INFERNO XX
INFERNO XX
1–3. The uniquely self-conscious opening of this canto, featuring the only explicit numeration of a canto in the poem, has caused a certain puzzlement and even consternation. One discussant, H. D. Austin, has argued that its prosaic superfluity recommends that future editors either excise it from the poem, as an addition by an overenthusiastic scribe, or at least print it in square brackets (Aust.1932.1, pp. 39–40). Its self-consciousness and difficulty, one might argue in rejoinder, are precisely signs of Dantean authorship.
The opening line portrays a poet who only unwillingly commits himself to the difficult task he now must assume. Many of the words of this first tercet have received close critical attention. Nova has either the sense (or both senses, as our translation would indicate) of “new” or “strange” (see D’Ovidio [Dovi.1926.1], p. 318). Matera is, as Chiavacci Leonardi says (Chia.1991.1), p. 599, a “technical term,” one used to denote the subject that a writer chooses to treat. Canto is here used for the first time (it will be used again only at Inf. XXXIII.90, Par. V.16 and V.139) to indicate a part of the poem; as Bara´nski (Bara.1995.3, pp. 3–4) has pointed out, the early commentators found this term strange, rendering it with Latin or Italian words for “chapter” or “book.” Canzone is a still more troubling choice of word (it is used twice more, Purg. XXXI.134, XXXII.90); in De vulgari eloquentia (e.g., Dve II.viii.2–9) it is the word (cantio in Dante’s Latin) that describes the lofty vernacular ode that Dante presents (with himself as most successful practitioner of the form) as the height of poetic eloquence in the mother tongue, and thus “tragic” in tone, because it is like the lofty style of the classical poets. Is Dante suggesting that Inferno is tragic? (For some thoughts along this line see Hollander [Holl.1980.1], pp. 137–40.) It is only in Purg. XXXIII.140 that he will finally give a part of the poem the name it now enjoys: cantica, with its religious (resonance of Solomon’s Canticle of Canticles [see Pert.1991.1, pp. 107–8]) and “comic” overtones. And finally there is the apparently strikingly inexact word sommersi, which has seemed to many commentators wrong, since the damned are not submerged in water but buried under earth. Marino Barchiesi (Barc.1973.2), p. 85, resolved this problem by finding a probable source in the Aeneid (VI.267), where Virgil asks the gods for permission “pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas” (to reveal things immersed deep in earth and darkness).
If the opening tercet causes this much difficulty, what follows will often be at least as challenging. One of the most interesting and provocative studies of the canto remains Parodi’s essay (Paro.1908.1). It is a canto that is still today renowned for its problematic nature. [return to English / Italian]
4–9. The first description of the diviners insists upon their silence and their misery, expressed by tears, the only form of expression allowed them, given the fact that their necks are twisted, thus cutting off the possibility of speech. We are probably meant to reflect on the fact that their voices, announcing their false prescriptions, were the instruments of their deception of their clients/victims. [return to English / Italian]
10–12. Hollander has suggested (Holl.1980.1, p. 141) that the image of the twisted necks of the diviners, with the resultant loss of the capacity of speech, may have been suggested by a text in Lucan (Phars. V.197), in which Apollo closes off the throat of a prophetess (Phemonoe) before she can reveal the rest of a dire prophecy, thus depriving her Roman listener of news of his unhappy destiny: “Cetera suppressit faucesque obstruxit Apollo” (Apollo closed her throat and suppressed the rest of her speech). [return to English / Italian]
13–15. The backward-looking diviners suffer this contrapasso for having looked, with wrongful intent, into the future. Biblical references have seemed apt to an occasional commentator. Pietro di Dante adduces Isaiah 44:25: “[I am the Lord] That frustrates the tokens of the liars, and makes diviners mad; that turns wise men backward, and makes their knowledge foolish.” [return to English / Italian]
19–24. The first tercet of this fourth address to the reader in this cantica (see note to Inf. VIII.94–96) is generally understood as indicating that, given the sad sight he must behold, Dante is excusing himself from blame for weeping. Benvenuto da Imola, however, has a differing view (and says that “this subtle fiction is poorly understood by many others”). According to him, Dante’s tears reveal his guilty feelings about his own involvement in astrological prediction and that “as a result he presents himself as weeping out of compassion for others, and for himself because of his own errors.” It is possible to read the passage in an even harsher light. If the reader is to “gather fruit” from reading this passage, is it not likely that its point is that Dante was wrong to weep for these creatures? What he feels is sadness at the human figure rendered so contorted, forgetting the reason for the (entirely just) punishment. [return to English / Italian]
