Inferno (Dante)

• 1. Introduction

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  Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy, begins with a man who has lost his way. He is 35 years old and says he stands "midway in the journey of our life." The age is deliberate, because it is half of the biblical lifespan of 70. The setting is a dark wood on the night of Maundy Thursday in the year 1300, shortly before the dawn of Good Friday. The lost traveller is a fictionalised version of the poet himself, astray from the straight way of salvation. Ahead of him lies a descent through Hell, imagined as nine concentric circles of torment inside the Earth. The poem is also an allegory of the soul's journey toward God, and in this first part the soul learns to recognise sin and turn from it. Who would lead a living man into such a place, and why would he be allowed to enter? What logic decides where each soul belongs, and why do the punishments seem to mirror the crimes? And what happens to a poem about the afterlife when its author fills it with people he admired, loved and resented?

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• 2. Guides and Gates

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  A lonza, a leone and a lupa block the lost poet's path as he tries to climb a small mountain. Translators render these as a leopard or leopon, a lion and a she-wolf. The animals come from the book of Jeremiah (5:6) and stand for three kinds of sin. John Ciardi reads the she-wolf as incontinence, the lion as violence and bestiality, and the leopard as fraud and malice. The beasts drive Dante back into a lower place where the sun is silent.

  A shade then rescues him and announces that he was born in the time of Julius Caesar and lived under Augustus. He is Virgil, author of the Aeneid, a Latin epic that includes its own journey through the underworld.

  On the evening of Good Friday, Dante begins to hesitate behind his guide. Virgil answers by explaining that Beatrice, the symbol of Divine Love, has sent him. She was moved to act by the Virgin Mary, who stands for compassion, and by Saint Lucia, who stands for illuminating Grace. Rachel, symbol of the contemplative life, also appears in the heavenly scene Virgil describes. Dante still doubts his worthiness. He measures himself against Aeneas and Paul, two men who were granted passage through the realms of the afterlife.

  Above the gate of Hell runs an inscription whose best-known translation ends: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Just beyond it, anguished screams rise from the Uncommitted. These are people who took no side in life, neither for good nor for evil, and thought only of themselves. Dante recognises one who made the "great refusal," implied to be Pope Celestine V. Mixed in with them are souls who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels. They are neither in Hell nor out of it, and they linger on the shores of the Acheron. Naked, they race through mist after a wavering banner that symbolises their ever-shifting self-interest, while wasps and hornets sting them. At their feet, maggots and worms drink a stream of blood, pus and tears.

  Charon, the ferryman of the Acheron, refuses to carry Dante because he is a living man. Virgil silences him with the words "It is so willed there where is power to do / That which is willed." The wailing and blasphemy of the damned in Charon's boat contrast with the joyful singing of the blessed souls on the ferry in the Purgatorio. The crossing itself is never described, because Dante faints and wakes on the far bank. It will not be the last time he collapses.

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• 3. Blueprint of Hell

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  Virgil recalls the pages where "the Ethics tells of three / Conditions contrary to Heaven's will and rule / Incontinence, vice, and brute bestiality." Here he refers to Aristotle, whose ideas give Dante's Hell its structure. Dante bends them with Christian symbolism, exceptions and misreadings of Aristotle's text. A further layer comes from Cicero's De Officiis, which divided sins between violence and fraud. By merging Cicero's violence with Aristotle's bestiality, and his fraud with malice or vice, Dante arrived at three major categories of sin.

  The weakest sinners are those of incontinence, who failed to master their appetites, desires and natural urges. Aristotle's Ethics ranks incontinence as less condemnable than malice or bestiality. So these souls occupy four circles of Upper Hell, Circles 2-5, and suffer lighter torments. Violence and fraud are punished deeper down, inside the walls of the City of Dis.

  As a Christian, Dante adds Circle 1, Limbo, to Upper Hell, and Circle 6, Heresy, to Lower Hell. That makes nine circles. Counting the Vestibule of the Futile gives ten main divisions, and the same "9+1=10" pattern recurs in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. Lower Hell divides further: Circle 7 has three rings, Circle 8 has ten ditches called bolge, and Circle 9 has four regions. In all, Hell holds 24 divisions.

  Each punishment is a contrapasso, a symbolic form of poetic justice. Fortune-tellers, for example, must walk forward with their heads on backward, unable to see what lies ahead, because they tried to see the future by forbidden means. One reading holds that such a fate is "not merely a form of divine revenge, but rather the fulfilment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul during his or her life." Those who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before dying are not here at all. They labour in Purgatory instead, so Hell is reserved for people who tried to justify their sins and never repented.

