The Inferno

by Dante

  7–21. This elliptical version of a simile, so rich in its catalog of the horrors of war, involves four battles (or series of battles), two of them ancient, two modern, roughly as follows: [return to English / Italian]

  1150 B.C. ca. Aeneas’s Trojans triumph in south and central Italy;

  216 B.C. Romans are defeated by the Carthaginians at Cannae;

  1070 ca. Robert Guiscard’s Normans defeat the Saracens;

  1266 & 1268 Manfred, then Conradin, defeated by Charles of Anjou.

  In this series of military actions the Roman and/or imperial side first wins, then loses disastrously. The intrinsic view of history here is more chaotic than directed. Absent is Dante’s more optimistic view of history unfolding as a Roman and Christian manifestation of the spirit moving through time to its appointed goal. And we might further reflect that winning and losing battles has little to do with one’s final destination in God’s plan: Aeneas wins, but is in Limbo (Inf. IV.122), Robert Guiscard wins and is in heaven (Par. XVIII.48), Manfred loses and is on his way to heaven (Purg. III.112).

  For Dante’s relation to martial epic, a genre surely drawn to our attention by these scenes of war, see Hollander (Holl.1989.1). While Dante’s position here would also seem to look down on “mere” martial epic, with all its pointless slaughter, he nonetheless reveals an aptitude for the genre.

  9–11. Puglia (Apulia) here, most commentators agree, is meant in its wider sense, i.e., not only the southeast portion of the Italian peninsula, but the region including Lazio. The Trojans are then Aeneas and his men (some believe the reference is to the later Romans). The “long war” is the second Punic War (218–201 B.C.), during which the Romans suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces at Cannae (216 B.C.) in Apulia. Historians relate that after the battle a Carthaginian envoy showed the Roman senate the vast number of gold rings taken from the fingers of noble Romans killed in the battle. [return to English / Italian]

  12. The problem of the extent of Dante’s knowledge of Livy remains a vexed one. Commentators point out that Dante here would rather seem to be following Orosius (or Augustine) than Livy, but still appeals to Livy as the most authoritative historian of Rome. His vast compendium, Ab urbe condita, did not come through the ages intact; precisely which parts of it were known to Dante is not known to us. [return to English / Italian]

  13–14. Robert Guiscard, a Norman, won many victories in Puglia ca. 1060–80 to consolidate his power as duke of the region, including what for Dante was the most important one, that over the Saracens, which apparently helped to gain him his place in Paradiso (XVIII.48). [return to English / Italian]

  15–16. The text alludes to Manfred’s disastrous loss, occasioned, in Dante’s view, by the betrayal of his Apulian allies, at the battle near Ceperano that was prologue to his final defeat and death at the hands of the forces of the French king Charles of Valois at the battle of Benevento (1266). Manfred is the first saved soul found once Dante begins his ascent of the mount of purgatory (Purg. III.112). [return to English / Italian]

  17–18. Two years after the defeat at Benevento, the Ghibelline forces, now under Conradin, the grandson of the emperor Frederick II, suffered their final defeat near Tagliacozzo, in the Abruzzi, again at the hands of the forces of Charles of Anjou, who, after the battle, had Conradin put to death, thus ending the Hohenstaufen succession in Italy. Alardo was the French knight Érard de Valéry, who gave Charles the strategic advice that gained him military advantage on the field. [return to English / Italian]

  19–21. This image, suggesting layers of excavated battlefields, each containing vast areas of wounded soldiers holding out their mutilated limbs, gives us some sense of Dante’s view of the end result of war, sheer human butchery. Bosco/Reggio suggest that this bolgia brings into mind the image of a huge slaughterhouse. [return to English / Italian]

  For the Virgilian resonance (Aen. II.361–362) of these lines, see Tommaseo’s comment: this is Aeneas’s response when he must tell the terrible carnage during the night of the fall of Troy.