25–27. Dante weeps and thereby earns Virgil’s rebuke (which commentators since Tommaseo have related to the words that Jesus directed to Peter and the other apostles, slow to take his meaning, found in Matthew 15:16: “Adhuc et vos sine intellectu estis?” (Are you also even yet without understanding?) A question that has exercised many readers is whether the protagonist already knows that those punished here are the diviners. While some, like Ettore Caccia (Cacc.1967.1, p. 695) and Antonino Pagliaro (Pagl.1967.1, p. 611), argue that Dante weeps only at the piteous condition of the contorted human body, and not for the lot of the diviners, others, like Marino Barchiesi (Barc.1973.1, p. 62) reply that such distinction-making is oversubtle. Indeed, the whole context of the canto would make it seem necessary that Virgil’s rebuke is not aimed at so wide a target, but rather at Dante’s failure to react adversely to the diviners. [return to English / Italian]
28–30. Perhaps the tercet in the canto that has caused the most debate. Where is “here” (qui)? Who is indicated by the first “who” (chi)? And what does the last verse of the tercet mean? In response to the first two questions, Hollander has made the following observations (Holl.1980.1, p. 147), dividing the most plausible series of answers into two groups: “(1) If Dante weeps for lost humanity in general, qui refers to hell in general and chi almost certainly refers to Dante. (2) If Dante weeps for the diviners in particular, qui refers to this bolgia and chi almost certainly applies to the diviners.” Carlo Steiner, in his commentary to this passage, argues that it seems logically inconsistent for Virgil to call Dante “witless” at v. 27 and “impious” at v. 29, as stupidity and impiety are some stages distant one from another.
As for the complicated philological problem regarding the exact reading of verse 30, this writer, along with many another, accepts the arguments of Petrocchi (Petr.1966.1, pp. 181–82) for the reading “passion comporta” (and not “compassion porta” or “passïon porta”). For a fuller exposition, based on texts in Statius and St. Augustine, see Holl.1980.1, pp. 147–57, citing, for Augustine, the earlier discussions of Filomusi Guelfi (Filo.1911.1), pp. 192–95; and now see Puccetti (Pucc.1994.1), pp. 199–206. For brief descriptions of a good half-dozen competing interpretations of the sin of the diviners see Caccia (Cacc.1967.1), pp. 688–90. [return to English / Italian]
31–39. In Canto XI Virgil has two continuous speeches of some length, vv. 15–66 and vv. 76–115. We are here involved in Virgil’s longest single speech in the poem, vv. 27–99. Having warned Dante against the sin of divination, he now proceeds to identify its exemplars, beginning with five classical diviners. The first of these derives from Statius. “Amphiaraus … was one of the seven kings who joined in the expedition against Thebes (Inf. XIV.68); foreseeing that the issue would be fatal to himself, he concealed himself to avoid going to the war, but his hiding-place was revealed by his wife Eriphyle, who had been bribed by Polynices with the necklace of Harmonia (Purg. XII.50–51). Amphiaraus, as had been foreseen, met his death at Thebes, being swallowed up by the earth, but before he died he enjoined his son Alcmaeon to put Eriphyle to death on his return from Thebes, in punishment of her betrayal of him (Par. IV.103–105)” (T). The incidents referred to here are a somewhat reinvented version of the narrative found in Statius (Thebaid VII.690–823; VIII.1–210). For Dante’s willful distortions of the story of this augur, who is portrayed with great sympathy by Statius, see Holl.1980.1, pp. 170–73. [return to English / Italian]
40–45. “Tiresias, famous soothsayer of Thebes. According to the story he once separated with his staff two serpents which he found coupled in a wood, whereupon he was changed into a woman for seven years; at the expiration of this period he found the same two serpents and struck them again, whereupon he was changed back into a man. Subsequently, Jupiter and Juno having differed as to which of the two sexes experienced the greater [sexual] pleasure, the question was referred to Tiresias, as having belonged to both sexes, and he decided in favour of woman, which coincided with the opinion of Jupiter; Juno thereupon in anger struck him with blindness, but Jupiter, by way of compensation, endowed him with the gift of prophecy (Ovid, Metam. III.316–38)” (T). For a study of Dante’s recasting of Ovid’s essentially positive presentation of Tiresias, making him a repulsive figure rather than the truthful and blameless seer he is in Ovid, with particular attention to the verga, or magic wand, that Dante contrives for him, thus associating him with Circe and Mercury, see Holl.1980.1, pp. 173–84. [return to English / Italian]
