was the region of Arch heretics and their followers. Dante and his guide
passed round betwixt the walls and the sepulchres as in a churchyard,
and came to the quarter which held Epicurus and his sect, who denied the
existence of spirit apart from matter. The lids of the tombs remaining
unclosed till the day of judgment, the soul of a noble Florentine,
Farinata degli Uberti, hearing Dante speak, addressed him as a
countryman, asking him to stop.[20] Dante, alarmed, beheld him rise half
out of his sepulchre, looking as lofty as if he scorned hell itself.
Finding who Dante was, he boasted of having three times expelled the
Guelphs. "Perhaps so," said the poet; "but they came back again each
time; an art which their enemies have not yet acquired."
A visage then appeared from out another tomb, looking eagerly, as if it
expected to see some one else. Being disappointed, the tears came into
its eyes, and the sufferer said, "If it is thy genius that conducts thee
hither, where is my son, and why is he not with thee?"
"It is not my genius that conducts me," said Dante, "but that of one,
whom perhaps thy son held in contempt."
"How sayest thou?" cried the shade;--"_held_ in contempt? He is dead
then? He beholds no longer the sweet light?" And with these words
he dropped into his tomb, and was seen no more. It was Cavalcante
Cavalcanti, the father of the poet's friend, Guido.[21]
The shade of Farinata, who had meantime been looking on, now replied to
the taunt of Dante, prophesying that he should soon have good reason to
know that the art he spoke of _had_ been acquired; upon which Dante,
speaking with more considerateness to the lofty sufferer, requested to
know how the gift of prophecy could belong to spirits who were ignorant
of the time present. Farinata answered that so it was; just as there was
a kind of eyesight which could discern things at a distance though
not at hand. Dante then expressed his remorse at not having informed
Cavalcante that his son was alive. He said it was owing to his being
overwhelmed with thought on the subject he had just mentioned, and
entreated Farinata to tell him so.
Quitting this part of the cemetery, Virgil led him through the midst
of it towards a descent into a valley, from which there ascended a
loathsome odour. They stood behind one of the tombs for a while, to
accustom themselves to the breath of it; and then began to descend a
wild fissure in a rock, near the mouth of which lay the infamy of Crete,
the Minotaur. The monster beholding them gnawed himself for rage; and
on their persisting to advance, began plunging like a bull when he
is stricken by the knife of the butcher. They succeeded, however, in
entering the fissure before he recovered sufficiently from his madness
to run at them; and at the foot of the descent, came to a river of
boiling blood, on the strand of which ran thousands of Centaurs armed
with bows and arrows. In the blood, more or less deep according to the
amount of the crime, and shrieking as they boiled, were the souls of the
Inflicters of Violence; and if any of them emerged from it higher than
he had a right to do, the Centaurs drove him down with their arrows.
Nessus, the one that bequeathed Hercules the poisoned garment, came
galloping towards the pilgrims, bending his bow, and calling out from
a distance to know who they were; but Virgil, disdaining his hasty
character, would explain himself only to Chiron, the Centaur who
instructed Achilles. Chiron, in consequence, bade Nessus accompany
them along the river; and there they saw tyrants immersed up to the
eyebrows;--Alexander the Great among them, Dionysius of Syracuse, and
Ezzelino the Paduan. There was one of the Pazzi of Florence, and Rinieri
of Corneto (infestors of the public ways), now shedding bloody tears,
and Attila the Scourge, and Pyrrhus king of Epirus. Further on, among
those immersed up to the throat, was Guy de Montfort the Englishman, who
slew his father's slayer, Prince Henry, during divine service, in
the bosom of God; and then by degrees the river became shallower and
shallower till it covered only the feet; and here the Centaur quitted
the pilgrims, and they crossed over into a forest.
The forest was a trackless and dreadful forest--the leaves not green,
but black--the boughs not freely growing, but knotted and twisted--the
fruit no fruit, but thorny poison. The Harpies wailed among the trees,
occasionally showing their human faces; and on every side of him Dante
heard lamenting human voices, but could see no one from whom they came.
"Pluck one of the boughs," said Virgil. Dante did so; and blood and a
cry followed it.
"Why pluckest thou me?" said the trunk. "Men have we been, like thyself;
but thou couldst not use us worse, had we been serpents." The blood and
words came out together, as a green bough hisses and spits in the fire.
