by Dante
103–105. Manfred died (February 1266) some eight or nine months after Dante was born. His question is thus groundless, notwithstanding the exertions of commentators like Tommaseo (1837), Andreoli (1856), and Poletto (1894), who argue that Dante, as a deeply thoughtful man, looked old for his age. The utterly human perception that lies behind the poet’s lending Manfred this question is that the great and famous are used to being recognized, and often assume that everybody has seen them, even if they themselves tend to have small recollection of the many whom they have encountered. On the other hand, his question may also be a hopeful one, i.e., if this living soul happens to recognize him, Manfred hopes that he will cause others to pray for him—see Purgatorio V.49–50, where other late-repentant souls make similar requests. [return to English / Italian]
107–108. The “realism” of the detail of this scarred eyebrow has drawn much admiration. Singleton’s comment (1973) cites Augustine, De civ. Dei XXII.xix.3: “For, in the martyrs, such wounds will not be a deformity; they will have a dignity and loveliness all their own; and, though this radiance will be spiritual and not physical, it will, in some way, beam from their bodies.” He goes on to suggest that Manfred, though excommunicated by the Church, nonetheless is treated here as a sort of martyr, “persecuted” by that very Church.
While a number of antecedents for Manfred’s physical appearance have been proposed (e.g., David, Roland, Virgil’s Marcellus), one seems most likely to have been on Dante’s mind: the tragic figure of Deiphobus (Aen. VI.495–499), who attempts to hide his wounds from Aeneas, his mangled ears and his nose (“truncas inhonesto volnere naris” [his nostrils laid bare by a shameful wound—VI.498]). Deiphobus, desiring not to be recognized by his wounds, is, in this understanding, a foil to Manfred, eager to display the wound in his chest. Perhaps the first commentator to note this correspondence was Mattalia (1960); and see Hollander (Holl.1984.4), p. 119. [return to English / Italian]
111. Manfred’s second wound (the poet will insist on the importance of the fact that he has two visible wounds in verse 119), perhaps reminiscent of the wound in Christ’s side (John 19:34; 20:25), causes the reader to consider the possible significances of these two marks on his body. Perhaps we are to understand that the first wound, in his brow, traditionally and in Dante the locus of pride (see Inf. X.45 and XXXIV.35 and notes), is the sign of his pride brought low, his mark of Cain, as it were, now made good in his gesture of revealing his other wound, his mark of Christ, the seal of his humility. Torraca (1905) is nearly alone in seeing the resemblance, antithetic though it be, between the gestures of self-revelation in displaying wounds found in Manfred here and in Mohammed (Inf. XXVIII.29–31). [return to English / Italian]
112. Manfred’s smile is part of a “program” of smiling found in the two final cantiche (see note to Purg. II.83). His way of naming himself seems to be part of a program limited to the ante-purgatory, the only part of the poem in which characters name themselves using this formula (“io son” followed by their own name). Manfred’s smiling self-identification stands out from the evasive behavior in this regard exhibited by most of the sinners in hell. For the others who employ this formula see Purgatorio V.88 (Buonconte da Montefeltro), VI.34 (Sordello), VII.7 (Virgil). In the less personal exchanges in Paradiso only St. Bonaventure uses a version of it: “Io son la vita di Bonaventura.…” There the great Franciscan identifies himself as a living heavenly soul.
