and made the prow go down, as it pleased another,

until the sea closed over us.”

Ulysses’ speech occupies the whole second half of the canto, isolating him in an aura of almost mythical remoteness. There is no give and take of dialogue, no eager questioning by Dante to interrupt the flow of eloquence. His enthralling account of heroic courage in setting out into the unknown has inspired generations of readers. Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, based on Dante, ends famously with lines celebrating the Greek hero’s tenacity and endurance: “One equal temper of heroic hearts / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” In the Antarctic these lines are carved on the memorial to Robert Falcon Scott, a fitting tribute to a real-life explorer of uncharted regions who never came back. One can imagine that future explorers in space might feel minded to leave a similarly inscribed monument on some distant planet, as an enduring memorial to human courage, fortitude and nobility. So why is Ulysses damned?

Right in the middle of Ulysses’ speech is the orazion picciola, the “little speech” within the speech, addressed to his companions, urging them to undertake this last heroic voyage. Ulysses is in the circle of fraudulent counsellors, those who counselled others to act with guile or duplicity to achieve a goal. Is the speech to his companions on this last voyage another case of the fraudulent counsel for which he is condemned to hell?

The problem, in a nutshell, is that Ulysses appeals to the noblest part of human nature, in words of thrilling eloquence, in order to persuade his men to do something which is forbidden. In classical terms, it is forbidden by the gods, who had decreed that no one should go beyond the Pillars of Hercules. With his customary willingness to draw on and use elements from the pre-Christian world and incorporate them into his own world view, Dante accepts as binding in the Christian world prohibitions pronounced by deities in the classical world.

The classical prohibition on going beyond the Pillars of Hercules maps with striking felicitousness onto the geography of Dante’s imagined otherworld. The first-time reader of the Inferno does not yet know that purgatory is a mountain located in the southern hemisphere, at the direct antipodes of Jerusalem. The dark mountain seen in the distance by Ulysses and his men is in fact purgatory. In retrospect it will become clear to the reader that Ulysses has tried to take a shortcut to purgatory, relying on his courage, his eloquence, his companions’ loyalty and trust in his leadership, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, in defiance of the decree of the gods. In Christian terms, the voyage is sinful because it goes beyond the boundaries of what human beings can legitimately hope to achieve by their own efforts, bypassing divine grace. It is literally a transgression.

There is another important consideration, not strictly speaking religious. Dante had a strong sense of the stages of a human life, and the behaviour appropriate to each of them. Ulysses and his men are old and slow; it is time to bring the boat into harbour. Compare his journey with that of Aeneas, another Trojan hero. Aeneas, after extensive travels within the Mediterranean, came to Italy and founded the settlement that would become Rome, a place providentially ordained for the good of humanity. Aeneas is the exemplary hero, who acknowledges the social bonds of family and duty. By contrast Ulysses’ voyage is an act of hubris; it is, as he himself calls it, a folle volo: mad, foolhardy, reckless. Folle, we remember, was the word used by Dante at the beginning of his own journey to question his fitness to undertake it, his possible presumptuousness.

The polarisation of opinion about Ulysses and how we are to think of him is already there in the early commentators, and continues to this day. There are those who see the orazion picciola as sinful, and those who see it as thrillingly inspirational. Ulysses is a transgressor (one modern commentator even calls him a conman), or he is a hero. Dante inherits different and conflicting views from his reading: the heroic fortitude, the wily cunning, the love of knowledge add up to a complex and ambivalent character in whom Dante could reflect his own most compelling instincts and desires, and the sense of danger that was inseparable from them. Only at the beginning of Purgatorio will the full import of the parallel between the ancient Greek hero and the medieval poet become apparent to the reader, when the image of a sea voyage over uncharted waters becomes the dominant, energising image for Dante’s writing of his poem. Ulysses is the most obvious and most powerfully evoked of all the stand-ins for Dante himself, representing an aspect of the poet’s psychology which is at its very core.

Ulysses’ exhortation to his men is still for many people a touchstone for what gives meaning and value to human life. Primo Levi in Auschwitz famously tried to reconstruct the speech from memory, fighting despair in the hellhole that was the Lager. Bernardo Bertolucci, interviewed on the BBC a few years ago, unselfconsciously quoted the lines fatti non foste a viver come bruti / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza (ls. 119–20) as the most perfect distillation he knew of to express the proper goal of human aspiration.

Ulysses’ stirring words express an irresistible appeal to all that is best in human nature and human living: the practice of the moral virtues and the pursuit of knowledge. The man who speaks them is suffering eternal damnation. Reconciling these two stark facts is one of the great challenges for readers of Dante’s poem.

We are still in the circle of fraudulent counsel. Ulysses has moved off, and another sinner is eager to speak. Again we are told of the extreme difficulty of articulating intelligible speech from within the flame which envelops the sinner, this time through comparison with a horrifyingly ingenious form of torture, mentioned by Ovid among others. The Sicilian tyrant Phalaris had a hollow bull fashioned from brass. Into it criminals could be put and then roasted alive, so that their screams sounded as if the bull itself were roaring in agony. But there is a sting in the tail of the story. The craftsman who made the bull was its first victim. The bloodcurdling tale is a fitting introduction to the theme of this canto: the deceiver deceived, the trickster tricked.

When finally the shade’s speech becomes intelligible, it frames an urgent question.

«Se tu pur mo in questo mondo ciecocaduto se’ di quella dolce terra

27latina ond’ io mia colpa tutta reco,

“If you have only just now fallen

into this blind world from that sweet land

27of Italy from which I bring all my guilt with me,

dimmi se Romagnuoli han pace o guerra;ch’io fui d’i monti là intra Orbino

30e ’l giogo di che Tever si diserra».

Io era in giuso ancora attento e chino,quando il mio duca mi tentò di costa,

33dicendo: «Parla tu; questi è latino».

tell me if the people of Romagna are at peace or at war;

for I was from the mountains there between Urbino

30and the ridge from which the Tiber springs.”

I was still bent down and listening

when my guide nudged my side

33and said: “You talk; this one’s Italian.”

Dante can speak, Virgil says, because this is an Italian. There is a marked change of key, from the epic and heroic world of legendary Greek heroes to contemporary and local concerns. The sinner, not named, but immediately recognisable, is Guido da Montefeltro, a great warlord of the Romagna, who had died very recently, in 1298, just two years before the date of Dante’s imagined journey. Romagna, the region adjacent to and northeast of Tuscany in central Italy, is a region Dante knew well. It was here that Guido’s career as a prominent and powerful military leader, a notoriously astute tactician, had played out. Famously, in old age he had converted to a life of religious piety, becoming a member of the Franciscan order.

Guido is desperate to know if peace has at last been established in Romagna. Dante replies in detail, surveying the principal cities in the region, iconically evoked through the coats of arms of their powerful and ambitious ruling families: Ravenna, Forlì, Rimini, Faenza, Imola, Cesena. Yes, he is able to confirm, Romagna is currently in a state of peace, albeit a precarious one.

Now Dante asks the sinner to be equally forthcoming: to explain who he is and to tell his story. The sinner begins with a wary preamble, in which he explains why he feels able to speak freely. Far from wanting his name to be spoken of in the world of the living, as Dante mistakenly believes, he is taking a calculated risk, confident that no word of what he says will ever get back to those who are still alive. The lines in which he cautiously weighs up the risk of loss of reputation will be familiar to many readers as the epigraph used by T. S. Eliot for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

«S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fossea persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

63questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse;

ma però che già mai di questo fondonon tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,

66sanza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

“If I thought my reply was

to someone who might ever return to the world,

63this flame would remain without further flickering;

but since no man ever returned alive

from this depth, if what I hear is true,

66I answer you without fear of infamy.

Believing his reputation in the world of the living will remain intact, he launches into his story, venting his spleen against the man he holds responsible for his damnation. Caution gives way to forthrightness.

The two unequal halves of his life—once man of war, mercenary and famed strategist; then Franciscan friar, wearing the girdle that symbolises his religious vows—are encapsulated in a single beautifully balanced line. And the calculation would have paid off, but for one person.

Io fui uom d’arme, e poi fui cordigliero,credendomi, sì cinto, fare ammenda;

69e certo il creder mio venìa intero,

se non fosse il gran prete, a cui mal prenda!,che mi rimise ne le prime colpe;

72e come e quare, voglio che m’intenda.

I was a man of arms, and then I was a Franciscan,

thinking to make amends by wearing that girdle;

69and certainly what I was thinking would have come to pass,

had it not been for the high priest, may the devil take him!

who drew me back into my old sinful ways;

72and I want you to hear from me how and why.

He is eager to explain how he came to sin again, and who was responsible for his fall from grace. He openly admits to the deceit and cunning of his military life: he was not a lion, but a fox, famous for his deviousness.

Mentre ch’io forma fui d’ossa e di polpeche la madre mi diè, l’opere mie

75non furon leonine, ma di volpe.

While I had the form of flesh and bone

that my mother gave me, my actions

75were not those of a lion, but of a fox.

Li accorgimenti e le coperte vieio seppi tutte, e sì menai lor arte,

78ch’al fine de la terra il suono uscie.

I knew all the wily tricks and subterfuges,

and I practised them so skilfully

78that my fame spread to the ends of the earth.

In old age that changed. Near the end of life’s journey, he observes, one must take down the sails, and gather in the rigging, preparing for the calm of arrival in port and for making a good end. (This is precisely what Ulysses had failed to do—the cantos form a beautifully balanced pair.) He repents and takes confession, all that is required to die at peace with God. That would have done the job, he remarks bitterly.

