The Inferno

by Dante

  INFERNO XXXI

  1–6. The reader—at least on a second reading—may admire Dante’s insistence on his authorial freedom in not marking the border between Malebolge and the ninth Circle at the canto’s edge. Instead, with another classical simile (and Momigliano notes the large numbers of classical allusions sprinkled through Cantos XXVIII–XXXI), he delays the transition until v. 7.

  Virgil’s rebuke in Canto XXX.130–132 had both caused Dante embarrassment and supplied the antidote: his blush of shame (which reassured Virgil of his charge’s moral development). The most likely source for Dante’s reference to the lance of Achilles, which had the magical property of curing with a second touch the very wound that it had caused, is Ovid, Remedia Amoris I.43–44: “The Pelian spear [in Dante’s understanding, the spear of Peleus?] that once had wounded his enemy, the son of Hercules [Telephus], also brought comfort to the wound,” a tale presented as being of somewhat dubious provenance, as another one of those pagan yarns (“so I have heard it told”). For some of the problems associated with this text see Singleton’s commentary. Ovid in fact refers to the spear given by Chiron, the centaur (see Inf. XII.71), who lived on Mt. Pelion, to Achilles himself. At least one other medieval poet before Dante, Bernard de Ventadour, had referred to the weapon as belonging first to Peleus. Dante knew that Peleus was the father of Achilles, from, if nowhere else, Statius’s Achilleid (I.90). [return to English / Italian]

  7–13. The departure from Malebolge and arrival in the penumbral murk of the last bolgia is anything but dramatic. Here nothing is distinct until Dante hears a horn-blast. We shall eventually learn that this is sounded by Nimrod (v. 77). [return to English / Italian]

  16–18. The reference to the Chanson de Roland, a text that, Cecchetti reminds us, Dante knew in a form probably most unlike anything we read today (Cecc.1990.1, p. 409), is the reader’s first sure sign that we are in the realm of treachery, not mere “simple fraud.” As Scott points out (Scot.1985.1), pp. 29–30, for most medieval readers there was perhaps no worse betrayal than that of Ganelon (punished in the next canto, XXXII.122), whose treacherous act, in 778, was directed against Charlemagne, the future emperor (crowned in Rome on Christmas Day in 800) and future saint (canonized in 1165, exactly one hundred years before Dante’s birth); he betrayed Charlemagne’s rear guard to the Saracen invaders. Roland blew Oliphant, his horn, too late to bring back Charlemagne and his troops, miles distant, in time to save his part of the army, all of whom were slaughtered at Roncesvalles by the Saracens. Reminded of that blast, we know we are among the treacherous.

  The parallels set up by the scene are interesting. If Nimrod plays the role of Roland, his horn-blast is timely enough to prevent the entrance of the “invaders,” Dante and Virgil, but equally ineffectual. There is an “emperor” in this scene, too, “lo ’mperador del doloroso regno” (the emperor of the woeful kingdom), Satan (XXXIV.28). And Nimrod’s blast is meant to warn the Satanic forces of the advent of the enemy, as Roland’s was. Who is the Ganelon of the scene? Antaeus, who will “betray” his lord by helping Dante and Virgil descend into Satan’s stronghold. If all these inverse parallels work, we have to add another: Dante and Virgil are the Saracens in this series of analogies by contrary. [return to English / Italian]

  19–27. Dante’s confusion, as he peers through the mist, causes him to take giants for towers. For the medieval works on optics that lie behind the description of Dante’s misperceptions here, see Dronke (Dron.1986.1), p. 36. [return to English / Italian]

  28–33. Virgil, as gently and reassuringly as he can, prepares Dante to behold the giants. As the guardians of this zone of hell, as the most proximate servants of Satan, as it were, the giants are seen to represent the sin of pride. That is how Pietro di Dante saw them centuries ago: “Gigantes figurative pro superbis accipiuntur” (The giants are to be figuratively understood as those who are prideful). [return to English / Italian]

  34–39. The second simile of the canto is without classical decoration. It involves improving sight, whether because a mist gradually lifts or because a walker gets closer to the indistinct object he examines from afar. [return to English / Italian]

  40–45. The third simile compares the looming giants with the towers of the fortified town, Monteriggione, a Sienese outpost situated on the road between Florence and Siena. In the thirteenth century its defensive walls were supplemented by fourteen towers, each over sixty feet in height.