Born ca. 1231, Manfred was the illegitimate son of the emperor Frederick II and Bianca Lancia, and thus the natural grandson of Emperor Henry VI and Constance of Sicily. He was also the father, by his wife Beatrice of Savoy, of Constance, who married King Peter III of Aragon (see vv. 115–116). When Frederick died in 1250, Manfred was appointed regent of Sicily in the absence of his brother, Conrad IV, involved elsewhere. When Conrad died, in 1254, leaving the realm to his three-year-old son, Conradin, Manfred again became regent. At the rumors of the child’s death, in 1258 (he would in fact survive another ten years), Manfred was crowned king in Palermo. This did not sit well with the pope, and Alexander IV excommunicated him in 1258, as did Urban IV in 1261. Urban offered the vacated forfeited crown to Louis IX of France who, refusing it, opened the path to an invitation of Charles of Anjou, who accepted. Once Charles was crowned in Rome in January 1266, he set out to destroy Manfred, an aim that he accomplished the next month at the battle of Benevento. A lover of the “good life” at court, a fervent Ghibelline, a man charged (whether correctly or not) with a number of murders of his cofamiliars, supposedly undertaken to advance his political hopes, Manfred was not, at least not in Guelph eyes, a selection for salvation that could have been calculated to win sympathy to the work that contained such news. It is at least reasonable to believe that the first damned soul we see in hell is Celestine V (see note to Inf. III.58–60), a pope of saintly habits; here the first soul we find saved on the mountain is the excommunicated Manfred. Whatever else Dante enjoyed doing as he wrote this poem, he clearly delighted in shocking his readers—as though the salvation of Cato, with which the cantica begins, were not incredible enough for us.
On the problems raised for commentators by the salvation of the excommunicated Manfred see La Favia (LaFa.1973.1), who points out that a letter of Pope Innocent III dating from 1199 fully supports the notion that an excommunicate can eventually be saved, a position, as he demonstrates, that was not nearly as shocking to Dante’s earliest readers as it would later become. La Favia produces the key portion of that Latin text (pp. 87–88). [return to English / Italian]
113. Manfred does not identify himself as his father’s son (Frederick II is, after all, condemned to hell for heresy: Inf. X.119) but by reference to his paternal grandmother, Constance (1154–98). As Benvenuto uniquely (among the early commentators) points out, Dante has borrowed this tactic from Polynices who, questioned about his lineage by the king of Argos, Adrastus, in Statius’s Thebaid, prefers to omit the name of Oedipus in favor of that of his mother, Jocasta (I.676–681). [return to English / Italian]
117. The poet’s self-awareness is unmistakable here. Hardly anyone in his time would have consented to the notion that Manfred had been saved. He places this reference to the imagined dubiety of those who might hear such news (i.e., by reading Dante’s poem) in the mouth of his character and it is our turn to smile. Yet we can imagine how many Guelphs and churchmen would have fumed at this passage, adamant in their vehement and unflagging belief that Manfred had been damned. [return to English / Italian]
121–123. The sinners in hell, we must assume, failed exactly to do, even at the last moment of their lives, what Manfred did. While he is held back from purgation for the insubordination that resulted in his excommunication, he, too, is a late-repentant saved soul. [return to English / Italian]
124–129. The archbishop of Cosenza, in Calabria, enlisted by Pope Clement IV in his battles against Manfred’s Ghibellines, was responsible, at the end, for disinterring his corpse, buried under the cairn of stones piled upon his body by Guelph troops after the battle of Benevento.
There is some dispute as to the precise meaning of the word faccia here. Does it mean “face” or “page”? For the former, see Freccero (Frec.1986.1), p. 206. For “faccia” as page, see Frankel (Fran.1984.1), p. 107. The page in God’s writing indicated here is perhaps found at Apocalypse 20:12, the reference to the Book of Life, in which are recorded the names of the saved, including, we must reflect, that of Manfred. However, three particulars lend support to those who argue for “page,” faccia as an apocopation of facciata: (1) While most of the early commentators are vague in their readings of this verse, those who wrote in the Renaissance and after tend to find this interpretation more natural; (2) although modern commentators mainly prefer “face,” they do so without the sort of convincing argument that might conclude the debate; (3) the archbishop of Cosenza, we might reflect, obviously had no direct experience of God’s presence (at least not in Dante’s mind), but he surely did have some kind of access to the
Scripture, although he evidently—at least in Dante’s eyes—understood it poorly. [return to English / Italian]
130. After Tommaseo (1837) many modern commentators suggest that there is a reference here to Virgil’s Palinurus (Aen. VI.362): “Nunc me fluctus habet versantque in litore venti” (Now the waves have me and the winds hurl me onto the beach). See notes to Purgatorio V.91–93 and VI.28–33. [return to English / Italian]
131–135. Adding insult to the injury of disinterment, the archbishop ordered Manfred’s remains to be cast back into the world. They had first at least been allowed burial in unconsecrated ground with the ceremony prescribed for the excommunicate (“with torches quenched”). And so the corpse is put out of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily onto a bank of the river Verde, today the Liri.