Quando mi vidi giunto in quella partedi mia etade ove ciascun dovrebbe

81calar le vele e raccoglier le sarte,

ciò che pria mi piacëa, allor m’increbbe,e pentuto e confesso mi rendei;

84ahi miser lasso! e giovato sarebbe.

When I saw that I had reached that stage

in my life where everyone should

81lower the sails and gather in the rigging,

what earlier had pleased me, now pleased me no more;

and I repented and made my confession and became a friar;

84ah, miserable wretch that I was! and that would have done the job.

But the plan doesn’t work. The pope asks for his advice on how to defeat his enemies in the papal court, and promises absolution in advance for what both of them know will be the sin of fraudulent counsel. The pope’s enemies, Guido points out bitterly, were not the traditional enemies of Christendom, the Saracens or Jews, legitimate foes worthily engaged with, but powerful Christian families close to the curia, jockeying for papal power. This pope was not fighting at Acre in the Holy Land, but just twenty miles from Rome. The pope is not named (he is Boniface VIII, soon to arrive in hell himself). Guido refers to him contemptuously as the prince of the new Pharisees.

Lo principe d’i novi Farisei,avendo guerra presso a Laterano,

87e non con Saracin né con Giudei,

The prince of the new Pharisees,

fighting a war close to the Lateran,

87and not against the Saracens or Jews—

ché ciascun suo nimico era cristiano,e nessun era stato a vincer Acri

90né mercatante in terra di Soldano,

né sommo officio né ordini sacriguardò in sé, né in me quel capestro

93che solea fare i suoi cinti più macri.

for all his enemies were Christians,

and none of them had gone to conquer Acre,*

90or been a merchant in the Sultan’s lands—

* for the Muslims

showed no regard for his own supreme office

and holy orders, nor for my wearing the girdle

93that used to make its wearers thinner.

Boniface asks Guido for advice, uncaring both of his own holy office and sacred orders, and of the vows Guido took when he entered the Franciscan order. His words seem drunk. Guido says nothing.

Ma come Costantin chiese Silvestrod’entro Siratti a guerir de la lebbre,

96così mi chiese questi per maestro

a guerir de la sua superba febbre;domandommi consiglio, e io tacetti

99perché le sue parole parver ebbre.

But as Constantine asked Sylvester

from Soracte to cure him of leprosy,

96so this man asked me to be his doctor

to cure him of the fever of his arrogance;

he asked for my advice, and I was silent

99because his words seemed drunken.

The pope now uses a new and powerfully persuasive argument. He promises absolution in advance for the sin he is asking Guido to commit. As pope, he has possession of the keys of Peter, which can lock and unlock heaven, granting damnation or salvation. Just give him advice about how to overthrow Palestrina, the Colonna stronghold southeast of Rome.

E’ poi ridisse: ‘Tuo cuor non sospetti;finor t’assolvo, e tu m’insegna fare

102sì come Penestrino in terra getti.

Lo ciel poss’ io serrare e diserrare,come tu sai; però son due le chiavi

105che ’l mio antecessor non ebbe care’.

And then he spoke again: ‘Let your heart feel no fear;

I absolve you as of now; now you teach me what to do,

102to raze Palestrina to the ground.

I can lock and unlock heaven,

as you know; for there are two keys

105which my predecessor did not hold dear.’

There is a veiled threat of damnation in the mention of the keys. Silence seems the worse course; wiser to cooperate, and not displease the pope. But before offering advice, Guido warily recapitulates the details of the deal they have done, the promise of absolution in advance, spelling out the terms of the bargain:

Allor mi pinser li argomenti gravilà ’ ve ’l tacer mi fu avviso ’l peggio,

108e dissi: ‘Padre, da che tu mi lavi

di quel peccato ov’io mo cader deggio,lunga promessa con l’attender corto

111ti farà trïunfar ne l’alto seggio’.

Then his weighty arguments pushed me

to the point where silence seemed to me the worse course,

108and I said: ‘Father, since you are cleansing me

of that sin into which I must now fall,

promising much and fulfilling little

111will make you triumph on your lofty throne.’

Guido counsels deception: make a promise and then break it. The way he formulates the advice, in generic terms that sound almost proverbial (lunga promessa con l’attender corto), seems designed to distance the sinner from his sin. Boniface acted on the advice: he promised an amnesty, and then when the citizens of Palestrina had left the fortress, he razed the citadel to the ground.

We now cut to the end of the story. When after Guido’s death Saint Francis came for his soul, to take it to heaven, a devil arrived to contest it, and the devil turned out to be a master of logic. Repentance isn’t possible if you haven’t yet committed the sin you repent of: that’s a logical impossibility, he pointed out to Saint Francis, as he carried Guido off to hell.

Francesco venne poi com’ io fu’ morto,per me; ma un d’i neri cherubini

114li disse: ‘Non portar: non mi far torto.

Venir se ne dee giù tra ’ miei meschiniperché diede ’l consiglio frodolente,

117dal quale in qua stato li sono a’ crini;

Francis came for me later when I died;

but one of the black cherubim

114said to him: ‘Don’t take him: don’t do me a wrong.

He must come down below among my minions,

because he gave fraudulent counsel,

117and ever since then I have been right behind him;

ch’assolver non si può chi non si pente,né pentere e volere insieme puossi

120per la contradizion che nol consente’.

because you can’t absolve someone who hasn’t repented,

and you can’t repent of something and will it at the same time:

120the principle of contradiction doesn’t allow it.’

The devil’s final ironical comment is directed at Guido himself, triumphantly underlining where his calculation went wrong.

Oh me dolente! come mi riscossiquando mi prese dicendomi: ‘Forse

123tu non pensavi ch’io löico fossi!’.

Oh wretched me! how I shuddered

when he took me, saying: ‘Perhaps

123you didn’t think I was a logician!’

The idea of a devil who is an expert in Aristotelian logic and the law of contradiction is deliciously Dantean. Devils can’t do philosophy, he tells us elsewhere (Convivio III, xiii, 2), because love of wisdom is a prerequisite of philosophising; but logic they can do, at least in the world of Dante’s imagination. To be genuine, repentance must be heartfelt; it cannot ever be a matter of prudent calculation. In a canto early in Purgatorio we will find that the fate of Guido’s son, Bonconte da Montefeltro, illustrates the opposite truth: a moment of genuine repentance, even at the moment of death, is enough to achieve salvation.

The psychological portrayal of Guido is masterly, one of the most haunting in the Inferno. The deceiver is deceived. His sense of outraged grievance that his careful plan for salvation should have been thwarted is interspersed with imprecations directed at Boniface. He has met his match in the unscrupulous and scheming pope. As an early commentator neatly has him say: Bonifacius astutissimus circumvenit me astutissimum: “Boniface (very cunning) cheated me (very cunning).” Guido’s long confession to Dante is an act of self-revelation, not just in the bare bones of the story, but above all in the manner of its telling—the triumphant creation of a master poet and psychologist.

Dante in the Convivio (IV, xxviii, 8) had spoken admiringly of Guido’s conversion and embrace of the religious life in old age, using just this image of the boat coming into harbour after the hardships of a long journey. Clearly when he wrote the Convivio Dante knew nothing of Guido’s deal with Boniface. That Dante now puts him in hell, and has him condemn himself so eloquently out of his own mouth, suggests that in the interim the story had become, if not public knowledge, at least known to those with a keen interest in the subject. There is an early chronicle of the right date which mentions the story. Dante must have known it or one like it.

One of the special satisfactions of this intricately plotted and psychologically subtle canto is that Guido’s advice to Boniface (lunga promessa con l’attender corto, l. 110) exactly describes the deception of which he himself is the victim at the pope’s hands: Boniface made a promise and did not deliver on it. And the prudent calculation underlying Guido’s decision to tell his story is of course another miscalculation, since Dante will return to the world of the living, and will write the poem which records their conversation. Guido’s reputation lives on in the world, but not as he had wished it would. For the readers of Dante’s poem, he is not the elderly Franciscan friar with the distinguished if turbulent military record. He is the fox outfoxed.

After the thrilling rhetoric of ulysses and the compelling portrait of Guido da Montefeltro, two supreme examples of psychological penetration and poetic artistry, we return to sinners of lesser stature and punishments of more disturbing physicality. The sowers of discord in canto 28 are punished by bodily disfigurement and even dismemberment—their wounds and mutilations are worse than those suffered in all the wars fought on Italian soil from Trojan times to the recent past. It is harder for a poet than for a prose writer to do justice to the scene, Dante points out, because of the added metrical constraints of verse. We are gearing up to another stylistic tour de force to match the metamorphoses of canto 25. The count of body parts will again be high and the lexical choices low (they include jaw, gullet, stomach, shit, farting). Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro are bookended by cantos featuring virtuoso descriptions of torments inflicted on human bodies, which serve to isolate and set apart those two great protagonists (we hear them, but we do not see them: in our imaginations they tower over the surrounding squalor). The scene is now once again filled with thronging figures, and there is a great deal of agitated movement and action.

For medieval Christians, Islam was a heresy of Christianity which had deprived the church of a huge number of its rightful followers. It is no surprise therefore to find Mohammed and his nephew Alì among the schismatics, those who sowed discord in the religious arena. Mohammed is split from his chin to his groin, and his intestines hang outside his body; Alì is split from chin to forelock. Mohammed explains to Dante who these sinners are: they are seminator di scandalo e di scisma (“sowers of scandal and schism”). The terms reflect the two different spheres in which the damage was done, the civil and the religious. He explains too that a devil reopens the sinners’ wounds with a sword every time they pass by him as they circle the bolgia. The cycle of violence is constantly re-enacted. Mohammed asks Dante to warn Fra Dolcino, a contemporary religious schismatic, of the fate that awaits him.

