At the fourth, it made the poop rise
and the prow go down, as it pleased Another,
till the sea closed over us.”
“Com’ altrui piacque”—as it pleased Another. It is a classically stirring drama, with a classical culminating phrase. It is also a large moment in Dante’s assessment of himself. He too had left behind wife and children and home to seek experience of the world; he too had gone in search of “virtue and knowledge.” True, he had been ejected forcibly from his native city. But in a part of him he knew that ways, however humiliating, could be found to allow him to return to his family; and in another part, he felt that the endless pursuit of new experience was heroic to an extreme. (Tennyson’s Ulysses, it can be noted, while deriving audibly from Dante’s, is even more clearly cast in the heroic vein, as the well-known closing lines reveal:... that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.)
The flame that was Ulysses falls silent and goes away. Another being, wrapped in fire, comes toward the travelers, making bellowing sounds, like a bull. Virgil remarks that this one is obviously an Italian, so Dante can speak to him. Dante asks the sinner who he is; the voice roars a little longer, then quiets down and replies. His first utterance, with its recurring “s” sounds, catches the hissing noise of the flames: “S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse. ”
[If I thought my answer were made to one
who could ever return to the world, this flame
would shake no more.]
T. S. Eliot deploys the passage as the epigraph for his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), giving the next tercet as well to convey the sense of Prufrock, the Boston wanderer, speaking from a metaphorical world after death:“Ma per ció che gia mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s‘i’ odo il vero,
senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.”
[But since no one has ever returned alive
from this depth, if what I hear is true,
without fear of infamy I answer you.]
The sinner is Guido da Montefeltro, a Ghibelline leader who had connived with Boniface against his own party, then was typically deceived by the pope. He had died in 1298.
In the ninth chasm of the eighth circle there are the sowers of discord, a horde of them, sources of bitter uprisings in their cities and communities. Dante despised them in life, but their punishment in Hell is almost beyond his ability to describe. One of them has his body ripped down to “where one farts”; his entrails hang between his legs. Another has his throat pierced and his nose cut off. Still another has both hands sliced away. He lifts his stumps and identifies himself: he is Mosca, who galvanized his family and their Amadei relatives into murdering Buondelmonte on Easter morning in 1216, barking “Capo ha cosa fatta” [Let’s get it over with]. This, Mosca says mournfully, “was the seed of evil to the Tuscan people.”
In the tenth chasm are counterfeiters and forgers, among them Adam of Brescia, who forged Florentine gold coins and was burned at the stake for it in 1281. He is miserably parched, and Dante the poet provides him with a tantalizing image of the fresh Casentino waters in the world above:“The rivulets that from the verdant hills
of the Casentino descend into the Arno,
making their channels cool and moist
stand constantly before me.”
Adam points to another falsifier nearby, Simon the Greek, who cunningly persuaded his Trojan captors to admit the wooden horse. He engages in a noisy dispute with Simon, in language so colorful that Dante is transfixed until Virgil reprimands him severely, saying that to want to hear such things “is a vulgar wish.”
A horn sounds. In the mist, Dante thinks to see a number of high towers. They are giants sunk to their navels in a huge well and reminding Dante of the walled Tuscan town of Monteriggioni, with its circuit of fourteen towers. One of them, Dante discovers, is Nimrod, ruler of Babylon who, in the poet’s mythology, built the Tower of Babel, splintering the one human language into many. Another is the giant Antaeus; it is he, Virgil informs Dante, who will carry the two of them down “to the bottom of all guilt,” to the very base of Hell.
Virgil makes a bundle of Dante and himself; Antaeus takes hold of them. Looking up at him, Dante thinks of the leaning tower in Bologna:Such as the Carisenda seems to one’s view,
beneath the leaning side, when a cloud
is going over it ...
