by Dante
104–105. The phrase “per poco amor” (for lack of love) and the word “studio” (the Italian equivalent of the Latin word for “zeal”) combine to underline the defining vice and virtue of this terrace. [return to English / Italian]
107. Virgil’s “perhaps” is a gentle act of politesse on his part: these penitents were guilty of precisely what he describes. [return to English / Italian]
118–120. San Zeno, just outside the city of Verona (and, by common consent, one of the most beautiful churches in Italy), was also the site of a monastery. Its nameless abbot, who speaks here, is generally identified as “Gherardo II, who was abbot, in the time of the Emperor Frederick I, from 1163 till his death in 1187” (T). Frederick Barbarossa, emperor from 1152 until his death in 1190 as Frederick I, was a grandfather of Frederick II (emperor 1215–50). Dante’s overall opinion of him is difficult to measure, since he so rarely refers to him, but in the two passages that do invoke him, here and in Epistle VI.20, his destruction of Milan in 1162 for its anti-imperial activities is clearly applauded. On the question of Dante’s views of Barbarossa see Nardi (Nard.1966.1).
For the less than likely possibility that the adjective “buon” (good) that precedes his name is here to be taken ironically, see Tommaseo (1837) on this passage. One may add that the thirty occasions in the Commedia on which a reader finds the epithet combined with a name or title (e.g., “buon Marzucco,” “buon maestro”) do not reveal a single one in which an ironic reading seems warranted. [return to English / Italian]
121–126. Dante, welcomed by the Scaligeri family to Verona in 1303–4, there enjoyed the first happy time of his exile. His memories of those rulers of the city give rise to a post-eventum prophecy. Alberto della Scala was lord of Verona until his death in 1301, by which time he had appointed his lame, illegitimate son, Giuseppe (1263–1313), to serve as abbot of the monastery (in 1292), for the rest of his days. Alberto was succeeded by his eldest legitimate son, Bartolommeo, nearly certainly Dante’s first host in Verona. Upon Bartolommeo’s death, in 1304, Alberto’s second son, Alboino, became lord (many believe that Dante and Alboino did not get along, thus explaining Dante’s departure from Verona around 1304), a position he held until his death in 1311, when he was succeeded by Cangrande della Scala, the third legitimate son and Dante’s patron and host when the poet returned to Verona ca. 1314. [return to English / Italian]
127–129. The nameless abbot is moving so quickly that Dante cannot tell whether he has finished speaking or has simply moved too far ahead to be heard while continuing to speak—a nice final touch to convey the zeal with which he pursued his penitence. [return to English / Italian]
133–135. The first example of the sin of Sloth indicates the Hebrews who, having made the passage through the Red Sea, grew restive under Moses’ guidance and died of plague before the completed exodus across Jordan into the Promised Land accomplished only by Joshua and Caleb. See Numbers 14:1–38 and Deuteronomy 1:26–40. [return to English / Italian]
136–138. Similarly, some of Aeneas’s companions, egged on by Iris, disguised as the wife of Doryclus, rebelled against the leadership of Aeneas and chose to remain in Sicily. The matrons set fire to the ships and Aeneas, having saved all but four of them from destruction, allows all who wish to stay behind to do so (Aen. V.604–761). Padoan (Pado.1967.1), p. 686, argues that Dante’s treatment of Aeneid V here differs from that found in Convivio IV.xxvi.11, but the difference can be explained by the fact that in the earlier passage Dante focuses on the willingness of Aeneas to allow the discouraged to stay behind found in Virgil’s text itself, while here he judges the malingerers from a different vantage point, the divinely sanctioned imperative to found new Troy in Latium. [return to English / Italian]