The name of the river, Verde (green), however, stands intrinsically opposed to such purpose, since it both traditionally represents the virtue of hope and happens to have been the color that Manfred himself favored. And thus the identical rhyme “Verde/verde” underlines the hopeful sign that Manfred’s faith believed would come and his love longed for. The Church’s human agents may not understand God’s hidden disposition.
The final phrase here, “ha fior del verde,” has caused much difficulty. Lombardi (1791) paraphrases the passage as follows: “so long as death does not entirely dry up hope, but leaves a single thread of it green.” [return to English / Italian]
139. For a possible precursor for this period of delay see Aeneid VI.325–30, the one hundred years of wandering exacted of the souls of the unburied dead before they are permitted to cross Acheron, a connection perhaps first suggested by Daniello (1568). But this does not explain Dante’s choice of the number thirty. It is not until the twentieth century that one finds a commentator wondering about the possible reasons for this choice: Grandgent (1909): “Why thirty? See E. G. Gardner in the Modern Language Review, IX, 63. In Deut. xxxiv, 8, we read: ‘the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days.’ Hence the early Christian practice of saying prayers for the dead for thirty days after decease. Out of this grew the ‘Trental of St. Gregory,’ or thirty masses on thirty feast days through the year.” Trucchi (1936) resuscitates a previously unnoted observation of Francesco da Buti, recalling the tale told by Gregory the Great in his Dialogues: the ghost of a monk named Justus who, buried excommunicate for having fathered children, was redeemed when thirty masses said by Gregory set things right. Another analogue, offered by a Princeton student, Gerald Dal Pan ’82, in an examination paper in 1980, is worthy of discussion: the thirty years of Jesus’s life before he was baptized and entered by the Holy Spirit, when He took on his mission in the world (Luke 3:25).
Torraca (1905) suggests that Manfred lived nine years under the ban of excommunication and thus had a sentence of 270 years in ante-purgatory when he died in 1266, thus leaving him 236 years to wait before commencing his purgation. However, since Dante’s poem surely brought a storm of prayers to Heaven, he may have finished his penitential waiting much earlier than that. [return to English / Italian]
143. The third cantos of both Purgatorio and Paradiso are centrally involved with two women known as “Constance,” here the grandmother and daughter of Manfred, there Piccarda Donati, whose name as a nun was Constance, and the other Constance, also a nun, who accompanies her when the two of them appear to Dante in the sphere of the Moon.
For a bibliography of discussions of this canto see Scorrano (Scor.2000.1), pp. 69–71. [return to English / Italian]
PURGATORIO IV
1–15. This complex opening passage has its roots in classical and Scholastic discussions of the nature of the human soul. Commentators indicate passages known to Dante in Plato (Timaeus, putting forth a belief that there are three independent souls in man, a belief found also, in slightly different form, in the Manichees, and then repeated in Averroës), in Aristotle (De anima, arguing against Plato for a single soul, not a plurality of them), Albertus Magnus (De spiritu et respiratione), and Aquinas (Summa theologica, Summa contra Gentiles, and commentary on De anima) as these are reflected in Dante’s Vita nuova (II.4–5—see DeRo.1980.1, pp. 31–32), De vulgari eloquentia (II.ii.6) and Convivio (III.ii.11–16). For some of these texts see Singleton’s commentary (1973).
Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Dante believed that there was but a single soul in man, divided first into three faculties or powers (with this meaning, Dante uses, synonymously, the words virtù or potenze—he uses both of them in this passage): the vegetative (governing physical growth), the sensitive (governing the feelings), and the rational or intellective (governing thought). These are presented by Dante (Conv. III.ii.11) as “vivere, sentire e ragionare” (the force of life, of the senses, of the reason). Considering what happened within himself so that, absorbed by the words of Manfred for over three hours (50 degrees of the sun’s ascent), he could so lose track of time, Dante uses the evidence of his senses to argue, as Aquinas had done before him, that the very fact that parts of the soul cease their function when one of them is fully enjoined proves that we have not a plurality of souls, for these would simply continue to function independently at all times. That is, had Dante’s rational soul functioned unimpaired, he would have noted the passage of time even as he listened to Manfred.
