The Inferno (The Divine Comedy series Book 1)

by Dante

  40–45. These “lay brothers” of the “monastery” of the forgers are piteous in their aspect and in their groans; the protagonist, now of sterner stuff than he had been under the influence of his relative’s unavenged murder, covers his ears (where he had feasted his drunken eyes at the beginning of the canto). [return to English / Italian]

  46–51. The Valdichiana and Maremma, in Tuscany, and Sardinia were all characterized by malarial outbreaks in the summer. Commentators speak of the special hospitals set up in the Valdichiana to deal with outbreaks of the disease. [return to English / Italian]

  52–53. They cross the last bridge, now seen as an entity, the long span (interrupted over the sixth bolgia) that traverses the extent of Malebolge. [return to English / Italian]

  54–57. God’s unerring justice is portrayed as the punishing agent of the counterfeiters. But what does it mean that she records or “registers” them? And where is “here”? Most early commentators argued that “here” referred to the bolgia. Beginning in the Renaissance, the majority believe that it refers to this world. But what sense does it make to say that justice “registers” sinners in this world? The image is of writing down a person’s name in a book. For a review of the debate over the line (57) see Hollander (Holl.1982.1), proposing that “here” means “this book,” i.e., Dante’s Inferno, a solution put forth (although never discussed by later commentators) by John of Serravalle in the fifteenth century. Dante will once again (and only once again) use the verb registrare: see Purgatorio XXX.63, when his name, “Dante,” is “registered here,” i.e., in his text. [return to English / Italian]

  58–66. Details from Ovid’s lengthy account of the plague, sent by Juno, on the island of Aegina (Metam. VII.523–657) is here used in simile to describe the falsifiers, who have become plague-blasted shades of humans because of their counterfeiting, in which that which is worth less is made to seem worth more. That their affliction is an infernal version of leprosy (some commentators believe it is scabies [see v. 82]) is attested by Bosco/Reggio (commentary to this verse) on the basis of medieval medical treatises, some of which report that scabies is a secondary symptom of leprosy. Capocchio, the second of the two sinners revealed here, is described as “leprous” (v. 124).

  In verse 63 Dante takes mere poetic fictiveness to task (in Conv. IV.xxvii.17 he had referred to this story as a favola [fable]). His “real” sinners may resemble the plague-victims in Ovid’s fanciful tale; unlike them, however, they are not present in a fable, but in a truthful narrative. Here Dante’s insistence on the veracity of what he relates is so challenging that we can see the wink in his eye. [return to English / Italian]

  73–84. The three rapid comparisons are the very stuff of homely poetry: pans on a stove, stable boys currying horses, cooks’ helpers cleaning fish. We have seen precisely this stylistic range before, paired similetic passages describing the same thing in two very different registers, that of classical myth deployed alongside that of “scenes from everyday life.” Among other things, this second register, with its ordinary, even ugly, names of things in the real world, helps us “believe” that Dante’s poetry is in fact “true,” while Ovid’s is not—even as we acknowledge that Dante is as much a fabulist as was Ovid. [return to English / Italian]

  85–90. Even Virgil’s ironic captatio, his attempt to win Griffolino’s goodwill, reflects the low style of things in this scene. [return to English / Italian]

  109–120. Griffolino d’Arezzo was in fact burned at the stake for a charge of heresy brought by Albero di Siena, perhaps the natural son of the bishop of Siena, ca. 1270. Thus he was put to death for a sin he did not commit, but condemned by God for the one he did: falsifying metals. Dante obviously enjoyed telling this tale of buffoonish credulity, in which Griffolino failed in his role of Daedalus to Albero’s Icarus, and which would have fit a novella of Boccaccio, even though it is irrelevant to the sin punished here. [return to English / Italian]

  121–123. Florentines love to belittle the Sienese; Italians love to belittle the French. Dante gets two for one. [return to English / Italian]

