The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  And Lethe’s? One you omit, and of the other

  you only say the tear-flood is its source.”

  “In all you ask of me you please me truly,”

  he answered, “but the red and boiling water

  should answer the first question you put to me,

  and you shall stand by Lethe, but far hence:

  there, where the spirits go to wash themselves

  when their guilt has been removed by penitence.”

  And then he said: “Now it is time to quit

  this edge of shade: follow close after me

  along the rill, and do not stray from it;

  for the unburning margins form a lane,

  and by them we may cross the burning plain.”

  NOTES

  12. just such a waste as Cato marched across: In 47 B.C., Cato of Utica led an army across the Libyan desert. Lucan described the march in Pharsalia, IX, 587 ff.

  28-33. Like those Alexander: This incident of Alexander the Great’s campaign in India is described in De Meteoris of Albertus Magnus and was taken by him with considerable alteration from a letter reputedly sent to Aristotle by Alexander.

  43. that wraith who lies along the rim: Capaneus, one of the seven captains who warred on Thebes. As he scaled the walls of Thebes, Capaneus defied Jove to protect them. Jove replied with a thunderbolt that killed the blasphemer with his blasphemy still on his lips. (Statius, Thebiad, X, 845 ff.)

  53. Mongibello: Mt. Etna. Vulcan was believed to have his smithy inside the volcano.

  55. as he did at Phlegra: At the battle of Phlegra in Thessaly the Titans tried to storm Olympus. Jove drove them back with the help of the thunderbolts Vulcan forged for him. Capaneus himself is reminiscent of the Titans: like them he is a giant, and he certainly is no less impious.

  73. we reached a rill: The rill, still blood-red and still boiling, is the overflow of Phlegethon which descends across the Wood of the Suicides and the Burning Plain to plunge over the Great Cliff into the Eighth Circle. It is clearly a water of marvels, for it not only petrifies the sands over which it flows, but its clouds of steam quench all the flames above its course. It is obvious that the Poets’ course across the plain will lie along the margins of this rill.

  76. the Bulicame (Boo-lee-KAH-meh): A hot sulphur spring near Viterbo. The choice is strikingly apt, for the waters of the Bulicame not only boil and steam but have a distinctly reddish tint as a consequence of their mineral content. A part of the Bulicame flows out through what was once a quarter reserved to prostitutes; and they were given special rights to the water, since they were not permitted to use the public baths.

  94. Rhea: Wife of Saturn (Cronos) and mother of Jove (Zeus). It had been prophesied to Saturn that one of his own children would dethrone him. To nullify the prophecy Saturn devoured each of his children at birth. On the birth of Jove, Rhea duped Saturn by letting him bolt down a stone wrapped in baby clothes. After this tribute to her husband’s appetite she hid the infant on Mount Ida in Crete. There she posted her Corybantes (or Bacchantes) as guards and instructed them to set up a great din whenever the baby cried. Thus Saturn would not hear him. The Corybantic dances of the ancient Greeks were based on the frenzied shouting and clashing of swords on shields with which the Corybantes protected the infant Jove.

  97. An ancient giant: This is the Old Man of Crete. The original of this figure occurs in Daniel, ii, 32-34, where it is told by Daniel as Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Dante follows the details of the original closely but adds a few of his own and a totally different interpretation. In Dante each metal represents one of the ages of man, each deteriorating from the Golden Age of Innocence. The left foot, terminating the Age of Iron, is the Holy Roman Empire. The right foot, of terra cotta, is the Roman Catholic Church, a more fragile base than the left, but the one upon which the greater weight descends. The tears of the woes of man are a Dantean detail: they flow down the great fissure that defaces all but the Golden Age. Thus, starting in woe, they flow through man’s decline, into the hollow of the mountain and become the waters of all Hell. Dante’s other major addition is the site and position of the figure: equidistant from the three continents, the Old Man stands at a sort of center of Time, his back turned to Damietta in Egypt (here symbolizing the East, the past, the birth of religion) and fixes his gaze upon Rome (the West, the future, the Catholic Church). It is certainly the most elaborately worked single symbol in the Inferno.

  113. Cocytus: The frozen lake that lies at the bottom of Hell. (See Cantos XXXII- XXXIV.)

  124-125. Phlegethon . . . Lethe: Dante asks about Phlegethon and is told that he has already seen it (in the First Round: it is the river of boiling blood) and, in fact, that he is standing beside a branch of it. He asks about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and is told it lies ahead.

  Canto XV

  CIRCLE SEVEN: ROUND THREE

  The Violent Against Nature

  Protected by the marvelous powers of the boiling rill, the Poets walk along its banks across the burning plain. The WOOD OF THE SUICIDES is behind them; the GREAT CLIFF at whose foot lies the EIGHTH CIRCLE is before them.

