approach his stand, the beasts and branches crashing
and clashing in the heat of the fierce race.
And there on the left, running so violently
they broke off every twig in the dark wood,
two torn and naked wraiths went plunging by me.
The leader cried, “Come now, O Death! Come now!”
And the other, seeing that he was outrun
cried out: “Your legs were not so ready, Lano,
in the jousts at the Toppo.” And suddenly in his rush,
perhaps because his breath was failing him,
he hid himself inside a thorny bush
and cowered among its leaves. Then at his back,
the wood leaped with black bitches, swift as greyhounds
escaping from their leash, and all the pack
sprang on him; with their fangs they opened him
and tore him savagely, and then withdrew,
carrying his body with them, limb by limb.
Then, taking me by the hand across the wood,
my Master led me toward the bush. Lamenting,
all its fractures blew out words and blood:
“O Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea!” it said,
“what have you gained in making me your screen?
What part had I in the foul life you led?”
And when my Master had drawn up to it
he said: “Who were you, who through all your wounds
blow out your blood with your lament, sad spirit?”
And he to us: “You who have come to see
how the outrageous mangling of these hounds
has torn my boughs and stripped my leaves from me,
O heap them round my ruin! I was born
in the city that tore down Mars and raised the Baptist.
On that account the God of War has sworn
her sorrow shall not end. And were it not
that something of his image still survives
on the bridge across the Arno, some have thought
those citizens who of their love and pain
afterwards rebuilt it from the ashes
left by Attila, would have worked in vain.
I am one who has no tale to tell:
I made myself a gibbet of my own lintel.”
NOTES
6-10. The reference here is to the Maremma district of Tuscany which lies between the mountains and the sea. The river Cecina is the northern boundary of this district; Corneto is on the river Marta, which forms the southern boundary. It is a wild district of marsh and forest.
10-15. THE HARPIES. These hideous birds with the faces of malign women were often associated with the Erinyes (Furies). Their original function in mythology was to snatch away the souls of men at the command of the gods. Later, they were portrayed as defilers of food, and, by extension, of everything they touched. The islands of the Strophades were their legendary abode. Aeneas and his men landed there and fought with the Harpies, who drove them back and pronounced a prophecy of unbearable famine upon them.
18. The burning sand: The Third Round of this Circle.
25. I think perhaps he thought that I was thinking: The original is “Cred’ io ch’ei credette ch’io credesse.” This sort of word play was considered quite elegant by medieval rhetoricians and by the ornate Sicilian School of poetry. Dante’s style is based on a rejection of all such devices in favor of a sparse and direct diction. The best explanation of this unusual instance seems to be that Dante is anticipating his talk with Pier delle Vigne, a rhetorician who, as we shall see, delights in this sort of locution. (An analogous stylistic device is common in opera, where the musical phrase identified with a given character may be sounded by the orchestra when the character is about to appear.)
48. In my verses only: The Aeneid, Book III, describes a similar bleeding plant. There, Aeneas pulls at a myrtle growing on a Thracian hillside. It bleeds where he breaks it and a voice cries out of the ground. It is the voice of Polydorus, son of Priam and friend of Aeneas. He had been treacherously murdered by the Thracian king.
58. I am he, etc.: Pier delle Vigne (Pee-YAIR deh-leh VEE-nyeh), 1190-1249. A famous and once-powerful minister of Emperor Frederick II. He enjoyed Frederick’s whole confidence until 1247 when he was accused of treachery and was imprisoned and blinded. He committed suicide to escape further torture. (For Frederick see Canto X.) Pier delle Vigne was famous for his eloquence and for his mastery of the ornate Provençal-inspired Sicilian School of Italian Poetry, and Dante styles his speech accordingly. The double balanced construction of line 59, the repetition of key words in lines 67-69, and 70-72 are characteristic of this rhetorical fashion. It is worth noting, however, that the style changes abruptly in the middle of line 72. There, his courtly preamble finished, delle Vigne speaks from the heart, simply and passionately.
58. who held both keys: The phrasing unmistakably suggests the Papal keys; delle Vigne may be suggesting that he was to Frederick as the Pope is to God.
64. Caesar: Frederick II was of course Caesar of the Roman Empire, but in this generalized context “Caesar” seems to be used as a generic term for any great ruler, i.e., “The harlot, Envy, never turns her attention from those in power.”