In the secular sphere there are equally disturbing disfigurements. There is a sinner (nose hacked off, one ear missing, throat slit) who recognises Dante and tells him to warn two gentlemen of Fano that they will be murdered by being tied in a sack and drowned. There is the historical Curio, who incited Caesar to civil war, urging him to cross the Rubicon: his tongue is split. There is Mosca, who has lost his hands, and raises his two bloody stumps, so that blood runs down his face. He identifies himself by an off-the-cuff remark he made that had become proverbial: capo ha cosa fatta (“what’s done is done”). The civic troubles in Florence started with his intervention in a local quarrel between two families, when he advocated murder to avenge a perceived slight to one family’s honour. The polarisation of the city into bitter rival factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines dated from that incident, half a century before Dante’s birth; the ensuing conflict engulfed later generations. More than eighty years later the consequences are still being lived out, in the urban unrest and turmoil of a violently divided and lawless society.

E un ch’avea l’una e l’altra man mozza,levando i moncherin per l’aura fosca,

105sì che ’l sangue facea la faccia sozza,

And one, who had both his hands cut off,

raising his stumps in the murky air,

105so that the blood made his face filthy,

gridò: «Ricordera’ti anche del Mosca,che disse, lasso!, ‘Capo ha cosa fatta’,

108che fu mal seme per la gente tosca».

shouted: “You will remember Mosca, too,

who said, alas!, ‘What’s done is done,’

108which was the evil seed for the people of Tuscany.”

Dante now sees an even more horrific sight, and this final arresting spectacle brings the canto to a close. He would be afraid to report it were it not that he has the shield and protection of a clear conscience—he is reporting what he saw with his own eyes.

Io vidi certo, e ancor par ch’io ’l veggia,un busto sanza capo andar sì come

120andavan li altri de la trista greggia;

e ’l capo tronco tenea per le chiome,pesol con mano a guisa di lanterna:

123e quel mirava noi e dicea: “Oh me!”.

Di sé facea a sé stesso lucerna,ed eran due in uno e uno in due;

126com’ esser può, quei sa che sì governa.

I surely saw, and it’s as though I can still see it,

a body without a head walking along

120just like the others of that sorry crew;

and he was holding his severed head by its hair,

hanging from his hand like a lantern:

123and the head looked at us and said: “Alas for me!”

He made a lantern of himself for himself,

and they were two in one and one in two;

126how that can be, He knows who so disposes.

When the sinner reaches the foot of the bridge he raises his head in his hand, so that Dante can better hear the words he speaks:

Quando diritto al piè del ponte fue,levò ’l braccio alto con tutta la testa

129per appressarne le parole sue,

che fuoro: «Or vedi la pena molesta,tu che, spirando, vai veggendo i morti:

132vedi s’alcuna è grande come questa.

When he was right at the foot of the bridge,

he raised his arm high with his whole head,

129to bring his words closer to us,

which were: “Now you see the dire punishment,

you who while you still breathe come to view the dead:

132see if any other is as great as this.

He explains his sorry story. He is Bertran de Born, a Provençal poet Dante greatly admired, famous for his verses celebrating battles and military engagements. There are echoes of his poems in this canto in the vocabulary of bodies torn and riven. He had also been a soldier, close to the English royal family, and had accompanied Richard the Lionheart on a crusade to Palestine. He abetted Richard’s brother (“the young king”) to rebel against their father, Henry II of England. The sundering of father from son in life is reflected in the sundering of his own head from his torso in the afterlife.

E perché tu di me novella porti,sappi ch’i’ son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli

135che diedi al re giovane i ma’ conforti.

Io feci il padre e ’l figlio in sé ribelli;Achitofèl non fé più d’Absalone

138e di Davìd coi malvagi punzelli.

Perch’ io parti’ così giunte persone,partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!,

141dal suo principio ch’è in questo troncone.

Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso».

And so that you may carry back news of me,

know that I am Bertran de Born, the one

135who gave bad advice to the young king.

I turned father and son against each other;

Achitophel did no more to Absolom

138and David, with his wicked incitements.

Because I divided persons with such a bond,

I carry my brain divided, alas!

141from its starting point* which is in this trunk.

* i.e. the spinal cord

Thus is observed in me the law of contrapasso.”

The law of contrapasso, of fitting the punishment to the crime—one of the structuring principles of hell, operative from the very beginning of the journey—is here named for the first and only time in the Inferno. Dante borrowed the term from scholastic theologians, but the notion derives from the biblical law of retaliation (lex talionis: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth), and can be found in classical authors and even in non-Christian texts, reflecting the universal desire to see justice done and the wicked punished appropriately. Here in hell, punishments are either an externalisation of the aberrant impulse or a corrective to it. But in the Commedia, contrapasso is not just a form of divine revenge; it is the fulfilment of a destiny freely chosen by the individual in life—not so much a punishment devised by an external agent as (in the words of Erich Auerbach) a continuation, intensification and definitive fixation of the sinner’s situation on earth. The bodily mutilation of the sinners in this canto matches the mutilation they inflicted on the body politic, in the public sphere of life as a community.

Virgil urges dante not to weep at the spectacle of such savage mutilation. They have a long way to go, and not much time. They move off, and Dante explains to Virgil that he caught sight of someone he thought he recognised as a member of his own family. Virgil confirms that while Dante was talking to Bertran de Born, a sinner called Geri del Bello had pointed at Dante and shouted threateningly at him. Dante says he feels pity for him: this is his father’s cousin. No family member has avenged his violent death. The question of revenge and family honour is fleetingly raised but not explored. It seems that Dante has sympathy for the feelings of his aggrieved kinsman, but does not think vendetta is the right response. The situation calls to mind some modern Middle Eastern societies where honour killings reflect a way of thinking natural to older generations but rejected by younger family members.

Dante and Virgil walk on until they can see down into the next bolgia. They hear groans and lamentations; the valley is filled with diseased figures; there is a terrible stench of rotting flesh. The places named here—Maremma and Sardinia—were famous for malarial outbreaks in summer. Hospitals were set up in the Valdichiana to treat the huge numbers of those affected.

Qual dolor fora, se de li spedalidi Valdichiana tra ’l luglio e ’l settembre

48e di Maremma e di Sardigna i mali

fossero in una fossa tutti ’nsembre,tal era quivi, e tal puzzo n’usciva

51qual suol venir de le marcite membre.

What suffering there would be, if the sick people

from the hospitals of Valdichiana between July and September

48and from Maremma and Sardinia

were all together in one ditch,

so it was here, and such a stench came from it

51as usually comes from rotting limbs.

When they reach a position where they can see more clearly, they detect that these sinners, the falsifiers, lie on the valley floor in heaps. None of them can stand upright, though some can crawl.

Qual sovra ’l ventre e qual sovra le spallel’un de l’altro giacea, e qual carpone

69si trasmutava per lo tristo calle.

Passo passo andavam sanza sermone,guardando e ascoltando li ammalati,

72che non potean levar le lor persone.

Some lay on others’ bellies, and some on their backs,

and some dragged themselves

69on all fours along the evil path.

Meanwhile we walked on without speaking,

looking at and listening to the sick people,

72who could not stand upright.

Two sinners catch Dante’s eye because they are seated on the ground, leaning back to back. They are covered in scabs, which they tear at with their fingernails. A series of three extraordinarily graphic images describes their demeanour. This is Dante at his most grittily realistic, reflecting the detail of everyday domestic life in the Middle Ages: pots on the stove, a stable boy anxious not to keep his master waiting, a fish being scaled.

Io vidi due sedere a sé poggiati,com’ a scaldar si poggia tegghia a tegghia,

75dal capo al piè di schianze macolati;

e non vidi già mai menare stregghiaa ragazzo aspettato dal segnorso,

78né a colui che mal volontier vegghia,

come ciascun menava spesso il morsode l’unghie sopra sé per la gran rabbia

81del pizzicor, che non ha più soccorso;

I saw two sitting leaning back to back,

as pan is propped against pan to heat them up,

75blotchy from head to foot with scabs;

and I never saw a currycomb wielded so furiously

by a stable boy whose master was waiting for him,

78or by someone anxious to get to bed,

as each of them was using his nails to bite

into himself on account of the great rage

81of the itchiness, which has no other relief;

e sì traevan giù l’unghie la scabbia,come coltel di scardova le scaglie

84o d’altro pesce che più larghe l’abbia.

and their fingernails dragged off the scabs,

as a knife does the scales of a bream

84or of some other fish which has bigger ones.

Virgil asks them if there are any Italians here. They reply that they are Italians, and turn to him in astonishment when he explains that Dante is a living man visiting hell. Dante asks them who they are and what city they come from. One is Griffolino from Arezzo, who says he was burned at the stake by Albero of Siena, but not for the sin for which he is punished here in hell. He had rashly claimed in jest: I can fly through the air. Albero had him killed when he failed to deliver on this foolish boast. He is here because he was an alchemist, one of the four different kinds of falsifier we will meet in this circle.

Dante comments to Virgil on the foolishness of the Sienese, and the other sinner picks up on the point and illustrates it at length, supposedly identifying exceptions to the general rule, but in fact listing notoriously flagrant examples of it. One spendthrift young man is remarkable for his temperate spese (“modest expenditure”: the phrase is heavily ironical); another for a liking for rich foods prepared with exotic spices like cloves (cloves were a luxury item, an expensive import from the East; this was flagrantly conspicuous consumption). Two of them belonged to an infamous group that gathered to eat and drink, and then destroyed the plates they had eaten from, inescapably calling to mind the riotous partying of the Oxford undergraduate Bullingdon Club. The speaker who berates the Sienese for their extravagance and vacuousness identifies himself as Capocchio, another alchemist. Some early commentators tell us that Dante and Capocchio had known each other as students. If true, that might account for the collusive tone of witty irony deployed in sounding off about these privileged and very rich and empty-headed young men.

