The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Dante Alighieri

  6 (P.32) Ciacco: We know little about this figure, except that he was a Florentine and Dante’s contemporary. The name is probably a nickname for “pig” or “hog” and, by implication, “filthy” or “swinish.” Boccaccio’s Decameron, Day IX, Story 8, contains a character by the same name, but he was probably inspired by Dante. Several dozen Florentines appear in The Divine Comedy, and most of them are in Hell.

  7 (p. 32) “thy wretchedness ... to weep invites me”: Apparently, the Pilgrim has not yet learned that showing compassion in the face of sin and sinners provides evidence of moral weakness. In canto V, Dante was moved to weep and to swoon over two self-professed “tragic” lovers. Now, his human compassion and patriotism are aroused by meeting one of his fellow Florentine citizens, and he inquires if any Florentines are just and asks why Florence has always been torn by internecine strife. When the subject of Florentine politics is brought up, the Pilgrim seems to forget all about the scene at hand—the nature and punishment of gluttony.

  8 (P.33) And be to me... “The just are two, and are not understood there”. This is the first of some nine prophecies about events that touch Dante’s personal life. There are three other such prophecies delivered by three characters in the Inferno (Farinata, canto X: 79—81 ; Brunetto Latini, canto XV: 55—57; and Vanni Fucci, canto XXIV: 143—150); four characters in Purgatory (Currado Malaspina, canto VIII: 133-139; Oderisi, canto XI: 139-141; Bonagiunta da Lucca, canto XXIV: 37—38; and Forese, canto XXIV: 82—90); and one in Paradise (Cacciaguida, XVII: 46-93). During Dante’s era, there was a struggle between forces owing allegiance to the pope (the Guelphs) and those supporting the Holy Roman Emperor (the Ghibellines). In fact, however, these allegiances usually only reflected the struggle of factions with the various Italian city-states who sought allies outside their communes to continue their struggle. After defeating the Ghib ellines in 1289, the Florentine Guelphs split into warring factions: the Whites, led by the Cerchi family (called the “rustic” party in 1. 65, because many of them lived in the wooded outskirts of Florence), and the Blacks, led by the Donati family. In May of 1300, only a few weeks after the date of the Pilgrim’s journey, the two parties collided, resulting in the expulsion of the Blacks from the city in 1301. However, the Blacks returned in 1302 (“within three suns,” as the Poet writes in 1. 68, meaning “within three years”). They were assisted by the inaction of Pope Boniface VIII (“by force of him who now is on the coast,” as noted in 1. 69), and they drove the Whites (including Dante) into exile. The two just men are never identified in Dante’s poem, but many critics believe Dante refers to himself and to some other as yet unidentified person.

  9 (p. 33) “Farinata and Tegghiaio ...Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca”. Forgetting about the instruction he should be receiving about the nature of the sin of gluttony and warming to talk of his native Florence, the Pilgrim asks the fates of a number of Florentines of his day and learns that “they are among the blacker souls” (l. 85), in various locations in Hell. Farinata degli Uberti will appear in canto X with the heretics. Tegghiaio Aldobrandini and Jacopo Rusticucci are among the sodomites in canto XVI. Mosca dei Lamberti is among the sowers of discord in canto XXVIII. Arrigo does not reappear later in the poem and has never been successfully identified by scholars.

  10 (p. 33) “But when thou art again in the sweet world, I pray thee to the mind of others bring me”: Ciacco’s prophecy in 11. 64-75 (see note 8) and his conversation with the Pilgrim reveal another strange rule of Hell: Its inhabitants may foretell the future (such as the expulsion of Dante and the Whites from Florence within three years of the fictional date of the poem), and they may know or remember the past, but they know nothing about the present. It is part of their eternal punishment that they know nothing of their present reputation on earth, and, since earthly fame and family pride are two of the most characteristic qualities sought by the Florentines and Italians of Dante’s time, the damned souls are eager for Dante the Pilgrim to return to the land of the living and report favorably on them. Conversely, they dread any truthful account of their sins.

