The Inferno

by Dante

  139–151. The nameless suicide, now more careful of his “body” than he had been when he took his own life, asks to have his torn-off leaves returned to him. He identifies himself as Florentine by referring to the city’s first patron, Mars, the god of war, whose replacement by John the Baptist in Christian times had weakened her, according to his not very reliable view. (Dante’s sources seem to have confused Attila with Totila, who had in fact besieged the city in 542.) [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XIV

  1–3. The first tercet concludes the action of the preceding canto. This is a particularly egregious example of the way in which Dante deliberately avoids keeping his canto borders “neat” (see note to Inf. XIII.1–3). [return to English / Italian]

  4–6. These verses, on the other hand, would have made a “proper” beginning to the fourteenth canto, marking, as they do, the border between the second ring of the seventh Circle (violence against selves) and the third (violence against God). Here we shall witness (as indeed we have done before) the dreadful “art” of God in carrying out His just revenge upon sinners, in this case those who sinned directly against Him. [return to English / Italian]

  7–13. The hellscape, featuring impoverished “vegetation” in the last canto, now is as barren as it can possibly be: nothing can take root in this sand. The retrospective glance reminds us of where we have been in this Circle: Phlegethon, circling the wood, the wood in turn circling the sand (violence against others, against selves, and now against God).

  The translation of verse 7, which uses the adjective nove either to mean “new” or “strange,” or perhaps both at once, attempts to represent this ambiguity. [return to English / Italian]

  14–15. That Dante should refer here to Cato the Younger, who committed suicide at Utica (when further opposition by the republican forces led by him against Julius Caesar’s army seemed futile), seems to invite a negative judgment on him. Cato, however, will be presented in Purgatorio I and II, in an authorial decision that still baffles commentators, as one of the saved. To refer to him here, a few verses from the wood of the suicides—where Christian readers would normally assume that Cato might be punished—given Dante’s plan eventually to reveal his salvation, was a chancy choice for him to have made.

  The poet is translating a line from Lucan’s Pharsalia describing Cato’s heroic decision to lead the remnant of dead Pompey’s republican forces across the barren sands of Libya in an attempt to escape from Caesar, and to do so, not carried by slaves, as Roman generals were wont to be transported, but on foot himself: “primusque gradus in pulvere ponam” (and I, first among them, shall set my feet upon the sand [Phars. IX.395—the citation was perhaps first noted by Daniello in 1568]). (For a treatment of Cato in the context of Canto XIV see Mazzotta [Mazz.1979.1], pp. 47–65.)

  Dante thus reads Cato’s suicide as something other, an act resembling Christ’s sacrifice of Himself so that others may be free (for discussion see Hollander [Holl.1969.1], pp. 123–31). Such a view may seem blasphemous; it has caused extraordinary exertion on the part of commentators to “allegorize” the saved Cato we find in Purgatorio by turning him into an abstract quality rather than treating him as historical. Dante’s text will not permit us such luxury of avoidance. His Cato, a Christian through a process that hardly anyone has understood, is saved. [return to English / Italian]

  19–27. This passage is opaque to a first-time reader. Only in retrospect are we able with precision to realize which sinners are alluded to by which postures: those lying supine, the fewest in number, are the blasphemers (and they, because they cursed God, now cry out the loudest); the most numerous class of sinners, moving about incessantly, are the homosexuals, who sinned against nature (Canto XV); the sinners hunched up are the usurers, who sinned againt God’s “grandchild,” art, or industry (Canto XVI). [return to English / Italian]

  28. The flakes of fire showering down on all those who were violent against God seem most directly derived from the brimstone and fire rained down upon the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah for their allowance of the practice of homosexuality (Genesis 19:24), as was perhaps first observed by Vellutello in his commentary (1544) to this passage. [return to English / Italian]

  30. A clear reference to a line in a sonnet by Guido Cavalcanti, “Biltà di donna” (“A lady’s loveliness”), in which, describing things beautiful to behold, he refers to “white snow falling on a windless day” (e bianca neve scender senza venti). [return to English / Italian]