  22–31. This disgusting image of Mohammed derives from Dante’s conviction that the prophet was in fact a Christian whose schismatic behavior took the form of founding (in 630) what Dante considered a rival sect rather than a new religion, Islam. Thus Mohammed reveals himself as divided in two. [return to English / Italian]

  32–33. Alì, disciple, cousin, and son-in-law of Mohammed, became the fourth leader of the Muslims. But the issues surrounding his succession in 656 divided them into two factions, Sunni and Shiite, that continue to this day. [return to English / Italian]

  35. All punished here are described by this verse. “Scandal,” in this sense, means a promulgated doctrine that leads others to stumble and lose their way to the truth. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica II–II, q. 43, a. 1, resp., on the Greek word σκ˙αƲδαλοƲ, or “stumbling block.” Thus all here either caused schism in others or themselves lead schismatic groups, the first three religious (Mohammed, Alì, Fra Dolcino), the last five political (Pier da Medicina, Malatestino, Curio, Mosca, Bertran de Born). [return to English / Italian]

  37–40. The unseen devil of this ditch joins the cast of devils of the Malebolge, the whippers of the first bolgia and the hookers of the fifth. In this case there seems to be one devil alone, perhaps intended to remind the reader of the solitary Cherub, with flaming sword, sent to guard the Garden after Adam and Eve had been ejected from it (Gen. 3:24). (See Purgatorio VIII.25–27, where this passage is more clearly alluded to.) It is only in Malebolge that we find such creatures. [return to English / Italian]

  43–45. Mohammed evidently believes that Dante is one of the dead sinners. But how or why he thinks that such as they can loiter in hell, doing a bit of sightseeing before they go to judgment, is not easily explained. Virgil’s response (v. 49) makes it clear that only he, in this pair of visitors, is a dead soul. [return to English / Italian]

  55–60. Disabused of his erring view, Mohammed uses the occasion to send a message to his fellow in religious schism, Fra Dolcino. A northerner, from Novara (balancing the southern setting of the opening of the canto), Dolcino Tornielli was the head, from ca. 1300, of a group known as the Apostolic Brethren (gli Apostolici). This “order” had as its aim the restoration of the simplicity of apostolic times to the Christian religion. Its enemies accused Dolcino of holding heretical ideas, such as the community of goods and women. It did not help Dolcino’s case that he was accompanied by a beautiful woman, Margaret of Trent, reputed to be his mistress. Pope Clement V preached a crusade against the Brethren in 1305. In 1307, starved out by their enemies in the high country to which they had retreated, the Brethren were captured. Margaret and Dolcino were burned at the stake. [return to English / Italian]

  61–63. Mohammed’s placement of his suspended foot is read by some as a mere “realistic detail.” Rasha Al-Sabah (Alsa.1977.1) argues for an iconographic reading, based in a passage in St. Thomas on Proverbs 6:12–19, in which “a wicked man with lying mouth, sowing discord,” has “feet that are swift in running to mischief.” His posture, one foot suspended, may also refer to the Greek term “σκ˙αƲδαλοƲ,” for “stumbling block,” found at v. 35. [return to English / Italian]

  65. This bloodied figure, thus sliced by the sword-wielding devil, will be revealed as Pier da Medicina at v. 73. For the reminiscence of Virgil’s description of the disfigured visage of Deiphobus (Aen. VI.494–497), similarly deprived of his nose, see Scartazzini’s commentary and many later ones as well. [return to English / Italian]

  68. Pier opens his windpipe to speak, since the devil’s cut had wounded him there, thus preventing his breath from reaching his mouth. [return to English / Italian]

  70–75. The early commentators are not sure exactly who Pier of Medicina (a town between Bologna and Imola) was, but Dante and he apparently knew one another. While the nature of his schismatic behavior thus lies in shadow, the fact that his ensuing remarks refer to political intrigue
would seem to mark him also as a political, rather than a religious, schismatic. [return to English / Italian]

  76–81. Pier refers, in his prophecy, which parallels that given by Mohammed, initially to two victims of “schism,” Guido del Cassero and Angiolello di Carignano, first identified by Guiniforto in 1440, and then to the victimizer, Malatestino Malatesta, lord of Rimini. (He is referred to as “the younger mastiff” in the last canto at v. 46.) The details are not known to any commentators, but apparently Dante knew that these two leaders of the city of Fano were tricked by Malatestino into coming to confer with him at the town of La Cattolica. His men caught them in their ship on their way (or after they left) and drowned them. [return to English / Italian]

