The Divine Comedy

But after I had reached the foot of a hill, there where that valley ended which had pierced my heart with fear, I looked up and saw its shoulders already clothed in the rays of the planet that leads others straight on every road. Then the fear was quieted a little that had lasted in the lake of my heart through the night I had passed in such distress.note

And as one who, with laboring breath, has escaped from the open sea to the shore, turns to the perilous water and stares, so my mind, which was still fleeing, turned back to gaze again at the pass that never yet let anyone go alive. After I had rested my weary body a little, I took up my way again across the deserted slope, so that my firm foot was always the lower; and there, almost at the beginning of the steep, was a leopard, light and very swift, covered with a spotted hide.

And it would not go from before my face; rather, it so hindered my way that many times I turned to go back. The time was the beginning of the morning, and the sun was rising with those stars that were with it when divine Love first set those beautiful things in motion; so that the hour of the day and the sweet season gave me reason to hope well of that beast with the gaily colored hide; but not so much that I was not struck with fear by the sight of a lion that appeared to me.note

This one seemed to be coming against me with head held high and with ravenous hunger, so that the air itself seemed to fear him; and a she-wolf, who in her leanness seemed laden with every craving, and who has already made many peoples live in misery. She brought such heaviness upon me, with the fear that came from the sight of her, that I lost hope of the height.

And like one who gladly gains, and then the time comes that makes him lose, so that in all his thoughts he weeps and grieves, such did the beast that knows no peace make me, as, coming toward me, little by little she drove me back to where the sun is silent. While I was falling back down to the low place, there appeared before my eyes one who seemed faint from long silence. When I saw him in the great wilderness, “Miserere [Have mercy] on me,” I cried to him, “whoever you are, whether shade or real man!”

He answered me: “Not a man; once I was a man, and my parents were Lombards, both of them Mantuans by birth. I was born sub Iulio [under Julius], though late, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned. But you, why do you return to such misery? Why do you not climb the delightful mountain, which is the beginning and cause of all joy?”note

“Are you, then, that Virgil, that fountain that pours forth so wide a river of speech?” I answered him, with a shamefaced brow. “O honor and light of the other poets, may the long study and the great love that made me search your volume avail me now. You are my master and my author; you alone are the one from whom I took the beautiful style that has brought me honor.

See the beast because of which I turned back; help me against her, famous sage, for she makes my veins and pulses tremble.” “You must take another road,” he replied, when he saw me weeping, “if you wish to escape from this savage place; for this beast, at which you cry out, lets no one pass along her way, but hinders him until she kills him; and her nature is so wicked and vicious that she never fills her greedy appetite, and after feeding she is hungrier than before.

Many are the animals with which she mates, and there will be more still, until the greyhound comes who will make her die in pain. He will not feed on land or pewter, but on wisdom and love and virtue, and his birthplace will be between Feltro and Feltro. He will be the salvation of that humble Italy for which the virgin Camilla, Euryalus, Turnus and Nisus died of their wounds. He will hunt her through every town until he has put her back in Hell, from where envy first let her loose.note

Therefore I think and judge it best for you that you follow me, and I will be your guide and lead you from here through an eternal place, where you will hear the desperate cries of those ancient spirits in pain who each cry out for the second death; and then you will see those who are content in the fire, because they hope to come, whenever it may be, among the blessed people. To them, if you then wish to rise, there will be a soul more worthy of it than I; with her I will leave you when I depart;

for that emperor who reigns up there, because I was a rebel to his law, does not wish anyone to come into his city through me. He governs everywhere, and there he rules; there is his city and his high throne. Oh, happy the one he chooses for it!” And I to him: “Poet, I beg you, by that God whom you did not know, so that I may escape this harm and worse, lead me where you have just said, so that I may see the gate of Saint Peter and those whom you describe as so sorrowful.” Then he moved on, and I kept behind him.

You tell how the father of Silvius, while still corruptible, went to the immortal world, and went there in the body. So if the adversary of all evil was gracious to him, considering the high outcome that was to come from him, and who and what that would be, it does not seem unfitting to a man of understanding; for in the empyrean heaven he was chosen as father of glorious Rome and of her empire; and both of these, to tell the truth, were established as the holy place where the successor of the greater Peter sits.note

On this journey, for which you praise him, he learned things that were the cause of his victory and of the papal mantle. Later the Chosen Vessel went there, to bring back strength to that faith which is the beginning of the way of salvation. But I, why should I go there? Or who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; neither I nor anyone else believes me worthy of it. So if I give myself up to going, I fear the going may be folly; you are wise, you understand better than I can explain.”note

And like one who unwills what he willed, and changes his purpose with new thoughts, so that he draws back entirely from what he began, so I became on that dark slope; for by thinking it over I wore away the undertaking that had been so quick in its beginning. “If I have understood your words rightly,” replied that shade of the great-souled one, “your soul is stricken with cowardice, which often weighs a man down so that it turns him back from an honorable undertaking, as a false sight turns a beast when it shies.

So that you may free yourself from this fear, I will tell you why I came and what I heard at the first moment when I grieved for you. I was among those who are suspended, and a lady called me, so blessed and beautiful that I begged her to command me. Her eyes shone brighter than the star; and she began to speak to me, gently and softly, with an angelic voice, in her own speech:note

‘O courteous Mantuan soul, whose fame still endures in the world and will endure as long as motion lasts: my friend, who is no friend of fortune, is so hindered on his way on the deserted slope that he has turned back in fear; and I fear he may already be so lost that I have risen too late to help him, from what I have heard of him in Heaven.

Now go, and with your ornate speech, and with whatever is needed for his escape, help him so that I may be consoled. I am Beatrice, who make you go; I come from a place to which I long to return; Love moved me, and makes me speak. When I am before my Lord, I will often praise you to him.’ Then she fell silent, and then I began:

‘O lady of virtue, through whom alone the human race surpasses everything contained within that heaven which has the smallest circles: your command pleases me so much that to obey, had I obeyed already, would be late; you need not open your wish to me further. But tell me the reason why you do not shrink from coming down here into this center from the spacious place to which you burn to return.’ ‘Since you wish to know so deeply, I will tell you briefly,’ she answered me, ‘why I am not afraid to come in here.note

One should fear only those things that have power to do harm; not the others, for they are not to be feared. I am made by God, in his grace, such that your misery does not touch me, nor does any flame of this burning assail me. There is a noble lady in Heaven who so grieves at this hindrance to which I send you that she breaks the stern judgment up there. She summoned Lucy with her request and said: “Your faithful one now has need of you, and I commend him to you.”note

Lucy, enemy of everyone cruel, moved and came to the place where I was, sitting with ancient Rachel. She said: “Beatrice, true praise of God, why do you not help the one who loved you so much that he left the common crowd for your sake? Do you not hear the anguish of his weeping? Do you not see the death that assails him on that flood over which the sea cannot boast?”note

Never in the world were people so quick to seek their profit or to flee their harm as I, after such words were spoken, came down here from my blessed seat, trusting in your honest speech, which honors you and those who have heard it.’ After she had said this to me, she turned her shining eyes away, weeping; which made me quicker to come. And I came to you just as she wished; I took you from before that beast that robbed you of the short way up the beautiful mountain.

So what is it? Why, why do you hold back? Why do you harbor such cowardice in your heart? Why do you not have daring and boldness, since three such blessed ladies care for you in the court of Heaven, and my words promise you so much good?” As little flowers, bent and closed by the chill of night, all straighten up open on their stems when the sun brightens them, so did I with my flagging strength; and so much good courage rushed to my heart that I began like someone set free:

“Oh, compassionate is she who helped me! And you, courteous, who obeyed so quickly the true words she spoke to you! With your words you have so disposed my heart with desire to come that I have returned to my first intent. Now go, for there is one single will in us both: you are my guide, you my lord, and you my master.” So I spoke to him; and when he had moved on, I entered along the deep and savage way.

And he answered me, like one who understands: “Here all misgiving must be left behind; here all cowardice must die. We have come to the place where I told you that you would see the grieving people who have lost the good of the intellect.” And when he had placed his hand on mine, with a cheerful face that comforted me, he led me in among the hidden things. Here sighs, laments and loud wailing resounded through the starless air, so that at first I wept at it.

Different tongues, horrible languages, words of pain, accents of anger, voices loud and faint, and the sound of hands along with them, made a tumult that whirls forever in that air dark without time, like sand when the whirlwind blows. And I, whose head was wrapped in horror, said: “Master, what is this I hear? And what people are these, who seem so overcome by pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable condition is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise. They are mingled with that worthless choir of angels who were neither rebels nor faithful to God, but were for themselves. The heavens drove them out so as not to be less beautiful, and the depth of Hell does not receive them, for the wicked would have some glory from them.” And I: “Master, what is so heavy upon them that it makes them lament so loudly?” He answered: “I will tell you very briefly.

These have no hope of death, and their blind life is so low that they are envious of every other lot. The world does not let any fame of them remain; mercy and justice disdain them. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on.” And I, looking again, saw a banner that ran, whirling, so swiftly that it seemed to me to scorn all rest; and behind it came so long a line of people that I would never have believed death had undone so many.

After I had recognized some among them, I saw and knew the shade of him who through cowardice made the great refusal. At once I understood, and was certain, that this was the company of the worthless, displeasing to God and to his enemies. These wretches, who were never alive, were naked and much stung by gadflies and by wasps that were there. These streaked their faces with blood, which, mixed with tears, was gathered at their feet by loathsome worms.note

And when I gave myself to looking farther on, I saw people on the bank of a great river. So I said: “Master, now grant that I may know who they are, and what custom makes them seem so eager to cross over, as I can make out by the faint light.” And he to me: “These things will be made known to you when we halt our steps on the sad shore of Acheron.” Then, with eyes ashamed and lowered, fearing that my words had been a burden to him, I kept from speaking until we reached the river.note

And there, coming toward us in a boat, was an old man, white with ancient hair, crying: “Woe to you, wicked souls! Never hope to see heaven! I come to lead you to the other shore, into the eternal darkness, into heat and into cold. And you there, living soul, get away from these who are dead.” But when he saw that I did not go away, he said: “By another way, by other ports, you will come to shore to make your crossing, not here: a lighter vessel must carry you.”

And my guide to him: “Charon, do not be angry: it is so willed there where what is willed can be done, and ask no more.” At this the woolly cheeks of the ferryman of the livid marsh, who had wheels of flame around his eyes, grew still. But those souls, who were weary and naked, changed color and gnashed their teeth as soon as they heard the cruel words. They cursed God and their parents, the human race, the place, the time, and the seed of their begetting and of their birth.note

Then all of them together drew back, weeping loudly, to the evil shore that awaits every man who does not fear God. Charon the demon, with eyes like glowing coals, beckoning to them, gathers them all in; he strikes with his oar any who linger. As in autumn the leaves fall away one after another, until the branch sees all its spoils upon the ground, so the evil seed of Adam: they cast themselves from that shore one by one, at his signals, like a bird to its lure.

So they go off over the dark water, and before they have landed on the far side, a new band is already gathering on this side. “My son,” said the courteous master, “those who die in the wrath of God all assemble here from every land; and they are eager to cross the river, for divine justice spurs them on, so that their fear is turned into desire.

No good soul ever crosses here; and so, if Charon complains of you, you can well understand now what his words mean.” When this was ended, the dark plain trembled so violently that the memory of my terror still bathes me in sweat. The tearful ground gave forth a wind, which flashed with a crimson light that overpowered all my senses; and I fell like a man whom sleep seizes.

“Now let us go down into the blind world here below,” the poet began, deathly pale. “I will be first, and you will be second.” And I, who had noticed his color, said: “How shall I come, if you are afraid, you who are used to being the comfort of my doubts?” And he to me: “The anguish of the people who are down here paints on my face that pity which you take for fear.

Let us go, for the long way urges us on.” So he set out, and so he made me enter the first circle that girds the abyss. There, as far as could be told by listening, there was no weeping, only sighs, which made the eternal air tremble. This came from the sorrow without torments felt by the crowds, which were many and great, of infants and of women and of men.

My good master to me: “Do you not ask what spirits these are that you see? Now I want you to know, before you go farther, that they did not sin; and if they have merits, that is not enough, because they did not have baptism, which is part of the faith that you believe. And if they lived before Christianity, they did not worship God as was due; and I myself am one of these. For such defects, and not for any other wrong, we are lost, and only so far afflicted that without hope we live in longing.”

Great sorrow seized my heart when I heard him, because I recognized people of great worth who were suspended in that Limbo. “Tell me, my master, tell me, lord,” I began, wishing to be certain of that faith which overcomes every error, “did anyone ever go out from here, by his own merit or by another’s, who was afterward blessed?” And he, who understood my veiled speech, answered: “I was new to this state when I saw a mighty one come here, crowned with a sign of victory.note

He drew out from here the shade of our first parent, of Abel his son, and that of Noah, of Moses the lawgiver, the obedient; Abraham the patriarch, and David the king, Israel with his father and with his children, and with Rachel, for whom he did so much, and many others; and he made them blessed. And I want you to know that before them no human spirits were saved.” We did not stop walking while he spoke, but kept passing through the wood all the while—the wood, I mean, of crowded spirits.note

We had not yet gone far from the place where I had slept when I saw a fire that overcame a hemisphere of darkness. We were still some little distance from it, but not so far that I could not partly make out that honorable people occupied that place. “O you who honor both knowledge and art, who are these, who have such honor that it sets them apart from the manner of the others?” And he to me: “The honored fame that sounds of them up in your life wins grace in heaven, which so advances them.”

Meanwhile a voice was heard by me: “Honor the loftiest poet; his shade returns, which had departed.” After the voice had stopped and was quiet, I saw four great shades coming toward us; their look was neither sad nor glad. My good master began to say: “Look at him with that sword in his hand, who comes before the three as their lord. That is Homer, sovereign poet; the next who comes is Horace the satirist; Ovid is the third, and the last is Lucan.note

Since each of them shares with me the name that the single voice proclaimed, they do me honor, and in that they do well.” So I saw gathered the fair school of those lords of the loftiest song, which flies like an eagle above the others. When they had talked together a while, they turned to me with a sign of greeting; and my master smiled at this. And they did me far greater honor still, for they made me one of their company, so that I was sixth among such great wisdom.

So we went on as far as the light, speaking of things about which it is well to be silent, as it was well to speak of them there where I was. We came to the foot of a noble castle, seven times circled by high walls, defended all around by a fair little stream. This we passed over as if it were solid ground; through seven gates I entered with these sages; we came to a meadow of fresh green. There were people there with slow, grave eyes, of great authority in their bearing; they spoke seldom, with gentle voices.

So we drew aside to one of the edges, into an open place, luminous and high, so that all of them could be seen. There, straight before me on the green enamel, the great spirits were shown to me, so that I exult within myself at having seen them. I saw Electra with many companions, among whom I recognized Hector and Aeneas, and Caesar in armor, with his hawk-like eyes. I saw Camilla and Penthesilea; on the other side I saw King Latinus, who was sitting with Lavinia his daughter.note

I saw that Brutus who drove out Tarquin, Lucretia, Julia, Marcia and Cornelia; and alone, apart, I saw Saladin. When I raised my eyes a little higher, I saw the master of those who know, sitting among a philosophic family. All gaze at him, all do him honor. There I saw Socrates and Plato, who stand nearer to him than the others; Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance, Diogenes, Anaxagoras and Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus and Zeno;note

and I saw the good collector of qualities—Dioscorides, I mean; and I saw Orpheus, Tully and Linus and Seneca the moralist; Euclid the geometer and Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Avicenna and Galen, and Averroes, who made the great commentary. I cannot portray them all in full, for the long theme so drives me on that many times the telling falls short of the fact. The company of six dwindles to two: by another way the wise guide leads me, out of the quiet into the air that trembles; and I come to a place where nothing shines.note

Always there stand many of them before him; they go, each in turn, to the judgment; they speak and hear, and then are hurled below. “O you who come to the sorrowful inn,” said Minos to me when he saw me, leaving off the act of so great an office, “watch how you enter and in whom you trust: do not let the breadth of the entrance deceive you!” And my guide to him: “Why do you keep shouting?

Do not hinder his fated journey: it is so willed there where what is willed can be done, and ask no more.” Now the sorrowful notes begin to make themselves heard by me; now I have come where much weeping strikes me. I came into a place mute of all light, which bellows as the sea does in a storm when it is battered by warring winds. The infernal whirlwind, which never rests, sweeps the spirits along in its violence; turning and striking them, it torments them.

When they come before the ruin, there are the shrieks, the moaning and the lamentation; there they curse the divine power. I understood that to such torment are condemned the carnal sinners, who make reason subject to desire. And as their wings carry the starlings in the cold season, in a broad, full flock, so that blast carries the evil spirits. Here, there, down, up it drives them; no hope ever comforts them, not of rest, nor even of lesser pain.