  For the attempt of the giants to overthrow the Olympian gods, referred to obliquely here, see note at vv. 94–96. [return to English / Italian]

  49–57. Dante’s meditation on the handiwork of Nature, God’s child (see Inf. XI.99–105), can only be taken seriously, by a modern reader, when one considers that, according to Genesis 6:4, once “giants walked the earth.” Nature, as implementer of God’s design, is “more cautious and more just” because she now fashions her largest creatures without intelligence, thus better protecting humans. [return to English / Italian]

  58–66. The anatomy of the giants, visible only above their waists, since the bank forms a sort of apron, or “fig leaf” (perizoma—see the word in Gen. 3:7) for them, is described from the head down, to their shoulders (“where men make fast their cloaks”), to their waists. The giant’s head, which resembles the bronze pinecone Dante might well have seen in Rome in 1301 in the Vatican, is about eleven feet in height. Three Frieslanders, reputed to be among the tallest of men, standing on one another’s shoulders, would have reached merely from the bank to the bottom of his locks, some twenty-two feet, if we allow the topmost Frieslander to reach up with an arm toward that hair. This leaves a foot or two of neck unmeasured. Further, Dante himself, measuring by eye, thinks that the distance from the bank to the giant’s shoulders is some thirty spans (a span equals the space covered by a hand spread open), also some twenty-two feet. Dante indicates that the giant is about thirty-five feet tall measured from the waist, his midpoint, and thus some seventy feet in all. One senses his amusement at the reader who will do this calculation. [return to English / Italian]

  67. The garbled speech that issues from Nimrod’s mouth has caused a veritable orgy of interpretive enthusiasm. (The reader should be aware that we are not at all sure about what these words looked like when they left Dante’s pen; as nonsense, they may have caused more scribal confusion than others. Hence, any attempt to “construe” them should be extremely cautious, which has certainly not been the case.) Dante has variously been assumed to have known more Aramaic or Arabic or Hebrew than he likely could have, and to have deployed this arcane knowledge in creating a meaningful phrase. For a review of various attempts to make these words “make sense,” with bibliography, see Ettore Caccia, “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi,” ED, vol. 4, 1973. And see the note to Inferno VII.1, where Plutus also speaks five garbled words. While it is nearly certainly true that we are not meant to be able to understand Nimrod’s words (that is the point Virgil makes, after all), it is nonetheless likely that they, like those of Plutus, should be seen as corrupted versions of words that do make sense. “Raphel” can hardly fail to remind us of the name of the archangel Raphael, “maì” seems a version of the Italian word for “ever” (or “never”), “amècche” could be a series of simple words (a me che: “to,” “me,” “that”), “zabì” sounds like a slide into dialectical speech, and “almi” is perfectly good Italian for “holy,” “divine.” The point is not that these words make any sense; it is rather that they do not. Like Plutus’s outburst, they are meant to be understood as corrupted speech. And, as was true in that case, they are intended to keep these intruders out of the place this guardian has been posted to guard. See Chiari (Chia.1967.1), p. 1107, who argues that Nimrod’s cry is the product of anger and menace common to all infernal guardians.

  These five words may refer to St. Paul’s desire that the Corinthians speak five words with understanding rather than ten thousand in tongues (I Cor. 14:19), as was first noted by Pézard (Peza.1958.1), p. 59; he was
supported by one commentator, Giacalone, in 1968, and then by Kleinhenz (Klei.1974.1), p. 283n. Hollander (Holl.1992.1) attempts to take this ‘program’ into passages in Purgatorio and Paradiso.

  For the importance to Dante of St. Paul, who does not appear as a personage in the Commedia, see Angelo Penna and Giovanni Fallani, “Paolo, santo,” ED, vol. 4, 1973; Giorgio Petrocchi (Petr.1988.1). [return to English / Italian]

  69. That Dante refers to this fallen speech as “psalms” (salmi), even negatively, reminds the reader that Nimrod’s words reflect the divine origin of language, if we hear it now in its postlapsarian condition. [return to English / Italian]

  70–81. Virgil’s stinging remarks to Nimrod (which are in fact quite amusing) have drawn puzzled responses from some commentators. Why does Virgil address Nimrod, since the giant cannot understand him? Or are his words meant only for Dante? Some complain that it is like speaking to an animal for him to speak to this creature. Precisely so. And we humans do this all the time. It matters not at all that Nimrod cannot understand. The reader can.