(The words are inscribed at the foot of the Torre della Carisenda, as it leans against its twin, the Torre degli Asinelli, in Piazza di Porta Ravegnana in Bologna.) Dante rather wishes they could descend by some other means, but Antaeus carries them gently and sets them down on what Dante calls “the bottom of the universe.” To describe the scene, Dante remarks, is anything but a sport.
He espies a frozen lake; encased in it, with only their heads and necks showing, are those who betrayed their kinfolk or their country. Walking past, Dante kicks one of them savagely in the face. This is Bocca degli Abati, an ex-Ghibelline who had seemingly joined the Guelphs at Montaperti but who, at a crucial moment, had cut off the hand of the Florentine standard-bearer. The Guelph disaster followed.
They had barely left Bocca, Dante narrates,
when I saw two frozen in one hole so closely that the one head was a cap to the other.
They are Count Ugolino of Pisa and Archbishop Ruggieri of the same city, whose treacherous story has already been told. They are now packed close in the ice, with Ugolino gnawing at Ruggieri’s head.
Silence surrounds Ugolino’s long slow narrative (xxxiii, 4-75), an absence of sound the more chilling after the noisy cursing in the previous circle. So we hear of the children in the dungeon, of little Anselm pleading desperately, of little Guido crying out, “My father! Why don’t you help me?”
There he died; and even as you see me,
so I saw three fall dead, one by one,
between the fifth day and the sixth ...
then hunger had more power than grief.
Along with the Paolo and Francesca sequence, and those of Brunetto Latini and Ulysses, Ugolino’s story is the greatest poetic and dramatic moment in the Inferno. Coming near the end, it counterpoints the Paolo and Francesca story near the beginning. There two lovers are bound forever by love; here two enemies are bound forever by hatred. Dante is so moved by the tale told by Francesca that he faints away. His reaction to Ugolino’s narrative is cold silence, except for a burst of anger against the city of Pisa and the expressed wish that the Arno would flood it. The hideous fate of the little children may have grieved him; but Ugolino, like Ruggieri, is an unredeemable traitor.
The travelers move along to the final spectacle. Dante sees many other traitors buried in the ice:Some are lying; some stand upright,
this on his head, that on his soles,
another like a bow bends his face to his feet.
So they come to Satan, the Emperor of the Dolorous Realm. “Once as beautiful as he is now ugly,” Lucifer, the light-bearer, is up to his waist in ice and so enormous as to make the giants seem small.
Satan has three faces; tears gush steadily from all six eyes. From one frozen mouth in front hangs Judas Iscariot, the archtraitor of mankind; from the two behind hang Brutus and Cassius, the betrayers of Julius Caesar and the city of Rome.
“Night is reascending,” Virgil observes—it is the evening of Holy Saturday. “And now we must depart, for we have seen the whole.” Dante holds his master from behind, by the neck, and they make their way down the final slope. They then “entered the hidden road, to return to the bright world.” Their position is reversed as they leave the Inferno. Now they are climbing.
We mounted up, he first and I second ...
And thence we issued forth again to see t
he stars.
[E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle].
SEVEN
The Middle of the Journey: 1310-1319
FROM THE LATE SUMMER of 1310 to the midsummer of 1313, even as he was bringing the Inferno toward its conclusion, Dante’s mind was again aroused by grand possibilities in the world of war and politics. He had made one of his recurring visits to the Casentino, this time as the guest of Count Guido da Batifolle in his castle at Poppi, the fortified hill town that dominated the enclosed valley (as it does today) from the southern slope. Directly below, as Dante could see by gazing down over the shoulder-high wall-circuit, was the plain of Campaldino, where he had ridden to victory with the Florentine cavalry two decades before. Now, perhaps, history was preparing a larger victory, via the figure of young Henry VII of Luxembourg.
