by Michael Haag
The Third Circle serves Dante to introduce prophecy, as happens elsewhere in the Inferno. The predictions are highly accurate, certainly in the short term, because although Dante has set his epic in Easter 1300 he really began writing it eight years later, when he had certain knowledge of what had come to pass. In the Third Circle, he is accosted by the shade of Ciacco (the name means ‘pig’), a fellow Florentine, of whom he asks what will transpire in ‘the divided city’, that is his own Florence. Ciacco says there will be bloodshed, set off by ‘Envy and Arrogance and Avarice’. In the event, these were the circumstances that turned Dante into an exile from his own city.
THE FOURTH CIRCLE OF HELL: AVARICE
The inhabitants of the Fourth Circle are divided into two raging mobs, each sinner among them dragging a heavy weight. One mob is comprised of moneygrubbers and the other of spendthrifts, and they are forever at war, smashing against the opposing mob with their weights, dragging them apart, then clashing once again.
In life they could think of nothing but money, hoarding it or spending it to excess, and so in these clashes the one excess serves to punish the other. But ultimately their actions are meaningless, as they were in life; the weights are dead weights, burdensome impedimenta. Neither are the shades of the dead recognisable; the features of their souls have been destroyed by their avarice.
THE FIFTH CIRCLE OF HELL: WRATH
It has gone past Good Friday midnight as Virgil and Dante pass from the Fourth into the Fifth Circle of Hell, its boundary marked by a black stream falling over rocks and forming the stinking swamp of Styx. Across the marsh the poets see the countless souls of the wrathful who are forever condemned to attack one another in the slime. Bubbles rising from the ooze indicate the presence down below of the sullen, those who in life refused to acknowledge the light of Divine Illumination and now forever exhale the words of a grotesque hymn.
As the poets are ferried across the marsh of Styx their boat is approached by a swimming soul whom Dante recognises: ‘I know thee well, even thus in filth disguised’. His name is Filippo Argenti, about whom we know nothing other than Boccaccio’s remark that he was a Florentine of considerable bulk well known for his extreme waywardness and short temper. He was a member of the Adimari family who opposed Dante’s recall from exile and confiscated his property, and so here we see Dante settling a personal score. When Argenti tries to haul himself into the boat, Dante shoves him back into the marsh, and then takes delight in watching the other souls in the swamp tear ‘the moody Florentine’ to pieces before Argenti turns upon himself with his own ‘avenging fangs’.
THE SIXTH CIRCLE OF HELL: HERESY
The boat now approaches the flaming towers of Dis, the metropolis of Hell. The towers are described as the minarets of mosques (meschite in Italian). Dante says to Virgil ‘Master, I can see its mosques clearly glowing red within the ramparts as if they had just been drawn from the fire’, and Virgil replies ‘Here in inner Hell, the eternal fire that burns inside them makes them red.’
As Virgil remarks, beyond Dis is the abyss with its deepest circles of inner Hell. From there on we encounter the souls of malicious sinners, those who deliberately turned to violence, fraud and betrayal. The mosques of Dis stand as symbols of entrenched evil, of denizens beyond the grace of Christian salvation.
But the poets’ entrance to the city is blocked by fallen angels, rebels against God and thus the ultimate in evil. Only when a heavenly messenger strides through Hell and opens the gates before returning whence he came can Dante and Virgil enter Dis. They are now within the Sixth Circle, inhabited by heretics of every stripe, though in particular Dante means those who have denied the immortality of the soul.
Once within the gates the poets discover a vast cemetery with endless ranks of tombs, each with its lid lying to one side, flames issuing from within, forever burning the screaming heretics in their graves. Hearing Dante speaking and recognising him as a Tuscan, one of the damned rises from his tomb. He is Farinata degli Uberti, a leader of the Ghibellines in the wars against the Guelfs during the thirteenth century, who after his defeat was declared a heretic, and who engages Dante in talk about Florentine politics despite realising they are enemies.
The heretics’ flaming tombs in Botticelli’s illustration.
They are interrupted by another shade, Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, known for his atheistic views, and the father of Dante’s one-time friend, Guido dei Cavalcanti, leader of the Fedeli d’Amore, whom Dante implies is not the poet he used to be – Dante and Guido found themselves on opposite sides when the ruling Guelfs split into Blacks and Whites (see p.99), but Dante’s remark carries their differences well beyond that. When Cavalcanti returns to his fiery tomb, Uberti resumes talking where he left off, as though no interruption, no fires of Hell, can deflect him from his course – and he offers a prophecy, that Dante will be banished from Florence.
THE INNER CIRCLES OF HELL: SINS OF MALICE
As the poets leave the Sixth Circle they stand on a narrow ledge overlooking the inner circles of Hell where the stench rising from down below is so overpowering that they must pause. Virgil takes the opportunity to summarise for Dante the arrangement of the last three circles; first comes violence, then deeper still, because the sin is worse, fraud, and finally at the greatest depth that special kind of fraud that is betrayal. These are the sins of malice and cause the greatest offence to God.
THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL: VIOLENCE
The Seventh Circle is divided into three rings, each for a different category of violence: violence to others; violence to oneself; and violence against God and nature.