Two extended classical similes describe the mad fury of two pale, naked sinners who now attack Capocchio, like pigs let loose from a pigsty. They are Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha, both of whom impersonated other people for wicked ends. Falsatori di persona (“impersonators”) constitute the second category of falsifiers. Gianni Schicchi, a Florentine contemporary of Dante’s, impersonated Buoso Donati in order to falsify a will (the story will be familiar to readers as the plot of Puccini’s comic opera of that name). Myrrha, a figure from classical mythology, disguised herself as someone else in order to have sex with her father. The pairing of classical and contemporary figures is a familiar narrative strategy in the Commedia, one of the most distinctive aspects of the poem, which thus embraces the whole of human history. We are about to witness a far more starthng example of it, where a modern Florentine and an ancient Greek interact violently and exchange abusive insults. In the afterlife, distinctions of historical period count for nothing.

Dante sees a sinner so swollen with hydropsy that his belly is the shape of a lute. All he desires is one drop of water.

Io vidi un, fatto a guisa di lëuto,pur ch’elli avesse avuta l’anguinaia

51tronca da l’altro che l’uomo ha forcuto.

La grave idropesì, che sì dispaiale membra con l’omor che mal converte,

54che ’l viso non risponde a la ventraia,

faceva lui tener le labbra apertecome l’etico fa, che per la sete

57l’un verso ’l mento e l’altro in sù rinverte.

I saw one of them, shaped like a lute,

or he would’ve been if he’d been cut off at the groin

51from that other part of a man that is forked.*

* i.e. his legs

The heavy dropsy, that deforms

the limbs with its ill-converted humour,

54so the face is not proportionate to the belly,

made him hold his lips apart,

like a consumptive, who because of his thirst

57turns one lip down towards his chin and the other upwards.

The sinner appeals to Dante to listen to his story.

«O voi che sanz’ alcuna pena siete,

e non so io perché, nel mondo gramo»,

60diss’ elli a noi, «guardate e attendete

“O you who suffer no punishment,

and I don’t know why, in this grim world,”

60he said to us, “look and pay attention

a la miseria del maestro Adamo;io ebbi, vivo, assai di quel ch’i’ volli,

63e ora, lasso!, un gocciol d’acqua bramo.

to the wretchedness of Master Adam;

what I wanted I had in plenty while I was alive,

63and now, alas, I crave a drop of water.

The cool streams of the Casentino that flow down into the Arno are always in his mind’s eye; in a peculiar refinement of his torment, the thought of them parches him more than the disease he is suffering here in hell.

Li ruscelletti che d’i verdi collidel Casentin discendon giuso in Arno,

66faccendo i lor canali freddi e molli,

sempre mi stanno innanzi, e non indarno,ché l’imagine lor vie più m’asciuga

69che ’l male ond’ io nel volto mi discarno.

The little streams that run from the green hills

of the Casentino down into the Arno,

66making their channels cool and moist,

are always before my eyes, and not in vain,

for the image of them parches me much more

69than the disease that ravages my face.

Master Adam’s sin was to produce counterfeit coinage, and he was burned at the stake for it. His honorary title, master, reflects the fact that he had an academic qualification, which perhaps underpins his activities working with metals. Counterfeiters constitute the third category of falsifiers.

La rigida giustizia che mi frugatragge cagion del loco ov’ io peccai

72a metter più li miei sospiri in fuga.

Ivi è Romena, là dov’ io falsaila lega suggellata del Batista;

75per ch’io il corpo sù arso lasciai.

The stern justice that torments me

uses the landscape where I sinned

72to make me sigh all the more deeply.

There lies Romena, where I falsified

the coinage that bears the Baptist’s seal;

75for that I left my body burned up there.

(The florin was stamped on one side with the image of John the Baptist, patron saint of the city.) He blames those who induced him to strike coins with three carats of base metal.

Io son per lor tra sì fatta famiglia;e’ m’indussero a batter li fiorini

90ch’avevan tre carati di mondiglia».

Because of them I’m among people of this sort;

they induced me to strike florins

90that had three carats of dross.”

A florin had twenty-four carats of gold: three carats of dross was a very sizeable swindle. Counterfeiting currency was an offence punishable by death in Florence. The economic prosperity of the city depended on the reliability of the florin as an internationally trustworthy coin. The modern equivalent would be forged American dollars.

Master Adam identifies two sinners, one of whom is “the liar” Sinon, “the Greek from Troy.” (The fourth category of falsifiers are those who lie, falsifying words.) Sinon takes offence at the way he is identified and strikes Master Adam on his swollen belly, which resounds like a drum. Master Adam hits him on the face; although he can’t shift his body, his arm is still free. There follows an exchange of brutal verbal taunts, each occupying a tercet. You weren’t so free with your arm when you went to the stake, but you were when you did the counterfeiting! True, but you didn’t tell the truth in the matter of the Trojan horse! So I’m punished for one sin, and you for thousands! Remember the horse and the fact that everyone knows about it! May your thirst crack your tongue, and your belly swell like a hedge so you can’t see over it! And finally (two tercets rather than one, rounding off the dispute): If I’m thirsty and bloated, you’re parched and have an aching head, and it wouldn’t take much to make you lick the mirror of Narcissus (i.e. water)—in other words, You’re just as thirsty as I am!

Dante is transfixed listening to this argy-bargy, in all its explosive verbal energy. Virgil reproaches him for showing too much interest in this vulgar brawl. The canto ends with his sharp reproof: voler ciò udire è bassa voglia (“wanting to hear that is a base desire”). We are suddenly acutely aware of the distinction between Dante the character and Dante the poet. The character’s interest is unseemly, and is properly rebuked by Virgil; the poet’s mastery of the low style, his command of its colloquial vitality and vigour, his skill at fitting salty dialogue into his strict metre, his lexical, rhythmic and syntactical inventiveness, cannot fail to arouse our interest and admiration. Here Dante has it both ways: Virgil’s politically correct disapproval is held in delicate balance with the poet’s evident pleasure in exercising his stylistic skills in a low register.

Dante and virgil climb up the slope out of the last bolgia of the Malebolge, but they can’t see much. The air is murky. In this transitional canto they pass from the eighth to the ninth circle. It is a frightening experience, in an entirely new way.

A horn resounds: a powerfully evocative literary echo conveys its haunting power. It resounds more terribly than Roland’s horn did at Roncesvalles, in the climactic final scene of the Chanson de Roland, when the sounding of the horn signalled the defeat in battle of Charlemagne’s troops fighting against the Moors in Spain. That defeat followed the betrayal of Ganelon. We are about to enter the circle of treachery.

Dopo la dolorosa rotta, quandoCarlo Magno perdé la santa gesta,

18non sonò sì terribilmente Orlando.

After the dolorous rout, when

Charlemagne lost his holy band of knights,

18Roland did not sound so terrible a blast.

Dante turns to look in the direction the sound is coming from, and thinks he can make out the high towers of a city.

Poco portäi in là volta la testa,che me parve veder molte alte torri;

21ond’ io: «Maestro, dì, che terra è questa?».

I turned my head a little in that direction,

and I seemed to see many high towers;

21so I said: “Master, tell me, what city is this?”

Dante’s question is understandable. Towers seen in the distance as one approached a city was a commonplace of medieval travel. As modern travellers to Tuscany know, Monteriggioni, a circular fortress built by the Sienese in the war against Florence, still has its impressive circle of fourteen defensive towers around its walls. Though now somewhat reduced in height, they once stood over sixty feet tall. It is this familiar landmark that is invoked to suggest the size and disposition of the looming entities Dante dimly makes out in the gloom.

Virgil takes his hand caramente (“fondly”), and explains that what he sees in the distance are not towers, but giants. These giants encircle the well which forms the bottom of hell, their feet on the floor of the ninth circle, their upper bodies extending up into the eighth. The more clearly Dante sees the giants, the more frightened he becomes.

In all there are six giants; Dante sees four of them but only engages with two. The first is the horn blower, who now starts to shout. What he says is gobbledygook.

«Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi»,cominciò a gridar la fiera bocca,

69cui non si convenia più dolci salmi.

“Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi,”

the fierce mouth began to howl;

69sweeter psalms were not suited to it.

The very unintelligibility of his words reveals his identity. This is Nimrod, the arch-instigator for building the Tower of Babel. The Bible tells us that when human beings in their arrogance tried to build a tower that would reach heaven, they were punished by the confusion of tongues. Mutual unintelligibility among the various categories of workmen meant that the project could not go ahead, as Dante explains in the De vulgari eloquentia, his earlier treatise on language. Nimrod, director of the enterprise, can communicate with no one at all. Attempts to make sense of Nimrod’s garbled words shed no real light on what is clearly meant to be an act of failed communication. Virgil reproaches Nimrod, telling him to stick to his horn, to give up on language.

Virgil and Dante turn to the left and walk on. They come first to Ephialtes, who is in chains and angry; then to Antaeus, who is unfettered. Virgil asks Antaeus to pick them up and lower them down into the ninth circle, dove Cocito la freddura serra (“where cold locks Cocytus”). Cocytus is the fourth of the infernal rivers; it forms a lake at the bottom of hell. The lake is eternally frozen, locked solid by the cold.

Antaeus grasps Virgil, who holds on to Dante; he lowers them down to the next level and gently sets them down. Two vivid comparisons suggest the sheer size and movement of the giant as he does this. He is like the Garisenda Tower, the leaning tower in Bologna about which Dante had written a sonnet as a young man. If you stand under it and look up at it as a cloud is passing over it, it seems to bend towards you. After putting them down, the giant rises back up like the mast of a ship righting itself.