And as the cranes go singing their lays, making a long line of themselves in the air, so I saw coming, uttering wails, shades borne along by that same strife; so I said: “Master, who are those people whom the black air so punishes?” “The first of those of whom you wish to have news,” he said to me then, “was empress of many tongues. She was so abandoned to the vice of lust that she made whatever pleased lawful in her law, to remove the blame into which she had been brought.

She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus and was his wife: she held the land that the Sultan rules. The next is she who killed herself for love and broke faith with the ashes of Sychaeus; then comes lustful Cleopatra. See Helen, for whom so long a time of evil revolved, and see the great Achilles, who fought with love at the end. See Paris, Tristan”; and more than a thousand shades he showed me, pointing with his finger, and named them, whom love had parted from our life.note

As doves, called by desire, with wings raised and steady, come through the air to their sweet nest, carried by their will, so these came out of the flock where Dido is, coming toward us through the malignant air, so strong was my affectionate cry. “O living creature, gracious and kind, who go through the dark-purple air visiting us who stained the world with blood: if the King of the universe were our friend, we would pray to him for your peace, since you have pity on our perverse ill.

Of whatever you are pleased to hear and to speak, we will hear and speak with you, while the wind, as it does now, is silent for us. The city where I was born sits on the shore where the Po descends to have peace with the streams that follow it. Love, which is quick to take hold of the noble heart, seized this man for the fair body that was taken from me—and the manner of it still wounds me. Love, which pardons no one loved from loving in return, seized me so strongly with delight in him that, as you see, it still does not abandon me.note

Love led us to one death: Caina awaits him who quenched our life.” These words were carried to us from them. When I had heard those wounded souls, I bowed my face and kept it lowered until the poet said to me: “What are you thinking?” When I answered, I began: “Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how much desire led these two to the woeful pass!” Then I turned back to them and spoke, and I began: “Francesca, your torments make me sad and pitying to the point of tears.note

But tell me: in the time of the sweet sighs, by what and how did love grant that you should know the uncertain desires?” And she to me: “There is no greater sorrow than to remember the happy time in misery; and this your teacher knows. But if you have so great a longing to know the first root of our love, I will do as one who weeps and speaks. One day, for pleasure, we were reading of Lancelot, how love held him fast; we were alone and without any suspicion.note

Many times that reading drew our eyes together and drained the color from our faces; but it was one point alone that overcame us. When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a lover, he, who will never be parted from me, kissed my mouth, all trembling. A Galehaut was the book, and he who wrote it: that day we read no further in it.” While the one spirit said this, the other wept so that, out of pity, I fainted as if I were dying; and I fell as a dead body falls.note

Heavy hail, and foul water, and snow pour down through the darkened air; the ground that receives them stinks. Cerberus, a beast cruel and monstrous, barks like a dog with three throats over the people who are sunk there. His eyes are red, his beard greasy and black, his belly wide, and his hands clawed; he claws the spirits, swallows them, and tears them to pieces. The rain makes them howl like dogs; they make one side a shield for the other; the wretched unhallowed souls keep turning over.note

When Cerberus, the great worm, caught sight of us, he opened his mouths and showed us his fangs; there was not a limb of him he kept still. And my guide spread out his hands, took up earth, and with his fists full threw it into the ravenous gullets. Like a dog that bays in its hunger and grows quiet once it bites its food, for it strains and struggles only to devour it, so became those filthy faces of the demon Cerberus, who thunders at the souls so that they wish they were deaf.

We were passing over the shades whom the heavy rain beats down, and we set the soles of our feet on their emptiness, which looks like a body. They were all lying on the ground, except one, which sat up as soon as it saw us passing before it. “O you who are being led through this Hell,” it said to me, “recognize me, if you can: you were made before I was unmade.”

And I to it: “The anguish you are in perhaps takes you out of my memory, so that it does not seem I ever saw you. But tell me who you are, who are set in so painful a place and in such a punishment that, if any other is greater, none is so loathsome.” And he to me: “Your city, which is so full of envy that the sack is already overflowing, held me within it in the serene life.

You citizens called me Ciacco; for the ruinous fault of gluttony, as you see, I am beaten down by the rain. And I, a wretched soul, am not alone, for all these lie in like punishment for like fault.” And he said no more. I answered him: “Ciacco, your distress weighs on me so that it moves me to weep. But tell me, if you know, what the citizens of the divided city will come to; whether anyone there is just; and tell me the reason why such discord has assailed it.”note

And he to me: “After long strife they will come to bloodshed, and the rustic party will drive out the other with much injury. Then afterward this one must fall within three suns, and the other rise above it by the force of one who is now hedging his course. It will hold its head high for a long time, keeping the other under heavy burdens, however much that one weeps over it and is outraged. Two are just, but no one heeds them there. Pride, envy and avarice are the three sparks that have set hearts on fire.”note

Here he put an end to his tearful words. And I to him: “I want you to teach me still more, and to make me a gift of further speech. Farinata and Tegghiaio, who were so worthy, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo and Mosca, and the others who set their minds on doing good, tell me where they are, and let me know them; for a great desire presses me to know whether heaven sweetens their lot or Hell poisons it.”note

And he: “They are among the blackest souls; different faults weigh them down toward the bottom. If you go down so far, you will be able to see them. But when you are back in the sweet world, I beg you to bring me to people’s memory. I tell you no more and answer you no more.” Then he twisted his straight eyes into a squint; he looked at me a little, and then bowed his head, and fell with it level with the other blind ones.

And the guide said to me: “He wakes no more until the sound of the angelic trumpet, when the hostile Power comes. Each will find his sad tomb again, take back his flesh and his shape, and hear what resounds for all eternity.” So we passed with slow steps through the foul mixture of the shades and the rain, touching a little on the life to come; at which I said: “Master, will these torments grow after the great sentence, or be less, or will they be just as burning?”note

And he to me: “Go back to your science, which holds that the more perfect a thing is, the more it feels the good, and likewise pain. Although these accursed people will never come to true perfection, they expect to be nearer to it then than now.” We went around that road in a circle, speaking of much more than I repeat; we came to the point where it goes down; there we found Plutus, the great enemy.note

As sails swollen by the wind fall in a tangle when the mast snaps, so the cruel beast fell to the ground. So we went down into the fourth hollow, taking in more of the woeful bank that sacks up all the evil of the universe. Ah, justice of God! Who heaps up as many new toils and pains as I saw? And why does our guilt so ruin us?

As the wave does there over Charybdis, breaking against the wave it runs into, so the people here must dance their round. Here I saw people, far more than anywhere else, on one side and on the other, with great howls, rolling weights by force of chest. They crashed into each other, and then right there each one turned around, rolling back, shouting: “Why do you hoard?” and “Why do you squander?”note

So they went back around the gloomy circle, on either hand, to the opposite point, still shouting their insulting refrain at each other; then each one, when he had come through his half-circle to the other joust, turned around again. And I, whose heart was almost pierced, said: “My master, now show me what people these are, and whether all of these tonsured ones on our left were clerics.”

And he to me: “All of them were so squint-eyed in mind in the first life that they did no spending there with measure. Their voices bark this out clearly enough when they come to the two points of the circle where their opposite faults divide them. These, who have no covering of hair on their heads, were clerics, and popes and cardinals, in whom avarice works its excess.” And I: “Master, among such as these I ought surely to recognize some who were defiled by these evils.”

And he to me: “You are gathering an empty thought. The undiscerning life that made them foul now makes them too dark for any discerning. Forever they will come to the two clashes; these will rise from the tomb with fists clenched, and these with their hair cropped. Ill giving and ill keeping have taken the fair world from them and set them to this brawl; what it is like, I will not dress up with words. Now, son, you can see the brief mockery of the goods entrusted to Fortune, over which the human race wrangles.note

For all the gold that is beneath the moon, or ever was, could not give rest to a single one of these weary souls.” “Master,” I said to him, “now tell me also: this Fortune you touch on with me, what is she, who has the goods of the world so in her clutches?” And he to me: “O foolish creatures, how great is the ignorance that harms you! Now I want you to take in my judgment of her:

He whose wisdom transcends all things made the heavens and gave them guides, so that every part shines on every part, distributing the light equally. In the same way, over worldly splendors he set a general minister and leader, to shift in due time the empty goods from people to people and from one blood to another, beyond the power of human wits to prevent it. So one people rules and another languishes, following her judgment, which is hidden like the snake in the grass.note

Your knowledge has no means of resisting her: she foresees, judges, and carries on her reign, as the other gods do theirs. Her changes have no truce; necessity makes her swift, so often does someone come who takes his turn. This is she who is so crucified even by those who ought to give her praise, blaming her wrongly and speaking ill of her. But she is blessed and does not hear it; joyful among the other first creatures, she turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness.

Now let us go down to greater woe; already every star that was rising when I set out is sinking, and staying too long is forbidden.” We crossed the circle to the other bank, above a spring that boils and pours over into a ditch that runs from it. The water was dark, far darker than purple-black; and we, in company with the murky waves, went down by a strange path. This dismal stream, when it has descended to the foot of the malignant gray slopes, makes a marsh that is named Styx.note

And I, who stood intent on gazing, saw muddy people in that swamp, all naked and with angry looks. They struck each other not only with their hands but with their heads, their chests and their feet, tearing each other to pieces with their teeth. The good master said: “Son, now you see the souls of those whom wrath overcame. And I also want you to believe for certain that there are people beneath the water who sigh, and make this water bubble at the surface, as your eye tells you, wherever it turns.

Stuck in the slime they say: ‘We were sullen in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, carrying within us the smoke of sloth; now we are sullen in the black mire.’ This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for they cannot speak it in whole words.” So, between the dry bank and the slough, we went around a great arc of the filthy pond, with our eyes turned on those who gulp down the mud. At last we came to the foot of a tower.

And he to me: “Over the filthy waves you can already make out what is expected, if the fumes of the marsh do not hide it from you.” Never did a bowstring shoot off an arrow that sped through the air so swiftly as the little boat I saw coming toward us through the water at that moment, steered by a single oarsman, who was shouting: “So you have come, wicked soul?” “Phlegyas, Phlegyas, you are shouting in vain this time,” said my lord. “You will have us no longer than it takes to cross the mire.”note

Like one who hears of a great deception practiced on him and then resents it, so became Phlegyas in his pent-up wrath. My guide went down into the boat and then had me get in after him, and only when I was inside did it seem laden. As soon as the guide and I were in the vessel, the ancient prow moves off, cutting more of the water than it is used to with others. While we were running through the dead channel, there rose up before me one full of mud, who said: “Who are you, who come before your time?”

And I to him: “If I come, I do not stay. But who are you, who have become so foul?” He answered: “You see that I am one who weeps.” And I to him: “In weeping and in grief, accursed spirit, may you remain; for I know you, even though you are all filthy.” Then he stretched both hands toward the boat, at which the wary master pushed him off, saying: “Away there with the other dogs!” Then he put his arms around my neck, kissed my face, and said: “Indignant soul, blessed is she who carried you in her womb.note

That man was an arrogant person in the world; there is no goodness to adorn his memory, and so his shade is furious here. How many up there now think themselves great kings, who will lie here like pigs in the mire, leaving behind them horrible scorn!” And I: “Master, I would be very eager to see him dunked in this broth before we leave the lake.” And he to me: “Before the shore comes into sight, you shall be satisfied; it is right that you should have such a wish fulfilled.”

A little after this I saw the muddy people make such a mangling of him that I still praise and thank God for it. They were all shouting: “Get Filippo Argenti!” And the hot-tempered Florentine spirit turned on himself with his teeth. There we left him, and I tell no more of him; but a wailing struck my ears, at which I open my eyes wide and stare intently ahead. The good master said: “Now, son, the city named Dis is drawing near, with its grave citizens and its great host.”note

And I: “Master, I can already make out its mosques clearly there within the valley, red as if they had come out of fire.” And he said to me: “The eternal fire that burns them from within makes them look red, as you see in this lower Hell.” We came at last into the deep moats that fortify that disconsolate city; the walls seemed to me to be of iron. Not without first making a great circuit did we come to a place where the boatman loudly shouted to us: “Get out: here is the entrance.”note

Above the gates I saw more than a thousand of those rained down from heaven, who were angrily saying: “Who is this who, without death, goes through the kingdom of the dead?” And my wise master made a sign that he wished to speak with them privately. Then they held back their great scorn a little and said: “You come alone, and let that one go away, who so boldly entered this kingdom.note

Let him go back alone along his mad road; let him try if he knows how; for you shall stay here, who have escorted him through so dark a country.” Think, Reader, whether I lost heart at the sound of those accursed words, for I did not believe I would ever return here. “O my dear guide, who more than seven times have restored my confidence and drawn me out of deep peril that stood against me, do not leave me,” I said, “so undone; and if going further is denied us, let us quickly retrace our steps together.”

And that lord who had led me there said to me: “Do not fear, for no one can take our passage from us; it is granted to us by such a One. But wait for me here, and comfort your weary spirit and feed it with good hope, for I will not leave you in the low world.” So he goes away, and leaves me there, the sweet father, and I remain in doubt, for yes and no contend in my head.

I could not hear what he put to them; but he had not stayed there with them long when each one raced the others back inside. Those adversaries of ours shut the gates against the chest of my lord, who remained outside, and he turned back to me with slow steps. His eyes were on the ground, his brows shorn of all boldness, and he said amid sighs: “Who has denied me the houses of sorrow?”

And to me he said: “Do not be dismayed because I am angry, for I will win this contest, whoever circles within to defend the place. This insolence of theirs is nothing new, for they once used it at a less secret gate, which still stands without a bolt. Above it you saw the dead inscription; and already, on this side of it, there is coming down the slope, passing through the circles without escort, one by whom the city will be opened to us.”note

I saw clearly how he covered over his beginning with what came after, words different from the first. But his speech frightened me all the same, because I took his broken-off phrase to a worse meaning, perhaps, than the one it had. “Does anyone from the first level, whose only punishment is hope cut off, ever come down into the depth of this dismal hollow?” I put this question, and he answered me: “Seldom does it happen that any of us makes the journey on which I am going.note

It is true that I was down here once before, conjured by that cruel Erichtho who called shades back to their bodies. My flesh had been stripped of me only a short while when she made me enter within that wall to draw a spirit out of the circle of Judas. That is the lowest place and the darkest, and the farthest from the heaven that turns all things. I know the way well, so be reassured.note

This marsh that breathes out the great stench girds the sorrowful city all around, where we cannot now enter without anger.” And he said more, but I do not have it in mind, because my eye had drawn me wholly toward the high tower with the glowing summit, where in an instant three infernal Furies, stained with blood, had swiftly risen upright. They had the limbs and bearing of women, and were girded with bright green hydras; they had little serpents and horned vipers for hair, which bound their savage temples.

And he, who knew well the handmaids of the queen of eternal weeping, said to me: “Look at the fierce Furies. This is Megaera, on the left; the one who weeps on the right is Alecto; Tisiphone is in the middle”; and with that he fell silent. Each of them was tearing her breast with her nails; they beat themselves with their palms and cried out so loudly that I pressed close to the poet in fear. “Let Medusa come, and we will turn him to stone,” they all said, looking down; “we did wrong not to take vengeance on Theseus for his assault.”note

“Turn around and keep your eyes shut; for if the Gorgon shows herself and you should see her, there would be no returning above ever again.” So said the master; and he himself turned me around, and did not trust my hands so far as not to cover my eyes with his own as well. O you who have sound intellects, look at the teaching that hides itself beneath the veil of the strange verses.

And already there came across the murky waves the crash of a sound full of terror, at which both shores trembled—made no differently than a wind, violent because of opposing heats, that strikes the wood and, with nothing to check it, shatters the branches, beats them down and carries them off; dusty in front, it goes proudly on, and makes the beasts and the shepherds flee. He freed my eyes and said: “Now direct the nerve of your sight across that ancient foam, over there where that smoke is harshest.”

As frogs before their enemy the snake all scatter through the water until each one squats huddled on the land, so I saw more than a thousand ruined souls fleeing before one who was crossing the Styx at the ford with dry soles. He was clearing that thick air from his face, often moving his left hand before him, and he seemed weary only of that vexation. I perceived clearly that he was a messenger from heaven, and I turned to the master; and he made a sign to me that I should stand quiet and bow down to him.

Ah, how full of disdain he seemed to me! He came to the gate, and with a little wand he opened it, for it offered no resistance. “O outcasts from heaven, despised people,” he began upon the horrible threshold, “where does this insolence that dwells in you come from? Why do you kick against that will whose end can never be cut short, and which has many times increased your pain? What good is it to butt against the fates? Your Cerberus, if you remember well, still bears his chin and throat stripped bare for it.”note

Then he turned back along the filthy road and said not a word to us, but had the look of a man urged and gnawed by some other care than that of the one before him. And we moved our feet toward the city, secure after the holy words. We entered there without any battle; and I, who had a desire to look upon the condition that such a fortress locks in, as soon as I was inside, send my eye around, and I see on every side a great plain full of sorrow and cruel torment.

