The Portable Dante by Dante Alighieri
120
Then I saw other souls stuck in the river who had their heads and chests above the blood, and I knew the names of many who were there.
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The river’s blood began decreasing slowly until it cooked the feet and nothing more, and here we found the ford where we could cross.
126
“Just as you see the boiling river here on this side getting shallow gradually, ” the centaur said, “I would also have you know
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that on the other side the riverbed sinks deeper more and more until it reaches the deepest meeting place where tyrants moan:
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it is there that Heaven’s justice strikes its blow against Attila, known as the scourge of earth, against Pyrrhus and Sextus; and forever
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120. In 1272 during Holy Mass at the church (“in God’s keep”) in Veterbo, Guy de Montfort (one of Charles d’Anjou’s emissaries), in order to avenge his father’s death at the hands of Edward I, king of England, stabbed to death the latter’s cousin, Prince Henry, son of Richard, Earl of Cornwall. According to Giovanni Villani, the thirteenth-century chronicler, Henry’s heart was placed in “a golden cup … above a column at the head of London bridge” where it still drips blood above the Thames (Cronica VII, xxxix). The dripping blood signifies that the murder has not yet been avenged.
124-126. The sinners are sunk in the river to a degree commensurate with the gravity of their crimes; tyrants, whose crimes of violence are directed against both man and his possessions, are sunk deeper than murderers, whose crimes are against men alone. The river is at its shallowest at the point where the poets cross; from this ford, in both directions of its circle, it grows deeper.
134. Attila, king of the huns, was called the “scourge of God. ”
135. Pyrrhus is probably Pyrrhus (318-272 B.C.), king of Epirus, who fought the Romans three times between 280 and 276 B.C. before they finally defeated him.
extracts the tears the scalding blood produces from Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, whose battlefields were highways where they robbed. ”
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Then he turned round and crossed the ford again.
CANTO XIII
NO SOONER are the poets across the Phlegethon than they encounter a dense forest, from which come wails and moans, and which is presided over by the hideous harpies — half-woman, half-beast, birdlike creatures. Virgil tells his ward to break off a branch of one of the trees; when he does, the tree weeps blood and speaks. In life he was Pier Delle Vigne, chief counselor of Frederick II of Sicily; but he fell out of favor, was accused unjustly of treacherý, and was imprisoned, whereupon he killed himself. The Pilgrim is overwhelmed by pity. The sinner also explains how the souls of the suicides come to this punishment and what will happen to them after the Last judgment. Suddenly they are interrupted by the wild sounds of the hunt, and two naked figures, Lano of Siena and Giacomo da Sant’ Andrea, dash across the landscape, shouting at each other, until one of them hides himself in a thorny bush; immediately a pack of fierce, black dogs rush in, pounce on the hidden sinner, and rip his body, carrying away mouthfuls of flesh. The bush, which has been torn in the process, begins to lament. The two learn that the cries are those of a Florentine who had hanged himself in his own home.
Not yet had Nessus reached the other side when we were on our way into a forest that was not marked by any path at all.
3
Sextus is probably the younger son of Pompey the Great. After the murder of Caesar he turned to piracy, causing near famine in Rome by cutting off the grain supply from Africa. He is condemned by Lucan (Pharsalia VI, 420-422) as being unworthy of his father. A few commentators believe that Dante is referring to Sextus Tarquinius Superbus, who raped and caused the death of Lucretia, the wife of his cousin.
137-138. Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo were two highway robbers famous in Dante’s day.
No green leaves, but rather black in color, no smooth branches, but twisted and entangled, no fruit, but thorns of poison bloomed instead.
6
No thick, rough, scrubby home like this exists— not even between Cecina and Corneto— for those wild beasts that hate the run of farmlands.
9
Here the repulsive Harpies twine their nests, who drove the Trojans from the Strophades with filthy forecasts of their close disaster.
12
Wide-winged they are, with human necks and faces, their feet are clawed, their bellies fat and feathered; perched in the trees they shriek their strange laments.
15
“Before we go on farther, ” my guide began, “remember, you are in the second round and shall be till we reach the dreadful sand;
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now look around you carefully and see with your own eyes what I will not describe, for if I did, you wouldn’t believe my words. ”
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Around me wails of grief were echoing, and I saw no one there to make those sounds; bewildered by all this, I had to stop.
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I think perhaps he thought I might be thinking that all the voices coming from those stumps belonged to people hiding there from us,
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and so my teacher said, “If you break off a little branch of any of these plants, what you are thinking now will break off too. ”
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Then slowly raising up my hand a bit I snapped the tiny branch of a great thornbush, and its trunk cried: “Why are you tearing me?”
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8-9. The vast swampland known as the “Maremma toscana” lies between the towns of Cecina and Corneto, which mark its northern and southern boundaries.