The voice was that of Piero delle Vigne, the good chancellor of the
Emperor Frederick the Second. Just though he had been to others, he
was thus tormented for having been unjust to himself; for, envy having
wronged him to his sovereign, who sentenced him to lose his eyes, he
dashed his brains out against a wall. Piero entreated Dante to vindicate
his memory. The poet could not speak for pity; so Virgil made the
promise for him, inquiring at the same time in what manner it was that
Suicides became thus identified with trees, and how their souls were to
rejoin their bodies at the day of judgment. Piero said, that the moment
the fierce self-murderer's spirit tore itself from the body, and passed
before Charon, it fell, like a grain of corn, into that wood, and so
grew into a tree. The Harpies then fed on its leaves, causing both pain
and a vent for lamentation. The body it would never again enter, having
thus cast away itself, but it would finally drag the body down to it by
a violent attraction; and every suicide's carcass will be hung upon the
thorn of its wretched shade.
The naked souls of two men, whose profusion had brought them to a
violent end, here came running through the wood from the fangs of black
female mastiff's--leaving that of a suicide to mourn the havoc which
their passage had made of his tree. He begged his countryman to gather
his leaves up, and lay them at the foot of his trunk, and Dante did so;
and then he and Virgil proceeded on their journey.
They issued from the wood on a barren sand, flaming hot, on which
multitudes of naked souls lay down, or sat huddled up, or restlessly
walked about, trying to throw from them incessant flakes of fire, which
came down like a fall of snow. They were the souls of the Impious. Among
them was a great spirit, who lay scornfully submitting himself to the
fiery shower, as though it had not yet ripened him.[22] Overhearing
Dante ask his guide who he was, he answered for himself, and said, "The
same dead as living. Jove will tire his flames out before they conquer
me."
"Capaneus," exclaimed Virgil, "thy pride is thy punishment. No martyrdom
were sufficient for thee, equal to thine own rage." The besieger of
Thebes made no reply.
In another quarter of the fiery shower the pilgrims met a crowd of
Florentines, mostly churchmen, whose offence is not to be named; after
which they beheld Usurers; and then arrived at a huge waterfall, which
fell into the eighth circle, or that of the Fraudulent. Here Virgil, by
way of bait to the monster Geryon, or Fraud, let down over the side
of the waterfall the cord of St. Francis, which Dante wore about his
waist,[23] and presently the dreadful creature came up, and sate on the
margin of the fall, with his serpent's tail hanging behind him in
the air, after the manner of a beaver; but the point of the tail was
occasionally seen glancing upwards. He was a gigantic reptile, with the
face of a just man, very mild. He had shaggy claws for arms, and a body
variegated all over with colours that ran in knots and circles, each
within the other, richer than any Eastern drapery. Virgil spoke apart
to him, and then mounted on his back, bidding his companion, who was
speechless for terror, do the salve. Geryon pushed back with them from
the edge of the precipice, like a ship leaving harbour; and then,
turning about, wheeled, like a sullen successless falcon, slowly down
through the air in many a circuit. Dante would not have known that he
was going downward, but for the air that struck up wards on his face.
Presently they heard the crash of the waterfall on the circle below,
and then distinguished flaming fires and the noises of suffering.
The monster Geryon, ever sullen as the falcon who seats himself at a
distance from his dissatisfied master, shook his riders from off his
back to the water's side, and then shot away like an arrow.
This eighth circle of hell is called Evil-Budget,[24] and consists of
ten compartments, or gulfs of torment, crossed and connected with
one another by bridges of flint. In the first were beheld Pimps and
Seducers, scourged like children by horned devils; in the second,
Flatterers, begrimed with ordure; in the third, Simonists, who were
stuck like plugs into circular apertures, with their heads downwards,
and their legs only discernible, the soles of their feet glowing with a
fire which made them incessantly quiver. Dante, going down the side of
the gulf with Virgil, was allowed to address one of them who seemed in
greater agony than the rest; and, doing so, the sufferer cried out in a
malignant rapture, "Aha, is it thou that standest there, Boniface?[25]
Thou hast come sooner than it was prophesied." It was the soul of Pope
Nicholas the Third that spoke. Dante undeceived and then sternly
rebuked him for his avarice and depravity, telling him that nothing but
reverence for the keys of St. Peter hindered him from using harsher
words, and that it was such as he that the Evangelist beheld in the
vision, when he saw the woman with seven heads and ten horns, who
committed whoredom with the kings of the earth.
