The Inferno

by Dante

  8–9. Commentators occasionally remark that Dante has here forgotten the fact that insubstantial Virgil, a shade, would give Dante no shelter at all. The “rules” of the poem overrule the “rules” of even his own physics if and when he chooses. For example, Virgil picks Dante up and carries him at Inferno XIX.124–125 and XXIII.37. See note to Inferno VI.34–36. [return to English / Italian]

  10. Since Tommaseo, in 1837, commentators have cited, for this verse, Aeneas’s words as he tells the story of Laocoön (Aen. II.204): “horresco referens” (I shudder merely to tell it). In the Aeneid two serpents are moving toward the priest to kill him; here, the Serpent is being approached by Virgil and Dante. The differing context is eventually reassuring, but the protagonist is, for the last time in this cantica, filled with fear. [return to English / Italian]

  11–12. For the third time in Cocytus the fact that we have crossed a boundary is made clear only by the fact that sinners are now punished in a different posture. This last realm is named, of course, for Judas, who betrayed his rightful Lord, Jesus Christ. [return to English / Italian]

  13–15. The sinners here are frozen inside the ice, as though tossed into it helter-skelter before it froze and now stuck in their various postures eternally, like straw caught in molten glass in the artisan’s shop and now fastened in that glass, a lasting imperfection in it. Their postures are horizontal (whether facedown or supine we cannot tell—perhaps both), vertical (both head-up and head-down), or bent in two. We eventually realize that in this zone we will not learn the identity of any of these sinners, a situation that may remind us of the anonymity that was insisted on for the neutrals in Inferno III.49–51. All of our attention is saved for Lucifer and the three special betrayers who are punished in his mouth. [return to English / Italian]

  20–21. Virgil uses the classical name for the king of hell, as he has once before (Inf. XI.65), and as he did in his own poem (e.g., Aen. VI.269). This is the last time that we will hear that name, as we are shortly to leave his “kingdom.” The phrase “Ecco Dite” here surely echoes the phrase used of Jesus, before he is sentenced to death, “Ecce homo.” See note to Inferno XVII.1–3. [return to English / Italian]

  22–27. The last verse of this seventh and last address to the reader in Inferno is treated by most commentators as a triviality, i.e., Dante assures the reader that he was indeed half-dead (as he has already said). See, for example, the comment found in Bosco/Reggio: “The expression simply translates … that simple and banal phrase … in Italian, mezzo morto [half dead].” Does Dante need to ask us to exercise our wits, if we have these, in order to understand that? The portentousness of his declaration that he cannot write what he became because words would fail him cannot be squared with such an interpretation, words for which would fail no one. Few, however, have come forward with more vital readings. Gregorio Di Siena, in his commentary, quotes Torricelli, who says that at this moment Dante is passing from the state of death to the state of living in God’s forgiveness. Ernesto Trucchi, who bridles at the terribly uninteresting readings put forward by previous commentators, claims that this is the moment in which, in the protagonist, the fear of hell becomes the fear of God. More recently, Durling and Martinez propose (Durl.1996.1, p. 544) the following: “This moment is the culmination of the penitential imitation of Christ in the descent into hell, symbolically the pilgrim’s death to sin, that is, the death of the ‘old man,’ leading to the reversal of direction from descent to ascent.” They give credit to Freccero’s essay “The Sign of Satan” (Frec.1986.1), pp. 167–79. Whether we accept their interpretation or not, it does seem that they, and very few others, have responded with the kind of attention that the passage obviously calls for. [return to English / Italian]

  30–31. That is, “I am, proportionally, closer in size to a giant than a giant is to Lucifer.” For the size of the giants, ca. seventy feet, see the note to Inferno XXXI.58–66. Let us, merely for purposes of calculation, agree that Dante was six feet tall. The equation is simple: 6/70 = 70/x; x = 817. Since a body is roughly 2.5 times an arm’s length, Satan is some 2000 feet tall and thus looms, from the waist up, over the ice by some 1000 feet. [return to English / Italian]

  35. Satan, once of the highest order of angels, the Seraphim, has come a long way down. It is worth noting that the only other sinner in hell referred to as raising his brows is prideful Farinata (Inf. X.45). [return to English / Italian]