  31–36. The reference is to an incident related in a letter (falsely) attributed to Alexander the Great, writing to his tutor, Aristotle, from his campaign in India. Dante found the text in the De Meteoris (I.iv.8) of Albertus Magnus, a work to which he adverts fairly frequently (see, e.g., note to Inf. XII.4–10). [return to English / Italian]

  40. Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary explains that the “tresca” is a Neapolitan dance in which a leader touches one part of his or her body with a hand, a gesture imitated by all the other dancers; then, rapidly, the leader touches another part, then another, sometimes using one, sometimes two, hands, each gesture, acclerated in time, being similarly imitated by the rest. [return to English / Italian]

  43–45. Dante’s preface to his question about the identity of the noteworthy personage before them might be compared to the unnecessarily flippant question posed by a student to a teacher who had been caught out in an earlier mistake. There seems to be no other reason for Dante to remind Virgil of his failure to enter the walls of Dis (Inf. VIII.115–117). [return to English / Italian]

  46–48. Like Farinata, Capaneus (we learn his name from Virgil at v. 63) is a figure of some greatness (see Inf. X.73, where Farinata is magnanimo [great of soul]—and see Statius, Thebaid XI.1, where Capaneus is referred to as magnanimus); like Farinata, he seems not to be bothered by the pains of hell (Inf. X.36).

  The last verb in the tercet is a matter of debate. As always, in our translation we follow Petrocchi, even when we disagree with him. His reading is marturi, or “torture”; others prefer the traditional reading, maturi, “ripen” or “soften,” a view with which we concur. [return to English / Italian]

  49–50. Capaneus, though undergoing the pain inflicted by the burning flakes, is alert enough to overhear the two strangers discussing him. Surely his stoic reserve creates an initial positive impression on the reader. [return to English / Italian]

  51–60. Capaneus was one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes in aid of Polynices, the son of Oedipus whose twin brother, Eteocles, refused to allow him his turn at ruling. The narrative of the death of Capaneus on the walls of Thebes and his boast against Jupiter are drawn from Statius, Thebaid X.883–939.

  As Capaneus’s oratorical flourish begins, the listener tends to admire the courage of his speech. As it continues, it more and more resembles vainglorious boasting. Capaneus may play the role of a stock character in Roman comedy, the miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier. When we study his words we find some disquieting elements in them: alive he was a defamer of the gods, as he is now; he says that Jupiter will not have his revenge against him even if he sends Vulcan in his forge in Mount Etna into mass production of lightning bolts (as was necessary to quell the insurrection of the giants at the battle of Phlegra [see the further reference at Inf. XXXI.95]). We may reflect that, in the first place, Jupiter (or indeed the true God he would have blasphemed had he known Him) already has his vengeance (one look at supine Capaneus confirms this); in the second, when Jupiter took his revenge at Thebes, it took him but a single bolt to dispatch Capaneus (and Statius says that he was lucky not to live long enough for the second). In short, Capaneus, in his egregious overconfidence, makes something of a fool of himself (and see Inf. XXV.15 for confirmation of his prideful opposition to God). [return to English / Italian]

  61–66. The vehemence of Virgil’s outburst against Capaneus, underlined as being his most heated condemnation of a sinner yet (and no other will exceed it), is difficult to explain. A stud
ent, Edward Sherline (Princeton ’82), some years ago suggested that Virgil, already angered by Dante’s wry reminder of his previous insufficiency before the walls of Dis (vv. 43–45), is now having his revenge on Capaneus, a revenge especially pleasing when Virgil considered what Capaneus was quite effective doing and what he himself had utterly failed to do: besting the defenders of the walls of a hostile city (mere victory of that kind was not enough for Capaneus, who challenged Jupiter himself to combat). [return to English / Italian]

  69–70. Some readers have objected that blasphemy against Jupiter should be welcomed in a Christian dispensation, not punished. Dante’s point is clearly that Capaneus meant to oppose the very principle of divine power, no matter what its name. [return to English / Italian]

  76–84. The little stream that the travelers now see is the second (and last) body of water that moves across their usual circular path and downward (see Inf. VII.100–108, where the descent from the fourth to the fifth Circle is made alongside a little stream that seems to connect Acheron to Styx). All other gatherings of water have been circles that they had eventually to cross in order to descend. We will soon be able to understand (vv. 115–117) that this particular stream contains waters from Phlegethon that will eventually fall into the frozen Cocytus (heard tumbling down to the eighth Circle at XVI.1–2). Dante and Virgil apparently do not happen to see the stream that connects Styx to Phlegethon because, as Virgil suggests (vv. 128–129), their path does not describe a full circle in every zone (e.g., their passage along Phlegethon, which covers exactly a semicircle, in Inf. XII).