Dante and Virgil have arrived in the ninth circle, the circle of treachery. Treachery is a misuse of human reason more evil than simple fraud, because it is practised against those who had a special reason to trust the perpetrator. There are four categories of treachery, depending on the strength of the bond which links the perpetrator to the victim, the bond violated by the treacherous act: family, country or party, guests, benefactors. Thus there are four regions in Cocytus, a series of concentric circles which form the floor of hell, the lowest point in Dante’s geocentric universe.

We are about to discover a landscape utterly different from anything we have yet encountered: a vast lake of ice in which the sinners are frozen. The icy-heartedness of those who betray is externalised emblematically in their eternal fate. This punishment, with its simple correlation between the landscape and the inner state of the sinner, has no counterpart in medieval depictions of hell. It is one of Dante’s most original and artistically satisfying inventions.

The canto opens with an extended virtuoso riff on what is known as the inexpressibility topos, the preemptive strategy by which an author declares the impossibility of doing justice to the subject he is about to tackle. Typically, a lyric poet might declare that his lady’s beauty far surpasses anything he can convey in words. For Dante the challenge is to do justice to the pit of hell, fondo a tutto l’universo (“the bottom of the whole universe”), a subject which requires harsh and raucous rhymes to capture its brutal physical reality and the moral depravity of its inhabitants. This is as low as it is possible to go in terms of human degradation. Needless to say, even as he declares his misgivings about whether he can carry this off, he is demonstrating his stylistic mastery.

S’ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce,come si converrebbe al tristo buco

3sovra ’l qual pontan tutte l’altre rocce,

io premerei di mio concetto il sucopiù pienamente; ma perch’ io non l’abbo,

6non sanza tema a dicer mi conduco;

If I had harsh and raucous rhymes,

such as would be fitting for the wretched hole

3on which all the other rocks press down,

I would squeeze out the juice of my thought

more fully; but since I do not,

6it is not without fear that I set about writing;

ché non è impresa da pigliare a gabbodiscriver fondo a tutto l’universo,

9né da lingua che chiami mamma o babbo.

for describing the bottom of the whole universe

is not an undertaking to take on in jest,

9nor one for a tongue that calls ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy.’

In his earlier treatise on language, the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante had theorised the “high” style which should be used by poets aspiring to write with distinction in the vernacular. There, these very words “mummy” and “daddy” had been programmatically excluded as childishly inappropriate in register for a serious poet. Only words of exquisite polish and refinement, in both their meaning and their phonetic character, had been judged suitable for use by an accomplished poet. Words dismissed as plebeian, regional, low, coarse, harsh-sounding had no place in such a poet’s lexicon. But now in the Commedia, with its new ideal of linguistic inclusiveness, these childish words can be invoked to emphasise by contrast the sheer stylistic sophistication and range and brilliance the poet will need if he is to do justice to his subject. That subject requires control of the full range of linguistic resources that human language can provide. Nothing can be excluded a priori from the poet’s word hoard.

An unidentified voice warns the travellers not to tread on the heads which stick up out of the ice. Dante, who has been gazing back up at the wall, turns and sees in front of him a lake which looks as if it is made of glass, not water. The ice is thicker than that found on the Danube or the Don. If a mountain fell on it, it would not creak, even at the edge. Sinners are frozen in the ice, with only their heads poking out, their faces turned downwards. We are in Caina, the first zone of Cocytus, named after Cain, who killed his brother Abel. Francesca in canto 5 had predicted that her murderous husband would end up here.

E come a gracidar si sta la ranacol muso fuor de l’acqua, quando sogna

33di spigolar sovente la villana,

And as the frog sits croaking

with its snout poking out of the water,

33when the peasant woman often dreams of gleaning,*

* i.e. in summer

livide, insin là dove appar vergognaeran l’ombre dolenti ne la ghiaccia,

36mettendo i denti in nota di cicogna.

Ognuna in giù tenea volta la faccia;da bocca il freddo, e da li occhi il cor tristo

39tra lor testimonianza si procaccia.

so the suffering shades, bluish with cold,

were immersed in the ice up to where shame is visible,*

36their teeth clattering like the sound of storks.

* i.e. their faces

Each of them held his face turned downwards;

their mouths pay testimony to the cold

39and their eyes to their wicked hearts.

Dante sees a couple pressed tightly together, chest to chest. They are Tuscan brothers who had killed each other, now locked together for eternity. When they look up to see Dante, their icy tears run down their faces and freeze, and they head butt each other like goats. Five other sinners are named, all guilty of betraying family members.

Now moving on towards the centre, Dante kicks a sinner in the head; he’s not sure whether it happened by accident, or deliberately, or was simply fated to be. The sinner protests.

E mentre ch’andavamo inver’ lo mezzoal quale ogne gravezza si rauna,

75e io tremava ne l’etterno rezzo;

se voler fu o destino o fortuna,non so; ma, passeggiando tra le teste,

78forte percossi ’l piè nel viso ad una.

Piangendo mi sgridò: «Perché mi peste?se tu non vieni a crescer la vendetta

81di Montaperti, perché mi moleste?».

And as we were going towards the centre,

to which all weights are drawn,

75and I was shivering in the eternal chill,

whether it was deliberate or destiny or chance,

I do not know; but, walking among the heads,

78I struck my foot hard in the face of one of them.

Wailing he chided me: “Why do you trample on me?

If you haven’t come to increase the revenge

81of Montaperti, why are you harassing me?”

The mention of Montaperti—the battle where the Sienese Ghibellines led by Farinata defeated the Florentine Guelfs—arouses Dante’s suspicion. He asks the sinner who he is; the sinner counterattacks: and who are you, who go around Antenora kicking people in the face? (We are now in the second section of Cocytus, reserved for traitors to country or political party, named for Antenor, a Trojan who in non-Virgilian versions of the story betrayed Troy to the Greeks.) At Montaperti a traitor had betrayed the Florentines by cutting off the hand of their standard-bearer, leaving the troops in confusion, with no leader to follow. Dante clearly suspects that this may be the guilty man. So indeed it proves to be, but the sinner will not willingly divulge his identity. He is certainly not moved by the thought of having his name put on record in Dante’s poem.

E io: «Maestro mio, or qui m’aspetta,sì ch’io esca d’un dubbio per costui;

84poi mi farai, quantunque vorrai, fretta».

Lo duca stette, e io dissi a coluiche bestemmiava duramente ancora:

87«Qual se’ tu che così rampogni altrui?».

«Or tu chi se’ che vai per l’Antenora,percotendo», rispuose, «altrui le gote,

90sì che, se fossi vivo, troppo fora?».

And I: “My master, just wait for me here,

so I may resolve a doubt about this man;

84then you can hurry me as much as you want.”

My guide stopped, and I said to the shade

who was still cursing violently:

87“Who are you to reproach someone else in this way?”

“And who are you, going across Antenora,

striking someone else’s cheeks,” he replied,

90“so that, even if you were alive, it would be too much.”

But I am alive, Dante is able to reply, and that may be to your advantage.

«Vivo son io, e caro esser ti puote»,fu mia risposta, «se dimandi fama,

93ch’io metta il nome tuo tra l’altre note».

Ed elli a me: «Del contrario ho io brama.Lèvati quinci e non mi dar più lagna,

96ché mal sai lusingar per questa lama!».

“I am alive” was my reply,

“and if you’re seeking fame, you may be pleased,

93that I put your name among my other notes.”

And he said to me: “The opposite is what I want.

Get away from here and stop bothering me,

96you don’t know how to flatter down in this hole!”

The sinner does not want his name to be on record; he wants precisely the opposite. But Dante does not give up so easily. He grabs the sinner by the hair, threatening to pull it out. The sinner still resists.

Allor lo presi per la cuticagnae dissi: «El converrà che tu ti nomi,

99o che capel qui sù non ti rimagna».

Ond’ elli a me: «Perché tu mi dischiomi,né ti dirò ch’io sia, né mosterrolti,

102se mille fiate in sul capo mi tomi».

Then I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck,

and I said: “You’ll have to tell me your name,

99or there won’t be a hair left on your head.”

Whereupon he said to me: “Even if you pull out all my hair,

I won’t tell you who I am, or show you,

102even if you stamp on my head a thousand times.”

As Dante pulls the sinner’s hair out in chunks, another sinner calls out to him by name, asking what the devil has got into him. Thus his identity is revealed.

Io avea già i capelli in mano avvolti,e tratti glien’ avea più d’una ciocca,

105latrando lui con li occhi in giù raccolti,

quando un altro gridò: «Che hai tu, Bocca?non ti basta sonar con le mascelle,

108se tu non latri? qual diavol ti tocca?».

I already had his hair wrapped around my hand,

and I’d pulled out more than one tuft,

105with him howhng and his eyes turned down,

when another shade shouted: “What’s the matter with you, Bocca?

Isn’t it enough for you to clack your jaws together,

108do you have to howl as well? What devil has got you?”

Bocca degh Abati was indeed the notorious traitor to the Florentine cause at Montaperti, always viewed as a loathed and reviled betrayer of the city. How are we to interpret Dante’s violent manhandling of him? Some readers react with horror, decrying the “medieval ferocity” of the gesture. Others see it as a proper response to a sin and sinner where all human values (compassion, empathy, warmth, love) have been obliterated. Dante says he will tell the world where Bocca now is, to his eternal shame.

«Omai», diss’ io, «non vo’ che più favelle,malvagio traditor; ch’a la tua onta

111io porterò di te vere novelle».