Just as at Arles, where the Rhone grows stagnant, just as at Pola near the Quarnaro, which shuts Italy in and bathes its borders, the tombs make all the ground uneven, so they did here on every side, except that the manner here was more bitter: for flames were scattered among the graves, and these made them glow so thoroughly that no craft asks for iron hotter. All their lids were raised, and from them came such grievous laments that they truly seemed the laments of the wretched and the tormented.note

And I: “Master, who are those people who, buried within those stone coffins, make themselves heard with their sorrowful sighs?” And he to me: “Here are the arch-heretics with their followers of every sect, and the tombs are laden far more than you believe. Like is buried here with like, and the monuments are more and less hot.” And after he had turned to the right, we passed between the torments and the high battlements.

In this part Epicurus has his cemetery, with all his followers, who make the soul die with the body. Therefore the question you put to me will soon be satisfied in here, and so will the desire you keep silent from me.” And I: “Good guide, I do not keep my heart hidden from you except so as to speak little; and you have disposed me to that not only now.”note

“O Tuscan, who go alive through the city of fire, speaking so courteously, may it please you to stop in this place. Your speech makes it plain that you are a native of that noble fatherland to which I was perhaps too harsh.” This sound came suddenly from one of the stone coffins; so, fearing, I drew a little closer to my guide. And he said to me: “Turn around—what are you doing? See there Farinata, who has risen upright: you will see all of him from the waist up.”note

I had already fixed my gaze on his; and he was rising up with chest and brow as if he held Hell in great scorn. And the bold and ready hands of my guide pushed me among the sepulchers to him, as he said: “Let your words be well chosen.” When I was at the foot of his tomb, he looked at me a little, and then, almost disdainfully, asked me: “Who were your ancestors?”

I, who was eager to obey, did not hide it from him but laid it all open to him; at which he raised his brows a little upward, then said: “They were fiercely opposed to me and to my forebears and to my party, so that twice I scattered them.” “If they were driven out, they returned from every quarter,” I answered him, “both the one time and the other; but your people did not learn that art well.”note

Then there rose up at the uncovered opening, beside this one, a shade visible down to the chin; I think he had risen to his knees. He looked around me, as if he had a wish to see whether someone else was with me; but when his suspicion was entirely spent, he said, weeping: “If you go through this blind prison by height of genius, where is my son? And why is he not with you?” And I to him: “I do not come by myself: he who waits there leads me through here, one whom perhaps your Guido held in disdain.”note

His words and the manner of his punishment had already read me his name; that is why my answer was so full. Suddenly drawing himself upright, he cried: “What? Did you say ‘he held’? Is he not still alive? Does the sweet light not strike his eyes?” When he perceived some delay that I made before answering, he fell back face upward and did not appear outside again. But that other, great-souled one, at whose bidding I had stopped, did not change his expression, nor move his neck, nor bend his side.

“And if,” he said, continuing his first words, “if they have learned that art badly, that torments me more than this bed. But the face of the lady who reigns here will not be rekindled fifty times before you will know how heavy that art weighs. And so may you ever return to the sweet world, tell me: why is that people so pitiless against my kin in every one of its laws?” Whereupon I to him: “The slaughter and the great carnage that dyed the Arbia red cause such prayers to be made in our temple.”note

After he had shaken his head, sighing, “I was not alone in that,” he said, “nor surely would I have moved with the others without cause. But I was alone, there where everyone agreed to wipe out Florence, the one who defended her openly.” “Ah, so may your descendants someday find rest,” I begged him, “untie for me the knot that has tangled my judgment here. It seems, if I hear rightly, that you see beforehand what time brings with it, and that with the present you hold a different way.”note

“We see, like one who has poor light, the things,” he said, “that are far from us; so much does the supreme Leader still shine on us. When they draw near, or are present, our intellect is wholly empty; and unless someone brings us word, we know nothing of your human state. So you can understand that all our knowledge will be dead from that moment when the door of the future is closed.” Then, as if stung with remorse for my fault, I said: “Now, then, you will tell that fallen one that his son is still joined with the living.

And if I was silent before answering, let him know that I did it because I was already thinking within the error you have resolved for me.” And my master was already calling me back; so I begged the spirit more hastily to tell me who was there with him. He said to me: “Here I lie with more than a thousand: in here is the second Frederick, and the Cardinal; and of the others I am silent.” Then he hid himself; and I turned my steps toward the ancient poet, thinking again on that speech which seemed hostile to me.note

He moved on, and then, as we went, he said to me: “Why are you so bewildered?” And I satisfied him in his question. “Let your mind keep what you have heard against yourself,” that sage commanded me, “and now pay attention here”—and he raised his finger. “When you stand before the sweet ray of her whose lovely eye sees everything, from her you will learn the journey of your life.” Then he turned his feet to the left: we left the wall and went toward the middle by a path that strikes into a valley, whose stench was offensive even up there.note

So the master; and I said to him: “Find some compensation, so that the time does not pass lost”; and he: “You see that I am thinking of that. My son, within these rocks,” he then began to say, “are three smaller circles, from level to level, like those you are leaving. All are full of accursed spirits; but so that afterward the sight alone may suffice you, understand how and why they are confined. Of every malice that wins hatred in heaven, injury is the end, and every such end afflicts another either by force or by fraud.

But because fraud is man’s own evil, it displeases God more; and so the fraudulent are below, and more pain assails them. The first circle is all of the violent; but because violence is done to three persons, it is divided and built in three rings. One can do violence to God, to oneself, to one’s neighbor—I mean to them and to their things, as you will hear with clear reasoning.

Violent death and painful wounds are dealt to one’s neighbor, and to his possessions ruin, burning and harmful extortions; so murderers and everyone who strikes wrongfully, wreckers and plunderers, are all tormented by the first ring in different bands. A man may lay violent hands on himself and on his own goods; and so in the second ring whoever deprives himself of your world, gambles away and squanders his wealth, and weeps there where he should be joyful, must repent in vain.

One can do violence to the Deity by denying and blaspheming it in one’s heart, and by despising nature and her goodness; and so the smallest ring seals with its mark both Sodom and Cahors, and whoever speaks from the heart in contempt of God. Fraud, by which every conscience is stung, a man may use on one who trusts in him and on one who keeps no store of trust.note

This latter way seems to kill only the bond of love that nature makes; so in the second circle nest hypocrisy, flatteries and whoever practices sorcery, falsification, theft and simony, panders, grafters and similar filth. By the other way, both the love that nature makes is forgotten and the love that is added to it afterward, from which special trust is created; so in the smallest circle, where the center of the universe is, on which Dis sits, whoever betrays is consumed forever.”note

And I: “Master, your reasoning proceeds quite clearly, and distinguishes quite well this abyss and the people who possess it. But tell me: those of the fat marsh, those whom the wind drives and whom the rain beats, and those who clash with such bitter tongues, why are they not punished inside the red city, if God holds them in wrath? And if he does not, why are they in such a plight?” And he to me: “Why does your wit,” he said, “stray so far from its usual way? Or where else is your mind looking?note

Do you not remember those words with which your Ethics treats fully the three dispositions that heaven does not want: incontinence, malice and mad bestiality? And how incontinence offends God less and incurs less blame? If you consider this teaching well and call to mind who those are who undergo punishment up above, outside, you will see clearly why they are separated from these wicked ones, and why divine vengeance hammers them less wrathfully.” “O Sun that heals every troubled sight, you content me so when you resolve my doubts that doubting pleases me no less than knowing.note

Turn back again a little,” I said, “to where you say that usury offends the divine goodness, and untie the knot.” “Philosophy,” he said to me, “for one who understands it, notes, and not in one place only, how nature takes her course from the divine intellect and from its art; and if you note your Physics well, you will find, after not many pages, that your art follows nature as far as it can, as the pupil follows the master, so that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.note

From these two, if you call to mind Genesis at the beginning, people must take their living and advance. And because the usurer holds to another way, he despises nature in herself and in her follower, since he places his hope elsewhere. But follow me now, for it pleases me to go: for the Fishes are quivering on the horizon, and the Wain lies wholly over Caurus, and the way down the cliff is farther on, over there.”note

such was the descent of that ravine. And on the edge of the broken chasm lay stretched the infamy of Crete, which was conceived in the false cow; and when he saw us he bit himself, like one whom rage consumes within. My sage cried out toward him: “Perhaps you believe that here is the Duke of Athens, who up in the world dealt you your death? Get away, beast, for this man does not come taught by your sister, but goes to see your punishments.”note

Like that bull which breaks loose at the moment it has already received the deathblow, and cannot walk but plunges this way and that, so I saw the Minotaur do. And my guide, quick to see it, cried: “Run to the passage; while he is in his fury, it is good that you go down.” So we took our way down over that heap of fallen stones, which often shifted under my feet because of the unaccustomed weight. I went along thinking, and he said: “You are thinking, perhaps, about this ruin, which is guarded by that bestial anger I have just quenched.

Now I want you to know that the other time I came down here into lower Hell, this rock had not yet fallen. But certainly, if I judge rightly, a little before He came who took from Dis the great prey of the uppermost circle, the deep, foul valley shook on every side so much that I thought the universe felt love, by which, as some believe, the world has more than once been turned back into Chaos; and at that moment this ancient rock, here and elsewhere, was thrown down like this.note

But fix your eyes below, for the river of blood is drawing near, in which boils whoever harms others by violence.” O blind greed, wicked and mad, which so spurs us on in our short life, and then in the eternal one steeps us so cruelly! I saw a wide ditch bent into an arc, as one that embraces the whole plain, just as my escort had said; and between the foot of the bank and the ditch, centaurs armed with arrows were running one behind another, as they used to go hunting in the world.

Seeing us come down, every one of them stood still, and three left the troop with bows and arrows chosen beforehand; and one cried from far off: “To what torment are you coming, you who are descending the slope? Tell us from there; if not, I draw the bow.” My master said: “We will make our answer to Chiron, close by, over there; your will was always so hasty, to your own harm.”

Then he nudged me and said: “That is Nessus, who died for the beautiful Deianira, and himself took vengeance for himself; and the one in the middle, who gazes down at his chest, is the great Chiron, who raised Achilles; that other is Pholus, who was so full of rage. Around the ditch they go by thousands upon thousands, shooting at any soul that pulls itself out of the blood farther than its guilt has allotted it.”note

We drew near those swift beasts. Chiron took an arrow, and with its notch pushed his beard back along his jaws. When he had uncovered his great mouth, he said to his companions: “Have you noticed that the one behind moves whatever he touches? The feet of the dead do not usually do that.” And my good guide, who was now at his chest, where the two natures are joined, answered: “He is indeed alive, and all alone as he is I must show him the dark valley; necessity brings him here, and not pleasure.

One who left off singing alleluia gave me this new office; he is no robber, nor am I a thieving soul. But by that power through which I move my steps along so wild a road, give us one of yours to keep beside us, to show us where the ford is and to carry this man on his back, for he is not a spirit that can go through the air.”note

Chiron wheeled round on his right breast and said to Nessus: “Go back and guide them as he asks, and make any other troop that runs into you give way.” Now we moved on with our trusty escort along the edge of the crimson boiling, where those being boiled were raising loud shrieks. I saw people sunk in it up to the eyebrows; and the great centaur said: “These are tyrants who laid hands on blood and on others’ goods.

Here they weep for the merciless harm they did; here is Alexander, and fierce Dionysius, who gave Sicily years of grief; and that brow with hair so black is Azzolino; and that other, who is blond, is Opizzo da Esti, who in truth was snuffed out by his stepson up in the world.” Then I turned to the poet, and he said: “Let him be first for you now, and I second.” A little farther on the centaur stopped above a people who seemed to rise out of that boiling stream as far as the throat.note

He showed us a shade off to one side, alone, saying: “That one, in the bosom of God, cleft the heart that is still honored on the Thames.” Then I saw people who held their heads, and their whole chests as well, out of the stream; and of these I recognized many. So, more and more, that blood grew shallower, until it cooked only the feet; and there was our crossing of the ditch.note

“Just as you see that on this side the boiling stream keeps growing shallower,” said the centaur, “I want you to believe that on this other side its bed sinks lower and lower, until it comes round again to where tyranny must groan. Divine justice here goads that Attila who was a scourge on earth, and Pyrrhus, and Sextus; and forever milks the tears that it unlocks with the boiling from Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, who made such war upon the roads.” Then he turned back and crossed the ford again.note

They have wide wings, and human necks and faces, taloned feet, and their great bellies feathered; they make laments on the strange trees. And my good master: “Before you go in farther, know that you are in the second ring,” he began to say to me, “and will be, until you come to the horrible sand. So look well, and you will see things that would rob my words of belief.” I heard wailing drawn out on every side, and saw no one who was making it; so I stopped, utterly bewildered.

I believe he believed that I believed that so many voices came from among those stumps, from people who were hiding from us. So the master said: “If you break off some little twig from one of these plants, the thoughts you have will all be cut short.” Then I reached my hand a little forward and plucked a small branch from a great thornbush; and its trunk cried: “Why do you break me?”

After it had grown dark with blood, it began to cry again: “Why do you tear me? Have you no spirit of pity at all? We were men, and now we have been turned into stumps; your hand should surely have been more merciful, even if we had been the souls of snakes.” As from a green log that is burning at one end, and drips at the other, and hisses with the air escaping, so from that broken splinter came words and blood together; at which I let the tip fall, and stood like a man who is afraid.

“If he had been able to believe before, wounded soul,” my sage replied, “what he had seen only in my verse, he would not have stretched out his hand against you; but the incredible thing made me lead him to a deed that weighs on me myself. But tell him who you were, so that, by way of some amends, he may refresh your fame in the world above, where he is allowed to return.” And the trunk: “You so lure me with sweet speech that I cannot keep silent; and may it not burden you if I let myself be snared a little into talking.note

I am he who held both keys of Frederick’s heart, and who turned them, locking and unlocking, so gently that I shut almost everyone else out of his secrets. I kept faith with my glorious office, so much that I lost my sleep and my strength for it. The prostitute who never turned her lewd eyes away from Caesar’s household, the common death and the vice of courts, inflamed every mind against me; and the inflamed so inflamed Augustus that glad honors turned to dismal mourning.note

My mind, in a scornful mood, believing it could escape scorn by dying, made me unjust against my just self. By the new roots of this tree I swear to you that I never broke faith with my lord, who was so worthy of honor. And if either of you returns to the world, let him comfort my memory, which still lies low from the blow that envy dealt it.” He waited a little, and then: “Since he is silent,” the poet said to me, “do not lose the moment; but speak, and ask him whatever more you wish.”

So I said to him: “You ask him further about whatever you think would satisfy me; for I could not, so much pity grips my heart.” So he began again: “So may this man freely do for you what your words beg, imprisoned spirit, may it please you further to tell us how the soul is bound into these knots; and tell us, if you can, whether any soul ever frees itself from such limbs.”

Then the trunk blew hard, and afterward that wind turned into this voice: “You will be answered briefly. When the fierce soul leaves the body from which it has torn itself away, Minos sends it to the seventh mouth. It falls into the wood, and no place is chosen for it; but wherever fortune flings it, there it sprouts like a grain of spelt; it rises as a shoot, and then as a wild plant; the Harpies, feeding afterward on its leaves, give it pain, and for the pain a window.

Like the others we shall come for our cast-off bodies, but not so that any of us may put them on again; for it is not just to have what one has taken from oneself. Here we shall drag them, and through the mournful wood our bodies will be hung, each on the thornbush of its hostile shade.” We were still attending to the trunk, believing it wanted to tell us more, when we were surprised by a noise, like one who hears the boar and the hunt coming toward his post, and hears the beasts and the branches crashing.note

And there were two on the left, naked and scratched, fleeing so hard that they broke through every tangle of the wood. The one in front: “Now come, come quickly, death!” And the other, who thought himself too slow, was shouting: “Lano, your legs were not so nimble at the jousts of the Toppo!” And since perhaps his breath was failing, he made one knot of himself and a bush. Behind them the wood was full of black hounds, ravenous and running, like greyhounds slipped from the chain.note

They set their teeth into the one who had crouched down, and tore him apart piece by piece; then they carried off those suffering limbs. Then my escort took me by the hand and led me to the bush, which was weeping, in vain, through its bleeding wounds. “Jacomo da Sant’Andrea,” it was saying, “what good did it do you to make a screen of me? What blame have I for your wicked life?” When the master had stopped above it, he said: “Who were you, who through so many broken tips blow out your sorrowful speech with blood?”note

And he to us: “O souls who have come to see the shameful mangling that has so torn my leaves from me, gather them up at the foot of this wretched bush. I was of the city that changed its first patron for the Baptist; for which reason he, with his art, will always make it sorrowful; and were it not that at the crossing of the Arno some semblance of him still remains, those citizens who afterward refounded it on the ashes Attila left would have labored in vain. I made a gibbet for myself of my own house.”note

The ground was a dry, dense sand, made in no other way than that which was once trodden by the feet of Cato. O vengeance of God, how much you must be feared by everyone who reads what was made manifest to my eyes! I saw many flocks of naked souls, who were all weeping most wretchedly, and different laws seemed to be laid upon them. Some people lay on the ground face upward; some sat all huddled up; and others moved about continually. Those that went around were the most numerous, and those that lay down under the torment were fewer, but their tongues were more loosened to lament.note

Over all the sand, falling slowly, broad flakes of fire were raining down, like snow in the mountains when there is no wind. Like the flames which Alexander, in those hot regions of India, saw falling on his army, unbroken all the way to the ground, so that he took care to have the soil trampled by his troops, because the fire was more easily put out while it was still single: so the eternal burning came down; and the sand caught fire from it, like tinder under the steel, to double the pain.note

Never at rest was the dance of the wretched hands, now here, now there, shaking the fresh burning off themselves. I began: “Master, you who overcome all things except the hard demons who came out against us at the entrance of the gate, who is that great one who seems not to care about the fire, and lies scornful and scowling, so that the rain does not seem to ripen him?”