Virgil and Dante make their way down a steep slope of shattered rock caused by an earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion. The slope is guarded by the Minotaur, which menaces them, but Virgil tricks him and they manage to slip by. At the bottom of the cliff is Phlegethon, the River of Blood, which marks the first ring and flows round the circle. Those who have been violent against others are boiling in its stream and any who attempt to emerge more than their punishment allows are shot with arrows by patrolling centaurs. One of the centaurs, called Nessus, carries Virgil and Dante across the shallowest part of the stream and points out to Dante along the way the shades of various conquerors, tyrants, highwaymen and assassins that are being boiled. Immersed in the deepest part of the river are Alexander the Great, up to his eyelashes in blood, and with him Attila the Hun. The Minotaur and the centaurs are symbolically significant; the former is half man, half bull, and the latter are half man, half horse; in each case they are half beast, which says something about those sinners condemned to this circle.
After crossing the River of Blood the poets come to the Wood of the Suicides, whose souls have transformed into withered and poisonous trees whose leaves are eaten by ravenous harpies. Again there is symbolism in the harpies, who have the bodies and claws of birds and the faces of women pale with hunger; they represent the will to self-destruction. Only as their limbs bleed from being picked at by the harpies are the souls in the trees able to speak; they who have destroyed their bodies can speak only as they are being destroyed. Also in this second ring are the souls of the profligates, those who have destroyed their lives by destroying the resources – money and property – by which life is maintained; they are forever chased and mauled by vicious dogs.
Pressing on to the third ring, Dante and Virgil arrive at a great desert of burning sand where a fiery rain falls forever from the sky. Depending on the nature of their offence against God, those condemned here are exposed to a greater or lesser suffering. The blasphemers suffer most of all, for they are stretched supine upon the sand; the sodomites run in endless circles; and the usurers seek what comfort they can by huddling in the desert. The symbolism of the landscape is evident; the desert and the burning heat represent sterility and wrath, just as usury, sodomy and blasphemy are counted as unnatural and sterile actions.
Yet for all that, it is here that Dante encounters Brunetto Latini, his former t
eacher, for whom he has the highest regard and affection as a man, a writer and a mentor. For one thing, Dante would not condemn Latini’s homosexuality.
‘If my entreaty wholly were fulfilled’,
Replied I to him, ‘not yet would you be
In banishment from human nature placed …’
And for another, Dante will always honour him for helping him to write, which allows the poet to achieve eternity through his words.
‘You taught me how a man becomes eternal;
And how much I am grateful, while I live
Behoves that in my language be discerned.’
This is one of several examples in the Divine Comedy where Dante places someone he values in Hell, but only because he is following the doctrinal requirements of the Church. Virgil is the outstanding case; Brunetto Latini is another. While Dante gives every appearance of accepting Church doctrine, the question remains whether he believed everything he wrote.
THE EIGHTH CIRCLE OF HELL: FRAUD
A steep cliff drops from the Seventh Circle to the Eighth. To make the descent, Virgil arranges that the poets should ride on the back of Geryon, a winged monster of fraud with the face of a just man but with the claws of a beast and the tail of a scorpion. The Eighth Circle of Hell is called Malebolge, which means the Evil Ditches or Pockets; there are ten of these, each called a bolgia. Arranged concentrically, and connected by radial bridges of stone, they become smaller and smaller the deeper they are within the Eighth Circle, each pocket or chasm containing a different sort of fraudster.
Bolgia One contains panderers and seducers, among them Jason of the Argonauts who gained the help of Medea for his voyage by seducing her, only to abandon her later for another woman.
Bolgia Two is inhabited by flatterers.
Bolgia Three contains those guilty of simony, that is the selling of spiritual things, whether positions or sacraments, by the Church. This is effectively what Pope Boniface VIII did in the jubilee year of 1300, when Dante witnessed first-hand the selling of indulgences by the pope. From that moment Dante saw Boniface as corruption incarnate and loathed him possibly more than any man on Earth. As Boniface was not dead at Eastertime 1300, the date that Dante’s journey into Hell takes place, he is not included here, but Dante has placed Pope Nicholas III in the third bolgia, along with two of his successors, Boniface and Clement V, whom he denounces for the same offence. Nicholas is already placed head first in a hole in the rock, his feet kicking in the air, his soles aflame; clearly, Boniface will shortly be shoved head first into Nicholas’ backside, and Clement shoved into Boniface after that.
Bolgia Four is for sorcerers, astrologers and other sorts of false prophets, their heads twisted round so that they cannot see ahead of them and are forced to walk backwards.
Bolgia Five holds corrupt politicians who are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, symbolising the dark secrecy of their wheeling and dealing.
Bolgia Six is the confine of hypocrites, who wear gilded lead cloaks and walk about listlessly, born down by the weight of their falsity. Also here is Caiaphas, the high priest of the Temple at Jerusalem who was responsible for having Jesus crucified; his fate is to be crucified to the ground and endlessly trampled upon.
Bolgia Seven is for thieves who are now chased by lizards and snakes that bite at them, and bit by bit steal their very substance and identity.
