The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

And I think, indeed, it pleased my Guide: his look

  was all approval as he stood beside me

  intent upon each word of truth I spoke.

  He approached, and with both arms he lifted me,

  and when he had gathered me against his breast,

  remounted the rocky path out of the valley,

  nor did he tire of holding me clasped to him,

  until we reached the topmost point of the arch

  which crosses from the fourth to the fifth rim

  of the pits of woe. Arrived upon the bridge,

  he tenderly set down the heavy burden

  he had been pleased to carry up that ledge

  which would have been hard climbing for a goat.

  Here I looked down on still another moat.

  NOTES

  1. Simon Magus: Simon the Samarian magician (see Acts, viii, 9-24) from whom the word “Simony” derives. Upon his conversion to Christianity he offered to buy the power to administer the Holy Ghost and was severely rebuked by Peter.

  8. the next grave: The next bolgia.

  8. that part of the bridge: The center point. The center of each span is obviously the best observation point.

  11. Evil World: Hell.

  17-18. the font of my beautiful San Giovanni: It was the custom in Dante’s time to baptize only on Holy Saturday and on Pentecost. These occasions were naturally thronged, therefore, and to protect the priests a special font was built in the Baptistry of San Giovanni with marble stands for the priests, who were thus protected from both the crowds and the water in which they immersed those to be baptized. The Baptistry is still standing, but the font is no longer in it. A similar font still exists, however, in the Baptistry at Pisa.

  19-21. In these lines Dante is replying to a charge of sacrilege that had been rumored against him. One day a boy playing in the baptismal font became jammed in the marble tube and could not be extricated. To save the boy from drowning, Dante took it upon himself to smash the tube. This is his answer to all men on the charge of sacrilege.

  29. more than all the others: The fire is proportioned to the guilt of the sinner. These are obviously the feet of the chief sinner of this bolgia. In a moment we shall discover that he is Pope Nicholas III.

  46-47. like a friar, etc.: Persons convicted of murdering for hire were sometimes executed by being buried alive upside down. If the friar were called back at the last moment, he should have to bend over the hole in which the man is fixed upside down awaiting the first shovelful of earth.

  POPE NICHOLAS III. Giovanni Gaetano degli Orsini, Pope from 1277-1280. His presence here is self-explanatory. He is awaiting the arrival of his successor, Boniface VIII, who will take his place in the stone tube and who will in turn be replaced by Clement V, a Pope even more corrupt than Boniface. With the foresight of the damned he had read the date of Boniface’s death (1303) in the Book of Fate. Mistaking Dante for Boniface, he thinks his foresight has erred by three years, since it is now 1300.

  66. the Great Mantle: of the Papacy.

  67. son of the She-Bear: Nicholas’ family name, degli Orsini, means in Italian “of the bear cubs.”

  69. pursed: A play on the second meaning of bolgia (i.e., “purse”). “Just as I put wealth in my purse when alive, so am I put in this foul purse now that I am dead.”

  77-79. a lawless Shepherd . . . Jason of the Maccabees . . . the French King: The reference is to Clement V, Pope from 1305 to 1314. He came from Gascony (the West) and was involved in many intrigues with the King of France. It was Clement V who moved the Papal See to Avignon where it remained until 1377. He is compared to Jason (see Maccabees iv, 7 ff.) who bought an appointment as High Priest of the Jews from King Antiochus and thereupon introduced pagan and venal practices into the office in much the same way as Clement used his influence with Philip of France to secure and corrupt his high office.

  Clement will succeed Boniface in Hell because Boniface’s successor, Benedictus XI (1303-1304), was a good and holy man. The terms each guilty Pope must serve in this hellish baptism are:Nicholas III 1280-1303

  (four good Popes intervene)

  Boniface VIII 1303-1314

  (one good Pope intervenes)

  Clement V 1314—not stated

  88-89. nor did Peter . . . of Matthias: Upon the expulsion of Judas from the band of Apostles, Matthias was chosen in his place.

  93. Charles of Anjou: The seventh son of Louis VIII of France. Charles became King of Naples and of Sicily largely through the good offices of Pope Urban IV and later of Clement IV. Nicholas III withdrew the high favor his predecessors had shown Charles, but the exact nature and extent of his opposition are open to dispute. Dante probably believed, as did many of his contemporaries, that Nicholas instigated the massacre called the Sicilian Vespers, in which the Sicilians overthrew the rule of Charles and held a general slaughter of the French who had been their masters. The Sicilian Vespers, however, was a popular and spontaneous uprising, and it did not occur until Nicholas had been dead for two years.

