Canto 33

Canto 33

Purgatory has no scriptural basis. (hell, by contrast, has a firm foundation in well-known passages in the Bible, including the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke.) Indeed, in Dante’s time purgatory was a relatively recent invention. Only in 1274 with the Second Council of Lyons—nine years after Dante’s birth—had it become official church doctrine, after a hundred years of sporadic theological debate. The 1274 council did not explain where purgatory was, and it has never been explained since. Even today for Catholic believers and theologians, its whereabouts remains vague.

Spiritually, purgatory is a zone of transition, an intermediate realm, a place of cleansing. It is where saved souls, destined for paradise, go when they die. There they purge themselves, not of the sins they have committed, but of the sinful tendencies or dispositions in their character. They suffer, but their suffering is forward-looking and finite.

Emotionally, purgatory creates a powerful connection between the dead and those they leave behind in the world, who are linked not just by memories, but by the possibility of effective interaction. Relatives and friends can pray on behalf of the deceased and shorten their term of penance, lessening their suffering. This idea, perhaps inevitably, quickly became monetarised. Personal prayer is efficacious, but so are masses said for the dead, and these must be paid for. Social historians point out that the doctrine of purgatory was hugely profitable for the church, providing a new and lucrative income stream. The corruption connected with the sale of “indulgences” would ultimately lead to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, but that was two hundred years after Dante’s time.

There is no sense in Purgatorio that the issue is contentious. Rather, there is a joyous sense of the variety and interest in human and dramatic terms of the many situations that link the dead to the living. Purgatory opens up new narrative and psychological possibilities for the poet, a range of subtle and very human emotions that have no place in hell or indeed in paradise—remorse, regret, nostalgia, yearning, sorrow at having been forgotten by family and friends. Surprise is now accompanied by delight (a friend is saved) rather than horror (a revered master is damned).

For Dante the poet, the invention of purgatory could not have been more timely. The existence of purgatory determines the structure and shape of the Commedia. The simple traditional two-way opposition—heaven vs. hell, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong—is replaced by a model with three component parts. A binary system becomes tripartite. The poem in its very structure embodies a three-in-one principle which satisfyingly echoes the central tenet of Christianity, the Trinity: three persons, one God; three cantiche, one poem; three realms, one afterlife; and, of course, a three-in-one metrical unit, the tercet. Within the poem itself, microcosm mirrors macrocosm, just as in the real world the three-personed deity is imprinted in the fabric of nature and on all aspects of human functioning and endeavour.

The geographical location and landscape of purgatory in the Commedia is Dante’s invention. The huge mountain which rises in the antipodes directly opposite Jerusalem in the northern hemisphere has no scriptural or literary antecedent. That Jerusalem and purgatory are on the same axis is one of the most satisfying aspects of Dante’s invented world. The place of man’s fall and the place of his redemption through the crucifixion are linked in a direct line which passes through the centre of the terrestrial globe, where Satan is immobilised and powerless.

When Dante emerges with Virgil onto the shore at the mountain’s foot, he does not know what awaits him. Just as he had done in hell, he learns about the topography of this new realm as he travels through it. The reader learns with him. There is no guidebook or map to help at the outset. We know nothing of a mountain, with terraces cut into its steep sides, crowned at the top with a delightful garden (the earthly paradise). The picture is built up as we go, fuelled by drama, curiosity, anxiety, amazement, awe on the part of Dante the character—all orchestrated with supreme skill by Dante the poet. “Delight” is one of the first words we come across as we set out on this second section of the journey; and, in sharp contrast to hell, it is one of the first emotions the pilgrim himself experiences.

Fig. 2 in dante’s cosmos the mountain of purgatory, with the earthly paradise at its summit, is at the antipodes of Jerusalem, so that the place of mankind’s fall (the garden of Eden) is on the same axis as the site of his redemption through the crucifixion. The fall from heaven of Lucifer (Satan), imprisoned at the centre of the earth, caused the creation of both hell and purgatory: the earth displaced from the vast cavity of hell with its nine circles formed the huge mountain of purgatory with its seven terraces.

Purgatorio (unlike inferno) announces its theme at the outset, in a nautical metaphor that marks a decisive change in mood. The little ship of Dante’s genius will now travel over better waters than the cruel sea of hell. Earlier writers had used the metaphor of a sea voyage for the composition of a long work, but never with such serene confidence of attack and such poetic force. Literal-minded manuscript illuminators often transform the metaphor into a concrete image of sea-borne adventure. At the beginning of the new cantica, within the loop of the large decorated capital P, they paint a tiny vessel with two intrepid occupants. Sometimes Dante is writing on a tablet while Virgil steers the boat.

Per correr miglior acque alza le veleomai la navicella del mio ingegno,

3che lascia dietro a sé mar sì crudele;

e canterò di quel secondo regnodove l’umano spirito si purga

6e di salire al ciel diventa degno.

To cross better waters the little ship

of my genius now hoists its sails,

3leaving behind it a sea so cruel;

and I will sing of that second realm,

where the human spirit is cleansed

6and becomes worthy of ascending to heaven.

In the final line of Inferno Dante and Virgil had emerged from below ground onto the shore of purgatory, a riveder le stelle (“to see the stars again”). Now Dante takes in the details of this new landscape. First, the intense deep blue of the pre-dawn sky. The colour lifts his spirits. We are back in the natural world, and its beauty is a cause for joy.

Dolce color d’orïental zaffiro,che s’accoglieva nel sereno aspetto

15del mezzo, puro infino al primo giro,

a li occhi miei ricominciò diletto,tosto ch’io usci’ fuor de l’aura morta

18che m’avea contristati li occhi e ’l petto.

Sweet colour of oriental sapphire,

which grew deeper in the cloudless aspect

15of the air, pure as far as the horizon,

renewed delight to my eyes,

as soon as I came forth from the dead air

18which had afflicted my eyes and breast.

The heavenly bodies in the southern sky are another source of delight. The planet Venus is shining in the east, her brightness casting a veil over the sign of Pisces, the Fish. Turning to the south, Dante sees four stars never seen since the time of the first people. The first people are Adam and Eve: thus we learn that the Garden of Eden is situated in this southern hemisphere. (We will find it at the top of the mountain.)

Lo bel pianeto che d’amar confortafaceva tutto rider l’orïente,

21velando i Pesci ch’erano in sua scorta.

I’ mi volsi a man destra, e puosi mentea l’altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle

24non viste mai fuor ch’a la prima gente.

Goder pareva ’l ciel di lor fiammelle:oh settentrïonal vedovo sito,

27poi che privato se’ di mirar quelle!

The beautiful planet which moves us to love*

made the whole of the eastern sky smile,

21outdazzling the Fishes which accompanied her.**

* Venus

** i.e. the planet Venus lit up the eastern sky so brightly that the constellation of Pisces with which she was in conjunction was hard to make out

I turned to the right, and gazed

at the other pole, and I saw four stars

24which had never been seen except by the first people.

The sky seemed to rejoice with their lights:

oh widowed northern region,

27denied the sight of those stars!

The verbs that describe the heavenly bodies are emotionally charged: ridere (“to smile”), godere (“to enjoy”). Venus is not just shining, it is making the whole of the eastern horizon smile. The sky seems to rejoice in the light of the heavenly bodies it carries. The landscape is infused with positive emotions: Dante feels joy gazing at it. The new setting, and the traveller’s emotional response to it, are inseparable.

Dante turns to find a venerable figure standing beside him, an old man with a long white beard, and hair falling on his chest in two strands. His face is radiant in the reflected light of the four stars. This is the guardian of purgatory, who is taken aback to find these travellers on the seashore. The unorthodox route they have taken, emerging from underground, contravenes all normal purgatorial procedures. He asks a series of urgent questions that reflect his bewilderment: Who are you who have escaped the eternal prison? Who acted as your guide? and, with mounting incredulity: Son le leggi d’abisso così rotte? (“Are the laws of the abyss so broken?”) Or is there a new decree in heaven which allows damned souls to come to purgatory?

Virgil urges Dante to kneel and bow his head in reverence. He explains the circumstances of their journey, providing a succinct résumé of the action so far. A key tercet reminds us, in case we have lost sight of it, of the extremity of Dante’s plight at the point where Virgil came to his aid:

Questi non vide mai l’ultima sera;ma per la sua follia le fu sì presso,

60che molto poco tempo a volger era.

This man never saw his final evening;

but through his folly he was so close to it

60that very little time was left to run.

The word follia is a resonant reminder both of Dante’s anxious self-questioning in Inferno 2 and of Ulysses’ folle volo (“mad flight”) in Inferno 26.

Virgil has recognised this venerable figure, and now asks him to welcome Dante to this new realm, appealing to him in the name of the search for liberty that is the goal of Dante’s journey. The thought-provoking statement is not elaborated on: What is the freedom that Dante is seeking? (The answer—freedom of the will—will emerge at a much later point in the story.) This old man had valued liberty so highly that he died for it. In this compressed, allusive way his identity is revealed. He is Cato of Utica, named for the place where he died, north of Carthage in Africa, the scene of Caesar’s definitive victory. Cato famously took his own life in the name of liberty, rather than submit to Caesar. He is never named here in purgatory.

Or ti piaccia gradir la sua venuta:libertà va cercando, ch’è sì cara,

72come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta.

Tu ’l sai, ché non ti fu per lei amarain Utica la morte, ove lasciasti

75la vesta ch’al gran dì sarà sì chiara.

May it now please you to welcome his coming:

he goes in search of liberty, which is so precious,

72as one who gives up his life for it well knows.

You know it, because for you death in its name

was not bitter in Utica, where you left

75the raiment that will shine so brightly on the great day.

To find Cato here as the guardian of purgatory is shocking. It breaks all the rules. Cato was a pagan; virtuous pagans belong in limbo. He was a suicide; suicides are punished by eternal damnation. He was on the wrong side politically: in his opposition to Caesar, he obstructed the founding of the Roman Empire, which in Dante’s eyes was divinely ordained. Even more astonishingly, at the Last Judgment (the gran dì of l. 75), when his custodial role is complete and the realm of purgatory no longer exists, he is destined for paradise.

It is entirely characteristic of Dante that he offers no explanation for this extraordinary piece of casting. We are left to grapple with its implications with no authorial guidance whatsoever. In the ancient world, Cato was a byword for moral probity. But how does that relate to faith and salvation in a Christian universe?

Some aspects of Cato’s character will emerge as he interacts with Virgil, who now appeals to him in the name of his wife, Marcia, who is in limbo with the other virtuous pagans. But the attempt at ingratiation is ill-judged, and Cato rebukes Virgil for its inappropriateness. Earthly ties no longer count in this context, the old man sternly observes. It is enough that the journey is desired by a donna del ciel (Beatrice). There’s no need for flattery, he says bluntly: non c’è mestier lusinghe. This uncomfortable exchange is a first telling sign that Virgil is on less sure ground in this new Christian realm.

Cato gives Virgil instructions to go down to the water’s edge, to pluck a reed and tie it around Dante’s waist, and to wash the grime of hell from Dante’s face. The rising sun will show them the path they must follow to climb the mountain. He then vanishes as mysteriously as he had appeared. Dante and Virgil turn to face the shore. The first light of dawn reveals the shimmering surface of the sea.

L’alba vinceva l’ora mattutinache fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano

117conobbi il tremolar de la marina.

Dawn was defeating the last hour of night

which fled before it, so that in the distance

117I made out the shimmering of the sea.

Light conquering darkness. Darkness fleeing before the oncoming light. This is to be a recurring, powerful motif in these opening cantos. (The ora mattutina is not, as common sense might suggest, the “morning” hour: it is, liturgically, the last hour of night.)

When they reach the shore, Virgil enacts the cleansing ritual, following the instructions he has been given. He first wipes all traces of the grime of hell from Dante’s tear-stained cheeks.

Quando noi fummo là ’ve la rugiadapugna col sole, per essere in parte

123dove, ad orezza, poco si dirada,

ambo le mani in su l’erbetta spartesoavemente ’l mio maestro pose:

126ond’ io, che fui accorto di sua arte,

porsi ver’ lui le guance lacrimose;ivi mi fece tutto discoverto

129quel color che l’ inferno mi nascose.

When we came to where the dew

resists the sun—in a place where,

123because of the sea breeze, it evaporates more slowly—

my master gently placed

both his outspread hands on the grass;

126whereupon I, who understood what he intended,

offered him my tear-stained cheeks;

he fully revealed in them

129that colour which hell had concealed.

Then, as instructed, Virgil plucks a reed from the foreshore, and ties it around Dante’s waist. Miraculously, a new reed springs up in its place. The ritual is rich with spiritual implications of renewal and rebirth, yet it requires no commentary. The scene itself tells us everything we need to know.

Venimmo poi in sul lito diserto,che mai non vide navicar sue acque

132omo, che di tornar sia poscia esperto.

Quivi mi cinse sì com’ altrui piacque:oh maraviglia! ché qual elli scelse

135l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque

subitamente là onde l’avelse.

Then we came onto the deserted shore,

which never saw its waters sailed

132by any man who afterwards was able to return.

There he girded me, as it pleased another:

Oh wonder! for as he picked the lowly plant,

135another exactly like it sprang up

immediately where he had plucked it.

The landscape itself embodies the spiritual actions and qualities required of the protagonist: washing and purification (the dew), humility and resilience (the reeds that resist the buffetting of wind and water).

The canto concludes, just as it had started, with a sea voyage. The sea voyage of the opening lines was a metaphor for Dante’s writing of his poem, the little boat of his genius now setting out over better waters. The closing lines tell us that no man ever sailed these waters and returned to tell the tale—a clear allusion to the doomed voyage of Ulysses. The “mountain dark in the distance” that Ulysses and his men saw just before their boat sank was, we now understand, the mountain of purgatory. The closing rhyme sequence of the canto underscores the point: acque-piacque-rinacque echoes the sequence at the end of Ulysses’ account of his voyage in Inferno 26 (nacque-piacque-acque), with one small, but crucial, change. Rinacque instead of nacque: not just birth, but rebirth.

This beautiful canto is remarkable for many things: its descriptions of the pre-dawn sky and the heavenly bodies it carries; the sea-voyage theme which bookends it so perfectly; the thought-provoking notion of Dante’s journey through the afterlife as a quest for liberty; the questions raised by the choice of the pagan suicide Cato as guardian of this Christian realm. At its centre is the unexplained mystery of Cato’s presence.

The four stars whose light illuminates Cato’s face represent the four cardinal virtues. (By a happy coincidence those stars suggest to modern readers the constellation of the Southern Cross, though Dante could not have known of it.) The cardinal virtues are prudence (practical wisdom in the conduct of life), temperance (due measure in all things), fortitude (stoical acceptance of the trials life sends) and justice (giving to each his due). These virtues were celebrated in classical civilisation, by Aristotle and Cicero and many others. In the medieval world they stand alongside the theological virtues of faith, hope and love (caritas): these are specifically Christian virtues, by definition unknown to the pagans.

Ancient and medieval writers alike agree that, as supreme possessor of the four cardinal virtues, Cato is the living embodiment of virtue. Dante celebrated this reputation in other works (Convivio, Monarchia). But Cato’s presence here—a pagan guardian of a Christian realm—is deeply mysterious, and never explained. There is an irony in the fact that Cato questions whether laws have been broken by Dante’s journey when his own presence seems so clamorously to contravene the laws which govern the afterlife. His role is especially striking if we bear in mind the fate of the other great characters in the Roman drama of Caesar’s rise and fall. Caesar himself is in limbo, characterised only by the armour he wears and his fierce, hawk-like eyes, his occhi grifagni. Brutus and Cassius (Cato’s former allies and themselves suicides) are crushed in Satan’s maw, and were the last human beings we saw in hell.

It is striking that Dante the character does not react to Cato’s presence on the shore of purgatory. He must surely be as astounded as we are. But he says not a word throughout the canto. All the talking is done by Virgil, briskly informative in his lengthy exchange with Cato (though the mention of Marcia is ill-judged). All the emotions are Dante’s: his joyous elation at the beauty of the natural world (the stars in the night sky, the early dawn light that reveals the sea), the silent bewilderment he surely feels as he comes to terms with Cato’s presence, his vibrant expectation as the cleansing ritual is enacted, tempered with wonder at the reed which miraculously renews itself. A central experience of Dante the character in the canto, though unexamined, is—like that of the reader—confrontation with a mystery, the riddle of Cato’s presence as an embodiment of the mystery of God’s decrees, the impenetrability of God’s mysteries. Only Dante the author can explain Cato’s presence, but he has chosen not to do so.

It is now dawn. as night and day circle the earth opposite each other, key geographical locations on the earth’s surface give us our bearings here in the southern hemisphere. Purgatory is at the antipodes of Jerusalem; they are exactly 180 degrees apart. When the sun is setting in Jerusalem, as it now is, it is midnight over the river Ganges in India (and noon at Cadiz near the Straits of Gibraltar in Spain). Here in purgatory it is dawn, and Aurora’s cheeks glow white and crimson.

These reference points—Jerusalem, India, Spain—anchor Dante’s imagined otherworld to familiar locations in the known world of the northern hemisphere. The time of day in Italy—roughly midway between Spain to the west and Jerusalem to the east—will be three hours (45 degrees) behind Jerusalem and three hours ahead of Spain. With these geographical coordinates in mind, time references later in the poem, even when allusive, will be clear.

Fig. 3 the global clock

The majestic sense of night and day circling the terrestrial globe gives a new cosmic dimension to the landscape and the narrative. There is a sense of space and elevation as we gaze up at the pre-dawn sky. We have been restored to our natural world, far removed from the claustrophobia of hell. Dante’s is a geocentric universe. The earth is at its centre; the sun, stars and planets circle around it. He can now once again see the heavenly bodies, as we all do in our daily lives, though the perspective from which he is seeing them is changed.

The elaborate time reference introduces a dimension of purgatory that makes it quite different from hell. Hell is eternal; nothing there will ever change. In purgatory, time—marked out by the rising and setting of the sun and other heavenly bodies—is of the essence. There is a sense of urgency as souls work out their allotted penances on the terraces of the mountain, as staging posts on the way to heaven. The necessity of not wasting time will become an insistent theme.

As Dante and Virgil are standing on the seashore, a light comes speeding towards them across the water. Dante turns to ask Virgil what it is; when he turns back the light is larger and brighter. As he gazes he can make out something white to the sides of the light and below it. In a scene of cinematic power, the white patches as they draw nearer become wings. Virgil recognises that this is an angel—an angel boatman—ferrying a craft across the sea towards them. Disdaining human mechanisms, needing neither oars nor sails, the angel propels the boat he steers by the movement of his wings through the air. The closer he gets, the more dazzling the light that emanates from him. Virgil shouts to Dante to kneel.

The vessel the angel is ferrying skims the surface of the water. In it are seated more than a hundred spirits, who are singing in unison.

‘In exitu Isräel de Aegypto’cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce

48con quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto.

Poi fece il segno lor di santa croce;ond’ ei si gittar tutti in su la piaggia:

51ed el sen gì, come venne, veloce.

“In exitu Isräel de Aegypto,”*

they all sang together with one voice,

48along with all that follows in that psalm.

* “When Israel went out of Egypt”

Then he made the sign of the holy cross over them;

at that they all flung themselves onto the shore:

51and he went off, as speedily as he came.

The souls throw themselves onto the shore, and the angel boatman speeds off. These are saved souls. Though they still have the arduous climb up the mountain ahead of them, they are destined for paradise.

The song they are singing as they arrive, “In exitu Isräel de Aegypto,” is the exodus psalm, which celebrates the historical exodus of Moses and his people from Egypt in the time of Pharoah, as recounted in the Old Testament. In spiritual terms the exodus signifies deliverance from bondage (in historical terms, the bondage of slavery in Egypt; in Christian terms, the bondage of the flesh, of sin). In medieval funeral services this psalm was chanted as the body in its coffin was carried from the church to the graveyard, that is, as the soul of the deceased made its spiritual exodus into the afterlife. The souls sing in unison: a group activity reflecting harmony and solidarity, a communal endeavour.

The disembarked souls gaze around unsure of themselves, unfamiliar with their surroundings. The sun, now risen above the horizon and shooting forth its rays, has chased the constellation of Capricorn from the zenith. (The sun is in Aries; Capricorn is at 90 degrees from Aries, so is no longer at the highest point in the sky.) The metaphor of the hunter with his arrows is an image of energy and vitality and vibrant purpose. A little more than half an hour has passed since sunrise. It is now broad daylight.

La turba che rimase lì, selvaggiaparea del loco, rimirando intorno

54come colui che nove cose assaggia.

Da tutte parti saettava il giornolo sol, ch’avea con le saette conte

57di mezzo ’l ciel cacciato Capricorno,

quando la nova gente alzò la frontever’ noi, dicendo a noi: «Se voi sapete,

60mostratene la via di gire al monte».

The throng that remained there seemed

not to know the place, gazing around

54like people experiencing something new.

The sun, which with its expert arrows

had chased Capricorn from the zenith,

57was now shooting out daylight on all sides,

when the new arrivals raised their faces

towards us, saying to us: “If you know,

60show us the way to reach the mountain.”

The newcomers ask for directions. Virgil explains that he and Dante too are newcomers: noi siam peregrin come voi siete (“we are pilgrims just like you”). The theme of pilgrimage harks back to the opening line of the poem, and the notion of life as a journey (the cammin di nostra vita: Inferno 1, 1). Human life is a journey or pilgrimage towards the heavenly city, our heavenly home. The souls see that Dante is breathing and realise that he is still alive. They turn pale with astonishment, then press around him.

L’anime, che si fuor di me accorte,per lo spirare, ch’i’ era ancor vivo,

69maravigliando diventaro smorte.

The souls, who had realised

from my breathing that I was still alive,

69turned pale in wonder.

Astonishment or wonder is to be another key theme in this second realm of the afterlife.

One of the shades suddenly darts forward to embrace Dante, in such a spontaneous gesture of affection that Dante reciprocates and hugs him back, even though he does not yet know who this person is. But Dante cannot hug him back. His arms pass through the shade’s insubstantial shadow body. Dante tries to embrace him three times, but three times he fails.

Io vidi una di lor trarresi avanteper abbracciarmi con sì grande affetto,

78che mosse me a far lo somigliante.

Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi,

81e tante mi tornai con esse al petto.

I saw one of them move forward

to embrace me, with such great affection

78that he moved me to do the same thing.

Alas, empty shadows, except in appearance!

Three times I grasped my hands behind him,

81and three times they came back to my own breast.

Dante has borrowed this dramatic and disconcerting incident from Aeneid VI, 701–702, where Aeneas tries in vain to embrace the shade of his father Anchises. The souls’ astonishment at Dante’s breathing, the sign of a living man, is now matched by Dante’s astonishment as his arms pass right through the shade’s body. The insubstantiality of shadow bodies is not described but enacted—performed for us, if you will. The shade smiles, the first smile we have seen since limbo; and this is the first embrace in the poem. Dante has still not recognised the shade who embraces him so affectionately, but will recognise him by his voice when he speaks. This he now does, asking Dante to wait. In response Dante, who has recognised an old friend, asks him to stay a little and talk.

Di maraviglia, credo, mi dipinsi;per che l’ombra sorrise e si ritrasse,

84e io, seguendo lei, oltre mi pinsi.

Soavemente disse ch’io posasse;allor conobbi chi era, e pregai

87che, per parlarmi, un poco s’arrestasse.

I think my face was a picture of amazement;

at which the shade smiled and drew back,

84and I, following him, moved forward.

Gently he told me to stop;

then I knew who he was, and I asked

87that he should stay a little to speak with me.

There follows a delightfully natural exchange between two old friends who have not seen each other recently, and who run into each other in unexpected circumstances. The shade: How come you’re here? Dante, naming his friend: Casella, how come it’s taken you so long to get here?

Rispuosemi: «Così com’ io t’amainel mortal corpo, così t’amo sciolta:

90però m’arresto; ma tu perché vai?».

«Casella mio, per tornar altra voltalà dov’ io son, fo io questo vïaggio»,

93diss’ io; «ma a te com’ è tanta ora tolta?».

He replied: “Just as I loved you when I was

in my mortal body, so I love you now I’m free of it:

90and so I’ll stay; but why are you here?”

“My Casella,” I said, “I’m making this journey

to return another time to where I am now,

93but why has it taken you so long to get here?”

Why is Casella only now arriving on the shore of purgatory? He had died some time earlier. Why the delay?

Casella explains, for Dante’s benefit and ours, how people get to purgatory. The souls of the dead gather at a collection point, a kind of holding ground, at the mouth of the Tiber. They do not embark immediately. Some of them are held back; this is normal procedure, though the rules have been relaxed recently. Pope Boniface had proclaimed a Jubilee in early 1300, the first such Jubilee in church history. The Jubilee had relaxed certain conditions relating to purgatory and the penance of souls.

In the most natural way possible—a dialogue between friends, one satisfying the other’s curiosity—two key points have emerged: how souls reach purgatory, and the time frame of the poem (it is spring 1300). This is a neat example of exposition subsumed into dialogue and dramatic encounter.

The mood now changes. Dante asks his friend a favour, reflecting their old habits of companionship. Will Casella sing a song, just as he used to do, to raise Dante’s spirits after the rigours of the journey through hell?

E io: «Se nuova legge non ti togliememoria o uso a l’amoroso canto

108che mi solea quetar tutte mie doglie,

di ciò ti piaccia consolare alquantol’anima mia, che, con la sua persona

111venendo qui, è affannata tanto!».

And I said: “If the law of this new realm doesn’t prevent you

from remembering or performing love songs,

108which used to soothe all my sorrows,

may it please you by doing so to refresh

my soul, which, coming here together with

111my body, is so fatigued!”

Casella obliges. With perfect tact the song he chooses to sing is one of Dante’s own poems. Virgil, Dante and the other souls are rapt, absorbed in the performance, captivated by the sweetness of the singing.

‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’cominciò elli allor sì dolcemente,

114che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.

Lo mio maestro e io e quella gentech’eran con lui parevan sì contenti,

117come a nessun toccasse altro la mente.

“Love which speaks to me in my mind”

he then began so sweetly

114that the sweetness still resounds within me.

My master and I and those people

who were with him seemed so content,

117as though no other thought were on our minds.

Suddenly Cato reappears out of nowhere. He reproaches them harshly for their tardiness and lack of zeal. They have been too easily distracted from their purpose.

Noi eravam tutti fissi e attentia le sue note; ed ecco il veglio onesto

120gridando: «Che è ciò, spiriti lenti?

qual negligenza, quale stare è questo?Correte al monte a spogliarvi lo scoglio

123ch’esser non lascia a voi Dio manifesto».

We were all absorbed in and caught up

in his music; and here was the venerable old man,

120shouting: “What is this, laggard spirits?

what tardiness, what dawdling is this?

Hasten to the mountain to slough off the impurity

123that prevents you from seeing God.”

The shades scatter, like feeding doves surprised by something that alarms them. Virgil and Dante depart in equal haste: né la nostra partita fu men tosta (“nor was our departure any less speedy”).

In this moving recognition scene, two friends come upon each other in unlikely circumstances and immediately slip back into their old companionable ways. Their affectionate ease in each other’s company is touching. To our eyes, this is a harmless scene. But their behaviour is inappropriate here in purgatory, where spiritual striving, symbolised by climbing up the mountain, is paramount. Dante and Virgil, like the other newly arrived souls, are vulnerable to distraction, easily losing their sense of urgency and purpose.

The canto is structured around two songs: the exodus psalm, sung in unison by the arriving souls, and a poem of Dante’s—an earlier love lyric—sung by a solo performer to delight an audience. Both songs are quoted directly, each quotation exactly filling a line of verse. The contrast between the songs embodies the difference between a proper, focused sense of one’s spiritual goal and a too-easily-distracted willingness to be entertained.

This is not the only time Dante quotes himself. He will do so again on two later occasions. His self-citations are always revealing, and always bear on the theme of his own retrospective self-assessment as a younger poet. Here the poem Casella sings is a love poem, but the lady it celebrates is not a flesh-and-blood creature. Rather, it is Lady Philosophy, as Dante explained in the commentary on the poem he wrote in the Convivio. (But the commentary was written many years after the poem itself: not all readers have found this retrospective account of the lady’s identity persuasive.) In this new context even the celebration of a love of philosophy is not innocent. For all the seeming innocuousness of this pleasurable interlude, listening to the song is blame-worthy.

We know nothing of Casella apart from this episode, which suggests that he was a musician and accomplished performer, who set Dante’s poems to music. Almost all the early commentators say he was a Florentine, but the information they provide may well just be an extrapolation from this scene in purgatory.

The shades scatter and run towards the mountain. Dante draws close to Virgil, who is consumed with self-reproach at Cato’s remonstrances. The sun is still low in the sky. Dante’s body casts a shadow on the ground in front of him. In a moment of panic, seeing just one shadow, Dante thinks Virgil has abandoned him. But of course shades do not cast shadows, and Virgil is still at his side.

Lo sol, che dietro fiammeggiava roggio,rotto m’era dinanzi a la figura,

18ch’avëa in me de’ suoi raggi l’appoggio.

The sun, which was flaming red behind me,

was broken in front of me in the shape of my body,

18for in me it had an obstacle to its rays.

Io mi volsi dallato con paurad’ essere abbandonato, quand’ io vidi

21solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura;

I turned to my side, fearing

I had been abandoned, when I saw

21the shadow on the ground only in front of me;

Virgil urges Dante to trust in his guidance. He does not cast a shadow because the physical body he once had is buried in Naples, where it is now dusk. (If the sun has set in Jerusalem, then it is dusk in Italy.) How is it possible for incorporeal bodies to suffer the physical torments of the afterlife? Such mysteries are beyond human understanding. An exhortation to accept the limitations of human reason is followed by a plangent reminder of Virgil’s own exclusion from beatitude:

Matto è chi spera che nostra ragionepossa trascorrer la infinita via

36che tiene una sustanza in tre persone.

State contenti, umana gente, al quia;ché, se potuto aveste veder tutto,

39mestier non era parturir Maria;

Mad is he who hopes that our reason

can go down the infinite path

36taken by one substance in three persons.

Be content, humankind, with the quia;*

for had you been able to see everything,

39there was no need for Mary to give birth.

* the that, the fact that it is so

State contenti, umana gente, al quia: this exhortation has become proverbial among Italians. It is characteristically invoked by those coping with the more baffling requirements of the country’s bureaucracy.

Virgil reflects mournfully on the fate of the great thinkers of antiquity who were unable to veder tutto, to understand everything, and are therefore excluded from beatitude:

e disïar vedeste sanza fruttotai che sarebbe lor disio quetato,

42ch’etternalmente è dato lor per lutto:

io dico d’Aristotile e di Platoe di molt’ altri»; e qui chinò la fronte,

45e più non disse, e rimase turbato.

and you saw men desire in vain

—men whose desire would have been satisfied (had such a thing been possible)—

42their desire eternally a cause of sorrow to them;

I mean Aristotle and Plato

and many others”; and here he bowed his head,

45and said no more, and looked troubled.

A new group of souls arrives as Virgil and Dante are trying to work out the way up the mountain. Their hesitancy is beautifully caught in a sustained comparison with a flock of sheep leaving a pen: those at the back of the group rely on those in front of them to lead the way.

Come le pecorelle escon del chiusoa una, a due, a tre, e l’altre stanno

81timidette atterrando l’occhio e ’l muso;

e ciò che fa la prima, e l’altre fanno,addossandosi a lei, s’ella s’arresta,

84semplici e quete, e lo ’mperché non sanno;

As sheep come out of the fold,

in ones, in twos, in threes, and the others stand

81timid, their eyes and muzzle to the ground;

and what the first one does, the others do,

pressing close behind it, if it stops,

84simple and quiet, and they don’t know why;

Just so the shades move forward hesitantly:

sì vid’ io muovere a venir la testadi quella mandra fortunata allotta,

87pudica in faccia e ne l’andare onesta.

so I saw the ones at the front

of that fortunate flock move forward,

87their expressions modest, their bearing dignified.

Then those at the front of the group see the shadow Dante’s body casts on the ground and draw back. Those at the back do likewise, not even knowing why they do so.

Come color dinanzi vider rottala luce in terra dal mio destro canto,

90sì che l’ombra era da me a la grotta,

restaro, e trasser sé in dietro alquanto,e tutti li altri che venieno appresso,

93non sappiendo ’l perché, fenno altrettanto.

When the ones at the front saw

the light on the ground broken to my right side,

90so that my shadow stretched from me to the cliff face,

they stopped, and drew back a little,

and all those who were coming behind them

93did the same, not knowing why.

One of the souls addresses Dante:

E un di loro incominciò: «Chiunquetu se’, così andando, volgi ’l viso:

105pon mente se di là mi vedesti unque».

And one of them began: “Whoever

you are, as you walk along, turn to look at me;

105think if you ever saw me on earth.”

Dante turns towards him and looks closely. The man is fair-haired and strikingly good-looking, though one eyebrow is disfigured by a scar. But Dante does not recognise him.

Io mi volsi ver’ lui e guardail fiso:biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto,

108ma l’un de’ cigh un colpo avea diviso.

Quand’ io mi fui umilmente disdettod’averlo visto mai, el disse: «Or vedi»;

111e mostrommi una piaga a sommo ’l petto.

I turned towards him and looked steadily at him;

he was fair-haired and handsome and noble looking,

108but a blow had split one of his eyebrows.

When I had respectfully declared

that I had never seen him, he said: “Now look,”

111and showed me a wound high on his chest.

Then, smiling in spite of his wounds, the shade launches into his story. It will occupy the remainder of the canto. The gesture of displaying the wound on his chest, which echoes the gesture of Christ to doubting Thomas after the resurrection, as it is recounted in the Gospels, invites us to recognise that this speaker is in some sense a figura Christi, a figure of Christ.

The speaker is Manfred, grandson of the Empress Constance of Sicily, and father of another Constance, the daughter who produced kings of Aragon and Sicily.

Poi sorridendo disse: «Io son Manfredi,nepote di Costanza imperadrice;

114ond’ io ti priego che, quando tu riedi,

vadi a mia bella figlia, genitricede l’onor di Cicilia e d’Aragona,

117e dichi ’l vero a lei, s’altro si dice.

Then smiling he said: “I am Manfred,

grandson of the empress Constance;

114and so I beg you, when you return,

go to my fair daughter, mother

of the honour of Sicily and of Aragon,

117and tell her the truth, if people are saying otherwise.

Manfred does not identify himself, as we might have expected him to do, as the son of a famous father. That father—one of the most famous men of his time—was the emperor Frederick II, named as a heretic in a throwaway line at the end of Inferno 10. It is as though John F. Kennedy Jr. had identified himself not as President Kennedy’s son, but as the grandson of a Boston society matron and the brother of her beautiful granddaughter Caroline. Although the story which now unfolds is a key episode in the struggle between empire and papacy in the second half of the thirteenth century, involving figures on the world stage, at its heart is a matter of personal conscience, the relationship between an individual sinner and his maker.

Manfred tells the story of his death, and of how, at the moment of dying, he repented of his terrible sins. In lines of sublime simplicity he explains what happened after receiving his two mortal wounds on the battlefield.

Poscia ch’io ebbi rotta la personadi due punte mortali, io mi rendei,

120piangendo, a quei che volontier perdona.

Orribil furon li peccati miei;ma la bontà infinita ha sì gran braccia,

123che prende ciò che si rivolge a lei.

After I had broken my body

with two mortal wounds, I gave myself up,

120weeping, to him who willingly pardons.

My sins were horrible;

but infinite goodness has such wide arms

123that it takes what turns to it.

These simple but powerful lines enunciate a fundamental principle. God’s mercy is infinite. Whoever genuinely repents, even at the moment of death, and no matter how grave the sins, will be forgiven and saved.

Just how horrible were Manfred’s sins? Contemporary critics (fuelled by papal propaganda) accused him of heinous crimes. He was said to be dissolute in his private life, caring only for worldly pleasures; a heretic; a usurper; a murderer (of his brother, of various nephews, even of his father) in his pursuit of power. A sinner on a superhuman scale. And yet he is saved.

Manfred had been excommunicated by the pope, whose implacable enmity continued even after his death. That enmity was acted out in a last vengeful blow against a fallen foe. The story emerges in the bitter lines which now describe the desecration of Manfred’s grave on the field of battle where he died.