Bolgia Eight is reserved for fraudulent advisors and evil counsellors. Oddly, Ulysses is in Hell for his deception of the Trojan Horse; he tells the story of his final voyage (a complete invention by Dante) to the end of the earth where his ship founders near Mount Purgatory. This is the spot from which Dante ascends towards Paradise, whereas the unbaptised Ulysses’ ship went down, and he drowned.
Bolgia Nine is for the sowers of discord. Just as they divided others in life, so a demon hacks them apart with a sword, waits for their bodies to heal, and then hacks them apart again. Among the condemned are Mohammed, whom Dante regarded not as the founder of a new religion but as a schismatic who created an offshoot of Christianity. Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, who became the fourth caliph, is also among the sowers of discord for his role in contributing to the Sunni-Shia split in Islam.
Bolgia Ten holds alchemists, perjurers, impostors and counterfeiters among its many types of falsifiers. They are afflicted by diseases just as they were a disease on society.
THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL: BETRAYAL
As Dante and Virgil leave the Eighth Circle they approach a deep central pit where they see a circle of chained giants as though standing on guard. One of these, Antaeus, the only one unbound, lowers the poets into the depths of the pit that is the Ninth Circle of Hell. The greatest of all sinners, those who have betrayed, are condemned to eternity here, though even they are sorted into four categories and assigned to one of four concentric rounds according to the degree of their depravity.
The traitors do not burn in Hell, however; their heartless and cold-blooded sin means that they are consigned to an equally cold world, the frozen lake of Cocytus, where the graver the sin the deeper they stand encased in the ice. Gravity here is measured in medieval terms, with betrayal of the family counting for less than betrayal of the liege lord. First there is the round for those who have betrayed their families; the second is for those who have betrayed their communities; the third round is reserved for those who have committed the yet greater sin of betraying their guests; and the fourth round is for those who have betrayed their liege lords. At the very centre of all is Satan, condemned for committing the greatest betrayal of all, against God.
Round One is named Caïna, for Cain who killed his brother Abel. Those who have betrayed their kin are immersed here in ice up to their necks, allowing them some movement of their heads, which they bow against the freezing wind or to allow their tears to fall freely without sealing their eyes shut.
Round Two is called Antenora, for Antenor of Troy who according to medieval legend betrayed his city to the Greeks. Those who have betrayed their cities, their countries, their parties, are condemned to a frozen existence here. Among them are Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, one-time partners in crime, now turned viciously against each other. Having conspired together to gain control of Pisa before the battle of Campaldino against Florence (in which Dante fought in the cavalry), the two eventually fell out. Ruggieri arrested Ugolino and his four children and locked them together in the same cell, abandoned without food or water. All that is known for certain is that Ugolino and his children died, but Dante here – in the best sensationalist tradition – uses a story going round that as each child died, Ugolino ate them one by one. Dante here has produced an inversion of the central Christian mystery, the ceremony of the eucharist in which believers consume the blood and flesh of Christ. But the story has another purpose. Ugolino and Ruggieri are sharing the same hole in the ice, and one is eating the other’s brains as Dante comes along. It is Ugolino who has been making a meal of it, and Dante pauses just long enough to allow him to wipe his lips on what is left of the hair on Ruggieri’s skull before telling the story of how he ate, or maybe did not, his four children before he himself starved to death. As a metaphor for the self-destructive conflict between Blacks and Whites that was tearing Dante’s native Florence apart, the story hits powerfully home.
Botticelli’s three-headed Satan devouring Brutus, Cassius and Judas.
Round Three, Ptolomaea, is probably named after that Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who appears in 1 Maccabees in the Apocrypha, inviting Simon Maccabaeus and his two sons to a banquet and then killing them. Treachery towards guests is severely punished, and the sinners here must lie flat on their backs with only their faces above the surface of the ice so that their tears freeze on their eyes and drive the cold deep within.
Round Four, called Judecca, takes its name from Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus Christ. The sinners here are punished by being completely in the grip of the ice, body and head, unable to speak or move, and contorted
into all sorts of grotesque positions. With no conversation possible, Dante and Virgil quickly pass them by and go to the very centre of Hell.
Satan is fixed in the ice where he flaps his great wings as if to escape, but only creates the freezing wind felt throughout the Ninth Circle which more surely freezes Satan in place. In a parody of the Trinity, Satan has three faces. In each mouth he grips a sinner whom he tears apart: Judas Iscariot at the centre, and Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar, on either side.
O, what a marvel it appeared to me,
When I beheld three faces on his head!
The one in front, and that vermilion was;
Two were the others, that were joined with this
Above the middle part of either shoulder,
And they were joined together at the crest;
And the right-hand one seemed ’twixt white and yellow;
The left was such to look upon as those
Who come from where the Nile falls valley-ward.
Underneath each came forth two mighty wings,
Such as befitting were so great a bird;
Sails of the sea I never saw so large.
No feathers had they, but as of a bat
Their fashion was; and he was waving them,
So that three winds proceeded forth therefrom.
Thereby Cocytus wholly was congealed.
With six eyes did he weep, and down three chins