46–51. “Aruns, Etruscan soothsayer, who, according to Lucan (Phars. I.584–638) foretold the civil war, which was to end in the death of Pompey and the triumph of Caesar. Dante … describes him as having dwelt in a cave … in the Carrara hills” (T). Castelvetro, in his comment on this passage, points out that, in Lucan’s text, Aruns does not dwell in a cave but within the walls of Luni and that, furthermore, he was not an astrologer (as Dante implies) but used other means to develop his soothsaying (e.g., studying the flight of birds, the innards of animals, the course of the thunderbolt). [return to English / Italian]
52–56. “Manto, daughter of Tiresias, Theban prophetess…; Dante here puts into Virgil’s mouth an account of the founding of Mantua by Manto … which is totally inconsistent with Virgil’s own account as given in the Aeneid (X.198–200). By an oversight Dante also includes la figlia di Tiresia, who can be none other than Manto, among the persons mentioned by Statius who Virgil says are together with himself in Limbo (Purg. XXII.113)” (T). Compared with the violence done to classical texts in the preceding three examples (Amphiaraus, Tiresias, and Aruns), that done to Virgil’s tale of Manto is even more remarkable. Even her hair seems to belong to another, whether the uncombed locks of frenetic Erichtho (“inpexis … comis”—Phars. VI.518), as Benvenuto da Imola suggested, or those of the Sibyl (perhaps the “source” for Lucan’s witch’s hair), “non comptae … comes” (Aeneid VI.48), as noted by Grabher. Since the Roman poet, as surely Dante realized, had deliberately associated his birthplace (Pietola, then probably known as Andes, near Mantua) with Manto, so as to make himself, like her, a vates, or prophet (see the study by Marie Desport [Desp.1952.1]), Dante now makes his maestro ed autore recant the fiction that he himself had devised. (Virgil’s commentators themselves had wondered how the Greek Manto could have come to Italy in order to found her city, since Virgil’s poem is the only text to contain this claim.)
One of the lasting problems left by this canto is its eventual contradiction of Dante’s placement of Manto in Limbo in Purgatorio XXII.113, where Virgil tells Statius that various of the characters of whom the later poet wrote are found in that zone of the afterworld. Previous writers had resorted to various hypotheses, none particularly satisfying, in order to explain how Dante could have forgotten what he had said about Manto here when he wrote the later passage, or that, with equal failure to satisfy, “the daughter of Tiresias” of Purgatorio XXII was someone other than Manto, or even that the original text read something other than “la figlia di Tiresia.” Two Americans have argued independently that the apparent contradiction is intentional, and is based on Dante’s willful insistence that the Manto portrayed by Virgil was indeed a diviner, while the same character portrayed by Statius was not (she is rather the dutiful daughter of Tiresias, helping with the chores, as it were). See Richard Kay (Kay.1978.2) and Robert Hollander (Holl.1980.1), pp. 205–13. Kay also argues, less convincingly, that Dante thought of Virgil’s Manto as historical and of Statius’s character as fictive, thus further excusing the bilocation. [return to English / Italian]
57–60. With risible understatement, the poet has Virgil ask for a little of the protagonist’s time (his digression will continue until verse 99, occupying fully fourteen terzine). This passage begins by tacitly acknowledging the utter fictiveness of this account, since we have no source for what happened to Manto after Tiresias’s death (and the conquest of Thebes by Creon). Dante puts, into the mouth of Virgil, an account of her voyage into Italy. As is the case for that undertaken by Ulysses in Canto XXVI, there is no known source for this one, either. [return to English / Italian]
61–63. We turn our attention from the story of Manto in order to examine the landscape of Italy, to which she will repair in her wanderings. Benaco is now known as Lake Garda. [return to English / Italian]