He had been buried on the battlefield where he fell. His grave was marked by a cairn of stones, each stone added by a soldier honouring his valour and leadership. Contemporary chroniclers tell us that he had acquitted himself with great bravery, though he does not say that himself. If the bishop of Cosenza, and Pope Clement, who urged him on, had had a true understanding of contrition and repentance, they would have left his burial place undisturbed. Instead, they disinterred his bones and scattered them outside the kingdom—the kingdom of Sicily, whose boundary with the papal state was marked by the river Verde. In death Manfred’s mortal remains are vengefully removed from the kingdom he had gained in life at the church’s expense. His bones were carried a lume spento, with candles extinguished and upside down, as the marker of his excommunicated status. (This poignant phrase had an afterlife as the title for a small volume of poems by Ezra Pound.)

Se ’l pastor di Cosenza, che a la cacciadi me fu messo per Clemente allora,

126avesse in Dio ben letta questa faccia,

l’ossa del corpo mio sarieno ancorain co del ponte presso a Benevento,

129sotto la guardia de la grave mora.

Or le bagna la pioggia e move il ventodi fuor dal regno, quasi lungo ’l Verde,

132dov’ e’ le trasmutò a lume spento.

If the bishop of Cosenza, who was then

sent by Clement to hunt me down,

126had read this face of God aright,

the bones of my body would still be buried

at the end of the bridge near Benevento,

129under the guardianship of the heavy cairn.

Now the rain wets them and the wind stirs them

outside the kingdom, almost along the Verde,

132where he transported them with tapers extinguished.

But no earthly condemnation, even by the highest religious authority, can undo an act of genuine repentance, even if that repentance takes place only at the last moment of a person’s life, and in the privacy of his conscience.

Per lor maladizion sì non si perde,che non possa tornar, l’etterno amore,

135mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.

By their curse no one so loses

eternal love that it cannot be regained,

135as long as hope has any hint of green.

The words are a flagrant challenge to the pope’s supreme authority. Excommunication is not the ultimate penalty the pope would have people believe.

The excommunicated who die a good death, making their peace with God in their final moments, are saved. But they do have an additional penance to undergo in purgatory. They must wait longer than other souls to begin climbing the mountain—thirty times longer than the period of their excommunication. The only way of shortening this waiting time is if a living person in a state of grace prays for them.

Vero è che quale in contumacia moredi Santa Chiesa, ancor ch’al fin si penta,

138star li convien da questa ripa in fore,

per ognun tempo ch’elli è stato, trenta,in sua presunzion, se tal decreto

141più corto per buon prieghi non diventa.

It is true that whoever dies in contumacy

of Holy Church, even if he repents at the end,

138must remain outside this wall

thirty times as long as he spent

in his presumption, unless that sentence

141is made shorter by good prayers.

Manfred asks Dante to tell his daughter Constance that her prayers will shorten her father’s punishment in the afterlife.

Vedi oggimai se tu mi puoi far lieto,revelando a la mia buona Costanza

144come m’hai visto, e anco esto divieto;

Now see if you can make me happy,

revealing to my good Constance

144how you have seen me, and this exclusion too;

The canto closes with a line which encapsulates this principle of effective intervention by the living in the fate of those who are dead:

ché qui per quei di là molto s’ avanza».

for those on earth can help us greatly here.”

This moving episode has given us two more rules of purgatory. The first is that the excommunicated are delayed for a period thirty times as long as their state of excommunication lasted. The whole of this first section of purgatory—conventionally called ante-purgatory—is based on the idea that for certain categories of sinner there is an enforced delay before they can start the process of purgation. Before Dante gets to the door of purgatory proper, which he reaches only in the ninth canto, he will encounter three other groups waiting on the lower slopes.

The second rule we learn here is that the prayers of the living can help the dead in the afterlife. This will prove to be a constant pretext for interaction between Dante and the shades he meets. Unlike the souls in hell, who mostly craved oblivion, the souls in purgatory are always eager that news of their fate should be carried back to those on earth. The prayers of family and friends can directly affect the fate in the afterlife of those they pray for.

Purgatorio 4 is a low-key canto, sandwiched between the two dramatic cantos that precede it and two equally dramatic cantos that follow. In it Dante runs into an old friend. This friend, overhearing the poet engaged in earnest conversation with Virgil about the position of the sun in the sky, comments drily on his eagerness to understand, and gently teases him for being such a keen student. This snippet of affectionate banter strikes an entirely new note in the poem.

But first there is an arduous climb, taxing because of the steepness and narrowness of the path upwards through the rock, and exhausting for Dante because of his physical body. When the travellers reach the open slope above, they stop for a rest. Virgil, seeing Dante puzzled by the position of the sun, gives a lengthy explanation about the earthly globe, and the relative positions of Jerusalem and purgatory, pointing out that to an observer in the southern hemisphere the sun will necessarily appear to his north. The geographical and astronomical coordinates set out at the beginning of canto 3 are mentioned again, their significance reinforced. Dante, keen to demonstrate that he has grasped the point, confidently adds a corollary about the equator. He then asks how much further they will have to travel, since the mountain is so immensely high that he cannot see its top.

A voice close by comments drily: “Perhaps you’ll need to sit down before you get there.” Dante and Virgil turn and see a large boulder. There are souls lounging languidly in its shadow, one of them clasping his knees with his head bent down. Dante points him out to Virgil: he looks like indolence personified. The shade comments laconically: “You go on up then, if you’re so energetic.” Dante now recognises him; the soul makes yet another teasing comment: “Are you quite sure you got that point about the sun being on your left?”

This is Belaqua, a Florentine friend and neighbour of Dante’s. Dante is delighted to find him here among the saved. When he asks why Belaqua and his companions are sitting, another law of the second realm is explained. Because they put off turning to God until the end of their lives, they are not allowed to enter purgatory proper until they have spent time here in ante-purgatory equal to the length of those lives. There is no point in hurrying, for they will be turned away by the angel who guards the gate, unless the prayers of the living speed up the process for them. In a neat closing touch that reinforces the geography lesson, Virgil points out that the sun has now reached the meridian (the highest point in the sky)—that is, it is midday—and it has therefore just set in Morocco.

Readers who find this canto dull compared with the drama and passions that surround it should bear in mind that Dante’s contemporaries had no knowledge of the southern hemisphere, and no knowledge of Dante’s imagined otherworld—no maps or diagrams of the kind we can so easily consult. They were reliant on information built into the narrative itself to get their bearings in the antipodes. Dante has done a fine job of giving them the information they need. This crucial piece of exposition enables readers to engage imaginatively with a geographical reality of which they had no direct knowledge. It occurs in an episode which reveals an unexpectedly human side to a poet usually thought of as embodying uncompromising sternness. Here he shows himself as the butt of affectionate teasing. An unlikely fan of this canto was Samuel Beckett, who seems to have been obsessed with Belaqua and his indolence.

Dante’s shadow again attracts the attention of a group of souls, who gaze at him in wonderment. Virgil reprimands him for allowing himself to be distracted:

Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti:sta come torre ferma, che non crolla

15già mai la cima per soffiar di venti;

Follow me, and let people talk:

stand like a sturdy tower whose top never shakes,

15no matter how the winds blow;

Dante is mortified. Meanwhile a new group of souls approaches; they too are struck by Dante’s shadow, and send two messengers forward to ask about his state. Virgil confirms that Dante is indeed a living man. The whole group presses forward, clamouring, and Virgil urges Dante to continue walking as they talk to him.

Guarda s’alcun di noi unqua vedesti,sì che di lui di là novella porti:

51deh, perché vai? deh, perché non t’arresti?

Look if you ever saw any of us on earth,

so that you can carry news of him back to the world:

51why do you go on? why don’t you stop?

All these souls came to violent ends. They made their peace with God only at the eleventh hour, on the point of death.

Noi fummo tutti già per forza morti,e peccatori infino a l’ultima ora;

54quivi lume del ciel ne fece accorti,

sì che, pentendo e perdonando, foradi vita uscimmo a Dio pacificati,

57che del disio di sé veder n’accora».

We all died violent deaths,

and we were sinners until the last hour;

54at that moment a light from heaven made us aware,

so that, repenting and forgiving, we departed

from life having made our peace with God,

57who consumes us with the desire to see him.

Dante recognises no one, but says he will do what he can to satisfy their desires. Three spirits now speak in rapid succession, telling their stories, and hoping that when Dante returns to the world of the living he will ensure that prayers are said on their behalf.

The first shade tells the story of his sudden, violent death. The story plays out against a background of political intrigue. He was born in the Marche, the region between Romagna to the north and the kingdom of Naples to the south. If Dante ever visits Fano, his birthplace, will he please ask people there to pray on his behalf?

Quindi fu’ io; ma li profondi fóriond’ uscì ’l sangue in sul quale io sedea,

75fatti mi fuoro in grembo a li Antenori,

là dov’ io più sicuro esser credea:quel da Esti il fé far, che m’avea in ira

78assai più là che dritto non volea.

I was from there; but the deep wounds

from which my lifeblood flowed

75were inflicted on me in Paduan territory,

where I thought myself safest:

that man from Este had it done; he was far

78angrier with me than justice warranted.

He was betrayed in a region where he had believed himself to be safe. The marquis of Este was responsible for his death. We still do not know who the speaker is.

He made a crucial miscalculation. If he had taken another route, he would still be alive. As it was, he fled to the marshland, where he fell among the reeds and watched as the lifeblood flowed from his veins.

Ma s’io fosse fuggito inver’ la Mira,quando fu’ sovragiunto ad Orïaco,

81ancor sarei di là dove si spira.

Corsi al palude, e le cannucce e ’l bracom’impigliar sì ch’i’ caddi; e lì vid’ io

84de le mie vene farsi in terra laco».

But if I had fled towards Mira,

when I was overtaken at Oriago,

81I would still be in the land of the living.

I ran to the marshland, and the reeds and the mud

entangled me so that I fell; and there I saw a pool

84form on the ground out of my veins.

The image of the pool of blood forming on the ground as his life ebbs away is all the more haunting because the word “blood” is not used. We never learn the speaker’s identity. He is Jacopo del Cassero. The circumstances of his betrayal and murder were so well known that Dante could count on his readers identifying him.

With no pause or comment on this story, a second shade makes the same plea to be remembered back on earth, noting mournfully that no relatives pray on his behalf or show any concern for his fate.

Poi disse un altro: «Deh, se quel disiosi compia che ti tragge a l’alto monte,

87con buona pïetate aiuta il mio!

Io fui di Montefeltro, io son Bonconte;Giovanna o altri non ha di me cura;

90per ch’io vo tra costor con bassa fronte».

Then another said: “Ah, may the desire

that draws you to the mountain height be fulfilled;

87help my desire with your compassion.

I was from Montefeltro, I am Bonconte;

Giovanna and others have no thought for me;

90and so I walk among these people with eyes downcast.”

Bonconte was the son of Guido da Montefeltro, the great warlord from the Romagna whom we met among the counsellors of fraud in hell. The contrast between their fates is arresting. Dante has a question for Bonconte: What became of him after the Battle of Campaldino? Dante had done military service in that decisive battle between the Florentine Guelfs and the Ghibellines of Arezzo in 1289. Bonconte was the leader of the Ghibelline forces; after the battle his body had never been found.

E io a lui: «Qual forza o qual venturati travïò sì fuor di Campaldino,

93che non si seppe mai tua sepultura?».

And I said to him: “What force or what chance

carried you off so far from Campaldino,

93that your burial place was never known?”

Bonconte’s account of his violent end in battle is dramatic. Once again we have wounds, flight, blood. In the Casentino region, near where the Archiano, a tributary of the Arno, flows into the main river, he fled on foot, already wounded and bleeding.

«Oh!», rispuos’ elli, «a piè del Casentinotraversa un’acqua c’ha nome l’Archiano,

96che sovra l’Ermo nasce in Apennino.

“Oh,” he replied, “at the foot of the Casentino

there runs a stream that is called the Archiano,

96whose source is in the Apennines, above the Hermitage.

Là ’ve ’l vocabol suo diventa vano,arriva’ io forato ne la gola,

99fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano.

I reached the point where its name is no longer needed,*

pierced through the throat,

99fleeing on foot and bloodying the plain.

* i.e. where it flows into the Arno

But he died with the name of the Virgin Mary on his lips, and that last moment of turning to God determined his fate in the afterlife. Dante must tell the story to the living: an angel came to take his soul; the devil who had been deprived of it spitefully wreaked his revenge on the lifeless body. (Exactly the opposite had happened to his father, we remember. The angel who had come for the soul of Guido da Montefeltro when he died, after his embrace of the religious life in old age, was thwarted by a devil who carried it off, taunting him by citing the Aristotelian logical rule of non-contradiction: it is not possible to will something and repent of it simultaneously. The pope’s promise of absolution in advance for the sin he was asking him to commit was worthless.)

Quivi perdei la vista e la parola;nel nome di Maria fini’, e quivi

102caddi, e rimase la mia carne sola.

Io dirò vero, e tu ’l ridì tra ’ vivi:l’angel di Dio mi prese, e quel d’inferno

105gridava: ‘O tu del ciel, perché mi privi?

Tu te ne porti di costui l’etternoper una lagrimetta che ’l mi toglie;

108ma io farò de l’altro altro governo!’.

There I lost the power to see and to speak;

I died saying the name of Mary, and there

102I fell, and my body alone remained.

I’ll tell you the truth, and you retell it among the living:

the angel of God took me, and the one from hell

105shouted: ‘O you from heaven, why are you depriving me?

You are carrying off the eternal part of him*

because of a tear that robs me of him;

108but I’ll treat the other part** in a different fashion!’

* his soul

** his body

The storm gathering over the battlefield is intensified by the ill will and spite of the thwarted devil.

Ben sai come ne l’aere si raccogliequell’ umido vapor che in acqua riede,

111tosto che sale dove ’l freddo il coglie.

Giunse quel mal voler che pur mal chiedecon lo ’ntelletto, e mosse il fummo e ’l vento

114per la virtù che sua natura diede.

You well know how the humid vapour

that turns into rain condenses in the air,

111as soon as it rises to where the cold takes hold of it.

That evil will that always seeks evil joined itself

to intellect, and drove the smoke and the wind

114by the power that its nature gave it.

The devil summons up a wild storm, its raging described with virtuoso brilliance in Dante’s lines. Torrential rain pours down and fills the streams and ditches; the water flows with unstoppable force into the rivers and tributaries, and then into the main river.

Indi la valle, come ’l dì fu spento,da Pratomagno al gran giogo coperse

117di nebbia; e ’l ciel di sopra fece intento,

sì che ’l pregno aere in acqua si converse;la pioggia cadde, e a’ fossati venne

120di lei ciò che la terra non sofferse;

e come ai rivi grandi si convenne,ver’ lo fiume real tanto veloce

123si ruinò, che nulla la ritenne.

Then, when the day had died, it covered

the valley from Pratomagno to the great ridge

117with fog; and it made the sky above saturated,

so that the air dense with vapour turned to water;

the rain fell, and what the earth

120could not absorb came to the gullies;

and when it flowed into the swollen streams,

it poured headlong down towards the main river

123with such force that nothing held it back.

The raging waters of the Archiano, swollen with rain, carry Bonconte’s body into the Arno. There the cross he made of his arms as he died is undone; his body is turned over and over in the waters; finally it is covered with debris and detritus. His body was never found.

Lo corpo mio gelato in su la focetrovò l’Archian rubesto; e quel sospinse

126ne l’Arno, e sciolse al mio petto la croce

ch’i’ fe’ di me quando ’l dolor mi vinse;voltòmmi per le ripe e per lo fondo,

129poi di sua preda mi coperse e cinse».

The raging Archiano found my frozen body

at its mouth; and it pushed it into the Arno,

126and unloosed on my breast the cross

that I made with my arms when pain overcame me;

it turned me over and over along the banks and the river bottom,

129then it covered me and enclosed me with its spoils.”

No sooner does the second speaker finish his story than a third breaks in. This one is a woman, Pia de’ Tolomei; her brief, unforgettable lines tell a story of a violent death of a very different kind. No dangerous enemy, no hostile terrain, no raging elemental forces; no wounds, no life blood draining from a dying body. Pia’s story seems almost disembodied. It is the story of a dynastic marriage gone wrong, of a husband who disposed of a wife he no longer wanted. We do not know how he did so; she does not tell us. The delicacy and reticence with which she alludes to her death leaves nothing in doubt about her husband’s responsibility for it, but draws a veil over exactly what happened. Contemporary sources suggest she was defenestrated from a high window onto rocks far below the castle walls.

«Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,e riposato de la lunga via»,

132seguitò ’l terzo spirito al secondo,

«ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma:

135salsi colui che ’nnanellata pria

disposando m’avea con la sua gemma».

“Ah, when you have returned to the world,

and rested from the long journey,”

132the third spirit followed on from the second,

“remember me: I am Pia;

Siena made me, Maremma unmade me:*

135he knows it who earlier, marrying me,

* i.e. I was born in Siena, I died in Maremma

had given me a ring with his gemstone.”

Not surprisingly, this is one of the most famous episodes in Purgatorio, its exquisite tact and delicacy all the more striking in contrast to the urgent and bloody physicality of the first two speakers. T. S. Eliot echoes it in The Waste Land when he says: “Highbury bore me; Richmond and Kew undid me.”

Dante pushes his way through the thronging souls, like the winner at a game of dice who is surrounded by onlookers pressing forward in the hope that they might share his winnings. He promises to do what he can for many of them. But he is puzzled by the notion that the prayers of the living can influence the fate of the dead. One of Virgil’s own texts seems to say precisely the opposite: “Banish the thought that praying can ever affect / the edicts of gods” (Aeneid VI, 376: Seamus Heaney’s translation). Virgil reassures him that there is no contradiction between his words and the reality of effective intercession. Beatrice will explain further at the top of the mountain. At the mention of her name, Dante is eager to move faster, but Virgil explains that they will not complete the journey up the mountain in a single day.

Now at last free of the throng, they catch sight of a solitary figure who might be able to give them directions. He stands alone, watchful and motionless, disdainful and proud as a lion couchant.

Venimmo a lei: o anima lombarda,come ti stavi altera e disdegnosa

63e nel mover de li occhi onesta e tarda!

Ella non ci dicëa alcuna cosa,ma lasciavane gir, solo sguardando

66a guisa di leon quando si posa.

We came to him: O Lombard soul,

how haughty and disdainful was your bearing,

63and how dignified and calm the movement of your eyes.

The soul said nothing to us,

but was letting us go by, just watching,

66like a lion when it is resting.

Virgil asks the way up the mountain, but the shade counters with a question of his own: Who are they, and where are they from? Virgil barely gets out the name of his birthplace, Mantua, when the shade leaps up and rushes towards him, embracing him, and saying: I’m Sordello, I’m from Mantua!

Pur Virgilio si trasse a lei, pregandoche ne mostrasse la miglior salita;

69e quella non rispuose al suo dimando,

ma di nostro paese e de la vitaci ’nchiese; e ’l dolce duca incominciava

72«Mantüa . . . », e l’ombra, tutta in sé romita,

surse ver’ lui del loco ove pria stava,dicendo: «O Mantoano, io son Sordello

75de la tua terra!»; e l’un l’altro abbracciava.

Yet Virgil approached him, asking him

to show us the best way up the mountain;

69and the shade didn’t answer the question,

but asked us about our country and our life;

and my gentle guide began “Mantua . . . ”

72and the shade, all withdrawn into himself,

rose up towards him from the place where he’d been,

saying, “O Mantuan, I’m Sordello

75from your city”; and they embraced one another.

A spontaneous embrace, sparked not by friendship or recognition but by the simple fact of being born in the same place. Sordello, a vernacular poet of an earlier generation who wrote in Provençal, as yet knows nothing of the man he embraces, apart from his birthplace. Just learning that he is from Mantua prompts his delighted response. This gesture of affectionate solidarity between two people who discover they come from the same town marks a sharp break in the narrative. Half a canto will pass before the narrative resumes.

The second half of canto 6, unprecedented in the poem, is a sustained invective against the degenerate state of contemporary Italy. It is not Dante the character who launches into this tirade, but Dante the poet. Where Inferno 6 bewailed the state of Florence, in a tense dialogue between Dante and a sinner, here the poet speaks in his own name, and his subject is the state of the whole country. He first addresses Italy directly:

Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello,nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta,

78non donna di province, ma bordello!

Ah, Italy enslaved, abode of suffering,

ship without pilot in a raging storm,

78not a mistress of provinces, but a whore!

Just the name of his birthplace was enough to prompt Sordello’s response. But now there is nowhere in Italy that is at peace, and within the walls of a single city fellow citizens tear each other apart.

Quell’ anima gentil fu così presta,sol per lo dolce suon de la sua terra,

81di fare al cittadin suo quivi festa;

e ora in te non stanno sanza guerrali vivi tuoi, e l’un l’altro si rode

84di quei ch’un muro e una fossa serra.

That noble soul was so ready,

just hearing the sweet name of his birthplace,

81to make his fellow citizen welcome there;

and now within your borders your inhabitants

are never free of war, and those enclosed

84by one city wall and one moat gnaw away at each other.

No part of Italy is at peace. The intimate second-person address is pained and incredulous as Dante challenges the country to deny his charges.

Cerca, misera, intorno da le prodele the marine, e poi ti guarda in seno,

87s’alcuna parte in te di pace gode.

Look, wretched one, at your coastal regions,

and then turn your gaze inland,

87does any part of you enjoy peace?

The tercet evokes the geography of the whole peninsula: the coastal regions include the thriving naval and mercantile cities of Genoa, Venice, Naples, Amalfi; inland (in seno) lie the cities of Florence, Milan, Bologna, Rome. None of them is at peace. No one imposes the rule of law. Though the emperor Justinian had set out the legal code more than seven hundred years earlier, revising and updating the corpus of Roman law, no one enforces it. Italy is a horse that has a bit and bridle, but no rider to use them effectively. The situation would be less shameful had there been no codification of Roman law designed to guarantee peace and stability.

Che val perché ti racconciasse il frenoIustinïano, se la sella è vòta?

90Sanz’ esso fora la vergogna meno.

What does it avail that Justinian

fitted the bridle, if the saddle is empty?

90Without that bridle,* there would be less shame.

* i.e. if there were no legal code

Now Dante turns to men of the church. They should allow the emperor to control the horse, which has become wild and wicked because clerics do not use the spurs. The horse is out of control because it lacks a strong and capable rider. The struggle between empire and papacy, the broader political reality which underlies the dire state of the country, is made memorably physical in the image of the uncontrollable horse.

Ahi gente che dovresti esser devota,e lasciar seder Cesare in la sella,

93se bene intendi ciò che Dio ti nota,

guarda come esta fiera è fatta fellaper non esser corretta da li sproni,

96poi che ponesti mano a la predella.

Alas, you people who should be devout,*

and allow Caesar** to sit in the saddle,

93if you truly understand what God tells you,

* men of the church

** the emperor

look how this beast has become vicious,

from not being guided by the spurs,

96ever since you took the reins into your hands.

For the emperor to have abandoned Italy is a dereliction of his duty. May his heirs be punished for it, and may his fate strike fear into the heart of his successor. The emperor in question is the Holy Roman Emperor Albert of Germany, who neglects his responsibilities in Italy and has allowed the country to become ungovernable.

O Alberto tedesco ch’abbandonicostei ch’è fatta indomita e selvaggia,

99e dovresti inforcar li suoi arcioni,

giusto giudicio da le stelle caggiasovra ’l tuo sangue, e sia novo e aperto,

102tal che ’l tuo successor temenza n’aggia!

O German Albert, you who abandon

the beast that has become untamed and wild,

99when you should be mounted astride the saddle,

may a just judgment fall from heaven

on your bloodline, and may it be unprecedented and clear,

102such that it may strike fear into your successor!

It is greed which accounts for the emperor’s dereliction of duty. He is too occupied with his lucrative interests in Germany to have any thought for the fate of Italy, in reality the choicest part of his empire.

Ch’avete tu e ’l tuo padre sofferto,per cupidigia di costà distretti,

105che ’l giardin de lo ’mperio sia diserto.

For you and your father, by your greed

embroiled in your affairs up there, have allowed

105the garden of the empire to become a wasteland.

Let Albert come and witness with his own eyes the damage caused in Italy by his failure to act. Four powerful tercets begin with the same injunction: Vieni a veder (“Come and see”). The repetition orchestrates a crescendo of mounting outrage. The panorama of a country torn apart by internecine warfare unfolds before our eyes.

Vieni a veder Montecchi e Cappelletti,Monaldi e Filippeschi, uom sanza cura:

108color già tristi, e questi con sospetti!

Come and see the Montecchi and the Cappelletti,

the Monaldi and the Filippeschi, you who do not care:

108the former already gloomy, the latter fearful.

The family names evoke concrete, local Ghibelline and Guelf rivalries in the Italian cities. The Montagues of Verona were at war with the Capulets of Cremona; the Monaldi and Filippeschi fought for control of Orvieto. The defeated Ghibelline families, the first in each pair, are gloomy; the victorious Guelf families, temporarily in control, are fearful because well aware of the precariousness of their state.

Cura, “care”: the word, first used as a noun, is now repeated as a verb, as the emperor is urged to come and see with his own eyes the damage his indifference has caused.

Vien, crudel, vieni, e vedi la pressurad’i tuoi gentili, e cura lor magagne;

111e vedrai Santafior com’ è oscura!

Come, cruel one, come, and see the oppression

of your nobles, and care for their misfortunes;

111and you will see how dark is Santafiora!

The emperor’s indifference to the fate of Italy and its past glories is evoked in another emblematic name. Santafiora, in southern Tuscany between Siena and Rome, close to Monte Amiata, was once one of the most powerful and flourishing feudal counties in the land, ruled by the great Aldobrandeschi family. Now it has lost much of its territory and prestige, its previous splendour darkened by depredations from Siena. We are moving steadily from north to south; we now reach Rome.

Rome is widowed, and calls for her master, the emperor. The widowed city that weeps is a powerful and highly charged biblical image, echoing the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament, where he is speaking of Jerusalem.

Vieni a veder la tua Roma che piagnevedova e sola, e dì e notte chiama:

114«Cesare mio, perché non m’accompagne?».

Vieni a veder la gente quanto s’ama!e se nulla di noi pietà ti move,

117a vergognar ti vien de la tua fama.

Come and see your Rome, weeping,

widowed and alone, and calling out day and night:

114“My Caesar, why are you not with me?”

Come and see how the people love one another!

and if you are not moved by pity for us,

117come and feel shame for your reputation.

If compassion does not move the absent emperor, the thought of his reputation should.

Now in an astonishing moment Dante questions God himself: Are His eyes turned away? Is He not looking at what is happening to Italy? To our modern ears it may seem thrillingly incongruous that Dante’s Christian God is here addressed as Jove, the supreme Roman pagan deity, in the context of the crucifixion. This is a potent example of Dante’s boldness in drawing on linguistic and mythical elements from the pre-Christian world as and when they serve his poetic purposes: here, a useful rhyme and an unforgettable tercet, where the exalted Latinism is in perfect balance with the heartfelt directness of the last line.

E se licito m’è, o sommo Gioveche fosti in terra per noi crucifisso,

120son li giusti occhi tuoi rivolti altrove?

And if it is allowed me, O highest Jove,

you who were crucified on earth for us,

120are your just eyes turned elsewhere?

The poet immediately self-corrects: Or is all this in preparation for some greater good that human beings cannot discern?

O è preparazion che ne l’abissodel tuo consiglio fai per alcun bene

123in tutto de l’accorger nostro scisso?

Or is this a preparation that you are making,

in the depths of your wisdom, for some good

123that is completely cut off from our understanding?

The lacerating indictment continues with undiminished force. The cities of Italy are governed by tyrants and torn apart by factional fighting:

Ché le città d’ Italia tutte pieneson di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa

126ogne villan che parteggiando viene.

For the cities of Italy are all full

of tyrants, and every peasant

126who signs up to a faction becomes a Marcellus.

Marcellus was an upstart factional leader who opposed Julius Caesar, and as such he is identified with the anti-imperial cause. There is an implicit reference here too to the devastating effect on city life of the influx of peasants from the countryside, one of the causes in Dante’s eyes of the catastrophic turn of events in Florentine history in recent decades. It is to Florence that he now turns.

There is heavy irony as Dante emphasises that of course none of what he has just said applies to his native city. Florence is exempt from criticism. Her citizens are resourceful and zealous; they talk a great deal about justice; they are eager to shoulder the burden of civic responsibility.

Fiorenza mia, ben puoi esser contentadi questa digression che non ti tocca,

129mercé del popol tuo che si argomenta.

My Florence, you can be well pleased

with this digression, which does not concern you,

129thanks to your people and their exertions.

Il popol tuo (“your people”) is the citizen body of Florence. Legislation passed in the last decade of the thirteenth century had severely curtailed the role of the aristocrats and the powerful elites, the magnates or grandi, in governing the city. The Ordinamenti di Giustizia of 1293, revised in 1295, had widened the democratic base of the governing class in the city precisely in the interests of the popolo, the middle and lower classes. Dante’s repeated references to il popol tuo when addressing Florence in these lines allude to decades of turbulent local history.

In contrast with the citizens of other cities, who talk about justice only after careful reflection, the Florentines invoke it often, and they are eager to take on civic responsibilities. The heavily ironical compliments imply hastiness, impulsivity, self-aggrandisement, empty rhetoric—motives of naked self-interest far removed from any genuine concern for good government and the public welfare.

Molti han giustizia in cuore, e tardi scoccaper non venir sanza consiglio a l’arco;

132ma il popol tuo l’ha in sommo de la bocca.

Molti rifiutan lo comune incarco;ma il popol tuo solicito risponde

135sanza chiamare, e grida: «I’ mi sobbarco!».

Many have justice in their hearts, and yet are slow to loose the arrow,*

so as not to come to the bow without deliberation;

132but your people have it always on their lips.

* i.e. slow to speak of it

Many refuse public office;

but your people eagerly volunteer

135without being asked, and shout: “I’ll take it on!”

The irony ramps up. The city can be proud: it is rich, peaceful, wise. The facts speak for themselves:

Or ti fa lieta, ché tu hai ben onde:tu ricca, tu con pace, e tu con senno!

138S’io dico ’l ver, l’effetto nol nasconde.

Now be happy, for you have good reason to be:

you are rich, you are at peace, and you are wise!

138If I speak the truth, the facts do not hide it.

Athens and Sparta, the two great cities of the ancient world, are nothing by comparison with Florence as exemplars of stable and well-ordered city life. In what seems at first glance to be praise, the damaging instability of the constantly changing legislation and every other aspect of Florentine public life is highlighted. Laws passed in October do not even last till mid-November, in the constant flux of unstable government:

Atene e Lacedemona, che fennol’antiche leggi e furon sì civili,

141fecero al viver bene un picciol cenno

verso di te, che fai tanto sottiliprovedimenti, ch’a mezzo novembre

144non giugne quel che tu d’ottobre fili.

Athens and Sparta, who made

the ancient laws, and were so civilised,

141made a small gesture towards living well,

compared with you, who make such subtle

provisions, that what you spin* in October

144does not last to mid-November.

* i.e. the legislation you pass

Quante volte, del tempo che rimembre,legge, moneta, officio e costume

147hai tu mutato e rinovate membre!

How many times, within your memory,

have you changed laws, coinage, offices and customs,

147and renewed your members!

The renewing of members refers to the changing composition of the citizen body as a result of the banishment of whichever party was not in power: originally Ghibellines or Guelfs, more recently Blacks or Whites. In a final image the city is described as a sick woman who tosses and turns on her bed, unable to find rest no matter which way she lies.

E se ben ti ricordi e vedi lume,vedrai te somigliante a quella inferma

150che non può trovar posa in su le piume,

ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma.

And if you remember and see clearly,

you’ll see that you are like a sick woman

150who finds no rest on her feather bed,

but tossing and turning tries to ease her pain.

This long, lacerating tirade is unlike anything we have encountered up to this point in the Commedia: direct, anguished commentary on the current state of the world by Dante the author, in his own name. Usually invective is confined within the narrative: Dante the character berates a shade, one shade berates another, a shade berates Dante. But here invective bursts forth from the narrative confines, and with unprecedented ferocity. The author addresses in turn his country; the emperor who has abandoned it; the church that interferes in public life; God, who appears to have deserted Italy; and finally his own native city. His bitterness and anger are explosive; the vehemence is miraculously confined within, yet at the same time powered by, the strict metrical form that contains it. The words fall with perfect naturalness on the metrical frame.

The focus in the final section of the canto is on Florence, but before that we have surveyed the whole of Italy, whose disastrous state is caused by the emperor who neglects his duty, as his father had done before him. This is the essence of Dante’s political message: the emperor must come and sort Italy out. In hell, the focus had been on Florence; now it has broadened to take in the entire country. And soon we will be invited to contemplate the neighbouring countries that border on Italy, many of whose recently dead princes and leaders we will encounter in the very next canto.

In the middle of canto 6 virgil and sordello, on discovering they were both born in Mantua, spontaneously embraced. But only one of them knows the other’s identity. Now, as the narrative resumes, Sordello asks his fellow Mantuan who he is.

Poscia che l’accoglienze oneste e lietefuro iterate tre e quattro volte,

3Sordel si trasse, e disse: «Voi, chi siete?».

After their courteous and joyous greetings

had been repeated three or four times,

3Sordello drew back, and said: “And you, who are you?”

On learning that this is Virgil, Sordello is inarticulate with emotion, breaking off in mid-sentence as he expresses his confusion. He then embraces his fellow citizen not as one embraces an equal, but in a way which shows the deepest reverence and respect.

Qual è colui che cosa innanzi sésùbita vede ond’ e’ si maraviglia,

12che crede e non, dicendo «Ella è . . . non è . . . »,

tal parve quelli; e poi chinò le ciglia,e umilmente ritornò ver’ lui,

15e abbracciòl là ’ve ’l minor s’appiglia.

Like someone who unexpectedly sees

something in front of him, and is astonished,

12believing and not believing, saying: “It is . . . it isn’t . . . ”

so he seemed; and then he bowed his head,

and humbly turned back towards him,

15and embraced him where someone of lower status does.

Sordello embraced Virgil deferentially, but we can’t be certain exactly where. Just under his armpits? around his waist? his knees? his ankles? Impossible to be sure (all have been suggested), though this last seems most likely.

Overcome at meeting the great Latin poet, Sordello pays an emotional tribute to Virgil’s poetic distinction and command of language:

«O gloria di Latin», disse, «per cuimostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra,

18o pregio etterno del loco ond’ io fui,

qual merito o qual grazia mi ti mostra?

“O glory of the Italians,” he said, “through whom

our language showed what it could do,

18O eternal honour of the place where I was born,

what merit or what grace shows you to me?

One poet acknowledges the supreme achievement of another, incredulous that he has been granted the privilege of meeting his hero. He enquires whether Virgil is in hell. Virgil explains about limbo.

Not by coincidence, Sordello’s most famous poem, the Lament for Ser Blacatz, has a strong political dimension. In it Sordello laments the decadence of certain noble families, whose weak and ineffectual living heirs are urged to partake metaphorically of the heart of their forebears in order to learn the chivalric values of courage and honour. In the scene we are about to witness, Dante has given Sordello a role inspired by this poem, but with a generational twist. Rather than calling to account unworthy offspring of distinguished families, as he did in life, here he will point out to Dante European rulers and princes whose descendants are degenerate.

Virgil asks if Sordello knows the way up the mountain. Sordello explains another law of purgatory: no progress can be made upwards once the sun has set. There is no physical constraint involved, but nightfall impedes the will. There is a protected declivity close by where they will be able to pass the night. Flowers and grass of intense colour and smell adorn it: it is a place of privilege, commensurate with the status of those who reside there. The three poets make their way to what is known as the valley of the negligent princes.

In it are sheltering European rulers whose responsibilities in the public sphere prevented their attending to their spiritual duties until the end of their lives. From a raised vantage point, in the fading light of the setting sun, Sordello delivers a roll call of royal and princely heads of state. They are arranged in a hierarchy that reflects their status, from the top of the valley to its bottom. All adopt contemplative poses at odds with their active earthly lives. They sigh, they weep, they beat their breasts, they sing the hymn Salve, Regina.