And that same one, who had noticed that I was asking my guide about him, cried: “What I was alive, that I am dead. Though Jove should weary his smith, from whom in anger he took the sharp thunderbolt with which I was struck on my last day; or though he should weary the others, one shift after another, in Mongibello at the black forge, crying, ‘Good Vulcan, help, help,’note

as he did at the battle of Phlegra, and should hurl his bolts at me with all his might, he could not have a joyful revenge on me.” Then my guide spoke with such force that I had never heard him so loud: “O Capaneus, in that your pride is not quenched, you are punished all the more: no torment except your own rage would be pain enough to match your fury.”note

Then he turned to me with a kinder look, saying: “That was one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes; he held God in disdain, and seems to hold him so still, and seems to prize him little. But, as I told him, his own scorn is a fitting ornament for his breast. Now follow behind me, and take care that you do not set your feet on the burning sand yet, but always keep them close to the wood.” In silence we came to where a little stream gushes out of the wood, whose redness still makes me shudder.

As the brook that flows out of the Bulicame, which the sinful women then share among themselves, so this one ran down across the sand. Its bed and both its sloping banks had been turned to stone, and so had the margins on either side, so I saw that our way lay there. “Among all the other things I have shown you since we came in through the gate whose threshold is denied to no one, your eyes have seen nothing as notable as this present stream, which quenches all the little flames above it.”note

These were my guide’s words, so I begged him to grant me the food for which he had granted me the appetite. “In the middle of the sea there lies a ruined land,” he said then, “which is called Crete, under whose king the world was once chaste. There is a mountain there, once glad with water and leaves, which was called Ida; now it is deserted, like a thing worn out with age. Rhea once chose it as a safe cradle for her son, and to hide him better, she had shouts raised there whenever he cried.note

Inside the mountain stands a great old man, upright, who keeps his back turned toward Damietta and looks at Rome as if into his mirror. His head is formed of fine gold, and his arms and breast are pure silver; then he is copper down to the fork. From there downward he is all choice iron, except that his right foot is baked clay, and he stands upright on that one more than on the other.note

Every part except the gold is broken by a crack that drips tears, and these, gathered together, bore through that cavern. Their course falls from rock to rock into this valley: they form Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. Then it goes down through this narrow channel to where there is no more going down; they form Cocytus, and what that pool is like you will see, so it is not described here.” And I to him: “If the present stream flows down in this way from our world, why does it appear to us only at this border?”

And he to me: “You know that the place is round, and although you have come a long way, always to the left as you went down toward the bottom, you have not yet turned through the whole circle. So if something new appears to us, it should not bring wonder to your face.” And I again: “Master, where are Phlegethon and Lethe to be found? For you are silent about the one, and the other, you say, is made from this rain.”

“In all your questions you certainly please me,” he replied, “but the boiling of the red water should well have answered one of those you ask. You will see Lethe, but outside this pit, there where souls go to wash themselves when their guilt, repented of, has been taken away.” Then he said: “Now it is time to leave the wood. See that you come behind me. The margins, which are not burned, make a path, and above them every fiery vapor is quenched.”note

We were already so far from the wood that I would not have seen where it was, even if I had turned back, when we met a troop of souls coming along the bank. Each of them looked at us as people look at one another in the evening under a new moon, and they puckered their brows at us as an old tailor does at the eye of his needle. Eyed in this way by such a company, I was recognized by one, who took me by the hem and cried: “What a marvel!”

And I, when he stretched out his arm to me, fixed my eyes on his baked features, so that the scorched face did not keep my intellect from knowing him; and bending my face down to his, I answered: “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” And he: “O my son, may it not displease you if Brunetto Latini turns back with you a little way and lets the file go on.”note

I said to him: “I beg it of you with all my heart; and if you wish me to sit with you, I will, if he is willing, for I go with him.” “O son,” he said, “whoever of this flock stops even for a moment must then lie a hundred years without fanning himself when the fire strikes him. So go on: I will come along at your hem, and then I will rejoin my band, who go weeping for their eternal losses.”

I did not dare come down from the road to walk level with him, but I kept my head bowed, like someone walking in reverence. He began: “What fortune or destiny leads you down here before your last day? And who is this who shows you the way?” “Up there above, in the clear life,” I answered him, “I lost my way in a valley, before my age was full. Only yesterday morning I turned my back on it; this one appeared to me as I was going back into it, and he is leading me home by this path.”

And he to me: “If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach the glorious harbor, if I judged rightly in the fair life; and if I had not died so early, seeing heaven so kind to you, I would have given you comfort in your work. But that ungrateful, malicious people who came down from Fiesole in ancient times, and still smack of the mountain and the rock, will become your enemy because of your good deeds. And with reason: for among the sour sorb apples it is not fitting for the sweet fig to bear fruit.note

An old report in the world calls them blind; they are a people avaricious, envious and proud: see that you cleanse yourself of their ways. Your fortune holds such honor in store for you that both one party and the other will hunger for you, but the grass will be far from the goat. Let the beasts of Fiesole make fodder of themselves, and not touch the plant, if any still springs up in their dung, in which the holy seed of those Romans lives again who stayed there when it became the nest of so much malice.”

“If my prayer were fully granted,” I answered him, “you would not yet be banished from human nature; for fixed in my mind, and now it grieves my heart, is the dear, kind, fatherly image of you, when in the world, from time to time, you taught me how a man makes himself eternal. And how grateful I am for it must, while I live, be seen in what I say. What you tell me of my course I write down, and keep it, with another text, to be explained by a lady who will know how, if I reach her.note

This much I want to be plain to you: so long as my conscience does not reproach me, I am ready for Fortune, whatever she wills. Such a pledge is not new to my ears; so let Fortune turn her wheel as she pleases, and the peasant his mattock.” My master then turned back over his right cheek and looked at me; then he said: “He listens well who takes note of it.” Nor do I go on speaking any less with Ser Brunetto for that, and I ask who are his most famous and most eminent companions.

And he to me: “It is good to know of some; of the others it will be praiseworthy to keep silent, for the time would be too short for so much talk. In sum, know that all were clerics and great men of letters, and of great fame, befouled in the world by one and the same sin. Priscian goes along with that wretched crowd, and Francesco d’Accorso; and you could also have seen there, if you had had any craving for such scurf, the one who was transferred by the servant of servants from the Arno to the Bacchiglione, where he left his ill-strained sinews.note

I would say more, but my walking and my talk cannot go on longer, for I see new smoke rising there from the sand. People are coming with whom I must not be. Let my Treasure be commended to you, in which I still live; and I ask no more.” Then he turned back, and seemed like one of those who run for the green cloth at Verona across the open field; and of them he seemed the one who wins, not the one who loses.note

At their cries my teacher stopped to listen; he turned his face toward me and said: “Now wait; to these one ought to be courteous. And if it were not for the fire that the nature of the place shoots down, I would say that haste befitted you more than them.” As we stopped, they began their old lament again, and when they had reached us, all three made a wheel of themselves.

As champions, naked and oiled, used to do, watching for their hold and their advantage before they come to blows and thrusts, so, wheeling, each kept his face turned toward me, so that his neck traveled continually in the opposite direction to his feet. “And if the misery of this soft, sandy place brings us and our prayers into contempt,” one began, “and our darkened and scorched appearance, let our fame move your mind to tell us who you are, who so securely rub your living feet through Hell.

This one, whose footprints you see me tread, though he goes naked and stripped of hair, was of higher rank than you believe. He was the grandson of the good Gualdrada; his name was Guido Guerra, and in his life he did much with his counsel and with his sword. The other who tramples the sand behind me is Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, whose voice should have been welcomed in the world above. And I, who am set on this cross with them, was Jacopo Rusticucci; and certainly my fierce wife harms me more than anything else.”note

If I had been sheltered from the fire, I would have thrown myself down among them, and I believe my teacher would have allowed it. But since I would have been burned and baked, fear overcame the good will that made me eager to embrace them. Then I began: “Not contempt, but sorrow, did your condition fix within me, so deep that it will be long before it leaves me entirely, as soon as this lord of mine said words to me by which I understood that people such as you were coming.

I am from your city, and always I have retold and heard with affection your deeds and your honored names. I am leaving the gall behind, and going for the sweet fruits promised me by the truthful guide; but first I must plunge down to the center.” “So may your soul long guide your limbs,” that one answered again, “and so may your fame shine after you, tell us: do courtesy and valor dwell in our city as they used to, or have they gone clean out of it?

For Guglielmo Borsiere, who has been grieving with us only a short while and goes there with our companions, torments us greatly with his words.” “The newcomers and the sudden gains have bred pride and excess in you, Florence, so that already you weep for it.” So I cried with my face raised; and the three, who took this as my answer, looked at one another as men look when they hear the truth. “If at other times it costs you so little,” they all replied, “to satisfy others, happy are you, who can speak like this at will!note

So, if you escape from these dark places and return to see the beautiful stars again, when it will please you to say, ‘I was there,’ see that you speak of us to people.” Then they broke their wheel, and as they fled, their swift legs seemed like wings. An ammen [amen] could not have been said as quickly as they vanished; so my master thought it time to go. I followed him, and we had gone only a little way when the sound of the water was so near us that, had we spoken, we would scarcely have been heard.

Like that river which is the first to keep its own course from Monte Viso eastward, on the left slope of the Apennines—which is called Acquacheta up above, before it comes down into its low bed, and at Forlì no longer bears that name—and roars there above San Benedetto dell’Alpe as it falls in a single cascade, where there ought to have been shelter for a thousand; so, down a steep bank, we found that dark-stained water resounding, so loud that in a short while it would have hurt our ears.note

I had a cord girded around me, and with it I had once thought to catch the leopard with the painted hide. After I had loosed it all from me, as my guide had commanded, I held it out to him knotted and coiled. Then he turned toward his right side, and somewhat away from the edge he threw it down into that deep abyss. “Surely something new must answer,” I said to myself, “this new signal that my master follows so with his eye.”

Ah, how cautious people should be near those who do not see the deed alone, but with their wisdom look within our thoughts! He said to me: “Soon there will come up what I await, and what your thought is dreaming must soon be revealed to your sight.” To that truth which has the face of a lie a man should always close his lips as long as he can, because it brings him shame through no fault of his own;

but here I cannot keep silent; and by the notes of this comedy, Reader, I swear to you—so may they not be empty of lasting favor—that I saw, through that thick, dark air, a figure come swimming upward, marvelous to even the steadiest heart, just as one returns who sometimes goes down to free the anchor that grips a reef or something else hidden in the sea, who stretches upward and draws in his feet.note

It had two paws, hairy up to the armpits; its back and chest and both its flanks were painted with knots and little circles. Tartars and Turks never made cloth with more colors in ground and pattern, nor were such webs ever set on the loom by Arachne. As boats sometimes lie at the shore, partly in the water and partly on land, and as there, among the gluttonous Germans, the beaver settles itself to wage its war, so that worst of beasts lay on the rim of stone that encloses the sand.note

Its whole tail quivered in the void, twisting upward the venomous fork that armed its tip like a scorpion’s. The guide said: “Now our way must turn aside a little, as far as that wicked beast that lies there.” So we went down on the right-hand side and took ten steps along the edge, to keep well clear of the sand and the flames; and when we had come to it, I saw, a little farther on, people sitting on the sand near the edge of the void.

There the master said to me: “So that you may carry away full experience of this ring, go and see how they fare. Let your talk there be brief; until you return I will speak with this beast, so that it may lend us its strong shoulders.” So, still along the outermost edge of that seventh circle, I went all alone to where the sorrowful people sat. Their grief was bursting out through their eyes; this way and that they defended themselves with their hands, now against the flames, now against the burning ground.

Not otherwise do dogs in summer, now with their muzzles, now with their paws, when they are bitten by fleas or flies or gadflies. When I had set my eyes on the faces of some of them, on whom the painful fire falls, I recognized none of them; but I noticed that from the neck of each hung a pouch, which had a certain color and a certain emblem, and on this their eyes seem to feast.note

And as I came among them, looking, I saw on a yellow purse a blue figure that had the face and bearing of a lion. Then, as the course of my gaze moved on, I saw another purse, red as blood, showing a goose whiter than butter. And one who had his small white bag marked with a fat blue sow said to me: “What are you doing in this pit? Now go away; and since you are still alive, know that my neighbor Vitaliano will sit here at my left side.note

Among these Florentines I am a Paduan; many times they deafen my ears, shouting: ‘Let the sovereign knight come, who will bring the pouch with three beaks!’” Here he twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue, like an ox licking its nose. And I, fearing that staying longer might anger him who had warned me to stay only a little, turned back from those weary souls. I found my guide, who had already climbed onto the rump of the fierce animal, and he said to me: “Now be strong and bold.note

From now on we go down by stairs like these. Climb on in front, for I want to be in the middle, so that the tail can do no harm.” Like one so near the shivering fit of the quartan fever that his nails are already pale, and who trembles all over just at the sight of shade, so I became at the words he spoke to me; but shame made its threats to me, the shame that makes a servant strong in the presence of a good lord. I settled myself on those huge ugly shoulders. “Yes”—I wanted to say, but my voice did not come out as I expected—“make sure you hold me.”

But he, who at another time had helped me in another peril, as soon as I had mounted clasped me in his arms and held me up; and he said: “Geryon, move now: make your circles wide and your descent slow; think of the new burden you carry.” As a small boat leaves its berth, backing, backing, so the beast moved away from there; and when it felt itself entirely free, it turned its tail to where its chest had been, and, stretching it out, moved it like an eel, and with its paws gathered the air toward itself.

I do not believe there was greater fear when Phaethon let go of the reins, so that the sky was scorched, as it still appears, nor when wretched Icarus felt his back losing its feathers as the wax grew hot, while his father cried to him, “You are taking a bad course!”—than was mine, when I saw that I was in the air on every side, and saw every sight extinguished except the beast. It goes on swimming, slowly, slowly; it wheels and descends, but I do not perceive it, except that the wind blows on my face and from below.note

I could already hear, on my right hand, the whirlpool making a horrible roar beneath us, so I thrust my head out, with my eyes looking down. Then I was more afraid of the drop, for I saw fires and heard laments; so that, trembling all over, I clenched my legs tight. And then I saw—for I had not seen it before—our descending and our circling, by the great torments that drew near on different sides.

As the falcon that has been long on the wing, and, without seeing lure or bird, makes the falconer say, “Alas, you are coming down!”—descends weary to the place it left so swiftly, through a hundred circles, and settles far from its master, disdainful and sullen: so Geryon set us down at the bottom, right at the foot of the sheer rock, and, once unburdened of our persons, vanished like the arrow’s notch from the string.

As, where moat after moat encircles castles to guard their walls, the ground where they lie forms a pattern, such was the image those ditches formed here; and as from the thresholds of such fortresses little bridges run to the outer bank, so from the base of the cliff ran ridges of rock that cut across the embankments and ditches as far as the well, which cuts them off and gathers them in. In this place, shaken off Geryon’s back, we found ourselves; and the poet kept to the left, and I moved behind him.

On my right hand I saw new things to pity, new torments and new scourgers, with which the first ditch was filled. At the bottom the sinners were naked: those on our side of the middle came toward us, facing us; those on the other side went in our direction, but with longer strides; just as the Romans, because of the great throng in the year of the Jubilee, have found a way to get the people across the bridge, so that on one side all have their faces toward the castle and go to Saint Peter’s, while on the other side they go toward the hill.note

Here and there, along the dark rock, I saw horned demons with great whips, who beat them cruelly from behind. Ah, how they made them lift their heels at the first strokes! Not one waited for the second or the third. As I went on, my eyes met one of them, and at once I said: “My eyes have not gone without the sight of this man before.”