  11 (p. 34) “Return unto thy science”- The Pilgrim’s seemingly innocent question about whether punishments increase or decrease af ter the Last Judgment is answered sternly by Virgil, who orders him to return to his “science,” which for that day could have meant only Aristotle. It has been suggested that the source of this idea is a commentary by Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle’s De anima. The gist of the discussion about the souls after the Last Judgment is that the damned will feel more pain while the blessed will feel more pleasure as they are both, in a sense, “perfected.”

  12 (p. 34) There we found Plutus: The mythological figure overseeing the punishments in the next layer, the fourth circle, is the classical god of wealth (not to be confused with Pluto, ruler of the underworld). He is the perfect choice to preside over the torture of the avaricious and the prodigal.

  CANTO VII

  1 (p. 35) “Papë Satàn, Papë Satàn, Aleppë!”. The first words Plutus speaks are generally considered to be gibberish. Though Virgil, “who all things knew” (1. 3), understands this strange language, no one else has managed to make any sense of it, although a number of interpretations have been advanced to explain their meaning. “Aleppë” might seem to suggest “aleph,” the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet ; “Papë” seems to suggest “papa” or “pope”; and “Satàn” obviously brings “Satan” to mind. But taken together these words make little sense. Perhaps the most amusing explanation comes from Ben venuto Cellini’s My Life (II: 27). The sixteenth-century Florentine sculptor knew Dante’s poem quite well and while living in Paris claimed that Dante must have learned this strange language from the howling judges and screaming magistrates in the Parisian courts, who entangled him in endless lawsuits.

  2 (p. 35 the proud adultery: Longfellow takes the original Italian (del superbo stupor) to mean a sexual assault, while most other translators render the words to mean a generic attack, referring to the battle between the rebel angels and the Archangel Michael, who defeated them.

  3 (p.35) the fourth chasm: Virgil and the Pilgrim continue their descent into the abyss of the fourth circle, which is devoted to the punishment of two different but integrally related sins: avarice, or miserliness, and prodigality, or wastefulness. Both categories of sinners thought of nothing but money, albeit in different ways, and as a result, their humanity was distorted by their perversity. As a fitting punishment, they are encumbered by dead weights and are forced to participate in a parody of an earthy dance. In this canto, for the first time, two different circles of Hell will be introduced, since the canto also introduces the sins of the fifth circle, where the wrathful and the sullen reside.

  4 (P. 35) Charybdis: In classical mythology, this is the name given to a whirlpool in the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily.

  5 (p. 37) their roundelay: The popular dance to which the movement of the sinners is compared is, in Italian, a ridda, a dance that includes the reversal of circular movement as each strophe begins. The circular movement of the dance of the sinners is directly related to the concept of Fortune discussed in great detail later in canto VII, ll. 59-96 since the power of Fortune was traditionally represented in the medieval and Renaissance periods by the classical image of a turning wheel.

  6 (p. 37) “unto all discernment dim”- Virgil explains why the Pilgrim is unable to recognize anyone in the group of the avaricious and the prodigal, many of whom are men of the Church: Since they accomplished nothing in their lives except thinking about money, here their sordid earthly nature renders them anonymous. Avarice is completely contrary to the directives of Christ to embrace poverty, a virtue exemplified by that most remarkable Italian saint of the Middle Ages, Saint Francis of Assisi, whose mendicant order took vows of poverty in imitation of Christ. For a religious person to practice avarice was the negation of his vocation. Dante’s remarks, and his placement of unnamed popes and cardinals in Hell, imply that the churchmen even outnumbe
r others in their practice of avarice.

  7 (p. 37) “With the fist closed, and these with tresses shorn”: At the Last Judgment, the avaricious will have their outstretched hands closed forever, while the prodigal (who have spent their last cent) will be shaved bald, perhaps recalling an old Italian proverb that describes the wasteful as spending “down to their last hair.”

  8 (p. 38) “He... ordained a general ministress and guide”: Asked to elaborate on Fortune, Virgil explains that this force (which in mythology and other classical literature is often personified as a fickle woman or as a turning wheel that determines human fates by its random movements) is actually delegated by God. In other words, Dante has Christianized a pagan deity and has changed it from a fickle and irrational force into something that ultimately has purpose and direction within a Christian mission. Fortune is thus transformed into a kind of angel.

  9 (p. 39) “Already sinks each star that was ascending when I set out”, It is now after midnight on Good Friday evening, and approximately six hours have passed since the Pilgrim and Virgil set out in the morning. The stars that are now setting in the West were rising in the East at the beginning of the journey.