There is Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg (the father of “German Albert” berated in the previous canto). He could have healed Italy’s wounds had he chosen to.

Rodolfo imperador fu, che poteasanar le piaghe c’hanno Italia morta,

96sì che tardi per altri si ricrea.

He was Emperor Rudolph, who could

have healed the wounds that have killed Italy,

96so that it is late for another to revive her.

There is Ottakar, king of Bohemia, whose son Wenceslas, given over to debauchery and laziness, is an unworthy successor to his father.

Ottacchero ebbe nome, e ne le fascefu meglio assai che Vincislao suo figlio

102barbuto, cui lussuria e ozio pasce.

His name was Ottokar, and in his swaddling clothes

he was much more worthy than Wenceslas, his

102bearded son, who feeds on lust and idleness.

These two were implacable enemies on earth; now in the afterlife Ottokar comforts Rudolph, a pattern that will be repeated in other pairings of earthly antagonists.

There are members of the French ruling dynasty in its various branches (the Capetians and the Angevins), responsible in Dante’s eyes for the political and moral decadence of Europe and Italy. They are unnamed, but identifiable by their physical attributes and by what Sordello tells us of their dynastic connections. There is one with a small nose who sits by a man of benign appearance. His death is described in a resonant line.

E quel nasetto che stretto a consigliopar con colui c’ha sì benigno aspetto,

105morì fuggendo e disfiorando il giglio:

And that one with the small nose, who seems in close counsel

with the man who has such a kindly aspect,

105he died fleeing and dishonouring the lily.

The lily is the fleur-de-lis, the French national emblem; it is dishonoured (“deflowered”) by being stripped of its petals and leaves. He beats his chest in a ritualised gesture of remorse; his kindly-looking companion sighs as he rests his cheek on his palm, a typical contemplative pose. These are Philip the Bold and Henry of Navarre, father and father-in-law respectively of a figure whose degenerate life causes them shame.

Padre e suocero son del mal di Francia:sanno la vita sua viziata e lorda,

111e quindi viene il duol che sì li lancia.

They are father and father-in-law of the plague of France:

they know his vicious, filthy life,

111and that’s what causes the grief that so afflicts them.

Their respective son and son-in-law is Philip the Fair, who is the cause of their sorrow. Though condemned on a number of occasions in the poem for his greed and violence, Philip is never named by Dante.

There is another figure, with a large nose: he is Charles of Anjou, who is singing in unison with a muscular Peter (Pedro) III of Aragon, his bitter adversary in life. Peter was a virtuous man, and had one good son who died young; but his surviving sons, James and Frederick, heirs to his kingdoms of Aragon and Sicily, are unworthy. They inherited status and power, but not his qualities of character. Human worth is rarely passed down from generation to generation. God is the source of human worth, not family bloodline: the tercet encapsulates the moral meaning of the whole episode. Unlike modern family trees, medieval ones are typically drawn like real trees, with the roots at the bottom, offspring as branches at the top.

Rade volte risurge per li ramil’umana probitate; e questo vole

123quei che la dà, perché da lui si chiami.

Human worth rarely rises up through

the branches; and so He wills who gives it,

123so that it may be attributed to Him

Charles of Anjou’s large nose was evidently distinctive enough to identify him; it is referred to not once but twice. (It is as though Donald Trump were referred to not by name but as “big hair”). Charles was a key player in thirteenth-century European history from 1266 onwards. He was king of Sicily, and his maladministration of the island lay behind the uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers. The regions of Puglia and Provence lament the rule of his degenerate son Charles II of Anjou, hereditary king of Naples (Puglia) and count of Provence (another wonderfully resonant line to conclude the tercet).

Anche al nasuto vanno mie parolenon men ch’a l’altro, Pier, che con lui canta,

126onde Puglia e Proenza già si dole.

My words are for the man with the large nose as well,

no less than for the other one, Peter, who sings with him,

126on whose account Puglia and Provence already suffer.

Harry of England (Henry III), who sits alone, has had better luck in his offspring (Edward III):

Vedete il re de la semplice vitaseder là solo, Arrigo d’ Inghilterra:

132questi ha ne’ rami suoi migliore uscita.

See the king of the simple life,

sitting there on his own, Harry of England;

132he has a better outcome in his branches.

Henry III was always described in his lifetime as vir simplex (a simple man or, less kindly, a simpleton) and rex christianissimus (a most Christian king). Whether simplex implied unassuming modesty or dimwittedness was not spelled out. Dante, echoing the phrase used by Henry’s contemporaries, leaves the question open.

At the lowest point in the valley, reflecting his lesser rank, and gazing upwards, is an Italian, William, the marquis of Monferrato, on whose account much suffering has occurred in northern Italy in the regions that form his marquisate.

Annotated editions of the Commedia run to many, many pages of dense historical detail to elucidate the intricate dynastic relationships and the turbulent decades-long history of military engagements compressed into Sordello’s stirring lines. Those lines constitute an allusive, highly charged survey of fifty years of European history in the persons of its recently deceased Christian rulers. All those rulers are now absorbed in contemplative attitudes of different kinds, pondering the shortcomings and failures of their earthly existences. There is a distancing effect, since Dante does not interact with them, but merely listens and observes. The mood is muted and melancholy after the incandescent rage of canto 6. But it amounts to a desolate spectacle, a bleak panorama of a world gone wrong. For now, the political theme has run its course.

Time is important in purgatory, its passing constantly marked. Lines that are among the best loved in the poem tell us that it is now dusk, at the end of Dante’s first day on the mountain.

Era già l’ora che volge il disioai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core

3lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio;

e che lo novo peregrin d’amorepunge, se ode squilla di lontano

6che paia il giorno pianger che si more;

It was already the time of day that makes seafarers

think back with longing, and makes their hearts grow tender,

3the day they’ve said goodbye to their dear friends;

and that makes the pilgrim who has just set out

feel a pang of love, if he hears a bell in the distance,

6which seems to mourn the dying of the day;

The delicate musicality and restrained lyricism culminate in the last line of each tercet. Byron translated these lines in Don Juan (in canto 3, stanza 108): his more self-consciously melancholy, “romantic” (and linguistically self-indulgent) version throws into sharp relief the simplicity and restraint of Dante’s lines, which distil the emotion of leave-taking into something quintessential, a universal human experience. The two great metaphors for this journey and this poem—the sea voyage and the pilgrimage—are hauntingly evoked in their everyday human reality.

A soul rises to his feet, joins his hands as though in prayer, and leads the others in singing Te lucis ante (“To you before the end of day”), the hymn traditionally sung at this hour to pray for protection against the dangers of the night. A direct address invites the reader to pay close attention to what comes next; the veil is so fine that it will be easy to understand the meaning behind it.

Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero,ché ’l velo è ora ben tanto sottile,

21certo che ’l trapassar dentro è leggero.

Sharpen your eyes to the truth here, reader,

for the veil is now so fine

21that piercing through it is certainly easy.

Just such a passage had heralded the arrival in Inferno 9 of the messo celeste, the angel whose help had enabled Dante and Virgil to enter the city of Dis. And indeed not one but two angels will shortly appear. They act out a purgatorial ritual which happens every evening on the mountain: a symbolic enactment of evil thwarted by good. The ritualised drama of danger averted by angelic intervention will be punctuated by Dante’s encounter with two shades, one an old friend, the other a future benefactor.

The two angels, bearing swords, are dressed in fresh green like new leaves in spring—another magical line: Verdi come fogliette pur mo nate (“Green like little leaves newly unfurled”). They take up positions on guard opposite each other on the embankment of the valley.

Dante goes down into the valley, and though the air is darkening, he recognises an old friend. He is delighted to find him among the saved.

Ver’ me si fece, e io ver’ lui mi fei:giudice Nin gentil, quanto mi piacque

54quando ti vidi non esser tra ’ rei!

He moved towards me, and I towards him:

noble judge Nino, how pleased I was

54when I saw that you were not among the damned!

Nino has bitter words about his wife, who quickly remarried after his death, and makes no mention of him in her prayers. Now a serpent, perhaps the very one that gave the apple to Eve, comes slinking between the grass and the flowers. The angels move too fast for Dante to see; he registers their movement only after it has happened. The serpent flees; the angels return to their post.

Another soul, who has been gazing at Dante, now speaks:

cominciò ella, «se novella veradi Val di Magra o di parte vicina

117sai, dillo a me, che già grande là era.

Fui chiamato Currado Malaspina;non son l’antico, ma di lui discesi;

120a’ miei portai l’amor che qui raffina».

he began, “if you know true tidings

of Val di Magra or nearby parts,

117tell it to me, for I was once a great man there.

My name was Currado Malaspina;

I’m not the old Currado, but a descendant of his;

120the love I felt for my family is purified here.”

The Val di Magra is in Lunigiana, a region in northern Tuscany. Dante pays the speaker an elaborate compliment: he has never been in those parts, he says, but the Malaspina family is famous throughout Europe for their courage and their liberality, the two quintessential feudal virtues. This is not mere flattery. The Malaspina family and its generous hospitality had long been celebrated by Provençal troubadours who had been guests at the court.

«Oh!», diss’ io lui, «per li vostri paesigià mai non fui; ma dove si dimora

123per tutta Europa ch’ ei non sien palesi?

La fama che la vostra casa onora,grida i segnori e grida la contrada,

126sì che ne sa chi non vi fu ancora;

e io vi giuro, s’io di sopra vada,che vostra gente onrata non si sfregia

129del pregio de la borsa e de la spada.

“O,” I said to him, “I’ve never been in your lands;

but is there any inhabited place

123in all of Europe where they are not renowned?

The fame that honours your house

celebrates its lords and celebrates its lands,

126so that even someone who hasn’t yet been there knows of them;

and I swear to you, as I hope to go on upwards,

your honoured line still displays

129the virtues of the purse and of the sword.

The shade responds that, before seven years have passed, Dante will experience the family’s generosity for himself. Dante was the guest of the Malaspina family in the Lunigiana in late 1306, one of the few securely documented sojourns in the early years of his exile. While there he represented the family in peace negotiations with the bishop of Luni. The document that names those involved survives in a local archive. In the time frame of the poem, these events lie in the future. Here the poet repays the courtly hospitality of the Malaspina family with generous words, written long after the event.

It is now night in purgatory, but dante the poet—plotting time on a global clock (see ), and with supreme confidence of attack—describes not night in purgatory, but dawn in Italy. As he launches into these lines there is an unmistakable surge of linguistic power and energy. The poet is su di giri, “revved up,” as a professor of mine in Florence back in the ’60s remarked of these (in narrative terms, strictly speaking, gratuitous) lines.

La concubina di Titone anticogià s’imbiancava al balco d’orïente,

3fuor de le braccia del suo dolce amico;

di gemme la sua fronte era lucente,poste in figura del freddo animale

6che con la coda percuote la gente;

The concubine of ancient Tithonus

was already growing pale at the balcony of the east,

3rising from the arms of her sweet lover;

her brow shone with gems,

set in the shape of the cold animal

6that strikes people with its tail;

The concubine of ancient Tithonus is Aurora, or dawn. The mythical Tithonus is ancient because Aurora asked the gods to give her lover eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. He does not die, but becomes immensely old. Aurora wears jewels on her forehead: that is, the constellation of Scorpio is visible in the pale eastern sky.

But here in purgatory it is night, nearly nine o’clock, and Dante the character has fallen asleep, lying down on the grass where his companions are seated. He will spend three nights on the mountain, and each night he will have a dream. Early morning dreams were believed in the Middle Ages to be prophetic, to give a knowledge of a reality not accessible to the rational mind of the dreamer. Each of Dante’s dreams will connect in a different but significant way with the unfolding narrative. As the pre-dawn chorus begins with the song of the swallow, Dante dreams of an eagle.

Ne l’ora che comincia i tristi laila rondinella presso a la mattina,

15forse a memoria de’ suo’ primi guai,

e che la mente nostra, peregrinapiù da la carne e men da’ pensier presa,

18a le sue visïon quasi è divina,

in sogno mi parea veder sospesaun’aguglia nel ciel con penne d’ oro,

21con l’ali aperte e a calare intesa;

In the hour close to morning

when the swallow begins her plaintive laments,

15perhaps remembering her ancient woes,

and when our mind, more detached from the flesh

and less caught up in thinking,

18is almost godlike in its visions,

in a dream I seemed to see, hovering in the sky,

an eagle with golden feathers,

21its wings spread wide and poised to swoop;

The eagle plummets down, seizes Dante, and carries him aloft, immensely high up into the sky.

Poi mi parea che, poi rotata un poco,terribil come folgor discendesse,

30e me rapisse suso infino al foco.

Then it seemed to me that, having circled a little,

it plunged down terrible as lightning,

30and carried me up as far as the sphere of fire.

Of the four elements that make up the world—earth, water, air, fire—fire by its nature is born to rise. In the medieval understanding of the cosmos, the sphere of fire is fire’s natural resting place, beyond the earth’s atmosphere (air), just below the sphere of the moon. In the dream, both eagle and Dante burn in the fire. Dante wakes up from the sensation of intense heat.

What has happened, Virgil tells him—the reality of which the dream was a shadowy counterpart—is that a woman came and carried the sleeping Dante up, leaving Sordello and the other shades down below in the valley. She was Saint Lucy, who had intervened, with Beatrice and the Virgin Mary, to save Dante in Inferno 2. It is now morning; the morning sun shining on Dante’s face woke him up.

Virgil explains to him that they have reached the door of purgatory (the word is used here for the first time).

Tu se’ omai al purgatorio giunto:vedi là il balzo che ’l chiude dintorno;

51vedi l’entrata là ’ve par digiunto.

You have reached purgatory now:

see over there the rocky wall that encircles it;

51see the entrance there where there’s a gap in the wall.

Another address to the reader draws attention to this key moment of transition, in the journey itself and in the writerly skill needed to deal with it. A loftier theme—purgatory proper is by definition loftier than hell and ante-purgatory—will require greater art in the writer.

There are three steps below the door, and a silent angel seated on the threshold as doorkeeper.

vidi una porta, e tre gradi di sottoper gire ad essa, di color diversi,

78e un portier ch’ancor non facea motto.

I saw a door, and three steps beneath it

to go up to it, of different colours,

78and a doorkeeper who for now said not a word.

This solemn scene is now described in greater detail. The first step is shining white marble; the second is dark, rough, stone-coloured; the third is porphyry, the colour of blood. The angel sits on a diamond throne, his feet resting on the top step, with an unsheathed sword in his hand. The scene has a static, monumental quality, like a majestic stage set for an opera. It is the preamble to a key moment in the narrative, the crossing of a boundary or threshold: going through the doorway into purgatory proper.

Virgil leads Dante up the stairs and instructs him to ask the angel to unlock the door. The angel inscribes the letter P seven times on Dante’s forehead with the point of his sword.

Divoto mi gittai a’ santi piedi;misericordia chiesi e ch’el m’aprisse,

111ma tre volte nel petto pria mi diedi.

Sette P ne la fronte mi descrissecol punton de la spada, e «Fa che lavi,

114quando se’ dentro, queste piaghe» disse.

Devoutly I threw myself at his holy feet;

I asked for mercy, and that he should open it for me,

111but first I smote my breast three times.

He inscribed seven Ps on my forehead

with the point of his sword, and said: “Make sure you

114wash away these wounds when you’re inside.”

The angel draws forth two keys from under his ashen-coloured garment, one golden, the other silver. He uses both of them to open the door, explaining that these are the keys of Saint Peter, and that both are necessary to unlock it. He pushes the door open and tells Dante to go in, warning him that he must not look backwards:

Poi pinse l’uscio a la porta sacrata,dicendo: «Intrate; ma facciovi accorti

132che di fuor torna chi ’n dietro si guata».

Then he pushed open the door of the hallowed portal,

saying, “Go in; but I warn you that

132whoever looks behind him must come back outside.”

The injunction not to look back is both biblical (Luke 9:62) and classical (a backward glance caused Orpheus to lose Eurydice). The heavy door creaks as it turns on its metal hinges. Dante can hear singing, and picks out some of the words of the hymn Te deum laudamus (“You, God, we praise”), the words partly muffled as when one hears singing accompanied by an organ.

Even the most casual reader will understand that every detail of the scene we have just witnessed is pregnant with spiritual meaning. Canto 9 invites decoding in a simple way—x stands for y—that is unusual in the poem. To risk simplifying a scene which has given rise to a rich vein of theological commentary and debate, the three steps are the three stages in the heart of the sinner preceding absolution from sin: confession, contrition, satisfaction. (Dante, never afraid to depart from orthodox thinking, has inverted the traditional order of the first two, but we will never know why he did so.) The keys used by the angel to open the door represent the confessor’s authority and judgment. The letter P inscribed seven times on Dante’s forehead stands for peccato (sin), but does not preclude ideas of poenitentia (penitence), pena (punishment) and piaga (wound). The eagle perhaps signifies divine grace, though it is possibly also a symbol of empire. Why Saint Lucy? We don’t really know. She is the patron saint of sight. Her name—from lux, “light”—suggests clear-sightedness, perhaps even the insight Dante will need as he encounters varieties of sinful disposition on his way up the mountain.

Some readers find this kind of decoding exercise intrinsically “unpoetic.” But the tautness and energy of the lines that describe it are as impressive as ever. Dante the pilgrim comes as close here as he ever does to being a generic Christian penitent. The solemnity of this pivotal transitional scene leaves no room for the personal and the emotional.

The letters inscribed on Dante’s forehead give us our first clue both to the psychological state of the penitents and to the structure of purgatory. Hell punishes sinful actions for which the sinner has shown no remorse. The penitents in purgatory have been absolved of their sins by repenting and turning to God. Their punishments correct the character flaws which led them to sin. Absolution absolves, but there remains a debt to be paid. Where punishment in hell is retribution (you get what you deserved, you are paid back), in purgatory it is rehabilitation, and paying back is a matter of repaying a debt: of making satisfaction, of re-establishing an equilibrium, of bringing things back into balance, of restoring order in the world.

The seven deadly sins (or, more correctly, capital vices) determine the structure of purgatory with its seven terraces. Dante tells us nothing of this in advance; he gives no ground plan or road map upfront. The hierarchy of sins and their relationship to one another—the moral and theological underpinning of the topography—will be described only midway up the mountain. For now, we go with the narrative flow.

The first sin we encounter gives us a magnificent sequence of three cantos: in effect, a triptych. What that sin is becomes apparent as we go. Emerging on the first terrace, we piece together a series of clues, as Dante does. There are works of art in the form of miraculously lifelike carvings which decorate the inner wall of the terrace, and whose theme is humility. There is the physical condition of the sinners themselves when Dante at last makes them out, bent double under huge boulders they carry on their backs as they slowly and painfully move around the terrace. The sin punished here is pride.

In canto 12 we come on a second series of carvings, this time carved into the floor of the terrace, and trampled underfoot by Dante and Virgil as they walk. These horizontal carvings, like flat tombstones set into the floor of a church, show notorious examples of pride punished. Dante’s interaction with the sinners is framed by the wall carvings and the floor carvings with their exemplary instances of humility celebrated and hubris struck down.

Only in canto 11 does Dante talk to three sinners, who exemplify three different kinds of pride: pride in ancestry, pride in artistic talent, pride in political power. In their stories and their words of self-recrimination, the sin is at last displayed in some of its characteristic manifestations (arrogance, vainglory, grandiosity—in the persons of an aristocrat, an artist and a political leader).

Pride, we remember, had no specific circle of hell assigned to it, yet it is the first sin we meet in purgatory. It is indeed the sin which lies at the root of all sin. It caused Lucifer to rise up against his creator. It caused Eve to eat the apple. In hell it is ubiquitous rather than localised. It is a sin that Dante himself is vulnerable to, as he well knows. It is no accident that at the centre of the central panel of the triptych we find an artist. Pride in one’s innate talent or gifts, and an awareness of the potential danger of too strong a sense of self-belief, lies at the heart of Dante’s own human experience.

Dante and virgil have crossed the threshold into purgatory proper and now climb up through a steep, narrow, zigzagging passage cut into the rock. When they emerge, they are on a flat ledge or terrace, between the cliff face which drops away below them and the mountain which soars above. The terrace is narrow, the width of three human bodies laid end to end, a surprisingly precise measurement that serves to emphasise the contrast between the ledge and the soaring mountain. It stretches evenly in both directions as far as the eye can see. The internal cliff face of the mountain is white marble, and it is wondrously carved. The carvings outdo not just the craftsmanship of the most famous ancient Greek sculptor, Polycletus, but nature herself.

The first scene Dante makes out on the inner wall of the terrace is the annunciation.

L’angel che venne in terra col decretode la molt’ anni lagrimata pace,

36ch’aperse il ciel del suo lungo divieto,

The angel who came to earth with the decree

of peace that had been wept-for many years,

36which opened heaven after man’s long banishment,

dinanzi a noi pareva sì veracequivi intagliato in un atto soave,

39che non sembiava imagine che tace.

appeared before us so lifelike,

carved there in his gentle bearing,

39that it did not seem a silent image.

The line de la molt’ anni lagrimata pace (“of the many-years-wept-for peace”) is difficult to render in English that doesn’t sound awkward. It is so mellifluous in Italian that it almost demands to be said aloud or sung. The scene is so lifelike that the marble figures seem to be speaking:

Giurato si saria ch’el dicesse ‘Ave!’;perché iv’ era imaginata quella

42ch’ad aprir l’alto amor volse la chiave;

e avea in atto impressa esta favella‘Ecce ancilla Deï’, propriamente

45come figura in cera si suggella.

You would have sworn that he was saying “Ave!”*;

for pictured there was the image of the woman

42who turned the key to open love on high;

* “Hail!”

and the words “Ecce ancilla Dei”*

were imprinted in her bearing,

45exactly as a figure is stamped in wax.

* “Behold the handmaid of the Lord”

The words the angel and Mary seem to be saying are those found in pictorial representations of the annunciation in frescoes and manuscripts throughout the medieval period and into the renaissance, based on the account of the annunciation in the Gospel of Luke.

Gazing beyond the Virgin Mary, Dante sees a second scene carved into the marble surface. He moves towards it. The carvings themselves in effect draw him in the right direction. Going to the right will always be the correct way to go in purgatory; in hell by contrast, circling downwards to the left was normal. Bearing in mind that Dante turned upside down on Lucifer’s flanks when he left hell behind, as he passed through the centre of the earth in order to climb upwards, we can see that the two spiral movements, apparently in antithetical directions—downwards to the left, then upwards to the right—constitute a single continuous helical trajectory through the cosmos.

In this second carving David is dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, as described in the Old Testament (2 Samuel 6:14). Again the scene is so lifelike that not just one but two senses (hearing and smell) are confused: gazing at it, Dante seems to hear the voices of the chorus singing, and to smell the incense.

Era intagliato lì nel marmo stessolo carro e ’ buoi, traendo l’arca santa,

57per che si teme officio non commesso.

Dinanzi parea gente; e tutta quanta,partita in sette cori, a’ due mie’ sensi

60faceva dir l’un ‘No’, l’altro ‘Sì, canta’.

Similemente al fummo de li ’ncensiche v’era imaginato, li occhi e ’l naso

63e al sì e al no discordi fensi.

There was carved into the marble itself

the cart and the oxen, drawing the holy ark,

57that makes men fear to take on a task not assigned to them.

In front of it were people; and all of them,

divided into seven choruses, made my two senses

60say, “No, they aren’t,” and, “Yes, they are singing.”

In just the same way, with the smoke of the incense

carved there, my eyes and my nose

63disagreed, saying “Yes” and “No.”

As David dances in front of the Ark, his wife Micol gazes down scornfully at him from a palace window. David as he dances incarnates both humility and its opposite, exaltation. He is more and less than a king, just as Mary is paradoxically both the humblest and the most exalted of women.

Lì precedeva al benedetto vaso,trescando alzato, l’umile salmista,

66e più e men che re era in quel caso.

Di contra, effigïata ad una vistad’un gran palazzo, Micòl ammirava

69sì come donna dispettosa e trista.

There the humble psalmist, leaping in dance

with his robe hitched up, went ahead of the blessed ark,

66and in doing so was both more and less than a king.

Opposite him, depicted at a window

of a great palace, Micol gazed down,

69like a woman scornful and annoyed.

Still moving to the right, Dante comes to a third, even more animated, scene. It shows the episode, famous from classical times, of the Emperor Trajan encountering a widow who begs him to intervene to secure justice for her son.

Quiv’ era storïata l’alta gloriadel roman principato, il cui valore

75mosse Gregorio a la sua gran vittoria;

i’ dico di Traiano imperadore;e una vedovella li era al freno,

78di lagrime atteggiata e di dolore.

Here was depicted the lofty glory

of the roman prince, whose virtue

75moved Gregory to his great victory;

I mean the emperor Trajan;

and a humble widow was at his bridle,

78in tears, and grieving.

Gregory the Great’s “great victory,” celebrated in legend, was to have Trajan, a dead pagan emperor, admitted to heaven. The story had wide currency in the Middle Ages (and indeed we will find Trajan in Paradiso 20 among the just rulers). The emperor’s troops on horseback throng around him, their gold standards with the eagle symbol fluttering in the wind.

Intorno a lui parea calcato e pienodi cavalieri, e l’aguglie ne l’oro

81sovr’ essi in vista al vento si movieno.

Around him there seemed to be a dense throng

of men on horseback, and the eagles on the gold

81were visible moving in the wind above them.

The wretched woman begs him to revenge her son’s death. He says he will do it when he returns from battle. But what if you don’t return, she counters. The person who replaces me will do it, he says. But what good is someone else’s good deed to you, if you neglect your own duty? she persists. He concedes the point. He will do it now, before he leaves: justice and compassion require him to. The extraordinary animation of this dialogue belies the fact that this is a scene carved in marble.

La miserella intra tutti costoropareva dir: «Segnor, fammi vendetta

84di mio figliuol ch’è morto, ond’ io m’accoro»;

The wretched woman in the midst of all of them

seemed to be saying: “My lord, avenge

84my son who is dead, which causes me great sorrow”;

ed elli a lei rispondere: «Or aspettatanto ch’ i’ torni»; e quella: «Segnor mio»,

87come persona in cui dolor s’affretta,

«se tu non torni?»; ed ei: «Chi fia dov’ io,la ti farà»; ed ella: «L’altrui bene

90a te che fia, se ’l tuo metti in oblio?»;

ond’ elli: «Or ti conforta; ch’ei convenech’i’ solva il mio dovere anzi ch’i’ mova:

93giustizia vuole e pietà mi ritene».

and he replied: “Just wait

till I get back”; and she said,

87like someone whose grief is urgent, “My lord,

what if you don’t come back?”; and he: “The person who takes my place

will do it for you”; and she: “What good to you

90is someone else’s good, if you neglect to do the good you should do?”;

at that he said: “Now take comfort; for it is right

that I should do my duty before I leave:

93justice requires it, and pity holds me back.”

The rapid back-and-forth of question and answer fills four tercets. The urgent exchange seems to unfold audibly, so lifelike are the carvings: a tour de force for the sculptor, who has created speech that is visible rather than audible; and a tour de force for the poet, who captures in his lines the dramatic vitality of the carved figures that seem to speak. The sculptor of these miraculously lifelike reliefs is of course God himself, whose artistry surpasses that of any human artist:

Colui che mai non vide cosa novaprodusse esto visibile parlare,

96novello a noi perché qui non si trova.

He who never saw a new thing

produced this visible speech,

96new to us because it’s not found here.

There is a technical term for the representation in poetry of a visual artwork, be it painting, sculpture or engraving: “ekphrasis.” The classic example is the engravings on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad XVIII, 478–608. Dante rises to the challenge: his description of the carved figures here in Purgatorio 10 is a virtuoso example of the genre. The scenes, drawn from biblical and classical sources, are increasingly challenging to depict in all their movement and detail.

Dante’s attention has been fully occupied with the wondrously lifelike carvings—imagini di tante umilitadi (“images of such great humility”). But now he makes out sinners on the terrace. Their condition is so painful to look at that he hopes it will not deter the reader if he describes it.

Non vo’ però, lettor, che tu ti smaghidi buon proponimento per udire

108come Dio vuol che ’l debito si paghi.

Non attender la forma del martìre:pensa la succession; pensa ch’al peggio

111oltre la gran sentenza non può ire.

Reader, I don’t want you to be disheartened

in your good resolve when you hear

108how God wills that the debt be paid.

Pay no heed to the form of the punishment:

think of what follows it; think that at worst

111it cannot go beyond the Last Judgment.

The figures he is looking at do not even seem to be people, so distorted are their bodies. Virgil explains that they are bent double under huge stones they carry on their backs, and can move only very slowly.

Io cominciai: «Maestro, quel ch’io veggiomuovere a noi, non mi sembian persone,

114e non so che, sì nel veder vaneggio».

Ed elli a me: «La grave condizionedi lor tormento a terra li rannicchia,

117sì che ’ miei occhi pria n’ebber tencione.

Ma guarda fiso là, e disviticchiacol viso quel che vien sotto a quei sassi:

120già scorger puoi come ciascun si picchia».

I began: “Master, what I see moving

towards us, they don’t look like people,

114yet I don’t know what they are, I can’t see clearly.”

And he said to me: “The heavy condition

of their punishment huddles them close to the ground,

117so that at first my eyes had difficulty making them out.

But look there closely, and disentangle

with your sight what is coming under those stones:

120you can already make out how each one beats himself.”

And now, finally, the sin of pride is mentioned, in an invocation urging proud Christians to see what the true goal of life is. The exclamatory address famously develops the image of the caterpillar and the butterfly:

O superbi cristian, miseri lassi,che, de la vista de la mente infermi,

123fidanza avete ne’ retrosi passi,

non v’accorgete voi che noi siam verminati a formar l’angelica farfalla,

126che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi?

O proud Christians, unhappy wretches,

sick in your mind’s eyes,

123who put your trust in backwards steps,

don’t you realise that we are worms

born to form the angelic butterfly,

126that unimpeded soars to justice?

Human beings in their earthly existence are in an imperfect state, just like the caterpillar from which the butterfly will emerge in its fully formed beauty. (Verme in Italian is more inclusive than “worm” in English, and, like “worm,” allows for strong negative moral connotations that “caterpillar” doesn’t have.) They will reach the butterfly stage of their existence, become their true selves, when they reach paradise.

And now, to conclude this richly visual and evocative canto, we have an arresting description of the shades and their burdens:

Come per sostentar solaio o tetto,per mensola talvolta una figura

132si vede giugner le ginocchia al petto,

la qual fa del non ver vera rancuranascere ’n chi la vede; così fatti

135vid’ io color, quando puosi ben cura.

Sometimes, to support a ceiling or a roof,

one sees a figure join its knees to its chest

132as a corbel,

which makes the beholder feel real distress

for a distress that isn’t real; that’s how

135I saw them to be, when I looked closely.

The comparison is not with upright caryatids supporting Greek temples, who appear to carry their load lightly, but with the grotesque and contorted figures sometimes used as supporting architectural elements in medieval buildings, whose distorted limbs and features express pain and endurance at the weight they bear, and whose feigned suffering, carved in stone, causes the onlooker real discomfort.

Vero è che più e meno eran contrattisecondo ch’avien più e meno a dosso;

138e qual più pazïenza avea ne li atti,

piangendo parea dicer: ‘Più non posso’.

It’s true that they were more and less hunched over

according as they had more or less on their backs;

138and those who seemed most patient in their bearing,

weeping, seemed to say: “I can’t take any more.”

The canto turns on the striking contrast between marble images that look alive, seeming to move and speak, and human figures that seem less than fully human, reduced to the instrumental function of an architectural embellishment or conceit. The carvings themselves are a potent reminder that God’s workmanship outdoes anything humans can produce, and that even the most brilliant artist must never lose sight of this. The penitent souls show what awaits if he should forget.

Pride is problematic for Dante the pilgrim, who is often contemptuous about other people and their failings; but it is even more so, perhaps, for Dante the poet. Aspiring to create something of beauty, of lasting value, of benefit to mankind, requires huge belief in one’s own powers and talents. This issue comes fully into focus in the next canto, to which this one has been a dazzling prelude.

The canto opens with a paraphrase in italian of the Lord’s Prayer, recited by the shades as they circle the mountain. The last line of the prayer (“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”), though no longer relevant to the saved in purgatory, is still important for those they have left behind on earth. In a resonant line that underscores the difference between the punishments in hell and in purgatory, the shades are said to be purgando la caligine del mondo (“washing away the mist of the world”), the traces of the earthly passions that still darken the limpidity of their souls. Their punishment is not punitive and eternal, but temporary and redemptive.

Così a sé e noi buona ramognaquell’ ombre orando, andavan sotto ’l pondo,

27simile a quel che tal volta si sogna,

disparmente angosciate tutte a tondoe lasse su per la prima cornice,

30purgando la caligine del mondo.

Thus, praying for a happy outcome for themselves and for us,

those shades went along beneath the weight,

27like the kind you sometimes experience in a dream,

all of them suffering in different degrees,

and weary, around the first ledge,

30washing away the mist of the world.

Virgil asks the best way up for a living man; a shade, intrigued by Dante’s status, wonders if he knows him, but cannot check because he cannot lift his head to look. He spells out the relation between the sin of pride and its punishment:

E s’io non fossi impedito dal sassoche la cervice mia superba doma,

54onde portar convienmi il viso basso,

cotesti, ch’ancor vive e non si noma,guardere’ io, per veder s’i’ ’l conosco,

57e per farlo pietoso a questa soma.

And if I were not prevented by the stone

that tames my proud neck,

54so that I must keep my eyes turned down,

I’d look at that man who is still alive, and

doesn’t say his name, to see if I know him,

57and to make him feel pity for this burden I bear.

Without further ado, he launches into his story:

Io fui latino e nato d’un gran Tosco:Guiglielmo Aldobrandesco fu mio padre;

60non so se ’l nome suo già mai fu vosco.

I was Italian and son of a great Tuscan:

Guiglielmo Aldobrandesco was my father;

60I don’t know if you ever heard his name.

L’antico sangue e l’opere leggiadred’i miei maggior mi fer sì arrogante,

63che, non pensando a la comune madre,

ogn’ uomo ebbi in despetto tanto avante,ch’io ne mori’, come i Sanesi sanno

66e sallo in Campagnatico ogne fante.

The ancient blood and the chivalrous deeds

of my ancestors made me so arrogant,

63that, not thinking of our common mother,*

* Eve

I held all men in such contempt

that I died for it, as the Sienese know,

66and every child in Campagnatico knows it.

Campagnatico was a feudal holding of the Aldobrandeschi, where even among children the story is well known.

Io sono Omberto; e non pur a me dannosuperbia fa, ché tutti miei consorti

69ha ella tratti seco nel malanno.

E qui convien ch’io questo peso portiper lei, tanto che a Dio si sodisfaccia,

72poi ch’io nol fe’ tra ’ vivi, qui tra ’ morti».

I am Omberto; and it wasn’t just me

that pride harmed, for it dragged

69all my kinsmen into ruin.

And because of it I must carry this weight,

here among the dead, until satisfaction is made to God,

72since I didn’t do it among the living.

Chroniclers give different versions of how Omberto, count of Santafiora, died at the hands of the Sienese. Paid assassins suffocated him while he slept, in one account; in another, he was set upon in the market square and died fighting for his life. The story is not spelled out here. Like the husband of Pia de’ Tolomei, the perpetrators of his murder know what happened.

In order to hear Omberto, Dante turns his face down, himself adopting the emblematic posture of humility, with head bowed. Another shade twists under his boulder to look at him; he recognises Dante and calls out. The mutual recognition scene which follows introduces themes that are among the most powerful and personal in the poem.

Ascoltando chinai in giù la faccia;e un di lor, non questi che parlava,

75si torse sotto il peso che li ’mpaccia,

Listening I bent my face down;

and one of them, not the one who was talking,

75twisted under the weight that encumbers them,

e videmi e conobbemi e chiamava,tenendo li occhi con fatica fisi

78a me che tutto chin con loro andava.

and he saw me and recognised me and called out,

holding his eyes fixed with difficulty on me,

78who was walking along with them all bent over.