  Dante may have erred in interpreting the Sicilian question, but his point is indisputably clear when he laments the fact that simoniacally acquired wealth had involved the Papacy in war and political intrigue, thereby perverting it from its spiritual purpose.

  95. the Great Keys: of the Papacy.

  100-105. the Evangelist . . . She Who Sits upon the Waters: St. John the Evangelist. His vision of She Who Sits upon the Waters is set forth in Revelations, xvii. The Evangelist intended it as a vision of Pagan Rome, but Dante interprets it as a vision of the Roman Church in its simoniacal corruption. The seven heads are the seven sacraments; the ten horns, the ten commandments.

  109-11. Ah Constantine, etc.: The first rich Father was Silvester (Pope from 314 to 355). Before him the Popes possessed nothing, but when Constantine was converted and Catholicism became the official religion of the Empire, the Church began to acquire

  wealth. Dante and the scholars of his time believed, according to a document called “The Donation of Constantine,” that the Emperor had moved his Empire to the East in order to leave sovereignty of the West to the Church. The document was not shown to be a forgery until the fifteenth century. Knowledge of the forgery would not, however, have altered Dante’s view; he was unwavering in his belief that wealth was the greatest disaster that had befallen the Church, for in wealth lay the root of the corruption which Dante denounced so passionately.

  Canto XX

  CIRCLE EIGHT: BOLGIA FOUR

  The Fortune Tellers and Diviners

  Dante stands in the middle of the bridge over the FOURTH BOLGIA and looks down at the souls of the FORTUNE TELLERS and DIVINERS. Here are the souls of all those who attempted by forbidden arts to look into the future. Among these damned are: AMPHIAREUS, TIRESIAS, ARUNS, MANTO, EURYPYLUS, MICHAEL SCOTT, GUIDO BONATTI, and ASDENTE.

  Characteristically, the sin of these wretches is reversed upon them: their punishment is to have their heads turned backwards on their bodies and to be compelled to walk backwards through all eternity, their eyes blinded with tears. Thus, those who sought to penetrate the future cannot even see in front of themselves; they attempted to move themselves forward in time, so must they go backwards through all eternity; and as the arts of sorcery are a distortion of God’s law, so are their bodies distorted in Hell.

  No more need be said of them: Dante names them, and passes on to fill the Canto with a lengthy account of the founding of Virgil’s native city of Mantua.

  Now must I sing new griefs, and my verses strain

  to form the matter of the Twentieth Canto

  of Canticle One, the Canticle of Pain.

  My vantage point permitted a clear view

  of the depths of the pit below: a desolation

  bathed with the tears of its tormented crew,

  who moved about the circle of the pit

  at about the pace of a litany procession.

  Silent and weeping, they wound round and round it.

 
; And when I looked down from their faces, I saw

  that each of them was hideously distorted

  between the top of the chest and the lines of the jaw;

  for the face was reversed on the neck, and they came on

  backwards, staring backwards at their loins,

  for to look before them was forbidden. Someone,

  sometime, in the grip of a palsy may have been

  distorted so, but never to my knowledge;

  nor do I believe the like was ever seen.

  Reader, so may God grant you to understand

  my poem and profit from it, ask yourself

  how I could check my tears, when near at hand

  I saw the image of our humanity

  distorted so that the tears that burst from their eyes

  ran down the cleft of their buttocks. Certainly

  I wept. I leaned against the jagged face

  of a rock and wept so that my Guide said: “Still?

  Still like the other fools? There is no place

  for pity here. Who is more arrogant

  within his soul, who is more impious

  than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?

  Lift up your eyes, lift up your eyes and see

  him the earth swallowed before all the Thebans,

  at which they cried out: ‘Whither do you flee,

  Amphiareus? Why do you leave the field?’

  And he fell headlong through the gaping earth

  to the feet of Minos, where all sin must yield.

  Observe how he has made a breast of his back.

  In life he wished to see too far before him,

  and now he must crab backwards round this track.

  And see Tiresias, who by his arts

  succeeded in changing himself from man to woman,

  transforming all his limbs and all his parts;

  later he had to strike the two twined serpents

  once again with his conjurer’s wand before

  he could resume his manly lineaments.

  And there is Aruns, his back to that one’s belly,

  the same who in the mountains of the Luni

  tilled by the people of Carrara’s valley,

  made a white marble cave his den, and there

  with unobstructed view observed the sea

  and the turning constellations year by year.

  And she whose unbound hair flows back to hide

  her breasts—which you cannot see—and who also wears

  all of her hairy parts on that other side,

  was Manto, who searched countries far and near,

  then settled where I was born. In that connection

  there is a story I would have you hear.

