The Inferno (The Divine Comedy series Book 1)

by Dante

  Ugolino is found in Antenora, and thus was a betrayer of party or country. In what did his sin consist? Dante refers to the “betrayal” involving the castles in v. 86, but seems to think this was only an accusation. However, his real treacherous behavior, in Dante’s eyes, may have involved either his betrayal of his own Ghibelline party, or of the good forces in Pisa itself in his double-dealing with Judge Nino, who also happened to be his grandson.

  Almost all admire the horror of this scene, Ugolino lifting his gore-stained mouth from Ruggieri’s neck, then wiping it on the hair of his enemy’s head. We may reflect that Ugolino is moved to cease his vengeful chewing by his hope for further, greater vengeance: Dante’s recounting of his case against Ruggieri in the world above. [return to English / Italian]

  4–6. Ugolino’s first words are nearly universally observed to be a citation of the opening of Aeneas’s sad speech to Dido in Aeneid II.3–8, a passage also nearly universally cited for the beginning of Francesca’s second speech to Dante (Inf. V.121–123). Why the repetition? Hollander (Holl.1984.5), p. 550, suggests that it represents a sort of test for the reader, who now hears another “sympathetic sinner” trying to capture the goodwill of the protagonist (and, indeed, of the reader) and is supposed to realize that this refrain has been heard before, similarly put to the service of exculpating a sinner by that very sinner.

  For a second Virgilian resonance here see Aeneid I.209, where Aeneas hides the grief in his heart from his companions (“premit altum corde dolorem”); the echo of these words (“che ’l cor mi preme”) was noted by Tommaseo, who observes the differing contexts. [return to English / Italian]

  8. The phrasing of Ugolino’s hoped-for fruition of infamy for Ruggieri possibly reflects the language of the parable of the sower (Luke 8:4–11), where Jesus interprets the seed as the word of God. Durling and Martinez (Durl.1996.1), p. 531, suggest the importance, for the images of fruition used both by Ugolino and Alberigo, of Matthew 7:20, “by their fruits you shall know them.” [return to English / Italian]

  9. Both Francesca (Inf. V.126) and Ugolino weep and speak simultaneously, each of them in imitation of Aeneas’s imagined hardened soldier, who would have to speak through tears if he had the fall of Troy to narrate (Aen. II.6–8). And both Francesca and Ugolino are accompanied by a companion who does not speak in Dante’s presence. [return to English / Italian]

  11–12. Like Farinata (Inf. X.25), Ugolino realizes that Dante is Florentine from his speech. [return to English / Italian]

  20–21. The story of Ugolino’s imprisonment and death was familiar to all who lived in Tuscany. What Dante could not have known, Ugolino says, was how much he had suffered. The way in which he says this, on the other hand, indicates the sort of egotism that we will experience all through his speech. Here is a man who has experienced death in the company of his children; we do not even hear of them at first, since his attention is fixed entirely on himself. See Holl.1984.5, p. 551. [return to English / Italian]

  22–24. The tower (the edifice remains, without its tower, in the Piazza dei Cavalieri in Pisa to this day) would not serve as prison many years into the fourteenth century, but it apparently still did so when Dante wrote these lines. [return to English / Italian]

  26–27. For the supposed greater truth of morning dreams see note to Inferno XXVI.7. [return to English / Italian]

  28–36. Ugolino’s dream turns out to have been completely accurate: Ruggieri, out hunting on Mount San Giuliano, is after Ugolino (the wolf) and his children (the cubs). He has set, ahead of the chase, the waiting ambushers, the Ghibelline leaders of Pisa, and with his hounds he is driving his victims toward them and to their destruction.

  For the canine imagery in Cocytus and especially in this canto, see Brugnoli (Brug.1989.1). [return to English / Italian]

  37–39. Ugolino awakes from the dream to find its reality before his eyes, his children hungry in their sleep and crying for their daily bread, usually brought them in the morning (see vv. 43–44). [return to English / Italian]

  40–42. Ugolino is angered by the fact that Dante is not weeping. The protagonist, unlike most readers, has evidently found a moral vantage point from which there seems something wrong with this narration. Since we have seen him weep for other apparently less sympathetic figures, his lack of compassion might serve as a clue to us about our own reactions.