  82–84. Unriddled, the passage means that the entire Mediterranean Sea never witnessed so great a crime. For the phrase “gente argolica,” meaning “Greeks,” a synecdoche based on the part (the denizens of Argos) for the whole (Greece), see Aeneid II.78, as was noted in Torraca’s commentary (1905). [return to English / Italian]

  85–87. Malatestino, one-eyed, holds Rimini, the city that Curio (v. 102) wishes he had never seen (because it was there that he offered the advice that condemns him to this punishment). [return to English / Italian]

  89–90. The two men of Fano (v. 76) will have no need of prayer for help against the tricky winds off Focara’s point because they will be dead. [return to English / Italian]

  91–93. Dante, his appetite whetted by Pier’s elliptical phrasing at v. 87, wants him to expand. [return to English / Italian]

  96–102. Pier opens the tongueless mouth of Curio, seen as a schismatic for his advice to Caesar to march on Rome, thus destroying the republic and causing the civil wars. For Curio in Lucan and Dante see Stul.1991.1, pp. 27–28. [return to English / Italian]

  103–108. The description of Mosca dei Lamberti is one of the most affecting in this canto filled with affective moments. Mosca was among those Florentine citizens mentioned by Dante (Inf. VI.80) as having attempted to do good in the divided city; for his crime, of those mentioned he is the farthest down in hell. A fervent Ghibelline, in 1216 he urged the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, who, engaged to a girl of the Amidei family, married a Donati instead. The result of this killing was the origin of the bitter rivalry between the Amidei and the Donati, Ghibellines and Guelphs respectively, and of the civil discord that tore Florence apart. Mosca is thus seen as a modern-day Curio, urging the powerful to do what in their hearts they must have known was not to be done.

  His words, “a done deed finds its purpose,” so mercilessly laconic, now cause him enough by way of regret that we can sense some justification in Dante’s original characterization of him. [return to English / Italian]

  109–111. Dante is nonetheless stern in his criticism of Mosca, not accepting his gesture of penitence, and Mosca is left with his deserved heartbreak. [return to English / Italian]

  115–117. The poet’s self-assurance, playful though it certainly is, may offend some readers. He can narrate what is to follow because he knows he actually saw the next scene, a shade carrying his severed head. [return to English / Italian]

  130–138. Bertran de Born, one of the great poets of war of his or any time (and thus greatly admired by Ezra Pound in the last century) loved to see destruction of towns and men. One thinks of Robert Duvall’s character in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, who loved the smell of napalm in the morning. It is often pointed out that v. 132 is a reprise of a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah (Lament. 1:12), already cited by Dante in the opening verses of an “exploded” sonnet in his Vita nuova (VII.1–3) to express his own solitary sadness in love. In a sense, they are part of Bertran’s punishment, the “tough guy” portrayed as self-pitying.

  Bertran was a Gascon nobleman of the second half of the twelfth century. His poetry, written in Provençal, which is reflected in several passages in this canto, is not the subject of his discourse. Rather, he condemns himself for his implacable schismatic actions at the English court, where he supported and encouraged the rebellious plotting of Prince Henry against his own father, Henry II, king of the realm. For a text that encapsulates the problem presented in Bertran and all the other political schismatics, see Luke 11:17: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (cited by Marianne Shapiro [Shap.1974.1], p. 114).

  For the reference to Ahitophel’s similar support and encouragement of Absalom’s rebellion against his father, King David, see II Samuel 15:7–18:15. [return to English / Italian]

  142. The word contrapasso is generally understood to be based on an Aristotelian term in its Latin translation, contrapassum, used in the same sense that the biblical concept of retribution, expressed in the Latin lex talionis (the taking of an eye for an eye, etc.), is understood to have. That is, one does something wrong and receives the appropriate punishment for doing it. Out of the Hebrew and Aristotelian concept (the latter refined by Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle), Dante supposedly developed this idea, which is given a name here, but has been operative since we saw the first sinners in hell, the neutrals, in Canto III. For a lengthy and helpful gloss, see Singleton on this verse. Valerio Lucchesi (Lucc.1991.1) has mounted a complex argument attempting to deny this positive understanding of the term by Dante on the basis of its instability as a concept that St. Thomas actually embraces. [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XXIX