So I stopped my feet to make him out; and my sweet guide stopped with me and allowed me to go back a little. And that whipped soul thought he could hide himself by lowering his face, but it did him little good, for I said: “You who cast your eyes on the ground, if the features you bear are not false, you are Venedico Caccianimico. But what brings you to such stinging Salse?” And he said to me: “I say it unwillingly; but I am compelled by your plain speech, which makes me remember the world of old.note

I was the one who brought Ghisolabella to do the Marquis’s will, however the vile story may be told. And I am not the only Bolognese who weeps here; in fact this place is so full of them that not so many tongues are now taught to say sipa between the Savena and the Reno; and if you want proof or testimony of this, call to mind our greedy hearts.” As he was speaking, a demon struck him with his lash and said: “Off with you, pimp! There are no women here to sell for coin.”note

I rejoined my escort; then with a few steps we came to where a ridge of rock jutted from the bank. We climbed it quite easily, and, turning right along its jagged crest, we left those eternal circling walls. When we were at the place where it opens out beneath to let the scourged pass through, my guide said: “Stop, and let the faces of these other ill-born souls strike your sight, for you have not yet seen them, since they have been going in the same direction as we.”

From the old bridge we watched the line that came toward us from the other side, which the whip likewise drives on. The good master, without my asking, said to me: “Look at that great one who is coming, who for all his pain seems not to shed a tear: what a regal bearing he still keeps! That is Jason, who by courage and cunning deprived the Colchians of the ram. He passed by the island of Lemnos after its bold and pitiless women had put all their males to death.note

There, with cunning and with ornate words, he deceived Hypsipyle, the young girl who had earlier deceived all the others. He left her there, pregnant and alone; such guilt condemns him to such torment; and vengeance is also taken here for Medea. With him go all who deceive in that way; and let this be enough to know of the first valley and of those it holds in its jaws.” We were already where the narrow path crosses the second embankment and makes of it a buttress for another arch.note

From there we heard people whimpering in the next ditch, snorting through their snouts, and beating themselves with their palms. The banks were crusted with a mold from the breath below that cakes on them, which made war on the eyes and nose. The bottom is so deep that no spot gives enough of a view without climbing to the crown of the arch, where the rock rises highest.

There we came, and from there, down in the ditch, I saw people plunged in excrement that seemed to have come from human privies. And while I was searching down there with my eyes, I saw one with his head so smeared with dung that one could not tell whether he was layman or cleric. He shouted at me: “Why are you so greedy to look at me more than at the other filthy ones?” And I said to him: “Because, if I remember right, I have seen you before with your hair dry, and you are Alessio Interminei of Lucca: that is why I eye you more than all the others.”note

And then he, beating his head: “Down here I have been sunk by the flatteries of which my tongue never had its fill.” After that my guide said to me: “See that you push your sight a little farther forward, so that your eyes can properly reach the face of that filthy, disheveled woman who is scratching herself there with her dung-fouled nails, and now crouches down, and now stands on her feet. That is Thaïs, the prostitute who answered her lover when he said, ‘Do I stand in great favor with you?’—‘No: in marvelous favor!’ And with this let our eyes be satisfied.”note

I saw, along the sides and across the bottom, the livid stone full of holes, all of one width, and each one round. They seemed to me neither smaller nor larger than those in my beautiful San Giovanni, made as places for those who baptize; one of which, not many years ago, I broke for the sake of someone who was drowning in it: and let this be a seal to undeceive everyone.note

Out of the mouth of each hole there stuck a sinner’s feet, and his legs up to the thick of the calf, and the rest of him stayed inside. The soles of all of them were on fire, both soles; so that their joints twitched so violently that they would have snapped ropes of willow and of grass. As the flame on oily things usually moves only along the outer surface, so it was there from the heels to the toes. “Who is that one, master, who torments himself, twitching more than his other companions,” I said, “and whom a fiercer flame is sucking?”

And he said to me: “If you want me to carry you down there by that bank which lies lower, you will learn from him about himself and his wrongs.” And I: “Whatever pleases you is good to me: you are my lord, and you know that I do not depart from your will, and you know what is left unsaid.” Then we came onto the fourth embankment; we turned and went down on the left hand into the narrow, perforated bottom.

The good master did not set me down from his hip until he had brought me to the hole of the one who was lamenting so with his shanks. “Whoever you are, who keep your upper part below, sad soul, planted like a stake,” I began to say, “if you can, speak.” I stood like the friar who hears the confession of the treacherous assassin, who, once he is planted, calls him back, and so puts off his death. And he cried: “Are you already standing there, are you already standing there, Boniface? The writing lied to me by several years.note

Are you so soon sated with that wealth for which you did not fear to take the beautiful Lady by deceit, and then to ravage her?” I became like those who stand as if mocked, because they do not understand what has been answered to them, and do not know how to reply. Then Virgil said: “Tell him quickly: ‘I am not the one, I am not the one you think.’” And I answered as I was told. At this the spirit twisted both his feet; then, sighing, and with a tearful voice, he said to me: “Then what do you want of me?note

If it matters so much to you to know who I am that you have come all the way down the bank for that, know that I was clothed in the great mantle; and truly I was a son of the she-bear, so eager to advance the cubs that up there I put wealth in my purse, and here I have put myself. Beneath my head are dragged the others who came before me in simony, flattened in the fissures of the stone. I too will fall down there, when the one comes whom I believed you were when I asked my sudden question.note

But the time I have already spent with my feet burning, standing upside down like this, is longer than he will stay planted here with red feet: for after him will come, guilty of uglier deeds, from the west, a lawless shepherd, such that he must cover both him and me. He will be a new Jason, of whom we read in Maccabees; and as his king was pliant to that one, so to this one will be he who rules France.”note

I do not know whether I was too rash here, for I answered him in this strain: “Ah, now tell me: how much treasure did our Lord ask of Saint Peter before he placed the keys in his keeping? Surely he asked nothing but ‘Follow me.’ Nor did Peter or the others take gold or silver from Matthias when he was chosen by lot for the place that the guilty soul had lost. So stay there, for you are justly punished; and guard well the ill-gotten money that made you bold against Charles.note

And were it not that I am still forbidden by reverence for the supreme keys, which you held in the happy life, I would use still harsher words; for your avarice afflicts the world, trampling the good and raising up the wicked. It was you shepherds the Evangelist had in view when he saw her who sits upon the waters prostituting herself with kings: she who was born with the seven heads and drew strength from the ten horns, as long as virtue pleased her husband.note

You have made yourselves a god of gold and silver; and what difference is there between you and the idolater, except that he worships one, and you a hundred? Ah, Constantine, how much evil was mothered, not by your conversion, but by that dowry which the first rich father took from you!” And while I was singing him such notes, whether anger or conscience was biting him, he kicked hard with both his soles. I truly believe it pleased my guide, so contented was his look as he listened all the while to the sound of the true words I spoke.note

So he took me in both his arms, and, when he had me wholly up against his chest, he climbed back by the way he had come down; nor did he tire of holding me clasped to him until he had carried me to the top of the arch that is the crossing from the fourth to the fifth embankment. There he gently set down his burden—gently, because of the rough, steep ridge, which would be a hard passage for goats. From there another valley was revealed to me.

Perhaps someone was once twisted so completely by the force of palsy; but I have never seen it, nor do I believe it can be. Reader, so may God let you gather fruit from your reading, now think for yourself how I could keep my face dry, when close at hand I saw our image so contorted that the tears from the eyes bathed the buttocks along the cleft. Truly I wept, leaning on one of the rocks of the hard ridge, so that my escort said to me: “Are you still one of the other fools?

Here pity lives when it is truly dead. Who is more wicked than one who feels anguish at divine judgment? Raise your head, raise it, and see the one for whom the earth opened before the eyes of the Thebans, so that they all shouted: ‘Where are you rushing, Amphiaraus? Why are you leaving the war?’ And he did not stop plunging downward until he reached Minos, who seizes every one. See how he has made a chest of his shoulders: because he wanted to see too far ahead, he looks behind and goes a backward path.note

See Tiresias, who changed his appearance when from male he became female, all his limbs being transformed; and afterward he had to strike the two entwined serpents with his rod once more before he could regain his manly plumes. Aruns is the one who backs up against that one’s belly, who in the mountains of Luni, where the man of Carrara who lives below them works the land, had his cave among white marbles for his dwelling; from there his view was not cut off from watching the stars and the sea.note

And she who covers her breasts, which you cannot see, with her loosened tresses, and has all her hairy skin on the other side, was Manto, who searched through many lands, and afterward settled where I was born; so I would like you to listen to me a little. After her father departed from life, and the city of Bacchus became enslaved, she wandered the world for a long time. Up in beautiful Italy, at the foot of the Alps that shut in Germany above Tyrol, lies a lake that is called Benaco.note

By a thousand springs, I think, and more, the Apennine is bathed between Garda and Val Camonica with the water that settles in that lake. There is a place in the middle where the shepherd of Trent, and the one of Brescia, and the one of Verona could each give his blessing, if he traveled that way. Peschiera sits there, a fine and strong fortress for facing the Brescians and the Bergamasques, where the shore round about runs lowest. There everything that cannot stay in the lap of Benaco must fall, and becomes a river down through green pastures.note

As soon as the water starts to run, it is no longer called Benaco but Mincio, as far as Governolo, where it falls into the Po. It has not run far before it finds a low plain, over which it spreads and turns it to marsh, and in summer it is sometimes unhealthy. Passing that way, the cruel virgin saw land in the middle of the swamp, untilled and bare of inhabitants. There, to flee all human company, she stayed with her servants to practice her arts, and lived, and left there her empty body.

Then the men who were scattered round about gathered at that place, which was strong because of the swamp it had on every side. They built the city over those dead bones; and after her who first chose the place they called it Mantua, without casting any other lot. Its people within were once more numerous, before the folly of Casalodi was deceived by Pinamonte. Therefore I charge you, that if you ever hear the origin of my city told otherwise, let no lie defraud the truth.”note

And I: “Master, your accounts are so certain to me, and so take hold of my faith, that any others would be spent coals to me. But tell me about the people who are passing, if you see any of them worthy of note; for to that alone my mind keeps returning.” Then he said to me: “That one who spreads his beard from his cheeks over his dark shoulders was, when Greece was so empty of males that they hardly remained even in the cradles, an augur, and with Calchas he gave the moment in Aulis for cutting the first cable.note

Eurypylus was his name, and so my lofty Tragedy sings of him in a certain passage: you know it well, who know the whole of it. That other one, who is so thin in the flanks, was Michael Scot, who truly knew the game of magic frauds. See Guido Bonatti, see Asdente, who now would wish he had attended to his leather and his thread, but repents too late.note

See the wretched women who left the needle, the shuttle and the spindle, and made themselves fortune-tellers; they worked spells with herbs and with images. But come now, for already Cain and his thorns hold the boundary of both hemispheres and touch the wave below Seville; and already last night the moon was full: you must remember it well, for it did you no harm at times in the deep wood.” So he spoke to me, and meanwhile we went on.note

one hammers at the prow and another at the stern; another makes oars, and another twists ropes; another patches the jib and the mainsail: so, not by fire but by divine art, a thick pitch was boiling down there, which smeared the bank on every side. I saw it, but saw nothing in it except the bubbles that the boiling raised, and all of it swelling and settling again, compressed. While I was gazing fixedly down there, my guide, saying, “Look out, look out,” drew me to him from the place where I was standing.

Then I turned, like the man who is eager to see what he ought to flee, and whom sudden fear unnerves, so that he does not delay his departure in order to look: and I saw behind us a black devil coming, running up along the ridge. Ah, how fierce he was in his look! And how cruel he seemed to me in his bearing, with his wings open and light upon his feet! His shoulder, which was sharp and high, was loaded with a sinner by both his haunches, and he held him clutched by the sinews of his feet.

From our bridge he said, “O Malebranche, here is one of the elders of Saint Zita: put him under, while I go back for more to that city, which I have well supplied with them: everyone there is a grafter, except Bonturo; there, for money, no is turned into ita [yes].” He hurled him down there and turned back along the hard ridge; and never was a mastiff let loose with such haste to chase a thief.note

That one plunged in and came back up doubled over; but the demons who had cover under the bridge shouted: “Here the Holy Face has no place; here one swims differently than in the Serchio; so if you do not want our hooks, do not stick out above the pitch.” Then they bit into him with more than a hundred hooks, and said: “Here you must dance under cover, so that, if you can, you may grab in secret.”note

Not otherwise do cooks have their scullions push the meat down into the middle of the cauldron with hooks, so that it does not float. The good master said to me: “So that it may not appear that you are here, crouch down behind a jagged rock that may give you some screen; and whatever offense is done to me, do not be afraid, for I know these things, because I was in such a fray once before.”

Then he passed beyond the head of the bridge, and as he reached the sixth bank, he needed to show a steady brow. With the fury and the storm with which dogs rush out at the poor beggar, who stops short and begs where he stands, those came out from under the little bridge and turned all their hooks against him; but he shouted: “Let none of you be savage.

Before your hook takes hold of me, let one of you come forward to hear me, and then take counsel about hooking me.” All of them shouted: “Let Malacoda go”; so one moved, and the others stood still; and he came to him, saying: “What good will it do him?” “Do you think, Malacoda, that you see me come here,” said my master, “safe already from all your obstacles, without divine will and favorable fate? Let us go, for it is willed in heaven that I show another this wild way.”

Then his pride so fell that he let his hook drop at his feet and said to the others: “Now let him not be struck.” And my guide said to me: “O you who sit crouching low among the jagged rocks of the bridge, now you may come back to me safely.” So I moved and came to him quickly; and the devils all pressed forward, so that I feared they would not keep the pact.

And so I once saw the foot soldiers afraid who came out of Caprona under treaty, seeing themselves among so many enemies. I drew up close, with my whole body, alongside my guide, and did not turn my eyes from their looks, which were not good. They lowered their hooks, and “Do you want me to touch him,” one kept saying to another, “on the rump?” And they answered: “Yes, see that you let him have it.” But that demon who was holding talk with my guide turned round very quickly and said: “Down, down, Scarmiglione.”note

Then he said to us: “One cannot go farther along this ridge, because the sixth arch lies all shattered at the bottom; and if you still wish to go forward, go along this bank; nearby is another ridge that makes a way. Yesterday, five hours later than this hour, one thousand two hundred and sixty-six years were completed since the way here was broken. I am sending some of mine over there to see whether anyone is airing himself; go with them, for they will do you no harm.”note

“Step forward, Alichino and Calcabrina,” he began to say, “and you, Cagnazzo; and let Barbariccia lead the ten. Let Libicocco come too, and Draghignazzo, tusked Ciriatto, and Graffiacane, and Farfarello, and mad Rubicante. Search all around the boiling birdlime; let these two be safe as far as the next ridge, which runs all unbroken over the dens.” “Oh me, master, what is it that I see?” I said. “Ah, let us go alone, without an escort, if you know the way, for I for my part do not ask for one.note

If you are as alert as you usually are, do you not see that they gnash their teeth and threaten us with harm with their brows?” And he to me: “I do not want you to be afraid: let them gnash as much as they please, for they do it for the boiled wretches.” They wheeled round along the left-hand bank; but first each had pressed his tongue between his teeth toward their leader as a signal, and he had made a trumpet of his backside.

We went along with the ten demons: ah, savage company! But in church with the saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons. Still my attention was on the pitch, to see every feature of the ditch and of the people who were burning in it. Like dolphins, when they signal to sailors with the arch of their backs that they should take steps to save their ship, so now and then, to ease his pain, one of the sinners would show his back, and hide it again in less time than lightning flashes.

And as at the edge of the water of a ditch the frogs stand with only their snouts out, so that they hide their feet and the rest of their bulk, so the sinners stood on every side; but as Barbariccia drew near, so they drew back beneath the boiling. I saw, and my heart still shudders at it, one waiting just so, as it happens that one frog stays and another darts away.

And Graffiacane, who was most directly opposite him, hooked him by his pitch-smeared hair and hauled him up, so that he looked to me like an otter. I already knew the names of all of them, so well had I noted them when they were chosen, and when they called one another I listened for how. “O Rubicante, see that you set your claws on him and flay him,” the cursed ones all shouted together. And I: “My master, if you can, find out who the wretch is who has fallen into the hands of his enemies.”

My guide went up beside him and asked him where he came from, and he answered: “I was born in the kingdom of Navarre. My mother put me in the service of a lord, for she had borne me to a scoundrel, a destroyer of himself and of his possessions. Then I was a member of the household of good King Thibaut; there I set myself to practicing graft, for which I render account in this heat.”note

And Ciriatto, from whose mouth a tusk came out on either side, like a hog’s, made him feel how one of them could rip. The mouse had come among wicked cats; but Barbariccia locked him in his arms and said: “Stand off there, while I hold him pinned.” And he turned his face to my master: “Ask,” he said, “if you want to learn more from him, before someone else tears him apart.”

My guide: “Then tell us now about the other guilty ones: do you know anyone under the pitch who is Italian?” And he: “I parted a little while ago from one who was from near there; I wish I were still covered with him, for I would fear neither claw nor hook.” And Libicocco said, “We have put up with too much,” and caught his arm with his grapple, so that, tearing, he carried off a piece of muscle. Draghignazzo too wanted to grab him down by the legs; at which their captain of ten turned round and round with an evil look.

