by Dante
123. Those who argue that Cato is being overzealous should pay closer attention to this strong charge he makes against the negligent spirits. Whatever the “slough” (scoglio) signifies, their adherence to it prevents their seeing God. In the world of the Commedia that can never be a slight problem. [return to English / Italian]
124–132. This third and final simile of the canto likens the new pilgrims to doves (for the three programmatic references to these birds in the Commedia, here and in Inf. V.82 and Par. XXV.19, see Shoaf [Shoa.1975.1]). See Hollander (Holl.1990.1), p. 41: “Their saved souls hunger on high, but their appetitive natures are not yet wrung dry of earthly longing. Thus they are careless in their ingestion (see Matthew 13:36–43 for the parable of the wheat and the tares alluded to in their failure to make a decision between ‘biado o loglio’). If music be the food of love, there is also a heavenly music. We and the pilgrims know that this is true. They have sung it themselves in this very place.” [return to English / Italian]
133. The final verse, in its understated brevity, conveys a feeling for the two travelers’ guilty acceptance of Cato’s command and their hasty departure in shame.
“The second canto of the Purgatorio dramatizes the need for interpretation by presenting two songs to its audience, the arriving pilgrims. It is clear that we comprise a still more crucial audience. Most of us have chosen to follow the lead of the one whom we take to be our leader, Dante himself. (His several intellectually or morally flawed responses as he moved through Inferno have not, apparently, been cogent enough sign of his frequent inadequacy as guide to our reactions.) He, lost in the beauty of his own old song, either fails to understand or else forgets the message of the new song which he has heard first, and which should have served as a rein on his enthusiasm. It is as old as Exodus and as new as the dawn which brings it, this Easter Sunday morning on the shore of the mountain” (Holl.1990.1, p. 41). [return to English / Italian]
PURGATORIO III
1–6. The two “companions” are running, but not as quickly as the souls who precede them, while Virgil considers his previous inappropriate behavior and Dante his own (as we shall learn in vv. 7–9, 12–13). The poet, as though apologizing for what he is putting Virgil through in these scenes, reminds the reader of his enduring debt to the pagan poet, without whom this journey through the afterworld would have been impossible.
The word “ragione” in verse 3 does not mean “reason” but “justice,” as is attested by Dante’s earlier usage in Convivio (where it nine times refers to law, especially Justinian’s codification of Roman statutes—see Vasoli’s analytical index to Convivio [Vaso.1988.1], pp. 1011–12), and the entire commentary tradition (even if a small subset of commentators believes the word here means “conscience”). See also Marta Cristiani, “ragione,” ED IV (1973), pp. 831–41, esp. 841. In this context it nearly certainly refers to divine justice. [return to English / Italian]
7–9. Virgil’s remorse is self-caused. As Venturi (1732) remarked, Virgil rebukes himself even though he could not have been a target of Cato’s anger, since he was not a soul on the way to purgation. And thus the little fault applies to him alone, not to Dante and the others (for all of whom it is considerably more serious). [return to English / Italian]
10–11. Virgil, here momentarily lacking onestade (dignity), is bracketed by the figures of Cato and the group containing Manfred; both of these are referred to as onesto (Purg. II.119; III.87). [return to English / Italian]
12–13. As Virgil is preoccupied with his minor failing, so Dante is troubled by his own guilty thoughts. Daniello (1568) points to Cato’s rebuke (Purg. II.120–121) as the cause of his shame when he considers his hesitation in moving toward the necessary mountain. [return to English / Italian]
15. The verb dislagarsi (literally meaning “to unlake itself”) is a Dantean coinage, a phenomenon that will grow as the poem progresses and flower in profusion in Paradiso. [return to English / Italian]