72. new roots: Pier delle Vigne had only been in Hell fifty-one years, a short enough time on the scale of eternity.
98. wherever fortune flings it: Just as the soul of the suicide refused to accept divine regulation of its mortal life span, so eternal justice takes no special heed of where the soul falls.
102. pain and pain’s outlet simultaneously: Suicide also gives pain and its outlet simultaneously.
117 ff. THE VIOLENT AGAINST THEIR SUBSTANCE. They are driven naked through the thorny wood pursued by ravening bitches who tear them to pieces and carry off the limbs. (Obviously the limbs must re-form at some point so that the process can be repeated. For a parallel see Canto XXVIII, the Schismatics. Boccaccio uses an identical device in the Decameron, V, vi.) The bitches may be taken as symbolizing conscience, the last besieging creditors of the damned who must satisfy their claims by dividing their wretched bodies, since nothing else is left them. It is not simply prodigality that places them here but the violence of their wasting. This fad of violent wasting, scandalously prevalent in Dante’s Florence, is hard to imagine today.
120. Lano: Lano da Siena, a famous squanderer. He died at the ford of the river Toppo near Arezzo in 1287 in a battle against the Aretines. Boccaccio writes that he deliberately courted death having squandered all his great wealth and being unwilling to live on in poverty. Thus his companion’s jeer probably means: “You were not so ready to run then, Lano: why are you running now?”
133. Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea (YAH-coe-moe): A Paduan with an infamous lust for laying waste his own goods and those of his neighbors. Arson was his favorite prank. On one occasion, to celebrate the arrival of certain noble guests, he set fire to all the workers’ huts and outbuildings of his estate. He was murdered in 1239, probably by assassins hired by Ezzolino (for whom see Canto XII).
131-152. AN ANONYMOUS FLORENTINE SUICIDE. All that is known of him is what he says himself.
143. the city that tore down Mars and raised the Baptist: Florence. Mars was the first patron of the city and when the Florentines were converted to Christianity they pulled down his equestrian statue and built a church on the site of his temple. The statue of Mars was placed on a tower beside the Arno. When Totila (see note to line 150) destroyed Florence the tower fell into the Arno and the statue with it. Legend has it that Florence could never have been rebuilt had not the mutilated statue been rescued. It was placed on the Ponte Vecchio but was carried away in the flood of 1333.
150. Attila: Dante confuses Attila with Totila, King of the Ostrogoths (died 552). He destroyed Florence in 542. Attila (d. 453), King of the Huns, destroyed many cities of northern Italy, but not Florence.
Canto XIV
CIRCLE SEVEN: ROUND THREE
The Violent Against
God, Nature, and Art
Dante, in pity, restores the torn leaves to the soul of his countryman and the Poets move on to the next round, a great PLAIN OF BURNING SAND upon which there descends an eternal slow RAIN OF FIRE. Here, scorched by fire from above and below, are three classes of sinners suffering differing degrees of exposure to the fire. The BLASPHEMERS (The Violent against God) are stretched supine upon the sand, the SODOMITES (The Violent against Nature) run in endless circles, and the USURERS (The Violent against Art, which is the Grandchild of God) huddle on the sands.
The Poets find CAPANEUS stretched out on the sands, the chief sinner of that place. He is still blaspheming God. They continue along the edge of the Wood of the Suicides and come to a blood-red rill which flows boiling from the Wood and crosses the burning plain. Virgil explains the miraculous power of its waters and discourses on the OLD MAN OF CRETE and the origin of all the rivers of Hell.
The symbolism of the burning plain is obviously centered in sterility (the desert image) and wrath (the fire image). Blasphemy, sodomy, and usury are all unnatural and sterile actions: thus the unbearing desert is the eternity of these sinners; and thus the rain, which in nature should be fertile and cool, descends as fire. Capaneus, moreover, is subjected not only to the wrath of nature (the sands below) and the wrath of God (the fire from above), but is tortured most by his own inner violence, which is the root of blasphemy.
Love of that land that was our common source
moved me to tears; I gathered up the leaves
and gave them back. He was already hoarse.
We came to the edge of the forest where one goes
from the second round to the third, and there we saw
what fearful arts the hand of Justice knows.
To make these new things wholly clear, I say
we came to a plain whose soil repels all roots.
The wood of misery rings it the same way
the wood itself is ringed by the red fosse.
We paused at its edge: the ground was burning sand,
just such a waste as Cato marched across.