  Dorothy L. Sayers describes fraud as the "abuse of the specifically human faculty of reason." That judgment places the cleverest sinners in the deepest pits.

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• 4. Virtuous Pagans

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  Dorothy L. Sayers sums up the First Circle with a single contrast: those in it "could not, that is, choose Christ; they could, and did, choose human virtue, and for that they have their reward." This is Limbo, the home of the unbaptised and the virtuous pagans, and Virgil himself lives here. They are not sinful enough for damnation, yet they did not accept Christ. The source compares Limbo to the Asphodel Meadows, a deficient form of Heaven where the guiltless damned lack any hope of something greater.

  When Dante asks whether anyone has ever left, Virgil tells of a Mighty One who descended into Limbo. He took Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham and David into his arms and carried them to Heaven as the first human souls saved. This event, the Harrowing of Hell, supposedly occurred around AD 33 or 34.

  Four poets greet the travellers: Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. They welcome Dante into their company and call him "sixth in that high company." Beyond them stands a great castle, home of the wisest men of antiquity, ringed by seven gates and a flowing brook. Past the gates lies an exquisite green meadow.

  The residents there read like a roll call of the ancient world. Hector and Aeneas are present, along with Julius Caesar "in his armor, falcon-eyed." So are Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, Lucretia, and Cornelia Africana. Dante also sees Saladin, remembered as a Muslim military leader who fought the Crusaders and was known for generous and merciful conduct.

  A second group gathers around Aristotle, with Socrates and Plato at his side. Euclid is there, and so are Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Galen. Dante also finds Avicenna, a Persian polymath, and Averroes, a medieval Andalusian polymath known for his commentaries on Aristotle.

  Dante implies that all virtuous non-Christians end up here, yet the poem undercuts this. He later meets Cato of Utica and Statius in Purgatory, and Trajan and Ripheus in Heaven. In Purgatorio XXII, Virgil names still more residents of Limbo whom the Inferno never mentions.

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• 5. Appetites Unchained

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  Minos, a serpentine judge, waits at the entrance to the Second Circle and wraps his tail around himself to pass sentence. The number of coils matches the circle to which each soul must go. Every soul must first confess all its sins to him, so each one speaks and sanctions its own ranking among the condemned. Dante is spared this ordeal when Virgil rebukes Minos. The Second Circle is described as "a part where no thing gleams."

  The lustful are battered without rest by the winds of a violent storm, a picture of how lust blows aimlessly. Because lust involves mutual indulgence and is not wholly self-centred, Dante treats it as the least heinous sin. Its punishment is the mildest within Hell proper. Many rulers are among the lustful, including Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy. Paris, Achilles and Tristan are also there, which is why the fifth canto has been called the "canto of the queens."

  Francesca da Rimini speaks most memorably. She married the deformed Giovanni Malatesta, known as Gianciotto, for political purposes. She then fell in love with his younger brother Paolo. Sometime between 1283 and 1286, Giovanni surprised the pair in her bedroom and stabbed them both to death. Francesca says they yielded to their love while reading of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Old French romance Lancelot du Lac. Her verdict is "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse." The word galeotto means pander, and it is also the Italian name for Gallehaut, the go-between of Lancelot and Guinevere. Giovanni Boccaccio took the name Prencipe Galeotto for the alternative title of The Decameron.

  Francesca never fully confesses. She casts herself as a passive party in the affair, the very behaviour that put her in this circle. The English poet John Keats, in his sonnet "On a Dream," imagines the point of view of Paolo that Dante leaves unwritten.

  In the Third Circle, the gluttonous lie in freezing slush under a ceaseless, foul rain, which the poem calls "a great storm of putrefaction." Cerberus, described as il gran vermo, "the great worm," mauls them with his claws as they howl like dogs. Virgil gets past the beast by filling its three mouths with mud. Sayers notes that the gluttons grovel alone, sightless and heedless of their neighbours, so the sin that began as shared pleasure ends in solitary self-indulgence.

  The Fourth Circle is guarded by Plutus, the classical deity of wealth, whom Dante calls Pluto. He greets the travellers with the cryptic cry "Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe." Hoarders and spendthrifts joust here, pushing great weights with their chests. Many hoarders are clergymen, popes and cardinals. Both groups are so absorbed in their quarrel that Virgil tells Dante not to bother speaking to them, since they have lost their individuality. He fills the pause with a speech on Fortune, who shifts "those empty goods from nation unto nation, clan to clan."

