by Dante
For the resemblances to Moses in Dante’s portrait of Cato see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 124–26, and Carol Kaske (Kask.1971.1), pp. 2–3, 12–15. [return to English / Italian]
37–39. The general sense is clear: Cato’s face is shining with light. Is this true because the four stars irradiate his face as though they were a sun shining upon him (the more usual interpretation), or is Dante saying that it was as though, in the brightness of Cato’s face, the sun were shining before him? In our translation we have allowed the majority view, aware that the truncated grammatical logic of the line invites completion with “Cato” rather than “myself.” However, we remain tempted by the minority view (restated by Giannantonio [Gian.1989.1], pp. 14–15), encouraged by, among other things, the fact that Dante had described the face of Lady Philosophy in the second ode of Convivio (vv. 59–62) as overcoming our understanding as the sun overcomes weak sight. Since the next canto will introduce the text of the second ode from Convivio for our consideration, it may be worth considering the appropriateness of that image to this scene. [return to English / Italian]
40–45. Cato’s initial rigid and probing moral attitude may seem to indicate that he does not immediately understand the very grace that has brought him here. He reasons that Dante and Virgil, not arriving at his shores in the “normal” way (disembarking from the angel’s ship that we shall see in the next canto), may have snuck into this holy land. He intuits that they have come up from the stream (the eventual course of Lethe?) that descends into hell (see Inf. XXXIV.129–132) and is eager to know how they could have done so without a very special grace indeed. Nonetheless, in a manner totally unlike that encountered in the demons of Inferno, he at once allows for the possibility of grace. His second tercet immediately reveals what a different place we have now reached, one in which doubt and possibility exist even in the minds of its sternest keepers. [return to English / Italian]
46–48. His second set of questions maintains a similar balance: “Are you here because some newfangled ordinance of hell permits it, or has Heaven decreed a new law, permitting such unusual travel, that has been superimposed upon the New Law made by Christ?” That he refers to the cliffs of purgatory as his own shows that he is the keeper of the whole mountain, not just of its shore, a matter that used to cause debate. [return to English / Italian]
49–51. Cato’s queries finally bring Virgil into the conversation. It is probably significant that the opening splendors of this Christian realm have been presented for Dante’s sake alone. Only now does Virgil resume his role as guide.
The “signs” (cenni) with which he encourages his charge are probably facial gestures. [return to English / Italian]
52–54. Virgil’s response echoes Dante’s to Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti (Inf. X.61): “Da me stesso non vegno” (I come not on my own). There Dante reveals his debt to Virgil; here Virgil owns his subservience to Beatrice. [return to English / Italian]
58–60. Virgil’s insistence on Dante’s near-death condition at the outset of the poem may remind us of the possible connection between that condition and suicide (see note to Inferno XIII.24). The reflections of Inferno I and XIII in this canto, presided over by the “good” suicide, Cato, may produce an overtone of this concern.
Virgil’s ascription of Dante’s proximity to death to his follia may also remind the reader of Ulysses’ folle volo (Inf. XXVI.125—the last text in which we have seen the word in its adjectival or nominal form). The younger Dante may have attempted to exercise options that he now regards as self-destructive. Cantos I, XIII, XXVI, and XXXIV of Inferno are perhaps those most present from that cantica in the verses of this opening canto of Purgatorio. [return to English / Italian]
66. That all the souls on the mountain are seen as being in Cato’s charge makes it close to impossible to assign him a partial role, as do even some commentators who treat him as historical and not an allegory, one in which he has authority only over the entrance at the shore or over that and the “vestibule” (ante-purgatory). He seems rather to be the guardian, appointed by God, of the entire mountain. [return to English / Italian]