  The Bulicame is a hot spring near Viterbo from which prostitutes, perhaps not allowed to frequent the public baths, made conduits from the source to service their own dwellings.

  The passage to the next and deeper zone of the burning sand now lies right before them (it is a necessary expedient, we want to remember, to get Dante across the burning sand); before they can follow it, Virgil will take up the subject of the waters of hell. [return to English / Italian]

  94–111. Virgil, in his presentation of the rivers of hell, pauses first to create an etiological myth that explains their source. It has two parts, a history of Crete and a description of the statue of an old man that stands inside Mount Ida. [return to English / Italian]

  94–102. Virgil’s first words rely on the passage in the Aeneid (III.104–106) describing Crete, similarly located “in the middle of the sea” (medio … ponto). It was once “chaste” when it enjoyed a “golden age” under Saturn (see Iann.1992.2, for Dante’s almost entirely positive treatment of Saturn). But now its mountain, Ida, the site of a sort of classical “Eden,” rich in water and vegetation, is a wasteland; like Eden, it, too, is deserted. Rhea, Saturn’s wife, chose it as the cradle for her son, Jupiter. But now “original sin” seems to have crept into the Golden Age: the crying child needs to be protected (in the original myth, of course, from Saturn himself, who had the unpleasant habit of eating his children so as to be sure not to be dethroned by one of them).

  That is all we are told. On Crete there was once a Golden Age, but something went awry. Many commentators refer to the parallel with the similar narrative found in Ovid (Metam. I.89–150), the descent from an age of gold, to one of silver, to one of bronze, and finally to one of iron, when Astraea, justice, is the last of the gods to leave the earth. (See note to Inf. XXXIV.121–126.) [return to English / Italian]

  103–111. Dante’s second myth is more of his own devising. While the statue of the old man is closely modeled on that found in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Daniel 2: 31–35), the poet’s enclosure of the statue in Ida seems to be essentially his own invention. But there are “hydraulic” reasons for putting him and his tears (these are not found in Daniel) there: Dante needs to account for the origin of the rivers of hell. The gran veglio, within the mountain, turns his back on Egypt (Damietta, a city in the Nile delta) and gazes on Rome as though it were his mirror. Interpretations of this detail vary, but it would seem that the movement of temporal rule from the East to Rome would account for this representative of the original political order looking toward its new home. What does he see there? Probably, in Dante’s view, his mirror image, since the empire is totally ineffective. He is putting more weight upon his right foot, formed of baked clay, which most of the early commentators thought represented the corrupt Church; yet an argument can be made that, since the veglio is a figuration of pagan man, the Church would be inappropriately a part of his “physique.” In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream a rock destroys the feet of the statue; for Christian exegetes this rock represents Christ, destroying the Old Man and making the new life possible for mankind. [return to English / Italian]

  112–114. The waters that collect from all the non-golden and riven parts of the statue gather somewhere beneath it under Mount Ida and force their way into the underworld. For the root of the image of the rivers of hell as tears from the veglio’s eyes in the redeeming blood of Christ on the Cross, flowing into Limbo to redeem Adam, see Silverstein (Silv.1931.1) and Cassell (Cass.1984.1), pp. 58–60. The Old Man is, in this reading, the parodic anticipation of the New Man, the Son of God. [return to English / Italian]

  115–129. And now Virgil can get to his putative main point, the disposition of the rivers of hell. Dante’s question in response seems to reveal that he has forgotten what he has seen at the border of Avarice and Wrath (Inf. VII.100–108). See note to vv. 76–84, above. On the other hand, Virgil does not make that plain to him. As a result, whether that stream is supposed to be from the same source as this one—the most attractive hypothesis—becomes, at best, moot. [return to English / Italian]

