INFERNO XVII
INFERNO XVII
1–3. Virgil’s description of Geryon (not identified by name until v. 97) reflects his triple nature in classical literature. In the tradition known to Dante, he enticed strangers to be his guests, only to kill and eat them. He was eventually killed by Hercules. In the Aeneid he is twice identified with the number three: he is described as forma tricorporis umbrae (the form of the three-bodied shade—VI.289) and again as tergemini … Geryonae (triple Geryon—VIII.202). Ovid (Heroides IX.92) says that “in tribus unus erat” (he was one in three). In classical literature he is sometimes referred to as the king of three Iberian islands—which may account for his tripleness. “Dante’s image was profoundly modified, however, by Pliny’s description—followed by Solinus—of a strange beast called Mantichora (Historia Naturalis, VIII, 30) which has the face of a man, the body of a lion, and a tail ending in a sting like a scorpion’s” (Grandgent’s introductory note to this canto). All these threes find an answer in the three destructive action verbs describing him in this first tercet. This embodiment of fraud (he is the “foul effigy of fraud” at v. 7) is thus presented as the counterfeit of Christ, three-in-one rather than one-in-three. The very words that introduce this numerically central canto of Inferno, “Ecco la fiera” (Behold the beast), would seem to echo the familiar tag for Christ, Ecce homo (Behold the man [John 19:5]), as a student at Dartmouth College (Sarah LaBudde, ’84) suggested some years ago. [return to English / Italian]
10–11. The positive words that accompany this description, invoking justice and benignity, remind us of the absence of such qualities in hell. Now they appear, but only as the masks for Fraud. The realm of Violence here will show us its last set of sinners, the usurers, men identified by bestial devices hanging from their throats; this first tip of the iceberg of Fraud is in the form of a huge beast, his bestial and reptilian parts at first mainly hidden in the void, with the fair face of a man. The last book in the Christian scripture tells of similar creatures, the locusts of destruction that will be loosed upon the world who have faces like men and tails like scorpions, with stingers in them (Rev. 9:7; 9:10). [return to English / Italian]
14–18. The “tattooed” body of Geryon looms in eerie beauty until the resemblance to the similarly “painted” leopard of Canto I.42 (referred to again at XVI.108) suggests that we can understand both these creatures as embodiments of the sins of fraud (see Durling and Martinez on these verses [Durl.1996.1]). And the concluding reference to Arachne (Ovid, Metam. VI.5–145), that world-class weaver turned into a spider, whose metamorphosed beguiling art has a purpose: the entrapment of flies. Chiavacci Leonardi (Chia.1991.1) calls attention to Rossetti’s commentary to vv. 7–12, in which he interprets the shape of the serpent as a sort of history of the process of fraud: “Fraud begins its work by inspiring trust (the face of a just man); then weaves its deceit (the serpentine trunk); and at last strikes its final blow (the pointed tail).” [return to English / Italian]
19–24. The two similes identify the posture of Geryon in terms of homely images, a boat drawn up to shore, a beaver fishing with its tail. (Beavers were reputed to use their tails as bait, eventually grasping the thereby attracted fish with their paws.) Tommaseo’s commentary to this passage pointed out that hyperactive Teutonic appetite was a matter of note as far back as the histories of Tacitus. [return to English / Italian]
28–33. Their descent to the right causes some commentators to think that the travelers have changed direction, as they did in the Circle of heresy; what they have done is merely what they have done before, all across the ring of the violent against nature; that is, they are moving downward toward the center. They have not changed their essential leftward course on this occasion, either. [return to English / Italian]
37–39. For only the second time in the poem Virgil leaves Dante alone (see Inf. VIII.106–111). And now, for the first time, he is allowed to visit a group of sinners unguided. Virgil’s decision to let him do so probably tells us that he believes the protagonist already proof against the danger or attraction of usury. Further, on both occasions we have come to the end of a large area of hell, first Incontinence and now Violence. For the idea that the infernal voyage is divided into five segments, in each of which the protagonist moves through cycles of unworthy fear and improper sympathy until he reaches firmness against an entire category of sin, see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 301–7, with addendum in Holl.1980.1, pp. 168–69. [return to English / Italian]
45–48. Having learned that the homosexuals were punished by continual movement, reflective of their agitated lives, the reader now finds the third set of the violent against God sitting in place (and thereby undergoing precisely the punishment that the violent against nature dreaded). Usurers, we may understand, have caused money to race from hand to hand, but were themselves stationary, unmoved movers hunched over their desks in the pursuit of gain. We are in the third and final zone of the third ring of the seventh Circle. Like the first, it is located at a margin of that Circle (see Inf. XIV.12). [return to English / Italian]
55–57. The usurers, rendered unrecognizable by the burning (and by the degrading nature of their sin, which is a sin against God’s “grandchild,” industry, yet is also a sin against His child, nature, because it makes money “copulate”), have their only identity in the coats-of-arms hanging from their necks, fastened loose enough so that they themselves can see them. Their identities are made known to an observer by these devices, but they would rather seem to be gazing on their “real” selves, the money that used to fill their purses, than on their escutcheons. [return to English / Italian]