68. The “power” that leads Virgil from above was apparent to him when he first saw Beatrice in Limbo and she was “donna di virtù” (Inf. II.76). [return to English / Italian]
71–74. Virgil’s phrasing, which makes freedom (libertà) the key word connecting Dante and Cato, may also remind the reader of Christ, who gave His life for our freedom. For perhaps the first substantial understanding that there are significant figural relations between Christ and Cato see Raimondi (Raim.1962.1), pp. 78–83; for the compelling further notion that Dante would have seen confirmation of exactly such a reading in the text of Lucan itself, see Raimondi (Raim.1962.1, p. 80, and Raim.1967.2, p. 21) highlighting Cato’s words (Phars. II.312): “Hic redimat sanguis populos” (and let my blood ransom the people). Barberi Squarotti eventually summarized this view as follows: “Cato, finally, comes to take on the function of a lay figura of Christ” (Barb.1984.1), p. 33. See also, in this vein, Wetherbee (Weth.1984.1), p. 135. [return to English / Italian]
75. This line is so clear in its prediction of Cato’s eventual salvation, when he will receive his glorified body in the general resurrection of the just that will follow the Last Judgment, that one has difficulty accepting Pasquazi’s claim that the issue of Cato’s salvation is left unresolved (Pasq.1965.1, p. 534). Pasquazi is closer to the mark than Andreoli, who, in his commentary (1856) to this verse, simply denies the possibility that Cato could be saved, arguing that Dante provides no grounds by which we might accept such a view. This is but another example of how the force of Dante’s daring treatment of Cato has escaped his readers. [return to English / Italian]
77. Virgil’s self-serving reference to the fact that he was not an active sinner temporarily hides the further fact that he is damned. [return to English / Italian]
78–84. Virgil’s attempt at captatio benevolentiae (the winning of an audience’s goodwill) probably sounds reasonable enough to most readers. Since he dwells in Limbo with Marcia, Cato’s wife, he seeks to sway him with reference to her. Virgil has learned, we might reflect, how captatio functions in a Christian context from Beatrice, who practiced it upon him (Inf. II.58–60, II.73–74). If such rhetoric worked on him, he would seem to have surmised, perhaps it will now be effective with Cato. However, and as Di Benedetto (DiBe.1985.1), p. 175, has noted, “the mention of Marcia was something of a gaffe.” [return to English / Italian]
85–93. Cato’s rebuke of Virgil is gentle but firm: (1) Marcia pleased me well enough when I was mortal, but after I was harrowed from Limbo by Christ (the maker of the “New Law”), pity for the damned was no longer possible for me; (2) Beatrice’s having interceded for you is all that is required—there is no need for flattery. Cato, unlike Orpheus, will not look back for his dead wife. He would seem rather to have Christ’s words in mind: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30), a passage Dante cites later in this cantica (Purg. XIX.137).
Cato’s characterization of Virgil’s words as lusinghe (flatteries) is harsh, but justified by Virgil’s error. The name that would have worked (and still does) is Beatrice’s, not Marcia’s. Virgil has relied upon the power of the spiritually dead when he should have appealed to that of the saved. [return to English / Italian]
94–99. Turning from his admonition (which would have seemed gratuitous had the author not wanted to call Virgil’s sense of the situation into question), Cato now orders the Roman poet to gird Dante’s loins with a symbol of humility. Pietro di Dante (commentary to vv. 134–136) refers to the sixth chapter of Matthew (he means Micah 6:14): “humiliatio tua in medio tui” (your casting down shall be in your midst), what Singleton’s comment to verse 95 calls the cingulum humilitatis (cincture of humility). Dante’s confirmation in humility must be joined with his purification (the cleansing of his face) so that he be pure in sight when he stan
ds before the “admitting angel” at the gate of purgatory in Canto IX.