16–18. Dante’s presence here in the body is a double-edged proposition, as it both emphasizes his extraordinary state of grace in being here in the flesh and his debilitated status, resulting from his fleshly view of things. For a study of this phenomenon and its development through the cantica see Berk (Berk.1979.1), who points out that, while we may feel that Dante in Purgatorio all too frequently presents himself as casting a shadow, he in fact does so only six times: here; later in this canto (vv. 88–90); then in Purgatorio V.4–6 and 25–27; XXVI.4–8; XXVII.64–69. Berk also makes the point that Dante’s corporeal shadow finds a correspondence, later in the canto, in Manfred’s wounds (vv. 108, 111), the signs of that soul’s former mortality. [return to English / Italian]
19–21. Having noted his own shadow, the protagonist now is struck by the absence of Virgil’s, and momentarily thinks he has been abandoned by his guide. While, as soon as the travelers reached the shore of the mount of purgatory and reentered the sunlight, the protagonist might have noted that none of the immortal denizens of this new place casts a shadow—not Cato, none of the pilgrims, not his guide—the poet reserves that recognition for this canto, so filled with reminiscence of the death of Virgil. [return to English / Italian]
22–24. Benvenuto da Imola’s paraphrase of Virgil’s rebuke begins with the words “modicae fidei”: (“you of little faith, why have you so easily lost the faith and the hope that you ought and may have in me, who never left you behind in the city of the demons?”). Benvenuto is clearly thinking of the words of Christ in the Gospels (in the Latin Bible the phrase “modicae fidei” is found four times and only in Matthew [6:30; 8:26; 14:31; 16:8]). If Benvenuto has correctly heard that echo, its effect is noteworthy, for then the faithless Virgil is reproving his pupil, modeling his speech on the words of Christ, for his lack of faith, evident on occasion from the first canto of the Inferno until Virgil leaves the poem in Purgatorio XXX. Whether Virgil is citing Scripture or having Scripture placed in his mouth by his Christian author is a problem the reader has already encountered (see Inf. VIII.45 and note to VIII.40–45). [return to English / Italian]
25–26. Since it is shortly after dawn here in purgatory, it is shortly after sunset at the antipodes, Jerusalem. And since Italy, in Dante’s geography, lies midway between Jerusalem and Gibraltar, it is sometime after 3 PM there, as evening (vespero) begins with the sun’s last quarter, between 3 PM and 6 PM. [return to English / Italian]
27. Virgil died on 21 September 19 B.C. at Brindisi, a city in Apulia that still serves as a port for maritime travelers to and from Greece. Augustus was responsible for the transfer of his body from Brindisi to Naples, or actually, Pozzuoli, some ten miles distant, where it was interred in a grotto in the vast tunnel, built by the ancient Romans, connecting Pozzuoli and the road to Naples. John of Serravalle (1416) records his having visited the site on 30 August 1413 and having held bones of Virgil in his hands. This passage begins what has been called “an antepurgatorial preoccupation with the body and its place of burial” (Heil.1972.1, p. 44).
Pietro di Dante was perhaps the first to cite Virgil’s versified epitaph, as found in the Vitae of Virgil by Suetonius and Donatus:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.
[Mantua gave me birth, Calabria took me off; now Naples holds me; I sang of pastures, fields, and kings.]
Virgil “sang” his Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. For the possible reference to the three Virgilian subjects in the final hundred verses of the canto, see Hollander (Holl.1984.4), p. 114:
46–78: The barren landscape of this scene (rura)
79–102: the contumacious as sheep (pascua)
103–145: Manfred and empire (duces)
In this experimental formulation Dante would, in exactly one hundred lines, have deployed the three “spokes” of the stylistic rota Vergilii (the wheel of Virgil).