  37–38. The “wonder” that is Satan even now reminds us of his divine origin. As many have noted, he stands before us as a parodic version of Christ crucified, even to his physical resemblance to the scene on Golgotha, in which Christ was upon a cross between two thieves. For a representation of the three-headed Satan known to Dante from the mosaic on the ceiling of the Baptistry in Florence see Bosco/Reggio’s commentary. [return to English / Italian]

  39–45. The three colors of Satan’s faces have caused much debate. Almost all the early commentators equate them with the opposites of the three attributes of the trinitarian God, Love, Power, and Knowledge. They associate red with anger, thus hatred (or impotence), yellowish white with impotence (or hatred), and black with ignorance. As many note, these are not particularly convincing schemes, if their overall applicability seems acceptable. [return to English / Italian]

  46–51. The six wings of Satan are his six wings as one of the angelic order of Seraphim (Isaiah 6:2); they are now not glorious in color but the wings of a giant bat. Their resemblance to sails on a great ship is parodic, since Satan proceeds nowhere, but connects with images associated with Ulysses (Inf. XXVI) and the ship bringing the saved souls to the shore of purgatory (Purg. I). [return to English / Italian]

  53–57. Guido da Pisa associates Satan’s tears and mastication with a biblical text (Matth. 8:12), Jesus’ words to the centurion concerning those who fail to believe: “and there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” [return to English / Italian]

  61–67. The three most gravely punished sinners of the poem are Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus (founder of the Church), as well as Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar (the first ruler of the empire). Judas is tortured more severely, his back flayed (see vv. 58–60) as was Christ’s, on the way to Golgotha, bearing the cross. Nonetheless, Brutus and Cassius, those stalwarts of the Roman Republic, which Dante honored so notably (see Holl.1986.1), are not treated a great deal better. When we consider that another “conspirator” against Julius, Cato the Younger, is found saved in the next canto (Purg. I), we must surely be puzzled. For Dante, despite his predominant hostility to him as a man (see Stul.1991.1, pp. 33–43), Julius was nonetheless the first emperor of Rome, and thus served a divinely-ordained purpose. For this reason, Brutus and Cassius are seen as betrayers of their rightful lord. [return to English / Italian]

  68–69. It is now nightfall of the Saturday of Easter weekend; the journey to this point has lasted precisely twenty-four hours. We have also reached the border of the midpoint of this canto, verse 69 of 139. The next verse begins the action that will encompass another twenty-four-hour period, seventy verses that will extend through exactly as many hours as have been consumed by the journey up to now. [return to English / Italian]

  71–75. When Satan opens his wings, Virgil, with Dante holding on to him, seizes the moment to grasp the animal-like flank of “the Beast.” [return to English / Italian]

  76–84. At the very center of the universe even Virgil, a shade, feels the pull of gravity as he tries to move back up toward the light.

  The locution describing Virgil’s changed direction, “ov’ elli avea le zanche” (where he had his shanks), has caused debate, some believing that the “he” refers to Virgil himself, i.e., turned his head to where his legs had been; others, that he turned his head to where Satan’s leg were. Our translation follows Hatcher and Musa, who opt for Satan’s legs (Hatc.1964.1 and Hatc.1966.1), pointing out, among other things, that Dante’s insertion of the pronoun “elli” before the verb “avea” makes it almost nece
ssary to draw this conclusion, since he never else inserts a pronoun into a sequence of verbs without introducing a new subject of the verb; that is, if the line read “[Virgilio] volse la testa ov’ avea le zanche,” Virgil would clearly be the implied subject of the second verb. According to Hatcher and Musa, the “elli” all but removes that possibility.

  Since Dante doesn’t understand (see vv. 90–93) that he has reached the center of the universe and is being moved back upward toward the surface of the earth at the antipodes, he assumes that Virgil is going back up toward the ice of Cocytus. [return to English / Italian]

  94–96. It is now 7:30 AM (midway between 6:00 and 9:00, the first “tierce,” or three-hour period, into four of which the solar day was divided (6–9; 9–noon; noon-3; 3–6). Since moments ago (v. 68) we had learned that it was 6 PM in Jerusalem, how can this be? For the first time in the poem Virgil tells time by the sun, and not the moon; and he tells it by the position of the sun in purgatory, twelve hours ahead of Jerusalem (where it is currently 7:30 PM). We are leaving hell behind. [return to English / Italian]

  97–120. Even though the travelers have to traverse an enormous distance in seventy lines, thirty-nine of them (88–126) are devoted to their new situation, Dante’s three questions, and Virgil’s responses. The setting is a space on the convex side of the ice of Cocytus, i.e., on its far side. The only remaining evidence of the infernal core is offered by the legs of Lucifer, sticking up through the crust of the area that contains the rest of him. We are on the other side of the ice, and there is nothing more by way of constructed space to catch our eye.