When they had calmed down a little, my guide, without delay, asked the one who was still gazing at his wound: “Who was that one from whom you say you made an unlucky parting to come ashore?” And he answered: “It was Friar Gomita, the one from Gallura, vessel of every fraud, who had his lord’s enemies in his hands and treated them so that each of them praises him for it: he took their money and let them off quietly, as he says; and in his other offices too he was no petty grafter, but a sovereign one.note

Lord Michel Zanche of Logudoro keeps company with him; and their tongues never grow tired of talking about Sardinia. Oh me! See that other one gnashing his teeth: I would say more, but I fear he is getting ready to scratch my scabby head.” And the great commander, turning to Farfarello, who was rolling his eyes, ready to strike, said: “Get away there, wicked bird.” “If you want to see or hear,” the frightened one began again then, “Tuscans or Lombards, I will make them come.note

But let the Malebranche keep back a little, so that the others need not fear their vengeance; and I, sitting in this very spot, for me alone will make seven come, when I whistle, as is our custom whenever one of us gets out.” At these words Cagnazzo raised his snout, shaking his head, and said: “Listen to the trick he has thought up to throw himself back down!”

At this he, who had snares in great abundance, replied: “I am too cunning indeed, when I bring greater misery on my own companions.” Alichino could not hold back and, against the others, said to him: “If you dive, I won’t come after you at a gallop, but I’ll beat my wings above the pitch. Let the top of the ridge be left, and let the bank be our screen, to see whether you alone are a match for all of us.”

O you who read, you will hear of a new sport! Each of them turned his eyes toward the other slope, and first of all the one who had been most set against doing it. The Navarrese chose his moment well: he planted his feet on the ground, and in an instant he leapt and broke free of their leader. At this each of them was stung with guilt, but most of all the one who had caused the blunder; so he sprang forward and shouted: “You’re caught!”

But it did him little good, for wings could not outrun fear: the one went under, and the other, flying, turned his breast upward. Not otherwise does the duck plunge down all at once when the falcon draws near, and the falcon returns aloft, angry and beaten. Calcabrina, furious at the trick, flew after him, eager for the sinner to escape so that he could have a fight. And as soon as the grafter had disappeared, he turned his claws on his companion and grappled with him above the ditch.

But the other was a true sparrowhawk, full-grown and fierce, to claw him well in return, and both fell into the middle of the boiling pond. The heat parted them at once; but there was no rising out of it, so gummed up were their wings. Barbariccia, grieving with the rest of his crew, sent four of them flying to the other bank with all their hooks, and very swiftly, on this side and that, they came down to their posts. They stretched their hooks out toward the two stuck in the lime, who were already cooked inside their crust. And we left them, entangled like that,

This is what I was thinking: “These devils have been made fools of because of us, with harm and with such mockery that I believe it galls them greatly. If anger is wound on top of their ill will, they will come after us more cruelly than the dog after the hare it snaps in its jaws.” Already I felt all my hair standing on end with fear, and I was looking back intently, when I said: “Master, if you do not hide yourself and me quickly, I am afraid of the Malebranche: we already have them behind us; I imagine them so vividly that I can already hear them.”

And he: “If I were a mirror of leaded glass, I would not catch your outward image more quickly than I take in the image within you. Just now your thoughts came among mine, with the same bearing and the same face, so that out of both I have made a single plan. If the right-hand bank slopes enough for us to get down into the next ditch, we shall escape the chase you imagine.” He had not finished laying out this plan when I saw them coming with wings spread, not far off, intent on seizing us.

My guide took hold of me at once, like a mother who is woken by the noise and sees the flames blazing close to her, who takes her son and flees and does not stop, caring more for him than for herself, not even long enough to put on more than a shift. And down from the brink of the hard bank he let himself go, on his back, along the sloping rock that walls in one side of the next ditch.

Never did water run so fast through a sluice to turn the wheel of a mill on land, when it draws closest to the paddles, as my master went down that bank, carrying me on his chest like his son, not like a companion. Hardly had his feet reached the bed of the bottom below when they were up on the ridge right above us; but there was nothing to fear from them, for the high Providence that chose to make them ministers of the fifth ditch takes from all of them the power to leave it.

Down there we found a painted people, who were going round with very slow steps, weeping, and in their looks weary and defeated. They wore cloaks with hoods pulled low in front of their eyes, made in the cut that is made for the monks in Cologne. Outside they are gilded, so that they dazzle; but inside they are all lead, and so heavy that the ones Frederick used to put on men were straw by comparison.note

O mantle wearisome for all eternity! We turned once more, still to the left, along with them, intent on their sad weeping; but because of the weight those weary people came on so slowly that we found ourselves in new company at every swing of the hip. So I said to my guide: “See if you can find someone known by deed or by name, and as we walk, turn your eyes around.”

And one who recognized the Tuscan speech cried out behind us: “Hold back your feet, you who run like this through the murky air: perhaps you will have from me what you are asking.” At this my guide turned and said: “Wait, and then go on at his pace.” I stopped, and saw two whose faces showed a great eagerness of mind to be with me; but their load and the narrow way held them back. When they had come up, they looked me over for a long while, with sidelong eyes, without saying a word; then they turned to each other and said between themselves:

“This one seems alive, by the movement of his throat; and if they are dead, by what privilege do they go uncovered by the heavy robe?” Then they said to me: “O Tuscan, who have come to the college of the sad hypocrites, do not scorn to tell us who you are.” And I to them: “I was born and grew up beside the fair river Arno, in the great city, and I am in the body I have always had.

But who are you, down whose cheeks, as I see, such grief trickles, and what punishment is this upon you that glitters so?” And one of them answered me: “These orange cloaks are of lead so thick that the weight makes its scales creak like this. We were Jovial Friars, and Bolognese; I was named Catalano, and he Loderingo, and we were chosen together by your city, as one man alone is usually chosen, to keep its peace; and what we were can still be seen around the Gardingo.”note

I began: “O friars, your miseries…” But I said no more, for one caught my eye who was crucified on the ground with three stakes. When he saw me, he writhed all over, blowing sighs into his beard; and Friar Catalano, who noticed this, said to me: “That one pinned there, whom you are looking at, advised the Pharisees that it was fitting to put one man to torment for the sake of the people.note

He lies naked across the path, as you see, and he must feel how much each one who passes weighs before they pass; and in the same way his father-in-law is racked in this ditch, along with the others of the council that was an evil seed for the Jews.” Then I saw Virgil marvel over the one who was stretched out on a cross so basely in the eternal exile.note

Then he addressed these words to the friar: “May it not displease you, if you are permitted, to tell us whether there is any opening on the right by which we two can get out of here without forcing some of the black angels to come and take us from this bottom.” He answered then: “Nearer than you hope there is a ridge of rock that starts from the great circle and crosses all the cruel valleys, except that at this one it is broken and does not span it: you will be able to climb up over the rubble, which lies along the slope and piles up at the bottom.”

My guide stood a little while with his head bowed, then said: “He gave a false account of the matter, the one who hooks the sinners over there.” And the friar: “I once heard many of the Devil’s vices spoken of at Bologna, and among them I heard that he is a liar and the father of lies.” Then my guide went off with great strides, his face somewhat troubled with anger; and so I left those burdened souls, following in the prints of the dear feet.note

he goes back into the house and grumbles here and there, like a poor wretch who does not know what to do; then he comes out again and gathers up his hope once more, seeing that the world has changed its face in a little while, and he takes his crook and drives his lambs out to graze. Just so my master dismayed me when I saw his brow so troubled, and just as quickly the salve came to the sore; for when we came to the broken bridge, my guide turned to me with that sweet look I had first seen at the foot of the mountain.

He opened his arms, after taking some counsel with himself, having first looked carefully at the rubble, and took hold of me. And like one who works and calculates as he goes, always seeming to plan ahead, so, while lifting me up toward the top of one great boulder, he would pick out another crag, saying: “Next grip on to that one; but test it first to see whether it will hold you.” It was no road for anyone wearing a cloak, for we could barely climb from ledge to ledge, he weightless and I pushed up from below.

And were it not that on that embankment the slope was shorter than on the other, I do not know about him, but I would certainly have been beaten. But because Malebolge slopes all the way down toward the mouth of the lowest pit, the lay of each valley means that one bank rises high and the other runs lower. We came at last, all the same, onto the point from which the last stone breaks away. The breath had been so milked from my lungs by the time I was up that I could go no farther; instead I sat down as soon as I arrived.

“Now you must shake off sloth like this,” said the master, “for no one comes to fame sitting on cushions of down or lying under the covers; and whoever spends his life without fame leaves no more trace of himself on earth than smoke in the air or foam on the water. So get up; conquer your breathlessness with the spirit that wins every battle, if it does not sink under the weight of its heavy body.

A longer stair must yet be climbed; it is not enough to have left these behind. If you understand me, now act so that it does you good.” Then I got up, showing myself better supplied with breath than I felt, and said: “Go on, for I am strong and bold.” We took our way up along the ridge of rock, which was rugged, narrow and hard going, and far steeper than the one before. I talked as I went so as not to seem weak; and then a voice came out of the next ditch, ill-suited to forming words.

I do not know what it said, though I was already on the crown of the arch that crosses there; but whoever was speaking seemed stirred to anger. I had turned to look down; but my living eyes could not reach the bottom for the darkness. So I said: “Master, make for the next bank, and let us climb down the wall; for as I hear from here and do not understand, so I look down and make out nothing.” “I give you no other answer,” he said, “than the doing of it; for a fair request should be followed by the deed, in silence.”

We went down the bridge from its head, where it joins the eighth bank, and then the ditch lay open to me; and I saw within it a terrible mass of serpents, of such strange kinds that the memory still drains the blood from me. Let Libya boast no more of her sands; for though she breeds chelydri, jaculi and phareae, and cenchri with the amphisbaena, she never showed so many plagues or such deadly ones, not with all Ethiopia, nor with the land that lies along the Red Sea.note

Among this cruel and most dismal swarm ran people naked and terrified, with no hope of a hiding place or a heliotrope. They had their hands tied behind them with snakes, which thrust tail and head through their loins and were knotted together in front. And look: at one who was near our bank a serpent darted, and pierced him through at the spot where the neck is knotted to the shoulders.note

Never was an O or an I written as quickly as he caught fire and burned, and as he fell he had to turn entirely to ash; and when he lay destroyed like this on the ground, the dust gathered itself together of its own accord and at once returned into that same man. In the same way the great sages affirm that the Phoenix dies and then is reborn as it approaches its five-hundredth year. In its life it feeds on neither grass nor grain, but only on tears of incense and on amomum; and nard and myrrh are its last swaddling bands.

And like a man who falls and does not know how, whether by force of a demon that drags him to the ground or of some other blockage that binds a man, and who, when he rises, gazes around him, utterly bewildered by the great anguish he has suffered, and sighs as he looks; such was the sinner when he had risen. O power of God, how severe it is, raining down such blows in vengeance!

My guide then asked him who he was; to which he answered: “I rained down from Tuscany, not long ago, into this savage gullet. A beast’s life pleased me, and not a man’s, mule that I was: I am Vanni Fucci, a beast, and Pistoia was a fitting den for me.” And I to my guide: “Tell him not to slip away, and ask what sin thrust him down here; for I knew him as a man of blood and rage.”note

And the sinner, who heard, did not pretend, but turned his mind and his face toward me, and colored with a dismal shame. Then he said: “It grieves me more that you have caught me in the misery where you see me than when I was taken from the other life. I cannot refuse what you ask: I am put down this far because I was the thief who robbed the sacristy of its fine ornaments,

and the blame was once falsely laid on another. But so that you may take no pleasure in this sight, if ever you get out of these dark places, open your ears to my announcement, and hear: Pistoia first thins herself of the Blacks; then Florence renews her people and her ways. Mars draws a vapor out of Val di Magra, wrapped in turbid clouds, and with an impetuous and bitter storm there will be fighting over Campo Piceno; then the vapor will suddenly tear through the mist, so that every White will be struck by it. And I have told you this so that it will grieve you.”note

Through all the dark circles of Hell I saw no spirit so proud against God, not even the one who fell from the walls at Thebes. He fled without speaking another word, and I saw a centaur full of rage come calling, “Where is he, where is the bitter one?” I do not think the Maremma has as many snakes as he had on his back, up to where our human form begins.note

On his shoulders, behind the nape of his neck, lay a dragon with its wings spread, and it sets on fire whoever it comes across. My master said, “That is Cacus, who beneath the rock of Mount Aventine many times made a lake of blood. He does not travel the same road as his brothers, because of the fraudulent theft he made of the great herd that was near him. For this his crooked deeds came to an end under the club of Hercules, who perhaps gave him a hundred blows, and he did not feel ten of them.”note

While he was speaking, the centaur ran on, and three spirits came below us, whom neither I nor my guide noticed until they shouted, “Who are you?” At this our talk stopped, and from then on we attended only to them. I did not know them; but it happened, as it often happens by some chance, that one of them had occasion to name another, saying, “Where can Cianfa have stayed behind?” So I, to make my guide stay alert, put my finger up from my chin to my nose.note

If you are now slow, Reader, to believe what I shall tell, it will be no wonder, for I who saw it can scarcely allow it to myself. As I kept my eyes raised on them, a serpent with six feet darts up in front of one of them and fastens itself to him all over. With its middle feet it clasped his belly, and with its front feet it seized his arms; then it sank its teeth into both his cheeks.

It stretched its hind feet along his thighs and put its tail between them both, and bent it up behind along his loins. Ivy never clung to a tree as tightly as the horrible beast entwined its own limbs around the other’s. Then they stuck together, as if they had been made of hot wax, and mixed their colors, and neither one nor the other now seemed what it had been: as, ahead of the flame, a brownish color moves up across paper, which is not yet black, and the white dies away.

The other two were watching, and each of them cried, “Oh, Agnello, how you change! See, already you are neither two nor one.” Already the two heads had become one, when two shapes appeared to us mingled in one face, in which two were lost. The arms became two out of four strips; the thighs with the legs, the belly and the chest became limbs such as were never seen.note

Every former aspect was canceled there; the perverse image seemed both two and none, and such as it was it went off with slow steps. As the green lizard, under the great lash of the dog days, darting from hedge to hedge, seems a flash of lightning if it crosses the road, so, coming toward the bellies of the other two, appeared a little fiery serpent, livid and black as a peppercorn. And in that part through which we first take our nourishment it pierced one of them; then it fell down, stretched out before him.

The pierced one gazed at it but said nothing; rather, with his feet planted, he yawned, just as if sleep or fever were attacking him. He looked at the serpent, and the serpent at him; one through the wound and the other through the mouth smoked hard, and the smoke met. Let Lucan now be silent, where he tells of wretched Sabellus and of Nasidius, and wait to hear what is now let fly.note

Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa; for if in his poetry he turns him into a serpent and her into a fountain, I do not envy him, since he never transformed two natures face to face so that both forms were ready to exchange their matter. They answered each other by such rules that the serpent split its tail into a fork, and the wounded one drew his feet together. The legs, together with the thighs, stuck to each other so that in a short while the join left no mark that could be seen.note

The split tail took on the shape that was being lost on the other side, and its skin was growing soft, and the other’s hard. I saw the arms withdraw in through the armpits, and the beast’s two feet, which were short, lengthen as much as the arms were shortening. Then the hind feet, twisted together, became the member that a man conceals, and the wretch had put forth two feet from his own.

While the smoke veils the one and the other with a new color, and makes hair grow on the one and strips it from the other, the one rose up and the other fell down, yet neither turned aside his wicked lamps, beneath which each was changing his snout. The one who was upright drew his snout back toward the temples, and from the excess matter that went there, ears came out of the smooth cheeks; what did not run back but was retained made, out of that surplus, a nose for the face, and thickened the lips as much as was fitting.

The one who lay down thrusts his snout forward and draws his ears back into his head, as the snail does its horns; and his tongue, which before was whole and ready for speech, splits, and the forked tongue of the other closes up, and the smoke stops. The soul that had become a beast fled hissing along the valley, and the other spits behind it as he speaks. Then he turned his new shoulders on it and said to the other one, “I want Buoso to run on all fours along this path, as I have done.”note

So I saw the seventh ballast change and exchange; and here let the strangeness be my excuse if my pen goes at all astray. And although my eyes were somewhat confused and my mind bewildered, those spirits could not flee so secretly that I did not clearly make out Puccio Sciancato; and he was the only one of the three companions who had come first who was not changed. The other was the one whom you, Gaville, mourn.note

We left, and up along the stairs that the jutting stones had made for us to come down before, my master climbed back and drew me up. And as we went on along the solitary way among the splinters and boulders of the ridge, the foot could make no progress without the hand. Then I grieved, and now I grieve again when I turn my mind to what I saw; and I rein in my genius more than I usually do, so that it may not run where virtue does not guide it, so that, if a good star or something better has given me this good, I may not deprive myself of it.