«Va via», rispuose, «e ciò che tu vuoi conta;ma non tacer, se tu di qua entro eschi,

114di quel ch’ebbe or così la lingua pronta.

“Now,” I said, “I don’t want you to say any more,

evil traitor; I will carry back

111true news about you, to your shame.”

“Go away,” he replied, “and say what you like;

but if you get out of here, be sure to mention

114the shade who was so free with his tongue just now.

Bocca now spitefully informs on others, revealing the names of another five sinners, mostly Tuscans, mostly near contemporaries of Dante’s, all involved in murderous political intrigue. But the list also includes Ganelon, the betrayer of Roland and Charlemagne at Roncesvalles, who for the Middle Ages was the arch-traitor, alongside Judas.

The canto had opened with a pair of sinners locked together, and it closes with another pair. With perfectly satisfying symmetry, the abrasive and shocking encounter with Bocca at its centre is framed on either side by the naming of five sinners, and at the extreme edges by a pair who do not speak. This is the first canto in the poem where Virgil has not said a single word. It is the first and only canto where Dante acts out his moral revulsion with physical violence against a sinner.

This new pair is an electrifying sight. One of them is behind the other, gnawing with animal-like savagery at the nape of the other’s neck.

Noi eravam partiti già da ello,ch’io vidi due ghiacciati in una buca,

126sì che l’un capo a l’altro era cappello;

e come ’l pan per fame si manduca,così ’l sovran li denti a l’altro pose

129là ’ve ’l cervel s’aggiugne con la nuca:

non altrimenti Tidëo si rosele tempie a Menalippo per disdegno,

132che quei faceva il teschio e l’altre cose.

We had already left him behind,

when I saw two of them frozen in one hole,

126so that one head was a hat to the other;

and just as a famished man eats bread,

so the one above placed his teeth on the other one

129where the brain joins the nape of the neck:

in just the same way as Tydeus gnawed

the temples of Menalippus out of disdain,

132so he was doing to the skull and the other things.

Dante asks the sinner to explain the reason for his ferocity; if it is justified, he will carry news of it back to the world of the living.

«O tu che mostri per sì bestial segnoodio sovra colui che tu ti mangi,

135dimmi ’l perché», diss’ io, «per tal convegno,

che se tu a ragion di lui ti piangi,sappiendo chi voi siete e la sua pecca,

138nel mondo suso ancora io te ne cangi,

se quella con ch’io parlo non si secca».

“Oh you who with this bestial sign

show your hatred for the person you are eating,

135tell me the reason,” I said, “on this understanding,

that if you have good cause to complain of him,

knowing who you are and what his sin is,

138I will repay you for it, in the world up there,

if the thing I speak with does not dry up.”

We segue straight into one of the most majestically horrifying canto openings in the Inferno:

La bocca sollevò dal fiero pastoquel peccator, forbendola a’ capelli

3del capo ch’elli avea di retro guasto.

That sinner raised his mouth from the fierce meal,

wiping it on the hair

3of the head whose back he had wasted.

In English these lines lose some of their impact because English word order does not allow us to begin the sentence with the word bocca (“mouth”). Having wiped his mouth in this gruesome fashion, the sinner launches into his story, prepared to relive the pain of his death if it will bring infamy to the man who betrayed him. Like Francesca, he echoes the words of Aeneas telling Dido of the fall of Troy in the opening lines of Book II of the Aeneid; like her, he weeps as he speaks; but where she speaks of love, he will speak of hate.

Poi cominciò: «Tu vuo’ ch’io rinovellidisperato dolor che ’l cor mi preme

6già pur pensando, pria ch’io ne favelli.

Ma se le mie parole esser dien semeche frutti infamia al traditor ch’i’ rodo,

9parlar e lagrimar vedrai insieme.

Then he began: “You want me to renew

a desperate sorrow which presses on my heart

6even just thinking, before I speak of it.

But if my words are to be the seed that bears

the fruit of infamy for the traitor I’m gnawing on,

9you will see me speak and weep together.

Like Farinata, the sinner recognises Dante as a Florentine by his accent. He introduces himself and his antagonist: he is Count Ugolino, the other man is Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa. These are figures from recent history whom Dante’s contemporaries would have known well (Ugolino had died in 1289). The sinner says he will explain why he is behaving in this unneighbourly way.

Io non so chi tu se’ né per che modovenuto se’ qua giù; ma fiorentino

12mi sembri veramente quand’ io t’odo.

Tu dei saper ch’i’ fui conte Ugolino,e questi è l’arcivescovo Ruggieri:

15or ti dirò perché i son tal vicino.

I don’t know who you are, nor by what means

you’ve come to be down here; but to me you seem

12Florentine, in truth, when I hear you.

You should know that I was Count Ugolino,

and this is Archbishop Ruggieri:

15now I’ll tell you why I’m such a neighbour to him.

Dante will know part of the story already, he says, but not all of it. He will know that Ugolino was betrayed, and that he died; but what he can’t know is how he died.

Che per l’effetto de’ suo’ mai pensieri,fidandomi di lui, io fossi preso

18e poscia morto, dir non è mestieri;

però quel che non puoi avere inteso,cioè come la morte mia fu cruda,

21udirai, e saprai s’e’ m’ha offeso.

That as a result of his evil thoughts,

trusting him, I was captured

18and then killed, there is no need to tell;

however what you cannot have heard,

that is, how cruel my death was,

21you’ll hear, and you will know if he has wronged me.

He had been locked up in a tower in Pisa for several months when he had a bad dream, a terrible premonition of what was to come.

Breve pertugio dentro da la Muda,la qual per me ha ’l titol de la fame,

24e che conviene ancor ch’altrui si chiuda,

m’avea mostrato per lo suo foramepiù lune già, quand’ io feci ’l mal sonno

27che del futuro mi squarciò ’l velame.

A small aperture inside the Muda tower,

which because of me is called the Tower of Hunger,

24and in which others will still be imprisoned,

had through its opening already shown me

several moons,* when I had the bad dream

27which tore open the veil of the future for me.

* i.e. several months had passed

In the dream there is a hunt, led by Ruggieri, with other prominent Sienese families. They chase a wolf and its wolf cubs towards the mountains. The animals quickly tire out and are torn apart by the hounds.

Questi pareva a me maestro e donno,cacciando il lupo e ’ lupicini al monte

30per che i Pisan veder Lucca non ponno.

Con cagne magre, studïose e conteGualandi con Sismondi e con Lanfranchi

33s’avea messi dinanzi da la fronte.

In picciol corso mi parieno stanchilo padre e ’ figh, e con l’agute scane

36mi parea lor veder fender li fianchi.

This man seemed to me master and lord,

hunting the wolf and the wolf cubs towards the mountain

30which prevents the Pisans from seeing Lucca.

With lean, eager and expert hounds,

the Gualandi, with the Sismondi and the Lanfranchi,

33he’d placed up at the front ahead of him.

After a short time the father and the sons

seemed to me to be tired, and I seemed to see

36their flanks torn open with sharp fangs.

On awaking the next morning in the tower where he is imprisoned, he hears his children weeping and calling for food.

Quando fui desto innanzi la dimane,pianger senti’ fra ’l sonno i miei figliuoli

39ch’eran con meco, e dimandar del pane.

When I awoke before the daybreak,

I heard my sons who were with me

39weeping in their sleep, and asking for bread.

If Dante doesn’t weep at what he is about to hear, what would he weep at?

Ben se’ crudel, se tu già non ti duolipensando ciò che ’l mio cor s’annunziava;

42e se non piangi, di che pianger suoli?

You’re very cruel if you’re not already grieving

at the thought of what my heart was telling me;

42and if you don’t weep, what can make you weep?

The hour comes when food was normally brought to the prisoners, but instead he hears the sound of the entrance to the tower being nailed up. Wordlessly, he gazes at his children; he understands that they are to be left to starve to death.

Già eran desti, e l’ora s’appressavache ’l cibo ne solëa essere addotto,

45e per suo sogno ciascun dubitava;

e io senti’ chiavar l’uscio di sottoa l’orribile torre; ond’ io guardai

48nel viso a’ mie’ figliuoi sanza far motto.

They were already awake, and the hour was approaching

when food was usually brought to us,

45and each of us, because of his dream, was uneasy;

and down below I heard the door

of the horrible tower being nailed shut; at that I looked

48into my sons’ faces without saying a word.

Ugolino does not weep, but turns to stone inside; his children weep, and one of them asks his father what is the matter with him. Ugolino does not reply; and still he does not weep.

Io non piangëa, sì dentro impetrai:piangevan elli; e Anselmuccio mio

51disse: ‘Tu guardi sì, padre! che hai?’.

Perciò non lagrimai né rispuos’ iotutto quel giorno né la notte appresso,

54infin che l’altro sol nel mondo uscìo.

I did not weep, I so turned to stone inside;

they wept; and my little Anselm

51said: ‘You’re staring so, father! What’s the matter?’

So I didn’t weep or reply

all that day and the night that followed,

54until the next day’s sun came into the world.

A day has passed. Ugolino bites into his own hands in grief. The children think he is doing it from hunger, and offer their own flesh to assuage that hunger.

Come un poco di raggio si fu messonel doloroso carcere, e io scorsi

57per quattro visi il mio aspetto stesso,

ambo le man per lo dolor mi morsi;ed ei, pensando ch’io ’l fessi per voglia

60di manicar, di sùbito levorsi

e disser: ‘Padre, assai ci fia men dogliase tu mangi di noi: tu ne vestisti

63queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia’.

Queta’mi allor per non farli più tristi;lo dì e l’altro stemmo tutti muti;

66ahi dura terra, perché non t’apristi?