  Virgil treats Nimrod like a drunk at a New Year’s Eve party, telling him to give over attempts at speech and content himself with blowing his horn. Referring to the giant’s rage, he underlines the oppositional intent of his outburst; calling him “creature of confusion” (anima confusa), he probably alludes to the “confusion of tongues” that followed in the wake of the building of the Tower of Babel. Before dismissing Nimrod as unworthy of further speech, Virgil makes this association clear. In Genesis, Nimrod was not a giant, but “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (10:9). It is probably to St. Augustine, who mentions him three times in De civitate Dei XVI as a giant, that we owe Dante’s decision to do so as well. The building of the tower and the resultant “confusion” of language (Gen. 11:1–9) was, for Dante, one of the defining moments in the history of human language, the “linguistic fall” described there paralleling the fall of Adam and Eve. See Arno Borst (Bors.1957.1), vol. 2, pp. 869–75, for Dante’s place in the history of responses to the building of the tower.

  Nimrod will be referred to by name twice more in the poem (Purg. XII.34; Par. XXVI.126), so that he is mentioned once in each cantica. For this phenomenon, words that appear a single time in each cantica, see Hollander (Holl.1988.3), pp. 108–10. [return to English / Italian]

  84–90. The second of the three giants whom we see in this canto (we shall hear of three others) will be identified shortly (v. 94) as Ephialtes. Unlike Nimrod, too stupid to be dangerous, this one, bigger still and far more fierce, is capable of the harm that the poet feared in vv. 55–57. [return to English / Italian]

  91–96. Ephialtes was one of the giants who attempted, by piling Pelion on Ossa, to scale Olympus and overthrow the gods. He and his fellow rebels were killed by Jove at Phlegra (Inf. XIV.58). [return to English / Italian]

  97–105. Dante wants to see Briareus because, we suppose, he has read about him in the Aeneid (X.565–567); he has a hundred arms and hands and breathes fire from fifty mouths and breasts. It is important to note that Virgil himself apologizes for this account: dicunt, he says, “or so they say,” the same tactic that Dante has used when warning us against the excesses of pagan mythmaking when he imports it to his own poem (see Inf. XXIX.63; XXXI.4). Dante, however, wants to have some fun at his fellow poet’s expense. Briareus, Virgil explains (like a host who does not want to produce a particularly embarrassing guest at a party), is way up ahead there, and he looks just like Ephialtes, anyway. What Dante has made his auctor do is to apologize for including such unbelievable rot in the divine Aeneid, while allowing Virgil to escape the discomfort of actually having to gaze upon the “normal,” Dantean version of a proper giant, human in everything but his size. Most commentators do not perceive the humor of this moment. However, for a sense of Dante’s playfulness here, see Andreoli in 1856 and Trucchi in 1936.

  Not only is Antaeus a “normal” giant (we see what Dante has gotten us to assent to by overruling “excessive” gigantism—an acceptance of “normal” gigantism), but he is a relatively friendly one, unfettered, we assume, because he did not fight against the gods at Phlegra. The son of Neptune and Gea, Earth, Antaeus was invincible in combat so long as he remained in contact with earth. Hercules, discovering this, was able to hold him free from the earth and kill him, crushing him in his hands. On Dante’s treatment of Antaeus, see Rabuse (Rabu.1961.1). [return to English / Italian]

  108. Ephialtes is angry, either because he thinks Virgil and Dante will have more success with Antaeus or because Virgil has said that Briareus looks even meaner than he. [return to English / Italian]

  113–114. The size of Antaeus’s upper body, not including his head, is seven ells, about twenty-two feet, thus roughly the same as Nimrod’s. [return to English / Italian]

  115–124. Virgil begins by referring to the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C., where Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal (revenge for the Battle of Cannae in 216—see Inf. XXVIII.9–11), thus successfully concluding the second Punic War, which had begun so badly. Needless to say, this (for Dante and any Roman-minded reader) great victory is hardly of a comparable magnitude to that of a giant capturing a lot of lions. Thus the reference to Zama offers a backhanded compliment to Antaeus, who killed his lions in the same place that Scipio defeated Hannibal.