Dante in his turn recognises the speaker, and pays him a compliment.

«Oh!», diss’ io lui, «non se’ tu Oderisi,l’onor d’Agobbio e l’onor di quell’ arte

81ch’alluminar chiamata è in Parisi?».

“Oh!” I said to him, “aren’t you Oderisi,

the honour of Gubbio and the honour of that art

81which in Paris is called illumination?”

Oderisi came from Gubbio, the small hilltop town in Umbria. He was a famous illuminator of manuscripts, his miniatures prized for the richness and vibrancy of their colours. But he deflects Dante’s compliment: there is a more accomplished artist than he now at work illustrating manuscripts, though his pride would never have allowed him to admit that while he was alive. Here we see pride as competitiveness, the desire to excel, to be better than others.

«Frate», diss’ elli, «più ridon le carteche pennelleggia Franco Bolognese;

84l’onore è tutto or suo, e mio in parte.

Ben non sare’ io stato sì cortesementre ch’io vissi, per lo gran disio

87de l’eccellenza ove mio core intese.

“Brother,” he said, “the pages painted by the brush of

Franco from Bologna smile more brightly;

84the honour is now all his, and mine only in part.

I certainly wouldn’t have been so courteous

while I was alive, because of the great desire

87to excel on which my heart was set.

He can now admit that the miniatures of Franco from Bologna surpass his own in the beauty of their colours. Franco’s is the name on everybody’s lips. The notion of purgatorial punishment as the setthng of a debt is spelled out explicitly:

Di tal superbia qui si paga il fio;e ancor non sarei qui, se non fosse

90che, possendo peccar, mi volsi a Dio.

Here one pays the debt for pride like that;

and I wouldn’t be here yet, if it were not that,

90while I could still sin, I turned to God.

Earthly fame, he says, is vain and short-lived, unless the artist happens to live at a time just before a period of artistic decline.

Oh vana gloria de l’umane posse!com’ poco verde in su la cima dura,

93se non è giunta da l’etati grosse!

Oh vain glory of human powers!

how short a time it stays green at its peak,

93unless it’s followed by an age of decadence.

Oderisi gives two examples from within living memory of the transitoriness of fame and artistic reputation, one from the visual arts, another from literature. How soon is one master at the peak of his powers eclipsed by another who is even more gifted and acclaimed.

Credette Cimabue ne la pitturatener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,

96sì che la fama di colui è scura:

così ha tolto l’uno a l’altro Guidola gloria de la lingua; e forse è nato

99chi l’uno e l’altro caccerà del nido.

Cimabue thought he held the field

in painting, and now Giotto’s all the cry,

96so that Cimabue’s fame is darkened.

In the same way one Guido has taken the glory of language

from the other; and perhaps he is born

99who will drive both of them from the nest.

Giotto and Cimabue were, each in his time, the most famous painter in Florence. Giotto was Cimabue’s pupil, a generation younger, and he surpassed his teacher. In the first great room in the Uffizi gallery, magnificent altarpieces of the Madonna and Child by these two masters are displayed side by side. In Cimabue’s Maestà di Santa Trinita the stiff, linear, almost abstract depiction of the folds in Mary’s robe and mantle, in a style that is Byzantine in origin, gives no real sense of a human body beneath it. By comparison, the breasts and knees of Giotto’s earthy Madonna d’Ognissanti look palpably solid under the cloth which lies over them. Giotto’s art, revolutionary in its time, eclipsed that of his brilliant teacher. Dante is not making an abstract point about fame from hearsay. These are artists whose works he knew directly in Florentine churches in the decades before his exile. He is keenly interested in the visual arts. One episode in the Vita Nuova describes him drawing an angel.

Oderisi’s second example is even closer to home. Just as Giotto became more famous than Cimabue in painting, so in the field of poetry one Guido surpassed the other. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s Florentine friend and mentor, whose father we met in Inferno 10, outdid Guido Guinizzelli, the Bolognese author of exquisite love poems of a generation earlier. Dante will meet Guinizzelli further up the mountain, and pay tribute to this revered early master. The gnomic reference to a poet who will outdo both Guidos must be a reference to Dante himself. As has often been wryly noted, Dante is displaying pride in his own poetic powers here on the very circle of pride. But the point is made in passing, immediately undercut by Oderisi’s insistence that earthly fame is a mere breath of wind in the eye of eternity.

Non è il mondan romore altro ch’un fiatodi vento, ch’or vien quinci e or vien quindi,

102e muta nome perché muta lato.

Che voce avrai tu più, se vecchia scindida te la carne, che se fossi morto

105anzi che tu lasciassi il ‘pappo’ e ’l ‘dindi,’

pria che passin mill’ anni? ch’ è più cortospazio a l’etterno, ch’un muover di ciglia

108al cerchio che più tardi in cielo è torto.

Worldly fame is nothing but a breath of wind,

that blows now from one side and now from another,

102and changes its name because it changes direction.

What more fame will you have if you put off your flesh

when it is old* than if you had died

105before you stopped saying “pappo” and “dindi,”**

* i.e. if you die in old age

** i.e. in infancy, before you stopped using baby talk

when a thousand years have passed? which is a shorter time

compared with eternity than the blink of an eye

108compared to one turn of the slowest heavenly sphere.

Pappo and dindi are childish words for “food” and “money.” The tension between the confident assertion of Dante’s own stature as a poet, destined to outdo the best poets of his age, and the vanity of all earthly ambition is unexamined and unresolved.

Oderisi points to another sinner, a great man in his time in Tuscany but now almost forgotten.

Colui che del cammin sì poco pigliadinanzi a me, Toscana sonò tutta;

111e ora a pena in Siena sen pispiglia,

ond’ era sire quando fu distruttala rabbia fiorentina, che superba

114fu a quel tempo sì com’ ora è putta.

All Tuscany resounded with the name

of the man who moves ahead of me so slowly;

111and now it’s barely whispered in Siena,

where he was lord when the

presumptuousness of Florence was destroyed,

114a city then as proud as now it is a whore.

This is Provenzan Salvani, famous in his time, who had led the victorious Sienese at the Battle of Montaperti against the Florentines. But fame is like the fading grass: the sun, which causes it to grow, later causes it to wither, a natural cycle that no human distinction or ingenuity can gainsay.

La vostra nominanza è color d’erba,che viene e va, e quei la discolora

117per cui ella esce de la terra acerba».

Your renown is the colour of grass,

that comes and goes, and the very thing that brings it forth

117fresh from the earth is what causes it to fade.”

Dante has a question: Why has Provenzan made such rapid progress up the mountain? Why is he not waiting in ante-purgatory as might be expected?

One act of genuine humility and self-abnegation on behalf of a friend has spared him the delay:

«Quando vivea più glorïoso», disse,«liberamente nel Campo di Siena,

135ogne vergogna diposta, s’affisse;

e lì, per trar l’amico suo di penach’e’ sostenea ne la prigion di Carlo,

138si condusse a tremar per ogne vena.

“When he was at the height of his glory,” he said,

“putting aside all shame, he took his stand

135of his own free will in the Piazza del Campo in Siena;

and there, to release a friend of his from the punishment

he was suffering in Carlo’s prison,

138he brought himself to tremble in every vein.

To save his friend from prison, Provenzan, at the peak of his power, abased himself by sitting in the Piazza del Campo in Siena and humbly begging his fellow citizens to contribute what they could to raise the funds necessary to free him. The friend had been taken prisoner in the Battle of Tagliacozzo by Charles of Anjou, who demanded a huge ransom of ten thousand florins. This act of self-abasement on another’s behalf, a single selfless gesture of humility, released him from the need to spend time in ante-purgatory.

More ekphrasis: virgil urges dante to cast his eyes to the ground and observe what he is walking on. He finds the terrace floor to be covered with bas-relief carvings, like tombstones set into the floor of a church. They show exemplary instances of pride struck down, drawn from the Bible and classical myth and history. Each story is encapsulated at its key moment in a lapidary tercet of extreme concision and forcefulness. Altogether there are thirteen such examples. They follow in rapid succession with no interval or commentary between them. The tercets are arranged in groups of three: the opening letters of these groups—V, O, M—form an acrostic: uom(o), “man.” Here are some of them.

Lucifer is cast down from heaven, the speed and finality of his fate caught in the tautness and energy of the tercet.

Vedea colui che fu nobil creatopiù ch’altra creatura, giù dal cielo

27folgoreggiando scender, da l’un lato.

I saw the one who was created more noble

than any other creature fall from heaven

27like a thunderbolt, on one side.

The giant Nimrod stands at the foot of the Tower of Babel, unable to communicate with his fellow workers because of the confusion of tongues, the punishment for his hubris in thinking he could reach heaven by his own efforts.

Vedea Nembròt a piè del gran lavoroquasi smarrito, e riguardar le genti

36che ’n Sennaàr con lui superbi fuoro.

I saw Nimrod at the foot of his great work,

as though bewildered, gazing at the people

36who were proud with him in Shinar.

Niobe weeps over her dead children, whose deaths were caused by her prideful boasting about them, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI, 112):

O Nïobè, con che occhi dolentivedea io te segnata in su la strada,

39tra sette e sette tuoi figliuoli spenti!

Oh Niobe, with what sorrowing eyes

I saw you carved on the roadway,

39amidst your seven dead sons and seven dead daughters!

Arachne was so proud of her skill at weaving tapestries that she challenged the goddess Minerva, who destroyed the tapestry she was working on and turned her into a spider (Metamorphoses VI, 5–145). We see her at the moment of transition:

O folle Aragne, sì vedea io tegià mezza ragna, trista in su li stracci

45de l’opera che mal per te si fé.

O mad Arachne, I saw you

already half turned to spider, desolate on the tatters

45of the tapestry that brought you so much harm.

Thamyris, queen of the Scythians, taunts the decapitated head of her enemy, King Cyrus of Persia, which she has cast into a vessel full of human blood, mocking him with a play on words. Dante knew this gruesome story from the early medieval historian Orosius, who recounted it in his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans.

Mostrava la ruina e ’l crudo scempioche fé Tamiri, quando disse a Ciro:

57«Sangue sitisti, e io di sangue t’empio».

It showed the ruin and the cruel slaughter

wrought by Thamyris, when she said to Cyrus:

57“You thirsted for blood, and I’m giving you your fill of blood.”

The last in the series is not a person but a city. The splendour of Troy—superbum / Ilium: “proud / Ilium” (Aeneid III, 2–3)—is reduced to ruins:

Vedeva Troia in cenere e in caverne;o Ilión, come te basso e vile

63mostrava il segno che lì si discerne!

I saw Troy in ashes and in ruins;

Oh Ilion, how low and base

63the carving visible there showed you to be!

These carvings, like the earlier ones on the walls, are extraordinarily lifelike: Morti li morti e i vivi parean vivi (“the dead seemed dead, and the living seemed alive”). The series offers snapshots of human history in supreme moments of reckless and overreaching arrogance and monstrous self-regard. None of the examples is from Christian history, humility being the founding virtue of Christianity.

Now Dante and Virgil come upon an angel, who leads them to a point where there are steps cut into the rock and they can easily go up. The angel touches Dante’s forehead with his wing and promises him safe passage. Voices can be heard singing a beatitude, Beati pauperes spiritu! (“Blessed are the poor in spirit!”).

The beatitudes, pronounced by Jesus to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12), proclaim the virtues by which a good Christian should live. They express a Christian value system that is very different from the classical and feudal ones. The pairing of them with the seven deadly sins, as Dante does to such striking effect in Purgatorio, is not his invention. It had been anticipated by the twelfth-century scholastic theologian Hugh of St. Victor in his De quinque septenis (Dante, as usual, varies the model somewhat). The virtues celebrated in the beatitudes—among them humility, mercy, mildness, non-combativeness (in modern terms: compassion, empathy, kindness, gentleness, consideration for others)—are the opposite of prideful assertion of self.

A puzzled Dante feels lighter, as though a weight has been lifted from him. Virgil explains that when all the Ps have been erased from his forehead, as one has now been, his feet will feel no tiredness at all. A doubtful Dante checks his forehead for the letters, and indeed finds only six. His action prompts Virgil to smile.

Allor fec’ io come color che vannocon cosa in capo non da lor saputa,

129se non che ’ cenni altrui sospecciar fanno;

per che la mano ad accertar s’aiuta,e cerca e truova e quello officio adempie

132che non si può fornir per la veduta;

e con le dita de la destra scempietrovai pur sei le lettere che ’ncise

135quel da le chiavi a me sovra le tempie:

a che guardando, il mio duca sorrise.

Then I did as people do who go around

with something on their head they don’t know about,

129but other people’s gestures make them suspect something;

so their hand tries to check,

and it seeks and finds and carries out the task

132that their sight cannot;

and with the fingers of my right hand spread open

I found only six of the letters

135the angel with the keys inscribed on my forehead:

watching this, my leader smiled.

The canto ends on this delicately comic and affectionate note, beautifully captured by Botticelli in his drawing for this scene.

A pattern has been established on the terrace of pride. It will be followed, with variations, on every terrace. First we encounter examples of the virtue opposed to the sin punished, always starting with the Virgin Mary, followed by other biblical and classical instances. There follow encounters with the sinners, whose punishment will always prove to be a corrective to, or an embodiment of, the psychological state that caused them to sin. Then there are notorious examples of the sin punished. Finally, the pronouncing of a beatitude, and an angel who touches Dante’s forehead with his wing, erasing one of the Ps inscribed on it. The beatitude and the angel are fixed points that mark the end of one terrace before Dante is ready to move up to the next one.

In Inferno, there was no such regularity and patterning in the narrative. Rather, there were constant surprises. The unpredictability of the topography and the unexpectedness of the narrative twists and turns fuelled the reader’s curiosity. One might fear that Purgatorio, with its more regular terrain and predictable pattern of events, would be less engaging. But Dante’s fertility of invention is unabated. Indeed the narrative constraints of regularity and repetition seem, if anything, to power his imagination, just as the metrical constraints of the terza rima galvanise and energise his linguistic inventiveness.

On the circle of pride we met an aristocrat, an artist, and a political leader: three categories who might be thought peculiarly susceptible to the sin. Pride encompasses every kind of attitude born of a conviction of one’s own superiority to other people, an inflated sense of one’s own importance in the scheme of things. Its various manifestations include arrogance, vainglory, hubris, presumption, boastfulness. In modern life we speak of grandiosity, narcissism, egotism, a sense of entitlement, a superiority complex, bigheadedness, overbearingness, snobbery, haughtiness, disdain, a dismissive contempt for lesser mortals. The beatitude that concludes the sequence devoted to pride—beati pauperes spiritu: “blessed are the poor in spirit”—celebrates precisely the opposite frame of mind.

The central example of pride punished in canto 12 is Arachne, the only figure punished for boastfulness about artistic skill. Her fate prompts a question: Where does legitimate pride in one’s own talents and achievements end, and an inflated sense of one’s own importance begin? Arachne challenged a goddess, not a wise move. She is called folle (mad), the very word used by Dante at the beginning of his journey when he voiced doubt about his fitness to undertake it (and, by extension, to write the poem that records the experience). The delicate nexus which links self-belief with self-aggrandisement is allusively touched on here, but it is not explored. It is a concern which perforce underlies the whole poem. The poem as an artefact exists only because of its maker’s pride in it, and in his own talents which enable him to make it. But acknowledging one’s God-given gifts and using them properly as a way to self-fulfilment is not the same thing as self-aggrandisement. What is at issue here is not talent (unarguable, God-given), but character. The notion of character turns, in large part, on one’s relationship to and treatment of other people. It is a matter of our interactions in the world: how we relate to and treat our fellow human beings.

We can take a moment to admire Dante’s formal sense of composition. The centrality of the theme of artistic pride is matched by its central position in the triptych. The artist is flanked by the aristocrat and the political leader, and they in turn by the exemplars of humility exalted and hubris punished. The poet’s human dilemma in his own life was to nurture his self-belief while resisting self-aggrandisement. The circumstances of his life post-exile, dependent on the hospitality and generosity of others, will surely have helped to maintain the delicate balance.

Dante and virgil emerge from the staircase onto the second terrace. There is no sign of people, nor of carvings on the cliff face or the path; both are dark, stone-coloured and unadorned. They walk on, and suddenly hear disembodied voices flying past, calling out:

e verso noi volar furon sentiti,non però visti, spiriti parlando

27a la mensa d’amor cortesi inviti.

La prima voce che passò volando‘Vinum non habent’ altamente disse,

30e dietro a noi l’andò reïterando.

E prima che del tutto non si udisseper allungarsi, un’altra ‘I’ sono Oreste’

33passò gridando, e anco non s’affisse.

«Oh!», diss’ io, «padre, che voci son queste?».E com’ io domandai, ecco la terza

36dicendo: ‘Amate da cui male aveste’.

and flying towards us were heard,

but not seen, spirits speaking

27courteous invitations to the table of love.

The first voice that flew past

said loudly: “Vinum non habent,”*

30and went off behind us repeating it.

* “They have no wine”

And before it was quite out of hearing

in the distance, another voice passed by,

33shouting, “I am Orestes,” and it too did not stay.

“O,” I said, “father, what voices are these?”

And as I asked here was the third,

36saying: “Love those who did you wrong.”

The fragments of dialogue are all the more evocative for their brevity and the speed with which they fly past. This is the circle of envy, Virgil explains, and the examples just heard are cases of love and loving kindness, the virtue opposed to the sin. Mary at the wedding in Cana told Jesus, “They have no wine,” and this led to his first miracle: turning water into wine. Pylades offered to die in place of his friend Orestes: when the tyrant of Tauris wished to kill Orestes, but did not know him, Pylades claimed to be him (“I am Orestes”), hoping to sacrifice himself for his friend. The words of Jesus, the most profoundly challenging and difficult Christian injunction of all, were: “Love your enemies, those who have harmed you.”

These exemplary cases of loving kindness function like whips, spurring the shades on to good. The examples of envy punished, which they will hear before they leave the terrace, have the opposite effect, acting like bridles, to curb unloving impulses. The terms “whips” and “bridles” suggest the training of horses: the penitents must be metaphorically disciplined and schooled in the appropriate state of mind.

E ’l buon maestro: «Questo cinghio sferzala colpa de la invidia, e però sono

39tratte d’amor le corde de la ferza.

Lo fren vuol esser del contrario suono;credo che l’udirai, per mio avviso,

42prima che giunghi al passo del perdono.

And my good master: “This circle scourges

the sin of envy, and therefore

39the cords of the whip are drawn from love.

The bridle must sound the opposite note;

I think you’ll hear it, in my view,

42before you reach the passage of pardon.”

Whips were made of leather thongs braided together: each of the three fragmentary phrases is thus a strand in the whip. The “passage of pardon” is the point at which they can climb to the next terrace.

Virgil encourages Dante to look harder; if he does, he will make out seated figures leaning against the wall of the cliff, their cloaks the same dark colour as the stone they lean on.

Ma ficca li occhi per l’aere ben fiso,e vedrai gente innanzi a noi sedersi,

45e ciascun è lungo la grotta assiso».

Allora più che prima li occhi apersi;

guarda’mi innanzi, e vidi ombre con manti

48al color de la pietra non diversi.

But sharpen your gaze more intently through the air,

and you’ll see people seated ahead of us,

45and each of them is sitting along the cliff wall.

Then I opened my eyes wider than before;

I gazed ahead, and I saw shades with cloaks

48no different in colour from the stone.

Dante is filled with compassion at what he sees. The shades wear coarse cloth, and lean against one another, propping each other up against the cliff face, like blind beggars outside churches.

Di vil ciliccio mi parean coperti,e l’un sofferia l’altro con la spalla,

60e tutti da la ripa eran sofferti.

Così li ciechi a cui la roba falla,stanno a’ perdoni a chieder lor bisogna,

63e l’uno il capo sopra l’altro avvalla,

perché ’n altrui pietà tosto si pogna,non pur per lo sonar de le parole,

66ma per la vista che non meno agogna.

They seemed to me to be covered in rough haircloth,

and they were leaning on one another’s shoulders,

60and all of them were supported by the rock wall.

Just so blind people who have nothing to eat,

sit at church doorways to beg for what they need,

63and one inclines his head against the other,

the more readily to arouse pity in passersby,

not just at the sound of their words,

66but at the sight of them, that pleads no less strongly.

And then the most horrifying detail of all. The shades are like blind beggars huddled outside a church, but their inability to see has a very different cause: they cannot see because their eyes are stitched shut with wire, like those of a wild falcon when it is being trained.

E come a li orbi non approda il sole,così a l’ombre quivi, ond’ io parlo ora,

69luce del ciel di sé largir non vole;

ché a tutti un fil di ferro i cigh fórae cusce sì, come a sparvier selvaggio

72si fa però che queto non dimora.

And just as the sun does not profit the blind,

so the light of heaven does not bestow itself

69on the shades there, the ones I’m talking about now;

for an iron wire pierces all their eyelids

and sews them shut, just as people do

72to a wild falcon that will not be still.

In a delicate psychological touch, Dante notes in passing how uncomfortable he feels seeing people who can’t see him:

A me pareva, andando, fare oltraggio,veggendo altrui, non essendo veduto:

Going along, it seemed to me a discourtesy,

seeing people and not being seen by them:

He asks the shades if there are any Italians among them. A shade corrects him: You mean, is there anyone who lived in Italy while on the journey, the pilgrimage of life.

«O frate mio, ciascuna è cittadinad’una vera città; ma tu vuo’ dire

96che vivesse in Italia peregrina».

“Oh my brother, each of us is the citizen

of a true city; but you mean:

96who lived in Italy as a pilgrim.”

Earthly life, these words remind us, is a pilgrimage, a journey towards one’s true home, the celestial city, paradise. The speaker says she was from Siena. She freely acknowledges her faults with a play on words: although her name was Sapìa, which might suggest she was savia (wise), she was in fact anything but.

Savia non fui, avvegna che Sapìafossi chiamata, e fui de li altrui danni

111più lieta assai che di ventura mia.

I was not wise, though Sapìa was my name,

and I was a lot more joyful at the misfortunes

111of other people, than at my own good fortune.

In a devastatingly honest account of her own character, which takes us to the heart of what envy is, she says other people’s misfortune gave her more pleasure than any good fortune of her own.

We think of envy as wanting what someone else has got: understandable, perhaps even aspirational. As Dante portrays it, it is more sinister: wanting them not to have it, begrudging them their success or good fortune. The etymology of the word as it was understood in Dante’s time spells this out. Invidia comes from the Latin verb invidere, understood to mean in (“not”) and videre (“to see”). Uguccione da Pisa’s Derivationes (an etymological dictionary written a hundred years earlier) offers a definition that resonates with Dante’s portrayal: invideo tibi, idest non video, idest non fero videre te bene agentem (“I envy you, that is, I do not see you, that is, I cannot bear to see you doing well”); even more simply, invidia est odium alienis felicitatis (“envy is hatred of another’s happiness”). The eyes stitched shut, the haircloth that replicates in physical discomfort the psychological prickle of ill feeling towards others, the dark colour reflecting the absence of joy in lives consumed with spiteful, malicious thoughts: every aspect of the punishment of the envious bodies forth the sin of envy itself.

Sapìa gives an example of her perverse pleasure in the misfortunes of others:

Eran li cittadin miei presso a Collein campo giunti co’ loro avversari,

117e io pregava Iddio di quel ch’e’ volle.

Rotti fuor quivi e vòlti ne li amaripassi di fuga; e veggendo la caccia,

120letizia presi a tutte altre dispari,

tanto ch’io volsi in sù l’ardita faccia,gridando a Dio: ‘Omai più non ti temo!’,

123come fé ’l merlo per poca bonaccia.

My fellow citizens were near Colle,

joined with their enemies on the field of battle,

117and I prayed to God for what He then willed to happen.*

* i.e. the defeat of the Sienese

They were routed there, and turned in bitter

steps of flight; and seeing them pursued,

120I felt a joy unlike all other joys,

so much so that I turned my bold face upwards,

shouting to God: ‘Now I don’t fear you anymore!’

123as the blackbird did at a brief spell of fine weather.

What she prayed for (the defeat of her compatriots) is almost too terrible to put into words. But at the end of her life she turned to God in a different spirit. She would not have paid off the debt of penitence owed for her envy had it not been for the prayers of the saintly Pier Pettinaio, Peter the Comb-Seller:

Pace volli con Dio in su lo stremode la mia vita; e ancor non sarebbe

126lo mio dover per penitenza scemo,

se ciò non fosse, ch’a memoria m’ebbePier Pettinaio in sue sante orazioni,

129a cui di me per caritate increbbe.

I desired peace with God at the very end

of my life; and my debt would not yet

126be reduced by penitence,

if it were not that Peter the Comb-Seller

remembered me in his holy prayers;

129in his charity he felt sorry for my fate.

Peter prayed for her, and his prayers settled in part the debt she owed. Sapìa now asks Dante who he is. He answers in terms that freely acknowledge his own character failings. Pride he is guilty of, envy no. He will have to put in time on the first terrace, but very little time here on the second.

«Li occhi», diss’ io, «mi fieno ancor qui tolti,ma picciol tempo, ché poca è l’offesa

135fatta per esser con invidia vòlti.

Troppa è più la paura ond’ è sospesal’anima mia del tormento di sotto,

138che già lo ’ncarco di là giù mi pesa».

“My eyes,” I said, “will be taken from me here as well,

but not for long, for the offence done

135because they gazed in envy is slight.

My soul is much more afraid

of the punishment on the terrace below,

138for already the burden from down there weighs on me.”

This candid acknowledgement of his own character flaws nicely balances the self-affirmation at the centre of the previous terrace, though his claim that envy is not much of a problem for him might cause a psychoanalyst to raise an eyebrow.

The canto opens delightfully with a snatch of conversation between two shades who have registered that Dante is a living man, and, their curiosity piqued, discuss how best to ask him who he is.

«Chi è costui che ’l nostro monte cerchiaprima che morte li abbia dato il volo,

3e apre li occhi a sua voglia e coverchia?».

«Non so chi sia, ma so ch’e’ non è solo;domandal tu che più li t’avvicini,

6e dolcemente, sì che parli, acco’lo».

“Who is this man who’s circling round our mountain,

before death has given him wings,

3and he opens and shuts his eyes as he pleases?”

“I don’t know who he is, but I know he’s not alone;

you ask him, since you’re closer to him,

6and greet him courteously, so that he speaks.”

Dante does not reveal his name: it would mean nothing to them, he says. He merely volunteers that he comes from the river that flows through Tuscany. This is enough to spark off an impassioned attack by the shade on the valley of the Arno, where virtue is shunned like a serpent. In a bravura outburst, he traces the course of the river from its source in the mountains all the way down to the sea. City by city, the inhabitants are identified as animals. Those who live high up in the Casentino region are swine; the inhabitants of Arezzo, where the river swerves around the city rather than running through it, are yapping dogs; the Florentines are wolves; the Pisans are foxes.

Tra brutti porci, più degni di galleche d’altro cibo fatto in uman uso,

45dirizza prima il suo povero calle.

Botoli trova poi, venendo giuso,ringhiosi più che non chiede lor possa,

48e da lor disdegnosa torce il muso.

Vassi caggendo; e quant’ ella più ’ngrossa,tanto più trova di can farsi lupi

51la maladetta e sventurata fossa.

Discesa poi per più pelaghi cupi,trova le volpi sì piene di froda,

54che non temono ingegno che le occùpi.

It first directs its modest course

among ugly swine, more fit for acorns

45than for any food meant for human beings.

Then as it flows down it finds curs,

who snarl more than their power warrants,

48and it turns its snout away from them in disdain.

It carries on falling; and the wider it gets,

the more the accursed and ill-fated ditch

51finds that the dogs have become wolves.

Descending then through many deep-cut gorges,

it finds foxes so full of fraud,

54they have no fear that any trap can catch them.

The full force of the speaker’s disdain is expressed in the magnificently explosive and contemptuous line: la maladetta e sventurata fossa (“the cursed and ill-fated ditch”). This is an apocalyptic vision of a landscape peopled by inhabitants who are less than human: the valley of the Arno seen not in its natural beauty, but in its moral degradation.

The vision now becomes darker. The speaker launches into a bitter prophecy about the grandson of his companion, who will chase the Florentine wolves, selling them and murdering them, inflicting irreparable damage on the city. This is as dark a passage of prophecy as we will find in the poem.

Io veggio tuo nepote che diventacacciator di quei lupi in su la riva

60del fiero fiume, e tutti li sgomenta.

Vende la carne loro essendo viva;poscia li ancide come antica belva;

63molti di vita e sé di pregio priva.

Sanguinoso esce de la trista selva;lasciala tal, che di qui a mille anni

66ne lo stato primaio non si rinselva».

I see your grandson become

the huntsman of those wolves on the bank

60of the fierce river, and he terrorises them all.

He sells their flesh while they are still alive;

then he slaughters them like an ancient beast;

63he deprives many of life and himself of honour.

Bloodied he comes forth from the wicked wood;

he leaves it in such a state that in a thousand years

66the trees will not grow green as they once did.”

The grandson whose behaviour is so shocking is Fulcieri da Calboli, who became podestà (chief magistrate) of Florence in 1302–3, where he was a tool of the Black Guelphs, and betrayed both the White Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Contemporary chroniclers recount the atrocities he inflicted on his political rivals, selling them alive (essendo viva: selling them on the hoof, so to speak) to be tortured and killed by their enemies. This is one of the darkest episodes in Florentine history in the years immediately following Dante’s exile. Fulcieri was the podestà who immediately succeeded Cante de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio, the magistrate responsible for Dante’s exile, whose ruthlessly violent and divisive policies he continued. The passion with which the shade speaks as he reviles the monstrous Fulcieri is Dante’s own.

The shade now identifies himself, and freely acknowledges his envious nature, emphasising that it is other people’s good fortune that he finds intolerable:

Ma da che Dio in te vuol che tralucatanto sua grazia, non ti sarò scarso;

81però sappi ch’io fui Guido del Duca.

But since God wills his grace to shine forth

so brightly in you, I won’t be unforthcoming;

81know then that I was Guido del Duca.

Fu il sangue mio d’invidia sì rïarso,che se veduto avesse uom farsi lieto,

84visto m’avresti di livore sparso.

My blood was so fired up with envy,

that, if I saw any man become joyful,

84you would have seen my face turn livid.

“Livid” literally means leaden coloured, the dark colour of a bruise; a complexion mottled or blotched with dark patches was thought to be a typical sign of envy. It is of course the colour of the stone on which the shades are seated and against which they lean. Why, Guido asks, do human beings place their desires on things that cannot be shared?

o gente umana, perché poni ’l core

87là ’v’ è mestier di consorte divieto?

O human race, why set your hearts on things

87where of necessity there can be no sharing.

The material possessions human beings desire are diminished in quantity if they are shared. Dante will pick up on this phrase in the next canto and ask Virgil to explain it.

Guido introduces his companion, Rinieri da Calboli, also from Romagna, grandfather of the reviled Fulcieri. Like Tuscany, Romagna is not the place it was. The old families have unworthy heirs, the old ways have died out. Guido launches into a bravura lament on the theme ubi sunt (“where are they?”): Where are they now, the noblemen of old? The threnody matches in intensity, but in the opposite key, his denunciation of Fulcieri earlier in the canto.

Ov’ è ’l buon Lizio e Arrigo Mainardi?Pier Traversaro e Guido di Carpigna?

99Oh Romagnuoli tornati in bastardi!

Quando in Bologna un Fabbro si ralligna?quando in Faenza un Bernardin di Fosco,

102verga gentil di picciola gramigna?

Non ti maravigliar s’io piango, Tosco,quando rimembro, con Guido da Prata,

105Ugolin d’Azzo che vivette nosco,

Where is worthy Lizio and Arrigo Mainardi?

Pier Traversato and Guido di Carpigna?

99Oh men of Romagna become bastards again!

When will there be another Fabbro in Bologna?

when another Bernardin di Fosco in Faenza,

102noble offspring from modest stock?

Do not be amazed if I weep, Tuscan,

when I remember, with Guido da Prata,

105Ugolin d’Azzo, who lived in our parts,

Federigo Tignoso e sua brigata,la casa Traversara e li Anastagi

108(e l’una gente e l’altra è diretata)

le donne e ’ cavalier, li affanni e li agiche ne ’nvogliava amore e cortesia

111là dove i cuor son fatti sì malvagi.

Federigo Tignoso and his companions,

the Traversari family and the Anastagi

108(both families without an heir),

the ladies and the knights, the hardships and the leisure

which love and courtesy made us desire,

111where now hearts have become so wicked.

The litany continues with more names and equal eloquence for another four tercets. Investing a simple list of names with such evocative power is something few writers can pull off. A modern equivalent, in negative key, might be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s list of the hangers-on who go to Gatsby’s parties, a powerful evocation of a milieu and a morality through no more than a list of names.

The canto closes with disembodied voices that call out examples of envy punished. Two cases of sibling envy are captured in two memorably succinct lines. Cain, not named but instantly recognisable, envied his brother Abel, killed him, and was an outcast for life (‘Anciderammi qualunque m’apprende’: “Whoever finds me shall kill me”). Aglauros envied her sister Herse, who was loved by the god Mercury. (The story is told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses.) Aglauros barred Mercury from entering her sister’s bedchamber, but at a touch of his wand she was turned into dark stone (‘Io sono Aglauro che divenni sasso’: “I am Aglauros, who became stone”).

But these whips and bridles are ignored by human beings. Virgil laments the human susceptibility to blandishments, the ease with which people can be led off the true path; and this in spite of the beauty of the night sky. The heavenly bodies should draw mankind’s gaze upwards.

Ma voi prendete l’esca, sì che l’amode l’antico avversaro a sé vi tira;

147e però poco val freno o richiamo.

Chiamavi ’l cielo e ’ntorno vi si gira,mostrandovi le sue bellezze etterne,

150e l’occhio vostro pur a terra mira;

But you take the bait, so that the hook

of your old adversary draws you to him;

147and therefore curb and lure are of little avail.

The heavens call you and circle around you,

showing you their eternal beauty,

150and yet your eyes still gaze at the earth;

Another angel, another beatitude (beati misericordes!: “Blessed are the merciful!”). Both Thomas Aquinas and Cicero before him had seen mercy as the direct opposite of envy (“Just as compassion is distress at another’s unhappiness, so envy is distress at another’s happiness,” Tusculan Disputations 3, X).

The travellers have completed their stay on the second circle. They climb upwards, the stairs less steep than previously. As they climb, Dante asks a question: What did Guido del Duca mean when he talked about “no sharing with others”? Virgil’s explanation leaves him not entirely satisfied. He reformulates the question:

Com’ esser puote ch’un ben, distributoin più posseditor, faccia più ricchi

63di sé che se da pochi è posseduto?

How can it be that a good, distributed

among many possessors, can make them

63richer than if it were possessed by just a few?

If many people share something, how can they be richer than if it were shared by fewer people? The answer turns on the distinction between material possessions and spiritual goods. Sharing material possessions is a zero-sum game: if I have more, you have less. Not so with spiritual treasure. The more it is shared, the more enriching it is for everybody. If this explanation doesn’t satisfy Dante, Beatrice will explain at a later point.

They have reached the third terrace. Even before he gets his bearings Dante is caught up in the next series of whips, which present themselves to him in the form of an ecstatic vision:

Ivi mi parve in una visïoneestatica di sùbito esser tratto,

87e vedere in un tempio più persone;

e una donna, in su l’entrar, con attodolce di madre dicer: «Figliuol mio,

90perché hai tu così verso noi fatto?

There I seemed suddenly to be

drawn into an ecstatic vision,

87and to see many people in a temple;

and a woman, on the threshold, saying

with the gentle bearing of a mother: “My son,

90why have you acted towards us like this?

Ecco, dolenti, lo tuo padre e ioti cercavamo». E come qui si tacque,

93ciò che pareva prima, dispario.

Behold, your father and I, distressed,

were looking for you.” And as she here fell silent,

93what had appeared to me disappeared.

This is the story of Mary and Joseph finding the child Jesus in the temple, disputing with the elders. The gentleness of the mother’s questioning of her son, who had been missing for three days, is an example of the virtue opposed to the vice of anger: mildness or gentleness of manner.