  They pass one of the roving bands of SODOMITES. One of the sinners stops Dante, and with great difficulty the Poet recognizes him under his baked features as SER BRUNETTO LATINO. This is a reunion with a dearly-loved man and writer, one who had considerably influenced Dante’s own development, and Dante addresses him with great and sorrowful affection, paying him the highest tribute offered to any sinner in the Inferno. BRUNETTO prophesies Dante’s sufferings at the hands of the Florentines, gives an account of the souls that move with him through the fire, and finally, under Divine Compulsion, races off across the plain.

  We go by one of the stone margins now

  and the steam of the rivulet makes a shade above it,

  guarding the stream and banks from the flaming snow.

  As the Flemings in the lowland between Bruges

  and Wissant, under constant threat of the sea,

  erect their great dikes to hold back the deluge;

  as the Paduans along the shores of the Brent

  build levees to protect their towns and castles

  lest Chiarentana drown in the spring torrent—

  to the same plan, though not so wide nor high,

  did the engineer, whoever he may have been,

  design the margin we were crossing by.

  Already we were so far from the wood

  that even had I turned to look at it,

  I could not have made it out from where I stood,

  when a company of shades came into sight

  walking beside the bank. They stared at us

  as men at evening by the new moon’s light

  stare at one another when they pass by

  on a dark road, pointing their eyebrows toward us

  as an old tailor squints at his needle’s eye.

  Stared at so closely by that ghostly crew,

  I was recognized by one who seized the hem

  of my skirt and said: “Wonder of wonders! You?”

  And I, when he stretched out his arm to me,

  searched his baked features closely, till at last

  I traced his image from my memory

  in spite of the burnt crust, and bending near

  to put my face closer to his, at last

  I answered: “Ser Brunetto, are you here?”

  “O my son! may it not displease you,” he cried,

  “if Brunetto Latino leave his company

  and turn and walk a little by your side.”

  And I to him: “With all my soul I ask it.

  Or let us sit together, if it please him

  who is my Guide and leads me through this pit.”

  “My son!” he said, “whoever of this train

  pauses a moment, must lie a hundred years

  forbidden to brush off the burning rain.

  Therefore, go on; I will walk at your hem,

  and then rejoin
my company, which goes

  mourning eternal loss in eternal flame.”

  I did not dare descend to his own level

  but kept my head inclined, as one who walks

  in reverence meditating good and evil.

  “What brings you here before your own last day?

  What fortune or what destiny?” he began.

  “And who is he that leads you this dark way?”

  “Up there in the happy life I went astray

  in a valley,” I replied, “before I had reached

  the fullness of my years. Only yesterday

  at dawn I turned from it. This spirit showed

  himself to me as I was turning back,

  and guides me home again along this road.”

  And he: “Follow your star, for if in all

  of the sweet life I saw one truth shine clearly,

  you cannot miss your glorious arrival.

  And had I lived to do what I meant to do,

  I would have cheered and seconded your work,

  observing Heaven so well disposed toward you.

  But that ungrateful and malignant stock

  that came down from Fiesole of old

  and still smacks of the mountain and the rock,

  for your good works will be your enemy.

  And there is cause: the sweet fig is not meant

  to bear its fruit beside the bitter sorb-tree.

  Even the old adage calls them blind,

  an envious, proud, and avaricious people:

  see that you root their customs from your mind.

  It is written in your stars, and will come to pass,

  that your honours shall make both sides hunger for

  you:

  but the goat shall never reach to crop that grass.

  Let the beasts of Fiesole devour their get

  like sows, but never let them touch the plant,

  if among their rankness any springs up yet,

  in which is born again the holy seed

  of the Romans who remained among their rabble

  when Florence made a new nest for their greed.”

  “Ah, had I all my wish,” I answered then,

  “you would not yet be banished from the world

  in which you were a radiance among men,

  for that sweet image, gentle and paternal,

  you were to me in the world when hour by hour

  you taught me how man makes himself eternal,

  lives in my mind, and now strikes to my heart;

  and while I live, the gratitude I owe it

  will speak to men out of my life and art.

  What you have told me of my course, I write

  by another text I save to show a Lady

  who will judge these matters, if I reach her height.

  This much I would have you know: so long, I say,

  as nothing in my conscience troubles me

  I am prepared for Fortune, come what may.

  Twice already in the eternal shade

  I have heard this prophecy; but let Fortune turn

  her wheel as she please, and the countryman his spade.”

  My guiding spirit paused at my last word

  and, turning right about, stood eye to eye

  to say to me: “Well heeded is well heard.”

