The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  Canto XXVIII

  CIRCLE EIGHT: BOLGIA NINE

  The Sowers of Discord

  The Poets come to the edge of the NINTH BOLGIA and look down at a parade of hideously mutilated souls. These are the SOWERS OF DISCORD, and just as their sin was to rend asunder what God had meant to be united, so are they hacked and torn through all eternity by a great demon with a bloody sword. After each mutilation the souls are compelled to drag their broken bodies around the pit and to return to the demon, for in the course of the circuit their wounds knit in time to be inflicted anew. Thus is the law of retribution observed, each sinner suffering according to his degree.

  Among them Dante distinguishes three classes with varying degrees of guilt within each class. First come the SOWERS OF RELIGIOUS DISCORD. Mahomet is chief among them, and appears first, cleft from crotch to chin, with his internal organs dangling between his legs. His son-in-law, Ali, drags on ahead of him, cleft from topknot to chin. These reciprocal wounds symbolize Dante’s judgment that, between them, these two sum up the total schism between Christianity and Mohammedanism. The revolting details of Mahomet’s condition clearly imply Dante’s opinion of that doctrine. Mahomet issues an ironic warning to another schismatic, FRA DOLCINO.

  Next come the SOWERS OF POLITICAL DISCORD, among them PIER DA MEDICINA, the Tribune CURIO, and MOSCA DEI LAMBERTI, each mutilated according to the nature of his sin.

  Last of all is BERTRAND DE BORN, SOWER OF DISCORD BETWEEN KINSMEN. He separated father from son, and for that offense carries his head separated from his body, holding it with one hand by the hair, and swinging it as if it were a lantern to light his dark and endless way. The image of Bertrand raising his head at arm’s length in order that it might speak more clearly to the Poets on the ridge is one of the most memorable in the Inferno. For some reason that cannot be ascertained, Dante makes these sinners quite eager to be remembered in the world, despite the fact that many who lie above them in Hell were unwilling to be recognized.

  Who could describe, even in words set free

  of metric and rhyme and a thousand times retold,

  the blood and wounds that now were shown to me!

  At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain;

  the language of our sense and memory

  lacks the vocabulary of such pain.

  If one could gather all those who have stood

  through all of time on Puglia’s fateful soil

  and wept for the red running of their blood

  in the war of the Trojans; and in that long war

  which left so vast a spoil of golden rings,

  as we find written in Livy, who does not err;

  along with those whose bodies felt the wet

  and gaping wounds of Robert Guiscard’s lances;

  with all the rest whose bones are gathered yet

  at Ceperano where every last Pugliese

  turned traitor; and with those from Tagliacozzo

  where Alardo won without weapons—if all these

  were gathered, and one showed his limbs run through,

  another his lopped off, that could not equal

  the mutilations of the ninth pit’s crew.

  A wine tun when a stave or cant-bar starts

  does not split open as wide as one I saw

  split from his chin to the mouth with which man farts.

  Between his legs all of his red guts hung

  with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder,

  and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung.

  I stood and stared at him from the stone shelf;

  he noticed me and opening his own breast

  with both hands cried: “See how I rip myself!

  See how Mahomet’s mangled and split open!

  Ahead of me walks Ali in his tears,

  his head cleft from the top-knot to the chin.

  And all the other souls that bleed and mourn

  along this ditch were sowers of scandal and schism:

  as they tore others apart, so are they torn.

  Behind us, warden of our mangled horde,

  the devil who butchers us and sends us marching

  waits to renew our wounds with his long sword

  when we have made the circuit of the pit;

  for by the time we stand again before him

  all the wounds he gave us last have knit.

  But who are you that gawk down from that sill—

  probably to put off your own descent

  to the pit you are sentenced to for your own evil?”

  “Death has not come for him, guilt does not drive

  his soul to torment,” my sweet Guide replied.

  “That he may experience all while yet alive

  I, who am dead, must lead him through the drear

  and darkened halls of Hell, from round to round:

  and this is true as my own standing here.”

  More than a hundred wraiths who were marching under

  the sill on which we stood, paused at his words

  and stared at me, forgetting pain in wonder.

  “And if you do indeed return to see

  the sun again, and soon, tell Fra Dolcino

  unless he longs to come and march with me

  he would do well to check his groceries

  before the winter drives him from the hills

  and gives the victory to the Novarese.”

  Mahomet, one foot raised, had paused to say

  these words to me. When he had finished speaking

  he stretched it out and down, and moved away.

