The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  116. Buoso da Duera: Of Cremona. In 1265 Charles of Anjou marched against Manfred and Naples (see Canto XVIII), and Buoso da Duera was sent out in charge of a Ghibelline army to oppose the passage of one of Charles’ armies, but accepted a bribe and let the French pass unopposed. The event took place near Parma.

  119. Beccheria: Tesauro dei Beccheria of Pavia, Abbot of Vallombrosa and Papal Legate (of Alexander IV) in Tuscany. The Florentine Guelphs cut off his head in 1258 for plotting with the expelled Ghibellines.

  120. Gianni de’ Soldanier: A Florentine Ghibelline of ancient and noble family. In 1265, however, during the riots that occurred under the Two Jovial Friars, he deserted his party and became a leader of the commoners (Guelphs). In placing him in Antenora, Dante makes no distinction between turning on one’s country and turning on one’s political party, not at least if the end is simply for power.

  121. Ganelon: It was Ganelon who betrayed Roland to the Saracens. (See Canto XXXI.)

  122. Tebaldello: Tebaldello de’ Zambrasi of Faenza. At dawn on November 13, 1280, he opened the city gates and delivered Faenza to the Bolognese Guelphs in order to revenge himself on the Ghibelline family of the Lambertazzi who, in 1274, had fled from Bologna to take refuge in Faenza.

  130-1. Tydeus . . . Menalippus: Statius recounts in the Thebaid that Tydeus killed Menalippus in battle but fell himself mortally wounded. As he lay dying he had Menalippus’ head brought to him and fell to gnawing it in his dying rage.

  Canto XXXIII

  CIRCLE NINE: COCYTUS

  ROUND TWO: ANTENORA

  ROUND THREE: PTOLOMEA

  Compound Fraud

  The Treacherous to Country

  The Treacherous to Guests

  and Hosts

  In reply to Dante’s exhortation, the sinner who is gnawing his companion’s head looks up, wipes his bloody mouth on his victim’s hair, and tells his harrowing story. He is COUNT UGOLINO and the wretch he gnaws is ARCHBISHOP RUGGIERI. Both are in Antenora for treason. In life they had once plotted together. Then Ruggieri betrayed his fellow-plotter and caused his death, by starvation, along with his four “sons.” In the most pathetic and dramatic passage of the Inferno, Ugolino details how their prison was sealed and how his “sons” dropped dead before him one by one, weeping for food. His terrible tale serves only to renew his grief and hatred, and he has hardly finished it before he begins to gnaw Ruggieri again with renewed fury. In the immutable Law of Hell, the killer-by-starvation becomes the food of his victim.

  The Poets leave Ugolino and enter PTOLOMEA, so named for the Ptolomaeus of Maccabees, who murdered his father-in-law at a banquet. Here are punished those who were TREACHEROUS AGAINST THE TIES OF HOSPITALITY. They lie with only half their faces above the ice and their tears freeze in their eye sockets, sealing them with little crystal visors. Thus even the comfort of tears is denied them. Here Dante finds FRIAR ALBERIGO and BRANCA D’ORIA, and discovers the terrible power of Ptolomea: so great is its sin that the souls of the guilty fall to its torments even before they die, leaving their bodies still on earth, inhabited by Demons.

  The sinner raised his mouth from his grim repast

  and wiped it on the hair of the bloody head

  whose nape he had all but eaten away. At last

  he began to speak: “You ask me to renew

  a grief so desperate that the very thought

  of speaking of it tears my heart in two.

  But if my words may be a seed that bears

  the fruit of infamy for him I gnaw,

  I shall weep, but tell my story through my tears.

  Who you may be, and by what powers you reach

  into this underworld, I cannot guess,

  but you seem to me a Florentine by your speech.

  I was Count Ugolino, I must explain;

  this reverend grace is the Archbishop Ruggieri:

  now I will tell you why I gnaw his brain.

  That I, who trusted him, had to undergo

  imprisonment and death through his treachery,

  you will know already. What you cannot know—

  that is, the lingering inhumanity

  of the death I suffered—you shall hear in full:

  then judge for yourself if he has injured me.

  A narrow window in that coop of stone

  now called the Tower of Hunger for my sake

  (within which others yet must pace alone)

  had shown me several waning moons already

  between its bars, when I slept the evil sleep

  in which the veil of the future parted for me.

  This beast appeared as master of a hunt

  chasing the wolf and his whelps across the mountain

  that hides Lucca from Pisa. Out in front

  of the starved and shrewd and avid pack he had placed

  Gualandi and Sismondi and Lanfranchi

  to point his prey. The father and sons had raced

  a brief course only when they failed of breath

  and seemed to weaken; then I thought I saw

  their flanks ripped open by the hounds’ fierce teeth.

  Before the dawn, the dream still in my head,

  I woke and heard my sons, who were there with me,

  cry from their troubled sleep, asking for bread.