  124–135. Capocchio was burned alive as an alchemist in 1293. As was the case when we listened to Griffolino, what we first hear about from him does not concern falsification, but another topic altogether—the luxurious living of the Sienese, down to their overindulgence in the use of cloves to season their food. This is exemplified in Stricca the spendthrift; Niccolò the gourmet; and Caccia d’Asciano who, with Abbagliato, was part of the notorious brigata spendereccia (Spendthrift Brigade) of Siena, which liked to gather to eat and drink and then destroy the plates and service while they were at it. [return to English / Italian]

  136–139. Capocchio was, according to some early commentators, known to Dante in their early days as students. He was supposedly a particularly adept imitator of the words and gestures of others, a talent which he later extended to “alchemical” malfeasance, to his cost. For the concept of the ape as mimic, see Curtius (Curt.1948.1), pp. 538–40. [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XXX

  1–12. This is the first of two lengthy classical opening similes derived from the third, fourth, and thirteenth books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dante’s classical material in this first sally involves the matter of Thebes, his favorite example of the “city of destruction” in ancient times. Juno, jealous of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, takes out her wrath on the city by destroying Semele herself (only referred to indirectly here in v. 3) and her sister, Ino, the consort of Athamas, king of Orchomenus. Juno’s revenge in this second instance is achieved by making Athamas go mad. In his distemper he kills his son Learchus, thus causing Ino to leap with the other (Melicertes) into the sea (see Metam. IV.512–530). [return to English / Italian]

  13–21. The second tale is related to Troy, that other classical “city of destruction.” After the fall of the city, the widowed queen, Hecuba, was, according to Ovid’s account in his thirteenth book, carried off by the Greeks. When they stopped in Thrace, she witnessed the sacrifice of her daugher Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles and then, when she had gone to the sea for water to prepare the corpse for burial, found the body of her son Polydorus, murdered by the Thracian king, Polymnestor, washed up on the shore beside her. At this she went mad, and began barking like a dog (Metam. XIII.404–406). Finally, she killed Polymnestor, according to Ovid, by tearing out his eyes. [return to English / Italian]

  22–27. The completion of each opening similetic comparison is only now put forward. Reduced to madness, Athamas kills his own child, Hecuba, the king who had killed her son (Metam. XIII.558–564). Nonetheless, they are less savage than the two bestial forms that now appear. [return to English / Italian]

  28–33. One of these two sinners attacks and bears off Capocchio, who had held our attention at the end of the last canto. This new shade is thus associated with Athamas, acting out his maddened rage, and is identified by Griffolino, the other sinner we met in Canto XXIX, as Gianni Schicchi. Where Capocchio had been scratching himself, he now gets his scabrous belly scraped by the ground as he is dragged off.

  Gianni Schicchi was a member of the Florentine Cavalcanti family and was renowned for his ability to impersonate others. He was dead by 1280. Commentators speculate that Dante would have heard tell of his impersonations while he was still a boy. One particular case is detailed a few lines farther on (vv. 42–45). [return to English / Italian]

  37–41. Griffolino explains to Dante that the other furious shade is that of Ovid’s Myrrha (Metam. X.298–502). She, daughter of Cinyras, king of Cyprus, disguised herself, abetted by her nurse, as a willing young woman (her mother being absent) in order to sleep with her father. In the development of the canto, she is at least formally in parallel with Hecuba (since Gianni plays the part of Athamas), but beyond their common feminine savagery there is little to associate them.

  We may speculate that all the Ovidian material of this canto has marginalized Virgil. Indeed, he does not speak a word
until v. 131. This is the longest silence on his part since he entered the poem in its first canto; it is 169 lines since he last spoke at XXIX.101. For preceding long Virgilian silences see Inferno V.112–VI.93; XV.1–99; XVI.18–121. In two cantos he speaks only a single verse: Inferno XV.99 and XXVII.33. However, the longest Virgilian silences in the poem await us. Inferno XXXII is the first canto in the poem in which he does not speak a word (and he is silent between XXXI.134 and XXXIII.106, a total of 255 verses); Purgatorio XXIV is the second and the longest (with Virgil silent between XXIII.15 and XXV.17, a total of 288 verses). [return to English / Italian]