The second vision is classical. Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, was urged by his enraged wife to put to death a young man who was in love with their daughter and had dared to kiss her in the marketplace. He responded in a way that became legendary: If we are to kill those who love us, what are we to do to those who hate us? His mild-mannered response deflated his wife’s demand for violent revenge.

The third vision is biblical, disturbing in its starkness. Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, even as he is stoned to death, prays for forgiveness for his murderers. The scene of his martyrdom so graphically portrayed here is an iconic exemplar of meekness, of the refusal to be goaded to anger or retaliation even by extreme violence.

Poi vidi genti accese in foco d’iracon pietre un giovinetto ancider, forte

108gridando a sé pur: «Martira, martira!».

E lui vedea chinarsi, per la morteche l’aggravava già, inver’ la terra,

111ma de li occhi facea sempre al ciel porte,

orando a l’alto Sire, in tanta guerra,che perdonasse a’ suoi persecutori,

114con quello aspetto che pietà diserra.

Then I saw people aflame with anger

stoning a youth to death, shouting

108loudly to one another: “Kill, kill!”

And I saw him sinking towards the ground,

for death was now weighing heavily on him,

111but he always kept his eyes open to heaven,

praying the Lord on high, in such great anguish,

to forgive his persecutors,

114with that look that unlocks pity.

This is one of the most memorable, and memorably Christian, vignettes in the poem, an arresting enactment of Christ’s injunction to love one’s enemies. The three exemplars of meekness act in increasingly challenging circumstances: a mother gently calling her son to task for causing his parents anxiety; a father resisting pressure to respond with moral outrage to a perceived social transgression; a protomartyr submitting himself unprotesting to his fate. We are on the terrace of anger, of which mansuetudo, mildness or gentleness, is the corrective virtue. Dante comes out of his trancelike state, and realises that he has been seeing visions, not real events.

Quando l’anima mia tornò di foria le cose che son fuor di lei vere,

117io riconobbi i miei non falsi errori.

When my mind came back outside,

to the real things that are outside it,

117I recognised my not-false errors.

The paradoxical phrase i miei non falsi errori underscores the visionary nature of what he has just experienced. The visions are errori because they are not real, they exist only in his mind; but they are not false, as errors usually are, because they convey a truth. The delicate nexus which links fact, truth and imagination—the complex interplay between the inner life and the outside world—is dramatically enacted in this visionary experience, but it is not analysed or explored.

It is striking that Dante’s visit to the otherworld in the Commedia is presented as a matter of fact: this actually happened. “I found myself in a dark wood,” not—as so often in medieval narrative poems about otherworldly experience—“I fell asleep and dreamed that I found myself in a dark wood.” The dreams and visions Dante experiences in purgatory are all the more powerful in light of this primary (and paradoxical) narrative truth-claim.

Thick smoke comes towards them. There is no place where they can take refuge from it. They are engulfed in its darkness, a meteorological counterpart to blind rage.

The smoke is so thick that dante can see nothing. to carry on he must place his hand on Virgil’s shoulder for guidance, like a blind man following a guide. An unseen shade, overhearing Virgil’s admonition to stay close, realises that Dante is a living man, and asks who he is. Dante in his turn asks the shade to identify himself, and to tell them the best way up the mountain. The shade succinctly answers both questions.

«Lombardo fui, e fu’ chiamato Marco;del mondo seppi, e quel valore amai

48al quale ha or ciascun disteso l’arco.

Per montar sù dirittamente vai».

“I was from Lombardy, and my name was Marco;

I knew the world, and I loved that virtue

48that no one aims his bow at anymore.

To go upwards, carry straight on.”

The speaker is a courtier from northern Italy of whom historically we know little, though stories survive about his wisdom and his love of peace. His life experience was similar to Dante’s, living in and travelling between the northern courts, a man both involved in and detached from contemporary political events. He serves in some sense as a stand-in for Dante himself. Through him Dante explores the key issue of personal responsibility for one’s actions. From personal ethics, the talk will then move on to society and politics. The personal and the political prove to be closely linked. An understanding of human developmental psychology, as Dante sees it, leads to an understanding of how the world should be governed.

Marco’s reply has touched fleetingly on the loss of the old courtly values, echoing Guido del Duca’s lament in canto 14. It sparks Dante’s fierce curiosity about the responsibility for the sorry state of the contemporary world. Does the fault lie in men, or in the stars? Some people think one thing, others the opposite.

Lo mondo è ben così tutto disertod’ogne virtute, come tu mi sone,

60e di malizia gravido e coverto;

ma priego che m’addite la cagione,sì ch’i’ la veggia e ch’i’ la mostri altrui;

63ché nel cielo uno, e un qua giù la pone».

The world truly is as utterly barren

of every virtue as you say,

60pregnant with wickedness and covered in it;

but I beg you to point out the cause to me,

so that I may see it and show it to others;

63for some people place it in the heavens, and others down here below.”

Is the cause of contemporary depravity to be found in astral influences over which men have no control, or is it rather the fault of men themselves? Marco’s answer is prefaced by a long, weary sigh.

Alto sospir, che duolo strinse in «uhi!»,mise fuor prima; e poi cominciò: «Frate,

66lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui.

First he uttered a deep sigh, which sorrow

compressed into a groan; then he began: “Brother,

66the world is blind, and you surely come from it.

The lines which now follow take us to the heart of the moral universe of the poem.

Voi che vivete ogne cagion recatepur suso al cielo, pur come se tutto

69movesse seco di necessitate.

Se così fosse, in voi fora distruttolibero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia

72per ben letizia, e per male aver lutto.

You who are alive attribute every cause

to the heavens above alone, as though they moved

69everything with them by necessity.

If that were so, free will would be

destroyed in you, and there would be no justice

72in having joy for good, and grief for evil.

If men’s actions were determined by the stars, there would be no fairness in a system of rewards and punishments in the afterlife for actions committed on earth. (‘Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore’—“Justice moved my maker on high”—is inscribed over the gate of hell, at the outset of the journey to the otherworld.) Those actions would in the final analysis have been caused by astral influences outside an individual’s control. If astral determinism were true, there would be no poem. (In the modern world, where the philosophical conundrum of determinism is as relevant as ever to any thinking person, determinists devolve responsibility onto genetic and environmental factors: nature and nurture.)

If the fault for men’s misconduct lay in the stars, this would mean that there is no free will. But there is free will, Marco argues. The stars determine men’s dispositions and characters, their strengths and weaknesses, their inclinations and revulsions, but—crucially—they do not determine their actions. Human beings are given two things that make them free agents: judgment and free will. If to start with it is difficult to exercise these two faculties, with practice and encouragement, training and discipline, these choices become easier.

Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia;non dico tutti, ma, posto ch’i’ ’l dica,

75lume v’è dato a bene e a malizia,

e libero voler; che, se faticane le prime battaglie col ciel dura,

78poi vince tutto, se ben si notrica.

The heavens set your actions in motion;

I don’t say all of them, but, even were I to say that,

75a light is given you to tell good from evil,

and free will; if it struggles

in its early battles with the heavens,*

78later it conquers all, if it is well nurtured.

* i.e. in overcoming its natural inclinations or predispositions, determined by the stars

Human beings have reason, and they have free will. The light of reason gives them the capacity to tell right from wrong. Free will enables them to make choices and to act on them. The human mind is not subject to the decrees of the stars. On the contrary, it is subject to God alone. As Mark Antony puts it in Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140–41): “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves.” Marco’s intricate, careful, complex working through the argument could be thought of as an extended gloss or commentary avant la lettre on Shakespeare’s famously terse lines.

A maggior forza e a miglior naturaliberi soggiacete; e quella cria

81la mente in voi, che ’l ciel non ha in sua cura.

To a greater power and to a better nature*

you are freely subject; and that creates

81mind in you, which the heavens do not control.

* God

It is God who creates the human mind, which is subject only to Him, and thus free. The paradox of free submission to God is enunciated but not explored. Astral influences affect human character, but they do not govern the mind. If the world has gone wrong, the fault is to be found in men, not in the stars.

Però, se ’l mondo presente disvia,in voi è la cagione, in voi si cheggia;

84e io te ne sarò or vera spia.

So if the present world has gone astray,

the reason’s in you, look for it in yourselves;

84and I’ll now be a true guide to you in this.

Marco now elaborates on this by explaining, in a passage of remarkable freshness and delicacy, how the human soul is created and how it develops. As it grows, it is attracted by what gives it pleasure.

Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggiaprima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla

87che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia,

l’anima semplicetta che sa nulla,salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,

90volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla.

From the hand of Him who looks on it lovingly

before it comes into being, like a little girl

87who weeps and laughs childishly,

the simple soul comes forth, knowing nothing,

save that, brought into being by a joyful creator,

90it turns spontaneously to what delights it.

At first it is attracted to small goods; it pursues them unless it is turned aside from them by a guide or by a curb.

Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore;quivi s’inganna, e dietro ad esso corre,

93se guida o fren non torce suo amore.

At first it tastes the flavour of a small good;

in that it is deceived, and runs after it,

93unless a guide or curb deflect its love.

Marco now circles back from human developmental psychology to broader social issues, the way the world is organised. Humankind needs the law to function as a curb on its primary pleasure-seeking impulse; it needs a ruler to function as a guide, to show the way at least towards the true city.

Onde convenne legge per fren porre;convenne rege aver, che discernesse

96de la vera cittade almen la torre.

Thus law was necessary as a curb;

a ruler was necessary, who might make out

96at least the tower of the true city.

Marco now becomes openly political and polemical. Where in canto 6 it was the emperor who failed in his duty, now the pope stands accused. As the spiritual leader of the human race, he is unfitted to exercise the temporal power he has usurped. There are laws, but who enforces them? No one, because the pope, the shepherd of the human flock, is not equipped to do so.

Le leggi son, ma chi pon mano ad esse?Nullo, . . .

The laws are there, but who enforces them?

No one, . . .

The people, seeing their spiritual leader intent on accruing temporal power and possessions, the very things they themselves desire, follow his example and look no further.

per che la gente, che sua guida vedepur a quel ben fedire ond’ ella è ghiotta,

102di quel si pasce, e più oltre non chiede.

and so the people, who see their leader

pursuing the very goods they’re greedy for,

102feed on those, and ask for nothing more.

If the pope is seen to pursue precisely those material goods that his flock desires (money, power), his behaviour validates their basest instincts. The inescapable conclusion about mankind’s own culpability for the depravity of the world is summarised in a tercet:

Ben puoi veder che la mala condottaè la cagion che ’l mondo ha fatto reo,

105e non natura che ’n voi sia corrotta.

You can clearly see that bad leadership

is the cause that has made the world wicked,

105and not nature that has become corrupt in you.

The problem with the world is mala condotta, “bad leadership”—poor governance, not malign astral influences.

Marco turns to history to explain what has gone wrong. He uses the striking image of the two suns, signifying religious and secular authority, which historically illuminated the human race. But the pope has usurped temporal powers. No single figure can operate effectively in both spheres, the religious and the secular.

Soleva Roma, che ’l buon mondo feo,due soli aver, che l’una e l’altra strada

108facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo.

L’un l’altro ha spento; ed è giunta la spadacol pasturale, e l’un con l’altro insieme

111per viva forza mal convien che vada;

Rome, which made the good world,*

used to have two suns,** which illuminated the two paths,

108the world’s path and God’s path.

* i.e. provided a model for good government

** papal and imperial authority

The one has extinguished the other; and the sword

is joined with the crook, and linked together

111by force they inevitably proceed badly;

Just look at the results in the world around you to see if what I am saying is true, he urges. The courtly values of courage and courtesy used to rule in northern Italy, but this is no longer so, not since the time of Frederick II, who died in 1250. Although initially favoured by the popes, in the later decades of his rule (the 1230s and 1240s) he was increasingly opposed by them. The ensuing struggle between emperor and pope for power in the peninsula, now ongoing for seventy years, has brought only political turmoil and instability. Though we have seen Frederick condemned to hell for his atheism in Inferno 10, his rights and privileges as emperor are an unassailable principle.

A final tercet summarises with breathtaking directness the disastrous effects of papal interference in politics:

Dì oggimai che la Chiesa di Roma,per confondere in sé due reggimenti,

129cade nel fango, e sé brutta e la soma».

Say then that the Church of Rome,

because it confounds in itself two kinds of governance,

129falls in the mud, and soils itself and its burden.”

The burden it soils is the imperial authority it has usurped.

No reader could mistake the vital importance of this episode in the unfolding drama of the poem. We are told nothing of Marco or his story or his sin; the sin itself is not dwelt on, nor do we engage with the shades guilty of it. The legitimate question of whether there can be righteous, justified anger is not touched on, though both Dante and Marco might be thought to share it and express it. We are very near the centre of the poem. Its political message has now been spelled out with visceral directness. The next two cantos will take us to the conceptual, theological and psychological truths that underpin that message: to the heart of Dante’s thinking about human behaviour and society.

To describe the smoke dissipating, dante appeals to the reader’s experience of being in thick fog in the mountains as the sun first starts to penetrate it. The unfolding narrative and the dense line of argument now embedded in it are characteristically anchored to concrete visual detail, evoked with an almost cinematographic sense of movement and light:

Ricorditi, lettor, se mai ne l’alpeti colse nebbia per la qual vedessi

3non altrimenti che per pelle talpe,

come, quando i vapori umidi e spessia diradar cominciansi, la spera

6del sol debilemente entra per essi;

Remember, reader, if ever in the mountains

you were caught by fog, through which you could see

3only as a mole does through its skin,

how, when the damp, dense vapours

begin to thin out, the disk of the sun

6shows weakly through them;

The smoke is thinning. After a second set of miraculous visions (the bridles or curbs on the sin of anger), a staircase, an angel, and a beatitude (Beati pacifici: “Blessed are the peacemakers”), Dante and Virgil leave the terrace of wrath behind them and emerge onto a new terrace. It is nightfall. Dante asks what sin is punished here. Virgil explains that it is an insufficiently developed or active love of the good: sloth or spiritual laziness.

Ed elli a me: «L’amor del bene, scemodel suo dover, quiritta si ristora;

87qui si ribatte il mal tardato remo.

And he said to me: “The love of the good

that falls short of what it should be is restored here;

87here the sluggish oar is plied anew.

These sinners were spiritual slackers; now they must make up for that lack of keenness by metaphorically rowing harder and faster. The concrete image of the mal tardato remo (“sluggish oar”) is memorably concise. The meaning is crystal clear yet can be unpacked only through cumbersome paraphrase. The metaphorical oar, used lazily while alive, and wrongly so (that is, sinfully), must be plied strenuously as a corrective.

The sin of sloth is of limited dramatic potential. It harms no one else; nor is it self-destructive. It is a difficult sin to represent in terms of temperament or actions. To modern eyes, it might sometimes look like depression. The punishment of the penitent slothful, when we encounter them in the next canto, will simply be to run past Virgil and Dante, overtaking them and shouting as they go. Vigorous exercise energises, exhilarates: a physical corrective to spiritual torpor.

But having defined the sin so memorably in the arresting mal tardato remo, Dante uses the terrace of sloth, and the fall of night, as a perfect context for further doctrinal enlightenment. Dante’s initial question (What sin is punished here?) prompts a further crucial explanation from Virgil, who elucidates the role of love in human life, as an aid to understanding the sin of sloth and its relationship to the other six capital vices.

«Né creator né creatura mai»,cominciò el, «figliuol, fu sanza amore,

93o naturale o d’animo; e tu ’l sai.

Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore,ma l’altro puote errar per malo obietto

96o per troppo o per poco di vigore.

“No creator or creature,”

he began, “my son, was ever without love,

93either natural or elective; and you know this.

Natural love is always without error,

but the other can err by choosing a wrong object,

96or because it’s too strong, or not strong enough.

Natural love is instinctive, unerring; the primary impulse to love is in itself blameless. But elective love (amor d’animo: love in the mind) involves choice, and it can go wrong in three ways.

Mentre ch’elli è nel primo ben diretto,e ne’ secondi sé stesso misura,

99esser non può cagion di mal diletto;

ma quando al mal si torce, o con più curao con men che non dee corre nel bene,

102contra ’l fattore adovra sua fattura.

As long as it is directed to the primal good,*

and observes due measure in secondary** goods,

99it cannot be a cause of sinful pleasure;

* God

** i.e. earthly

but when it turns towards evil, or pursues some good

with more zeal or with less zeal than it should,

102the creature is working against its creator.

Love, Virgil declares, is the seed of all human action, good or bad.

Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser conveneamor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute

105e d’ogne operazion che merta pene.

Thus you can understand that of necessity

love is the seed in you of every virtue

105and of every action that deserves punishment.

The key to understanding human behaviour, whether praiseworthy or sinful, is love. It is indeed, as we shall see, the key to understanding the universe, and Dante’s poem, at whose exact centre we now find ourselves.

Virgil elaborates further: It is not possible not to love oneself. (The modern psychoanalytic view, which sees self-loathing and low self-esteem as the root of much destructive, antisocial and even criminal behaviour, could not be further from Dante. Apparently the Dalai Lama likewise had difficulty grasping this Western concept, that it is possible not to love oneself.) Nor is it possible not to love one’s maker. So love that is wrongly directed, that turns towards a bad object (al mal si torce), involves neither oneself nor God, but one’s fellow human beings; and it takes three forms.

Resta, se dividendo bene stimo,che ’l mal che s’ama è del prossimo; ed esso

114amor nasce in tre modi in vostro limo.

It follows, if I’m correct in these distinctions,

that the ill we love must be our neighbour’s harm;

114and that love arises in three ways in your clay.

Here, in a nutshell, at the very centre of Purgatorio (canto 17 out of thirty-three), is the conceptual basis of the three terraces we have already passed through; the ground plan for the structure of all the terraces on the mountain will follow. Love of another’s harm expresses itself in three ways: pride, envy, anger. The proud, desiring to excel, hope that other people are brought low; the envious, as we have seen so eloquently expressed by Sapìa and Guido del Duca, experience the good fortune of others as intolerable, and hope things go badly for them; the wrathful, out of revenge for a wrong, want harm to befall the perpetrator.

The love which pursues the good but with too little vigour is sloth, the terrace on which we now find ourselves. But there are other goods, things which are good in themselves, but which, if pursued too eagerly, do not bring happiness.

Altro ben è che non fa l’uom felice;non è felicità, non è la buona

135essenza, d’ogne ben frutto e radice.

There’s another good that does not make man happy;

it is not happiness, it is not the good essence

135that is the fruit and root of all that’s good.

Virgil then observes the sound pedagogical principle that Dante must work out for himself how the final three cornices relate to this false good.

L’amor ch’ad esso troppo s’abbandona,di sovr’ a noi si piange per tre cerchi;

138ma come tripartito si ragiona,

tacciolo, acciò che tu per te ne cerchi».

The love which gives itself to that too much,

is mourned above us in three circles;

138but of how it’s subdivided into three,

I say nothing, so you can search it out for yourself.”

Fig. 4 the mountain of purgatory and its subdivisions

Dante has more questions, but hesitates to ask. virgil urges him to speak up. Dante’s question is simple: If, as Virgil says, love is the key to all human behaviour, what is love exactly? how does it work?

Però ti prego, dolce padre caro,che mi dimostri amore, a cui reduci

15ogne buono operare e ’l suo contraro».

Therefore I beg you, dear sweet father,

explain love to me, from which you derive

15every good action and its opposite.”

Virgil’s explanation, simple as a conceptual model, yet expounded sometimes using highly technical philosophical language, will prove to be the key to understanding the moral universe in which human beings operate.

«Drizza», disse, «ver’ me l’agute lucide lo ’ntelletto, e fieti manifesto

18l’error de’ ciechi che si fanno duci.

He said, “Turn towards me the sharp light

of your understanding, and you will clearly perceive

18the error of the blind who set themselves up as guides.

How does love operate in human beings? As modern readers, we must put aside any notions we might have of love as romantic longing or sexual passion. Virgil offers an account of love which is philosophical (in medieval terms, “scientific”), pitched at a level of generalisation that reduces it to first principles, a law of nature, applicable to everyone in every aspect of their lives. The experience of attraction and desire is universal.

L’animo, ch’è creato ad amar presto,ad ogne cosa è mobile che piace,

21tosto che dal piacere in atto è desto.

The mind, which is created with a natural disposition to love,

moves towards everything that pleases it,

21as soon as it is roused by pleasure to action.

The potentiality for loving, innate in human beings, becomes an actuality, a reality, when an individual perceives an attractive object in the outside world and is drawn towards it. It now internalises the image of the thing that attracts it.

Vostra apprensiva da esser veracetragge intenzione, e dentro a voi la spiega,

24sì che l’animo ad essa volger face;

Your perception draws a mental image

from a real thing, and unfolds it within you,

24so that it makes the mind turn towards it;

The mind contemplates the mental image that the sense faculties have abstracted from something that exists in the outside world. If it finds itself drawn to the image, that process of attraction is what we call love.

e se, rivolto, inver’ di lei si piega,quel piegare è amor, quell’ è natura

27che per piacer di novo in voi si lega.

and if, so turned, it inclines towards it,

that inclining is love, that is nature

27which is bound in you in the first place through pleasure.

The natural inclination to love, innate in all of us, remains a potentiality until it is activated by a pleasing object outside oneself, and is drawn to it. At this point potentiality becomes actuality. Love is simply that attraction, no more, no less: quel piegare è amor; love is that “bending towards,” that “being drawn to,” the object or person whose mental image is nurtured in the mind. Just as fire naturally rises, so the desiring soul seeks the object of desire, and finds no peace until it is united with it.

Poi, come ’l foco movesi in alturaper la sua forma ch’è nata a salire

30là dove più in sua matera dura,

così l’animo preso entra in disire,ch’è moto spiritale, e mai non posa

33fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire.

Then, just as fire moves upwards,

because of its form which is born to rise,

30to where it lasts longer in its element,

just so the captive mind begins to desire;

this is a movement of the spirit, and it never rests

33until the thing that is loved makes it feel joy.

Union with the loved object brings happiness. So those who think all loves are praiseworthy are mistaken.

Or ti puote apparer quant’ è nascosala veritate a la gente ch’avvera

36ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa;

però che forse appar la sua materasempre esser buona, ma non ciascun segno

39è buono, ancor che buona sia la cera».

Now you can see how hidden the truth is

from those people who aver

36that every love in itself is a praiseworthy thing;

perhaps because its matter

seems always to be good, but not every imprint

39is good, even though the wax be good.”

The natural inclination to love (the wax) will always be good, but not every instance of loving (a particular imprint made on the wax) will be good. Though love itself, as an impulse, is always free of blame, any given act of loving will not necessarily be so. The goodness of the wax does not preclude a smudged or defective impression, a bad or flawed instance of loving.

But Dante still has a question: If the object of attraction exists outside the observer, who has no control over it, and love is a natural force, how can there be any praise or blame in loving, since no act of choosing is involved?

«Le the parole e ’l mio seguace ingegno»,rispuos’ io lui, «m’hanno amor discoverto,

42ma ciò m’ha fatto di dubbiar più pregno;

ché, s’amore è di fuori a noi offertoe l’anima non va con altro piede,

45se dritta o torta va, non è suo merto».

“Your words, and my intellect that follows them,”

I answered him, “have revealed love to me,

42but that has made me more full of doubt;

for if love is offered us from outside ourselves,

and loving is the soul’s natural inclination,

45if it goes straight or crooked, there’s no merit involved.”

Virgil clarifies that his explanation can go only as far as reason can see; beyond that is Beatrice’s realm, a matter of faith, and Dante must turn to her. Our modern sense that reason and faith might be at odds with each other is alien to Dante; like Aquinas, he sees the understanding that comes from theology as perfecting and completing the understanding that comes from philosophy.

The language becomes almost technical as Virgil proceeds to grapple with fundamental issues. There are aspects of human functioning that are as instinctive to people as it is instinctive to bees to make honey. We are born with our knowledge of prime notizie, “primal concepts,” and with our appetite for the primi appetibili, “primary objects of desire.” The prime notizie are first principles which underlie our capacity for thinking (notions like contradiction, existence and nonexistence, whole and part, truth and falsity); the primi appetibili stand in the same relation to appetite as these primal concepts stand to intellection; they are aspects of the primal good, God (so goodness, truth, beauty). We do not know where this knowledge and this desire come from. Their functioning in us does not attract praise or blame.

Però, là onde vegna lo ’ntellettode le prime notizie, omo non sape,

57e de’ primi appetibili l’affetto,

che sono in voi sì come studio in apedi far lo mele; e questa prima voglia

60merto di lode o di biasmo non cape.

And so, man does not know whence comes

his knowledge of primal concepts,

57and his attraction to primary objects of desire;

they are in you in the same way as the urge

to make honey is in bees; and this first desire

60does not merit praise or blame.

So that other loves do not conflict with the blameless character of this primal, instinctive love, reason stands vigilant on the threshold of consent, cultivating worthy loves and weeding out unworthy ones.

Or perché a questa ogn’ altra si raccoglia,innata v’è la virtù che consiglia,

63e de l’assenso de’ tener la soglia.

Quest’ è ’l principio là onde si pigliaragion di meritare in voi, secondo

66che buoni e rei amori accoglie e viglia.

Now, so that all other desires may conform with this one,

there is inborn in you the power of discernment,

63and it must guard the threshold of assent.

This is the principle from which derives

the reason for your meriting praise or blame,

66according as it welcomes good loves and weeds out bad ones.

The role of free will in human life, the foundation stone of human moral agency, was already apparent to the great philosophers of antiquity:

Color che ragionando andaro al fondo,s’accorser d’esta innata libertate;

69però moralità lasciaro al mondo.

Those who by reasoning went to the bottom of the matter

recognised this inborn freedom;

69and thus they left morality to the world.

The concept of morality exists only in a world where there is free will, where people can choose to do one thing rather than another. Pagan thinkers (Aristotle, Plato), using natural reason alone, penetrated to this basic principle of moral conduct, and founded the study of ethics. Aristotle’s Ethics, filtered through the Christian theology of Aquinas, is a fundamental source for Dante’s views on human behaviour. The recovery of Aristotle’s texts in the hundred years before Dante’s birth is one of the major landmarks in the intellectual history of Western Europe, and leaves an indelible mark on Dante and his thinking.

Onde, poniam che di necessitatesurga ogne amor che dentro a voi s’accende,

72di ritenerlo è in voi la podestate.

So, granted that every love which is kindled

in you arises of necessity,

72the power to restrain it lies in you.

Although there is no blame in the initial attraction, which is beyond the control of the individual, acting on the attraction, pursuing the object of desire, may be sinful. Virgil concludes this dense exposition by saying that Beatrice will enlighten Dante further on free will, as indeed she does in canto 5 of Paradiso.

To summarise: The individual as a moral agent is working with his own character and temperament, which are influenced by the stars; he is dealing on the one hand with an innate disposition to be attracted to things outside the self, and on the other with those very attractions out there in the world, external objects that unavoidably elicit desire. But he also has the judgment required to tell good from evil, right from wrong; and he has free will, which enables him to make choices, to operate effectively as a moral agent. He makes his own moral choices. He is responsible for his own destiny.

Virgil’s exposition of love to an eagerly attentive and questioning Dante is a nugget of scholastic philosophy at the core of the poem. This could be a medieval philosophy class, the pupil putting to the teacher objections, problems, complications, which the teacher expertly counters and clarifies. The intricate line of argument is laid out with effortless ease within the tight metrical form. Though the terminology is at times arcane, there is a notable clarity and fluency in the exposition. Some of the key statements have a memorable epigrammatic quality (contra ’l fattore adovra sua fattura; se dritta o torta va, non è suo merto; però moralità lasciaro al mondo).

From this vantage point, we can look back and see that Francesca’s account of love in Inferno 5 was deeply flawed. That account, delivered with charm and eloquence, echoed formulations in earlier lyric love poems, including Dante’s own. Here is its refutation.

Love plays a fundamental role in all human life. Indeed, as we will discover, the whole universe and its workings are to be understood in terms of love. And, fittingly, love frames the whole poem of which it has just proved to be the central conceptual pivot. The poem began with Beatrice’s intervention to ask Virgil to help Dante lost in the dark wood (amor mi mosse: “love moved me”) and Dante’s appeal to Virgil in the name of ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore (“the long study and the great love”) he has devoted to Virgil’s work; it ends with the moment when Dante is caught up in the beatific vision of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” in the final lines of the poem.

Dante is feeling sleepy, but a group of souls overtakes them, running past. There is a brief exchange with the abbot of the church of San Zeno in Verona at the time of Frederick I Barbarossa, who complains about the appointment of the current incumbent. Dante falls asleep. This is his second night on the mountain, and again he dreams—a deeply disturbing dream, whose meaning will become clear in the next canto.

Dante dreams of a hideous female figure—misshapen, stammering, cross-eyed—who, as he gazes at her, is transformed into an alluring siren. She sings an entrancing song, and Dante is captivated. A saintly lady appears and reproaches Virgil, and he, gazing into her eyes, rips the siren’s clothes off to display her stinking belly. Dante abruptly wakes up. Virgil urges him to get up and move on. They encounter an angel and a beatitude is pronounced (“Blessed are they that mourn,” Matthew 5:4).

Virgil now explains the meaning of the unsetthng dream. The hideous figure who became seductive as Dante gazed at her represents the attraction of earthly pleasures, by which human beings become entranced if they focus on them too eagerly. Her perverse attractiveness can be resisted with the help of divine grace (the holy woman) and reason (Virgil). With her powerful allure masking her true nature and its stench, she emblematically foreshadows the three terraces that lie ahead.

Dante and Virgil have arrived on the fifth terrace, where they find shades lying face downwards on the ground.

Com’ io nel quinto giro fui dischiuso,vidi gente per esso che piangea,

72giacendo a terra tutta volta in giuso.

‘Adhaesit pavimento anima mea’sentia dir lor con sì alti sospiri,

75che la parola a pena s’intendea.

When I emerged onto the fifth circle,

I saw people on it who were weeping,

72lying on the ground face down.

“Adhaesit pavimento anima mea,”*

I heard them say, with such deep sighs

75that the words were barely audible.

* “My soul cleaved to the dust”

“My soul cleaved to the dust.” The line from Psalm 118 spells out the spiritual dimension of the souls’ physical prostration.

Dante asks one of them who he is, and why the shades lie face downwards. The soul’s first words contain an electrifying revelation.

Ed elli a me: «Perché i nostri diretririvolga il cielo a sé, saprai; ma prima

99scias quod ego fui successor Petri.

And he said to me: “You will learn why heaven

keeps our backsides turned towards it; but first

99scias quod ego fui successor Petri.*

* know that I was a successor to Peter

The speaker is a pope, a successor to Saint Peter on the papal throne.

This pope is Adrian V, Ottobono de’ Fieschi of Genoa, who was elected on July 11, 1276, and died just over a month later on August 16. (On the matter of his late conversion, Dante seems to be confusing him with the earlier Adrian IV, whose words, reported by John of Salisbury in his widely read Policraticus, will be echoed almost verbatim in lines 105 and 110.) By slipping into Latin, the language of the church, he reveals his exalted status dramatically and with great economy. He tells the story of his brief pontificate:

Un mese e poco più prova’ io comepesa il gran manto a chi dal fango il guarda,

105che piuma sembran tutte l’altre some.

For little more than a month I felt how the great mantle

weighs on one who protects it from the mud,

105so that all other burdens seem featherlight.

He repented at this late date, coming to understand that worldly goods (power, status, wealth) give no satisfaction.

La mia conversïone, omè!, fu tarda;ma, come fatto fui roman pastore,

108così scopersi la vita bugiarda.

My conversion, alas!, was late;

but, when I became shepherd of Rome,

108then I discovered how false is earthly life.

He had reached the pinnacle of power in the world; there was no more exalted position he could aspire to; and yet his heart found no peace.

Vidi che lì non s’acquetava il core,né più salir potiesi in quella vita;

111per che di questa in me s’accese amore.

Fino a quel punto misera e partitada Dio anima fui, del tutto avara;

114or, come vedi, qui ne son punita.

I saw that there my heart did not find peace,

nor was it possible to rise higher in that life;

111and so love of this life was kindled in me.

Up to that point I was a soul wretched

and cut off from God, utterly avaricious;

114now, as you see, I’m punished for it here.

He points out how perfectly the punishment of these souls mirrors their sin:

Quel ch’avarizia fa, qui si dichiarain purgazion de l’anime converse;

117e nulla pena il monte ha più amara.

What avarice does is made clear here

in the penance of these souls who turned to God;

117and the mountain has no punishment more bitter.

The faces pressed to the earth, the bound hands and feet that restrict their capacity to act: these are a perfect physical enactment of the nature of their sin. The contrapasso, the matching of punishment to sin, is exact in every detail.

Sì come l’occhio nostro non s’adersein alto, fisso a le cose terrene,

120così giustizia qui a terra il merse.

Just as our eyes were not directed

upwards, remaining fixed on earthly things,

120so justice sank them here to the earth.

Come avarizia spense a ciascun benelo nostro amore, onde operar perdési,

123così giustizia qui stretti ne tene,

ne’ piedi e ne le man legati e presi;e quanto fia piacer del giusto Sire,

126tanto staremo immobili e distesi».

Just as avarice extinguished our love

for every good, making us unable to act,

123so justice here holds us fast,

our feet and hands bound and captive;

and for as long as it pleases our just Lord,

126so long we shall remain motionless and prostrate.”

Dante has instinctively fallen to his knees as a sign of respect for the pope, but the soul rebukes him:

Io m’era inginocchiato e volea dire;ma com’ io cominciai ed el s’accorse,

129solo ascoltando, del mio reverire,

«Qual cagion», disse, «in giù così ti torse?».E io a lui: «Per vostra dignitate

132mia coscïenza dritto mi rimorse».

I had fallen to my knees and wanted to speak;

but as I was beginning, and he realised,

129just from listening, that I had knelt in reverence,

“What reason,” he said, “made you bow down like that?”

And I said to him: “Because of your high office,

132my conscience stung me standing upright.”

The soul’s energetic and colloquial response contrasts with the solemnity of his earlier Latin:

«Drizza le gambe, lèvati sù, frate!»,rispuose; «non errar: conservo sono

135teco e con li altri ad una podestate.

“Straighten your legs, get up, brother!”

he replied; “make no mistake: I am a fellow servant

135with you and with the others to one power.

All human beings are equal before God. Earthly rank counts for nothing in the context of eternity. Dante is the pope’s brother, frate, an equal. But there is no time for talking, because it impedes the weeping which measures out his penance.

Vattene omai: non vo’ che più t’arresti;

ché la tua stanza mio pianger disagia,

Be on your way, now: I don’t want you to stay any longer;

for your staying interferes with my weeping,

Nothing can be allowed to put off the process of penitential weeping. The colloquial bluntness of the imperative Vattene omai matches that of the earlier Drizza le gambe, lèvati sù (l. 133). The piquant contrast with the solemnity of the Latin (which happily exactly filled a hendecasyllable) is deliberate and will have delighted Dante.

Dante is a master of dialogue as a reflection of character. Savour the parallel with Inferno 19, another canto devoted to a pope—an unrepentant pope, the irascible Boniface VIII, whose character flaws were revealed through his testy exchange with Dante.

Dante reluctantly moves on, keeping close to the rock wall, since the ground is entirely occupied by prostrate shades, who weep and lament. An exclamatory interjection cursing the sin of avarice (the antica lupa) reminds us of the animals Dante encountered as he tried to emerge from the dark wood at the beginning of the poem. It was the she-wolf, not the lion or the leopard, that had driven him back. Once again the emphasis is on her insatiable appetite and her powerful hold on human beings.

Maladetta sie tu, antica lupa,che più che tutte l’altre bestie hai preda

12per la tua fame sanza fine cupa!

A curse upon you, ancient she-wolf,

who take more prey than all the other beasts,

12to feed your deep, bottomless hunger!

More people fall prey to avarice than to any other sin (“all the other beasts”). Avarice in its various forms—cupidity, graspingness, acquisitiveness, greed, not just for money and material possessions, but for power—invades the whole world. It has taken hold of the whole of humanity, insatiable in its ravening hunger. It is the root of all evil: radix malorum est cupiditas.