  Another—he had his throat slit, and his nose

  slashed off as far as the eyebrows, and a wound

  where one of his ears had been—standing with those

  who stared at me in wonder from the pit,

  opened the grinning wound of his red gullet

  as if it were a mouth, and said through it:

  “O soul unforfeited to misery

  and whom—unless I take you for another—

  I have seen above in our sweet Italy;

  if ever again you see the gentle plain

  that slopes down from Vercelli to Marcabò,

  remember Pier da Medicina in pain,

  and announce this warning to the noblest two

  of Fano, Messers Guido and Angiolello:

  that unless our foresight sees what is not true

  they shall be thrown from their ships into the sea

  and drown in the raging tides near La Cattolica

  to satisfy a tyrant’s treachery.

  Neptune never saw so gross a crime

  in all the seas from Cyprus to Majorca,

  not even in pirate raids, nor the Argive time.

  The one-eyed traitor, lord of the demesne

  whose hill and streams one who walks here beside me

  will wish eternally he had never seen,

  will call them to a parley, but behind

  sweet invitations he will work it so

  they need not pray against Focara’s wind.”

  And I to him: “If you would have me bear

  your name to time, show me the one who found

  the sight of that land so harsh, and let me hear

  his story and his name.” He touched the cheek

  of one nearby, forcing the jaws apart,

  and said: “This is the one; he cannot speak.

  This outcast settled Caesar’s doubts that day

  beside the Rubicon by telling him:

  ‘A man prepared is a man hurt by delay.’ ”

  Ah, how wretched Curio seemed to me

  with a bloody stump in his throat in place of the tongue

  which once had dared to speak so recklessly!

  And one among them with both arms hacked through

  cried out, raising his stumps on the foul air

  while the blood bedaubed his face: “Remember, too,

  Mosca dei Lamberti, alas, who said


  ‘A thing done has an end!’ and with those words

  planted the fields of war with Tuscan dead.”

  “And brought about the death of all your clan!”

  I said, and he, stung by new pain on pain,

  ran off; and in his grief he seemed a madman.

  I stayed to watch those broken instruments,

  and I saw a thing so strange I should not dare

  to mention it without more evidence

  but that my own clear conscience strengthens me,

  that good companion that upholds a man

  within the armor of his purity.

  I saw it there; I seem to see it still—

  a body without a head, that moved along

  like all the others in that spew and spill.

  It held the severed head by its own hair,

  swinging it like a lantern in its hand;

  and the head looked at us and wept in its despair.

  It made itself a lamp of its own head,

  and they were two in one and one in two;

  how this can be, He knows who so commanded.

  And when it stood directly under us

  it raised the head at arm’s length toward our bridge

  the better to be heard, and swaying thus

  it cried: “O living soul in this abyss,

  see what a sentence has been passed upon me,

  and search all Hell for one to equal this!

  When you return to the world, remember me:

  I am Bertrand de Born, and it was I

  who set the young king on to mutiny,

  son against father, father against son

  as Achitophel set Absalom and David;

  and since I parted those who should be one

  in duty and in love, I bear my brain

  divided from its source within this trunk;

  and walk here where my evil turns to pain,

  an eye for an eye to all eternity:

  thus is the law of Hell observed in me.”

  NOTES

  8. Puglia (POO-lyah): I have used the modern name but some of the events Dante narrates took place in the ancient province of Apulia. The southeastern area of Italy is the scene of all the fighting Dante mentions in the following passage. It is certainly a bloody total of slaughter that Dante calls upon to illustrate his scene.

  10. the war of the Trojans: The Romans (descended from the Trojans) fought the native Samnites in a long series of raids and skirmishes from 343-290 B.C.

  10-12. and in that long war . . . Livy: The Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.). Livy writes that in the battle of Cannae (216 B.C.) so many Romans fell that Hannibal gathered three bushels of gold rings from the fingers of the dead and produced them before the Senate at Carthage.

  14. Robert Guiscard: Dante places Guiscard (1015-1085) in the Paradiso among the Warriors of God. He fought the Greeks and Saracens in their attempted invasion of Italy.

  16. Ceperano (Tcheh-peh-RAH-noe): In 1266 the Pugliese under Manfred, King of Sicily, were charged with holding the pass at Ceperano against Charles of Anjou. The Pugliese, probably under Papal pressure, allowed the French free passage, and Charles went on to defeat Manfred at Benevento. Manfred himself was killed in that battle.

  17-18. Tagliacozzo . . . Alardo: At Tagliacozzo (Tah-lyah-KAW-tsoe) (1268) in a continuation of the same strife, Charles of Anjou used a stratagem suggested to him by Alard de Valéry and defeated Conradin, nephew of Manfred. “Won without weapons” is certainly an overstatement: what Alardo suggested was a simple but effective concealment of reserve troops. When Conradin seemed to have carried the day and was driving his foes before him, the reserve troops broke on his flank and rear, and defeated Conradin’s out-positioned forces.