The emperor’s seat had been empty since the spring of 1308, when Albert I of Austria, who had some claim to it, was murdered by his nephew John of Swabia. Clement V, the French pope who, in 1305, had settled the papacy at Avignon, seemed to favor Henry for the imperial crown. Henry was in his mid-thirties, of modest estate (as the chroniclers would say of him), courageous, free of cupidity (in Dante’s phrase), and magnanimous in spirit. As Henry, encouraged by the pope, prepared to enter Italy in September 1310, Clement issued a letter to the leaders of Italy and all its citizens, requesting them to welcome the new ruler and to obey him, proclaiming that Henry would come as a peacemaker.
This was likewise the theme of the rapturous letter that Dante composed in the Casentino in September 1310, dispatching it as from “the Italian Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, exiled counter to his deserts” and addressing it to all the princes and lords and people of Italy, foreseeing for them all the end of “our long calamity” and the looked-for joy when “peace-loving Titan shall arise, and justice ... will revive again.” In ever swelling rhetoric, Dante intoned, “O Italy, henceforth rejoice ... Your bridegroom, the solace of the world and the glory of your people, the most clement Henry, Divus and Augustus and Caesar, is hastening to the bridal.”
A month after that letter, in October, Henry entered Italy from the north. In January 1311, in Milan, he was crowned king of Lombardy, in a ceremony Dante was able to attend. But Henry then made the tactical error of appointing a Ghibelline as his viceroy (imperial representative); and this at once enraged the Black Guelphs in Florence. They refused to acknowledge Henry or even to see him; Henry in turn showed himself reluctant to make any move against the city. Dante, tingling with impatience, now wrote two open letters to both parties: to the Florentines on March 31, 1311, and to Henry on April 16.
Both letters were composed in the Casentino, to which Dante had retreated after Henry’s inauguration in Milan. He was now the honored guest of Count Bandino, in his ancient high-turreted castle, far up on the northern slope of the valley, “under the source of the Arno,” as Dante put it in his letter to Henry. The river, as Dante would soon be describing in Purgatorio, has its origin a little farther up on Monte Falterona.
With his fellow citizens, Dante did not strive for a conciliatory tone. “Iniquitous Florentines,” was his phrase for them; and he accused them of transgressing both human and divine law. He condemned them for their stupidity in refusing to open their gates to Henry VII as the true Holy Roman emperor of Italy and Europe. The Florentine rulers seemed blindly unaware that “the triumphant Henry” pursued not his own good but the general good. If the Florentines persisted in their stance, Henry would invade and ravage the city; even the new circuit of walls would be brought down—“You shall gaze mournfully upon them as they fall.”
For “the sacred and triumphant Henry,” Dante has a no less urgent message: invade Florence at once. Florence was the true impediment to gaining control of Italy; the emperor’s real enemy “does not drink of the headlong Po, nor of the Tiber, but his jaws pollute the streams of the torrent of Arno.” He concluded, “Come then, banish delay”; and, in a customary biblical idiom, “slay this Goliath ... and Israel shall be delivered.”
It was probably sage advice, though we do not know if Henry VII ever saw the eloquent appeal. In any event, he held back from attacking Florence. He spent most of the summer and the early fall of 1311 in a lackluster siege of Brescia, fifty-odd miles east of Milan, in the Lombard war zone. At the start of 1312, Henry formally declared the Florentines to be rebels against the empire. In late June, Henry was belatedly crowned Holy Roman emperor in Rome, in a ceremony of questionable validity: not in St. Peter’s, the proper place, and not by the pope (who was huddled away in Avignon), but in the church of St. John Lateran, and by a cardinal from Prato.
In the spring of 1313, Henry moved into Tuscany and appeared to be preparing for an assault upon Florence. But he had lost something of his old determination, especially since the death of his wife, Margherita of Brabant (Dante had been in correspondence with this intelligent and forceful woman), the preceding fall. He pulled his army back to the Pisan area and went down to Siena. Here he contracted malaria and died of it on August 24, 1313.
About the time when, to Dante’s perception, the imperial conquest of Tuscany seemed imminent, he issued a treatise on political philosophy called De Monarchia. He had begun it in the year 1308, when Henry of Luxembourg was just emerging as the likely and enormously desirable new emperor. Dante’s political passions were rekindled. But the Latin prose essay, on true rulership, was in no way a diversion from the poetic work-in-progress. On an immediate and personal level, the essay had to do with the political conditions under which the epic might most effectively be carried forward.
