My lungs were pumping as if they could not stop;
I thought I could not go on, and I sat exhausted
the instant I had clambered to the top.
“Up on your feet! This is no time to tire!”
my Master cried. “The man who lies asleep
will never waken fame, and his desire
and all his life drift past him like a dream,
and the traces of his memory fade from time
like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.
Now, therefore, rise. Control your breath, and call
upon the strength of soul that wins all battles
unless it sink in the gross body’s fall.
There is a longer ladder yet to climb:
this much is not enough. If you understand me,
show that you mean to profit from your time.”
I rose and made my breath appear more steady
than it really was, and I replied: “Lead on
as it pleases you to go: I am strong and ready.”
We picked our way up the cliff, a painful climb,
for it was narrower, steeper, and more jagged
than any we had crossed up to that time.
I moved along, talking to hide my faintness,
when a voice that seemed unable to form words
rose from the depths of the next chasm’s darkness.
I do not know what it said, though by then the Sage
had led me to the top of the next arch;
but the speaker seemed in a tremendous rage.
I was bending over the brim, but living eyes
could not plumb to the bottom of that dark;
therefore I said, “Master, let me advise
that we cross over and climb down the wall:
for just as I hear the voice without understanding,
so I look down and make out nothing at all.”
“I make no other answer than the act,”
the Master said: “the only fit reply
to a fit request is silence and the fact.”
So we moved down the bridge to the stone pier
that shores the end of the arch on the eighth bank,
and there I saw the chasm’s depths made clear;
and there great coils of serpents met my sight,
so hideous a mass that even now
the memory makes my blood run cold with fright.
Let Libya boast no longer, for though its sands
breed chelidrids, jaculi, and phareans,
cenchriads, and two-headed amphisbands,
it never bred such a variety
of vipers, no, not with all Ethiopia
and all the lands that lie by the Red Sea.
Amid that swarm, naked and without hope,
people ran terrified, not even dreaming
of a hole to hide in, or of heliotrope.
Their hands were bound behind by coils of serpents
which thrust their heads and tails between the loins
and bunched in front, a mass of knotted torments.
One of the damned came racing round a boulder,
and as he passed us, a great snake shot up
and bit him where the neck joins with the shoulder.
No mortal pen—however fast it flash
over the page—could write down o or i
as quickly as he flamed and fell in ash;
and when he was dissolved into a heap
upon the ground, the dust rose of itself
and immediately resumed its former shape.
Precisely so, philosophers declare,
the Phoenix dies and then is born again
when it approaches its five hundredth year.
It lives on tears of balsam and of incense;
in all its life it eats no herb or grain,
and nard and precious myrrh sweeten its cerements.
And as a person fallen in a fit,
possessed by a Demon or some other seizure
that fetters him without his knowing it,
struggles up to his feet and blinks his eyes
(still stupefied by the great agony
he has just passed), and, looking round him, sighs—
such was the sinner when at last he rose.
O Power of God! How dreadful is Thy will
which in its vengeance rains such fearful blows.
Then my Guide asked him who he was. And he
answered reluctantly: “Not long ago
I rained into this gullet from Tuscany.
I am Vanni Fucci, the beast. A mule among men,
I chose the bestial life above the human.
Savage Pistoia was my fitting den.”
And I to my Guide: “Detain him a bit longer
and ask what crime it was that sent him here;
I knew him as a man of blood and anger.”
The sinner, hearing me, seemed discomforted,
but he turned and fixed his eyes upon my face
with a look of dismal shame; at length he said:
“That you have found me out among the strife
and misery of this place, grieves my heart more
than did the day that cut me from my life.
But I am forced to answer truthfully:
I am put down so low because it was I
who stole the treasure from the Sacristy,
for which others once were blamed. But that you may
find less to gloat about if you escape here,
prick up your ears and listen to what I say:
First Pistoia is emptied of the Black,
then Florence changes her party and her laws.
From Valdimagra the God of War brings back
a fiery vapor wrapped in turbid air:
then in a storm of battle at Piceno
the vapor breaks apart the mist, and there
every White shall feel his wounds anew.
And I have told you this that it may grieve you.”