  130–138. Dante’s two questions are meant as an aid to the reader, who may not have realized that the river of blood and what has just now been called “Phlegethon” for the first time (at v. 116) are one and the same. As for Lethe, since it is thought of as being a major fluvial appurtenance of the afterworld, the poet wants to reassure his reader that it has not been forgotten in the watery arrangement of hell but awaits discovery in purgatory. [return to English / Italian]

  139–142. The coda ties the action back to where it stopped, at v. 84. The next canto, in fact, will pick up precisely from there (and not here), as though it were the last verse of the canto. For a similar phenomenon earlier on, see note to Inferno VIII.1. [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XV

  1–3. Both the words margini (borders) and ruscello (stream) appear in the passage at which the forward motion of the journey was arrested in the previous canto (XIV.79–84). The action, interrupted by Virgil’s discourse about Crete and the gran veglio, now continues. The poets walk along one of the two “banks” that rise above the barren plain of sand and border the red stream as it heads for the lower regions. Thus we know that all their movement until they reach the edge of the next boundary (XVI.103) is on a downward gradient, headed toward the center of the pit. This revision in their usual procedure (a leftward, circling movement) is necessitated by the topography of the ring of violence against God, the sand where flakes of fire fall and which admits no mortal traversal. [return to English / Italian]

  4–12. The double simile compares the construction made by God to carry the “water” of hell toward its final destination to the huge earthworks engineered in Flanders and in northern Italy to protect farmland and human habitations from flood. “Carentana” probably refers (the exact reference is debated in the commentaries) to the mountains north of Padua from which in spring the snows release their torrents. [return to English / Italian]

  13–21. Another double comparison. As the poets move away from the wood of the suicides and down across the sand along their dyke, they approach a group of the damned. Its members examine them as men look at one another under a new moon and as an aging tailor concentrates upon threading his needle. The first comparison may suggest the image of homosexual “cruising” in the darkest of moonlit nights (it is difficult for modern readers to imagine how dark the nighttime streets
of medieval cities were); the second conveys the intensity of such gazing. For this way of reading many of the words and images of the canto see Pequigney (Pequ.1991.1). And see the endnote after Canto XVI. [return to English / Italian]

  23–24. The sinner, standing below Dante, must reach up to touch the hem of his garment. His words of recognition capture the tone of an elderly teacher recognizing his former star pupil and, some would argue, of his effeminacy. [return to English / Italian]

  28–30. Dante recognizes his old “teacher,” Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220–94). He probably taught Dante by the example of his works rather than in any classroom, but the entire scene is staged as a reunion between teacher and former student.

  Brunetto, whose life has a number of similarities to Dante’s, was a Florentine Guelph, a man of letters who was much involved in politics, and, not least in importance, he wrote narrative verse in the vernacular; he was also a notary, which accounts for his title, ser. He became a de facto exile when he learned about the battle of Montaperti (1260) and the triumph of the Ghibellines while he was in France. He stayed there for six years and, wrote his French encyclopedic treatise, the Livre dou Tresor, or Treasure. Before his voluntary exile, Brunetto had previously written a major portion of an allegorical poem in Italian rhymed couplets, referred to within the work itself three times as Il Tesoro but which became known as the Tesoretto (“Little Treasure”—one supposes because it was both incomplete and did not seem as “weighty” as the Tresor [referred to as Tesoro in Bono Giamboni’s abbreviated Italian version of the prose work]). The Tesoretto, as it has continued to be called, was at that point, even though incomplete, the longest narrative poem composed in Italian. Returning to Florence after the “restoration” of 1266 in the wake of the battle of Benevento, he took up his political and notarial chores, and died in the city, much honored, in 1294. (For a careful presentation of the importance of Brunetto for Dante, see Francesco Mazzoni, “Latini, Brunetto,” ED, vol. 3, 1971, pp. 579–88. See also Mazzoni’s essential study of Dante’s borrowings from Brunetto [Mazz.1967.3]; and Charles Davis’s article [Davi.1967.1].)