  10 (p. 39) A marsh it makes, which has the name of Styx: The Styx is one of the five rivers in the classical underworld and the second of Dante’s four rivers in Hell. Dante turns the river into a filthy marsh, but it first appears as a boiling spring. Ultimately all of the rivers in Dante’s Hell derive from the tears pouring from a crack in the statue of the Old Man of Crete (canto XIV: 94-120). The geographical division of Hell between the rivers Acheron and the Styx delineates the portion of Upper Hell where the sins of the she-wolf, or Incontinence, are punished. Beyond the Styx, the Pilgrim will soon spy the flaming walls of the City of Dis, inside of which the sins of the lion and the leopard, or violence and fraud, will be encountered and described.

  11 (p. 39) The souls of those whom anger overcame: Now in the fifth circle proper, the Pilgrim and Virgil come upon the wrathful (which would seem to be a sin of violence, not of Incontinence) and the sullen. Most commentators believe that Dante was influenced by Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, which attempted to distinguish various types of anger. In his depiction of the sinners in the fifth circle, Dante concentrates upon the wrathful who express their anger actively and those who are more sullenly wrathful (“We sullen were,” Dante writes in 1. 121) and brood over their anger.

  CANTO VIII

  1 (p. 41) I say, continuing: Here, for the first time in the poem, Dante the Poet breaks into the narrative and relates what happened between the time the travelers encountered the wrathful being punished in the Styx and when they reached the foot of the tower of the walled city of Dis. The belief that this interruption might represent an actual break in the composition of the poem is difficult to prove or disprove, since there are no autograph manuscripts of Dante’s works extant.

  2 (p. 41) the foot of that high tower ... two flamelets we saw placed there: The tower of Dis functions as a point from which the boatman of the Styx may be summoned by the “two flamelets.”

  3 · (p. 41) “Phlegyas, Phlegyas”: Phlegyas was the mythological King of Boeotia. The son of Mars and a human mother, he set fire to one of Apollo’s temples after the god seduced his daughter. Apollo killed him and condemned him to eternal punishment in the Underworld. Because Phlegyas was sentenced to the other world for an act of wrath, he is the appropriate guardian of the wrathful. As a rebel against one of the Greek gods, he also suggests a parallel with the rebel angels, who will soon be revealed as the guards at the gates of the City of Dis.

  4 (p. 41) only when I entered seemed it laden: The boat piloted by Phlegyas sinks lower into the water when Dante the Pilgrim steps into it, because his body has material weight, while the shade of Virgil is weightless.

  5 (p. 42) “thou art all defiled.... Away there with the other dogs!”: Dante recognizes the damned soul arising from the marsh, but the reader only learns later, in 1. 61, that his name is Philippo (Filippo) Argenti—a member of the Admiari family and a Black Guelph, therefore one of Dante’s sworn political enemies. Note the dramatic difference in Dante’s reaction to this soul. No longer does the Pilgrim weep out of compassion for the sinner (the sinner weeps now), and he curses Argenti (“Away there with the other dogs”).

  6 (p. 42) “Blessed be she”: When Virgil detects the first note of righteous indignation in the Pilgrim’s reaction to the damned, he uses words reminiscent of Christ’s words in the Bible, Luke 11: 29—32. The Pilgrim’s desire to have Argenti punished more than is the norm (a desire that is satisfied) certainly borders on the vindictive and is thus a reflection of the wrath punished in this area of Hell. So, while the Pilgrim has progressed morally from his swooning at the words of Francesca in canto V, now his act of moral indignation is tainted with the very sin that is being punished where he stands.

  7 (p. 43) Dis: The King of the classical underworld, Pluto, was also called Dis. The City of Dis is the citadel of Lower Hell, where the most serious sins are punished and where Lucifer resides at its very bottom and center.

  8 (p. 43) Its mosques: By characterizing the City of Dis as having buildings shaped like mosques—the worship places of the most dangerous enemies of medieval Christendom—Dante renders the city much more frightening.

  9 (p. 43) fire eternal: The reader of the Inferno should note that contrary to popular ideas about Hell as a place characterized by fire and brimstone, this is the first time in the poem that Dante associates infernal punishment with fire. Dante’s imagination creates many other suitable punishments in his depiction of the afterworld.