NOTES
2. Aquarius: The zodiacal sign for the period from January 21 to February 21. The sun is moving north then to approach the vernal equinox (March 21), at which point the days and the nights are equal. The Italian spring comes early, and the first warm days would normally occur under Aquarius.
4. hoar-frost copies then: The hoar-frost looks like snow but melts away as soon as the sun strikes it.
7-15. the peasants, etc.: A fine example of Dante’s ability to build dramatic equivalents for the emotion he wishes to convey.
9. they smite their thighs: A common Italian gesture of vexation, about equivalent to smiting the forehead with the palm of the hand.
34-35. the bank along this side was lower: See diagram, Canto XVIII.
55. there is a longer ladder yet to climb: Many allegorical possibilities are obvious here. The whole ascent of Purgatory lies ahead, Virgil points out, and here Dante seems exhausted simply in climbing away from (renouncing) hypocrisy. Further, the descent into Hell is symbolic of the recognition of sin, and the ascent of Purgatory of the purification from sin. The ascent is by far the more arduous task.
61. a painful climb: The “top” Dante mentions in line 45 must obviously have been the top of the fallen stone that was once the bridge. There remains the difficult climb up the remainder of the cliff.
85-90. Libya . . . Ethiopia . . . lands that lie by the Red Sea: The desert areas of the Mediterranean shores. Lucan’s Pharsalia describes the assortment of monsters listed here by Dante. I have rendered their names from Latin to English jabberwocky to avoid problems of pronunciation. In Lucan chelydri make their trails smoke and burn, they are amphibious; jaculi fly through the air like darts piercing what they hit; pharese plow the ground with their tails; cenchri waver from side to side when they move; and amphisboenae have a head at each end.
93. heliotrope: Not the flower, but the bloodstone, a spotted chalcedony. It was believed to make the wearer invisible.
107. the Phoenix: The fabulous Phoenix of Arabia
was the only one of its kind in the world. Every five hundred years it built a nest of spices and incense which took fire from the heat of the sun and the beating of the Phoenix’s wings. The Phoenix was thereupon cremated and was then re-born from its ashes.
123. this gullet: Dante often gives an animate force to the ledges of Hell. The place in which the sinner is punished possesses him as if it were a living force. It should be remembered that, on one level of the allegory, Hell is every sinner’s own guilty conscience.
124. Vanni Fucci (VAH-nee FOO-tchee): The bastard son of Fuccio de Lazzeri, a nobleman (Black) of Pistoia. In 1293 with two accomplices he stole the treasure of San Jacopo in the Duomo of San Zeno. Others were accused, and one man spent a year in jail on this charge before the guilty persons were discovered. Vanni Fucci had escaped from Pistoia by then, but his accomplices were convicted.
129. a man of blood and anger: Dante (the traveler within the narrative rather than Dante the author) claims that he did not know Fucci was a thief, but only that he was a man of blood and violence. He should therefore be punished in the Seventh Circle.
142 ff. VANNI FUCCI’S PROPHECY. In May of 1301 the Whites of Florence joined with the Whites of Pistoia to expel the Pistoian Blacks and destroy their houses. The ejected Blacks fled to Florence and joined forces with the Florentine Blacks. On November 1st of the same year, Charles of Valois took Florence and helped the Blacks drive out the Whites. Piceno was the scene of a battle in which the Blacks of Florence and Lucca combined in 1302 to capture Serravalle, a White strong point near Pistoia.
Dante’s meteorological figure is based on the contemporary belief that electric storms were caused by a conflict between “fiery vapors” and the preponderant “watery vapors.” By their contraries the watery vapors (mist) surround the fiery vapors, seeking to extinguish them, and the fiery vapors combat to shatter the mist. Here the fiery vapor is the Blacks and the shattered mist is the Whites.
Canto XXV
CIRCLE EIGHT: BOLGIA SEVEN
The Thieves
Vanni’s rage mounts to the point where he hurls an ultimate obscenity at God, and the serpents immediately swarm over him, driving him off in great pain. The Centaur, CACUS, his back covered with serpents and a fire-eating dragon, also gives chase to punish the wretch.