  In this canto, vv. 5–75, words for weeping and grief (piangere, lagrimare, doglia, dolere, dolore, and doloroso) occur a total of thirteen times (see Holl.1969.1, p. 306). And see Vittorio Russo (Russ.1966.1) for a wider study of this phenomenon. [return to English / Italian]

  45. Apparently the children have had a dream similar to their father’s. The process of the starvation of Ugolino and his children roughly coincided with the Lenten season. [return to English / Italian]

  46–48. Ugolino’s dream now has a finer point. He understands at once that they are to die, caught by the hunter Ruggieri and his men. His first impulse, which will be repeated, is to keep silent. [return to English / Italian]

  49. Ugolino, who has just criticized Dante for being cruel because he does not weep, now tells the protagonist that he himself did not weep when he perceived the fate of his sons and of himself. Indeed, he turned to stone. For Hollander (Holl.1984.5), pp. 552–55, the key passage that stands behind this scene is found in Luke’s Gospel, 11:5–13, Christ’s parable of the importunate friend. A man is visited by a friend at midnight and goes to the house of another friend to seek bread in order to feed his guest. The importuned friend replies, “Trouble me not, the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give you.” Christ comments on the parable, insisting that importuning will eventually work: “If a son shall ask for bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” The various details of the parable, in a form that is both parallel and antithetic to the action recounted here, find their place in Ugolino’s narrative: the knocking on the door echoed in the hammer blows nailing up the prison, the man in bed with his children behind a locked door, and the father who will not give his son a stone when he asks for bread. Ugolino, however, gives his sons exactly that, a stony silence. When we ask ourselves what we would do in that situation, we probably know. We would speak, not be silent (see Botterill [Bott.1988.2], p. 287); we would weep with our children, not show stoic reserve; and, if we were thirteenth-century Italians, we would pray with them after having sought their forgiveness for having involved them, innocent, in our political machinations. The opening passage of Luke 11 has a prayer for us, should we require one, for it is in that text that Jesus teaches his disciples what we know as “the Lord’s prayer.” [return to English / Italian]

  58–63. Ugolino, silent, biting his hands from grief, causes the children to think that he is hungry and they offer themselves to him for food. They, like their father, can only think literally about nourishment, forgetting the symbolic eucharistic value of bread. (Freccero [Frec.1986.1], pp. 156–57, believes that their offer is eucharistic and spiritually motivated.) This is the last conversation among them. [return to English / Italian]

  64–69. The father, thinking that display of his own sorrow will only increase the pain felt by his sons, teaches them his lesson: stoic silence in the face of death. Had Seneca written this canto, perhaps we would be justified in thinking Ugolino’s reserve a valuable example of courage. The silence is only broken once more, on this fourth day, by Gaddo, dying, who asks the question the reader, too, might very well ask: “O father, why won’t you help me?” The drama of paternity that we find in this canto is not that proposed, in his beautiful essay, by Francesco De Sanctis (DeSa.1967.1), but that of a terribly failing father.

  The total absence of religious concerns in Dante’s portrait of Ugolino is in contrast to the tale that circulates in some of the commentaries, first in 1333 in the Ottimo Commento, that Ugolino, realizing they were all to die, asked for a friar to confess them, and was refused. Had Dante included such a detail, his Ugo
lino would have seemed a much different man. [return to English / Italian]

  74. Only now that it is too late does Ugolino break the silence with his cries. It is the last heartbreaking detail of his failure as a father. The tale that he tells to win Dante’s sympathy has also failed, as we shall see. [return to English / Italian]

  75. Did Ugolino ingest his children? For a history of the centuries-long debate see Hollander (Holl.1985.2). For a strong argument in favor of the notion, see Herzman (Herz.1980.1). To most, the position represented by Herzman and others, mainly (in recent years) Americans, seems a not convincing interpretation. In Singleton’s opinion, it is a “curious view,” one “hardly worth a serious rebuttal.” This writer stands with Geoffrey Chaucer’s view of the matter in the Monk’s Tale, v. 2455: “Hymself, despeired, eek for hunger starf” (and he, despairing, also [i.e., as the children had] died from hunger). One wishes that Chaucer had used a term for starvation, but that might not have rhymed or scanned. “Digiuno” (fasting) is not the same thing as “hunger.” And surely Chaucer knew that.