59–60. This device indicates the Gianfigliazzi family of Florence, Black Guelphs. Exactly which member of the family is not known, but perhaps Dante was happy to leave the door open to the widest possible speculation. [return to English / Italian]
62–63. The arms of the Obriachi family, Florentine Ghibellines. Once again commentators have proposed various individuals, but without a victorious candidate emerging. [return to English / Italian]
64–66. The “star” among the usurers, the only one with a speaking part, is, most commentators believe, Reginaldo degh Scrovegni, the only non-Florentine in the little group of identified sinners. He was from Padua and was a usurer on a major scale. A penitential desire to make up for paternal usurious practice reputedly moved his son, Arrigo, to endow the construction of the Scrovegni Chapel, its walls devoted to Giotto’s frescoes, one of the most beautiful interior spaces in the Western world. [return to English / Italian]
67–69. Reginaldo’s discourtesy to Dante is matched by his envious report that his fellow Paduan (and fellow usurer, still alive as late as 1307), Vitaliano del Dente (there is some disagreement as to his exact identity among the commentators) will join him here one of these days. [return to English / Italian]
72–73. Mocking his Florentine companions in usury, Reginaldo reports that they, too, are awaiting a townsman, the “king of the usurers” of Dante’s day (and alive until 1310), Giovanni Buiamonte, a Ghibelline. [return to English / Italian]
74–78. Reginaldo’s animalistic, sub-verbal facial gesture in response to the reported conversations of his companions conveys some of the self-enclosed antisocial nature of these sinners. They really did not care for anything but money. Dante, having been warned by Virgil to return quickly (and the whole scene has a rushed urgency about it), heads back toward Virgil—and Geryon.
This little narrative (vv. 43–78) of Dante’s first (and last) “solo” adventure in the Inferno is carried out with a striking mixture of brief understatement and the only vivid colors we find in the cantica (as Chiavacci Leonardi points out in her commentary to v. 63). The quick spareness of the narration allows the poet to give us five personages in this brief space. And for all the brightness of the color on the devices that we see, the net effect is of an enervated attachment, not so much to wealth as to the lonely pursuit of infinite gathering. [return to English / Italian]
82. The “stairs” to which Virgil refers are monstrous creatures, as he looks ahead to their means of conveyance over the great gaps in walkable terrain that they will face at Cocytus (Canto XXXI, Antaeus will be their “stairs” then) and at the center of the Earth (Canto XXXIV, where Satan’s legs will be the ladder Virgil climbs to begin to draw Dante up from hell). [return to English / Italian]
97–99. Virgil’s commands to Geryon, coupled with the monster’s instantaneous disappearance once his tour of duty is ended, make the reader realize that Virgil has used extraordinarily persuasive arguments to tame this beast. His having sent Dante away also reminds us of the time he left his charge alone but in sight of his temporary yet crushing defeat at the hands of the demons at the walls of Dis. This time he first gets his pupil out of viewing range and then, we do not know how, manages to control a most difficult demon and turn him into the first helicopter. If Dante is the main learner in Inferno, Virgil learns a few things himself. [return to English / Italian]
106–108. The extraordinary journey put fear into our hero, which he now may compare to that felt by classical precursors who failed on similar flights. As Brownlee points out, Phaeton (his story is found in Ovid, Metam. II.47–324) dropped the reins of his heavenly chariot as a result of his terror upon looking at the constellation Scorpio, while Dante mounts on the scorpion-tailed Geryon in order to accomplish his flight (Brow.1984.1), p. 136.
The “scorching” of the sky, the path of Phaeton’s fall, is the Milky Way. [return to English / Italian]
109–111. Icarus (Ovid, Metam. VIII.183–235), on a second extraordinary flight that failed, did not obey the instructions of his father, Daedalus, trying instead to turn a voyage home into a trip through the galaxy. If the protagonist then thought of these two precursors, he must have thought that he, too, might die for his temerity; the poet, however, making the analogies now, sees the comic resolution of a voyage that might have turned tragic except for the fact that this voyager had God on his side. [return to English / Italian]
115–126. This, perhaps the single most melodramatic and implausible narrative passage in the Comedy, is accomplished with considerable art. Dante, his face at first pushed up against the body of the beast, sees nothing. He feels the wind on his face, hears the torrent below, finally gets his eyes into play and sees the flames of lower hell, hears the cries of the damned, and finally, now that he is able to look, realizes the pattern of his descending flight from the “approach” of the circling and rising hellscape. [return to English / Italian]
127–136. The simile re-introduces falconry to the poem; references to this sport of hunting with birds will reappear several times. The similetic falcon, like Geryon an unwilling worker, has come down before finishing his mission (to catch a bird or be summoned home by the falconer’s lure); to compound his bad birdmanship, he does not even land on his master’s arm, but far afield. Geryon, on the other hand, while equally rebellious, does complete his flight as his master (Virgil) had ordered. The simile, now that the fearsome flight is over, has a way of making Geryon less terrifying than he was, comparing him to a small bird of prey. At this midpoint of the Comedy we have a provisional comic ending, with Dante safe and sound exactly halfway there. (For Dante’s distinctions between tragedy and comedy see the note to Inferno XX.106–114.) The last two verses of the canto, however, give Geryon a last moment of terrifying will and power. [return to English / Italian]