"O Constantine!" exclaimed the poet, "of what a world of evil was that
dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor of the church into a
rich man!" [26] The feet of the guilty pope spun with fiercer agony at
these words; and Virgil, looking pleased on Dante, returned with him
the way he came, till they found themselves on the margin of the fourth
gulf, the habitation of the souls of False Prophets.
It was a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent and
weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies. Their faces were
turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their heads came foremost,
and their tears fell on their loins. Dante was so overcome at the sight,
that he leant against a rock and wept; but Virgil rebuked him, telling
him that no pity at all was the only pity fit for that place.[27] There
was Amphiaraus, whom the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes; and
Tiresias, who was transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in
a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on
the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses
over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived
in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and
Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus,
the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut
away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face
over his swarthy shoulders. Guido Bonatti, too, was there, astrologer of
Forli; and Ardente, shoemaker of Parma, who now wishes he had stuck to
his last; and the wretched women who quit the needle and the distaff to
wreak their malice with herbs and images. Such was the punishment of
those who, desiring to see too far before them, now looked only behind
them, and walked the reverse way of their looking.
The fifth gulf was a lake of boiling pitch, constantly heaving and
subsiding throughout, and bubbling with the breath of those within it.
They were Public Peculators. Winged black devils were busy about the
lake, pronging the sinners when they occasionally darted up their backs
for relief like dolphins, or thrust out their jaws like frogs. Dante
at first looked eagerly down into the gulf, like one who feels that he
shall turn away instantly out of the very horror that attracts him.
"See--look behind thee!" said Virgil, dragging him at the same time from
the place where he stood, to a covert behind a crag. Dante looked round,
and beheld a devil coming up with a newly-arrived sinner across his
shoulders, whom he hurled into the lake, and then dashed down after him,
like a mastiff let loose on a thief. It was a man from Lucca, where
every soul was a false dealer except Bonturo.[29] The devil called out
to other devils, and a heap of them fell upon the wretch with hooks as
he rose to the surface; telling him, that he must practise there in
secret, if he practised at all; and thrusting him back into the boiling
pitch, as cooks thrust back flesh into the pot. The devils were of the
lowest and most revolting habits, of which they made disgusting jest and
parade.
Some of them, on a sudden, perceived Dante and his guide, and were going
to seize them, when Virgil resorted to his usual holy rebuke. For a
while they let him alone; and Dante saw one of them haul a sinner out of
the pitch by the clotted locks, and hold him up sprawling like an otter.
The rest then fell upon him and flayed him.
It was Ciampolo, a peculator in the service of the good Thiebault, king
of Navarre. One of his companions under the pitch was Friar Gomita,
governor of Gallura; and another, Michael Zanche, also a Sardinian.
Ciampolo ultimately escaped by a trick out of the hands of the devils,
who were so enraged that they turned upon the two pilgrims; but Virgil,
catching up Dante with supernatural force, as a mother does a child in
a burning house, plunged with him out of their jurisdiction into the
borders of gulf the sixth, the region of Hypocrites.
The hypocrites, in perpetual tears, walked about in a wearisome and
exhausted manner, as if ready to faint. They wore huge cowls, which hung
over their eyes, and the outsides of which were gilded, but the insides
of lead. Two of them had been rulers of Florence; and Dante was
listening to their story, when his attention was called off by the sight
of a cross, on which Caiaphas the High Priest was writhing, breathing
hard all the while through his beard with sighs. It was his office to
see that every soul which passed him, on its arrival in the place, was
oppressed with the due weight. His father-in-law, Annas, and all his
council, were stuck in like manner on crosses round the borders of the
gulf. The pilgrims beheld little else in this region of weariness, and
soon passed into the borders of one of the most terrible portions of
Evil-budget, the land of the transformation of Robbers.
The place was thronged with serpents of the most appalling and unwonted
description, among which ran tormented the naked spirits of the
robbers, agonised with fear. Their hands were bound behind them with
serpents--their bodies pierced and enfolded with serpents. Dante saw one
of the monsters leap up and transfix a man through the nape of the neck;
when, lo! sooner than a pen could write _o_, or _i_, the sufferer burst
into flames, burnt up, fell to the earth a heap of ashes--was again
brought together, and again became a man, aghast with his agony, and
staring about him, sighing.[30] Virgil asked him who he was.