  10 (p. 44) More than a thousand at the gates I saw out of the Heavens rained down: These are the rebel angels who, led by Lucifer, turned against God. These rebels will prove to be the greatest obstacle Virgil and the Pilgrim have encountered up to this point in the journey through Hell. Because of the Angels’ rank—though fallen, they are still higher in importance than the classical monsters Dante has recycled in other places—Virgil is forced to negotiate with them, something that proves fruitless without higher intervention.

  11 (p. 44) Think, Reader: Dante’s many addresses to his reader (seven in the Inferno; seven in Purgatory; five in Paradise) are crucial in creating an intimate relationship between author and audience. Moreover, in these addresses, Dante the Poet often asks his reader to consider a particular emotion that Dante the Pilgrim is experiencing—thereby underlining the distinction between Poet and Pilgrim that is so important to the overall structure and dramatic unfolding of the poem.

  12 (p. 44) “it by Such is given”: Virgil is referring either to God or to the three ladies in Heaven (the Virgin Mary, Lucy, and Beatrice) who have sent Virgil to guide Dante the Pilgrim.

  13 (p. 45) “because I am angry”: Because of the unexpected resistance of the rebel angels, who have closed the gates of Dis to the travelers, even Virgil shares the sin of the canto and expresses anger.

  14 (p. 45) less secret gate: When Christ harrowed Hell and descended into Limbo to release the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament, he broke the main entrance gate (the principal entrance was thus “less secret”), and it will now remain open for all eternity. Because Virgil witnessed the Harrowing of Hell by Christ, he has reason to believe that he too may prevail in his contest with the rebel angels, as Christ did. This particular gate is the one mentioned in the service for Mass on Holy Saturday (the day in question).

  15 (p. 45) “One by whose means the city shall be opened”: A Divine Messenger sent by God to open the gates of the City of Dis is on the way to help the two beleaguered travelers.

  CANTO IX

  1 (p. 46) his new color: While the Pilgrim has turned white with fright, his guide, Virgil, is probably red-faced, because of his anger at the end of canto VIII.

  2 (p. 46) “Because I carried out the broken phrase, perhaps to a worse meaning than he had”: In 11. 7—9, Virgil expresses doubt as to the outcome of their co
ntest with the inhabitants of Hell and even for a moment wonders if Beatrice’s promised assistance will materialize. When Virgil interrupts his train of thought, the Pilgrim wonders for a moment if they will be abandoned in Hell.

  3 (p. 46) “Doth any e’er descend from the first grade, which for its pain has only hope cut off?”: This is a reference to canto IV: 42, in which Virgil defines the punishment of the virtuous heathen in Limbo, the “first grade,” as “without hope we live on in desire.”

  4 · (P· 48) Erictho: In Lucan’s Pharsalia, Book VI, Erictho, or Erichtho, is a sorceress who conjures up dead spirits.

  5 (p. 48) the circle of Judas: Judecca, the ninth circle of Hell, is named for Judas, the betrayer of Christ.

  6 (p. 48) “That is the lowest region and the darkest.... Well know I the way”: Dante seems to have entirely invented the story about Virgil being conjured up by Erictho and visiting the lower extremities of Hell (Judecca), the region farthest from the Primum Mobile (“the heaven which circles all”). By this literary fiction, the Pilgrim is convinced that Virgil, his guide, knows the way through Hell from past personal experience, not just because he invented a fictional visit in his own epic poem, the Aeneid.

  7 (p. 48) The three infernal Furies: In Greek mythology, the Three Furies (or Erinyes)—Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone—are the traditional avengers of bloody crimes.

  8 (p.48) the Queen of everlasting lamentation: This is Hecate, or Persephone, wife of Pluto, classical god of the Underworld.

  9 (p. 48) Medusa: In classical mythology, Medusa is one of the three Gorgons; her gaze turns mortal men into stone.

  10 (p. 48) “Avenged we not on Theseus his assault!”: The Furies complain that Theseus, hero of Athens, was not put to death when he came to Hell to rescue Proserpina, Pluto’s queen. Dante’s sources for this story from classical mythology were Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI, and Statius’s Thebiad, Book VIII.