Carroll (1904) cites Plumptre for the opinion that this scene reflects the (unverified) tradition that St. P
aul visited Virgil’s grave at Naples and wept for the great poet, whom, had he but known him, he might have led to salvation. [return to English / Italian]
28–30. Dante’s heavens include the nine celestial spheres containing the Moon and, as they move higher, eventually no stellar bodies of any kind (the primum mobile). In Paradiso we will learn that, while they are material, they are also translucent. Something similar is also the case with respect to the shades here. [return to English / Italian]
31–33. Virgil here touches on the nature of the “aerial bodies” of the dead in Inferno and Purgatorio. The Roman poet Statius will elaborate on the “physical” nature of shades in Purgatorio XXV.34–108. [return to English / Italian]
34–36. The “posthumous Christian” ruefully acknowledges, by pointing to reason as his means for attempting to know the essence of things, his failure to have had faith. The reference to reason does not indicate, as some commentators insist, that Virgil embodies or personifies Reason, especially since, in this context, Reason would then be commenting on the shortcomings of reason. Reason is a property (or, in Scholastic terms, an “accident”) of the Roman poet, not his essence. [return to English / Italian]
37. The quia is a term deriving from Scholastic discourse. Benvenuto da Imola’s paraphrase nicely conveys both that style and precisely what is meant here: “sufficiat vobis credere quia sic est, et non quaerere propter quid est” (let it suffice you to believe that something is so, without seeking to know why it is so), i.e., to accept things as they are, without attempting to understand their causes. [return to English / Italian]
38–39. Some commentators (e.g., Benvenuto) are of the opinion that these lines indicate that had humankind been able to know the final mysteries, Adam and Eve would not have fallen and Christ would not have been needed to save us. It seems far more likely that Dante’s thought is more logically connected than such an analysis would indicate: had we known all, there would have been no need for Christ to come to bring us the final truth of things. The focus here is not moral so much as it is intellectual. [return to English / Italian]
40–45. Perhaps there is no passage in the poem that more clearly delineates the tragedy of Virgil, now studied by its protagonist himself. His own fourth Eclogue, which spoke of a virgin who would give birth to a son, but did not mean Mary and did not mean Jesus, is symptomatic of how near he came and thus how great was his failure, a result here addressed in an unspoken gesture—his lowering his head while holding back his tears. In the last canto, the newly arrived pilgrims looked up with hope (“la nova gente alzò la fronte” [the new people raised their faces]). The words describing Virgil’s silence echo key words from that passage in a contrastive spirit (as noted by Holl.1990.1, p. 36): “e qui chinò la fronte, / e più non disse, e rimase turbato” (and here he lowered his brow, said nothing more, and seemed disturbed). As Benvenuto would have it, it is as though Virgil were saying: “And woe is me, I was among their number.”
The words in rhyme position in these two tercets underline their message:
One way leads up through faith to Christian truth, mediated by the mortal woman who gave birth to God in the flesh, the other down from this potential happiness, through rational attempts to know the rationally unknowable, to everlasting unhappiness. Mary and Plato are here the very emblems of the choices that we humans face. [return to English / Italian]
46–48. There is a sharp dividing line between the elegiac passage devoted to Virgil’s consideration of his failure (vv. 22–45) and the scene that begins here, with the description of the sheer wall of the mountain and the first attempt at an ascent. For an appreciation of the nonetheless unitary nature of this canto as a whole, see Binni (Binn.1955.1), p. 9. [return to English / Italian]
49–51. Lerici and Turbia are settlements at either end of the Ligurian coast, to either side of Genoa, a region marked by rugged mountains sloping to the sea and, in Dante’s roadless day, difficult of access. [return to English / Italian]
52–57. Virgil’s question and attitude reveal a guide who has not taken this trip previously, as he had in Inferno. Further, while he falls back on the resource of his reason, the futility of which in certain situations has just been explored by the guide himself, his pupil, like the arriving penitents in the last canto (see note to vv. 40–45, above), does the intuitive and hopeful thing: he looks up. [return to English / Italian]
58–60. Having begun their attempt to ascend, Virgil and Dante begin moving leftward out of habit, we must assume. (They will only learn what direction they should be moving in at verse 101.) Our first glimpse of the souls of ante-purgatory marks them as unexcited and slow-moving, attributes that will gain in meaning when we learn more about them.