As many fireflies as the peasant resting on the hillside sees down along the valley, perhaps where he gathers his grapes and plows—in the season when he who lights the world keeps his face least hidden from us, at the hour when the fly gives way to the mosquito—with so many flames the whole eighth ditch was shining, as I saw as soon as I came where its bottom could be seen.note

And as he who was avenged by the bears saw Elijah’s chariot at its departure, when the horses rose straight up to heaven—for he could not follow it with his eyes so as to see anything but the flame alone, rising up like a little cloud—so each flame moved along the gullet of the ditch, for none shows its theft, and every flame steals away a sinner. I was standing on the bridge, risen up to see, so that if I had not caught hold of a rock, I would have fallen down without being pushed.note

And the guide, who saw me so intent, said, “Within the fires are the spirits; each is wrapped in that which burns him.” “My master,” I answered, “hearing you, I am more certain; but I had already thought it was so, and already I meant to say to you: Who is in that fire which comes so divided at the top that it seems to rise from the pyre where Eteocles was laid with his brother?”note

He answered me, “There within are tormented Ulysses and Diomedes, and so they go together to vengeance as they once went to wrath; and within their flame they groan for the ambush of the horse that made the gate through which the noble seed of the Romans went forth. Within it they weep for the trickery for which Deidamia, though dead, still grieves for Achilles, and there they pay the penalty for the Palladium.”note

“If they can speak within those sparks,” I said, “master, I earnestly beg you, and beg again, so that my prayer may be worth a thousand, not to refuse to let me wait until the horned flame comes here: you see how with desire I lean toward it.” And he to me: “Your prayer is worthy of much praise, and so I accept it; but see that your tongue restrains itself. Leave the speaking to me, for I have understood what you want; for they, since they were Greeks, might perhaps be disdainful of your words.”

When the flame had come to where it seemed to my guide the right time and place, I heard him speak in this manner: “O you who are two within one fire, if I deserved well of you while I lived, if I deserved of you much or little when in the world I wrote the lofty verses, do not move on; but let one of you tell where, lost through his own doing, he went to die.” The greater horn of the ancient flame began to shake, murmuring, just like a flame that the wind wearies.

but I set out on the deep open sea with one ship only and with that small company by which I had not been deserted. I saw one shore and the other as far as Spain, as far as Morocco, and the island of the Sardinians, and the others that sea bathes all around. My companions and I were old and slow when we came to that narrow strait where Hercules set up his markers so that men should venture no farther. On my right hand I left Seville; on the other I had already left Ceuta.note

‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains to us do not deny the experience, following the sun, of the world without people. Consider the seed from which you sprang: you were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.’ With this little speech I made my companions so eager for the voyage that afterward I could hardly have held them back.

And turning our stern toward the morning, we made wings of our oars for the mad flight, always gaining on the left-hand side. Night already saw all the stars of the other pole, and ours so low that it did not rise above the floor of the sea. Five times the light beneath the moon had been rekindled and as many times quenched since we had entered upon the deep passage, when there appeared to us a mountain, dark with distance, and it seemed to me higher than any I had ever seen.note

We rejoiced, and soon it turned to weeping; for from the new land a whirlwind arose and struck the forepart of the ship. Three times it whirled it round with all the waters; at the fourth it lifted the stern up and sent the prow down, as pleased another, until the sea had closed over us.”

so, having at first no path or opening out of the fire, the wretched words were turned into the fire’s language. But after they had found their way up through the tip, giving it the quiver that the tongue had given them as they passed, we heard it say, “O you to whom I direct my voice, and who were just now speaking Lombard, saying, ‘Now go your way, I urge you no more,’ though I have come perhaps somewhat late, may it not trouble you to stay and speak with me: you see that it does not trouble me, and I am burning.note

If you have only now fallen into this blind world from that sweet Latin land from which I bring all my guilt, tell me whether the people of Romagna have peace or war; for I was from the mountains there between Urbino and the ridge from which the Tiber springs.” I was still bent down and intent when my guide touched me on the side, saying, “You speak; this one is Latin.”note

And I, who already had my answer ready, began to speak without delay: “O soul who are hidden down there, your Romagna is not, and never was, without war in the hearts of its tyrants; but I left no open war there now. Ravenna stands as it has stood for many years: the eagle of Polenta broods over it, so that it covers Cervia too with its wings. The city that once stood the long trial and made a bloody heap of the French finds itself under the green paws.note

The old Mastiff and the young one of Verrucchio, who made such evil havoc of Montagna, go on sinking their teeth where they always have. The cities on the Lamone and the Santerno are led by the little lion of the white lair, who changes sides from summer to winter; and the city whose flank the Savio bathes, just as it lies between the plain and the mountain, lives between tyranny and freedom.note

Now I beg you to tell us who you are: do not be harder than another has been, so may your name hold its ground in the world.” After the fire had roared for a while in its own way, it moved its sharp point this way and that, and then gave out this breath: “If I believed that my answer were given to a person who would ever return to the world, this flame would stand without another quiver; but since no one has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy.

I was a man of arms, and then I was a friar of the cord, believing that, girded so, I would make amends; and certainly my belief would have come true in full, had it not been for the great Priest—may evil take him!—who put me back into my first sins; and I want you to understand how and quare [why]. While I was the form of bones and flesh that my mother gave me, my deeds were not those of the lion, but of the fox.note

The tricks and the covert ways, I knew them all, and I plied their art so well that the sound of it went out to the ends of the earth. When I saw that I had reached that part of my life where everyone ought to lower the sails and gather in the ropes, what had pleased me before then grieved me, and repentant and confessed I gave myself up; ah, wretched me! And it would have helped.

The Prince of the new Pharisees, having a war near the Lateran—and not with Saracens, nor with Jews, for every enemy of his was a Christian, and not one had been at the conquest of Acre, nor a merchant in the Sultan’s land—had regard neither for the supreme office and holy orders in himself, nor, in me, for that cord which used to make those it girded leaner. But as Constantine sought out Silvester within Soracte to cure his leprosy, so this man sought me out as a master to cure the fever of his pride: he asked me for counsel, and I kept silent, because his words seemed drunken.note

And then he said to me: ‘Let your heart not be suspicious: I absolve you here and now, and you teach me how to act so that I may throw Palestrina to the ground. I can lock and unlock Heaven, as you know; for the keys are two, which my predecessor did not hold dear.’ Then the weighty arguments pushed me to the point where silence seemed to me the worst course, and I said: ‘Father, since you wash me of that sin into which I now must fall, long promise with short keeping will make you triumph on the high throne.’note

Then Francis came for me, as soon as I was dead; but one of the black Cherubim said to him: ‘Do not carry him off; do not wrong me. He must come down among my wretches, because he gave the fraudulent counsel, and ever since then I have been at his hair; for one who does not repent cannot be absolved, nor can one repent and will a thing at the same time, because of the contradiction, which does not allow it.’ Oh, wretched me! How I started when he seized me, saying to me: ‘Perhaps you did not think that I was a logician!’note

He carried me to Minos; and Minos twisted his tail eight times around his hard back and, after he had bitten it in his great rage, said: ‘This one is for the sinners of the thieving fire’; and so I am lost where you see, and going clothed like this, I grieve.” When he had finished his speech in this way, the flame went off in sorrow, twisting and tossing its sharp horn. We passed on, I and my guide, up along the ridge as far as the next arch, which covers the ditch where the fee is paid by those who take on their burden by splitting apart.

with those who felt the pain of blows in resisting Robert Guiscard, and the others whose bones are still being gathered at Ceperano, where every Apulian proved false, and there by Tagliacozzo, where old Alardo conquered without arms; and if one showed his limb pierced and another his cut off, it would be nothing to equal the foul fashion of the ninth ditch. Even a cask that loses its middle-board or a side-piece is not so split open as one I saw, ripped from the chin down to where one farts:note

between his legs his guts hung down; his vital organs showed, and the miserable sack that turns whatever is swallowed into shit. While I was wholly intent on looking at him, he looked at me, and with his hands he pulled open his chest, saying: “Now see how I rip myself apart: see how mangled Muhammad is. In front of me Ali goes weeping, his face split from chin to forelock; and all the others you see here were sowers of scandal and of schism while they lived, and that is why they are split like this.note

A devil is back here who trims us up so cruelly, putting each of this crew to the edge of the sword again when we have gone round the sorrowful road; for the wounds have closed before anyone passes before him again. But who are you, gaping on the ridge, perhaps to put off going to the punishment that was adjudged on your own accusations?”

“Neither has death yet reached him, nor does guilt lead him here to be tormented,” my master replied; “but to give him full experience, it falls to me, who am dead, to lead him through Hell down here from circle to circle; and this is as true as that I am speaking to you.” There were more than a hundred who, when they heard him, stopped in the ditch to look at me, forgetting their torment in wonder.

“Now then, you who perhaps will see the sun before long, tell Fra Dolcino, if he does not want to follow me here soon, to arm himself so well with provisions that the grip of the snow may not bring victory to the Novarese, which otherwise would not be easy to win.” After he had lifted one foot to go on, Muhammad said these words to me; then he set it down on the ground to depart.note

Another, who had his throat pierced and his nose cut off right up to beneath the brows, and had no more than a single ear, having stopped to stare in wonder with the others, opened his windpipe before the others, and it was crimson all over on the outside; and he said: “You whom guilt does not condemn, and whom I saw up above in the land of Italy, unless too great a likeness deceives me, remember Pier da Medicina, if ever you return to see the sweet plain that slopes down from Vercelli to Marcabò.note

And let the two best men of Fano know, Messer Guido and Angiolello too, that, if our foresight here is not vain, they will be thrown out of their vessel and drowned, weighted down, near La Cattolica, through the treachery of a wicked tyrant. Between the island of Cyprus and Majorca, Neptune never saw so great a crime, not by pirates, not by the Argive people.note

That traitor who sees with only one eye, and holds the city that someone here with me would wish he had never set eyes on, will have them come to parley with him; then he will act so that they will need no vow or prayer against the wind of Focara.” And I to him: “Show me and make clear, if you want me to carry news of you up there, who is the one for whom the sight was bitter.” Then he put his hand on the jaw of one of his companions and opened his mouth, crying: “This is he, and he does not speak:note

this man, an exile, drowned the doubt in Caesar, declaring that one who is ready always suffers harm from delay.” Oh, how dismayed he seemed to me, with his tongue cut off in his throat, Curio, who had been so bold to speak! And one who had both hands cut off, raising the stumps through the murky air so that the blood fouled his face, cried: “You will remember Mosca too, who said, alas, ‘A thing done has an end,’ which was the evil seed for the Tuscan people.”note

And I added: “And the death of your clan”; at which, piling sorrow upon sorrow, he went off like a person grieving and crazed. But I stayed to look at the throng, and I saw a thing that I would be afraid even to tell without further proof, were it not that conscience reassures me, the good companion that makes a man bold beneath the armor of feeling itself pure. I saw for certain, and it still seems I see it, a trunk without a head walking, just as the others of the wretched flock were walking.

And it held its severed head by the hair, dangling from its hand like a lantern, and the head gazed at us and said: “Oh me!” It made of itself a lamp for itself, and they were two in one and one in two; how this can be, He knows who so ordains. When it was right at the foot of the bridge, it raised its arm high with the whole head, to bring its words close to us, and they were: “Now see the grievous punishment, you who, breathing, go looking at the dead: see if any is as great as this;

and so that you may carry news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, the one who gave the young king the evil encouragement. I made the father and the son rebels against each other: Ahithophel did no more with Absalom and David by his wicked goadings. Because I parted persons so joined, I carry my brain parted, alas, from its source, which is in this trunk. Thus retribution is observed in me.”note

“If you had paid attention,” I answered then, “to the reason why I was looking, perhaps you would have allowed me to stay longer.” Meanwhile my guide was going on, and I went behind him, already making my reply and adding: “Within that hollow where I was just now keeping my eyes so fixed, I believe a spirit of my own blood weeps for the guilt that costs so much down there.” Then the master said: “From now on, do not let your thought break itself on him: attend to other things, and let him stay there;

for I saw him at the foot of the little bridge pointing at you and threatening fiercely with his finger, and I heard him called Geri del Bello. You were then so wholly absorbed in the one who once held Hautefort that you did not look over that way, and so he went off.” “O my guide, the violent death that has not yet been avenged for him,” I said, “by anyone who is a partner in the shame, made him indignant; and so he went away without speaking to me, as I judge; and by this he has made me pity him the more.”note

So we talked as far as the first point on the ridge that would show the next valley all the way to the bottom, if there were more light there. When we were above the last cloister of Malebolge, so that its lay brothers could come into our sight, various laments shot at me, whose arrows were tipped with pity, and at this I covered my ears with my hands.

Such pain as there would be if the sick from the hospitals of Valdichiana between July and September, and of the Maremma and of Sardinia, were all together in one trench, such was there here; and such a stench came out of it as usually comes from rotting limbs. We went down onto the last bank of the long ridge, still to the left, and then my sight was keener down toward the bottom, where the minister of the high Lord, infallible Justice, punishes the falsifiers whom she records here.note

I do not believe it was a greater sorrow to see the whole people sick in Aegina, when the air was so full of pestilence that the animals, down to the little worm, all fell dead, and afterward the ancient peoples, as the poets hold for certain, were restored from the seed of ants, than it was to see, through that dark valley, the spirits languishing in various heaps. One lay on his belly, and another on the shoulders of another, and another, on all fours, was dragging himself along the wretched path.note

Step by step we went without speaking, looking at and listening to the sick, who could not lift up their bodies. I saw two sitting propped against each other, as pan is propped against pan to warm, spotted from head to foot with scabs; and I never saw a currycomb plied by a stable boy whose master is waiting for him, nor by one who stays awake unwillingly, the way each of them kept plying the bite of his nails upon himself, for the great fury of the itching, which has no other relief.

And their nails dragged the scabs down as a knife does the scales of a bream, or of another fish that has larger ones. “O you who strip off your mail with your fingers,” my guide began to one of them, “and who sometimes make pincers of them, tell us if any Italian is among those who are in here, so may your nails suffice you eternally for that work.” “We are Italians, both of us whom you see so ruined here,” one replied, weeping; “but who are you, who have asked about us?”

And my guide said: “I am one who goes down with this living man from ledge to ledge, and I mean to show him Hell.” Then their mutual support broke apart, and each turned trembling to me, with others who heard it as it echoed. The good master drew close to me, saying: “Say to them what you will.” And I began, since he so wished:

“So may your memory not steal away from human minds in the first world, but live on under many suns, tell me who you are and of what people: do not let your foul and loathsome punishment frighten you from revealing yourselves to me.” “I was from Arezzo, and Albero of Siena,” one replied, “had me put to the fire; but what I died for is not what brings me here.

It is true that I told him, speaking in jest, that I would know how to raise myself through the air in flight; and he, who had eagerness and little sense, wanted me to show him the art; and only because I did not make him a Daedalus, he had me burned by one who held him as a son. But Minos, who is not permitted to err, condemned me to the last ditch of the ten for the alchemy I practiced in the world.”note

And I said to the poet: “Now was there ever a people as vain as the Sienese? Certainly not the French, not by a long way.” At this the other leper, who heard me, answered my words: “Leave out Stricca, who knew how to spend in moderation; and Niccolò, who first discovered the costly custom of the clove in the garden where such seed takes root; and leave out the company in which Caccia d’Asciano squandered his vineyard and his great woods, and Abbagliato showed off his wit.note

But so that you may know who seconds you like this against the Sienese, sharpen your eye toward me, so that my face may answer you well; then you will see that I am the shade of Capocchio, who falsified metals with alchemy; and you must remember, if I eye you rightly, how good an ape of nature I was.”note

And when fortune brought low the loftiness of the Trojans, who dared everything, so that the king was wiped out together with his kingdom, Hecuba, sad, wretched and captive, after she had seen Polyxena dead, and in her sorrow had found her Polydorus on the seashore, went out of her mind and barked like a dog, so far had grief twisted her mind.note

But neither Theban furies nor Trojan were ever seen so cruel in anyone, in goading beasts, let alone human limbs, as I saw in two pale and naked shades who ran biting, the way a pig does when it is let out of the sty. One of them came at Capocchio, and sank its tusks into the nape of his neck, so that, dragging him, it made his belly scrape along the hard bottom. And the Aretine, who was left trembling, said to me: “That goblin is Gianni Schicchi, and in his rage he goes about treating others like this.”note

“Oh,” I said to him, “so may the other not fasten its teeth on you, do not find it a burden to tell me who it is, before it darts away from here.” And he to me: “That is the ancient soul of wicked Myrrha, who became her father’s lover, beyond rightful love. She came to sin with him in this way, by counterfeiting herself in another’s form, just as the other, who is going off over there, dared, in order to win the lady of the herd, to counterfeit Buoso Donati in himself, making a will and giving the will its proper legal form.”note

And when the two raging ones, on whom I had kept my eye, had passed, I turned it to look at the other ill-born souls. I saw one shaped like a lute, if only his groin had been cut off at the place where a man is forked. The heavy dropsy, which so mismatches the limbs with the humor it badly converts that the face does not answer to the belly, made him hold his lips apart, as the consumptive does, who for thirst turns one lip toward his chin and the other upward.