141–142. The protagonist’s novo pensiero (new thought) has puzzled his commentators. Is it one triggered by what he has seen and heard? Or is he anticipating the matters he will rehearse in his dream in the next canto? Or is the poet merely describing, generically, the way in which the mind works as it flits from subject to subject on the way to sleep (a view that is much present in the commentaries)? In the next canto, a similar phrase will refer to a mental image already experienced (the novella visïon of XIX.56) in his previous dream. Thus here it is at least possible that the “new thought” is a response to what he has seen or heard. Could he have wondered whether he was himself more like the backsliding Hebrews and Trojans than he is like Joshua or Aeneas? This would seem possible, but not demonstrable. In any case, this unreported thought leads to still others, and these are clearly—because the text tells us so—the matter of his dream. [return to English / Italian]
143. The verb Dante uses to describe his floating state of consciousness, vaneggiai (rambled), picks up an earlier phrasing, when he compares himself to one who sonnolento vana (rambles in his drowsy mind—verse 87) after Virgil has finished his explanation of love and free will. There he is falling into a fatigue that mirrors the sin purged on this terrace. Here he finally gives in to that weight of somnolence. [return to English / Italian]
145. Dante’s purgatorial dreams are described in cantos IX, XIX, and XXVII, but the second occurs here, in a single line, “e ’l pensamento in sogno trasmutai” (and I transformed my musings into dream). Since in Vita nuova he presents his age as having been nine, eighteen, and twenty-seven for his three main “encounters” with Beatrice, the poet perhaps wanted to retain those three nine-based and nine-spaced numbers for his three dreams that lead back to her now. For this calculation see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), p. 145. [return to English / Italian]
PURGATORIO XIX
1–3. Dante apparently believed that the rays of the moon, in his time considered a “cold planet” (e.g., by Jacopo della Lana [1324]), enhanced the natural nocturnal cooling of the earth, its temperature further decreased whenever another “cold” planet, Saturn, was visible above the horizon. The hour is just before dawn on Tuesday, the beginning of Dante’s third day at the antipodes. For an earlier Dantean reference to the coldness of Saturn see Convivio II.xiii.25. [return to English / Italian]
4–6. The early commentators who deal with the problems encountered here are in fairly close accord. Beginning with Benvenuto da Imola they indicate the following: geomancers are diviners who create charts based on random points on the earth’s surface and drawn in the sand (and later copied onto paper or in sand on a tabletop) that can be linked in such a way, by joining various of these points with lines, to create a number of figures (Daniello [1568], following Landino, names sixteen of these). The facts behind the passage seem to be pretty much as Grandgent (1909) said: “ ‘Geomancers’ foretold the future by means of figures constructed on points that were distributed by chance. Their specialty was the selection of favorable spots for burial. They were the first in Europe to use the compass. One of their figures, called fortuna major, or ‘greater fortune,’ resembled a combination of the last stars of Aquarius and the first of Pisces. As these constellations immediately precede Aries, in which the sun is from March 21 to April 21, the figure in question can be seen in the east shortly before sunrise at that season.” The name geomancer reflects the fact that such an adept draws his figures in the sand (or earth—Greek ge) and that he is a diviner (Greek mantis). The configuration known as Fortuna maior is illustrated by Benvenuto and others as shown here:
Whatever the precise nature of the practices of geomancers, it seems clear that Dante has not taken six lines to indicate that the time was shortly before dawn without purpose. Surely the unpleasant and unsavory connotations of coldness and of divination (we remember the treatment of diviners in Inferno XX) color our reception of the dream that shortly follows. We should also remember that this dream occurs on the terrace of Sloth, thus suggesting that it may reflect Dante’s own former tardiness in seeking the good. Insofar as that affliction also encouraged his involvement in cupidity, the dream may also look back to some sort of misdirected love. [return to English / Italian]
7–9. This secon
d purgatorial dream is at least as difficult to interpret as the first (see note to Purg. IX.19). For a brief and cogent review of classical, scriptural, patristic, and scholastic views of the nature of dreams see Armour (Armo.1990.1), pp. 13–16.