And when its blood turned dark around the wound, it started saying more: “Why do you rip me? Have you no sense of pity whatsoever?
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Men were we once, now we are changed to scrub; but even if we had been souls of serpents, your hand should have shown more pity than it did. ”
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Like a green log burning at one end only, sputtering at the other, oozing sap, and hissing with the air it forces out,
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so from that splintered trunk a mixture poured of words and blood. I let the branch I held fall from my hand and stood there stiff with fear.
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“O wounded soul, ” my sage replied to him, “if he had only let himself believe what he had read in verses I once wrote,
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he never would have raised his hand against you, but the truth itself was so incredible, I urged him on to do the thing that grieves me.
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But tell him who you were; he can make amends, and will, by making bloom again your fame in the world above, where his return is sure. ”
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And the trunk: “So appealing are your lovely words, I must reply. Be not displeased if I am lured into a little conversation.
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I am that one who held both of the keys that fitted Frederick’s heart; I turned them both, locking and unlocking, with such finesse
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that I let few into his confidence. I was so faithful to my glorious office, I lost not only sleep but life itself.
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47-49. Virgil is referring to that section of the Aeneid (III, 22-43) where Aeneas breaks a branch from a shrub, which then begins to pour forth blood; at the same time a voice issues from the ground beneath the shrub where Poiydorus is buried. (See Canto XXX, 18.) That courtesan who constantly surveyed
Caesar’s household with her adulterous eyes, mankind’s undoing, the special vice of courts,
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inflamed the hearts of everyone against me, and these, inflamed, inflamed in turn Augustus, and my happy honors turned to sad laments.
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My mind, moved by scornful satisfaction, believing death would free me from all scorn, made me unjust to me, who was all just.
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By these strange roots of my own tree I swear to you that never once did I brea
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If one of you should go back to the world, restore the memory of me, who here remain cut down by the blow that Envy gave. ”
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My poet paused awhile, then said to me, “Since he is silent now, don’t lose your chance, ask him, if there is more you wish to know. ”
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“Why don’t you keep on questioning, ” I said, “and ask him, for my part, what I would ask, for I cannot, such pity chokes my heart. ”
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He began again: “That this man may fulfill generously what your words cry out for, imprisoned soul, may it please you to continue
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by telling us just how a soul gets bound into these knots, and tell us, if you know, whether any soul might someday leave his branches. ”
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At that the trunk breathed heavily, and then the breath changed to a voice that spoke these words: “Your question will be answered very briefly.
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68-72. Pier was also a renowned poet of the Sicilian School, which flourished under Frederick’s patronage and which is noted for its love of complex conceits and convoluted wordplay.
The moment that the violent soul departs the body it has torn itself away from, Minos sends it down to the seventh hole;
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it drops to the wood, not in a place allotted, but anywhere that fortune tosses it. There, like a grain of spelt, it germinates,
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soon springs into a sapling, then a wild tree; at last the Harpies, feasting on its leaves, create its pain, and for the pain an outlet.
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Like the rest, we shall return to claim our bodies, but never again to wear them—wrong it is for a man to have again what he once cast off.
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We shall drag them here and, all along the mournful forest, our bodies shall hang forever more, each one on a thorn of its own alien shade. ”
108
We were standing still attentive to the trunk, thinking perhaps it might have more to say, when we were startled by a rushing sound,
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such as the hunter hears from where he stands: first the boar, then all the chase approaching, the crash of hunting dogs and branches smashing,
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then, to the left of us appeared two shapes naked and gashed, fleeing with such rough speed they tore away with them the bushes’ branches.
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The one ahead: “Come on, come quickly, Death!” The other, who could not keep up the pace, screamed, “Lano, your legs were not so nimble
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115-121. The second group of souls punished here are the Profligates, who did violence to their earthly goods by not valuing them as they should have, just as the Suicides did not value their bodies. The “tournament of Toppo” (121) recalls the disastrous defeat of the Sienese troops at the hands of the Aretines in 1287 at a river ford near Arezzo. Lano went into this battle to die because he had squandered his fortune: as legend has it, he remained to fight rather than escape on foot (hence Giacomo’s reference to his “legs, ” 120), and was killed.
when you jousted in the tournament of Toppo!” And then, from lack of breath perhaps, he slipped into a bush and wrapped himself in thorns.
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Behind these two the wood was overrun by packs of black bitches ravenous and ready, like hunting dogs just broken from their chains;
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they sank their fangs in that poor wretch who hid, they ripped him open piece by piece, and then ran off with mouthfuls of his wretched limbs.
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Quickly my escort took me by the hand and led me over to the bush that wept its vain laments from every bleeding sore:
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“O Giacomo da Sant’ Andrea, ” it said, “what good was it for you to hide in me? What fault have I if you led an evil life?”