  Dante wants to know why he no longer sees the ice, why Lucifer is “upside down,” and how it can already be morning. Some of Virgil’s explanations have already been adverted to. He also explains that they are now under the southern hemisphere of the world above, not the northern, where Christ was put to death and whence they had begun their descent. [return to English / Italian]

  121–126. Virgil’s final words in Inferno create, as it were, the foundation myth of sin: how it established itself in the world that God had made good. Forti (Fort.1986.1), p. 246, refers to the passage as a “genuine cosmological myth,” to the fall of Lucifer as “the first event that occurs in time” (p. 259).

  It is worth considering a similar passage in Ovid (Metam. I.151–162): Astraea, or justice, has just left the earth. The battle of Phlegra ensues (about which we have heard in Canto XXXI [44–45, 91–96, 119–121]); once the giants are destroyed, mother Earth, Gea, forms man in their image, if smaller, out of their gore. But this new stock, too, is contemptuous of the gods. Soon enough Lycaon (the “wolf-man”) will commit the first murder, one that will eventually lead to the murder of Julius Caesar (v. 201).

  Here, in the final moments of the final canto, we learn of the first things to occur in terrestrial time: Satan fell from heaven and crashed into our earth (see Par. XXIX.55–57). To flee from him, all the land in the southern hemisphere hid beneath the sea and moved to the north of the equator, while the matter that he displaced in his fall rose up behind him to form the mount of purgatory.

  Over the years there have been efforts to find contradictions to this view of the earth’s “geology” in Dante’s later Questio de aqua et terra (1320). Bruno Nardi (Nard.1959.1) made a case for the contradiction. Freccero’s review (Frec.1961.1) offered strong rebuttals to Nardi’s main arguments. The magisterial edition produced by Mazzoni (Mazz.1979.2) convincingly presents the work as Dantean. Pasquazi (Pasq.1985.1) makes a strong case for the absence of any significant contradiction. For a study of the wider question see Stabile (Stab.1983.1). [return to English / Italian]

  127–132. Along a passage in the rock through the space contained between the floor formed by the convex side of Cocytus and the underside of the earth above, the travelers follow the sound of a stream. It, many suggest, is the river Lethe, running down into hell filled with the sins now forgotten by all who have purged themselves of them (Purg. XXVIII.127–130). [return to English / Italian]

  133–138. There is no pausing for rest that now seems a waste of time, given the nearness of the light. Looking through a crevice (the word in Italian is pertugio, the same word used to describe the opening through which Ugolino could see the moon from his cell [Inf. XXXIII.22]) in the earth’s surface, whence, we assume, comes the little stream that they are following, Dante is able to see a few stars in the firmament above him. [return to English / Italian]

  139. In a single verse the cantica concludes. And in this line both Virgil and Dante actually step out of hell, and now can see the full expanse of the dawn sky, filled with stars. Both Purgatorio and Paradiso will also end with the word “stars” (stelle), the goals of a human sight that is being drawn to God. There is no doubt as to the fact that even Inferno, ending in happiness of this kind, is a comedic part of a comedic whole. [return to English / Italian]

  INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES

  * * *

  Index of these items (in their English forms, where these exist) in the Italian text of Inferno. NB: (1) if a character or place is mentioned more than once in a canto, only the first reference is present; (2) no distinction has been made between direct and indirect references; i.e., one will find “Laertes” instead of “Ulysses, father of.”

