The Portable Dante by Dante Alighieri
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26-27. The first bolgia accommodates two classes of sinners, each filing by rapidly, but in separate directions. The Pimps are those walking toward the Pilgrim and his guide; the Seducers go in the same direction with them.
28-33. Dante compares the movement of the sinners in the first bolgia to that of the many pilgrims who, having come to Rome for the Jubilee in 1300, were herded across the bridge, half going toward the Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s and the other half going toward Monte Giordano (“the mount, ” 33), a small knoll on the opposite side of the Tiber River.
they fixed it so on one side all were looking at the castle, and were walking to St. Peter’s; on the other, they were moving toward the mount.
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On both sides, up along the deadly rock, I saw horned devils with enormous whips lashing the backs of shades with cruel delight.
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Ah, how they made them skip and lift their heels at the very first crack of the whip! Not one of them dared pause to take a second or a third!
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As I walked on my eyes met with the glance of one down there; I murmured to myself: “I know this face from somewhere, I am sure. ”
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And so I stopped to study him more closely; my leader also stopped, and was so kind as to allow me to retrace my steps;
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and that whipped soul thought he would hide from me by lowering his face—which did no good. I said, “O you, there, with your head bent low,
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if the features of your shade do not deceive me, you are Venedico Caccianemico, I’m sure. How did you get yourself in such a pickle?”
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“I’m not so keen on answering, ” he said, “but I feel I must; your plain talk is compelling, it makes me think of old times in the world.
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I was the one who coaxed Ghisolabelia to serve the lusty wishes of the Marquis, no matter how the sordid tale is told;
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50-57. Venedico Caccianemico, born ca. 1228, was head of the Guelphs in Bologna from 1250 to 1297; he was at various times podestá (“mayor”) of Pistoia, Modena, Imola, and Milan. He was accused, among other things, of murdering his cousin, but he is placed in this bolgia because, according to popular report, he acted as a procurer, turning his own sister, Ghisolabelia, over to the Marquis of Este (either Obizzo II or his son, Azzo VIII) to curry favor.
I’m not the only Bolognese who weeps here— hardly! This place is packed with us; in fact, there are more of us here than there are living tongues,
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between Savena and Reno, saying ‘Sipa’; I call on your own memory as witness: remember we have avaricious hearts. ”
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Just at that point a devil let him have the feel of his tailed whip and cried: “Move on, you pimp, you can’t cash in on women here!”
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I turned and hurried to rejoin my guide; we walked a few more steps and then we reached the rocky bridge that juts out from the bank.
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We had no difficulty climbing up, and turning right, along the jagged ridge, we left those shades to their eternal circlings.
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When we were where the ditch yawned wide below the ridge, to make a passage for the scourged, my guide said: “Stop and stand where you can see
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these other misbegotten souls, whose faces you could not see before, for they were moving in the same direction we were, over there. ”
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So from the ancient bridge we viewed the train that hurried toward us along the other tract— kept moving, like the first, by stinging whips.
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And the good master, without my asking him, said, “Look at that imposing one approaching, who does not shed a single tear of pain:
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what majesty he still maintains down there! He is Jason, who by courage and sharp wits, fleeced the Colchians of their golden ram.
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86-96. Jason, leader of the Argonauts, had been deprived, when a child, of the throne of lolcus by his half-brother Pelias. When Jason grew up, Pelias promised him the kingdom if he could secure the golden fleece of King Aeëtes of Colchis. Jason agreed to make the attempt, and on the way to Colchis stopped at Lemnos, where he seduced and abandoned Hypsipyle (92), the daughter of the king of Lemnos. At Colchis, King Aeëtes agreed to give Jason the fleece if he would yoke two fire-breathing oxen to a plow and sow the teeth of the dragon that guarded the fleece. Medea (96), who was a sorceress and the daughter of the king, fell in love with Jason and with magic helped him fulfill her father’s conditions and obtain the fleece. The two returned to Greece where Jason married her, but later he fell in love with Creusa, daughter of Creon, king of Corinth, and deserted Medea to marry her. Medea, mad with rage, killed Creusa by sending her a poisoned coat as a wedding gift, and then murdered her own children; Jason himself died of grief.
He later journeyed through the isle of Lemnos, whose bold and heartless females, earlier, had slaughtered every male upon the island;
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there with his words of love, and loving looks, he succeeded in deceiving young Hypsipyle, who had in turn deceived the other women.
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He left her there, with child, and all alone: such sin condemns him to such punishment, and Medea, too, gets her revenge on him.
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With him go all deceivers of this type, and let this be enough to know concerning the first valley and the souls locked in its jaws. ”
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We were already where the narrow ridge begins to cross the second bank, to make it an abutment for another ditch’s arch.
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Now we could hear the shades in the next pouch whimpering, making snorting grunting sounds and sounds of blows, slapping with open palms.