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My master, standing over it, inquired: “Who were you once that now through many wounds breathes a grieving sermon with your blood?”
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He answered us: “O souls who have just come in time to see this unjust mutilation that has separated me from all my leaves,
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gather them round the foot of this sad bush. I was from the city that took the Baptist in exchange for her first patron, who, for this,
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swears by his art she will have endless sorrow; and were it not that on the Arno’s bridge some vestige of his image still remains,
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143-150. The identity of this Florentine Suicide remains unknown. The “first patron” of Florence was Mars, god of war; a fragment of his statue was to be found on the Ponte Vecchio until 1333. The second patron of the city was John the Baptist (143), whose image appeared on the florin, the principal monetary unit of the time. Florence’s change of patron indicates its transformation from stronghold of martial excellence (under Mars) to one of servile money-making (under the Baptist).
those citizens who built anew the city on the ashes that Attila left behind would have accomplished such a task in vain;
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I turned my home into my hanging place. ”
CANTO XIV
THEY COME to the edge of the Wood of the Suicides, where they see before them a stretch of burning sand upon which flames rain eternally and through which a stream of boiling blood is carried in a raised channel formed of rock. There, many groups of tortured souls are on the burning sand; Virgil explains that those lying supine on the ground are the Blasphemers, those crouching are the Usurers, and those wandering aimlessly, never stopping, are the Sodomites. Representative of the blasphemers is Capaneus, who died cursing his god. The Pilgrim questions his guide about the source of the river of boiling blood; Virgil’s reply contains the most elaborate symbol in the Inferno, that of the Old Man of Crete, whose tears are the source of all the rivers in Hell.
The love we both shared for our native city moved me to gather up the scattered leaves and give them back to the voice that now had faded.
3
We reached the confines of the woods that separate the second from the third round. There I saw God’s justice in its dreadful operation.
6
Now to picture clearly these unheard-of things: we arrived to face an open stretch of flatland whose soil refused the roots of any plant;
9
151. The Florentine’s anonymity corroborates his symbolic value as a representative of his city. Like the suicides condemned to this round, the city of Florence was killing itself, in Dante’s opinion, through its internecine struggles.
the grieving forest made a wreath around it, as the sad river of blood enclosed the woods. We stopped right here, right at the border line.
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This wasteland was a dry expanse of sand, thick, burning sand, no different from the kind that Cato’s feet packed down in other times.
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O just revenge of God! how awesomely you should be feared by everyone who reads these truths that were revealed to my own eyes!
18
Many separate herds of naked souls I saw, all weeping desperately; it seemed each group had been assigned a different penalty:
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some souls were stretched out flat upon their backs, others were crouching there all tightly hunched, some wandered, never stopping, round and round.
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Far more there were of those who roamed the sand and fewer were the souls stretched out to suffer, but their tongues were looser, for the pain was greater.
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And over all that sandland, a fall of slowly raining broad flakes of fire showered steadily (a mountain snowstorm on a windless day),
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like those that Alexander saw descending on his troops while crossing India’s torrid lands: flames falling, floating solid to the ground,
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and he with all his men began to tread the sand so that the bur
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15. Cato sided with Pompey in the Roman civil war. After Pompey was defeated at Pharsalia, and when it became apparent that he was about to be captured by Caesar, he killed himself (46 B.C.). The year before his death he led a march across the desert of Libya.
22-24. The shades in this third round of the Seventh Circle are divided into three groups: the Blasphemers lie supine on the ground, the Usurers are “crouching, ” and the Sodomites wander “never stopping. ” The sand they lie on perhaps suggests the sterility of their acts.
Here too a never-ending blaze descended, kindling the sand like tinder under flint-sparks, and in this way the torment there was doubled.
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Without a moment’s rest the rhythmic dance of wretched hands went on, this side, that side, brushing away the freshly fallen flames.
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And I: “My master, you who overcome all opposition (except for those tough demons who came to meet us at the gate of Dis),
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who is that mighty one that seems unbothered by burning, stretched sullen and disdainful there, looking as if the rainfall could not tame him?”
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And that very one, who was quick to notice me inquiring of my guide about him, answered: “What I was once, alive, I still am, dead!
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Let Jupiter wear out his smith, from whom he seized in anger that sharp thunderbolt he hurled, to strike me down, my final day;
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let him wear out those others, one by one, who work the soot-black forge of Mongibello (as he shouts, ‘Help me, good Vulcan, I need your help, ’
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the way he cried that time at Phlegra’s battle), and with all his force let him hurl his bolts at me, no joy of satisfaction would I give him!”
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My guide spoke back at him with cutting force, (I never heard his voice so strong before): “O Capaneus, since your blustering pride
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44-45. The “tough demons” were the rebel angels of Canto IX who barred the travelers’ entrance to the city of Dis.