  42–45. The story of Gianni Schicchi’s impersonation of the dead and testamentless Buoso Donati in order to help the surviving Schicchi family members get an inheritance they feared they would otherwise lose delighted the early commentators, who take pleasure in repeating it. Gianni’s payment for himself was to will himself the best animal—the lead mule—of Buoso’s herd. Puccini’s opera, bearing his name as its title, continues to purvey Gianni’s tale. [return to English / Italian]

  46–48. Reading the last canto for the first time, we may have assumed that the tenth bolgia was devoted to detailing the punishment of a single form of falsification, alchemical deceptions, punished in a single way, by the scabs that cover the bodies of these leprous sinners (see note to Inf. XXIX.58–66). After reading Canto XXX we have learned that there is a total of four species of falsification, each punished by a particular disease. The three species in this canto are as follows: impersonators (hydrophobia), counterfeiters of coin (dropsy), perjurors (fever). Here we come to the second in this group, the counterfeiters. [return to English / Italian]

  49–51. For the musical elements in the description of this sinner (he will find a name, Master Adam, at v. 61), see Iannucci (Iann.1995.1). The lute, which resembles “a pregnant guitar” (as a waggish student of music once insisted) was, in Dante’s time, generally regarded as a “serious” instrument, like David’s harp, and thus associated with the “right” kind of musical performance. Iannucci points out (p. 114) that this is the only stringed instrument mentioned in hell. Adam, who looks like a lute, ends up sounding like a drum (v. 103), an instrument, as Iannucci argues, associated with such lower forms of musical amusement as public spectacles. For the symbolic inversions in the musicality of this scene see Heilbronn (Heil.1983.1). [return to English / Italian]

  52–57. Dropsy, in which a main symptom is the retention of water, which distends parts of the body, was also characterized by terrible thirst. [return to English / Italian]

  58–61. Resentfully noting Dante’s lack of punishment, the sinner identifies himself. Master Adam, according to some commentators an Englishman, was in the employ of the Conti Guidi of Romena (in the Casentino, not far from Florence). (We will hear more of this family in vv. 73–87.) They convinced him to falsify the gold florin, stamped with the image of John the Baptist, the patron of Florence, by pouring gold of only 21 (and not 24) carats, thus reducing its purity by one-eighth. On the symbolic importance of money, as it is reflected in this canto, see Shoaf (Shoa.1983.1), pp. 39–48. Adam’s crime was discovered and he was burned alive in Florence in 1281.

  His name almost inevitably reminds the reader of his namesake, the first sinner. For discussion of the way in which this “new Adam” is in fact a modern version of the first one, see Mussetter (Muss.1978.1).

  As many note, the language here again reflects that found in the Lamentations of Jeremiah. See note to Inferno XXVIII.130–138. [return to English / Italian]

  64–69. Adam’s memories of “the green hills of home” torment him, only increasing his punishment. What for the reader is a moment of pastoral escape from hellish thoughts is for him torment. For a Virgilian source of the image see Eclogue X.42, describing “cool streams and gentle meadows.” [return to English / Italian]

  76–78. Envy, often marked by the desire to see those who are well off suffering, rules Adam’s heart. He would rather see his employers punished than slake his thirst. Fonte Branda, according to the early commentators, is the famous spring in Siena. Later writers have argued for another, of the same name, in the vicinity of Romena. However, that the earliest commentators do not refer to it probably seconds the notion that the more famous one is referred to here. [return to English / Italian]

  79–81. Guido had died in 1281 and news of his location in this bolgia has reached Adam through one of the rabid impersonators who range the territory. [return to English / Italian]

  82–87. Adam’s “impossible dream” is to be able to move an inch in a hundred years—and even that is beyond him. Were it not, Manfredi Porena did the math and calculated that, at even this speed, it would take him 700,000 years to find Guido.