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From a steaming stench below, the banks were coated with a slimy mold that stuck to them like glue, disgusting to behold and worse to smell.
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The bottom was so hollowed out of sight, we saw it only when we climbed the arch and looked down from the bridge’s highest point:
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Hypsipyle “deceived the other women” (93) of Lemnos by swearing that she had slain her father Thoas, the king, when the Lemnian women massacred all the males on that island. Instead she hid him, saving his life.
104-105. The sinners found in the excrement of the second bolgia are the Flatterers. Note the teeming nature of the language, different from that of the first bolgia, a change indicative of the sin of flattery and its punishment.
there we were, and from where I stood I saw souls in the ditch plunged into excrement that might well have been flushed from our latrines;
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my eyes were searching hard along the bottom, and I saw somebody’s head so smirched with shit, you could not tell if he were priest or layman.
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He shouted up: “Why do you feast your eyes on me more than these other dirty beasts?” And I replied: “Because, remembering well,
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I’ve seen you with your hair dry once or twice. You are Alessio Interminei from Lucca; that’s why I stare at you more than the rest. ”
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He beat his slimy forehead as he answered: “I am stuck down here by all those flatteries that rolled unceasing off my tongue up there. ”
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He finished speaking, and my guide began: “Lean out a little more, look hard down there so you can get a good look at the face
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of that repulsive and disheveled tramp scratching herself with shitty fingernails, spreading her legs while squatting up and down:
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it is Thaïs the whore, who gave this answer to her lover when he asked: ‘Am I very worthy of your thanks?’: ‘Very? Nay, incredibly so!’
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I think our eyes have had their fill of this. ”
122. The Interminei family w
133. This Thaïs is not the historical person of the same name (the most famous courtesan of all time) but a character in a play by the Roman dramatist Terence (186-159 B.C.) titled Eunuchus.
CANTO XIX
FROM THE BRIDGE above the Third Bolgia can be seen a rocky landscape below filled with holes, from each of which protrude a sinner’s legs and feet; flames dance across their soles. When the Pilgrim expresses curiosity about a particular pair of twitching legs, Virgil carries him down into the bolgia so that the Pilgrim himself may question the sinner. The legs belong to Pope Nicholas III, who astounds the Pilgrim by mistaking him for Boniface VIII, the next pope, who, as soon as he dies, will fall to the same hole, thereby pushing Nicholas farther down. He predicts that soon after Boniface, Pope Clement V will come, stuffing both himself and Boniface still deeper. To Nicholas’s rather rhetoric-filled speech the Pilgrim responds with equally high language, inveighing against the Simonists, the evil churchmen who are punished here. Virgil is much pleased with his pupil and, lifting him in an affectionate embrace, he carries him to the top of the arch above the next bolgia.
O Simon Magus! O scum that followed him! Those things of God that rightly should be wed to holiness, you, rapacious creatures,
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for the price of gold and silver, prostitute. Now, in your honor, I must sound my trumpet for here in the third pouch is where you dwell.
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We had already climbed to see this tomb, and were standing high above it on the bridge, exactly at the mid-point of the ditch.
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O Highest Wisdom, how you demonstrate your art in Heaven, on earth, and here in Hell! How justly does your power make awards!
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1-6. As related in Acts (8:9-24), Simon the magician, having observed the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles John and Peter, desired to purchase this power for himself, whereupon Peter harshly admonished him for even thinking that the gift of God might be bought. Derived from this sorcerer’s name, the word “simony” (74) refers to those offenses involving the sale or fraudulent possession of ecclesiastical offices.
I saw along the sides and on the bottom the livid-colored rock all full of holes; all were the same in size, and each was round.
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To me they seemed no wider and no deeper than those inside my lovely San Giovanni, in which the priest would stand or baptize from;
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and one of these, not many years ago, I smashed for someone who was drowning in it: let this be mankind’s picture of the truth!
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From the mouth of every hole were sticking out a single sinner’s feet, and then the legs up to the calf—the rest was stuffed inside.
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The soles of every sinner’s feet were flaming; their naked legs were twitching frenziedly— they would have broken any chain or rope.
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Just as a flame will only move along an object’s oily outer peel, so here the fire slid from heel to toe and back.
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“Who is that one, Master, that angry wretch, who is writhing more than any of his comrades, ” I asked, “the one licked by a redder flame?”
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And he to me, “If you want to be carried down along that lower bank to where he is, you can ask him who he is and why he’s here. ”
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And I, “My pleasure is what pleases you: you are my lord, you know that from your will I would not swerve. You even know my thoughts. ”
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When we reached the fourth bank, we began to turn and, keeping to the left, made our way down to the bottom of the holed and narrow ditch.
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25. Just as the Simonists’ perversion of the Church is symbolized by their “perverted” immersion in holes resembling baptismal fonts, so their “baptism” is perverted: instead of the head being moistened with water, the feet are “baptized” with oil and fire.