  But I did not reply to him, going on

  with Ser Brunetto to ask him who was with him

  in the hot sands, the best-born and best known.

  And he to me: “Of some who share this walk

  it is good to know; of the rest let us say nothing,

  for the time would be too short for so much talk.

  In brief, we all were clerks and men of worth,

  great men of letters, scholars of renown;

  all by the one same crime defiled on earth.

  Priscian moves there along the wearisome

  sad way, and Francesco d’Accorso, and also there,

  if you had any longing for such scum,

  you might have seen that one the Servant of Servants

  sent from the Arno to the Bacchiglione

  where he left his unnatural organ wrapped in cerements.

  I would say more, but there across the sand

  a new smoke rises and new people come,

  and I must run to be with my own band.

  Remember my Treasure, in which I shall live on:

  I ask no more.” He turned then, and he seemed,

  across that plain, like one of those who run

  for the green cloth at Verona; and of those,

  more like the one who wins, than those who lose.

  NOTES

  THE VIOLENT AGAINST NATURE. Dante calls them i sodomiti, the Sodomites: At root, the moral decedents of the people of biblical Sodom, by which Dante meant homosexuals, though he would probably have classed as sodomy oral and anal sex between heterosexuals, his puritanism classing all such sexuality as “bestial.” The connotations of the word “bestial” when so used have led to the more recent sense of sodomy as sexual union of a human being and an animal, though this is only one of the word’s senses, the original reference to homosexual Sodom remaining firm. In XII, 12-13, Pasiphaë is mentioned as having begotten the Minotaur after coupling with a great bull, but she is not among the damned souls there, nor does she appear here on the burning plain whose wretches include a number of known or suspected homosexuals, but none with a reputation as an “animal lover.” Pasiphaë seems, in fact, to be used as a sort of musical key to this passage on bestial behavior, but sodomy in the recent sense is not otherwise treated, as later in Cantos XXXII-XXXIII cannibalism is not specifically mentioned, though the act of cannibalism rings through all the phrasing as an ambiguous suggestion. It is almost as if Dante thought these sins too grievous to discuss openly.

  10. though not so wide nor high: Their width is never precisely specified, but we shall see when Dante walks along speaking to Ser Brunetto (line 40) that their height is about that of a man.

  23-119. Ser Brunetto Latino: or Latini. (Born between 1210 and 1230, died 1294.) A prominent Florentine Guelph who held, among many other posts, that of notary, whence the title Ser (sometimes Sere). He was not Dante’s schoolmaster as many have supposed—he was much too busy and important a man for that. Dante’s use of the word “master” is to indicate spiritual indebtedness to Brunetto and his works. It is worth noting that Dante addresses him in Italian as “voi” instead of using the less respectful “tu” form. Farinata is the only other sinner so addressed in the Inferno. Brunetto’s two principal books, both of which Dante admires, were the prose Livre dou Tresor (The Book of the Treasure) and the poetic Tesoretta (The Little Treasure). Dante learned a number of his devices from the allegorical journey which forms the Tesoretto.

  Dante’s surprise at finding Brunetto here is worth puzzling about. So too is the fact that he did not ask Ciacco about him (Canto VI) when he mentioned other prominent Florentines. One speculation is that Dante had not intended to place him in Hell, and that he found reason to believe him guilty of this sin only years after Brunetto’s death (the Inferno was written between 1310 and 1314, in all probability). This answer is not wholly satisfactory.

  40. I will walk at your hem: See also line 10. Dante is standing on the dike at approximately the level of Brunetto’s head and he cannot descend because of the rain of fire and the burning sands.

  61-67. that ungrateful and malignant stock: The ancient Etruscan city of Fiesole was situated on a hill about three miles north of the present site of Florence. According to legend, Fiesole had taken the side of Catiline in his war with Julius Caesar. Caesar destroyed the town and set up a new city called Florence on the Arno, peopling it with Romans and Fiesolans. The Romans were the aristocracy of the new city, but the Fiesolans were a majority. Dante ascribes the endless bloody conflicts of Florence largely to the internal strife between these two strains. His scorn of the Fiesolans is obvious in this passage. Dante proudly proclaimed his descent f
rom the Roman strain.

  66. sorb-tree: A species of tart apple.

  67. calls them blind: The source of this proverbial expression, “Blind as a Florentine,” can no longer be traced with any assurance, though many incidents from Florentine history suggest possible sources.

  71. shall make both sides hunger for you: Brunetto can scarcely mean that both sides will hunger to welcome the support of a man of Dante’s distinction. Rather, that both sides will hunger to destroy him. (See also lines 94-95. Dante obviously accepts this as another dark prophecy.)