Dante then meets FIVE NOBLE THIEVES OF FLORENCE and sees the further retribution visited upon the sinners. Some of the thieves appear first in human form, others as reptiles. All but one of them suffer a painful transformation before Dante’s eyes. AGNELLO appears in human form and is merged with CIANFA, who appears as a six-legged lizard. BUOSO appears as a man and changes form with FRANCESCO, who first appears as a tiny reptile. Only PUCCIO SCIANCATO remains unchanged, though we are made to understand that his turn will come.
For endless and painful transformation is the final state of the thieves. In life they took the substance of others, transforming it into their own. So in Hell their very bodies are constantly being taken from them, and they are left to steal back a human form from some other sinner. Thus they waver constantly between man and reptile, and no sinner knows what to call his own.
When he had finished, the thief—to his disgrace—
raised his hands with both fists making figs,
and cried: “Here, God! I throw them in your face!”
Thereat the snakes became my friends, for one
coiled itself about the wretch’s neck
as if it were saying: “You shall not go on!”
and another tied his arms behind him again,
knotting its head and tail between his loins
so tight he could not move a finger in pain.
Pistoia! Pistoia! why have you not decreed
to turn yourself to ashes and end your days,
rather than spread the evil of your seed!
In all of Hell’s corrupt and sunken halls
I found no shade so arrogant toward God,
not even him who fell from the Theban walls!
Without another word, he fled; and there
I saw a furious Centaur race up, roaring:
“Where is the insolent blasphemer? Where?”
I do not think as many serpents swarm
in all the Maremma as he bore on his back
from the haunch to the first sign of our human form.
Upon his shoulders, just behind his head
a snorting dragon whose hot breath set fire
to all it touched, lay with its wings outspread.
My Guide said: “That is Cacus. Time and again
in the shadow of Mount Aventine he made
a lake of blood upon the Roman plain.
He does not go with his kin by the blood-red fosse
because of the cunning fraud with which he stole
the cattle of Hercules. And thus it was
his thieving stopped, for Hercules found his den
and gave him perhaps a hundred blows with his club,
and of them he did not feel the first ten.”
Meanwhile, the Centaur passed along his way,
and three wraiths came. Neither my Guide nor I
knew they were there until we heard them say:
“You there—who are you?” There our talk fell still
and we turned to stare at them. I did not know them,
but by chance it happened, as it often will,
one named another. “Where is Cianfa?” he cried;
“Why has he fallen back?” I placed a finger
across my lips as a signal to my Guide.
Reader, should you doubt what next I tell,
it will be no wonder, for though I saw it happen,
I can scarce believe it possible, even in Hell.
For suddenly, as I watched, I saw a lizard
come darting forward on six great taloned feet
and fasten itself to a sinner from crotch to gizzard.
Its middle feet sank in the sweat and grime
of the wretch’s paunch, its forefeet clamped his arms,
its teeth bit through both cheeks. At the same time
its hind feet fastened on the sinner’s thighs:
its tail thrust through his legs and closed its coil
over his loins. I saw it with my own eyes!
No ivy ever grew about a tree
as tightly as that monster wove itself
limb by limb about the sinner’s body;
they fused like hot wax, and their colors ran
together until neither wretch nor monster
appeared what he had been when he began:
just so, before the running edge of the heat
on a burning page, a brown discoloration
changes to black as the white dies from the sheet.
The other two cried out as they looked on:
“Alas! Alas! Agnello, how you change!
Already you are neither two nor one!”
The two heads had already blurred and blended;
now two new semblances appeared and faded,
one face where neither face began nor ended.
From the four upper limbs of man and beast
two arms were made, then members never seen
grew from the thighs and legs, belly and breast.
Their former likenesses mottled and sank
to something that was both of them and neither;
and so transformed, it slowly left our bank.
As lizards at high noon of a hot day
dart out from hedge to hedge, from shade to shade,
and flash like lightning when they cross the way,
so toward the bowels of the other two,
shot a small monster; livid, furious,
and black as a pepper corn. Its lunge bit through
that part of one of them from which man receives
his earliest nourishment; then it fell back
and lay sprawled out in front of the two thieves.
Its victim stared at it but did no
t speak:
indeed, he stood there like a post, and yawned
as if lack of sleep, or a fever, had left him weak.
The reptile stared at him, he at the reptile;
from the wound of one and from the other’s mouth
two smokes poured out and mingled, dark and vile.
The Divine Comedy Page 24