  In the Fifth Circle, in the stinking waters of the river Styx, the actively wrathful tear at each other on the surface. The sullen lie beneath the slime, in what Sayers calls a "black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe." Far off, as the ferryman Phlegyas rows on, Dante sees high towers that resemble fiery red mosques.

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• 6. Florence in Hell

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  Ciacco, whose name means "hog," lies in the mud of the Third Circle and gives Dante the first of several political prophecies. He speaks of strife between the White and Black Guelphs, which grew after the Ghibellines were completely defeated. Ciacco predicts that the Black Guelphs, aided by Pope Boniface VIII, will drive the White Guelphs out of Florence. The Whites are Dante's own party, and their expulsion in 1302 began his long exile. The poem is set at Easter 1300, so a future event can be foretold, even though the poet had already seen it happen before he wrote.

  Filippo Argenti rises from the slime of the Styx, a Black Guelph from the prominent Adimari family. Little is known of him. Boccaccio describes an occasion when he lost his temper, and early commentators say his brother seized some of Dante's property after the exile began. Dante answers him with a curse: "In weeping and in grieving, accursed spirit, may you long remain." Virgil blesses Dante for it with words used to describe Christ himself. Literally, souls in Hell are fixed forever in the state they chose. Allegorically, the moment shows Dante beginning to sense his own sin.

  In flaming tombs of the Sixth Circle lie followers of Epicurus, who say "the soul dies with the body." Dante speaks with Farinata degli Uberti, a famous Ghibelline leader. After the Battle of Montaperti in September 1260, Farinata strongly protested the proposed destruction of Florence at the victors' meeting. He died in 1264 and was condemned for heresy in 1283. Beside him lies Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph and the father of Dante's friend and fellow poet, Guido Cavalcanti. Farinata explains that the dead see only the future, not the present. When the "portal of the future has been shut," they will know nothing at all.

  On the burning plain of the Seventh Circle, Dante is startled to recognise Brunetto Latini. He speaks to Brunetto with sorrowful affection, a tribute the source calls the highest paid to any sinner in the Inferno. That tribute refutes the idea that Dante put only his enemies in Hell. In Dante's own words, "you taught me how man makes himself eternal; / and while I live, my gratitude for that / must always be apparent in my words." Brunetto in turn prophesies the bad treatment Dante will receive from the Florentines.

  Three more admired Florentines break from the group nearby: Iacopo Rusticucci, Guido Guerra and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi. They ask for news of the city, and Dante laments its state. Rusticucci blames his "savage wife" for his torments.

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• 7. Violence and Fraud

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  The Furies Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone threaten the poets at the walls of Dis, and Medusa is invoked beside them. An angel sent from Heaven touches the gate with a wand and opens it. Allegorically, this shows that the poem is entering sins which philosophy and humanism cannot fully grasp.

  Virgil tells time without a clock. The Great Bear lies in the northwest over Caurus, and Pisces is just rising, the sign before Aries. Since Canto I places the sun in Aries, it must be about two hours before sunrise, 4:00 a.m. on Holy Saturday, the 9th of April.

  The Minotaur, called "the infamy of Crete," gnaws his own flesh at the entrance to the Seventh Circle. The path down is a jumble of broken rock. Virgil explains that it was shattered by the great earthquake at Christ's death. In the first ring, murderers, plunderers and tyrants sit in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire. Centaurs under Chiron and Pholus shoot arrows at any who rise higher than allowed. Among the immersed are Alexander the Great and Attila, called the "scourge on earth." In the second ring, those who took their own lives become gnarled, thorny trees fed upon by Harpies. Dante breaks a twig and hears from Pietro della Vigna, once a powerful minister of Emperor Frederick II, who was imprisoned and blinded. Because they threw away their bodies, these souls will not regain them at the Final Judgement. Instead their corpses will hang from their branches. The third ring is a plain of burning sand under falling flakes of fire, an image drawn from Sodom and Gomorrah. There Dante finds Capaneus, still scorning Jove after being struck down by a thunderbolt.

  Geryon, the Monster of Fraud, carries the poets down the great cliff. Dante gives him a wyvern's shape with a scorpion's tail, hairy arms, a gaudily marked reptilian body and the face of a just and honest man. Below lies Malebolge, "Evil ditches," a stone funnel with ten concentric trenches crossed by spurs of rock like umbrella ribs. Sayers calls it "the image of the City in corruption."