64–69. The fresh waters of northern Italy, entering into Garda, with its island that might serve for Christian services if the various bishops of its neighboring dioceses were to gather there, since a chapel on the island was subject to the jurisdiction of all three of them, will be seen to contrast with the muddy waters surrounding Manto’s adoptive homeland once we arrive there. For discussion of the meaning of these geographical references see Caccia (Cacc.1966.1). [return to English / Italian]
70–72. The fortress at Peschiera, under the control of the Scaliger family of Verona, with whom Dante was on good terms by the time he was writing the Comedy, is seen as strong enough to hold off attacks from the cities of Brescia or Bergamo. [return to English / Italian]
73–78. Leaving Benaco (Garda), the waters that began in the mountains to the north now head south (in the Mincio) and finally, after reaching Governolo, east (in the Po—in which they finally reach the [Adriatic] sea). [return to English / Italian]
79–81. Here the attention of Dante turns back to a spot that the waters reach before they attain Governolo, the untilled, swampy land that will become the site of Mantua. [return to English / Italian]
85–93. Finally here is Manto. She is described as “vergine cruda” (cruel virgin [in the sense that she does not like the company of men]), a phrase that may reflect Statius’s description of her (Thebaid IV.463) as “innuba Manto” and/or Dante’s description of that other diviner, Erichtho, who is “Eritón cruda” at Inf. IX.23. Here she practiced her divinatory arts with her servants and died. Those who had fled her fearsome presence returned after her death and built Virgil’s city upon her bones, giving it her name, but not her divinatory capacity. What is at first shocking about this account is that it contradicts what we find in the Aeneid, where (X.198–203) we learn that the city was founded by Ocnus, the son of Manto. In other words, Dante has excised (indeed, has forced Virgil himself to excise) Ocnus. For if Manto had had progeny, as she did according to Virgil, then her mantic ability might have been passed on to others—the claim that Virgil was evidently himself bent upon making in his poem, only to be forced to recant it here in Dante’s. It is an extraordinary moment. [return to English / Italian]
94–96. Dante’s reference to a late-thirteenth-century political disaster in Mantua probably seems gratuitous to the modern reader. Given the poet’s concern with the condition of his own Florence, however, we can appreciate his interest in the dramatic events resulting from when the Guelph leader of Mantua, the Count of Casalodi, allowed himself to be tricked by the Ghibelline Pinamonte Bonacolsi, who apparently convinced him to expel many of the nobles in order to mollify the populace, angered by his having come from Brescia to rule in 1272. Foolishly exiling even members of his own party, he was in time bereft of supporters; in 1291, Pinamonte led a popular revolt that sent the count into exile and killed the remaining noble families. The tercet offered Dante a moment’s bitter reflection upon his own condition as exiled Guelph, brought about by the similar folly of his fellow citizens. [return to English / Italian]
97–102. Capping his (to us absurd yet amusing) contradiction of the details of the founding of Mantua published in his own poem, Virgil now gets Dante to swear that he will regard only the current version of that history as truthful, and that he will consider any other version, i.e., the Roman poet’s own, as nothing other than a lie. The protagonist dutifully assents. Thus is Virgil made to remove the stain of divination from his poem and from himself. The result is eventually quite different from what the tactic might have been intended to secure, i.e., Virgil’s poem is seen precisely as associated with this fault. See Barolini (Baro.1998.1), pp. 283–84. [return to English / Italian]
106–114. “Eurypylus, augur sent by the Greeks to consult the oracle of Apollo as to their departure from Troy; he brought back the reply that, as their departure from Greece had cost them a bloody sacrifice in the death of Iphigenia, so by blood must they purchase their return (Aen. II.114–119). Dante, who describes Eurypylus as having a long beard,…makes Virgil say (vv. 110–113) that Eurypylus was associated with Calchas in foretelling the time of the sailing of the Greek fleet from Aulis; but there is no mention of this fact in the Aeneid” (T). Toynbee’s version is not exactly correct. Not even in Sinon’s lying account of these events, to which the text refers, is Eurypylus said to be an augur: the message that he brings back from Apollo’s shrine is then interpreted by Calchas, the “true” augur in the Aeneid, to mean that Sinon must be sacrificed. We should reflect that Dante must have realized that none of what Sinon says is truthful. Yet he nonetheless uses this material in order to concoct his own still more inauthentic version of events. See Holl.1980.1, pp. 200–3.