The three faculties are all further divided into subsets, the sensitive soul into two, one of these including the five senses, and it is to this set (the senses of hearing and of sight) that Dante adverts here. See the commentary of Daniello (1568) to this passage and the discussion of virtù by Philippe Delhaye and Giorgio Stabile in ED, V (1976), pp. 1050–59, esp. pp. 1053–55.
Singleton suggests that the apparently forced diction, regarding an ability to hear the passage of time, in fact refers to the sound of bells, the primary means of telling time in the Middle Ages. [return to English / Italian]
16–18. This “flock of sheep” was made aware of Dante’s desire to move upward in the last canto (verse 99). From behind the travelers they call out their courteous instruction, their “guidance” now at an end. [return to English / Italian]
19–25. A pseudosimile only because its formal grammatical relations (e.g., “just as … so”) are not expressed, these verses return to the countryside and the “humble style” that Dante has deployed in many of his similes in Inferno and that typified the sole simile found in the preceding canto (vv. 79–87). The farmer fixes his hedge, by filling holes in it with thorns, when the grapes come ripe so as to protect his vineyard from thieves. Steiner (1921) was perhaps the first commentator to note the reference to Matthew 7:14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leads to life, and there are few that find it.” [return to English / Italian]
26–28. Here is another pseudosimile, even less grammatically ordered than the last, in which steep paths to towns or to mountain peaks in north and central Italy are compared to this path, which is even steeper. [return to English / Italian]
37–39. Virgil, unacquainted with this place, gives sound provisional advice: it is best to keep moving up until some indication makes the way plain. [return to English / Italian]
41–42. Beginning with Benvenuto da Imola there has been a small battle over the reference here. Is it to geometry, the line drawn from the apex of the triangle formed by bisecting the right angle of a quadrant of a circle? Or is it (as Benvenuto strongly believed) to the astronomical instrument, the quadrant, which is so called because it replicates precisely a quadrant of a circle? In either case the angle of ascent is even greater than 45 degrees. [return to English / Italian]
50. It is no wonder, given the steepness of the slope, that Dante completes this part of the ascent by crawling on his hands and knees (carpando). For previous uses of the word carpone see Inferno XXV.141; XXIX.68. [return to English / Italian]
52–54. This brief respite may, at least intrinsically, bring to mind the antithetic figure of Ulysses. Where he left the east behind him (Inf. XXVI.124) and always ventured fo
rward, Dante now looks back to the east, whence the sun had risen. The eastern sky, locus of the sunrise, has a long tradition in Christianity of representing Jesus, the “light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5). [return to English / Italian]
55–57. Pietro di Dante (1340) was the first to cite, as a source for this detail, a passage in Lucan (Phars. III.247–248), where Arabs, coming south of the equator, marveled at the fact that the shadows of trees fell to their right, not to their left. Trucchi (1936) reminds the reader that, here in purgatory, levante, the place where the sun rises, is not east but west—from our perspective in the northern hemisphere.
Dante offers a more extended and entirely similar discussion of these matters in Convivio III.v.13–17. [return to English / Italian]
58–60. Aquilone (line 60 in the Italian) is the north wind. The tercet repeats the protagonist’s amazement upon seeing the morning sun to his left. The reader needs to understand that the poet imagines an “ideal” left and right in this and other particulars. That is, two people facing one another, in either hemisphere, would each claim that the sun is to the other hand. In the astronomical givens of the poem, above the Tropic of Cancer the sun is to the south of the imagined observer, to his or her right; “below” the Tropic of Capricorn (this is a northernizer’s view, it should be noted) it is to the north, or left. Substituting “north” for “left” and “south” for “right,” the reader may find this passage more readily understandable. [return to English / Italian]