  The ditches progress through every kind of deceit. Seducers and panderers are whipped by horned demons, and Jason is among them. Simoniacs, who sold church offices, are stuffed head-down in rock tubes like debased baptismal fonts, with flames burning the soles of their feet. Pope Nicholas III is there from 1280 until 1303, when Boniface VIII is due to take his place, and later Clement V. Corrupt politicians sink in boiling pitch guarded by the Malebranche, led by Malacoda. The last line of that canto uses a rude noise as the demons' trumpet signal. Hypocrites walk in leaden robes gilded on the outside, and Caiaphas lies crucified on the floor so that every passer-by treads on him. Thieves are bitten by serpents, and Vanni Fucci bursts into flames and re-forms from the ashes like a phoenix.

  Ulysses burns inside a double-headed flame among the evil counsellors. His tale of a last voyage, invented by Dante, tells how his desire to see the world outweighed love for his son, father and wife. He persuaded his crew into the unknown without the wisdom to see the danger, and they drowned after sighting Mount Purgatory. Guido da Montefeltro confesses that he gave Boniface VIII false advice about the Colonna family in 1297. A demon argues that absolution cannot cover a sin intended in the same moment, because a man cannot be contrite while planning the act.

  In the ninth ditch, the Sowers of Discord are hacked apart by a demon with a bloody sword. Muhammad is split from groin to chin, and Bertran de Born carries his severed head by its hair, swinging it like a lantern. In the tenth ditch, the falsifiers suffer diseases, stench, thirst and darkness. Master Adam of Brescia was burned at the stake in 1281 for minting florins of 21 carat gold instead of 24. In Hell he is swollen with a dropsy-like disease and tormented by thirst.

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• 8. The Frozen Bottom

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  The Giants stand with their legs sunk in the banks of the Ninth Circle and their upper halves rising above the rim of the central well. Dante first mistakes them for the towers of a city. Virgil names Nimrod, who tried to build the Tower of Babel, and Ephialtes, who with his brother Otus tried to storm Olympus. Briareus is there, along with Tityos and Typhon. Antaeus, who did not rebel against the gods and so goes unchained, lifts both poets in his palm and lowers them to the floor of Hell.

  Cocytus is a frozen lake, a sharp contrast to the popular picture of a fiery Hell. Ciardi explains why: "The treacheries of these souls were denials of love (which is God) and of all human warmth." It is divided into four rings for betrayal of family, community, guests and lords.

  The first ring, Caina, is named for Cain. There the brothers Alessandro and Napoleone degli Alberti, who killed each other over inheritance and politics between 1282 and 1286, lie bound in ice. Camiscion de' Pazzi also names Mordred, the traitorous son of King Arthur. Camiscion knows that in July 1302 his relative Carlino de' Pazzi will accept a bribe to surrender a castle. That treason, against his party, belongs in the next ring and will make Camiscion look virtuous by comparison.

  In Antenora, named for the Trojan Antenor, traitors to their country cannot bend their necks. Dante accidentally kicks the head of Bocca degli Abati, then treats him more savagely than any soul he has met so far. Two heads share a single hole, and one gnaws the nape of the other. The gnawing sinner is Count Ugolino, and the victim is Archbishop Ruggieri. Ugolino tells in what the source calls the most pathetic and dramatic passage of the Inferno how he conspired with Ruggieri in 1288 to oust his nephew, Nino Visconti. Once Nino was gone, the Archbishop turned on him and locked him in the Torre dei Gualandi with his sons and grandsons. In March 1289 the Archbishop condemned all of them to death by starvation.

  Ptolomaea, named for Ptolemy, holds traitors to their guests. Their tears freeze in their eye sockets and seal them under visors of crystal, so even weeping is denied. Fra Alberigo asks Dante to clear the ice from his eyes. In 1285 he had invited his brother Manfred and Manfred's son Alberghetto to a banquet where his men killed them. He adds that a soul can fall to Ptolomaea before the body dies, while a demon inhabits it until its natural end. Dante never keeps his promise: "And yet I did not open them for him; / and it was courtesy to show him rudeness."

  Judecca, named for Judas Iscariot, holds traitors to their lords and benefactors. Here Virgil says "Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni," meaning "The banners of the King of Hell draw closer." The silence is total. Every sinner is fully encased in ice and twisted in some posture, so no one can speak.

  At the very centre waits Lucifer, once the fairest of the angels, now a giant beast trapped waist-deep in the ice. He has three faces, red in the middle, pale yellow on the right and black on the left. His six wings are dark, bat-like and futile, since the icy wind they stir only keeps him imprisoned. He weeps from six eyes, and his tears mix with bloody froth and pus. Each mouth chews a prominent traitor. Brutus and Cassius dangle in the left and right mouths for their part in the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. To Dante, that murder destroyed a unified Italy and killed the man divinely appointed to govern the world.

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