“O you who are without any punishment (and I do not know why) in this grim world,” he said to us, “look and attend to the misery of Master Adam. Alive, I had plenty of what I wanted, and now, alas, I crave one drop of water. The little streams that run down from the green hills of the Casentino into the Arno, making their channels cool and soft, are always before me, and not in vain; for their image dries me up far more than the disease that strips the flesh from my face.note

The rigid justice that searches me takes its occasion from the place where I sinned, to put my sighs to flight all the more. There is Romena, where I counterfeited the alloy sealed with the Baptist, for which I left my body burned up above. But if I could see here the wretched soul of Guido, or of Alessandro, or of their brother, I would not give up the sight for Fonte Branda. One of them is already inside, if the raging shades who go around tell the truth; but what use is it to me, when my limbs are bound?note

If I were still just light enough to go one inch in a hundred years, I would already have set out along the path, looking for him among these disfigured people, even though the ditch runs eleven miles around and is no less than half a mile across. Because of them I am among such a household: they induced me to strike the florins that had three carats of dross.”

And I to him: “Who are the two wretches who steam like wet hands in winter, lying close against your boundaries on the right?” “I found them here, and they have not turned over since,” he answered, “when I rained down into this trough, and I do not believe they will turn for all eternity. One is the false woman who accused Joseph; the other is the false Sinon, the Greek from Troy: because of acute fever they give off such a stench.”note

And one of them, who perhaps took offense at being named so infamously, struck him with his fist on his rigid belly: it sounded as if it were a drum; and Master Adam struck him in the face with his arm, which seemed no less hard, saying to him: “Although I am deprived of movement by my limbs, which are heavy, I have an arm free for such work.” To which he answered: “When you were going to the fire you did not have it so ready; but you had it as ready, and more, when you were coining.”

And the dropsical one: “You speak the truth in this; but you were not so true a witness there at Troy, when you were asked for the truth.” “If I spoke falsely, you falsified the coin,” said Sinon, “and I am here for one fault, and you for more than any other demon.” “Remember the horse, perjurer,” replied the one with the swollen belly, “and may it torment you that the whole world knows it.” “And may the thirst that cracks your tongue torment you,” said the Greek, “and the putrid water that hedges your belly up so before your eyes.”

Then the coiner: “So your mouth gapes open to its own harm, as it always does; for if I have thirst and humor stuffs me full, you have the burning and the head that aches, and to lick the mirror of Narcissus you would not need many words of invitation.” I was wholly fixed on listening to them, when the master said to me: “Go on, keep staring, for it would take little for me to quarrel with you.” When I heard him speak to me in anger, I turned toward him with such shame that it still circles through my memory.note

And like one who dreams of something harmful to him, and, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming, so that he longs for what is as if it were not, so I became, unable to speak, for I wished to excuse myself, and was excusing myself all the while, and did not think I was doing so. “Less shame washes away a greater fault than yours has been,” said the master; “so unburden yourself of all sadness; and reckon that I am always at your side, if it happens again that fortune brings you where people are in a similar dispute; for to want to hear that is a base desire.”

Here it was less than night and less than day, so that my sight went only a little way ahead; but I heard a high horn sound, so loud that it would have made any thunder faint, and, as my eyes followed its path back toward it, it directed them wholly to one place. After the woeful rout, when Charlemagne lost his holy band, Roland did not sound his horn so terribly. I had kept my head turned that way only a little while when I seemed to see many high towers; so I said: “Master, tell me, what city is this?”note

And he to me: “Because you pierce the darkness from too far away, it happens that you then go astray in your imagining. You will see clearly, if you get there, how much the senses are deceived by distance; so spur yourself on a little more.” Then he took me lovingly by the hand and said: “Before we go farther, so that the fact may seem less strange to you, know that they are not towers but giants, and they are in the pit, around its bank, from the navel downward, every one of them.”

As, when the mist disperses, the gaze little by little makes out what the vapor that thickens the air conceals, so, as I pierced the thick, dark air, coming nearer and nearer to the edge, my error fled from me and my fear grew. For as Montereggioni crowns itself with towers on its round circle of walls, so the rim that surrounds the pit was towered over, with half their bodies, by the horrible giants, whom Jove still threatens from heaven when he thunders.note

And already I could make out the face of one of them, his shoulders and chest and a great part of his belly, and both his arms down along his sides. Nature certainly did very well when she gave up the art of making such creatures, to take such agents away from Mars; and if she does not repent of elephants and whales, whoever looks closely holds her the more just and the more prudent for it: for where the reasoning of the mind is joined to ill will and to power, people can make no defense against it.

His face seemed to me as long and as large as the pine cone of Saint Peter’s at Rome, and his other bones were in proportion; so that the bank, which was an apron from his middle down, showed so much of him above that three Frisians would have made a vain boast of reaching his hair; for I saw thirty great spans of him downward from the place where a man buckles his cloak. “Rafel mai amech zabi almi,” the savage mouth began to cry, to which no sweeter psalms were fitting.note

And my guide toward him: “Foolish soul, keep to your horn, and vent yourself with that when anger or some other passion touches you! Search at your neck, and you will find the strap that holds it tied, O confused soul, and see it banding your great chest.” Then he said to me: “He accuses himself; this is Nimrod, through whose evil thought one single language is no longer used in the world.note

Let us leave him alone, and not speak in vain; for every language is to him as his is to others, which is known to no one.” So we made a longer journey, turned to the left, and at the distance of a crossbow shot we found the next, far fiercer and larger. Who the master was who bound him I cannot say, but he had his left arm pinned in front and his right arm behind by a chain that held him fastened from the neck down, so that on the uncovered part it wound round him as many as five times.

“This proud one wished to test his power against highest Jove,” said my guide, “and so he has such a reward. Ephialtes is his name; and he made the great assaults when the giants made the gods afraid: the arms he plied then he never moves now.” And I to him: “If it can be, I would like my eyes to have experience of the immeasurable Briareus.” To which he answered: “You will see Antaeus near here, who speaks and is unbound, who will set us down at the bottom of all evil.note

The one you wish to see is much farther on, and he is bound and made like this one, except that he looks fiercer in the face.” Never was there an earthquake so violent that it shook a tower as hard as Ephialtes was quick to shake himself. Then I feared death more than ever, and the fear alone would have been enough to kill me, if I had not seen the chains. Then we went farther on, and came to Antaeus, who rose a good five ells out of the hollow, not counting the head.

“O you who, in the fortunate valley that made Scipio heir to glory when Hannibal and his men turned their backs, once took a thousand lions as prey, and who, had you been at the high war of your brothers, some still seem to believe would have made the sons of the earth victorious: set us down below (and do not scorn to do it) where the cold locks up Cocytus. Do not make us go to Tityus or to Typhon: this man can give what is longed for here; so bend down, and do not curl your snout.note

He can still give you fame in the world, for he is alive, and still expects a long life, if grace does not call him to itself before his time.” So spoke the master; and the giant in haste stretched out the hands whose great grip Hercules once felt, and took my guide. Virgil, when he felt himself taken, said to me: “Come here, so that I can take hold of you”; then he managed it so that he and I were one bundle.note

As the Carisenda looks when one gazes up at it from beneath its leaning side, when a cloud passes over it so that the tower leans against its course, so Antaeus looked to me as I stood watching to see him stoop; and that was such a moment that I would have wished to go by another road. But lightly he set us down in the depth that swallows Lucifer with Judas; nor did he linger there, stooped like that, but rose up like the mast of a ship.note

But may those Ladies aid my verse who aided Amphion to wall in Thebes, so that my telling may not differ from the fact. O rabble, ill-created beyond all others, who are in the place of which it is hard to speak, it would have been better for you to have been sheep or goats here! When we were down in the dark pit, beneath the giant’s feet, much lower, and I was still gazing up at the high wall, I heard someone say to me: “Watch how you step: go so that you do not tread with your soles on the heads of your wretched, weary brothers.”note

At this I turned, and saw before me and under my feet a lake that, through frost, had the look of glass and not of water. The Danube in Austria never made so thick a veil over its course in winter, nor the Don, there under the cold sky, as there was here; for if Tambernic had fallen onto it, or Pietrapana, it would not have given so much as a creak, even at the edge.note

And as the frog sits croaking with its muzzle out of the water, in the season when the peasant woman often dreams of gleaning, so, livid up to where shame shows, the grieving shades were in the ice, setting their teeth to the note of the stork. Each one held its face turned downward: among them the mouth bears witness to the cold, and the eyes to the sad heart. When I had looked around for a while, I turned to my feet, and saw two pressed so close together that the hair of their heads was mingled.

“Tell me, you who press your breasts so tightly together,” I said, “who you are.” And they bent their necks back; and when they had raised their faces to me, their eyes, which before were moist only within, dripped down onto their lips, and the frost froze the tears between them and locked them shut again. Never did a clamp bind wood to wood so tightly; at which they, like two billy goats, butted each other, such anger overcame them. And one who had lost both his ears to the cold, still with his face downward, said: “Why do you stare at us so, as if into a mirror?

If you want to know who these two are, the valley down which the Bisenzio flows belonged to their father Alberto and to them. They came out of one body: and you may search all Caina, and you will not find a shade more worthy to be fixed in this jelly: not the one whose breast and shadow were broken with one and the same blow by the hand of Arthur; not Focaccia; not this one who blocks me with his head so that I cannot see any farther, and who was named Sassol Mascheroni: if you are Tuscan, you know well by now who he was.note

And so that you do not put me to any further speech, know that I was Camicion de’ Pazzi, and I am waiting for Carlino to make me look innocent.” After that I saw a thousand faces turned purple, like a dog’s, by the cold; and so a shudder comes over me, and always will, at frozen pools. And while we were going toward the center, where all weight gathers, and I was trembling in the eternal chill—whether it was will, or destiny, or fortune, I do not know; but walking among the heads, I struck my foot hard against the face of one.note

Weeping, he cried out at me: “Why are you trampling on me? If you have not come to add to the vengeance for Montaperti, why do you torment me?” And I: “My master, wait for me here now, so that I may rid myself of a doubt about this one; then you can hurry me as much as you like.” My guide stopped; and I said to the one who was still cursing bitterly: “Who are you, that you rail at others so?” “Now who are you, who go through Antenora,” he answered, “striking other people’s cheeks so hard that, if you were alive, it would be too much?”note

“I am alive, and it may be dear to you,” was my answer, “if you seek fame, that I should put your name among my other notes.” And he to me: “What I crave is the opposite. Take yourself off from here and pester me no more, for you know poorly how to flatter in this hollow.” Then I took him by the scruff of the neck and said: “You will have to name yourself, or not a hair will be left on you up here.”

At this he said to me: “Though you strip me of my hair, I will not tell you who I am, nor show it to you, if you fall upon my head a thousand times.” I already had his hair twisted around my hand and had pulled out more than one tuft of it, while he barked with his eyes held down, when another cried out: “What is the matter with you, Bocca? Isn’t it enough for you to make noise with your jaws, without barking too? What devil is at you?”note

“Now,” I said, “I do not want you to speak, wicked traitor, for to your shame I will carry true news of you.” “Go away,” he answered, “and tell whatever you like; but if you get out of here, do not keep silent about the one who just now had his tongue so ready. He weeps here for the silver of the French. ‘I saw,’ you can say, ‘the one from Duera, there where the sinners are kept cool.’note

If you should be asked who else was there, you have beside you the one from Beccheria, whose throat Florence cut. Gianni de’ Soldanier, I believe, is farther on, with Ganelon and Tribaldello, who opened Faenza while it slept.” We had already left him when I saw two frozen in one hole, so that one head was a cap for the other; and as bread is devoured in hunger, so the one on top set his teeth into the other where the brain joins the nape.note

Tydeus gnawed the temples of Menalippus in his scorn no differently than this one was gnawing the skull and the other parts. “O you who show by so bestial a sign your hatred for the one you are devouring, tell me the reason,” I said, “on this condition: that if you have just cause to complain of him, once I know who you both are and what his sin was, I may yet repay you for it in the world above, if the tongue I speak with does not dry up.”note

You must know that I was Count Ugolino, and this is Archbishop Ruggieri: now I will tell you why I am such a neighbor to him. That by the working of his evil schemes, after I had trusted him, I was taken and then put to death, there is no need to say. But what you cannot have heard—that is, how cruel my death was—you shall hear, and you will know whether he has wronged me.note

A narrow slit within the mew, which because of me bears the name of Hunger, and in which others must yet be locked away, had already shown me through its opening several moons, when I dreamed the evil dream that tore away for me the veil of the future. This man appeared to me as master and lord, hunting the wolf and its cubs on the mountain that keeps the Pisans from seeing Lucca. With lean hounds, eager and well trained, he had put Gualandi, with Sismondi and with Lanfranchi, out in front of him.note

After a short run the father and the sons seemed weary to me, and I seemed to see their flanks torn open by sharp fangs. When I woke before the dawn, I heard my sons, who were with me, crying in their sleep and asking for bread. You are cruel indeed if you do not grieve already, thinking of what my heart was foreboding; and if you do not weep, what then do you usually weep for?

They were awake now, and the hour was drawing near when our food used to be brought to us, and each of them was anxious because of his dream; and I heard the door below being nailed up in the horrible tower; at which I looked into the faces of my sons without saying a word. I did not weep, so turned to stone was I within; they wept; and my little Anselm said: ‘You stare so, father: what is wrong?’ Still I shed no tears, nor did I answer all that day, nor the night after, until the next sun came out over the world.

As soon as a little ray had found its way into the sorrowful prison, and I saw in four faces my own appearance, I bit both my hands for grief. And they, thinking I did it from a longing to eat, rose up at once and said: ‘Father, it will be much less pain for us if you eat of us: you clothed us in this wretched flesh, and you strip it off.’ Then I calmed myself so as not to make them sadder; that day and the next we all stayed silent. Ah, hard earth, why did you not open?

When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself down stretched out at my feet, saying: ‘My father, why don’t you help me?’ There he died; and as you see me, so I saw the three fall one by one between the fifth day and the sixth; at which, already blind, I took to groping over each of them, and for two days I called them after they were dead. Then fasting had more power than grief.”

When he had said this, with eyes askew he seized the wretched skull again in his teeth, which were strong on the bone, like a dog’s. Ah, Pisa, disgrace of the peoples of the fair land where sì [yes] is heard, since your neighbors are slow to punish you, let Capraia and Gorgona move and make a hedge across the mouth of the Arno, so that it drowns every person in you!note

For if Count Ugolino had the name of having betrayed you in the matter of your castles, you should not have put his sons on such a cross. Their young age, you new Thebes, made Uguccione and Brigata innocent, and the other two whom my song names above. We passed on, to where the ice roughly swathes another people, not bent downward but turned all the way over on their backs.note

There the very weeping keeps them from weeping, and the grief that finds a barrier upon the eyes turns inward to increase the anguish; for the first tears form a knot and, like visors of crystal, fill the whole cup beneath the brow. And although, as in a callus, every feeling had left its dwelling in my face because of the cold, it now seemed to me that I felt some wind; so I said: “My master, who moves this? Is not every vapor quenched down here?”note

At which he said to me: “Soon you will be where your eye will give you the answer to this, when you see the cause that rains down this blast.” And one of the wretches of the frozen crust cried out to us: “O souls so cruel that the last station has been given to you, lift the hard veils from my face, so that I may vent a little the grief that swells my heart, before my weeping freezes again.”

So I said to him: “If you want me to relieve you, tell me who you are; and if I do not free you, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.” He answered, then: “I am Friar Alberigo; I am the one of the fruit from the evil garden, who here receive a date for a fig.” “Oh,” I said to him, “are you already dead, then?” And he to me: “How my body fares up in the world, I have no knowledge.note

This Ptolomea has such an advantage, that the soul often falls here before Atropos has sent it on its way. And so that you may more willingly scrape the glassy tears from my face, know that as soon as the soul betrays, as I did, its body is taken from it by a demon, who afterward governs it until its time has wholly run its course. The soul plunges down into such a cistern as this; and perhaps the body of the shade who winters here behind me still appears up above.note

You must know him, if you have only just come down: he is Ser Branca d’Oria, and many years have passed since he was shut up like this.” “I believe,” I said to him, “that you are deceiving me; for Branca d’Oria has never yet died, and he eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes.” “In the ditch of the Malebranche up above,” he said, “there where the sticky pitch boils, Michel Zanche had not yet arrived when this man left a devil in his place in his own body, as did one of his kinsmen who carried out the treachery together with him.note

But now stretch out your hand here; open my eyes.” And I did not open them for him; and to be rude to him was courtesy. Ah, Genoese, men estranged from all good ways and full of every corruption, why are you not scattered from the world? For alongside the worst spirit of Romagna I found one of you such that, for his deeds, in soul he is already bathing in Cocytus, and in body he still seems alive up above.