  You are cruelty itself if you can keep

  your tears back at the thought of what foreboding

  stirred in my heart; and if you do not weep,

  at what are you used to weeping?—The hour when food

  used to be brought, drew near. They were now awake,

  and each was anxious from his dream’s dark mood.

  And from the base of that horrible tower I heard

  the sound of hammers nailing up the gates:

  I stared at my sons’ faces without a word.

  I did not weep: I had turned stone inside.

  They wept. ‘What ails you, Father, you look so strange,’

  my little Anselm, youngest of them, cried.

  But I did not speak a word nor shed a tear:

  not all that day nor all that endless night,

  until I saw another sun appear.

  When a tiny ray leaked into that dark prison

  and I saw staring back from their four faces

  the terror and the wasting of my own,

  I bit my hands in helpless grief. And they,

  thinking I chewed myself for hunger, rose

  suddenly together. I heard them say:

  ‘Father, it would give us much less pain

  if you ate us: it was you who put upon us

  this sorry flesh; now strip it off again.’

  I calmed myself to spare them. Ah! hard earth,

  why did you not yawn open? All that day

  and the next we sat in silence. On the fourth,

  Gaddo, the eldest, fell before me and cried,

  stretched at my feet upon that prison floor:

  ‘Father, why don’t you help me?’ There he died.

  And just as you see me, I saw them fall

  one by one on the fifth day and the sixth.

  Then, already blind, I began to crawl

  from body to body shaking them frantically.

  Two days I called their names, and they were dead.

  Then fasting overcame my grief and me.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits when he was done,

  and he seized the skull again between his teeth

  grinding it as a mastiff grinds a bone.

  Ah, Pisa! foulest blemish on the land

  where “si” sounds sweet and clear, since those nearby you

  are slow to blast the ground on which you stand,

  may Caprara and Gorgona drift from place

  and dam the flooding Arno at its mouth

  until it drowns the last of your foul race!

  For if to Ugolino falls the censure

  for having betrayed your castles, you for your part

  should not have put his so
ns to such a torture:

  you modern Thebes! those tender lives you spilt—

  Brigata, Uguccione, and the others

  I mentioned earlier—were too young for guilt!

  We passed on further, where the frozen mine

  entombs another crew in greater pain;

  these wraiths are not bent over, but lie supine.

  Their very weeping closes up their eyes;

  and the grief that finds no outlet for its tears

  turns inward to increase their agonies:

  for the first tears that they shed knot instantly

  in their eye-sockets, and as they freeze they form

  a crystal visor above the cavity.

  And despite the fact that standing in that place

  I had become as numb as any callus,

  and all sensation had faded from my face,

  somehow I felt a wind begin to blow,

  whereat I said: “Master, what stirs this wind?

  Is not all heat extinguished here below?”

  And the Master said to me: “Soon you will be

  where your own eyes will see the source and cause

  and give you their own answer to the mystery.”

  And one of those locked in that icy mall

  cried out to us as we passed: “O souls so cruel

  that you are sent to the last post of all,

  relieve me for a little from the pain

  of this hard veil; let my heart weep a while

  before the weeping freeze my eyes again.”

  And I to him: “If you would have my service,

  tell me your name; then if I do not help you

  may I descend to the last rim of the ice.”

  “I am Friar Alberigo,” he answered therefore,

  “the same who called for the fruits from the bad garden.

  Here I am given dates for figs full store.”

  “What! Are you dead already?” I said to him.

  And he then: “How my body stands in the world

  I do not know. So privileged is this rim

  of Ptolomea, that often souls fall to it

  before dark Atropos has cut their thread.

  And that you may more willingly free my spirit of this glaze of frozen tears that shrouds my face,

  I will tell you this: when a soul betrays as I did,

  it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place,

  ruling the body till its time is spent.

  The ruined soul rains down into this cistern.

  So, I believe, there is still evident

  in the world above, all that is fair and mortal

  of this black shade who winters here behind me.

  If you have only recently crossed the portal

  from that sweet world, you surely must have known

  his body: Branca d’Oria is its name,

  and many years have passed since he rained down.”

  “I think you are trying to take me in,” I said,

  “Ser Branca d’Oria is a living man;

  he eats, he drinks, he fills his clothes and his bed.”

  “Michel Zanche had not yet reached the ditch

  of the Black Talons,” the frozen wraith replied,

  “there where the sinners thicken in hot pitch,

  when this one left his body to a devil,

  as did his nephew and second in treachery,

  and plumbed like lead through space to this dead level.

  But now reach out your hand, and let me cry.”

  And I did not keep the promise I had made,

  for to be rude to him was courtesy.

  Ah, men of Genoa! souls of little worth,

  corrupted from all custom of righteousness,

  why have you not been driven from the earth?

  For there beside the blackest soul of all

  Romagna’s evil plain, lies one of yours

  bathing his filthy soul in the eternal

  glacier of Cocytus for his foul crime,

  while he seems yet alive in world and time!