  Tiresias was her sire. After his death,

  Thebes, the city of Bacchus, became enslaved,

  and for many years she roamed about the earth.

  High in sweet Italy, under the Alps that shut

  the Tyrolean gate of Germany, there lies

  a lake known as Benacus roundabout.

  Through endless falls, more than a thousand and one,

  Mount Apennine from Garda to Val Cammonica

  is freshened by the waters that flow down

  into that lake. At its center is a place

  where the Bishops of Brescia, Trentine, and Verona

  might all give benediction with equal grace.

  Peschiera, the beautiful fortress, strong in war

  against the Brescians and the Bergamese,

  sits at the lowest point along that shore.

  There, the waters Benacus cannot hold within its bosom, spill and form a river that winds away through pastures green and gold.

  But once the water gathers its full flow,

  it is called Mincius rather than Benacus

  from there to Governo, where it joins the Po.

  Still near its source, it strikes a plain, and there

  it slows and spreads, forming an ancient marsh

  which in the summer heats pollutes the air.

  The terrible virgin, passing there by chance,

  saw dry land at the center of the mire,

  untilled, devoid of all inhabitants.

  There, shunning all communion with mankind,

  she settled with the ministers of her arts,

  and there she lived, and there she left behind

  her vacant corpse. Later the scattered men

  who lived nearby assembled on that spot

  since it was well defended by the fen.

  Over those whited bones they raised the city,

  and for her who had chosen the place before all others

  they named it—with no further augury—

  Mantua. Far more people lived there once—

  before sheer madness prompted Casalodi

  to let Pinamonte play him for a dunce.

  Therefore, I charge you, should you ever hear

  other accounts of this, to let no falsehood

  confuse the truth which I have just made clear.”

  And I to him: “Master, within my soul

  your word is certainty, and any other

  would seem like the dead lumps of burned out coal.

  But tell me of those people moving down

  to join the rest. Are any worth my noting?

  For my mind keeps coming back to that alone.”

  And he: “That one whose beard spreads like a fleece

  over his swarthy shoulders, was an augur

  in the days when so few males remained in Greece

  that even the cradles were all but empty of sons.

  He chose the time for cutting the cable at Aulis,

  and Calchas joined him in those divinations.

  He is Eurypylus. I sing him somewhere

  in my High Tragedy; you will know the place

  who know the whole of it. The other there,

  the one beside him with the skinny shanks

  was Michael Scott, who mastered every trick

  of magic fraud, a prince of mountebanks.

  See Guido Bonatti there; and see Asdente,

  who now would be wishing he had stuck to his last,

  but repents too late, though he repents aplenty.

  And see on every hand the wretched hags

  who left their spinning and sewing for soothsaying

  and casting of spells with herbs, and dolls, and rags.

  But come: Cain with his bush of thorns appears

  already on the wave below Seville,

  above the boundary of the hemispheres;

  and the moon was full already yesternight,

  as you must well remember from the wood,

  for it certainly did not harm you when its light

  shone down upon your way before the dawn.”

  And as he spoke to me, we traveled on.

  NOTES

  A GENERAL NOTE.

  The rather long account of the origin of Mantua with which Dante fills up this Canto often prompts students to ask why he does not delete this “irrelevant account” in order to spend more time on the diviners. The answer to that question (it could be asked in connection with many other passages in the Commedia) points to the core of Dante’s allegorical style. The fact is that once he has placed the diviners in their proper pit and assigned them an appropriate punishment, his essential allegorical function has been fulfilled: nothing more need be said.

  Thus, the structure carries all. Once the poem is under way, it is enough simply to name a man as being in a certain place in Hell suffering a certain punishment, and that man is not only located as precisely as an x drawn on a map locates the point it marks, but the sin which that man typifies is located on the scale of value which is constructed into the whole nature of the Universe as Dante saw it.

  The Poet is thereby left free to pass on to the discussion of all those matters of theology, history, politics, and “science” which fascinate him. But there is nothing “irrelevant” about th
ese multiple interests. Dante’s journey is “to experience all.” He is not simply taking a long walk: he is constructing a Universe. As part of that construction, he reaches out to draw data from a variety of sources. These are not “data” in the scientific sense. Rather they are “typical” data: i.e., each of Dante’s side discussions considers data that are central to its type: the history of Mantua relates to the history of Troy, to the history of Virgil, to the history of Rome, to the history of Florence. Moreover, the history of Mantua is excerpted as typical from the whole range of history (as if Dante were saying: “Thus are the States of man begun”) to advance one of the great themes of the Commedia—the backgrounds of civilization as Dante knew it.

  3. Canticle One: The Inferno. The other Canticles are, of course, The Purgatorio and The Paradiso.