Small seas of ink have been poured out in the quest for the source and meaning of this unpleasant woman. The far from convincing results previously obtained probably should warn anyone against advancing an opinion. On the other hand, it seems to some that the problem is easier to understand than are the attempts to solve it. The poem itself, in the words of Virgil, tells us precisely who the stammering woman is: she represents the conjoined sins of excessive love, avarice, gluttony, lust—the sins of the flesh or, in the language of Dante’s first cantica, the sins of incontinence. (See Virgil’s words at vv. 58–59: “You saw … that ancient witch / who alone is purged with tears above us here.”) Dante’s dream, nonetheless, must surely also have specific meaning for him. If the woman is the object of his affection, she must have particular reference to lust, since the poem nowhere offers any indication that Dante considered himself ever to have been avaricious (or prodigal, for that matter) or gluttonous. The “good that fails to make men happy” (Purg. XVII.133), in Dante’s case, must then nearly certainly be understood as involving wrongful sexual desire.
Consideration of the femmina balba (stammering woman) has caused readers to seek out some fairly recondite sources. For a general analysis of this passage see Cervigni (Cerv.1986.1), pp. 123–35.
What has rarely been noted in modern commentaries (but see Mattalia [1960] and, citing him, Giacalone [1968]) is the fact that balbus is the contrary of planus, the word that describes Beatrice’s speech in Inferno II.56 (see the note to Inf. II.56–57). Cf. the entry balbus in Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary, where this view is confirmed. [return to English / Italian]
10–15. The woman, we learn from the preceding tercet, stammers, is crooked in her glance as well as in her extremities, and sickly in her complexion. That is her natural condition. Dante, in the logic of the dream, redresses each of these sets of flaws, making her speech fluent, straightening her limbs, and making her facial complexion the color that love desires to find in a woman (commentators debate whether this is red or white, but only since the time of Tommaseo [the early commentators do not treat the question]); Tommaseo (1837) opts for the darker hue (purple, red); Bianchi, citing Vita nuova XXXVI.1, where the “color of love” is the pallor Dante finds in the donna gentile, the woman who replaces dead Beatrice in his affections, chooses the lighter: white. While the commentators remain divided, opting for a shade of red, a whiteness, or a combination of the two (all of which may be found in the lengthy tradition of the “colors of love,” at least from Ovid onward), the context of Vita nuova, which sponsors pallor as the “color of love,” supports only the second possibility. [return to English / Italian]
16–18. That Dante’s glance has transformed her may further suggest that the song she sings is, in some sense, of his composition also, as was the tempting song sung by Casella (Purg. II.112), the second canzone included in Dante’s Convivio, addressed to the donna gentile (and not to Beatrice).
For the view that the femmina balba reflects not only the potentially various flesh-and-blood ladies of Dante’s sexual transgressions but also the donna gentile of Convivio, see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 136–44, 162–63. It seems more likely that Dante here means to refer to the first and carnal lady for whom he betrayed Beatrice, the lady of the last section of Vita nuova, the lady who, he later claimed, was only an allegory for the unchallengeably virtuous Lady Philosophy. Thus the main thrust of his self-correction is aimed at the straying recorded in the earlier work; but, naturally enough, it would also hold in contempt that later allegorized lady as well, also presented as an “enemy” of Beatrice in the first three treatises of Convivio. Both move the lover from affection for his true beloved in service of one far less worthy. [return to English / Italian]
20–21. The phrasing that expresses the Siren’s power over men may put us in mind of the condition of Dante in the opening verses of the poem, when he, nel mezzo del cammin, was off his course and resembled a sailor who had nearly drowned. Does he now see himself as having been seduced by a “siren”? Insofar as the she-wolf represents the sins of Incontinence, and thus, for Dante, lust (see note to Inf. I.32–54), the essential reason for his having lost the true way would now seem to be predominantly related to his sexual affections. [return to English / Italian]