The giunco schietto (verse 95), the rush with which Virgil is ordered to bind his pupil, is, as Tommaseo (1837) was perhaps the first to suggest (in his commentary to vv. 94–96), meant to echo positively the horrible vegetation of the forest of the suicides (Inf. XIII.5), described as having branches that are not straight (“non rami schietti”), but contorted. [return to English / Italian]
100–105. Cato points Virgil (and Dante) toward a descent to the very shore of the island, its lowest point, truly a descent into humility, where the only vegetation is this most modest of plants, characterized by its plainness and its pliancy, and by its ability to grow in a landscape inhospitable to any other form of life. [return to English / Italian]
107–108. The guardian’s reference to the nascent sunrise reminds us that this scene, until now, has been played in the hour just before dawn. [return to English / Italian]
109. Dante has been kneeling all through this scene (see verse 51) and only now arises. [return to English / Italian]
115–117. The beginning of this dawn, Easter Sunday 1300, resonates, as Tommaseo (1837) was perhaps the first to notice, with a similar phrasing from Virgil, “splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus” (the sea gleams beneath her flickering light—Aen. VII.9). The scene is the departure of Aeneas as he resumes his voyage toward Latium, but the source of that light is the moon, not the sun. In both works the passage marks a boundary of importance, the beginning of the “Iliadic” second half of the Aeneid and the preparation for Dante’s journey upward toward God’s kingdom. [return to English / Italian]
118–120. The comparison equates the protagonist and his guide alike with a person who finds the necessary (and hitherto obscured) path; yet we surely reflect that it applies far more forcefully to Dante, who is reported as having lost the true way at the poem’s beginning (“ché la diritta via era smarrita”—Inf. I.3), and who now, and only now, is back on the path toward salvation. [return to English / Italian]
121–123. That is, once they had gotten closer to the sea, where the maritime breeze protects the dew from the heat of the sun more than it does higher up the slope. [return to English / Italian]
124–129. Virgil’s cleansing of Dante’s face removed the dark stain of the sins of hell from his visage and restored his white, or innocent (and faithful?), countenance. That we should think of the rite of baptism here may have been suggested by Benvenuto da Imola, whose gloss to vv. 121–125 refers to the rugiada (dew) as the “dew of divine grace, abundant when men humble their hearts before God and are cleansed of their habitual sinfulness.”
Pietro di Dante (1340) was the first (and remains one of the relative few) of the poem’s commentators to insist on the redoing here of Aeneas’s self-cleansing when he enters the Elysian fields (Aen. VI.635–636), a natural association for Dante to have had in mind. He too is entering a better precinct, having turned his attention away from “Tartarus,” the place of the wicked. [return to English / Italian]
130–132. The reminiscence of Ulysses here has had a recent surge of appreciation, but notice of it is as ancient as the commentary of Benvenuto da Imola (followed, as he often was, by John of Serravalle). Citing St. Augustine’s opinion (in De civitate Dei, Benvenuto [1380] says) that no one had ever lived at the antipodes who ever returned from there, Benvenuto goes on to suggest that this passage reflects the failed voyage of Ulysses. Some recent writers have also pointed out that the rhyme words in the passage (diserto, esperto; acque, piacque, rinacque) are also found in the Ulysses passage (Inf. XXVI.98f., XXVI.137f.). [return to English / Italian]
133–136. The triumphant wonder of the little miracle of the Christlike humble reed that renews itself concludes the canto with a proper Christian note. For Pasquazi (Pasq.1965.1), p. 537, the reed “expresses the beginning of an inner renewal, through which the poet, holding to the way of humility, opens himself to a new life.” This canto is thus a canto of two “suicides,” Cato and Jesus, each of whom voluntarily gave his life so that others might be free. For the way in which this scene counters the images of suicide found in Inferno XIII.31–32 see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 129–31. In the earlier scene, Dante, under Virgil’s orders, breaks off a twig from the thornbush that is the damned soul of Pier della Vigna. Bits broken from some of the suicides do not grow back (see XIII.141–142), but strew the forest floor. Here the humble plant does indeed regrow. Wetherbee (Weth.1984.1), pp. 37–38, makes a similar observation. Pasquini (Pasq.1996.1), pp. 421–22, studies still other connections between Cato and Pier.