  Virgil finds himself in a difficult situation. As was not the case with Ulysses, when Virgil could boast that he had written of his exploits (even if not very favorably, he had at least written of the Greek hero—see Inf. XXVI.80–82), he has not written about Antaeus at all. To make matters worse, he did once mention a certain Antaeus, a soldier in Turnus’s ranks, mowed down by Aeneas in his Achilles-like battlefield fury in Aeneid X.561. And, still worse, this mention of an Antaeus who is merely a walk-on corpse in Virgil’s poem precedes by only four lines Virgil’s mention of Briareus (see note to vv. 97–105). And so here is a poet who has, intrinsically at least, insulted the giant whom he now wants to cajole. What is he to do? What he does is borrow from Lucan (of course only we know that he is accomplishing this chronologically impossible feat) in order to praise Antaeus. It was Lucan, not Virgil, who told the tale of Antaeus the lion-killer (Phars. IV.601–602), and it was Lucan, not Virgil, who explicitly compared Antaeus favorably to Briareus, not to mention Typhon and Tityus (the two other giants of whom we are about to hear at v. 124). See Pharsalia IV.595–597. Gea had more reason to boast of this gigantic son, Antaeus, than of the others, Typhon, or Tityus, or fierce Briareus; and she was merciful to the gods when she did not set loose Antaeus on the field at Phlegra. (This detail offers the matter for Virgil’s second instance of the greatness of Antaeus.) It can hardly be coincidental that all four of the giants present in Virgil’s speech here are also together in Lucan’s text. And so Virgil’s two gestures toward Antaeus are both taken from Lucan. It is an extraordinarily amusing moment; one can imagine how Dante smiled as he composed it. Nonetheless, many of his commentators vehemently deny that this passage is ironic. It is difficult to see with what justice they do so. For what has Virgil really said to Antaeus? “You killed a lot of lions right near the place where Rome won one of its greatest military victories; you didn’t fight at the battle in which your brothers were killed by the gods.” [return to English / Italian]

  125–132. Virgil’s captatio benevolentiae has not been successful. Antaeus still needs persuading. Dante, Virgil tells him, can do what he didn’t do: make Antaeus famous. Perhaps Antaeus was a better reader of classical texts than some imagine; his lip was still curled with disdain after Virgil’s praise had ended. Fame is the spur; Antaeus bends and grasps Virgil, in a benevolent replay of his own death scene, when Hercules held him in his hands. [return to English / Italian]

  136–141. The fourth and last simile of the canto refers to one of two towers (the shorter one, in fact, but the one that “leans” the most) built in Bologna in 1109 and 1110. Towers and giants have pride in common, and so the comparison is not without its moral reasons. Its visual
reasons are indisputably stunning, a tower that seems to be falling because a cloud is passing over it. [return to English / Italian]

  142–143. For the tradition of hell as a devouring mouth, reflected in these verses, see Sonia Gentili (Gent.1997.1), pp. 177–82. And for a larger, more speculative, view, one that holds that hell is programmatically modeled on the shape of the human body (with the last Circle as the anus), see Durling (Durl.1981.1)

  There has been much debate as to where the giants stand in relation to the floor of Hell. Are their feet on the floor itself or do they stand on a ledge above it? See the next canto, vv. 16–18 and the note thereto. [return to English / Italian]

  144–145. No one in hell sticks around after work, neither angelic messenger (Inf. IX.100–103) nor cooperative monster (Inf. XVII.133–136).

  Guiniforto, in his comment to this passage, suggests that Dante must have had a small boat in mind, the mast of which may be raised very quickly.

  An entire canto has been devoted to a transition from one circle to the next. We realize, once all the exuberant poetic play has stopped, that we are on the lowest point in Dante’s universe, the floor of hell. From here, everywhere is up. [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XXXII

  1–9. Dante apologizes for not having under his control a language rough enough to be the exact counterpart of what he must describe. For the relationship of the diction of the passage to that found in Dante’s Rime petrose, see Poletto’s commentary (1894), perhaps the first to contain this observation, now become customary. See also Blasucci (Blas.1969.1).