  An observation in the commentary of Guido da Pisa also offers evidence that the number of days in the narrative (seven) is significant in this regard. Guido says, “And lest it seem impossible that one could have lived six days without food, heed Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio. He says that the life of a man cannot last beyond seven days without food.” If Dante, with his so carefully calculated seven days to starvation, is aware of this bit of medical lore, Ugolino died at the limit of human endurance without nourishment. Had he ingested the flesh of his children, he would have lived longer. Further, when the corpses were exhibited outside the tower, after their removal, the scandal of the teeth-torn flesh would have made the rounds. No such story did, with the exception of a variant, somewhat suspect, in the text of the commentary of Jacopo della Lana. See Holl.1985.2, n. 24. [return to English / Italian]

  76–78. His tale told, Ugolino resumes his bestial rage against the cause of his woes, the skull of Ruggieri, whose evil plots bested Ugolino’s own machinations. For the view that Ugolino hides his own culpability behind that of others, see Barberi Squarotti (Barb.1972.2). [return to English / Italian]

  79–90. Romantic readers, who admire Ugolino, do not often read past verse 75 with close attention. Dante’s apostrophe of Pisa, “new Thebes,” blames the city, not for killing Ugolino, which it had a reason to do (if not perhaps a correct one), but for killing the children. All of Dante’s sympathy is lodged with the children, none with Ugolino. And here we are not speaking of the protagonist (who was firm enough himself against Ugolino’s entreaties for pity), but of the author.

  In Dve (I.viii.2–5) Dante had divided Europeans into three large linguistic groups, Provençal, French, and Italian, by their respective ways of saying “yes,” oc, oïl, and sì. He thus, at vv. 79–80, refers to the inhabitants of Italy.

  Capraia and Gorgona are islands in the Mediterranean that then belonged to Pisa. [return to English / Italian]

  91–93. The transition to Ptolomea is as abrupt as that to Antenora had been (Inf. XXXII.70). And once again the determining detail is the positioning of the faces of those punished in the area. These now have their faces turned upwards (where those in Antenora looked straight ahead and those in Caïna had their faces tilted downward).

  Most commentators believe that Ptolomea, where treachery to guests and friends is punished, gets its name from Ptolemy, the captain of Jericho who, as recorded in I Maccabees 16:11–17, invited his father-in-law, Simon Maccabeus, and his two sons to a banquet and then, once they had drunk, slew them. (There is dispute about the matter, some proposing Ptolemy XII, king of Egypt, 51–47 B.C., who murdered Pompey as a favor to Julius Caesar [Lucan, Phars. VIII.536–712].) [return to English / Italian]

  94–99. Their upturned visages turn the eye sockets into cups in which the tears of the sinners become small basins of ice. Fra Alberigo will three times ask Dante to clear these for him (vv. 112–114, 127–128, 148–150). [return to English / Italian]

  100–105. Despite his frozen facial skin, Dante feels a wind, and asks Virgil how this can be, since the sun, creator of wind, is absent from this place. [return to English / Italian]

  106–108. Pietro di Dante suggests that the wind emanating from Satan, to which Virgil alludes gingerly, not wanting to alarm Dante unduly (cf. his behavior as they approached the giants in Inf. XXXI.29–33), is a perverse imitation of the breath of the Holy Spirit referred to in Acts 2:3. [return to English / Italian]

  109–114. The only speaking presence in Ptolomea (identified as Fra Alberigo in v. 118) believes that Dante and Virgil are sinners destined for Judecca, the “lowest station” in Inferno. In Antenora the souls seemed to be able to tell that Dante was alive; here, perhaps because of their greater physical discomfort and icebound blindness, their sensory capacities seem more limited than those of the souls above them. [return to English / Italian]