In canto 19 we met a pope, in canto 20 we meet a king. With Adrian V the emphasis was on the inner life of the sinner-pope, his personal experience of becoming aware that greed can never be satisfied, that the satisfactions it seems to promise are illusory. The king we are about to meet paints a broader canvas. He traces the damaging social and historical consequences of avarice in a royal family whose ruthless pursuit of power, territory and wealth have caused havoc throughout Europe. A whole dynasty is tainted.

Noi andavam con passi lenti e scarsi,e io attento a l’ombre, ch’i’ sentia

18pietosamente piangere e lagnarsi;

We went on with slow, careful steps,

and my attention was on the shades, whom I could hear

18piteously weeping and lamenting.

One of them calls out exemplary cases of the virtue opposed to the sin of greed. Mary gave birth to Jesus in a manger. The Roman consul Fabricius preferred to live in poverty rather than accept the rich gifts offered to corrupt him. Saint Nicholas secretly gave money to enable the three daughters of a gentleman fallen on hard times to marry honourably rather than be forced into prostitution. The focus is less on the circumstances of poverty in which these stories unfold than on the indifference to material wealth displayed by their protagonists.

Dante asks the speaker who he is, and his question unleashes a passionate invective that allows for no dialogue. It takes us directly back to the political theme, not to the ideal world order outhned by Marco Lombardo in canto 16, but to the dismal moral landscape of contemporary Europe described in the valley of the negligent princes in canto 7. Now we hear of an actively malign French ruling house whose territorial ambitions and thirst for power have compromised any possibility of peace and prosperity. In a brilliant dramatic stroke on Dante’s part, the dynasty is denounced by its founding father, who gazes with despair on the depredations of his descendants.

Io fui radice de la mala pianta

44che la terra cristiana tutta aduggia, . . .

I was the root of the evil plant

44which casts a gloomy shadow on Christian lands, . . .

Chiamato fui di là Ugo Ciappetta;di me son nati i Filippi e i Luigi

51per cui novellamente è Francia retta.

Figliuol fu’ io d’un beccaio di Parigi:

on earth I was called Hugh Capet;

the Philips and Luigis by whom France has been ruled

51in recent times are my descendants.

I was the son of a Parisian butcher:

(Dante is inaccurate on this last point—it was another Hugh Capet who was a butcher’s son.) The speaker explains how, in spite of his humble origins, power fell into his hands; how he took over governing the kingdom; how he was able to ensure that his own son inherited the crown. From that son the royal line of the Capetians descended. At first that line was undistinguished, but not actively wicked, he says, in a marvellous throwaway line: poco valea, ma pur non facea male (“it wasn’t worth much, but it wasn’t actually doing harm”)—a perfect way to describe any ineffectual but not actively noxious public figure.

But more recently things have got worse, he says, and they will get worse still. Three Frenchman called Charles have intervened in Italian affairs with disastrous consequences. Charles I of Anjou was the brother of King Louis IX of France; from him were descended the Angevins, a collateral branch of the French royal family. Capet summarises his career with biting sarcasm: extensive military depredations in Provence and elsewhere; the execution in a public square in Naples of the sixteen-year-old imperial pretender Conradin. He ends with the fiercely ironical statement that, to make amends for these misdeeds, Charles “pushed Thomas back up to heaven.” “Thomas” is Thomas Aquinas, the great scholastic philosopher, who died in 1274 and was canonised in 1323. Charles had him murdered.

Lì cominciò con forza e con menzognala sua rapina; e poscia, per ammenda,

66Pontì e Normandia prese e Guascogna.

Carlo venne in Italia e, per ammenda,vittima fé di Curradino; e poi

69ripinse al ciel Tommaso, per ammenda.

There he began his pillaging with force

and with fraud; and then, to make amends,

66he seized Ponthieu and Normandy and Gascony.

Charles came into Italy and, to make amends,

made a victim of Conradin; and then

69he pushed Thomas up to heaven, to make amends.

This last line almost suggests that Charles was giving Thomas a helpful leg up towards his final saintly destiny, the implication being that he was doing him a favour by summarily dispatching him. The repetition of per ammenda in the rhyme position is unprecedented in the poem, a metrical marker that underscores the savage irony of this crescendo of shameful exploits.

But worse is to come. Capet now modulates into prophetic mode. Another Charles will behave even more shamefully, betraying Florence, using not military might or deception, but the weapon of Judas (in other words, treachery, “the lance Judas jousted with”). This is Charles of Valois, the son of King Philip III of France and brother of King Philip IV, who, acting as an accomplice of Boniface VIII, enabled the Blacks to oust the Whites from Florence in 1301, in the coup which led to Dante’s exile.

Tempo vegg’ io, non molto dopo ancoi,che tragge un altro Carlo fuor di Francia,

72per far conoscer meglio e sé e ’ suoi.

Sanz’ arme n’esce e solo con la lanciacon la qual giostrò Giuda, e quella ponta

75sì, ch’a Fiorenza fa scoppiar la pancia.

I see a time, not very far away,

that brings another Charles out of France,

72to make himself and his kin better known.

He comes forth unarmed, bearing only

the lance that Judas jousted with, and he thrusts it

75so as to make Florence’s belly burst.

A third Charles, Charles II of Anjou, will sell his daughter in marriage for political advantage and financial gain, using her as a bargaining chip as pirates do slave girls.

L’altro, che già uscì preso di nave,veggio vender sua figlia e patteggiarne

81come fanno i corsar de l’altre schiave.

I see the other Charles, who left his ship a prisoner,

selling his daughter and haggling over her

81as pirates do with the other slave girls.

Avarizia is the driving force behind these shameful careers. All these royal figures descended from their troubled ancestor are driven only by insatiable greed—for territory, for money, for power.

But an even greater outrage lies in the not-very-distant future, when a representative of the French monarchy, now openly at loggerheads with the papacy, will mistreat and manhandle the pope, imprisoning him and humiliating him in his papal quarters at Anagni.

veggio in Alagna intrar lo fiordaliso,

87e nel vicario suo Cristo esser catto.

Veggiolo un’altra volta esser deriso;veggio rinovellar l’aceto e ’l fiele,

90e tra vivi ladroni esser anciso.

I see the fleur-de-lis enter Anagni,

87and Christ made prisoner in his vicar.

I see him being mocked a second time;

I see the vinegar and gall renewed,

90and I see him being killed between living thieves.

This humiliating episode (which caused scandal all over Europe) is known as the schiaffo di Anagni—schiaffo being a slap or blow to the face. Whether the schiaffo was literally a physical assault, or merely a blow to papal dignity, is a matter of debate. The two surviving eyewitness accounts differ on this point. The episode is presented by Capet as though it were a re-enactment of the crucifixion. The humiliated pope is Boniface, the arch-villain, but his manhandling by the agents of the French monarchy, far from giving Dante any satisfaction, is the worst crime of all. The distinction between office and incumbent is fundamental. Boniface is evil, but the office of pope commands respect.

The energy of this sustained denunciation makes it unmatched as political invective. The energy of the moral revulsion is Dante’s own. The poet comes as close here as he ever does to using a character in the afterlife as a mouthpiece for his own views.

Up to this point, events on the mountain have followed a regular pattern. Now something entirely unprecedented happens. The whole mountain shakes, as though struck by an earthquake. The souls in chorus call out “Glorïa in excelsis Deo.” Dante and Virgil stand motionless and waiting, just like the shepherds who first heard that song at the time of Christ’s birth, until the shaking of the mountain stops, and the singing with it. Then they carry on walking, picking their way among the weeping shades prostrate on the ground.

No’ istavamo immobili e sospesicome i pastor che prima udir quel canto,

141fin che ’l tremar cessò ed el compiési.

We stood quite still and in suspense,

like the shepherds who first heard that song,

141until the quaking stopped and the song ended.

Poi ripigliammo nostro cammin santo,guardando l’ombre che giacean per terra,

144tornate già in su l’usato pianto.

Then we continued on our holy way,

gazing at the shades who were lying on the ground,

144who had already returned to their accustomed weeping.

Dante has never felt such overpowering curiosity before; but he is too conscious of the need to press on, and too timid and lost in thought, to dare to say so.

Nulla ignoranza mai con tanta guerrami fé desideroso di sapere,

147se la memoria mia in ciò non erra,

quanta pareami allor, pensando, avere;né per la fretta dimandare er’ oso,

150né per me lì potea cosa vedere:

così m’andava timido e pensoso.

No ignorance ever assailed me

with so great a desire to know,

147if my memory is not mistaken in this,

as I seemed to feel then as I pondered;

nor did I dare ask, on account of our haste,

150nor was I able by my own wits to find an answer:

and so I walked on, timid and lost in thought.

This is how we find him at the beginning of canto 21: consumed by curiosity about what they have just witnessed, aware of the need for haste, compassionate for the suffering of the shades.

La sete natural che mai non saziase non con l’acqua onde la femminetta

3samaritana domandò la grazia,

mi travagliava, e pungeami la frettaper la ’mpacciata via dietro al mio duca,

6e condoleami a la giusta vendetta.

The natural thirst that is never quenched,

except with the water which the humble

3Samaritan woman asked for as a gift,

was tormenting me, and haste was urging me

along the crowded path behind my guide,

6and I was grieving at their just punishment.

The natural thirst is the thirst for knowledge, innate in all human beings. As we saw in Inferno 26, Dante had quoted Aristotle to this effect in the Convivio: “As the philosopher says at the beginning of the Metaphysics, all men naturally desire to have knowledge.” Ultimately, that thirst for knowledge can be satisfied only by divine grace, which raises man beyond his natural limitations. Aristotle, for all his intellectual brilliance, could not penetrate to the ultimate mysteries of existence. Jesus had told the woman of Samaria drawing water from the well: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.” She had replied: “Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not” (John 4:5–15). The idea of thirst and satisfying it will become a dominant theme in what follows.

A mysterious figure joins Dante and Virgil, coming upon them from behind as they walk; they become aware of his presence only when he speaks.

Ed ecco, sì come ne scrive Lucache Cristo apparve a’ due ch’erano in via,

9già surto fuor de la sepulcral buca,

ci apparve un’ombra, e dietro a noi venìa,dal piè guardando la turba che giace;

12né ci addemmo di lei, sì parlò pria,

dicendo: «O frati miei, Dio vi dea pace».Noi ci volgemmo sùbiti, e Virgilio

15rendéli ’l cenno ch’a ciò si conface.

And lo! as Luke writes that

Christ appeared to the two who were on the road,*

9already risen from his burial place,

* to Emmaus

a shade appeared to us, coming along behind us,

as we picked our way among the throng at our feet;

12nor were we aware of him, until he spoke,

saying: “O my brothers, may God grant you peace.”

We turned at once, and Virgil

15returned his greeting with a fitting gesture.

The reference to the meeting on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–17), where the risen Christ silently joins the two disciples as they walk along, makes it clear that we are witnessing something miraculous. The figure who joins Dante and Virgil is a figure of Christ, re-enacting the role of Jesus after his burial and resurrection.

Virgil asks this newcomer the cause of the earthquake, and why the song rang out. The newcomer explains that the quake has nothing to do with earthquakes as we know them on earth (caused, it was then believed, by trapped underground vapours escaping). The quake marks a spiritual event, the moment at which a shade feels free to leave purgatory because it has completed its penance. The choral song expresses the joy the other souls feel at this liberation.

The soul simply becomes aware of the state of its own will, its own readiness to move on. This is an inward event.

De la mondizia sol voler fa prova,che, tutto libero a mutar convento,

63l’alma sorprende, e di voler le giova.

The will alone gives proof of purity;

it surprises the soul, wholly free to change its station,*

63and the soul feels joy at willing it.

* i.e. to move from purgatory to paradise

The speaker explains that, having been on this terrace for more than five hundred years, it is he who has just experienced this libera volontà di miglior soglia (“free will to seek a better threshold”). He now tells his story.

«Nel tempo che ’l buon Tito, con l’aiutodel sommo rege, vendicò le fóra

84ond’ uscì ’l sangue per Giuda venduto,

col nome che più dura e più onoraera io di là», rispuose quello spirto,

87«famoso assai, ma non con fede ancora.

“In the time when worthy Titus, with the help

of the supreme king,* avenged the wounds

84from which the blood that Judas sold flowed forth,

* God

I bore on earth the name that most endures

and brings most honour,” replied that spirit;

87“I was very famous, but I was not yet a believer.

The name which endures longest and brings most honour is of course the name of poet. This poet, famous, but not yet a Christian, lived in the second half of the first century: the Romans under Titus laid siege to and destroyed Jerusalem in ad 70. Medieval Christians, following Saint Jerome and the historian Orosius, interpreted this military enterprise as an action that avenged the crucifixion (as we shall see in Paradiso 7).

This poet’s fame was such that he came from the provinces to Rome, which rewarded his poetic talent with the myrtle crown.

Tanto fu dolce mio vocale spirto,che, tolosano, a sé mi trasse Roma,

90dove mertai le tempie ornar di mirto.

Stazio la gente ancor di là mi noma:cantai di Tebe, e poi del grande Achille;

93ma caddi in via con la seconda soma.

So sweet was my poetic song

that Rome drew me from Toulouse, and there

90I became worthy to have my temples adorned with myrtle.

People on earth still call me Statius:

I sang of Thebes, and then of the great Achilles,

93but I fell along the way with the second burden.

Statius’s two masterpieces were the Thebaid and the Achilleid, the latter unfinished at his death. In a delicious dramatic irony, he now pays tribute to the decisive influence of Virgil on his development as a poet, not knowing that the man he is speaking to is Virgil himself. Virgil’s works were an inspiration to him; without Virgil’s example he would have achieved nothing.

Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville,che mi scaldar, de la divina fiamma

96onde sono allumati più di mille;

de l’Eneïda dico, la qual mammafummi, e fummi nutrice, poetando:

99sanz’ essa non fermai peso di dramma.

My poetic ardour was set alight by the sparks,

which warmed me, of the divine flame

96which enlightens thousands;

I mean the Aeneid, which was a mother to me

in writing poetry, and a nursemaid too:

99without it I’d have achieved nothing of any weight.

He now underlines the fervour of his devotion to Virgil with a wildly unorthodox declaration:

E per esser vivuto di là quandovisse Virgilio, assentirei un sole

102più che non deggio al mio uscir di bando».

To have lived on earth when

Virgil lived, I would agree to a year more

102than I owe before my coming forth from exile.”*

* i.e. before leaving purgatory

Though theologically questionable, in human terms this is intensely moving. Virgil, perhaps uncomfortable at the effusiveness of this tribute, turns to Dante:

Volser Virgilio a me queste parolecon viso che, tacendo, disse ‘Taci’;

105ma non può tutto la virtù che vuole;

ché riso e pianto son tanto seguacia la passion di che ciascun si spicca,

108che men seguon voler ne’ più veraci.

Io pur sorrisi come l’uom ch’ammicca;per che l’ombra si tacque, e riguardommi

111ne li occhi ove ’l sembiante più si ficca;

These words turned Virgil towards me

with a look that said, wordlessly, “Don’t say a word”;

105but willpower cannot do everything;

for laughter and tears follow so quickly

on the emotions from which they spring,

108that those who are most sincere can least control them.

I merely smiled like someone winking;

at that the shade fell silent, and looked me

111in the eyes, where feelings show themselves most clearly;

Why, he asks, did your face show a flicker of amusement just now? Dante is torn, the urgency of his predicament caught in the switch to the narrative present tense (Or son io d’una parte e d’altra preso: “Now I’m caught between one side and the other”). Virgil, seeing his dilemma, gives him permission to speak. His involuntary hint of a smile, Dante explains, was caused by the fact that Statius’s declaration of gratitude was, unbeknownst to him, made to the very man he was talking about, Virgil.

Statius has dropped to his knees before Dante finishes speaking:

Già s’inchinava ad abbracciar li piedial mio dottor, ma el li disse: «Frate,

132non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi».

Ed ei surgendo: «Or puoi la quantitatecomprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda,

135quand’ io dismento nostra vanitate,

trattando l’ombre come cosa salda».

Already he was stooping to embrace my teacher’s feet,

but Virgil said to him: “Brother, don’t do that,

132for you are a shade and it’s a shade you see.”

And he, rising: “Now you can understand

the measure of the love for you that warms me,

135when I forget our insubstantiality,

treating shades like a solid thing.”

Statius has shown the same instinctive reaction of deference and respect Dante had shown to Pope Adrian V. This time, as well as reverence, there is strong affection and gratitude. But the rejoinder is the same, there is the same disclaimer: Brother, we are all equals in the afterlife. The neatly balanced repetition of ombra (tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi: “you are a shade and it’s a shade you see”) reinforces the point.

This is another episode showing the power of attachment, admiration and affection linking poets across the generations—perhaps the most moving in the poem. Two poets who never met, born not much more than a hundred years apart, and whose fate in the afterlife is so different: one a decisive influence on the life and art of the other, the other anxious to declare his gratitude and indebtedness. T. S. Eliot, so alive to poetic tradition, used the final lines of this canto as an epigraph to the volume Prufrock and Other Observations.

The three poets have encountered an angel and heard a truncated form of the fourth beatitude (“Blessed are those who thirst for justice”), and are continuing on the upward climb to the next circle. Virgil is puzzled that Statius could have sinned through avarice. Statius explains that his sin was precisely the opposite, prodigality: both are deviations from the mean of a judicious, measured use of earthly goods (an Aristotelian notion, already encountered in hell where the avaricious and the prodigal clashed eternally and pointlessly, rolling their heavy stones towards one another). Furthermore, Statius says, it was a text of Virgil’s which taught him the error of his spendthrift ways.

Virgil now asks another question. Reading his poetry, there are no signs that Statius was a Christian. How did he come to be converted?

«Or quando tu cantasti le crude armide la doppia trestizia di Giocasta»,

57disse ’l cantor de’ buccolici carmi,

“Now when you sang of the cruel warfare

that caused Jocasta’s double grief,”

57said the poet of the Eclogues,

«per quello che Clïò teco lì tasta,non par che ti facesse ancor fedele

60la fede, sanza qual ben far non basta.

“in the light of what Clio there inspires in you,

it seems that faith, without which good works

60are not enough, had not yet made you a believer.

Clio is the Muse of history, invoked by Statius in the Thebaid in Book I and again in Book X. In line with this invocation, Dante, like others of his time, believed that the ancient epic poems were based on historical fact. Jocasta’s “double grief” is the deaths of her twin sons, Eteocles and Polynices, who killed each other.

So what was it that enlightened him about the Christian faith, Virgil asks?

Se così è, qual sole o quai candeleti stenebraron sì, che tu drizzasti

63poscia di retro al pescator le vele?».

If that is so, what sun or what candles

dispelled your darkness, so that afterwards

63you set your sails to follow the fisherman?”

The fisherman is Peter: in Matthew 4:18–19 Jesus said to Peter, a fisherman by trade, “I will make you a fisher of men.”

The answer pays further tribute to Virgil for the profoundly important role he has played in the younger poet’s life.

Ed elli a lui: «Tu prima m’invïastiverso Parnaso a ber ne le sue grotte,

66e prima appresso Dio m’alluminasti.

Facesti come quei che va di notte,che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova,

69ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte,

quando dicesti: ‘Secol si rinova;torna giustizia e primo tempo umano,

72e progenïe scende da ciel nova’.

And he said to him: “You first sent me

towards Parnassus to drink in its grottoes,

66and you first illuminated me concerning God.

You were like a man who is walking at night,

who carries a lantern over his shoulder and does himself no good,

69but throws light for the people who come behind him,

when you said: ‘The age is renewed,

justice returns, and the first human time,

72and a new progeny descends from heaven.’

Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano:

Because of you I was a poet, because of you a Christian:

The lines quoted here (ls. 70–72) about a new age and a miraculous birth come from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue. In reality, they were an extravagant compliment paid to a consul on the birth of his son. But the lines were read in the Middle Ages as an unknowing prophecy of the coming of Christ on the part of the unwitting pagan poet. Dante has gone a step further, and shown this pagan text as effecting a conversion to Christianity—an unprecedented claim for the power of poetry.

Statius now describes the process by which he became a convert. Not only were the words of these new preachers in tune with Virgil’s words about the dawn of a new age, but the Christians themselves seemed such good people that when Domitian persecuted them, Statius wept for them and with them, and began to help them. Their way of life made him come to see all other religious or philosophical sects as despicable.

E pria ch’io conducessi i Greci a’ fiumidi Tebe poetando, ebb’ io battesmo;

90ma per paura chiuso cristian fu’mi,

lungamente mostrando paganesmo;e questa tepidezza il quarto cerchio

93cerchiar mi fé più che ’l quarto centesmo.

And before I brought the Greeks to the rivers

of Thebes in my poem, I was baptised;

90but out of fear I remained a secret Christian,

for a long time acting outwardly as a pagan;

and this slackness made me circle the fourth terrace

93for more than four hundred years.

Statius’s unwillingness to profess his faith openly—tepidezza, or luke-warmness, is a synonym of accidia, spiritual slackness—caused him to spend more than four hundred years on the circle of sloth. He asks Virgil about the fate in the afterlife of old friends:

dimmi dov’ è Terrenzio nostro antico,Cecilio e Plauto e Varro, se lo sai:

99dimmi se son dannati, e in qual vico».

Tell me where our old friend Terence is,

and Caecilius, and Plautus, and Varro, if you know:

99tell me if they are damned, and in what place.”

Virgil reassures him that they are in limbo, and mentions many other writers and figures from classical literature who are also there. The talk ranges easily over literary terrain familiar to Virgil and Statius, including Greek writers (Euripides, Simonides) known to Dante only by repute.

The poets emerge onto a new terrace, and turn to the right as habit has taught them to do. Dante follows the two classical poets: a beautifully concrete narrative embodiment of his position in relation to them in literary history.

Elli givan dinanzi, e io solettodi retro, e ascoltava i lor sermoni,

129ch’a poetar mi davano intelletto.

They went ahead, and I alone

behind, and I listened to their talk,

129which gave me understanding about writing poetry.

This tantalising snippet of shoptalk is not shared with us. Dante—the only poet of medieval Italy who might be thought to be the equal of the classical poets—listens attentively as he walks in their footsteps, and from their conversation learns about writing poetry. But we are not told what it is they say.

Dante takes pleasure in orchestrating variations on the theme of meetings between poets. On the very next terrace there will be another, very different encounter: vernacular, colloquial, deeply affectionate. It will take us back not to the world of classical antiquity, but to the Florence of Dante’s youth and his friend Forese Donati. The two young men, partners in some unspecified reprehensible behaviour—one destined for greatness, the other not—share an intimate knowledge of the city. The encounter throws light on an aspect of Dante’s early poetic development that helps explain how the author renowned in his youth for exquisite love poems became the poet who could write the Commedia. Purgatorio is sometimes called la cantica dei poeti, “the poets’ cantica.” We begin to understand why.

Virgil and Statius’s talk is interrupted when they come to a strange tree in the middle of the path. It is like an inverted fir tree, tapering downwards rather than upwards. It bears delicious-smelling fruit, and clear water cascades down its leaves. The poets approach the tree, and a voice calls out from within its branches, citing examples of the virtue opposed to gluttony: abstemiousness, restraint or self-control in eating and drinking.

Poi disse: «Più pensava Maria ondefosser le nozze orrevoli e intere,

144ch’a la sua bocca, ch’or per voi risponde.

E le Romane antiche, per lor bere,contente furon d’acqua; e Danïello

147dispregiò cibo e acquistò savere.

Lo secol primo, quant’ oro fu bello,fé savorose con fame le ghiande,

150e nettare con sete ogne ruscello.

Mele e locuste furon le vivandeche nodriro il Batista nel diserto;

153per ch’elli è glorïoso e tanto grande

quanto per lo Vangelio v’è aperto».

Then it said: “Mary gave more thought to ensuring

that the wedding feast was honourable, and lacked nothing,

144than to her own mouth, which now pleads for you.*

* in heaven

And the ancient Roman matrons, for their drinking,

were content with water; and Daniel

147scorned food and acquired wisdom.

The first age was as beautiful as gold;

hunger made acorns appetising,

150and thirst made nectar of every stream.

Honey and locusts were the food

that nourished the Baptist in the desert;

153and for this he is glorious, and as great

as is revealed to you in the Gospel.”

The tantalising but unreported shoptalk between virgil and Statius continues, making Dante forget the onerousness of the journey. We can pause a moment to reflect that Statius, a pagan poet not known to be a Christian, is the only purified soul we meet in purgatory, a choice on Dante’s part as starthng as his choice of Cato, also a pagan, as its guardian.

The poets are overtaken by a group of shades who pass them silently, like pilgrims. These shades are terrifyingly emaciated, their faces mere skin and bone, their eye sockets like rings without gemstones. How can this extreme degree of emaciation, Dante wonders, be produced just by the smell of the unattainable fruit and water?

Suddenly a shade addresses him.

ed ecco del profondo de la testavolse a me li occhi un’ombra e guardò fiso;

42poi gridò forte: «Qual grazia m’è questa?».

and lo! from the depths of his head

a shade turned his eyes towards me and stared;

42then he cried out loudly: “What grace is granted me?”

Dante has been joyfully recognised. He has not recognised the speaker because of his disfigurement, but recognises his voice:

Mai non l’avrei riconosciuto al viso;ma ne la voce sua mi fu palese

45ciò che l’aspetto in sé avea conquiso.

Questa favilla tutta mi raccesemia conoscenza a la cangiata labbia,

48e ravvisai la faccia di Forese.

I never would have known him from his face;

but his voice revealed to me

45what his appearance had hidden.

This spark rekindled all

my recognition of his altered features,

48and I made out the face of Forese.

Forese Donati was a friend of Dante’s youth. The Donati were an important family in local politics, and lived close to Dante in the heart of the medieval city. Dante knew all three of the siblings, and all will appear in the poem. His own wife Gemma was a Donati, a distant cousin of Forese.

Two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years have run into each other in unexpected circumstances. Take no notice of my appearance, Forese says eagerly, but tell me your news, and who your travelling companions are.

ma dimmi il ver di te, dì chi son quelledue anime che là ti fanno scorta;

54non rimaner che tu non mi favelle!».

but tell me the truth about yourself, tell me who

are those two souls over there escorting you;

54don’t be silent, talk to me!”

Dante’s response attests to the strong bond of affection that linked the two in life.

«La faccia tua, ch’io lagrimai già morta,mi dà di pianger mo non minor doglia»,

57rispuos’ io lui, «veggendola sì torta.

“Your face, that I wept for when you died,

gives me no less cause for weeping now,”

57I answered him, “seeing it so disfigured.

But he can’t answer Forese’s questions, he says, until he understands the cause of the shades’ emaciation, which has filled him with wonderment: non mi far dir mentr’ io mi maraviglio (“don’t make me talk while I am marvelling”). Forese humours his old friend by not pressing him to answer immediately. He explains that the smell of the fruit and water torments the shades with hunger and thirst, causing their skeletal state. As he talks, he self-corrects, offering a telling definition of the nature of purgatorial torments: io dico pena, e dovria dir sollazzo (“I say suffering, and I should say pleasure”). The torments, agonizing though they are in the moment, are transitory and transitional; they are a way to paradise.

Dante has another pressing question: How come Forese is so far up the mountain? He died less than five years ago. Why isn’t he below, in ante-purgatory, putting in time for the years he delayed turning to God? Forese’s answer is heartfelt: the prayers of his wife Nella have brought him to this point, speeding his progress up the mountain.

Ond’ elli a me: «Sì tosto m’ha condottoa ber lo dolce assenzo d’i martìri

87la Nella mia con suo pianger dirotto.

Con suoi prieghi devoti e con sospiritratto m’ha de la costa ove s’aspetta,

90e liberato m’ha de li altri giri.

Whereupon he said to me: “My dear Nella

with her flowing tears has brought me so speedily

87to drink the sweet wormwood of the torments.

With her devout prayers and her sighs

she has drawn me from the slope where people wait,

90and freed me from the other circles.

Here is an example of the efficacy of the prayers of the living for the dead, so often requested by the shades Dante meets on the mountain. Nella’s prayers have released Forese from the waiting area, and from the lower circles. Another paradoxical linking of opposites describes purgatorial suffering: lo dolce assenzo d’i martìri (“the sweet wormwood of the torments”). Wormwood is of course very bitter.

Forese compares his wife’s good behaviour with that of her contemporaries in the city. Those other Florentine women, with their decadent fashions, are in their turn compared to the shameless women of the wilds of Sardinia, a byword for their immodesty.

Tanto è a Dio più cara e più dilettala vedovella mia, che molto amai,

93quanto in bene operare è più soletta;

ché la Barbagia di Sardigna assaine le femmine sue più è pudica

96che la Barbagia dov’ io la lasciai.

My dear widow, whom I greatly loved,

is the more dear to God and more beloved,

93the more alone she is in her good works;

for Barbagia in Sardinia is

much more modest in its females

96than the Barbagia where I left her.

What can he say? The time is not far away when Florentine women will be publicly berated from the pulpit for their indecent, sexually provocative clothing.

O dolce frate, che vuo’ tu ch’io dica?Tempo futuro m’è già nel cospetto,

99cui non sarà quest’ ora molto antica,

nel qual sarà in pergamo interdettoa le sfacciate donne fiorentine

102l’andar mostrando con le poppe il petto.

Quai barbare fuor mai, quai saracine,cui bisognasse, per farle ir coperte,

105o spiritali o altre discipline?

O dear brother, what do you want me to say?

I already see before me a time,

99in the not very distant future,

when from the pulpit the brazen women

of Florence will be forbidden to walk around

102showing their chest with their breasts.

What barbarian women, what Saracens

ever needed religious or other penalties

105to make them cover themselves as they go about?

What barbarian race ever needed legislation to make its women dress decently? Forese’s words remind us of the febrile mercantile reality of Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. The flourishing textile trade in luxury fabrics (wool and silk) had made the city enormously wealthy. The extravagance of female fashions was a direct result of this prosperity. In fact sumptuary laws were introduced in Florence in 1310 to curb these fashionable excesses.

But punishment will come, and it is not far off.

Ma se le svergognate fosser certedi quel che ’l ciel veloce loro ammanna,

108già per urlare avrian le bocche aperte;

ché, se l’antiveder qui non m’inganna,prima fien triste che le guance impeli

111colui che mo si consola con nanna.

But if the shameless women were certain

of what the swift heavens are preparing for them,

108they would already have opened their mouths to howl;

for if my foresight does not deceive me here,

they will be grieving before hair grows on the cheeks

111of babes who are now consoled with a lullaby.

Before those who are now infants grow facial hair (so in less than fifteen years) these women will have cause to howl with displeasure. Forese is foreseeing the tribulations of the city connected with its resistance to the coming to Italy of Henry VII in 1310–12.

Now at last it’s Forese’s turn to have his questions answered. What has brought Dante to the afterlife? Who are his companions? Deh, frate, or fa che più non mi ti celi! (“Come on, brother, don’t hide it from me any longer!”)

Dante, his curiosity appeased, is now able to answer. His reply introduces a sobering note of regret for shared past misdemeanours.

Per ch’io a lui: «Se tu riduci a mentequal fosti meco, e qual io teco fui,

117ancor fia grave il memorar presente.

So I said to him: “If you recall to mind

what you were with me, and what I was with you,

117it will still be painful remembering it now.

Even now the thought of their joint transgression should weigh heavily on them. He was rescued from that life by Virgil, who has led him through hell, and now through purgatory:

Indi m’han tratto sù li suoi conforti,salendo e rigirando la montagna

126che drizza voi che ’l mondo fece torti.

His comforting support has drawn me upwards,

climbing and circling the mountain

126that straightens you whom the world made crooked.

Note another arresting definition of purgatory: drizza voi che ’l mondo fece torti. And then, almost in a throwaway line, Dante mentions Beatrice. Virgil will lead him to the point where she takes over as his guide.

Tanto dice di farmi sua compagnache io sarò là dove fia Beatrice;

129quivi convien che sanza lui rimagna.

He says he will keep me company

until I am where Beatrice will be;

129there I must remain without him.

This moment is moving and unexpected. Nella’s name had been mentioned as someone Dante knew, with no need for explanation. Now Beatrice’s name is mentioned equally casually, requiring no explanatory paraphrase of the kind offered elsewhere (donna del ciel), because Forese knows who Beatrice is. In the Florence of their shared youth, he knew Beatrice just as Dante knew Nella.

This is a telling piece of evidence that Beatrice was indeed a Florentine girl Dante loved in his youth, and not simply a poetic figment invented for allegorical purposes to signify theology or grace, just as Virgil was a real Roman poet admired by Dante, not a cypher invented to signify human reason. Whatever the allegorical significance of Dante’s two guides, the first and most important fact about them is their historical reality. Each of them played a role of determining importance in Dante’s own life.

This touching and deeply human encounter invites speculation about what the two young men had got up to. Dante has taken good care not to feed our prurient appetites with any details. (A homosexual episode? But it seems significant that no early commentator interprets the lines this way.) One thing we can be sure of is that there was a verbal, indeed literary, dimension to their misconduct: a misuse of poetic talent to write poems of unworthy coarseness and vulgarity. As young men Dante and Forese had exchanged sonnets, three each, constituting a kind of argument in verse. In line with the genre of the improperium or insult, each poet charges the other with character failings and misconduct, each trying to outdo the other in the outrageousness of the accusations.

Forese is a glutton, and thieves to feed his gluttony. He will surely end up in prison. Dante’s father was a usurer, and Dante may end up in the poorhouse. Dante gets the better in the exchange, outdoing Forese both in the inventiveness of his insults and in the verbal élan with which they are delivered. Forese’s wife suffers from a cold in midsummer because of her inadequate bed covering (the clear implication being that Forese is unfaithful or impotent). Forese is a bastard, and short of asking his mother, it is impossible to know who his real father is. The jocular trading of insults between friends channelling their linguistic exuberance into metrical form becomes morally questionable when innocent third parties (Forese’s wife and mother), unable to speak for themselves, become the butt of the joke.

The lines calling Forese’s paternity into question make an insouciantly irreverent reference to religion: Forese’s father has as little to do with him as Joseph has with Christ (that is, he is a bastard). What’s more, the word “Christ” falls in the rhyme position. In the Commedia, when Christ occurs in the rhyme position, it is repeated so that it rhymes only with itself. It has often been suggested that this reverence for the name of Christ is one of the ways in which the Commedia makes amends for the youthful misuse of poetic gifts in the sonnet exchange. The purgatorial encounter makes amends for other aspects of it too: the tenderly loving words for Forese’s wife, his deeply felt gratitude for her goodness and affection.

The encounter plunges us back into Florentine life, to Dante’s pre-exile years, the years of his formation as a poet. In the next canto, still in the company of Forese, we will meet another poet, not one Dante knew in person. The question of his development and achievement as a poet will move centre stage.

Dante and forese walk on talking animatedly.

Né ’l dir l’andar, né l’andar lui più lentofacea, ma ragionando andavam forte,

3sì come nave pinta da buon vento;

Our talking didn’t slow our walking, nor our walking

our talking, but we moved on swiftly as we spoke,

3like a ship driven by a good wind;

Dante asks if Forese knows where his sister Piccarda is, and if there are persons of note among the shades who gaze at him in wonderment as a living man. Forese is able to reassure him about Piccarda:

«La mia sorella, che tra bella e buonanon so qual fosse più, trïunfa lieta

15ne l’alto Olimpo già di sua corona».

“My sister—I don’t know if she was more beautiful

or more good—triumphs rejoicing

15in her crown on high Olympus.”

Piccarda, the sister who is as virtuous as she is beautiful, is in heaven. Dante will meet her in a wonderfully affectionate encounter in Paradiso 3.

Forese points out many persons of interest among the gluttonous. There is a pope who was far too fond of a particular gourmet delicacy (eels from Lake Bolsena drowned in Vernaccia wine and then roasted: l’anguille di Bolsena e la vernaccia). There are other notables renowned for their appetites for food and wine, including one who, when told that people said he did nothing but drink, replied, Why don’t they say I’m always thirsty? But the person who gazes at Dante with special interest is Bonagiunta da Lucca, a vernacular poet, who seems eager to speak to him.

Bonagiunta asks a question that bears very directly on Dante’s own history as a poet:

Ma dì s’i’ veggio qui colui che foretrasse le nove rime, cominciando

51‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’».

