The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  which never after that felt rain nor dew.

  Ah mad Arachne! so I saw you there—

  already half turned spider—on the shreds

  of what you wove to be your own despair.

  Ah Rehoboam! your image in that place

  no longer menaces; a chariot bears it

  in panic flight, though no one gives it chase.

  Now see Alcmaeon, there on the hard pavement,

  standing above her mother when she learned

  the full cost of the fatal ornament.

  Now see there how his own sons fell upon

  Sennacherib at prayer within the temple,

  and how they left him dead when they were done.

  Now see Tomyris bloody with her kill

  after the ruin she wrought, saying to Cyrus:

  “Your thirst was all for blood. Now drink your fill.”

  Now see how the Assyrians broke and ran

  from Israel after Holofernes’ murder;

  and showed the slaughtered remnants of the man.

  Mark Troy there in its ashes overthrown.

  Ah, Ilion! how lowly and how lost!

  Now see your hollow shell upon that stone!

  What brush could paint, or etching-stylus draw

  such lineaments and shadings? At such skill

  the subtlest genius would have stared in awe.

  The dead seemed dead, the living alive. A witness

  to the event itself saw it no better

  than I did, looking down there at its likeness.

  Now swell with pride and cut your reckless swath

  with head held high, you sons of Eve, and never

  bow down to see the evil in your path!

  We had, I found, gone round more of the mount,

  and the sun had run more of its daily course,

  than my bound soul had taken into account;

  when Virgil, ever watchful, ever leading,

  commanded: “Lift your head. This is no time

  to be shut up in your own thoughts, unheeding.

  Look there and see an Angel on his way

  to welcome us; and see—the sixth handmaiden

  returns now from her service to the day.

  That he may gladly send us up the mountain,

  let reverence grace your gestures and your look.

  Remember, this day will not dawn again.”

  I was well used to his warnings to abjure

  all that delayed me from my good: on that point

  nothing he said to me could be obscure.

  Toward us, dressed in white, and with a face

  serenely tremulous as the Morning Star,

  the glorious being came, radiant with Grace.

  First his arms and then his wings spread wide.

  “Come,” he said, “the stars are near, and now

  the way is easy up the mountainside.

  Few, all too few, come answering to this call.

  O sons of man, born to ascend on high,

  how can so slight a wind-puff make you fall?”

  Straight to where the rock was cut he led.

  There he struck my forehead with his wings,

  then promised us safe journeying ahead.

  When a man has climbed the first slope toward the crown

  on which is built the church that overhangs

  at the Rubaconte, the well-managed town,

  the abrupt ascent is softened on his right

  by steps cut in the rock in other days,

  before the stave and ledger had grown light—

  just so the bank here, plunging like a slide

  from the Round above, has been made easier,

  though towering cliffs squeeze us from either side.

  We set out on the climb, and on the way

  Beati pauperes spiritu rang out,

  more sweetly sung than any words could say.

  Ah, what a difference between these trails

  and those of Hell: here every entrance fills

  with joyous song, and there with savage wails!

  We were going up the holy steps, and though

  the climb was steep, I seemed to feel much lighter

  than I had felt on level ground below.

  “Master,” I said, “tell me what heaviness

  has been removed from me that I can climb

  yet seem to feel almost no weariness.”

  He answered: “When the P’s that still remain,

  though fading, on your brow, are wiped away

  as the first was, without a trace of stain—

  then will your feet be filled with good desire:

  not only will they feel no more fatigue

  but all their joy will be in mounting higher.”

  A man with some strange thing lodged on his hat

  will stroll, not knowing, till the stares of others

  set him to wonder what they’re staring at:

  whereat his hand seeks out and verifies

  what he suspected, thus performing for him

  the office he could not serve with his eyes—

  just so, I put my right hand to my brow,

  fingers outspread, and found six letters only

  of those that had been carved there down below

  by the Angel with the keys to every grace;

  at which a smile shone on my Master’s face.

  NOTES

  3. the sweet pedagogue: Virgil. 5-6. boat . . . oars and sail: Virgil may simply be saying something equivalent to “every man must do his utmost.” More likely, however, each item mentioned had some allegorical significance in Dante’s mind. Thus boat might equal “the will to grace”; oars, “the individual’s own efforts”; and sail, “assistance from the prayers of others.”

  12. light of foot: Dante intends eagerness, of course. But one must remember that weight is always equated to sin. (See Inferno, XXXII, 73, note.) Every step toward purification makes the soul lighter.

  17. slabs: Dante specifically means a kind of gravestone rare in the United States but common in Europe and usually found in churches where the dead are sometimes buried under the pavement, their gravestones being set flush with the pavement and forming part of it.