  NOTES

  1-90. Ugolino and Ruggieri (Oog-oh-LEE-noe; Roo-DJAIR-ee): Ugolino, Count of Donoratico and a member of the Guelph family della Gherardesca. He and his nephew, Nino de’ Visconti, led the two Guelph factions of Pisa. In 1288 Ugolino intrigued with Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, leader of the Ghibellines, to get rid of Visconti and to take over the command of all the Pisan Guelphs. The plan worked, but in the consequent weakening of the Guelphs, Ruggieri saw his chance and betrayed Ugolino, throwing him into prison with his sons and his grandsons. In the following year the prison was sealed up and they were left to starve to death. The law of retribution is clearly evident: in life Ruggieri sinned against Ugolino by denying him food; in Hell he himself becomes food for his victim.

  18. you will know already: News of Ugolino’s imprisonment and death would certainly have reached Florence. what you cannot know: No living man could know what happened after Ugolino and his sons were sealed in the prison and abandoned.

  22. coop: Dante uses the word muda, in Italian signifying a stone tower in which falcons were kept in the dark to moult. From the time of Ugolino’s death it became known as The Tower of Hunger.

  25. several waning moons: Ugolino was jailed late in 1288. He was sealed in to starve early in 1289.

  28. This beast: Ruggieri.

  29-30. the mountain that hides Lucca from Pisa: These two cities would be in view of one another were it not for Monte San Giuliano.

  32. Gualandi and Sismondi and Lanfranchi (Gwah-LAHN-dee . . . Lahn-FRAHN-KEE): Three Pisan nobles, Ghibellines and friends of the Archbishop.

  51-71. UGOLINO’S “SONS”: Actually two of the boys were grandsons and all were considerably older than one would gather from Dante’s account. Anselm, the younger grandson, was fifteen. The others were really young men and were certainly old enough for guilt despite Dante’s charge in line 90.

  75. Then fasting overcame my grief and me: I.e., He died. Some interpret the line to mean that Ugolino’s hunger drove him to cannibalism. Ugolino’s present occupation in Hell would certainly support that interpretation but the fact is that cannibalism is the one major sin Dante does not assign a place to in Hell. So monstrous would it have seemed to him that he must certainly have established a special punishment for it. Certainly he could hardly have relegated it to an ambiguity. Moreover, it would be a sin of bestiality rather than of fraud, and as such it would be punished in the Seventh Circle.

  79-80. the land where “si” sounds sweet and clear: Italy.

  82. Caprara and Gorgona: These two islands near the mouth of the Arno were Pisan possessions in 1300.

  86. betrayed your castles: In 1284, Ugolino gave up certain castles to Lucca and Florence. He was at war with Genoa at the time and it is quite likely that he ceded the castles to buy the neutrality of these two cities. for they were technically allied with Genoa. Dante, however, must certainly consider the action as treasonable, for otherwise Ugolino would be in Caïna for his treachery to Visconti.

  88. you modern Thebes: Thebes, as a number of the foregoing notes will already have made clear, was the site of some of the most hideous crimes of antiquity.

  91. we passed on further: Marks the passage into Ptolomea.

  105. is not all heat extinguished: Dante believed (rather accurately, by chance) that all winds resulted from “exhalations of heat.” Cocytus, however, is conceived as wholly devoid of heat, a metaphysical absolute zero. The source of the wind, as we discover in the next Canto, is Satan himself.

  117. may I descend to the last rim of the ice: Dante is not taking any chances; he has to go on to the last rim in any case. The sinner, however, believes him to be another damned soul and would interpret the oath quite otherwise than as Dante meant it.

  118. Friar Alberigo (Ahl-beh-REE-ghoe): Of the Manfredi of Faenza. He was another Jovial Friar. In 1284 his brother Manfred struck him in the course of an argument. Alberigo pretended to let it pass, but
in 1285 he invited Manfred and his son to a banquet and had them murdered. The signal to the assassins was the words: “Bring in the fruit.” “Friar Alberigo’s bad fruit,” became a proverbial saying.

  125. Atropos: The Fate who cuts the thread of life. 137. Branca d’Oria (DAW-ree-yah): A Genoese Ghibelline. His sin is identical in kind to that of Friar Alberigo. In 1275 he invited his father-in-law, Michel Zanche (see Canto XXII), to a banquet and had him and his companions cut to pieces. He was assisted in the butchery by his nephew.

  Canto XXXIV

  NINTH CIRCLE: COCYTUS

  ROUND FOUR: JUDECCA

  THE CENTER

  Compound Fraud

  The Treacherous to Their Masters

  Satan

  “On march the banners of the King,” Virgil begins as the Poets face the last depth. He is quoting a medieval hymn, and to it he adds the distortion and perversion of all that lies about him. “On march the banners of the King—of Hell.” And there before them, in an infernal parody of Godhead, they see Satan in the distance, his great wings beating like a windmill. It is their beating that is the source of the icy wind of Cocytus, the exhalation of all evil.