22–24. A tormented tercet: what does vago mean? to whom or what does it refer? who is the serena who claims so to have held Ulysses’ attention? As Barbi (Barb.1934.1), p. 228, maintained, in this poem the adjective vago always (it is used thirteen other times) means bramoso (desirous of) and is, as here, used with the genitive (cf. Purg. XXVIII.1). Thus, while the commentators are divided roughly evenly, with more early ones opting for vago as modifying cammin (and meaning “wandering, indirect”), and more modern ones, beginning with Torraca (1905), believing that it modifies Ulysses (and means “eager”), one is more likely to be convinced, as was Mezzadroli (Mezz.1990.1), p. 29, that the context and Dante’s general practice allow us to resolve the first two questions as did Barbi (this woman drew Ulysses from the journey he was so eager to pursue). But what of this “Siren” who so beguiled Ulysses? Commentators have at times forgotten that Dante did not know Homer’s account (Odyssey XII.39–200) of Ulysses’ escape from the Sirens’ seductive wiles. We should probably understand, following Moore (Moor.1896.1) that, from Cicero’s De finibus V.xviii.48–49, Dante decided that Ulysses had indeed been tempted by the Sirens. In any case, that is how he has the Siren portray Ulysses, and he offers no textual support for any other view. For that matter, in Beatrice’s later opinion, Dante himself is seen in exactly the same light, as yielding to the temptation of the Sirens when he withdrew his attention from her in order to fall under the spell of another lady or ladies (Purg. XXXI.43–48). [return to English / Italian]
26–27. Attempting to identify this lady, Fedele Romani (Roma.1902.1), pp. 15–18, one hundred years ago opted for Beatrice, but has had few followers.
Among more recent proponents of Beatrice’s candidacy see Poletto (1894), who clearly prefers her as best fitting what happens in the poem, while ultimately not being quite certain, and Giacalone (1968), who offers the fullest and best defense of Beatrice as being the lady in question. [return to English / Italian]
28–30. If this is Beatrice, then it is hardly surprising that she would recognize Virgil, in the dreamer’s estimation, since he knows from what he was told in Inferno II.53 that Beatrice came to Virgil in Limbo. And as for the identity of the lady here, characterized as being “onesta” (virtuous), it is probably worth remembering that Beatrice is later compared to a “donna onesta” (chaste lady) in Paradiso XXVII.31. [return to English / Italian]
31–33. What is the subject of the verb prendea (seized)? Some have argued that it is the holy lady. A sense of grammatical structure indicates, instead, that it is Virgil, subject of the previous verb (venìa [came forward]) that is in parallel with it. Further, if the lady indeed represents Beatrice, it would be highly unlikely that she would do the dirty work herself. Just as she, in Inferno II, called on Virgil to make Dante aware of the foulness of the sins punished in hell, so now she stands to one side while Virgil reveals the noxious nature of her rival, the femmina balba.
The stench that arises from the naked belly of the femmina has, according to Hollander (Holl.1983.3), pp. 84–86, a familiar source, not one that must be sought in out-of-the-way medieval treatises, but in Virgil’s description of the Harpies in Aeneid III.216–218: “virginei volucrum vultus, foedissima ventris / proluvies, uncaeque manus, et pallida semper / ora fame” (maidenly of countenance, yet winged; most foul the discharge of their bellies; their hands taloned; their faces always pale with hunger). The particular similarity of the stinking bellies of Dante’s Siren and Virgil’s Harpies is surely striking. A further s
imilarity lies in the purpose both creatures have in the works that contain them, which is to draw the hero away from his task, whether from proceeding to Italy or from pursuing Beatrice to a destination in Christ. In this sense both are counselors of despair. In Dante’s case, it is his duty to confess that he himself had created, out of what should have been repulsive, what he came to worship; out of a Harpy he had formed a Siren. Unlike Ulysses’ Siren, Dante’s femme fatale is not even beautiful to begin with. It is no wonder that she will be brought back into play in his worst moment of guilt in the entire poem when he is censured by Beatrice in Purgatorio XXXI.43–48, warning him not to be lured by the “Sirens” ever again. [return to English / Italian]