O endless wrath of God: how utterly
thou shouldst become a terror to all men
who read the frightful truths revealed to me!
Enormous herds of naked souls I saw,
lamenting till their eyes were burned of tears;
they seemed condemned by an unequal law,
for some were stretched supine upon the ground,
some squatted with their arms about themselves,
and others without pause roamed round and round.
Most numerous were those that roamed the plain.
Far fewer were the souls stretched on the sand,
but moved to louder cries by greater pain.
And over all that sand on which they lay
or crouched or roamed, great flakes of flame fell slowly
as snow falls in the Alps on a windless day.
Like those Alexander met in the hot regions
of India, flames raining from the sky
to fall still unextinguished on his legions:
whereat he formed his ranks, and at their head
set the example, trampling the hot ground
for fear the tongues of fire might join and spread—
just so in Hell descended the long rain
upon the damned, kindling the sand like tinder
under a flint and steel, doubling the pain.
In a never-ending fit upon those sands,
the arms of the damned twitched all about their bodies,
now here, now there, brushing away the brands.
“Poet,” I said, “master of every dread
we have encountered, other than those fiends
who sallied from the last gate of the dead—
who is that wraith who lies along the rim
and sets his face against the fire in scorn,
so that the rain seems not to mellow him?”
And he himself, hearing what I had said
to my Guide and Lord concerning him, replied:
“What I was living, the same am I now, dead.
Though Jupiter wear out his sooty smith
from whom on my last day he snatched in anger
the jagged thunderbolt he pierced me with;
though he wear out the others one by one
who labor at the forge at Mongibello
crying again ‘Help! Help! Help me, good Vulcan!’
as he did at Phlegra; and hurl down endlessly
with all the power of Heaven in his arm,
small satisfaction would he win from me.”
At this my Guide spoke with such vehemence
as I had not heard from him in all of Hell:
“O Capaneus, by your insolence
you are made to suffer as much fire inside
as falls upon you. Only your own rage
could be fit torment for your sullen pride.”
Then he turned to me more gently. “That,” he said,
“was one of the Seven who laid siege to Thebes.
Living, he scorned God, and among the dead
he scorns Him yet. He thinks he may detest
God’s power too easily, but as I told him,
his slobber is a fit badge for his breast.
Now follow me; and mind for your own good
you do not step upon the burning sand,
but keep well back along the edge of the wood.”
We walked in silence then till we reached a rill
that gushes from the wood; it ran so red
the memory sends a shudder through me still.
As from the Bulicame springs the stream
the sinful women keep to their own use;
so down the sand the rill flowed out in steam.
The bed and both its banks were petrified,
as were its margins; thus I knew at once
our passage through the sand lay by its side.
“Among all other wonders I have shown you
since we came through the gate denied to none,
nothing your eyes have seen is equal to
the marvel of the rill by which we stand,
for it stifles all the flames above its course
as it flows out across the burning sand.”
So spoke my Guide across the flickering light,
and I begged him to bestow on me the food
for which he had given me the appetite.
“In the middle of the sea, and gone to waste,
there lies a country known as Crete,” he said,
“under whose king the ancient world was chaste.
Once Rhea chose it as the secret crypt
and cradle of her son; and better to hide him,
her Corybantes raised a din when he wept.
An ancient giant stands in the mountain’s core.
He keeps his shoulder turned toward Damietta,
and looks toward Rome as if it were his mirror.
His head is made of gold; of silverwork
his breast and both his arms, of polished brass
the rest of his great torso to the fork.
He is of chosen iron from there down,
except that his right foot is terra cotta;
it is this foot he rests more weight upon.
Every part except the gold is split
by a great fissure from which endless tears
drip down and hollow out the mountain’s pit.
Their course sinks to this pit from stone to stone,
becoming Acheron, Phlegethon, and Styx.
Then by this narrow sluice they hurtle down
to the end of all descent, and disappear
into Cocytus. You shall see what sink that is
with your own eyes. I pass it in silence here.”
And I to him: “But if these waters flow
from the world above, why is this rill met only
along this shelf?” An
d he to me: “You know
the place is round, and though you have come deep
into the valley through the many circles,
always bearing left along the steep,
you have not traveled any circle through
its total round; hence when new things appear
from time to time, that hardly should surprise you.”
And I: “Where shall we find Phlegethon’s course?
The Divine Comedy Page 15