When a weak ray of light made its way

into the prison of sorrow, and I saw

57in four faces my very own expression,

I bit into both my hands out of grief;

and they, thinking I did it out of a desire

60to eat, immediately stood up,

and said: ‘Father, it will cause us much less grief

if you eat of us: you clothed us

63in this wretched flesh, so you take it from us.’

I calmed myself then, so as not to make them sadder;

that day and the next none of us spoke a word;

66ah, hard earth, why didn’t you open up?

There are long silences. Time inexorably passes. On the fourth day one of the children, Gaddo, dies. Between the fifth and sixth days the other three die. Two days later, after agonisingly protracted suffering, Ugolino himself dies.

Poscia che fummo al quarto dì venuti,Gaddo mi si gittò disteso a’ piedi,

69dicendo: ‘Padre mio, ché non m’aiuti?’.

Quivi morì; e come tu mi vedi,vid’ io cascar li tre ad uno ad uno

72tra ’l quinto dì e ’l sesto; ond’ io mi diedi,

After we had reached the fourth day,

Gaddo threw himself down at my feet,

69saying, ‘My father, why don’t you help me?’

There he died; and as you see me,

I saw the other three fall one by one,

72between the fifth day and the sixth; whereupon I gave myself,

già cieco, a brancolar sovra ciascuno,e due dì li chiamai, poi che fur morti.

75Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno».

already blind, to groping over each of them,

and I called on them two days, after they were dead.

75Then hunger was more powerful than sorrow.”

The final line, with its deliberate ambiguity, leaves open the question of cannibalism. Does it mean that grief didn’t kill Ugolino, but hunger did? Or does it mean, more sinisterly, that his hunger was more powerful than his grief? Did Ugolino, in his desperation as he starved, eat the flesh of his own children? Dante doesn’t tell us. Commentators disagree. A powerful case can be made that this must be exactly what Dante means us to think. The episode opened with a scene of cannibalism, and so it closes. When Ugolino finishes speaking, he goes back to chewing on the skull of his betrayer, savagely, like a dog.

Quand’ ebbe detto ciò, con li occhi tortiriprese ’l teschio misero co’ denti,

78che furo a l’osso, come d’un can, forti.

When he had said that, with eyes twisted

he took the wretched skull back in his teeth,

78which were strong on the bone, like those of a dog.

This is probably the most famous single episode in the Commedia. It was translated early on by Chaucer in The Monk’s Tale, and has been a point of reference for English poets ever since. What are we to make of it?

Ugolino’s was not a good death. For all the horror of his circumstances, he was in the theologically privileged position of knowing that he was soon to die. He could have repented of his sins and made his peace with God, but, frozen in his all-consuming hatred of his old enemy, he did not do so. Nor did he offer words of love or comfort to his children. The children’s behaviour is very different. They reach out to their father; in a sacrificial gesture they offer him their own flesh. Their words echo those of Christ. Ugolino is unable to respond. He does not talk to them, offers them no comfort. In his stony-heartedness he is unreachable in the pain and despair of his final days. Even in purely human terms, this is not a good death.

In Chaucer’s retelling of the tale, the emphasis is all on the pathos of the children’s fate rather than on the mental state of their father: “And with hym been his litel children thre; / The eldest scarsly fyf yeer was of age.” It is Ugolino’s mental state that is so unforgettably captured in Dante’s lines. His mental state is precisely that denial and rejection of God which is the essence of damnation. Here in a single human being we have an example of supreme hatred, expressed in the animal gesture of devouring its object, and the supreme suffering of a father unable to help or comfort his children as they starve to death. The hatred and the suffering are intimately linked. The hatred is both the cause of the suffering and its effect.

Dante the character does not react to the devastating story; instead the poet launches into an invective against Pisa. Popular opinion may have had it that Ugolino betrayed the city in the affair of the castles, he says (though historians point out that ceding the castles could be interpreted as a strategic diplomatic move in the city’s interest); but nothing justifies the treatment of the children.

Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le gentidel bel paese là dove ’l sì suona,

81poi che i vicini a te punir son lenti,

muovasi la Capraia e la Gorgona,e faccian siepe ad Arno in su la foce,

84sì ch’elli annieghi in te ogne persona!

Che se ’l conte Ugolino aveva voced’aver tradita te de le castella,

87non dovei tu i figliuoi porre a tal croce.

Innocenti facea l’età novella,novella Tebe, Uguiccione e ’l Brigata

90e li altri due che ’l canto suso appella.

Ah, Pisa, shame of the people

of the fair land where they say sì,*

81since your neighbours are slow to punish you,

* i.e. where they speak Italian

may Capraia and Gorgona* move

and make a barrier at the mouth of the Arno,

84so that it drowns every person in you!

* two small islands

For if rumour had it that Count Ugolino

had betrayed you in the matter of the castles,

87you should not have inflicted such suffering on his children.

Their youth made the children innocent,

O new Thebes: Uguiccione and Brigata

90and the other two, named above in my canto.

All four of Ugolino’s innocent children have been named: two by their father, two in Dante’s apostrophe to Pisa. Dante’s own children, we remember, accompanied him into exile.

The story of Ugolino is framed by his own bestial behaviour at the beginning and end of his tale, and also, in a broader context, by the pitilessness of Dante’s treatment of Bocca and (yet to come) of Frate Alberigo. Those episodes contain words of hatred and rancour, the harsh and discordant rhymes Dante needed to describe human nature at its most abject. Ugolino’s words are very different. One commentator argues acutely that though Dante the character and Dante the author express no pity for him, the pity is there in the telling of the tale, in the words Dante has given Ugolino. The compassion and love for his sons that he is unable to express directly to them as they starve to death is expressed now in the afterlife in words that cannot fail to move. To see Ugolino’s appeal to Dante’s tears (e se non piangi, di che pianger suoli?, l. 42) as a calculated move to gain sympathy, a speech cynically contrived to obscure his guilt, diminishes both the complexity of his finely imagined character and the greatness of Dante’s art.

Virgil and Dante move on, to a section where sinners hold their heads not facing downwards, but tipped back. Their tears freeze over their eyes, filling their eye sockets and forming a crystal visor. We are now in Tolomea, the third section of Cocytus, reserved for those who betrayed guests. Medieval notions of hospitality, and the sacred, unbreakable bond between host and guest, make betrayal of guests even more heinous a sin than betrayal of family members or of country or party.

Noi passammo oltre, là ’ve la gelataruvidamente un’altra gente fascia,

93non volta in giù, ma tutta riversata.

Lo pianto stesso lì pianger non lascia,e ’l duol che truova in su li occhi rintoppo,

96si volge in entro a far crescer l’ambascia;

ché le lagrime prime fanno groppo,e sì come visiere di cristallo,

99rïempion sotto ’l ciglio tutto il coppo.

We moved on further, where the ice

harshly enwraps another kind of people,

93not facing downwards, but with heads tilted back.

There the weeping itself stops them weeping,

and the grief that finds a barrier over their eyes,

96turns inwards to increase the suffering;

for the first tears freeze hard,

and like crystal visors

99they fill the whole hollow under the eyebrow.

A sinner cries out for help, asking Dante to remove the ice from his eyes so that he can find momentary relief before the tears freeze over again.

E un de’ tristi de la fredda crostagridò a noi: «O anime crudeli

111tanto che data v’è l’ultima posta,

levatemi dal viso i duri veli,sì ch’ïo sfoghi ’l duol che ’l cor m’impregna,

114un poco, pria che ’l pianto si raggeli».

And one of the wretches in the icy crust

shouted to us: “O cruel souls,

111so much so that you’ve been assigned to the last place,*

* i.e. in hell

remove the hard veils* from my face,

so that I can give vent to the sorrow that grips my heart,

114a little, before the tears freeze again.”

* of ice

Dante strikes a bargain: he’ll do as the sinner asks if the sinner reveals his identity. He offers a guarantee of his good faith, saying: If I don’t deliver, may I go to the very bottom of the ice. But the promise is meaningless; both he and the reader know, though the sinner doesn’t, that he is going there anyway. The sinner reveals that he is Frate Alberigo, who killed his guests after inviting them to a banquet.

Per ch’io a lui: «Se vuo’ ch’i’ ti sovvegna,dimmi chi se’, e s’io non ti disbrigo,

117al fondo de la ghiaccia ir mi convegna».

Rispuose adunque: «I’ son frate Alberigo;i’ son quel da le frutta del mal orto,

120che qui riprendo dattero per figo».

So I said to him: “If you want me to help you,

tell me who you are, and if I don’t free you from them,

117may I go to the bottom of the ice.”

Then he replied: “I’m Brother Alberigo;

I’m the one known for the fruits of the evil orchard;

120here I’m being repaid date for fig.”

Asking for the fruit to be served was the secret signal for Frate Alberigo’s henchmen to murder the guests. Dante is taken aback, because he is not aware that Frate Alberigo has died. Are you really dead? he asks. The sinner doesn’t know: this region, Tolomea, receives sinners even before the hour of their death.

«Oh», diss’ io lui, «or se’ tu ancor morto?».Ed elli a me: «Come ’l mio corpo stea

123nel mondo sù, nulla scïenza porto.

Cotal vantaggio ha questa Tolomea,che spesse volte l’anima ci cade

126innanzi ch’Atropòs mossa le dea.

“Oh,” I said to him, “are you dead already?”

And he replied: “How my body fares

123up there in the world, I have no knowledge.

This region Tolomea has this advantage,

that often the soul falls down here

126before Atropos gives it leave to go.*

* i.e. before it dies, before the thread of its life is cut by the Fate Atropos

Frate Alberigo explains how this works. A devil arrives and takes the sinner straight down to hell; it then takes over the sinner’s body for its remaining lifetime on earth. There are people walking about on earth whose souls are already in hell, their bodies inhabited by a devil. But in Christian thinking the possibility of repentance exists right up to the moment of death. In theological terms this last invention of Dante’s is, to say the least, extremely unorthodox.