  Abbagliato, XXIX.132

  Abel, IV.56

  Abraham, IV.58

  Absalom, XXVIII.137

  Acheron, III.71; XIV.116

  Achilles, V.65; XII.71; XXVI.62; XXXI.5

  Acquacheta, XVI.97

  Acre, XXVII.89

  Adam, III.115; IV.55

  Adam, Master, XXX.49

  Adige, XII.5

  Aegina, XXIX.59

  Aeneas, I.74; II.13; IV.122; XXVI.93

  Aesop, XXIII.4

  Aghinolfo, XXX.77

  Agnello, XXV.68

  Ahithophel, XXVIII.137

  Alardo, XXVIII.18

  Alberigo, Friar, XXXIII.109

  Albero of Siena, XXIX.109

  Albert (Alberto degli Alberti), XXXII.57

  Alecto, IX.47

  Alessandro (count of Romena), XXX.77

  Alessandro degli Alberti, XXXII.41

  Alessio Interminei of Lucca, XVIII.122

  Alexander, XII.107; XIV.31

  Alì, XXVIII.32

  Alichino, XXI.118; XXII.112

  Altaforte, XXIX.29

  Amphiaraus, XX.31

  Amphion, XXXII.11

  Anastasius, XI.8

  Anaxagoras, IV.137

  Anchises, I.74

  Andrea de’ Mozzi, XV.112

  Angiolello, XXVIII.77

  Annas, XXIII.121

  Anselm (Anselmuccio), XXXIII.50

  Antaeus, XXXI.100; XXXII.17

  Antenora, XXXII.88

  Antiochus IV Epiphanes, XIX.87

  Apennines, XVI.96; XXVII.30

  Apulia, XXVIII.9

  Arabia, XXIV.90

  Arachne, XVII.18

  Arbia, X.86

  Arethusa, XXV.97

  Arezzo, XXII.5; XXIX.109

  Argos, XXVIII.84

  Ariadne, XII.20

  Arles, IX.112

  Arno, XIII.146; XV.113; XXIII.95; XXX.65; XXXIII.83

  Arrigo (unseen hell-dweller), VI.80

  Arsenal of Venice, XXI.7

  Arthur, King, XXXII.62

  Aruns, XX.46

  Asdente, XX.118

  Athamas, XXX.4

  Atropos, XXXIII.126

  Attila, XII.134; XIII.149

  Augustus (Caesar), I.71

  Aulis, XX.111

  Austria, XXXII.26

  Aventine, Mount, XXV.26

  Averroës, IV.144

  Avicenna, IV.143

  Azzo of Este, XII.112; XVIII.56

  Bacchiglione, XV.113

  Bacchus, XX.59

  Barbariccia, XXI.120; XXII.29

  Beccheria, XXXII.119

  Beelzebub, XXXIV.127

  Benaco, XX.63

  Bergamo, XX.71

  Bertran d
e Born, XXVIII.118; XXIX.29

  Bisenzio, XXXII.56

  Bocca (degli Abati), XXXII.106

  Bologna, XVIII.58; XXIII.103

  Bonifazio, XIX.53; XXVII.70

  Bonturo, XXI.41

  Branca d’Oria, XXXIII.137

  Brenta, XV.7

  Brescia, XX.68

  Briareus, XXXI.98

  Brigata, XXXIII.89

  Bruges, XV.4

  Brunetto Latini, XV.30

  Brutus (Lucius Junius Brutus), IV.127

  Brutus (Marcus Junius Brutus), XXXIV.65

  Bulicame, XIV.79

  Buoso, XXV.35

  Buoso da Duera, XXXII.106

  Buoso Donati, XXX.44

  Caccia d’Asciano, XXIX.131

  Cacus, XXV.17

  Cadmus, XXV.97

  Caesar, Julius, I.70; IV.123; XXVIII.98

  Cagnazzo, XXI.19; XXII.106

  Cahors, XI.50

  Caïaphas, XXIII.111

  Cain, XX.126

  Caïna, V.107; XXXII.58

  Calcabrina, XXI.118; XXII.133

  Calchas, XX.110

  Camilla, I.107; IV.124

  Camiscion de’ Pazzi, XXXII.52

  Campo Piceno, XXIV.148

  Cannae, XXVIII.8

  Capaneus, XIV.46; XXV.15

  Capocchio, XXIX.124; XXX.28

  Capraia, XXXIII.82

  Caprona, XXI.95

  Cardinal, the (see Ubaldini, Ottaviano)

  Carentana, XV.9

  Carlino de’ Pazzi, XXXII.69

  Carrarese, XX.48

  Casalodi, XX.95

  Casentino, XXX.65

  Cassius, XXXIV.67

  Castel Sant’ Angelo, XVIII.32

  Catalano, Fra, XXIII.104

  Cato, XIV.15

  Cattolica, La, XXVIII.80

  Caurus, XI.114