The good guide did not drop me from his side until he brought me to the broken rock of that one who was fretting with his shanks.
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“Whatever you are, holding your upside down, O wretched soul, stuck like a stake in ground, make a sound or something, ” I said, “if you can. ”
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I stood there like a priest who is confessing some vile assassin who, fixed in his ditch, has called him back again to put off dying.
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He cried: “Is that you, here, already, upright? Is that you here already upright, Boniface? By many years the book has lied to me!
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Are you fed up so soon with all that wealth for which you did not fear to take by guile the Lovely Lady, then tear her asunder?”
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I stood there like a person just made fun of, dumbfounded by a question for an answer, not knowing how to answer the reply.
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Then Virgil said: “Quick, hurry up and tell him: ’I’m not the one, I’m not the one you think!’ “ And I answered just the way he told me to.
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The spirit heard, and twisted both his feet, then, sighing with a grieving, tearful voice, he said: “Well then, what do you want of me?
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53. From the foreknowledge granted to the infernal shades, the speaker shows that Pope Boniface VIII, upon his death in 1303, will take his place in that very receptacle wherein he himself is now being tormented. The Pilgrim’s voice, so close at hand, has caused the sinner to believe that his successor has arrived unexpectedly before his time (three years, in fact) and, consequently, that the Divine Plan of Events, the Book of Fate (54), has lied to him.
Having obtained the abdication of Pope Celestine V, Boniface gained the support of Charles II of Nantes and thus was assured of his election to the papacy (1294). In addition to misusing the Church’s influence in his dealings with Charles, Boniface VIII freely distributed ecclesiastical offices among his family and confidants. As early as 1300 he was plotting the destruction of the Whites, the Florentine political faction to which Dante belonged.
57. The “Lovely Lady” is the Church.
If it concerns you so to learn my name that for this reason you came down the bank, know that I once was dressed in the great mantle.
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But actually I was the she-bear’s son, so greedy to advance my cubs, that wealth I pocketed in life, and here, myself.
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Beneath my head are pushed down all the others who came, sinning in simony, before me, squeezed tightly in the fissures of the rock.
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I, in my turn, shall join the rest below as soon as he comes, the one I thought you were when, all too quick, I put my question to you.
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But already my feet have baked a longer time (and I have been stuck upside-down like this) than he will stay here planted with feet aflame:
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soon after him shall come one from the West, a lawless shepherd, one whose fouler deeds make him a fitting cover for us both.
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He shall be another Jason, like the one in Maccabees: just as his king was pliant, so France’s king shall soften to this priest. ”
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67-72. Gian Gaetano degli Orsini (lit. “of the little bears, ” hence the designation “she-bear’s son” and the reference to “my cubs”) became Pope Nicholas III in 1277. As a cardinal he won renown for his integrity; however, in the short three years between ascent to the papal throne and his death he became notorious for his si-moniacal practices.
77. The man still to come is Boniface VIII. (See above, note on line 53.)
82-84. The “lawless shepherd” is Pope Clement V of Gascony, who, upon his death in 1314, will join Nicholas and Boniface in eternal torment.
85-87. Having obtained the high priesthood of the Jews by bribing King Antiochus of Syria,
I do not know, perhaps I was too bold here, but I answered him in tune with his own words: “Well, tell me now: what was the sum of money
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that holy Peter had to pay our Lord before He gave the keys into his keeping? Certainly He asked no more than ‘Follow me. ’
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Nor did Peter or the rest extort gold coins or silver from Matthias when he was picked to fill the place the evil one had lost.
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So stay stuck there, for you are rightly punished, and guard with care the money wrongly gained that made you stand courageous against Charles.
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And were it not for the reverence I have for those highest of all keys that you once held in the happy life—if this did not restrain me,
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I would use even harsher words than these, for your avarice brings grief upon the world, crushing the good, exalting the depraved.
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You shepherds it was the Evangelist had in mind when the vision came to him of her who sits upon the waters playing whore with kings:
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that one who with the seven heads was born and from her ten horns managed to draw strength so long as virtue was her bridegroom’s joy.
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You have built yourselves a God of gold and silver! How do you differ from the idolator, except he worships one, you worship hundreds?
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94-96. After the treachery and subsequent expulsion of Judas, the apostles cast lots in order to replenish their number. Thus, by the will of God, not through monetary payment, was Matthias elected to the vacated post (Acts 1:15-26).
106-111. St. John the Evangelist relates his vision of the dissolute Imperial City of Rome. To Dante, she “who sits / upon the waters” represents the Church, which has been corrupted by the simoniacal activities of many popes (the “shepherds” of the Church). The seven heads symbolize the seven Holy Sacraments; the ten horns represent the Ten Commandments.