  1–3. Dante’s weeping eyes have reminded commentators, beginning with Tommaseo, of biblical sources, particularly Isaiah 16:9 and 34:7, as well as Ezekiel 23:33. Durling (Durl.1996.1), p. 458, suggests an echo of a passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions (VI.8), when Alypius is described as becoming drunk at the sight of the blood spilled at the Roman games. [return to English / Italian]

  4–7. Virgil’s rebuke, reminiscent of that found in Canto XX (vv. 27–30), is particularly stern, as though Dante were guilty of the sort of appalling human ghoulishness that makes people today gather at the scenes of fatal accidents. [return to English / Italian]

  8–9. Virgil’s sarcastic thrust for the first time in the poem offers us a measurement of the size of one of the areas of hell: this bolgia is twenty-two miles in circumference. (We will discover, at Inf. XXX.86, that the next bolgia’s circumference is exactly half this one’s.) These two measurements were the cause of an orgy of calculating in the Renaissance, involving no less a figure than Galileo in absurd plottings of an implausibly huge Inferno. For an account of these see John Kleiner (Klei.1994.1), pp. 23–56. [return to English / Italian]

  10. Castelvetro hears the echo here of the Sibyl’s words in Aeneid VI.539: “nox ruit, Aenea; nos flendo ducimus horas” (Night is coming, Aeneas; we waste the time in weeping). He goes on to add that Servius, in his commentary to Aeneid VI.255, pointed out that only a single day was granted by the gods for Aeneas’s journey to the underworld. We understand that the same is true for Dante, whose voyage in hell takes exactly twenty-four hours. [return to English / Italian]

  11–12. Virgil’s lunar time-telling suggests that, since Inferno XXI.112, some six hours have passed, making it ca. 1:30 PM now and leaving less than five hours for the completion of the journey. [return to English / Italian]

  13–21. Defending himself against the charge of idle curiosity, Dante informs Virgil that he was looking for the shade of a relative among the schismatics. The exchange shows that Virgil cannot in fact “read” Dante’s thoughts. See note to Inferno XXIII.25–30. [return to English / Italian]

  22–27. Virgil now adds some details to Canto XXVIII: he had seen Geri del Bello menace Dante while the protagonist was so preoccupied by Bertran de Born. This family drama runs as follows. Geri del Bello, Dante’s father’s cousin, was evidently something of a troublemaker (he was once cited for attacking a man in Prato in 1280). He was murdered, perhaps at about this time, by a member of the Sacchetti family, and revenge was only achieved by another member of the Alighieri clan ca. 1310 (perhaps just as Dante was finishi
ng Inferno). The details are far from clear, and the accounts in the early commentators diverge. See Simonetta Saffiotti Bernardi and Renato Piattoli, “Alighieri, Geri,” ED, vol. 1, 1970. [return to English / Italian]

  31–36. For the delicate interplay between Dante’s aristocratic sense of the necessity of acting on behalf of his family’s honor and his Christian knowledge that vengeance is the province of God alone, see Pertile (Pert.1998.1), pp. 378–84. Pertile also argues that Dante and Geri play out the roles of Aeneas and Dido in the underworld, when the guilty former lover fails to communicate with the shade of his offended dead paramour and leaves with his guilt unresolved (Aen. VI.450–476). Dante’s feeling pio—piteous toward Geri—would seem to connect him with Virgil’s pius Aeneas, who also honored his familiars. [return to English / Italian]

  37–39. The change in setting, from one bolgia to the other, is more abrupt than usual. The first thirty-six verses of the canto have been a sort of personal addendum to the last canto; the rest of it will combine with the next one to present the final ditch of the Malebolge, devoted to the punishment of forgery, in various forms: of metals (all in Canto XXIX), of persons, of coins, of words (all in Canto XXX). For the “fraudulent” blending of metals by alchemists, those punished in the rest of this canto, see Meye.1969.1. [return to English / Italian]