  That this bolgia is half the circumference and breadth of the last one has given those who would like to establish the exact size of Dante’s hell the two coordinates they think they need. Such calculation is a temptation to be avoided. See the note to Inferno XXIX.8–9. Adam undercalculates the diameter, which is 3.5 miles, considerably. We reflect that his dubious measurement is the result of his dropsied bulk and consequent laziness. A half mile is hundreds of thousands of years of (for him impossible) movement. [return to English / Italian]

  88–90. Adam’s hatred of the Conti Guidi is understandable; his placing the entire blame on them for his own misdeeds is typical of certain sinners, always finding a cause for their failures in the hearts and minds of others. [return to English / Italian]

  97–99. Adam first identifies Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:6–20), who, having failed to seduce Joseph, accused him before Pharaoh of attempting to seduce her. Then he identifies Sinon (as he is known from the second book of the Aeneid), whose misrepresentations led to the destruction of Troy. Both suffer from high fever, seen not as a symptom of other ailments, but as a disease in itself; both worked treacherously against a “chosen people,” the Hebrews and the Trojans. [return to English / Italian]

  100–103. Angered by the words of Master Adam, Sinon’s first gesture is to strike him on his taut paunch, which booms like a drum. This act begins a series of exchanged insults, begun and ended by Adam. Until the last in the series, each one occupies a single tercet (Adam’s final flourish will occupy two). As many who have written on this scene have reflected, Dante’s technique here is modeled on the exchange of poetic insult found in the genre called tenzone. See note to Inferno VIII.31–39. [return to English / Italian]

  115. Not only are these exchanges generally reflective of the tradition of the tenzone, this particular verse has been seen (e.g., Casini/Barbi’s commentary in 1921) as rehearsing a particular tenzone, one between Cecco Angiolieri and Dante (whose sonnet, apparently the occasion for Cecco’s, is lost). Cecco’s (“Dante Alighieri, s’i’ so’ bon begolardo”) begins roughly as follows:

  Dante Alighieri, if I’m a foolish bard,

  I can feel your lance just behind my back;

  If I’m out for dinner, you’re there for a snack;

  If I chew the fat, you but suck the lard.

  [return to English / Italian]

  118. For Virgil’s presentation of Sinon’s lie see Aeneid II.152–159. [return to English / Italian]

  126–129. Adam’s last words remind Sinon that, even if the counterfeiter is suffering from dropsy, his accuser has got a case of fever. His last riposte jibes at Sinon’s thirst, which would lead him to the “mirror of Narcissus,” i.e., a pool that would reflect his true, hideous self—which image he would destroy out of thirst, in a sort of grubby version of the original myth. As Brownlee pointed out, this reference begins the “Narcissus program” in the Commedia, which includes references to the myth in a number of passages, and in all cantos numbered XXX (Brow.1978.1), pp. 205–6. [return to English / Italian]

  131–135. Virgil’s harsh rebuke here seems on the mark, certainly to Dante himself. Dante’s emphatic acceptance of it stands in clear contrast to his rejection of the similar rebuke in the last canto (Inf. XXIX.4�
��12), where Virgil had not understood the cause of his staring into the ninth bolgia. Here Dante has become an interested bystander (rather than a man with a mission), enjoying the back-and-forth argument between the two sinners (just as do we) because it is both violent and amusing. [return to English / Italian]

  136–141. This is a remarkable simile (or “pseudo-simile” on the grounds that it “compares a thing, person, or emotion with itself”—in the words of Eric Mallin (see Mall.1984.1), p. 15. (Mallin discusses this particular simile, pp. 28–31.) Tozer’s prior remark in his commentary (1901) is of interest: “This is a conspicuous instance of an interesting class of similes—viz. those drawn from mental experiences—of which there are as many as thirty in the Divine Comedy.” The simile is difficult enough that a prose paraphrase may help to make its point clearer: “As a man dreams of being harmed and of wishing he were only dreaming (which he in fact is), so did I, unable to speak, feel ashamed because I could not excuse myself—while all the while my blushing was doing just that for me.” [return to English / Italian]

  142–148. Virgil accepts Dante’s unvoiced apology and warns him against future backsliding of this kind. Berthier, in his gloss, cites from St. Bernard, De ordine vitae, from a passage, he says, located “before its middle”: “audire quod turpe est, pudori maximo est” (it is most shameful to give ear to vile things). [return to English / Italian]