  25-63. THE REIN OF PRIDE. The Whip of Pride consisted of examples of great humility designed to whip the soul on to emulation. Now as the Poets leave the First Cornice, their souls made humble, they find set before them as a final lesson, examples of great Pride and of the downfall to which it brings men. Their thoughts are reined in and brought under God’s control by a final reminder of what disasters they have escaped.

  The present rein is elaborately conceived and consists of thirteen bas-reliefs cut into the pavement over which the souls pass. Dante’s description of the first four panels begins with “Mark,” of the next four, with “Ah!” and of the next four, with “Now see.” In Italian these phrases are: Vedea ... O! . . . Mostrava. Acrostically (V being equal to U in Latin), this combination reads: UOM, i.e., “man.” The tercet describing the thirteenth panel repeats the three phrases in order at the beginning of each of the three lines. The pattern in the original reads, therefore: UUUU, OOOO, MMMM, UOM.

  This elaborate structure is clearly intended to show not only that Pride is the first and heaviest of man’s sins, but that it is so characteristic of him that PRIDE and MAN are practically synonymous.

  25. him: Satan. 30. Briareus: One of the Titans (Giants) who now guard the central well of Hell. (See Inferno, XXXI, 97-99, and note.) He stormed Olympus and tried to unseat Jupiter (as Satan tried to unseat God) but was felled by a thunderbolt.

  31-33. their father: Jupiter. Thymbraeus: Apollo, so called after his temple at Thymbra. Pallas: Minerva. The scene portrays another repulse of the Titans in their effort to storm heaven, this time at Phlegra in Thessaly.

  34-36. Nimrod: (See Inferno, XXXI, 77, note.) The first king of Babylon and builder of the Tower of Babel at Shinar. “. . . the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon
the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.” (Genesis , xi, 8-9.)

  37-39. Niobe: Had seven sons and seven daughters. In her pride, she mocked Latona, concubine of Jupiter, for having only one son (Apollo) and one daughter (Diana). Thereupon, Apollo took his bow and killed all the sons; Diana, hers and killed all the daughters. Dante follows Ovid’s version of this happy little legend on the solaces of religion (Metamorphoses, VI, 146-312).

  40. Saul: The proud first king of Israel. Defeated by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa, he fell on his own sword to avoid capture (I Samuel, xxxi, 4-5). David, mourning the death of Saul, cursed Mount Gilboa: “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offerings.” (II Samuel, i, 21.)

  43. Arachne: Her story runs much like that of the Pierides (I, 11, note). So proud was Arachne of her weaving that she boasted that it was superior to Minerva’s. Minerva in disguise challenged her to a contest. Arachne presumed to disparage the gods in her tapestry and was changed into a spider by Minerva, who had portrayed the glory of the gods.

  46-48. Rehoboam: The arrogant king of Israel who would not lighten the taxes of the ten tribes. He sent Adoram to collect the taxes, and when Adoram was stoned to death, Rehoboam fled in panic from Jerusalem, though no one pursued him (see I Kings, xii, 1-18).

  49-51. Alcmaeon: Son of Amphiareus, the Soothsayer (Inferno, XX, 34, note). Through his arts, Amphiareus foresaw that he would die at Thebes, and to avoid having to go there he hid in a place known only to Eriphyle, his wife. Eriphyle accepted a gold necklace as a bribe for revealing his hiding place, whereupon Amphiareus instructed his son, Alcmaeon, to avenge him. The panel, therefore, would represent Alcmaeon killing his mother, her downfall being the result of vanity, which is, of course, a form of pride. The ornament (certainly a further moral) was, moreover, predestined to be fatal. It had been made by Vulcan and it bore a charm that brought to grief whoever owned it. (Dante would certainly have thought of Vanity as precisely such an ornament.)

  52-54. Sennacherib: King of Assyria. He was defeated by the inferior forces of Hezekiah of Judah. Praying to his gods after his defeat, he was murdered by two of his sons. (See Isaiah, xxxvii, 37-38, and II Kings, xix, 37.)

  Dante’s moral seems to be that Sennacherib’s downfall was the result of his arrogant faith in a false god. Sennacherib with a mighty host blasphemed God. Hezekiah, with an inferior force, prayed humbly to the God of Israel and won the battle. Sennacherib, not yet sufficiently humbled, went back to his false god and met death in the act of prayer, but the true God made Hezekiah rejoice.

  55-57. Tomyris . . . Cyrus: Cyrus (560-529 B.C.), Emperor of the Persians, showed his contempt for Tomyris, the Scythian queen, by killing her son. Tomyris gathered her armies and defeated Cyrus in a battle in which he was killed. She then had Cyrus’ head cut off and threw it into an urn full of human blood, commanding the head of the bloodthirsty tyrant to drink its fill. (History does not record where Tomyris got an urnful of human blood.)