However, the major reference here is, as the early commentators were quick to realize, to the golden bough in the Aeneid (VI.143–144): “Primo avulso non deficit alter / aureus” (when the first is plucked, a second, golden too, does not fail to take its place). That scene offers a fitting parallel to this one, but with a major and governing difference: the classical object is artificial and precious, while the Christian one is natural and of little worth. Thus does the humility that inspires the Christian sublime help it outdo its classical forebear. [return to English / Italian]
PURGATORIO II
1–9. This elaborate way of telling time by the position of the sun and other stars in the heavens, inopportune in hell, where the sight of the sky is denied the travelers, will be a frequent feature of Purgatorio. The four main points of reference are, here (and on other occasions), Jerusalem, site of the Crucifixion and thus the most significant point on earth; the Ganges, 90 degrees to the east; the antipodes, 180 degrees to the south; and Cádiz, in Spain, 270 degrees around the circle of the meridian, a great-circle arc over Jerusalem. This makes a right angle in its intersection with the plane made by the equator, which extends into a similar great-circle arc known as the horizon. Each of the four equidistant points covered by the meridian is six hours from the other. Thus we are told that it was 6 PM in Jerusalem, midnight over India, and dawn here at the antipodes. The location of noon is left unexpressed, but we can understand that it is in fact over Cádiz, and may choose to understand that the omission forces us to supply this last indication and perhaps consider that this is the place associated with Ulysses’ departure on his “mad flight” (Inf. XXVI.106–111), especially since the concluding verses of the last canto had so clearly reminded the reader of Ulysses’ voyage (see note to Purg. I.130–132 and Holl.1990.1, pp. 32–33).
The phrase at vv. 4–6 is complicated, but eventually comprehensible. In the northern hemisphere, when the nights grow longer than the day after the autumn solstice, the sun appears in Libra, as a result no longer a nighttime constellation, and thus the Scales “fall from her [night’s] hand.” However, in the northern hemisphere it is now just after the spring solstice and the night is found in Libra, while the sun is in Aries. [return to English / Italian]
10–12. The mood of the travelers, compared by many, perhaps beginning with Benvenuto da Imola (1380), to pilgrims on their way to earn indulgence for their sins, is not particularly eager. Rather, they seem to hesitate. Vittorio Russo (Russ.1969.1), p. 243, cites Hebrews 11:13–16, with its insistence on the nature of life as a pilgrimage, as relevant to this tercet. That passage is contained in one of the most significant texts in the New Testament giving credence to the idea that those who were born before Christ were nonetheless responsible for and capable of believing in Christ to come (all of Hebrews 11 insists on the faith found in the great figures of the Old Testament). But our pilgrims seem more at home with “Egypt” than they are eager for the New Jerusalem, as were the Hebrews themselves in the desert (see Exodus 14:11–12; 16:2–3; 17:3) because they lacked a full measure of zeal for their journey. For a discussion of the hesitance that suffuses this canto see Gorni (Gorn.1982.1). As Poletto (1894) was perhaps the first to note, the phrasing here reflects that of Vita nuova XII.6, where, in a simile, Dante is unsure about the path he should pursue. [return to English / Italian]
13–18. This is, perhaps surprisingly, the first simile of Purg
atorio (there was a brief comparison at Purg. I.119–120; another at verse 11, just above). While the first canto (vv. 19–21) involved a special relationship to Venus, this canto turns instead to Mars, treated here, as was Venus there, as morning star. In his Convivio, where Dante associates the first seven heavens with the liberal arts, he says (II.xiii.20–24) that Mars may be compared to Music. He concludes (24): “Moreover, Music attracts to itself the human spirits, which are, as it were, principally vapors of the heart, so that they almost completely cease their activity; this happens likewise to the entire soul when it hears music, and the virtue of all of them, as it were, runs to the spirit of sense, which receives the sound” (tr. Lansing). We shall see that these notions will come into play when Casella sings Dante’s ode to the new pilgrims at the mountain’s shore later in the canto. Bernardino Daniello was perhaps the first commentator (1568) to bring that passage in Convivio to bear on this text. But the valence of the passage as it is reflected here puts the alluring red light of Mars (and, later, listening to music, which is what Mars signifies in the earlier text) into a negative correspondence with the alacrity and whiteness of the swiftly approaching angel. Looking west toward Mars implies turning one’s back on the sunrise to the east. Porena’s commentary (1946) observes that Dante, as a Tuscan, was acquainted with this view of the sea, one found on the western—and not the eastern—shore of the Italian peninsula. [return to English / Italian]
19–30. The gradual revelation of the approaching presence (more light, greater size, two elements of white that then resolve to three [two wings and the angel’s “body”]) culminates in Virgil’s recognition of the angelic nature of the steersman. For a brief account of the nature of and doctrinal problems inherent in Dante’s angelology see Alison Cornish (Corn.2000.1).