  115–117. Dante’s “agreement” with Alberigo is utterly cynical; he has no intention of helping this sinner in any way, and says what he says only to get the sinner to disclose himself, swearing a misleading oath in order to reassure him (of course he is going to the “bottom of the ice,” but not as a sinner for his eternal punishment, but as a very privileged visitor). [return to English / Italian]

  118–120. A member of the Jovial Friars (see note to Inf. XXIII.103), Alberigo was a Guelph from Faenza, and, in 1285, invited two of his relatives, with one of whom he had had a dispute, to dinner. When he called out for the fruit course, the prearranged signal, hired assassins rushed into the room and killed his guests. Now, he says, he is having a fruit course of his own, in which he is getting more (and worse) than he gave, date for fig (since, in Dante’s day, dates were more expensive than figs). [return to English / Italian]

  122–133. Here, in answer to the protagonist’s question, based in his surprise at finding him here, since he had not heard that he had died, Alberigo reveals the poet’s extraordinary innovation. Those who have broken the guest laws die in their souls as soon as they do so, so that their souls go to hell, leaving their bodies alive on earth. As early as Pietro di Dante, some commentators have pointed to a possible source in John 13:27, where it is said that, shortly after Judas betrayed Jesus at the Last Supper, Satan entered into Judas.

  Atropos (v. 126) is the third of the three Fates (Clotho spins the fabric for the skein of our lives, Lachesis lets it out from her distaff, and Atropos snips it off at our deaths). [return to English / Italian]

  134–147. To prove his point, Alberigo points out someone he believes Dante might know taking his “winter vacation” here in Ptolomea, Branca d’Oria. He was a Ghibelline nobleman of Genoa who, with the help of another family member, treacherously murdered his father-in-law, Michel Zanche (see Inf. XXII.88), around 1294. Thus his soul has been down here for six years, while his body is still eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting on clothes, as Dante insists. History contrived to make Dante’s fiction all the more amusing. Branca, who was born ca. 1233, lived into his nineties, only dying in 1325, thus outliving his condemner, Dante. Perhaps he had the great pleasure of reading about his “wintering” soul as he enjoyed his life in Genoa. [return to English / Italian]

  148–150. For the third time Alberigo asks Dante to clear the ice from his eyes, and now Dante, having what he wanted from him, simply does not do so. There are those who argue that the protagonist here behaves more like a sinner than a Christian, but by now we should be used to his approved form of righteous indignation. And there is no reproof for such behavior from Virgil here. [return to English / Italian]

  151–157. Matching the apostrophe attacking Pisa that ended the first part of the canto (vv. 79–90), this one of Genoa concludes the visit to Ptolomea, one of the shortest episodes in the Inferno. [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XXXIV

  1. The first verse of the last canto of Inferno (like the first verse of the last canto of Purgatorio) is in Latin. Its first th
ree words are identical to the first verse of a hymn of the True Cross composed by Venantius Fortunatus (sixth century) but the last, obviously, has been added by Dante. Satan, still in the distance, is naturally not “advancing” against Dante and Virgil, but the wind he emits might have made it seem that way as they approach him. Satan, as we shall see, is immobile.

  This is the only complete Latin verse in the cantica, but see seven earlier Latin words or phrases: Inferno I.65; I.70; XV.62; XVI.88; XVIII.6; XXI.42; XXVII.72. [return to English / Italian]

  4–7. “The Satanic mills” of William Blake may not reflect this passage, even as much as Blake read Dante, yet Dante’s simile immediately presents Satan as a vast contraption doing its necessary work in the architect’s plan for this infernal city. We reflect that this was once the fairest of angels, now reduced, despite his awesome size, to mindless iteration of his wings. Joan Ferrante speaks of “Lucifer, who emits no sound but sends forth a silent and freezing wind of hate, a parody perhaps of the love-inspiring tongues of flame brought to the Apostles by the Holy Spirit” (Ferr.1969.1), p. 38. [return to English / Italian]