The phrase with which Virgil indicates the Aeneid, “l’alta mia tragedìa,” has caused only some debate, as most commentators believe that, for Dante, with regard to its plot, Virgil’s epic was a “comedy” because it begins in difficulty (the shipwreck that initiates the action) and ends in happiness (the impending marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia; the impending foundation of Rome). Its style, on the other hand, is generally seen as lofty, and thus, in Dante’s understanding of such things, “tragic” (see, for example, Inf. XXVI.82, where Virgil also refers to epic writing as being in the high, or tragic style: “quando nel mondo gli alti versi scrissi” [when, in the world, I wrote my lofty verses]). For an attack on the usual understanding, beginning with the view that Virgil’s phrase would then be pleonastic (“l’alta mia tragedìa” would need to be understood as having the sense of “my lofty high poem,” twice referring to the stylistic level of the work), and arguing that both for a few early commentators and in Dante’s own views the plot of the Aeneid is indeed tragic, see Holl.1980.1, pp. 214–18; Holl.1983.1, pp. 130–34; Holl.1993.2, pp. 19, 62–66. According to this reading, the meaning of Virgil’s phrase is that his poem is lofty in style and unhappy at its conclusion, the death of Turnus at the hands of Aeneas, who gives over the ideal of clemency when he kills his enemy. [return to English / Italian]
115–117. “Michael Scot, who perhaps belonged to the family of the Scots of Balwearie in Fifeshire, was born ca. 1175; after studying at Oxford and Paris, he spent some time at Toledo, where he acquired a knowledge of Arabic, and thus gained access to the Arabic versions of Aristotle, some of which he translated into Latin at the instigation of the Emperor Frederick II, at whose court at Palermo he resided for several years; he died before 1235. His own works, which deal almost exclusively with astrology, alchemy, and the occult sciences in general, are doubtless responsible for his popular reputation as a wizard. Many of his alleged prophecies are recorded by the commentators, and by Villani, Salimbene, and others” (T). For a description of his Liber astronomicus see Lynn Thorndike (Thor.1923.1), vol. 2, pp. 826–35. [return to English / Italian]
118. “Bonatti, who was a tiler by trade, seems to have acted as domestic astrologer to Guido da Montefeltro; it is said to have been by his aid that the latter won his decisive victory over the French papal forces at Forlì, May 1, 1282. Bonatti wrote (ca. 1270) a work on astrology (Decem tractatus Astrologiae), which was printed at Augsburg in 1491” (T). [return to English / Italian]
118–120. “Maestro Benvenuto, nicknamed Asdente (i.e., toothless), a shoemaker of Parma who was famed as a prophet and soothsayer during the latter half of Cent. XIII…; referred to, as ‘il calzolaio di Parma,’ as an instance of an individual who would be noble, if notoriety constituted nobility (Conv. IV.xvi.6)” (T). [return to English / Italian]
121–123. Dante’s eight astrologers have moved from classical through thirteenth-century exemplars, the recent ones in descending nobility and literacy. His list now declines to an anonymous plurality of commonfolk, women who practice witchcraft through brewing magic potions and making images of their clients’ enemies. [return to English / Italian]
124–126. The moon is setting over the point that demarcates the border of the hemisphere of land (with its center, in the medieval and moralized cartographical conception, at Jerusalem) and that of water. The moon is setting in the ocean west of Seville and the sun is about to rise, from the perspective of one watching at Jerusalem. Medieval legend has it that what is often referred to in our time as “the man in the moon” was the image of Cain carrying a bundle of thorns. For a study of this tradition see Prato’s book (Prat.1881.1). For the astronomical and cartographical ramifications of the passage see Gizzi (Gizz.1974.1), vol. 2, pp. 113–36. [return to English / Italian]
127–129. Once again (see, for example, Inf. XVI.106–108) Dante adds a detail to an earlier scene in the poem, the prologue, the action of which takes place on this earth. There is no mention of the moon in the first canto. It is also not possible that Virgil means yesterday night, as some propose, for Dante and Virgil were then already in hell, having begun their descent on Friday evening after Dante spent his night in the wood on Thursday: “ ‘yesternight,’ i.e. the night before last, it being now early morning” is the explanation offered in Tozer’s gloss on this verse. [return to English / Italian]
130. Having proscribed the word introcque from the illustrious vernacular in De vulgari eloquentia (Dve I.xiii.2), Dante here employs it. It is a latinism (derived from inter hoc) and means, roughly, “meanwhile.” That is how Dante uses it as an example of crude Florentine “municipal” speech in De vulgari: “Since we ain’t got nuthin’ else to do, let’s eat” would be a colloquial American equivalent of the example he gives. If writers of the illustrious vernacular are to avoid such expressions, we are perhaps forced to reflect that Dante’s Comedy, unlike Virgil’s lofty Tragedy, is written in the low style (and has a “happy ending”). For discussions in this vein see Barberi Squarotti (Barb.1972.1), p. 281, and Hollander (Holl.1980.1), pp. 214–18. [return to English / Italian]