  32. Ali: Ali succeeded Mahomet to the Caliphate, but not until three of the disciples had preceded him. Mahomet died in 632, and Ali did not assume the Caliphate until 656.

  56. Fra Dolcino (Dohl-TCHEE-noe): In 1300 Fra Dolcino took over the reformist order called the Apostolic Brothers, who preached, among other things, the community of property and of women. Clement V declared them heretical and ordered a crusade against them. The brotherhood retired with its women to an impregnable position in the hills between Novara and Vercelli, but their supplies gave out in the course of a year-long siege, and they were finally starved out in March of 1307. Dolcino and Margaret of Trent, his “Sister in Christ,” were burned at the stake at Vercelli the following June.

  74. Vercelli . . . Marcabò: Vercelli is the most western town in Lombardy. Marcabò stands near the mouth of the Po.

  76-90. this warning: Malatestino da Rimini (see preceding Canto), in a move to annex the city of Fano, invited Guido del Cassero and Angioletto da Carignano (Ahndjoe-LEH-toe dah Kahr-ee-NYAH-noe), leading citizens of Fano, to a conference at La Cattolica, a point on the Adriatic midway between Fano and Rimini. At Malatestino’s orders the two were thrown overboard off Focara, a headland swept by such dangerous currents that approaching sailors used to offer prayers for a safe crossing.

  83. Cyprus . . . Majorca: These islands are at opposite ends of the Mediterranean.

  84. nor the Argive time: The Greeks were raiders and pirates.

  85. the one-eyed traitor: Malatestino.

  86. one who walks here beside me: This is the Roman Tribune Curio, who was banished from Rome by Pompey and joined Caesar’s forces, advising him to cross the Rubicon, which was then the boundary between Gaul and the Roman Republic. The crossing constituted invasion, and thus began the Roman Civil War. The Rubicon flows near Rimini.

  106. Mosca dei Lamberti: Dante had asked Ciacco (Canto VI) for news of Mosca as a man of good works. Now he finds him, his merit canceled by his greater sin. Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti had insulted the honor of the Amidei by breaking off his engagement to a daughter of that line in favor of a girl of the Donati. When the Amidei met to discuss what should be done, Mosca spoke for the death of Buondelmonte. The Amidei acted upon his advice and from that murder sprang the bloody feud between the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence.

  119. a body without a head: Bertrand de Born (1140-1215), a great knight and master of the troubadours of Provence. He is said to have instigated a quarrel between Henry II of England and his son Prince Henry, called “The Young King” because he was crowned within his father’s lifetime.

  137. Achitophel: One of David’s counselors, who deserted him to assist the rebellious Absalom. (II Samuel, xv-xvii.)

  Canto XXIX

  CIRCLE EIGHT: BOLGIA TEN

  The Falsifiers (Class I, Alchemists)

  Dante lingers on the edge of the Ninth Bolgia expecting to see one of his kinsmen, GERI DEL BELLO, among the Sowers of Discord. Virgil, however, hurries him on, since time is short, and as they cross the bridge over the TENTH BOLGIA, Virgil explains that he had a glimpse of Geri among the crowd near the bridge and that he had been making threatening gestures at Dante.

  The Poets now look into the last bolgia of the Eighth Circle and see THE FALSIFIERS. They are punished by afflictions of every sense: by darkness, stench, thirst, filth, loathsome diseases, and a shrieking din. Some of them, moreover, run ravening through the pit, tearing others to pieces. Just as in life they corrupted society by their falsifications, so in death these sinners are subjected to a sum of corruptions. In one sense they figure forth what society would be if all falsifiers succeeded—a place where the senses are an affliction (since falsification deceives the senses) rather than a guide, where even the body has no honesty, and where some lie prostrate while others run ravening to prey upon them.

  Not all of these details are made clear until the next Canto, for Dante distinguishes four classes of Falsifiers, and in the present Canto we meet only the first class, THE ALCHEMISTS, the Falsifiers of Things. Of this class are GRIFFOLINO D’AREZZO and CAPOCCHIO, with both of whom Dante speaks.

  The sight of that parade of broken dead

  had left my eyes so sotted with their tears

  I longed to stay and wee
p, but Virgil said:

  “What are you waiting for? Why do you stare

  as if you could not tear your eyes away

  from the mutilated shadows passing there?

  You did not act so in the other pits.

  Consider—if you mean perhaps to count them—

  this valley and its train of dismal spirits