E perché tu più volentier mi radele ’nvetrïate lagrime dal volto,

129sappie che, tosto che l’anima trade

come fec’ ïo, il corpo suo l’è toltoda un demonio, che poscia il governa

132mentre che ’l tempo suo tutto sia vòlto.

And so that you may the more willingly

scrape away the glassy tears from my face,

129know that, as soon as the soul betrays

as I did, its body is taken from it

by a demon, who afterwards controls it

132while its lifetime runs its full course.

The man behind him, Frate Alberigo points out, is Branca Doria, who has been down here for several years now.

Ella ruina in sì fatta cisterna;e forse pare ancor lo corpo suso

135de l’ombra che di qua dietro mi verna.

The soul falls headlong into this deep pit;

and perhaps the body of the shade who suffers the winter

135here behind me can still be seen up there on earth.

Tu ’l dei saper, se tu vien pur mo giuso:elli è ser Branca Doria, e son più anni

138poscia passati ch’el fu sì racchiuso».

You should know, if you’ve only just come down here;

he is ser Branca Doria, and it’s been several years

138since he was iced in like that.”

Dante is astonished. This can’t possibly be true. In a line of deliciously deliberate banality, he says that Branca Doria is alive and well up on earth: he eats and drinks and sleeps and wears clothes!

«Io credo», diss’ io lui, «che tu m’inganni;ché Branca Doria non morì unquanche,

141e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni».

“I think,” I said to him, “that you’re having me on;

Branca Doria never died,

141and he eats and drinks and sleeps and wears clothes.”

In fact Branca Doria didn’t die until 1325, four years after Dante, so for his first readers this was a truly shocking claim. But Frate Alberigo confirms that Branca Doria has been here in hell for some time, ever since he arranged the fatal feast for his hapless guests. He now reminds Dante of their bargain:

«Ma distendi oggimai in qua la mano;aprimi li occhi». E io non gliel’ apersi;

150e cortesia fu lui esser villano.

“But now reach out your hand in this direction;

open my eyes.” And I didn’t open them for him;

150and being boorish to him was courtesy.

The feudal values of cortesia (“courtesy”) and its opposite, villania (“baseness”), are invoked to justify Dante’s pitilessness. (It is interesting to remember that Virgil had used just this word when he encouraged Dante to be courteous to the sodomites in canto 16: disse: a costor si vuole esser cortese.) This scene too has prompted a fierce ethical debate among readers: Is Dante’s cruelty gratuitous, or is it necessary? The canto closes with an invective against the Genoese, balancing the earlier one against Pisa.

Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni

The banners of the king of hell advance

This opening line in Latin parodies a well-known hymn on the True Cross. Dante has added the word inferni (“of hell”) to adapt it to Satan, protagonist of this final canto of Inferno. Its solemnity is fitting: he is the king of hell, in eternal opposition to the King of Heaven. His banners (in fact not banners at all, as we shall see) are close to hand. Gazing through the mist, Dante thinks he sees a huge windmill. He feels a chill wind blowing strongly, as though from its sails. But it is not a windmill, he will soon discover; it is Satan himself, a gigantic figure that emerges partially from the ice in which he is trapped, now dimly apprehended in the distance. The sails of the windmill, the banners of the opening line, are in reality his monstrous, bat-like wings.

The travellers have reached the final section of Cocytus, called Giudecca, where the sinners are completely immersed in the ice. No part of their body emerges from it. They are frozen in different postures: upright, upside down, supine, bent over.

Già era, e con paura il metto in metro,là dove l’ombre tutte eran coperte,

12e trasparien come festuca in vetro.

Altre sono a giacere; altre stanno erte,quella col capo e quella con le piante;

15altra, com’ arco, il volto a’ piè rinverte.

Now I was, and with fear I put it into verse,

where the shades were completely covered,

12and showed through the ice like straws in glass.

Some are lying down; others are erect,

some with head uppermost and some with feet;

15others, like a bow, bend their face to their feet.

These are the sinners who betrayed lords and benefactors, the last and worst kind of treachery. This is all we hear of them. Locked in the ice, they cannot talk. The extinguishing of their capacity for language, the very thing that signifies and expresses their humanity, is a fitting measure of punishment for their icy-heartedness, their lack of human empathy. Dante reports the scene with clinical detachment, as though describing anatomical specimens preserved in a laboratory.

The travellers reach a point where Dante can gaze at Satan. Dante uses the name Lucifer, etymologically “Light Bearer,” to emphasise the contrast between the original radiance of the angel and his fallen state. He is la creatura ch’ebbe il bel sembiante (“the creature who once was fair of face”). There are incisive lines which contrast his state now with his beauty then, before in his arrogant rebelliousness he challenged his maker:

S’el fu sì bel com’ elli è ora brutto,e contra ’l suo fattore alzò le ciglia,

36ben dee da lui procedere ogne lutto.

If he was once as fair as now he is ugly,

and raised his brow against his maker,

36truly must all grief proceed from him.

Dante feels terror as he looks at him. Lucifer towers upwards from the ice from mid-chest. There is a meticulous comparison of his size with that of a giant (he is much bigger).

It is often said that Dante’s Satan is not a patch on Milton’s. Milton’s Satan is charismatic: he marshals his troops, gives stirring speeches, goes down fighting. Blake famously said that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it, meaning that the true poetic energy of Paradise Lost is concentrated in him; that the figure of Satan is where Milton’s creative imagination is most fully engaged.

Dante’s Lucifer is very different. He is huge, immobile, locked chest-deep in the ice. He has vast, bat-like wings. He has three faces (a parody of the Trinity), of three different colours: each mouth chews on the body of a sinner. He drools a mixture of tears and bloody saliva down his chins as he chews. He is disgusting—sin made manifest in all its horror and ugliness. But, crucially, he is silent. He is impotent. He is defeated. He has become no more than an instrument of God’s justice, his bat-like wings creating the icy wastes of Cocytus where the traitors are punished, the mechanical movement of his jaws, like some enormous piece of primitive agricultural machinery, endlessly crushing the three arch-traitors.

Virgil identifies the sinners Lucifer is chewing on. The first is Judas, who betrayed Jesus. The other two will take modern readers aback: they are Brutus and Cassius, who murdered Caesar. Virgil offers no comment on these traitors, whose nefarious role in human history is taken to be self-evident. In Dante’s eyes, Caesar was the founder of the providentially ordained Roman Empire. His assassins are thus arch-traitors in the unfolding course of human history.

«Quell’ anima là sù c’ha maggior pena»,disse ’l maestro, «è Giuda Scarïotto,

63che ’l capo ha dentro e fuor le gambe mena.

De li altri due c’hanno il capo di sotto,quel che pende dal nero ceffo è Bruto:

66vedi come si storce, e non fa motto!;

e l’altro è Cassio, che par sì membruto.Ma la notte risurge, e oramai

69è da partir, ché tutto avem veduto».

“That soul up there that has the harsher punishment,”

said my teacher, “is Judas Iscariot, who has

63his head inside and outside is waving his legs about.

Of the other two whose heads are dangling downwards,

the one who is hanging from the black maw is Brutus:

66see how he writhes, and doesn’t say a word!

and the other one is Cassius, who looks so muscular.

But the night is rising, and now it’s time

69to leave, for we have seen everything.”

It is time to go. They have seen it all.

They approach Lucifer, and, grasping his shaggy fur to grip on to, they climb down his body. When they reach the point where his hip joins his thigh, Virgil carefully turns them upside down, through 180 degrees. They continue climbing, but they now climb up Lucifer’s legs. Dante is puzzled, thinking they must be going back up towards hell. They pause to sit on a ledge and take stock, while Virgil answers Dante’s questions.

Virgil explains to Dante (and thus to the grateful reader) the geography of the globe, and how hell and purgatory were created. The fall of Lucifer, when he was cast down from heaven, created the vast, funnel-shaped cavity which houses hell, through which they have been travelling. The earth displaced in the creation of hell formed a mountain on the other side of the globe: the mountain of purgatory. Apart from that mountain, the surface of the southern hemisphere consists of water; all the land was pushed into the northern hemisphere by the force of Lucifer’s fall. Dante like his contemporaries believed that the northern hemisphere, with the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, was formed of land, while the southern hemisphere was formed of water.

Dante and Virgil have passed the midpoint of the globe, and must now climb up towards that mountain in the southern hemisphere. The journey through hell has lasted exactly a day. It started at dusk on Good Friday, and ended twenty-four hours later. But the clocks must be reset now that we are in the southern hemisphere, so it is not early evening but early morning on Easter Saturday as Dante and Virgil set out to make their way back up to the earth’s surface. We are told nothing of that twenty-four-hour journey, telescoped into just a line or two. They come on a stream, flowing down over the rock. They follow a narrow passage leading upwards. They reach a point where they see heavenly bodies through a round opening.

Lo duca e io per quel cammino ascosointrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo;

135e sanza cura aver d’alcun riposo,

salimmo sù, el primo e io secondo,tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle

138che porta ’l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.

My guide and I entered that hidden passage

to return to the bright world;

135and without bothering to take any rest,

we climbed up, he first and I second,

until I saw some of the beautiful things

138the heavens carry, through a round opening.

When they emerge onto the shore of mount purgatory, as they do in the final line of Inferno, it is just before dawn on Easter Sunday. They can see the stars for the first time since the journey began.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

And then we emerged and once again saw the stars.

1 In the Arthurian story, Galahad was the go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere.

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