For helpful references to classical discussions of the morally charged nature of the directions of human movement (right, up, and ahead are all “good”; left, down, and behind are all “bad”) see Stabile (Stab.1983.1), pp. 145–49. [return to English / Italian]
61–63. Underlining the difference between the guide’s and the protagonist’s ways of proceeding, Dante’s remark, urging Virgil to look up, intrinsically reveals a reversal of roles, as was noted by Margherita Frankel (Fran.1989.1), pp. 120–21. It is not the master who is giving instructions but the pupil; throughout the little scene that follows, one can sense Virgil’s effort to regain his attenuated authority. [return to English / Italian]
72. The souls are puzzled by what they see, two figures moving in the wrong direction (to the left) on this holy mountain, as Benvenuto da Imola was perhaps first to suggest. Not only are they going in the wrong direction, they are also moving quickly, not at the reverential and thoughtful pace of penitence. [return to English / Italian]
73–78. Virgil’s captatio benevolentiae (the attempt to capture the goodwill of one’s auditors) here, like the one he addressed to Cato in the first canto (Purg. I.70–84), reveals, as Frankel has been perhaps alone in arguing (Fran.1989.1, pp. 122–24), another example of his not understanding his own limitations. His epigrammatic concluding utterance, though taken in bono by commentator after commentator (and perhaps most pleasingly by Benvenuto, who goes on to claim that Dante himself was most prudent in using his time, so that he managed to get his Commedia finished before he died), shows him once again getting things a bit garbled. The self-assured turn of phrase, “The more we know, the more we hate time’s waste,” indicates that he is still without understanding of the positive aspects of not knowing, of not hurrying—two aspects of the saved souls whom he addresses that, as the following simile will make unmistakably clear, are praiseworthy in the Christian context of this scene. [return to English / Italian]
79–87. The sole extended comparison of the canto centers attention on the need for faith untroubled by reason. These sheep, following and imitating their bellwether, are presented positively for their humility and faithfulness. See Lansing (Lans.1977.1), pp. 47–53, for a discussion of this simile, contrasting the humility exemplified here in Manfred (whom we shall soon come to understand is the “bellwether” in the simile), whose life was marked by the opposite vice, presumption, in his opposition to the Church. In one of his typical outbursts against his intellectual enemies in Convivio, Dante calls them stupid and compares them to sheep (I.xi.9–10), those sheep that follow their leader in jumping into a ravine a mile deep (is that phrasing, “mille passi,” remembered in the same phrase at verse 68, above? Frankel [Fran.1989.1], p. 124, is of that opinion). Citation of this passage in Convivio was perhaps first brought into play by Daniello (1568), but it is only recently that readers have begun to understand that the ovine images in this simile work against the assertion found in the Convivial outburst. Its prideful, even presumptuous, tone is here countermanded by the poet’s better understanding of the virtues of sheep, as the arrogance of prideful philosophizing gives way to Christian piety.
In his commentary to this passage, Singleton notes the appropriateness of the 77th Psalm (Psalm 77 [78]:52), recapitulating the Exodus w
ith these words: “But [God] made his own people go forth like sheep, and guided them in the wilderness like a flock.” It seems clear that such traditional Judeo-Christian images of the flock of the just govern this simile. [return to English / Italian]
93. If we had not sensed the importance of humble acts committed by those “not knowing why” in verse 84, the fact that the souls, now described directly, repeat what had been done within the simile reinforces the importance of the point. [return to English / Italian]
94–96. For Dante’s shadow see note to vv. 16–18, above. [return to English / Italian]
101–102. The saved souls now express their concern: Dante and Virgil are heading in the wrong direction (see Fran.1989.1, pp. 121–22). They are thus aesthetically and morally disturbing as newcomers to purgatory.
The gesture that they make is puzzling to American readers, who give the sign for “Stop!” or “Go back!” by extending their palms outward. As Lombardi (1791) calmly points out, “The gesture referred to here by the poet is exactly the one with which we signal to others that they should turn and retrace their steps.” Experience on Tuscan streets and paths even today will verify this. [return to English / Italian]