But tell me if I’m looking at the man

who brought forth the new rhymes, beginning

51‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.’ ”*

* “Ladies who have understanding of love”

Is Dante the author of “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,” the canzone or ode that initiated a new poetic manner? Dante is indeed: this canzone, included in the Vita Nuova, where it appears at roughly the midpoint, had marked a turning point in his development as a love poet. It was the moment at which he had ceased to write poems in the hope of winning his lady’s favour. He had come to understand that the only true goal of his poetry was to sing her praises. But his answer to Bonagiunta is gnomic and could even seem self-deprecating, deflecting the compliment about his originality:

E io a lui: «I’ mi son un che, quandoAmor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo

54ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando».

And I said to him: “I am one who, when

Love breathes in me, takes note, and just

54as he dictates within me, I set forth my meaning.”

Fidelity to his inspiration is the key to his poetic manner. His inspiration is love. No more than that. Almost a banality. Perhaps no line in the poem has elicited more critical debate and commentary.

But Bonagiunta finds the explanation enlightening:

«O frate, issa vegg’ io», diss’ elli, «il nodoche ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne

57di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo!

“O brother,” he said, “now I see the knot

that held the Notary and Guittone and me

57back from the sweet new style I hear!

The Notary is Giacomo da Lentini, a leading poet of the Sicilian school centred on the court of Frederick II at Palermo two generations earlier (1230s–1240s). He invented the sonnet. Guittone is Guittone d’Arezzo, a high-profile and much esteemed (though not by Dante) poet of the previous generation from Arezzo in Tuscany, who wrote mostly on moral and political themes, and who in Dante’s eyes did not deserve his reputation. Bonagiunta himself, also from Tuscany (Lucca), completes the trio of earlier vernacular poets.

These names epitomise the vernacular literary tradition inherited by the Tuscans (from the Provençal troubadours via the Sicilians), from its inception up to recent times. Bonagiunta is acknowledging that these predecessors, himself included, failed to write with the same distinction as Dante, who surpasses all of them in the sweetness and novelty of his style. Dante’s poetic practice marks a definitive break with the past.

Bonagiunta adds an explanatory gloss to make it clear that he really has grasped the point.

Io veggio ben come le vostre pennedi retro al dittator sen vanno strette,

60che de le nostre certo non avvenne;

I clearly see how your pens

follow closely behind the one who dictates,

60which certainly wasn’t the case with ours;

e qual più a gradire oltre si mette,non vede più da l’uno a l’altro stilo»;

63e, quasi contentato, si tacette.

and whoever sets out to take the matter further

will see no other difference between the one style and the other”;

63and, as though well satisfied, he fell silent.

The term dolce stil novo used here (l. 57) is still used to refer to this key moment of transition in vernacular lyric poetry. Dante’s exchange with Bonagiunta lays down the outhnes literary historians still follow today. The style is new, a break with the past; and it is dolce, sweet; the novità lies precisely in the dolcezza. In the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante had used the damning word plebescere (“to write in a plebeian or commonplace manner”) of Guittone. Bonagiunta’s eagerness to discuss with Dante just what it is that distinguishes the new poetic manner from the old acknowledges Dante’s role and distinction as poetic innovator.

The other shades speed off after this interlude, but Forese drops back to walk with Dante, and asks, with perfect naturalness, one old friend to another, “When will I see you again?”

sì lasciò trapassar la santa greggiaForese, e dietro meco sen veniva,

75dicendo: «Quando fia ch’io ti riveggia?».

so he let the holy flock pass by,

and came along behind with me,

75saying: “When will I see you again?”

Dante doesn’t know how long he has to live, but, the state of Florence being what it is, the end cannot come too soon for him. Forese comforts him with a prophecy: the person most responsible for the ruinous state of the city will be dragged off to hell. The identity of this unnamed villain is not spelled out. Both know that it is Forese’s own brother, Corso Donati, a prime conspirator among the Blacks who have brought the city to ruin. The prophecy describes Corso’s real-life fate: pursued by Catalan mercenaries employed by his enemies, he fell from his horse but his foot remained caught in the stirrup. His lifeless body was dragged from the city. His brother predicts with apocalyptic confidence that that very animal will drag him down to hell.

«Or va», diss’ el; «che quei che più n’ha colpa,vegg’ ïo a coda d’una bestia tratto

84inver’ la valle ove mai non si scolpa.

La bestia ad ogne passo va più ratto,crescendo sempre, fin ch’ella il percuote,

87e lascia il corpo vilmente disfatto.

“Now go,” he said; “for the one who is most to blame

I see being dragged along behind a beast

84towards the valley where guilt is never absolved.

The beast goes faster with each step,

faster and faster, until it strikes him,

87and leaves his body hideously disfigured.

Forese takes his leave; he can’t continue to walk at Dante’s pace. The meaning of his prophetic words will become clear in the near future.

The Donati family are one of two examples of members of the same family ending up in different realms in the afterlife. Here it is three siblings. With the other family it is a generational distribution. We have seen the emperor Frederick II in hell, and his son Manfredi in purgatory. We will meet his mother, the empress Costanza, in paradise, in the same circle as Piccarda.

Dante now sees another tree, which comes into view as the travellers round the bend. Shades raise their hands to the tree and shout something inaudible up into its leaves, like small children eager and unthinking who ask for something though the person they ask does not answer, but, to sharpen their desire, holds the thing they want up high so they can still see it.

A voice resounds from the branches, declaring that this tree derives from the Tree of Knowledge:

«Trapassate oltre sanza farvi presso:legno è più sù che fu morso da Eva,

117e questa pianta si levò da esso».

“Go past without drawing near;

higher up there’s a tree whose fruit Eve ate,

117and this plant is an offshoot of that one.”

The three poets walk on lost in thought, as examples ring out of excessive eating and drinking (the bridles on gluttony). They come to a resplendent angel, who advises them that this is the point at which they leave this circle. As Dante senses the movement of the angel’s wing, he hears a fuller version of the fourth beatitude, with the emphasis now on hungering, rather than thirsting, after righteousness.

The canto opens with a question that has been puzzling Dante and to which Forese had given only a partial answer. How can the shadow bodies of the shades of purgatory show the effects of extreme hunger if they do not need food? How is it possible to grow thin when there is no material body that requires nourishment?

Virgil invites Statius to explain, as they set out on the long climb between the terraces. His explanation unfolds as a condensed, technical and wonderfully lucid account of human procreation and embryology as they were understood in Dante’s time, an understanding ultimately based on Aristotle. If it is slightly disconcerting to a modern reader familiar with genetics, it is nonetheless full of poetically vibrant lines.

Semen in the male is formed from perfect blood that remains in the heart and does not circulate in the veins. From there it descends to the testicles (though Statius avoids the crude anatomical term). It is then deposited onto the menstrual blood in the mother’s womb. The moment of impregnation is curiously impersonal, yet described with great delicacy and exactness:

Ancor digesto, scende ov’ è più bellotacer che dire; e quindi poscia geme

45sovr’ altrui sangue in natural vasello.

Further purified,* it descends to the place of which

it is more fitting to be silent than to speak; and then from there

45it trickles onto another’s blood in a natural vessel.

* i.e. having become sperm

The woman’s role in procreation, it was believed, is merely that of providing the “natural vessel” (the womb), the receptacle in which the developing foetus can grow. The sperm alone contains the seed of a human being, with all its powers potentially present. Only in recent times has the woman’s fifty percent genetic contribution to the formation of a child become scientific orthodoxy. A less salacious account of the moment of conception it would be hard to imagine.

Now Statius traces the stages of foetal development in the womb. First the foetus is like a plant (a living thing), except that a plant is fully formed, whereas in the human embryo this is merely a stage. Then it is like a sea sponge, a primitive animal form that can feel and move. All this comes from the generating seed, the semen of the father.

The final stage is what turns the embryo into a human being. Here Dante departs from Aristotle and follows Albert the Great. Describing this final stage, Statius takes care to dismiss an erroneous theory about human intellection.

Ma come d’animal divegna fante,non vedi tu ancor: quest’ è tal punto,

63che più savio di te fé già errante,

But how from an animal it becomes human,

you do not as yet see: this is a point

63that led a wiser man than you into error.

For “human” Statius uses the word fante: a speaker, capable of rational discourse. Human speech—language—is the marker of man’s humanity, his intellective power. The “wiser man” is Averroes, the twelfth-century author of the great commentary on Aristotle, whose controversial account of man’s intellective power was debated with polemical vigour in the thirteenth century. He is in error, because his view entails a denial of the immortality of the soul, a doctrine unacceptable to Christian thinkers.

Here, in a sentence that unfolds magisterially over nine lines, is the moment at which God breathes the soul into the perfectly prepared embryo.

Apri a la verità che viene il petto;e sappi che, sì tosto come al feto

69l’articular del cerebro è perfetto,

lo motor primo a lui si volge lietosovra tant’ arte di natura, e spira

72spirito novo, di vertù repleto,

che ciò che trova attivo quivi, tirain sua sustanzia, e fassi un’alma sola,

75che vive e sente e sé in sé rigira.

Open your heart to the truth that is coming;

and know that, as soon as in the foetus

69the brain is perfectly articulated,

the first mover* turns to it, rejoicing

in nature’s handiwork, and breathes into it

72a spirit, new and full of power;

* God

the spirit draws up into its own substance

what it finds active in the foetus, and becomes a single soul,

75which lives and feels and reflects on itself.

In language of extraordinary simplicity and vitality the final line summarises the threefold nature of human beings. A human being lives (like a plant), it feels (like an animal), and it is capable of reflecting on its experience. Whereas the early stages of embryonic development (vegetative and sensitive) are the work of nature, in the final stage (intellective) spirit is infused directly by God into the foetus. The capacity for thinking is the defining human characteristic. Human speech is its expression.

In this key doctrinal statement, the language of Aristotle is enriched with Christian elements that echo the Genesis story of the creation of Adam, where we are told that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The placing at the end of the line of the adjective lieto—the only emotive word in the entire account—emphasises the Creator’s joy in creation.

At the moment of death the soul is released from the body, and takes with it these powers, the vegetative and sensitive no longer active, the intellective (in its three defining components) much more keenly operational than when it was alive:

memoria, intelligenza e volontade

84in atto molto più che prima agute.

memory, understanding and will,

84much keener in their action than before.

The components of human intellection—memory, understanding and will—form another perfect hendecasyllable. In the soul after death these powers are potentiated. Hence the shades of the dead retain the ability to speak and laugh, to weep and sigh; hence their capacity to feel hunger and thirst, and to suffer emaciation. Statius’s lengthy answer to Dante’s question is complete.

It is entirely characteristic of Dante the poet that this scientific underpinning of his poetic invention of the shadow bodies of the souls in the afterlife is incorporated into the narrative, where it satisfies a natural curiosity on the part of Dante the character (and of any sufficiently thoughtful reader). Only Statius, and not Virgil, can give this explanation, since it involves a central Christian doctrine. We are reaching the limits of Virgil’s capacity to explain.

This long scientific disquisition, apparently a digression, is a vital piece in the pattern, adding to what we learned from Virgil about love in Purgatorio 18. It shows, if only by implication, that the proper end of sexual union is procreation and not mere sensual gratification. It forms a necessary preamble to the last terrace, which the poets have now reached.

On this last terrace those who sinned through lust are punished in fire. The fire is unleashed from the mountain wall, engulfing the whole of the flat surface where the souls are walking. Only on the extreme outer edge does the wind blowing up from below deflect the flames, creating a narrow path just wide enough to allow the three poets to proceed, albeit in single file, with Virgil leading, Statius following and Dante bringing up the rear. Dante is acutely aware of the twin dangers: the fire on one side, the edge of the cliff on the other. Virgil warns him more than once to be careful. Dante, perhaps especially aware of his own vulnerability to this last sin, proceeds with caution.

Boccaccio, in his life of the poet, tells us that Dante was guilty of lust, “and not only when he was young, but in middle age as well.” Boccaccio’s testimony may be suspect, but Dante was a writer of love poems. Love was a mandatory theme for any poet who aspired to distinction. It is the relationship between the erotic impulse, however sublimated, rarefied or intellectualised, and lust that this next canto will call into question. It is no surprise that we are about to meet more poets. A stay on this terrace might almost be regarded as an occupational hazard for a poet in Dante’s time.

As the canto closes, Dante sees souls moving in the flames.

e vidi spirti per la fiamma andando;per ch’io guardava a loro e a’ miei passi

126compartendo la vista a quando a quando.

and I saw spirits walking through the flames;

so that I looked at them and at my footsteps,

126dividing my gaze alternately between them.

The poets walk along the outer edge one behind the other, Virgil continuing to admonish Dante to be careful. The sun is low in the western sky. Dante’s solid body casts a shadow laterally onto the flames, making them appear redder. Many shades, noticing this, press forward out of curiosity, though always taking care not to emerge from the flames. One of them courteously questions him.

But suddenly there is movement. A second group of souls, coming in the opposite direction, greets the first group, exchanges chaste kisses with them, and then moves off. The two groups are compared to ants who rub their antennae together, in a simile rightly famous for the freshness and accuracy of its observation of the natural world.

così per entro loro schiera brunas’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica,

36forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna.

thus within their dark swarm

one ant nuzzles another,

36perhaps to spy out the path and what lies ahead.

But these ants also have an impeccable literary pedigree. Dante’s schiera bruna echoes Virgil’s nigrum agmen in Aeneid IV, 404–7: a lovely example of how Dante effortlessly combines the very literary and the utterly everyday to produce an image of uniquely Dantean stamp.

As they move off, each group cries out examples of unbridled lust. The new arrivals invoke the biblical “Sodom and Gomorrah,” the original group the story of Pasiphae, the mythological queen of Crete who fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the minotaur.

la nova gente: «Soddoma e Gomorra»;e l’altra: «Ne la vacca entra Pasife,

42perché ’l torello a sua lussuria corra

the newcomers cry: “Soddom and Gomorrah”;

and the others: “Pasiphae gets inside the cow,

42so that the bull can serve her lust.”

Pasiphae had a cow made from hide stretched over a wooden frame; to couple with the bull of which she was enamoured, she hid herself inside it. The story of her infatuation is telescoped into its most significant moment, the monstrous coupling of human being and animal.

Dante asks who the two groups are, explaining that he casts a shadow because he is a living man. The shades fall silent in amazement. They are likened to a mountain dweller who comes to the city for the first time and is struck dumb at what he sees. An early commentator tells us that the image was based on Dante’s firsthand experience of country bumpkins from the foothills of the Appenines coming to the thriving metropolis of Florence.

Non altrimenti stupido si turbalo montanaro, e rimirando ammuta,

69quando rozzo e salvatico s’inurba,

che ciascun’ ombra fece in sua paruta;

Just as the mountain dweller is amazed and bewildered,

and gazing about him, is speechless,

69when rough and uncouth he comes into the city,

so all those shades seemed, judging by their looks;

The dumbstruck mountain dweller is a powerful image of inarticulacy in a context notable for concern with speech and degrees of skill in its use. The patterning of speech and silence through the canto will prove to be one of its striking features. It is notable too that similes seem to be a spur to linguistic inventiveness: s’ammusa, ammuta and s’inurba are all verbs coined by Dante. S’inurba (literally, “he encities himself”) was so puzzling to some early copyists that they amended what they thought must be a corrupt text to a more banal entra in urba (“enters the city”).

The shades quickly recover, and the original speaker explains the identity of the two groups. They are the homosexual and heterosexual lustful. He identifies the homosexuals with anecdotal obliqueness—they sinned in the way that caused Caesar to be taunted as “Queen” as he rode in triumph through Rome, a reference to his rumoured homosexual relationship with the king of Bithynia. No such reticence inhibits his statements about the heterosexuals.

Again he invokes Pasiphae, the woman who disguised herself as an animal in order to satisfy her lust. The perverse ingenuity required to achieve her goal is far more disturbing than conventional notions of sexual excess. This is the only explicit image of the sexual act the canto offers us, and it offers it twice. In the Convivio Dante had said that the man who abandons reason and lives by the senses non vive uomo ma vive bestia (“lives not as a man but as an animal”). Pasiphae literally and emblematically enacts this moral truth.

Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito;ma perché non servammo umana legge,

84seguendo come bestie l’appetito,

Our sin was heterosexual;

but because we did not observe human law,

84following our appetite like beasts,

in obbrobrio di noi, per noi si legge,quando partinci, il nome di colei

87che s’imbestiò ne le ’mbestiate schegge.

when we move off, to our own shame,

we call out the name of her who

87became a beast inside the beast-shaped timbers.

This last, magnificent line is one of the most remarkable in the poem. Both the violence of the transgression against the natural order, and the urgency of the speaker’s moral revulsion, are expressed in the explosive harshness of the consonantal clusters (the repeated -st-, -st-, -sch-). Sexual and moral energy fuse with verbal energy, for imbestiare is another Dantean coinage.

The speaker declines to name his companions, for time is pressing, but he reveals his own name: he is Guido Guinizzelli.

Farotti ben di me volere scemo:son Guido Guinizzelli, e già mi purgo

93per ben dolermi prima ch’a lo stremo».

I’ll satisfy your wish about myself:

I’m Guido Guinizzelli; and I’m here

93because I truly grieved before the end.”

Dante’s reaction to this revelation is conveyed in a simile that is not visual or naturalistic, but literary and allusive. The episode alluded to is recounted by Statius at the end of Book V of the Thebaid. Hypsipyle (the unnamed mother referenced in l. 95) had been entrusted with the care of King Lycurgus’s infant son, but the child had been bitten by a snake and died. As she was being taken off to be put to death, her two sons came upon her unexpectedly, rushed forward and embraced her, and pulled her to safety. Dante gains a notable compression and resonance by telling us the barest of details. There is an almost palpable sense that we are approaching an emotional climax.

Quali ne la tristizia di Ligurgosi fer due figh a riveder la madre,

96tal mi fec’ io, ma non a tanto insurgo,

quand’ io odo nomar sé stesso il padremio e de li altri miei miglior che mai

99rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre;

As, on the occasion of Lycurgus’s grief,

two sons rejoiced on seeing their mother again,

96so I did, but I don’t rise to such heights,

when I hear say his name the father

of me and of others my betters who ever

99wrote sweet and graceful love poems;

e sanza udire e dir pensoso andailunga fïata rimirando lui,

102né, per lo foco, in là più m’appressai.

and without hearing and speaking I walked on lost in thought

for a long time gazing at him,

102nor, because of the fire, did I move any closer.

Dante feels the same surge of emotions as the sons of Hypsipyle: shock, delight, dismay, affection, filial concern. But unlike them he does not act. A switch to the narrative present in mid-line marks this moment of stasis: non a tanto insurgo (l. 96). He walks along, silent and lost in thought, unable to draw closer because of the fire. The failure to embrace Guinizzelli in the flames becomes the latest element in a series of embraces or failures to embrace which mark out the action of Purgatory (Casella and Dante, Sordello and Virgil, Statius and Virgil). For all Dante’s feelings of affection and gratitude towards the earlier poet, Guinizzelli cannot draw him into the fire, let alone lead him out the other side.

There is a long pause as they walk along in parallel. When he finally does speak, voicing his admiration for Guinizzelli’s poems, Dante uses the polite voi form, which Guinizzelli implicitly and tactfully corrects with the intimate tu and frate. When he has taken his fill of gazing, Dante offers his services to the older poet, who asks why, to judge by his words and looks, Dante feels affection for him. Dante replies:

E io a lui: «Li dolci detti vostri,che, quanto durerà l’uso moderno,

114faranno cari ancora i loro incostri».

And I said to him: “Your sweet poems,

which as long as modern usage lasts

114will make dear the very ink they’re written with.”

Dante’s affection extends even to the ink with which Guinizzelli wrote. All the tenderness and warmth in the canto are here.

Guinizzelli deflects the compliment, pointing out a better poet, just as Oderisi the miniaturist had pointed out a better artist on the circle of pride. He has transcended all pride in his own earthly achievement.

«O frate», disse, «questi ch’io ti cernocol dito», e additò un spirto innanzi,

117«fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.

“O brother,” he said, “the man I’m pointing

out to you,” and he pointed to a spirit ahead,

117“was a better craftsman of the mother tongue.

This poet surpassed all other vernacular writers, whether of verse or prose. Only fools think the man from Limoges was better. These fools base their opinion on hearsay, not on truth, not on a true understanding of poetic distinction. (The man from Limoges is Giraut de Bornelh, a Provençal poet Dante had once rated highly, but had come to think less well of.)

Versi d’amore e prose di romanzisoverchiò tutti; e lascia dir li stolti

120che quel di Lemosì credon ch’avanzi.

A voce più ch’al ver drizzan li volti,e così ferman sua oppinïone

123prima ch’arte o ragion per lor s’ascolti.

He surpassed all writers of love poems

and prose romances; and let the fools talk

120who think that the man from Limoges is better.

They pay more attention to reputation than to truth,

and so they settle their opinions

123before they listen to art or reason.

Just as Giraut was overrated in Provence, so in Italy many people overrated Guittone, praising him just because other people praised him, until finally the truth prevailed. Dante never changed his mind about Guittone, of whom, as we have seen, he had once used the damning word plebescere. Guittone lacked precisely the stylistic refinement Dante so admired and now celebrates in Guinizzelli.

Così fer molti antichi di Guittone,di grido in grido pur lui dando pregio,

126fin che l’ha vinto il ver con più persone.

Many of old did just this with Guittone,

voice after voice giving praise to him alone,

126until truth triumphed with many people.

The biblical echo (“The truth is great and shall prevail,” III Esdras 3:12 and 4:41) sets the seal on this damning judgment, which assesses true poetic worth with a robust disregard for prevailing critical opinion.

Literary polemic has erupted into the afterlife as Dante, through Guinizzelli, imposes his own pattern of meaning on recent literary history. The purgatorial encounter rewrites the record, polemically asserting the true line of poetic succession, setting the seal on a radical and definitive realignment of poetic reputations.

The double denigration of Giraut and Guittone, surprising in its vehemence at this point in the poem, serves Dante’s purpose in two ways. It adds further detail and emphasis to the picture of the history of vernacular poetry which began to emerge in canto 24. And it lengthens and broadens the poetic perspective, temporally and geographically. We are carried back to the Provençal tradition from which Italian lyric poetry took its origins, and which the closing lines of the canto will so memorably celebrate.

Guinizzelli asks Dante to say a prayer for him when he reaches paradise, or as he puts it, the chiostro / nel quale è Cristo abate del collegio (the “cloister / where Christ himself is abbot of the college”). Then he moves aside to make way for another shade, and disappears into the flames, like a fish going down into water. The simile is deservedly famous for its economy and precision: the verbal equivalent of a cinematic dissolve.

Poi, forse per dar luogo altrui secondoche presso avea, disparve per lo foco,

135come per l’acqua il pesce andando al fondo.

Then perhaps to make space for someone

who was close by him, he disappeared into the fire,

135like a fish going down through water to the bottom.

Guinizzelli is a father, padre, a pater electionis in the vernacular field to stand alongside Virgil (dolcissimo patre, and even più che padre) in the classical.

Dante moves towards the newcomer and greets him cordially.

Io mi fei al mostrato innanzi un poco,e dissi ch’al suo nome il mio disire

138apparecchiava grazïoso loco.

I moved forward a little towards the man who’d been

pointed out to me, and said that my desire

138prepared a place of welcome for his name.

The shade answers graciously—but not in Italian. The narrative convention that all souls, even foreigners, speak Italian is, on this one occasion, and to brilliant dramatic effect, abandoned. Everything in the canto has led to this moment, to Arnaut Daniel’s unexpected speaking in his own voice, in Provençal.

El cominciò liberamente a dire:«Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman,

141qu’ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;consiros vei la passada folor,

144e vei jausen lo joi qu’ esper, denan.

Ara vos prec, per aquella valorque vos guida al som de l’escalina,

147sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!».

Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina.

He began freely to speak:

“Your courteous request so pleases me

141that I cannot nor would I wish to conceal myself from you.

I am Arnaut, who weeps and goes singing;

grieving I see my past folly,

144and I see rejoicing the joy I hope for before me.

Now I beg you, by that goodness

which guides you to the summit of the stair,

147remember my pain in good time.”

Then he hid in the fire that refines them.

The effortless switch into Provençal startles and delights the reader. It makes the figure of Arnaut seem remote and solitary, linguistically set apart. But at the same time it reinforces the idea of the modern vernacular tradition as a continuum, geographical and temporal, clearly set off from the literary heritage of antiquity. For the first and only time in the poem a character gives an extended speech in a foreign language, pushing Dante’s willingness to exploit all the expressive possibilities of human speech to a new height. A recent translator, D. M. Black, a poet and psychoanalyst, renders Arnaut’s words in Scots to set them off from standard English, to unexpectedly powerful emotional effect. Just the effect Dante was aiming at.

Arnaut does not talk of literature. He has transcended literature both as a topic for discussion and a pretext for display. He consciously renounces the hermetic manner for which he was famous. Only his final line is ambiguous, meaning both “remember my pain and pray for me” and “remember my pain and learn your lesson.” This—the last line Dante hears from any soul in purgatory—beautifully encapsulates the double aspect of his relationship with the sinners on the mountain.

The fire refines the poets as they had once refined the language. The artisan image of purifying and tempering a resistant medium—now transposed from the artistic endeavour to the spiritual one—is the haunting image with which the canto closes.

It is no wonder that T. S. Eliot, so acutely sensitive to the relationship between tradition and the individual talent, was haunted by these closing lines of Purgatorio 26. He famously added the dedication “For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro” to the second edition of The Waste Land; the dedication captures in this briefest of phrases the themes of poetic distinction, poetic indebtedness and the generous acknowledgement of another’s superiority. From its earliest drafts, the last line of the canto had been one of the “fragments I have shored against my ruins” with which The Waste Land closes. The whole poem is inscribed, as it were, between lines 117 and 148 of canto 26.

These closing lines form a natural climax not just to the canto itself, as they magnificently do; not just to the story of the journey up the mountain; but to one of the central thematic strands that has unfolded over the length of the poem so far: the theme of Dante’s relationship to the poetic tradition that preceded him, both his immediate vernacular precursors and his more distant classical forerunners.

The cast of characters in this final encounter is remarkable in the scale and scope of the literary relationships it encompasses. Dante, a poet, meets and talks to two poets, in his eyes the supreme masters of vernacular literature in its two principal linguistic variants, Italian and Provençal. Arnaut Daniel and Guido Guinizzelli were indispensable models or exemplars for Dante’s stylistic apprenticeship in the two registers, the aspro (harsh) register and the dolce (sweet) register, both of them necessary to the Commedia. Two poets who enjoy falsely inflated reputations are robustly reassessed. (This is what Italians call critica militante, criticism at the cutting edge of establishing literary reputations.) Yet other poets are mentioned: those whom Arnaut surpasses, and those who, along with Dante, think of Guinizzelli as their poetic mentor. Dante’s travelling companions, two of the great poets of antiquity, witness all of this. At least four of the poets who are physically present are also textually present, their own poetry echoed or consciously alluded to in Dante’s text.

This is a canto of extraordinary richness, complexity and power, and it shows supreme skill in the orchestration of its themes: lust (human sexuality, the proper ordering of sexual appetite) and poetry. Lust is represented by a reader of poetry in hell, by poets in purgatory. The connection seems inescapable.

But the revered vernacular precursors must be left behind, trapped in the fire, the penitential reality which has replaced the poetic metaphor for passion. Only the ancient poets can take Dante through the fire, just as only the ancient epic poets provided a model for the work of dizzying ambition that is the Commedia.

The sun is setting. an angel appears, pronounces a beatitude (Beati mundo corde!: “Blessed are the pure in heart!”) and tells the poets that to continue upwards they must pass through the fire. Dante turns pale, thinking of human bodies he has seen burnt.

In su le man commesse mi protesi,guardando il foco e imaginando forte

18umani corpi già veduti accesi.

I leaned forward with my hands joined in front of me,

looking at the fire, and vividly imagining

18human bodies I had seen burning.

Execution by burning at the stake was a common punishment. Dante himself had been condemned to this fate in March 1302, should he have fallen into the hands of the Florentine authorities, when he failed to pay the fine of five thousand florins imposed on him in January.

Virgil has encouraging words for him, reminding him of dangers successfully overcome in the past. He must put aside his fear. The fire cannot hurt him.

Pon giù omai, pon giù ogne temenza;volgiti in qua e vieni: entra sicuro!».

33E io pur fermo e contra coscïenza.

Lay down, lay down all fear from this point on;

turn this way and come: go in confidently!”

33And yet I stood stock-still, against my conscience.

Ezra Pound echoes these lines in one of the most affecting passages in The Cantos (“Pull down thy vanity, I say, pull down”).

Virgil mentions Beatrice’s name by way of encouragement.

Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro,turbato un poco disse: «Or vedi, figlio:

36tra Bëatrice e te è questo muro».

When he saw me still immobile and obstinate,

a little perturbed he said: “Now look, son:

36this wall stands between you and Beatrice.”

He encourages Dante as a father does a stubborn child, who needs coaxing to do what has to be done with promise of a reward.

Ond’ ei crollò la fronte e disse: «Come!volenci star di qua?»; indi sorrise

45come al fanciul si fa ch’è vinto al pome.

At this he shook his head and said: “What!

do we want to stay on this side?”; then he smiled

45as we do at a child who is won over with an apple.

Virgil then steps into the flames ahead of Dante, asking Statius to bring up the rear:

Poi dentro al foco innanzi mi si mise,pregando Stazio che venisse retro,

48che pria per lunga strada ci divise.

Sì com’ fui dentro, in un bogliente vetrogittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,

51tant’ era ivi lo ’ncendio sanza metro.

Then he went ahead of me into the fire,

asking Statius, who earlier for a long stretch

48had walked between us, to follow behind.

As soon as I was inside, I would have thrown myself

into molten glass to cool down,

51so beyond all measure was the burning there.

Virgil continues to talk of Beatrice:

Lo dolce padre mio, per confortarmi,pur di Beatrice ragionando andava,

54dicendo: «Li occhi suoi già veder parmi».

My sweet father, to comfort me,

continued to talk of Beatrice as he went,

54saying: “I seem to see her eyes already.”

The singing voice of an angel guides them through the fire, and they emerge on the other side. The angel encourages them to carry on upwards before evening falls. When the sun is on the point of setting, each of them chooses a step to sleep on, Dante protected by his companions as a goat is protected by goatherds:

tali eravamo tutti e tre allotta,io come capra, ed ei come pastori,

87fasciati quinci e quindi d’alta grotta.

just so were all three of us then,

I like a goat, and they like shepherds,

87enclosed on both sides by the high rocky wall.

The stars are larger and shine more brightly than usual. Dante falls asleep, and in this, his third night on the mountain, he again has a pre-dawn dream. He sees the enchanting figure of a young woman wandering in a meadow and picking flowers, singing as she goes:

giovane e bella in sogno mi pareadonna vedere andar per una landa

99cogliendo fiori; e cantando dicea:

«Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimandach’i’ mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno

102le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda.

Per piacermi a lo specchio, qui m’addorno;ma mia suora Rachel mai non si smaga

105dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto giorno.

Ell’ è d’i suoi belli occhi veder vagacom’ io de l’addornarmi con le mani;

108lei lo vedere, e me l’ovrare appaga».

in a dream I seemed to see a lady,

young and fair, walking through a meadow,

99gathering flowers; and singing she said:

“Let whoever asks my name know

that I am Leah, and that I’m using

102my lovely hands to make myself a garland.

I adorn myself here to please myself at the mirror;

but my sister Rachel never turns away

105from her looking glass, and sits there all day long.

She is as eager to see her own fair eyes

as I am to adorn myself with my hands;

108she is satisfied by seeing, and I by doing.”

Leah and Rachel are traditional symbols of the active life and the contemplative life: the two different but equally valuable kinds of virtuous earthly existence that human beings can lead that will bring them happiness.

Dante wakes up to find Virgil and Statius already awake and eager to continue. When they reach the top of the staircase, Virgil gazes into Dante’s eyes and makes a solemn declaration. He can take Dante no further.

Come la scala tutta sotto noifu corsa e fummo in su ’l grado superno,

126in me ficcò Virgilio li occhi suoi,

As soon as the stairway below us had all

been climbed, and we were on the topmost step,

126Virgil fixed his eyes on me,

e disse: «Il temporal foco e l’etternoveduto hai, figlio; e se’ venuto in parte

129dov’ io per me più oltre non discerno.

and said: “My son, you have seen the temporal

and the eternal fire; and you have reached a place

129where on my own I can see no further.

From now on, Dante’s guide must be his own pleasure, as he makes his way through a spring landscape of which we catch a first glimpse in Virgil’s words. Here he can sit or wander as he pleases. He must be guided by his own will, now restored to health and freedom.

Tratto t’ho qui con ingegno e con arte;lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce;

132fuor se’ de l’erte vie, fuor se’ de l’arte.

Vedi lo sol che ’n fronte ti riluce;vedi l’erbette, i fiori e li arbuscelli

135che qui la terra sol da sé produce.

Mentre che vegnan lieti li occhi belliche, lagrimando, a te venir mi fenno,

138seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli.

Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,

141e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:

per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio».

I have brought you here with intellect and skill;

from now on take your pleasure as your guide;

132you have left behind the steep and narrow paths.

Look at the sun that shines upon your brow;

look at the tender grass, the flowers, the shrubs,

135that earth produces here spontaneously.

Until the joyful coming of the fair eyes,

that, weeping, made me come to you,

138you may sit and you may walk among them.

No longer wait for word or sign from me;

your will is upright, vigorous and free,

141not to do as it bids would be an error:

so over yourself I crown and mitre you.”

Though Dante does not know it, these are to be Virgil’s last words in the poem. They perfectly express both his historical human reality as Dante’s guide and companion through the afterlife, and his symbolic significance as human reason, which has brought Dante to this point but can take him no further.

Dante sets out eagerly to explore the idyllic spring landscape.

Vago già di cercar dentro e dintornola divina foresta spessa e viva,

3ch’a li occhi temperava il novo giorno,

sanza più aspettar, lasciai la riva,prendendo la campagna lento lento

6su per lo suol che d’ogne parte auliva.

Already eager to explore within and around

the divine forest, dense and verdant,

3which tempered the light of the new day to my eyes,

without waiting further I left the bank,

wandering slowly through the countryside,

6across ground that was fragrant on every side.

A gentle breeze stirs the foliage, but does not disturb the birds, who welcome the early hours of the day with their song. Within the wood, Dante comes to a stream whose rippling water bends the grass at its edge.

Già m’avean trasportato i lenti passidentro a la selva antica tanto, ch’io

24non potea rivedere ond’ io mi ’ntrassi;

ed ecco più andar mi tolse un rio,che ’nver’ sinistra con sue picciole onde

27piegava l’erba che ’n sua ripa uscìo.

Already my slow steps had carried me

within the ancient wood so far that I

24could no longer see back to where I had entered;

and lo! a stream barred my going any further,

its little waves bending to the left

27the grass that was growing along its bank.

The water of the stream is brilliantly clear even though it is in the perpetual shade of the foliage. Dante gazes across the stream to look at the profusion of flowers, and is full of wonder when he sees a young woman on her own walking and singing and picking flowers as she goes: the very scene of which, it transpires, his dream had been a premonition.

una donna soletta che si giae cantando e scegliendo fior da fiore

42ond’ era pinta tutta la sua via.

a lady all alone who was walking,

and singing and choosing from among the flowers

42with which her whole path was painted.

Dante addresses the lady (we will call her Matelda, though we learn her name only in a later canto). He asks her to draw closer to the stream so that he can hear what she is singing. He tells her that she reminds him of the myth of Proserpine when she was carried off to the underworld.

Tu mi fai rimembrar dove e qual eraProserpina nel tempo che perdette

51la madre lei, ed ella primavera».

You make me remember where and what

Proserpine was at the time when

51her mother lost her, and she lost spring.

The myth of Proserpine, carried off by Dis from a meadow near Enna in Sicily to become queen of Hades, is recalled with wonderful concentration. In a single moment her mother, Ceres, loses her daughter, and the daughter loses the flower-filled spring landscape through which she was wandering at the time of her abduction.