  58-60. Holofernes: He laid siege to Bethulia as general of the army of Nebuchadnezzar. The city, cut off from water, was about to surrender when Judith, a beautiful widow, made her way to Holofernes’ tent to spend the night with him. While he slept, she cut off his head and took it back to the city, where it was mounted on the wall. Holofernes’ fate threw the Assyrians into a panic and they fled, pursued by the Jews.

  75. bound soul: See IV, 1-18, and especially 10-12.

  80-81. the sixth handmaiden: The figure here conceives of the twelve hours of the light as twelve handmaidens serving the day. The sixth handmaiden is, therefore, the sixth hour of light, hence, noon, sunrise being at six o’clock. If the Poets emerged from the Needle’s Eye about 10:00 A.M. or a bit before, they have been on the First Cornice about two hours.

  89. the Morning Star: Venus. Note that the Angel Boatman of Canto II was first seen as a ruddy glow and compared to Mars.

  90. the glorious being: The Angel of Humility.

  92. now: Now that the soul has been purged of the heaviness of Pride. The Angel is about to remove the first P.

  96. so slight a wind-puff: The Angel of Humility is specifically concerned with Pride. In that context, the feeble wind seems best interpreted as the vanity of earthly ambition as compared to the eternal good of the soul.

  100-105. The church is San Miniato, built on a rise across the Arno from Florence. The Rubaconte (now Ponte alle Grazie) is the bridge that leads most directly to San Miniato. An old account explains: “Issuing from the gate [in the city walls] to go to San Miniato, one finds at first, only one road by which to climb. Then the road forks. And the one on the climber’s right hand has the stairs.”

  “Well managed” is, of course, ironic when applied to Florentine affairs. The “stave” was formerly an official measure, primarily for salt, which was taxed. One of the Chiaramontesi family, as head of the Salt Tax Department, had given rise to a famous scandal by auditing the salt in with a full stave and auditing it out with a lightened one, thus shaving a certain quantity from each transaction. The “ledger” had grown light when two officials ripped out a page to remove evidence of graft. The exact date of these events are disputed, but both took place in Dante’s time and both were widely known. The matter of the lightened stave even became the subject for a mocking popular ditty.

  110. Beati pauperes spiritu: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew, v, 3.) Each time Dante leaves one of the Cornices, he hears sung one of the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Dante does not specify in this instance that it is the Angel who sings. At each subsequent ascent, however, the beatitude is sung by the Angel who has allowed the Poets to pass. It should be clear that Dante is not likely to break so firm a part of his pattern without special reason. One must conclude, therefore, that it is the Angel who sings.

  Canto XIII

  THE SECOND CORNICE

  The Envious

  The Whip of Envy

  The Poets reach THE SECOND CORNICE and find the blue-black rock unadorned by carvings. There are no souls in sight to guide them and Virgil, therefore, turns toward the Sun as his Guide, BEARING RIGHT around the Cornice.

  As they walk on, Dante hears voices crying out examples of great love of others (CARITAS), the virtue opposed to Envy. These voices are THE WHIP OF ENVY.

  A short way beyond, Dante comes upon the souls of THE ENVIOUS and describes THEIR PUNISHMENT. The Cornice on which they sit is the color of a bruise, for every other man’s good fortune bruised the souls of the Envious. They offended with their eyes, envying all the good they saw of others, and therefore their eyes are wired shut. So blinded, they sit supporting one another, as they never did in life, and all of them lean for support against the blue-black cliff (God’s Decree). They are dressed in haircloth, the further to subdue their souls, and they intone endlessly THE LITANY OF THE SAINTS.

  Among them Dante encounters SAPÌA OF SIENA and has her relate her story. When she questions him in turn, Dante confesses his fear of HIS OWN BESETTING SIN, which is Pride.

  We climbed the stairs and stood, now, on the track

  where, for a second time, the mount that heals

  all who ascend it, had been terraced back.

  The terrace circles the entire ascent

  in much the same way as the one below,

  save that the arc it cuts is sooner bent.

  There were no spirits and no carvings there.

  Bare was the cliff-face, bare the level path.

  The rock of both was livid, dark and bare.

  “Were we to wait till someone came this way

  who might direct us,” Virgil said to me,

  “I fear that would involve a long delay.”

  Then he looked up and stared straight at the sun;

  and then, using his right side as a pivot,

  he sw
ung his left around; then he moved on.

  “O Blessed Lamp, we face the road ahead

  placing our faith in you: lead us the way

  that we should go in this new place,” he said.

  “You are the warmth of the world, you are its light;

  if other cause do not urge otherwise,

  your rays alone should serve to lead us right.”

  We moved on with a will, and in a while

  we had already gone so far up there