At the heart of the first of the three books are several linked statements. It is laid down, first, that only in the “tranquility of peace” is “the human race,” and every individual in it, “most freely and favorably disposed toward the work proper to it.” Universal peace being thus the supreme goal of mankind, it can, second, be ensured only by a single and universal empire ruled over, third, by a single monarch or emperor. The “work proper” to Dante Alighieri was the writing of the Comedy; ideally speaking, only a universal empire and emperor could create the proper conditions for it.
Dante, as we have been seeing, wrote much of the Inferno on the move—even on the run—sometimes hungry and threadbare. But in his intellectual vision there loomed an epoch of universal tranquility, with everyone, himself included, getting ahead with the work ordained.
De Monarchia sprang as well from a corollary conviction that it was the duty of highly educated persons to speak out concerning urgent political challenges. This too is set forth early on in Book I, when Dante argues that anyone who has been imbued with “public teachings”—for Dante, primarily the Politics of Aristotle—but who does not seek to “contribute to the public good” has fallen far short of his duty. Dante was here discussing what in our time is called the public responsibility of the intellectual; he felt strongly about the matter, and no one has written more cogently about it. Deploring the idea of the “buried talent,” he expressed his own deep desire to speak out “for the public advantage” and in the present treatise “to set forth truths unattempted by others.” It was all very well, he remarked, for intellectuals to brood about questions they can do nothing about, questions in mathematics and theology, for example; “but there are some that are subject to our power, and that we can not only think about but do.” The question at hand related to the best form of human society and hence was concerned “not with thinking but with doing.”
In this spirit, Dante, in his characteristically encyclopedic manner (recall the history of human language in the De Vulgari Eloquentia), offers a survey of Roman history, drawing upon the Aeneid, and following that history to the age of Augustus and the incarnation of Christ. The great image and need of a universal empire are contained within that mythic pattern, as Dante unfolds it. In Book III, he turns to the authority of the papacy in the universal scheme, and maintains that it extends only to spiritual matters and cannot impinge upon secular affairs. The
declaration of Christ before Pilate is invoked: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Less than a year before the death of Henry VII, Dante had returned to Verona, where he settled more or less continuously from late 1312 to mid-1318, the longest stay in his exile years. It is from this period that we have our first verbal portrait of him, put together by Boccaccio from interviews with Dante’s former associates. The poet, now about fifty, was of middle height and given to stooping a little. He had a long face, an aquiline nose, large eyes, a heavy jaw, and a prominent underlip. His complexion was dark. His hair and beard were thick, black, and crisp. Dante had grown a beard a good many years earlier. He walked in a grave and sedate manner, his countenance almost always sad and thoughtful. He was on all occasions and with all whom he encountered courteous to a degree.
Dante had become a not unfamiliar figure in Verona. Boccaccio tells of several Veronese ladies who saw him walking by one day. They were struck and a little frightened by his appearance, his face fixed in gloom and smudged as though by soot, his beard bristling as though tinged with fire. He seemed, they thought, a character emerging from his own Inferno.
That impressionistic reaction suggests, what we know from other sources, that Dante’s Inferno had gained recognition by, say, 1315. The first known reference to the Comedy, an allusion to the Inferno, was made in 1313—1314 by the Tuscan poet Francesco da Barberino, in a commentary on one of his own love poems.
It was in the Verona years that Dante revised the Inferno, wrote and revised the Purgatorio, saw to the copying and diffusing of the two canticles, and made considerable headway on the Paradiso. This fabulous productivity resulted in part from his living conditions in Verona: a version in small of the tranquility and ideal rulership he had envisaged in the De Monarchia. He was, in all this time, the beautifully accommodated guest of Can Grande della Scala.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 10