Matelda modestly turns towards him and approaches so that he can hear the words she is singing. When she gets to the bank of the river, she raises her eyes to look at him: they shine more brightly than the eyes of Venus when struck by Cupid’s dart. She continues to weave her flowers into a garland. Only the stream separates them, just three steps wide.

Gazing at her, Dante is entranced, captivated by her song, her eyes, her smile. She invites him, as a newcomer, to ask questions about this place. Dante says the stream and the breeze seem to conflict with the notion that there is no weather in purgatory. She explains the story of the earthly paradise, and of man’s expulsion from it through his own fault.

Lo sommo Ben, che solo esso a sé piace,fé l’uom buono e a bene, e questo loco

93diede per arr’ a lui d’etterna pace.

The highest Good, who pleases Himself alone,

made man good, and for good, and gave him

93this place as a pledge of eternal peace.

Per sua difalta qui dimorò poco;per sua difalta in pianto e in affanno

96cambiò onesto riso e dolce gioco.

Through his own fault he did not stay here long;

through his own fault he changed into weeping and woe

96innocent laughter and sweet play.

Here in this primal landscape neither breeze nor stream is the product of meteorological disturbances like earthly weather. The breeze is caused by the motion of the primum mobile, the highest of the circling heavenly spheres. The water of the stream is not earthly in origin, but comes from an unfailing source. It forms two rivers: one (the Lethe) removes the memory of sin; the other (the Eunoè) restores the memory of good deeds.

Matelda offers a corollary to her account: the poets of antiquity perhaps dreamed of this place when, on Mount Parnassus, they wrote of the golden age.

darotti un corollario ancor per grazia;né credo che ’l mio dir ti sia men caro,

138se oltre promession teco si spazia.

Quelli ch’anticamente poetarol’età de l’oro e suo stato felice,

141forse in Parnaso esto loco sognaro.

Qui fu innocente l’umana radice;qui primavera sempre e ogne frutto;

144nettare è questo di che ciascun dice».

I’ll give you a corollary as a gift;

I don’t think my words will be less precious to you

138if they say more than what I promised.

Those who in ancient times wrote poetry

about the golden age and its happy state,

141perhaps on Parnassus dreamed of this place.

Here the root of humankind was innocent;

here it is always spring, with every fruit;

144this is the nectar they all talk about.”

Dante turns to see how Virgil and Statius react to this. They are smiling in recognition and acknowledgement.

Io mi rivolsi ’n dietro allora tuttoa’ miei poeti, e vidi che con riso

147udito avëan l’ultimo costrutto;

poi a la bella donna torna’ il viso.

Then I turned right around, back

to my poets, and I saw that they had heard

147the last part of her speech with a smile;

then I turned my gaze back to the fair lady.

The earthly paradise, or Garden of Eden, is the site of the perfect happiness humanity forfeited through the fall at the beginning of human history, when Adam and Eve ate the apple. Matelda, its guardian, symbolises that prelapsarian innocence and joy. (Critical interpretations attributing a more precise meaning to her are legion.) Her function is to lead sinners into Eden proper and supervise their purification in the two rivers. This enchanting, idyllic spring landscape now becomes the stage for a dramatic pageant.

Few readers would choose purgatorio 29 as their favourite canto in the poem, though it has been eloquently defended. This is medieval allegory at its most medieval and most allegorical. Dante is about to witness a procession, electrifying in its splendour and solemnity. Purely as spectacle, a modern equivalent might be a Franco Zeffirelli production of Aida in the Arena in Verona. But the triumphal march in Aida requires no commentary. This pageant, by contrast, must be decoded, if we are to understand it. Each element in the procession represents or stands for something else. Numbers and colours have meaning.

Dante and Matelda are walking along in parallel on opposite sides of the stream. A sudden shining brightness flashes like lightning through the forest, and a melody runs through the air. Then Dante makes out what seem to be seven golden trees approaching, but as they draw closer they are revealed to be seven huge candlesticks. Dante turns to Virgil, and finds him equally amazed.

Io mi rivolsi d’ammirazion pienoal buon Virgilio, ed esso mi rispuose

57con vista carca di stupor non meno.

Full of wonderment I turned around

to my good Virgil, and he answered me

57with a look no less astonished.

Now come figures in dazzling white robes. Dante stops walking so he can see better. The candlesticks leave rainbow-coloured vapour trails in the sky. Twenty-four elderly men, crowned with lilies, come by in pairs. They are followed by four animals crowned with green foliage. Each of the animals has six wings, the feathers full of peacock eyes.

These animals stand at the four corners of a two-wheeled triumphal chariot drawn by a gryphon.

Lo spazio dentro a lor quattro contenneun carro, in su due rote, trïunfale,

108ch’al collo d’un grifon tirato venne.

The space between the four of them contained

a triumphal chariot, borne upon two wheels,

108which was drawn along harnessed to the neck of a gryphon.

By the right-hand wheel dance three women, clothed in red, white and green. Sometimes the white figure leads the dance, sometimes the red. On the left-hand side of the chariot there are four dancing female figures, dressed in purple, and they are led by one of them who has three eyes in her head. Then there are two dignified elderly men, distinguished by their apparel, one dressed like a doctor, the other like a warrior with a sharp, shining sword. Then follow four figures of humble aspect. Bringing up the rear is a solitary figure, an old man, who appears to be asleep or in a trance. These last seven figures are dressed like the first group, but instead of the crown of white lilies they have garlands of red roses and other crimson flowers, which at a distance look like flames rising from their heads.

This is a pageant of the Church bodied forth in its key texts and figures. The description is packed with detail, all of it significant, not all of it transparent. Much of the detail is based on the biblical Book of Revelation. There are striking parallels with visual representations of these themes in medieval art, as in the mosaics of the twenty-four elders in the crypt of the cathedral in Anagni. At risk of simplifying, here are the principal equivalences.

The seven candlesticks are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The twenty-four elderly men, in dazzling white robes, crowned with lilies, are the books of the Old Testament. They are dressed in white, the colour of faith, because they believed in Christ to come. The four animals crowned with green foliage are the four Gospels. The two-wheeled triumphal chariot is the church. There is no consensus about the significance of the two wheels: perhaps Dante simply wants us to visualise a Roman triumphal chariot rather than a four-wheeled ox-drawn cart. The gryphon—a mythical beast that has the head, breast and wings of an eagle, with the body and hindquarters of a lion—is Christ in his twofold nature, human and divine. The three women who dance by the right-hand wheel are the theological virtues, faith (white), hope (green) and charity or love (red). The four dancing female figures dressed in purple are the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude). Their purple robes evoke the classical world that lived by them. The one who leads them, who has three eyes in her head, is prudence, or practical wisdom, who sees past, present and future. There follow the other books of the New Testament, represented by their authors. The two dignified elderly men, the doctor and the warrior, are Luke, author of the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul, author of the epistles. The four figures of humble bearing are the authors of the lesser epistles (James, Peter, John and Jude). Their modest bearing reflects the brevity and familiar tone of what they wrote. Finally, the solitary old man is the author of the Book of Revelation, in the characteristic trancelike state of a visionary.

When the chariot is directly opposite Dante, just across the stream, there is a thunderclap, and it comes to a halt, as do all the accompanying figures. And here the canto ends. This transfixing spectacle, though perhaps not to modern poetic taste, would have appealed to medieval readers accustomed to visual images dense with spiritual and theological meaning. It is the prelude to one of the most moving and dramatic episodes in the poem. Dante is about to see Beatrice again, ten years after she had died.

The scene which now unfolds requires us to consider the meaning of Beatrice. In Dante’s personal life she is the girl he loved in his youth in Florence. That powerful emotional bond remains paramount. But, as the lines we are about to read make inescapably clear, she is also more than this. Just as Virgil is first and foremost the historical poet Dante revered above all others, but also signifies human reason, so Beatrice, the girl he loved, transcends her historical and contingent reality and carries a universal meaning: divine grace. This spiritual meaning is conveyed with great power and economy by the dense network of quotations with which her arrival is greeted.

The twenty-four elders in white turn to face the chariot, which becomes the centre of a tableau, framed by figures which gaze at it from each side. One of the elders calls out:

e un di loro, quasi da ciel messo,‘Veni, sponsa, de Libano’ cantando

12gridò tre volte, e tutti li altri appresso.

and one of them, as though sent from heaven,

singing cried out three times: “Veni, sponsa, de Libano,”*

12and all the others echoed him.

* “Come, my bride, from Lebanon”

The words “Come, my bride, from Lebanon” are addressed to a figure who is about to appear on the chariot. They are from the Old Testament Song of Songs (4:8), a text whose erotic language Christian thinkers repurposed in their interpretations of the bride as (variously, depending on the writer) the Church, the Virgin, or the soul. Dante seems to interpret her as divine Wisdom. In response to these words a hundred angels rise up from the chariot:

Tutti dicean: ‘Benedictus qui venis!’,e fior gittando e di sopra e dintorno,

21‘Manibus, oh, date lilïa plenis!’.

All of them were saying: “Benedictus qui venis!”*

and, throwing flowers into the air and around,

21“Manibus, oh, date lilïa plenis!”**

* “Blessed are you who come!”

** “Oh, give lilies with full hands!”

The second quotation (“Blessed are you who come!”) echoes the Gospel account of the words addressed to Christ as he entered Jerusalem: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (John 12:13; Mark 11:9–10; Matthew 21:9). The chanting angels replace venit (“he comes”) with venis (“you come”), as the words here are addressed to the sponsa, the bride invoked a few lines earlier. But although Dante adapts his quotations freely, he retains the masculine Benedictus, rather than using the feminine Benedicta we might have expected. The retention of benedictus makes the connection of this figure with Christ inescapable. Beatrice, the girl Dante had loved in the Florence of his youth, is more than an earthly being. Her meaning encompasses both divine Wisdom and Christ.

The third quotation (“Oh, give lilies with full hands!”) comes from Virgil (Aeneid VI, 883). Yes, these angels are quoting Virgil—a breathtakingly bold move on Dante’s part. The words are those Anchises pronounced over the body of the young Marcellus in his prophetic speech about the future of Rome, though the original context of mourning has mutated into this joyful scenario of angelic celebration. The exclamatory vernacular “oh” is inserted by Dante for metrical reasons to turn the Latin half line into a hendecasyllable. An astute commentator suggests that the sharp intake of breath represented by the “oh” might mark the very moment at which Beatrice appears on the scene.

This rich blending and conflating of texts from the Old Testament, the New Testament and (astonishingly) Virgil at this climactic moment as Beatrice is about to re-enter Dante’s life is starthng. By virtue of the first two quotations, she is identified with divine Wisdom and with Christ; by virtue of the third, with the providential ordering of Roman history. Her figure is charged with a meaning that transcends the autobiographical. But her words of reproach to Dante, which will occupy a large part of this canto and the next, will nonetheless be searingly personal and painful. And in spite of being hailed as sponsa, her manner will prove to be very different from that of a bride.

Here is Dante’s first sight of her:

Io vidi già nel cominciar del giornola parte orïental tutta rosata,

24e l’altro ciel di bel sereno addorno;

e la faccia del sol nascere ombrata,sì che per temperanza di vapori

27l’occhio la sostenea lunga fïata:

così dentro una nuvola di fioriche da le mani angeliche saliva

30e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fori,

sovra candido vel cinta d’ulivadonna m’apparve, sotto verde manto

33vestita di color di fiamma viva.

At break of day I have seen

the eastern part all rosy,

24and the rest of the sky cloudless and blue;

and the face of the rising sun veiled with mist,

so that because of the tempering vapours

27the eye could gaze at it for a long time:

just so within a cloud of flowers

that rose from the hands of the angels

30and fell back into the chariot and around it,

with an olive crown over her white veil,

a lady appeared to me, beneath a green mantle,

33clothed in the colour of living flame.

The clothes she wears—veil, mantle, gown—are the colours of faith, hope and charity, the theological virtues. Though Dante cannot see her face, he recognises her instantly.

E lo spirito mio, che già cotantotempo era stato ch’a la sua presenza

36non era di stupor, tremando, affranto,

sanza de li occhi aver più conoscenza,per occulta virtù che da lei mosse,

39d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza.

And my spirit, which for so long

a time had not been overcome, trembling,

36with wonderment in her presence,

without my eyes seeing anything more,

because of a hidden force that came from her,

39felt the great power of my ancient love.

Her face is hidden, but the power of her presence, the force field around her, is unmistakable. Dante turns instinctively to Virgil to share this moment with him.

Tosto che ne la vista mi percossel’alta virtù che già m’avea trafitto

42prima ch’io fuor di püerizia fosse,

volsimi a la sinistra col respittocol quale il fantolin corre a la mamma

45quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,

per dicere a Virgilio: ‘Men che drammadi sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi:

48conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’.

As soon as the lofty force, which had

already transfixed me before I left

42boyhood behind, struck my eyes,

I turned to the left with the confidence

with which a little child runs to its mother

45when it is afraid or when it is distressed,

to say to Virgil: “Less than a drop

of blood is left in me that is not trembling:

48I recognise the signs of the ancient flame.”

This last line is a Virgilian quotation (agnosco veteris vestigia flammae), a touching tribute to his poetic mentor at this supreme moment of reunion with his beloved. These are the words with which Dido tells her sister Anna (Aeneid IV, 23) that, after meeting Aeneas, for the first time since the death of her husband Sichaeus, she feels a reawakening of love. But hers was a new love; Dante’s is not. The quotation, in a context saturated with Virgilian echoes, underlines the pathos of what now follows.

Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemidi sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,

51Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi;

né quantunque perdeo l’antica matre,valse a le guance nette di rugiada,

54che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre.

But Virgil had left us bereft

of himself, Virgil, sweetest father,

51Virgil to whom I gave myself for my salvation;

nor could all that our ancient mother* lost

prevent my cheeks, cleansed by the dew,

54from turning dark from weeping.

* Eve

Virgil is gone. Dante weeps involuntarily at the loss of the steadfast companion who, by small incremental changes, has evolved over the course of the journey from a stern guide to a dolcissimo patre and even a più che padre. His vanishing is delicately handled: at the end of canto 27 are his last words, though we don’t know that as we read them; at the end of canto 28 is his smile at the mention of Parnassus; midway through canto 29, he and Dante exchange astonished glances at the appearance of the procession; now, suddenly, he is no longer there. All the beauties of the earthly paradise, lost by Eve, cannot stop Dante’s tears from flowing.

Beatrice calls him harshly to task. Her sternness is disconcerting, since the bond of tenderness and affection between master and pupil, so convincingly brought to life in the course of the poem, is abruptly dismissed: its loss is not worthy of his tears. Using his name—it is the first and only time it is used in the poem—Beatrice reminds him that he has a greater cause for grief than Virgil’s departure: shame at his own failings. Weeping for Virgil compounds the fault.

«Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada,non pianger anco, non piangere ancora;

57ché pianger ti conven per altra spada».

“Dante, do not weep yet, do not weep yet

because Virgil is gone;

57for another sword must cause your weeping.”

Dante turns at the sound of his name. The figure that confronts him has the imperious stance of the commander of a naval fleet.

Quasi ammiraglio che in poppa e in proraviene a veder la gente che ministra

60per li altri legni, e a ben far l’incora;

Like an admiral who on stern and prow

comes to see the people who serve

60on the other ships, and urges them on to do good work;

in su la sponda del carro sinistra,quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio,

63che di necessità qui si registra,

vidi la donna che pria m’appariovelata sotto l’angelica festa,

66drizzar li occhi ver’ me di qua dal rio.

on the left side of the chariot,

when I turned at the sound of my name,

63which of necessity is recorded here,

I saw the lady, who earlier appeared to me

veiled beneath the angelic rain of flowers,

66direct her eyes towards me from across the stream.

She is looking at him, but still he cannot see her face because the veil masks it. Her words are bracing.

«Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice.Come degnasti d’accedere al monte?

75non sapei tu che qui è l’uom felice?».

“Take a good look at me! I am, indeed I am Beatrice.

How could you think yourself worthy to approach the mountain?

75Didn’t you know that man is happy here?”

Her questions underscore that tears are inappropriate in the earthly paradise. Dante’s shame at this realisation and the justice of her reproach confound him:

Li occhi mi cadder giù nel chiaro fonte;ma veggendomi in esso, i trassi a l’erba,

78tanta vergogna mi gravò la fronte.

Così la madre al figlio par superba,com’ ella parve a me; perché d’amaro

81sente il sapor de la pietade acerba.

My eyes dropped to the clear stream;

but seeing myself reflected in it, I turned them to the grass,

78so great was the shame that weighed on my brow.

Just as a mother appears harsh to her son,

so she seemed to me;

81for stern compassion has a bitter taste.

When Beatrice falls silent, the angels sing.

Ella si tacque; e li angeli cantarodi sùbito ‘In te, Domine, speravi’;

84ma oltre ‘pedes meos’ non passaro.

She fell silent; and at once the angels

sang In te, Domine, speravi;

84but they didn’t go beyond pedes meos.

The angels sing from Psalm 30 (“In you, Lord, have I hoped”), but only the first eight lines. (The reader is perhaps expected to know that the remaining lines are not relevant here.)

Dante’s reaction on hearing first Beatrice’s rebuke and then the angels’ singing is described at length, in a comparison from the natural world. The description of snow-laden trees along the crest of the Apennines is justly famous.

Sì come neve tra le vive traviper lo dosso d’Italia si congela,

87soffiata e stretta da li venti schiavi,

poi, liquefatta, in sé stessa trapela,pur che la terra che perde ombra spiri,

90sì che par foco fonder la candela;

As snow along the backbone of Italy

freezes among the living beams,

87blown on and packed hard by Slavonian winds,

then, dissolving, trickles down into itself,

at just a breath of wind from Africa,

90so that it seems like fire melting a candle;

The trees are alive (vive), but at some point in the future they will be felled, and beams will be hewn from them: they are “living beams.” The two winds—the harsh winds from Slavonia to the northeast and the warm wind from Africa to the south—respectively freeze and melt the snow packed on their branches. Africa is the land that “loses” shadows: a body at midday casts less and less shadow as it approaches the equator. The effect of the winds on the snow—hardening, melting—is like the effect on Dante’s heart first of Beatrice’s harsh words, and then of the angels’ song:

così fui sanza lagrime e sospirianzi ’l cantar di quei che notan sempre

93dietro a le note de li etterni giri;

ma poi che ’ntesi ne le dolci temprelor compatire a me, par che se detto

96avesser: ‘Donna, perché sì lo stempre?’,

so I remained with no tears and no sighs,

before the singing of those beings whose notes

93are always attuned to the notes of the eternal spheres;

but when in their sweet harmonies I heard

their compassion for me, just as if they

96had said: “Lady, why are you tormenting him so?”

lo gel che m’era intorno al cor ristretto,spirito e acqua fessi, e con angoscia

99de la bocca e de li occhi uscì del petto.

the ice that had tightened around my heart

turned to breath and water, and, in anguish,

99flowed from my breast through mouth and eyes.

Dante weeps and sighs. But this is not enough. Beatrice now addresses the angels, spelling out Dante’s faults, so that he, listening to them, will feel grief commensurate with his wrongdoing. In one of the most devastating passages in the poem, she explains that as a young man he had had extraordinary potential. But it all came to nothing. His exceptional promise was not just a matter of a favourable conjunction of the stars, but of grace infused directly into him by God:

Non pur per ovra de le rote magne,che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine

111secondo che le stelle son compagne,

ma per larghezza di grazie divine,che sì alti vapori hanno a lor piova,

114che nostre viste là non van vicine,

questi fu tal ne la sua vita novavirtüalmente, ch’ogne abito destro

117fatto averebbe in lui mirabil prova.

Not only because of the workings of the great wheels,

which direct every seed to some end,

111according to the alignment of the stars,

but through an abundance of divine grace,

whose rain comes down from vapours so lofty

114that our sight does not come close to them,

this man was such in his youth

potentially, that every good habit

117would have produced a wondrous result in him.

But it was not to be. As with agriculture, so with human character. The more promising the terrain, the wilder it grows if it is left untilled.

Ma tanto più maligno e più silvestrosi fa ’l terren col mal seme e non cólto,

120quant’ elli ha più di buon vigor terrestro.

Alcun tempo il sostenni col mio volto:mostrando li occhi giovanetti a lui,

123meco il menava in dritta parte vòlto.

But the more natural earthy vigour the land has,

the wilder and more noxious it becomes

120with bad seed, and left uncultivated.

For some time I sustained him with my face:

showing my youthful eyes to him,

123I led him with me in the right direction.

Sì tosto come in su la soglia fuidi mia seconda etade e mutai vita,

126questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.

As soon as I was on the threshold

of my second age, and passed to a better life,

126he took himself from me, and gave himself to another.

After her death, he was unfaithful and betrayed her, embracing a life that was unworthy.

Quando di carne a spirto era salita,e bellezza e virtù cresciuta m’era,

129fu’ io a lui men cara e men gradita;

e volse i passi suoi per via non vera,imagini di ben seguendo false,

132che nulla promession rendono intera.

When I had risen from flesh to spirit,

and beauty and virtue were increased in me,

129I was less dear to him and less pleasing;

and he turned his steps along a path not true,

following false images of good,

132which never deliver what they promise.

She did her best to help him from beyond the grave, but in vain. So far did he go astray that he ended up in the dark wood, from which he had to be rescued.

Né l’impetrare ispirazion mi valse,con le quali e in sogno e altrimenti

135lo rivocai: sì poco a lui ne calse!

Tanto giù cadde, che tutti argomentia la salute sua eran già corti,

138fuor che mostrarli le perdute genti.

To no avail the inspirations I prayed for,

with which, in dreams and in other ways,

135I called him back: so little did he heed them!

He fell so low, that every expedient

for his salvation had already fallen short,

138except for showing him the damned people.

So she visited Virgil in limbo, and begged him to help.

Per questo visitai l’uscio d’i morti,e a colui che l’ha qua sù condotto,

141li prieghi miei, piangendo, furon porti.

For this reason I visited the threshold of the dead,

and my prayers and tears were carried

141to the one who brought him up here.

Alto fato di Dio sarebbe rotto,se Letè si passasse e tal vivanda

144fosse gustata sanza alcuno scotto

di pentimento che lagrime spanda».

God’s lofty decree would be broken

if Lethe were passed and its nourishment

144tasted without paying the fee

of repentance that sheds tears.

This evocative resume of Dante’s life and the moral squalor into which he fell after her death is full of memorable lines (imagini di ben seguendo false; e volse i passi suoi per via non vera). For the angels’ benefit, Beatrice reduces Dante’s story to its essence: love, death, betrayal, sin, rescue, the dire plight in which we found him at the beginning of the poem and the distance he has travelled since. No mention of his worldly careers as poet and politician.

Now he must confess and repent.

Beatrice turns to dante and asks him if what she says is true. He must confess. He tries to speak but fails. She urges him on. Again he fails: only a lip reader could detect the word “yes” on his lips. Finally, weeping and sighing and barely able to speak, he manages to articulate audible speech.

Piangendo dissi: «Le presenti cosecol falso lor piacer volser miei passi,

36tosto che ’l vostro viso si nascose».

Weeping I said: “Things of this world

with their deceptive pleasure led my steps astray,

36as soon as your face was hidden.”

After her death, transient earthly attractions and pleasures lured him from her memory. Beatrice explains that if he were silent or denied what he has just confessed, his sin would be known anyway. To reinforce his resistance to temptation in the future, she elaborates on his failings. Even after death she should have inspired him to follow the true path:

Mai non t’appresentò natura o artepiacer, quanto le belle membra in ch’io

51rinchiusa fui, e che so’ ’n terra sparte;

e se ’l sommo piacer sì ti fallioper la mia morte, qual cosa mortale

54dovea poi trarre te nel suo disio?

Never did art or nature set before you

beauty as great as in the lovely limbs

51in which I was enclosed, now scattered on earth;

and if supreme beauty thus failed you

by my dying, what mortal thing

54should then have drawn you to desire it?

No earthly beauty or pleasure lasts. Her death should have taught him that lesson. He should have been able to fix his sights on a higher goal, resistant to transient attractions. But he was a slow learner.

Ben ti dovevi, per lo primo stralede le cose fallaci, levar suso

57di retro a me che non era più tale.

Non ti dovea gravar le penne in giuso,ad aspettar più colpo, o pargoletta

60o altra novità con sì breve uso.

Novo augelletto due o tre aspetta;ma dinanzi da li occhi d’i pennuti

63rete si spiega indarno o si saetta».

Indeed, you should have risen up

after the first arrow from deceptive things,

57to follow me, who was no longer one of them.

No young girl, or other novelty

that lasts so short a time, should have weighed down

60your wings, to await another blow.

A young fledgling waits for two or three;

but before the eyes of fully fledged birds,

63a net is spread or an arrow shot in vain.

Dante is mute, and full of repentance.

Quali fanciulli, vergognando, muticon li occhi a terra stannosi, ascoltando

66e sé riconoscendo e ripentuti,

tal mi stav’ io; ed ella disse: «Quandoper udir se’ dolente, alza la barba,

69e prenderai più doglia riguardando».

As children full of shame stand silent,

with their eyes on the ground, listening,

66and acknowledging their fault, and remorseful,

just so I stood; and she said: “If

you feel pain at hearing, lift up your beard,

69and you will feel more pain from looking.”

Her robust injunction to “raise his beard,” that is, to look directly at her rather than at the ground, is barbed, as he well knows.

Con men di resistenza si dibarbarobusto cerro, o vero al nostral vento

72o vero a quel de la terra di Iarba,

ch’io non levai al suo comando il mento;e quando per la barba il viso chiese,

75ben conobbi il velen de l’argomento.

With less resistance is a sturdy oak

uprooted, whether by a wind of ours,

72or by one from the land of Iarbas,*

* i.e. Africa

than I at her command raised up my chin;

and when she said my beard, meaning my face,

75I recognised the venom in her words.

Dante looks up and sees that Beatrice has turned towards the gryphon, la fiera / ch’è sola una persona in due nature (“the animal which is one person in two natures”). She surpasses her earthly beauty.

Sotto ’l suo velo e oltre la riveravincer pariemi più sé stessa antica,

84vincer che l’altre qui, quand’ ella c’era.

Beneath her veil and on the other side of the stream

she seemed to outdo her former self in beauty,

84by more than she did all others when here on earth.

The nettle of repentance stings Dante so sharply that he passes out from remorse.

The confession of his personal sins and his heartfelt contrition are the prerequisite for crossing the Lethe. When he comes to, Matelda is standing over him. She drags him into the river, takes hold of him and pushes him under the water, some of which he swallows. She drags him out and offers him to the four dancing ladies. They will lead him to Beatrice; the other three will help him to gaze into her eyes.

They lead him to the gryphon. Dante gazes into Beatrice’s eyes, which are fixed on the gryphon, which is reflected in her eyes in its double nature. A direct address to the reader underlines the mystical nature of this apparition: the thing itself does not change, but its image, its reflection in Beatrice’s eyes, does.

Pensa, lettor, s’io mi maravigliava,quando vedea la cosa in sé star queta,

126e ne l’idolo suo si trasmutava.

Just think, reader, if I was amazed,

when I saw the thing in itself remain unchanged,

126yet transform itself in its reflected image.

The ladies urge Beatrice to reveal her mouth to Dante. This she does in the last lines of the canto by removing her veil (by this act, she has become Revelation). No poet could do justice to the radiance he then saw, her smile being a reflection of God’s eternal light.

Dante is completely caught up in gazing at beatrice, unaware of anything else.

Tant’ eran li occhi miei fissi e attentia disbramarsi la decenne sete,

3che li altri sensi m’eran tutti spenti.

My eyes were so fixed and intent

on satisfying their ten-year thirst

3that all my other senses were shut down.

Beatrice had died in 1290, exactly ten years earlier. The virtues reprimand him for gazing too fixedly; he turns left towards them and finds himself temporarily blinded, like someone who has gazed at the sun. When he can see again, he finds that the procession has wheeled to the right and is turning back to where it had come from. The gryphon again begins to pull the chariot. Matelda, Statius and Dante follow at its right wheel.

After a short distance (three arrow flights) Beatrice descends from the chariot. All of them murmur, “Adam”; he too, as well as Eve, was responsible for the expulsion from Eden. They form a circle around a leafless tree (the Tree of Knowledge, from which the trees on the terrace of gluttons were grafted), whose branches spread wider the higher up they are. They all shout out praise of the gryphon for not eating of the tree; it concurs, then pulls the chariot to the tree and ties it there. The tree bursts forth in crimson foliage. (The despoiled tree with no leaves reflects Adam’s sin; its renewed foliage denotes Christ’s blood shed to redeem mankind.) A hymn is sung by the assembled company, but Dante does not understand it. He falls asleep: if he could describe falling asleep he would, but he can’t, so he passes on to his being awakened by a dazzling light and a voice calling: “Arise, what are you doing?” There are strong biblical echoes here, of Peter, James and John witnessing Christ’s transfiguration, passing out and being summoned to arise (Matthew 17:1–8).

Dante asks Matelda where Beatrice is. She is seated under the newly flowering tree, encircled by the virtues. The rest of the company along with the gryphon are on their way back up to heaven.

Beatrice tells him he must write of what he is about to see:

«Qui sarai tu poco tempo silvano;e sarai meco sanza fine cive

102di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano.

Però, in pro del mondo che mal vive,al carro tieni or li occhi, e quel che vedi,

105ritornato di là, fa che tu scrive».

“For a short time you’ll remain here in the wood;

and then with me you’ll be forever a citizen

102of that Rome in which Christ is a Roman.

Therefore, for the benefit of the world that lives badly,

keep your eyes on the chariot now, and what you see,

105when you’ve gone back, make sure you write it down.”

This is a key moment in the poem. Dante is instructed by Beatrice to write for the world’s benefit, to relate what he has seen. His mission will be reconfirmed by Saint Peter, no less, towards the end of Paradiso. The betterment of the human race is the poem’s aim. Its author is to be a latter-day prophet, worthy to stand alongside his Old Testament forerunners Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Now a dramatic action sequence unfolds. This is the pageant of the Church Militant: it enacts the transformations of the historical church in the world through time. The chariot suffers a series of attacks and transformations (whose significance is explained below in the parentheses that follow each one).

First an eagle strikes the chariot (early imperial persecutions). Then a fox leaps into it, but is driven off by Beatrice (early heresies, successfully repulsed). Then the eagle strikes again, this time leaving the chariot covered with its feathers (the donation of Constantine, when in the fourth century the emperor Constantine gave the territory of Rome to the church, turning it into a temporal power).

At this point a voice comments bitterly:

e qual esce di cuor che si rammarca,tal voce uscì del cielo e cotal disse:

129«O navicella mia, com’ mal se’ carca!».

and a voice, like one that comes from a grieving heart,

came forth from heaven, and said:

129“O my little ship, what an evil cargo you carry!”

Then a dragon drives its tail up through the floor of the chariot, and makes off with some of the floor planks (Mohammed and the heresy of Islam, which in the seventh century deprived the church of a substantial portion of Christian believers). More eagle feathers cover the wheels and the shaft of the chariot (further property granted to the church in the eighth century by Charlemagne and Pepin). The chariot sprouts seven heads with ten horns (the corruption of the church, bent on acquiring territory, power and money). The chariot now resembles the figure of the beast described in the Book of Revelation 17:1–18.

And just as in the Book of Revelation, a wanton harlot is seated on top of it. In the biblical text the “great harlot” refers to imperial Rome; for Dante, following the interpretation of the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Flora who wrote a commentary on the text, she is the corrupt Roman curia. She canoodles with a giant who stands beside her.

Sicura, quasi rocca in alto monte,seder sovresso una puttana sciolta

150m’apparve con le ciglia intorno pronte;

e come perché non li fosse tolta,vidi di costa a lei dritto un gigante;

153e basciavansi insieme alcuna volta.

Secure, like a fortress on a high mountain,

sitting on top of it I saw a whore,

150her clothes unloosed, her gaze provocative;

and as though to prevent her being taken from him,

I saw a giant standing beside her;

153and they kissed each other from time to time.

The giant is the royal house of France, whose designs on the papacy had led to a large increase in the number of Frenchmen in the College of Cardinals in the closing years of the thirteenth century. We are now close to 1300, the present of the poem. The final lines of the canto switch dramatically into prophetic mode. Shockingly, Dante himself is drawn into the action. When the harlot gazes lasciviously at Dante, the giant beats her.

Ma perché l’occhio cupido e vagantea me rivolse, quel feroce drudo

156la flagellò dal capo infin le piante;

But because she turned her eager, roving eye

towards me, that fierce lover

156beat her from head to foot;

Then he drags her off along with the chariot she is seated on (the papacy is moved to Avignon, as happened in 1309). The monstrous vehicle disappears from sight into the wood.

poi, di sospetto pieno e d’ira crudo,disciolse il mostro, e trassel per la selva,

159tanto che sol di lei mi fece scudo

a la puttana e a la nova belva.

then, full of suspicion and cruel in his rage,

he untied the monster, and dragged it off through the wood,

159so far that the wood itself blocked my sight

of the whore and the strange beast.

This astonishing and violent spectacle is full of movement and energy. The savagery and audacity of Dante’s criticisms of the church, expressed through this act of witnessing an otherworldly symbolic pageant whose meaning was all too apparent, would be hard to overstate. But quite why Dante is the object of the whore’s lustful attentions has never been satisfactorily explained.

Beatrice moves off, with the seven virtues ahead of her, and Dante, Statius and Matelda behind. She invites Dante to ask questions, but he defers to her knowledge of what he needs to know. She tells him that it is time for him to put aside shame and fear and to speak the truth. She prophesies that a saviour figure will come who will kill the whore and the giant, a mysterious cinquecento dieci e cinque (“five hundred and fifteen”: DVX in Roman numerals), a leader, almost certainly an emperor, who will restore the church and the world to its proper state. The prophecy is obscure, because it refers to an unknown future event, unlike earlier prophecies which refer to events that had already happened at the time of writing, but still lay in the future in 1300, the date of the journey to the afterlife.

Perhaps her prophecy is unclear, Beatrice says, but events will clarify it soon enough. He is to take note and report it to the living.

Tu nota; e sì come da me son porte,così queste parole segna a’ vivi

54del viver ch’è un correre a la morte.

You take note; and, just as they come from me,

set down these words for the living

54who live the life that is a race to death.

She urges him to abandon the way of thinking that led him astray, the belief that human philosophy could enable him to understand celestial truths. He says he has no memory of ever having strayed:

Ond’ io rispuosi lei: «Non mi ricordach’i’ stranïasse me già mai da voi,

93né honne coscïenza che rimorda».

Then I said to her: “I don’t remember

that I ever estranged myself from you,

93nor does my conscience prick me on that score.”

Smilingly she reminds him that he has drunk the water of Lethe, so of course has no memory of it.

The ladies come to a halt. Dante sees two rivers that seem to be the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Dinanzi ad esse Ëufratès e Tigriveder mi parve uscir d’una fontana,

114e, quasi amici, dipartirsi pigri.

In front of them, I seemed to see the Euphrates and the Tigris

flowing forth from a single source,

114and, like friends, slowly going their separate ways.

He asks what rivers they are; Matelda says she has already explained; as Beatrice instructs, Matelda takes Dante and Statius to the Eunoè. But he does not describe his immersion in the river and the drinking of its waters.

S’io avessi, lettor, più lungo spazioda scrivere, i’ pur cantere’ in parte

138lo dolce ber che mai non m’avria sazio;

ma perché piene son tutte le carteordite a questa cantica seconda,

141non mi lascia più ir lo fren de l’arte.

Reader, if I had more space

to write, I would continue to sing in part

138the sweet drinking that never would have sated me;

but because all the pages

set out for this second cantica are full,

141the bridle of art allows me to go no further.

This address to the reader at the very end of the cantica brings into the foreground the poet who writes, the poet whose words we are reading. Artistic constraints of length and form compel him to stop at this point. The pages set aside for Purgatorio are full. We are reminded that this is a constructed work of art, which has its own imperatives of shaping and length.

In four brief lines Dante can describe how he was transformed by drinking the water:

Io ritornai da la santissima ondarifatto sì come piante novelle

144rinovellate di novella fronda,

puro e disposto a salire a le stelle.

I returned from that most holy river,

remade like new young plants

144renewed with new-sprung leaves,

pure and ready to rise up to the stars.

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