"I was but lately rained down into this dire gullet," said the man,
"amidst a shower of Tuscans. The beast Vanni Fucci am I, who led a
brutal life, like the mule that I was, in that den Pistoia."
"Compel him to stop," said Dante, "and relate what brought him hither. I
knew the bloody and choleric wretch when he was alive."
The sinner, who did not pretend to be deaf to these words, turned round
to the speaker with the most painful shame in his face, and said, "I
feel more bitterly at being caught here by thee in this condition, than
when I first arrived. A power which I cannot resist compels me to let
thee know, that I am here because I committed sacrilege and charged
another with the crime; but now, mark me, that thou mayest hear
something not to render this encounter so pleasant: Pistoia hates thy
party of the Whites, and longs for the Blacks back again. It will have
them, and so will Florence; and there will be a bloody cloud shall burst
over the battlefield of Piceno, which will dash many Whites to the
earth. I tell thee this to make thee miserable."
So saying, the wretch gave a gesture of contempt with his thumb and
finger towards heaven, and said, "Take it, God--a fig for thee!" [31]
"From that instant," said Dante, "the serpents and I were friends; for
one of them throttled him into silence, and another dashed his hands
into a knot behind his back. O Pistoia! Pistoia! why art not thou
thyself turned into ashes, and swept from the face of the earth, since
thy race has surpassed in evil thine ancestors? Never, through the
whole darkness of hell, beheld I a blasphemer so dire as this--not even
Capaneus himself."
The Pistoian fled away with the serpents upon him, followed by a
Centaur, who came madly galloping up, crying, "Where is the caitiff?" It
was the monster-thief Cacus, whose den upon earth often had a pond of
blood before it, and to whom Hercules, in his rage, when he slew him,
gave a whole hundred blows with his club, though the wretch perceived
nothing after the ninth. He was all over adders up to the mouth; and
upon his shoulders lay a dragon with its wings open, breathing fire on
whomsoever it met.
The Centaur tore away; and Dante and Virgil were gazing after him, when
they heard voices beneath the bank on which they stood, crying, "Who are
ye?" The pilgrims turned their eyes downwards, and beheld three spirits,
one of whom, looking about him, said, "Where's Cianfa?" Dante made a
sign to Virgil to say nothing.
Cianfa came forth, a man lately, but now a serpent with six feet.[32]
"If thou art slow to believe, reader, what I am about to tell thee,"
says the poet, "be so; it is no marvel; for I myself, even now, scarcely
credit what I beheld."
The six-footed serpent sprang at one of the three men front to front,
clasping him tightly with all its legs, and plunging his fangs into
either cheek. Ivy never stuck so close to a tree as the horrible monster
grappled with every limb of that pinioned man. The two forms then
gradually mingled into one another like melting wax, the colours of
their skin giving way at the same time to a third colour, as the white
in a piece of burning paper recedes before the brown, till it all
becomes black. The other two human shapes looked on, exclaiming,
"Oh, how thou changest, Agnello! See, thou art neither two nor yet one."
And truly, though the two heads first became one, there still remained
two countenances in the face. The four arms then became but two, and
such also became the legs and thighs; and the two trunks became such a
body as was never beheld; and the hideous twofold monster walked slowly
away.[33]
A small black serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to the body
of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on
the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated
and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand
steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or
fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and
both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled into one
volume.
And now, let Lucan never speak more of the wretched Sabellus or
Nisidius, but listen and be silent; and now, let Ovid be silent, nor
speak again of his serpent that was Cadmus, or his fountain that was
Arethusa; for, says the Tuscan poet, I envy him not. Never did he change
the natures of two creatures face to face, so that each received the
form of the other.
With corresponding impulse, the serpent split his train into a fork,
while the man drew his legs together into a train; the skin of the
serpent grew soft, while the man's hardened; the serpent acquired
tresses of hair, the man grew hairless; the claws of the one projected
into legs, while the arms of the other withdrew into his shoulders; the
face of the serpent, as it rose from the ground, retreated towards the
temples, pushing out human ears; that of the man, as he fell to the
ground, thrust itself forth into a muzzle, withdrawing at the same time
its ears into its head, as the slug does its horns; and each creature
kept its impious eyes fixed on the other's, while the features beneath
the eyes were changing. The soul which had become the serpent then
turned to crawl away, hissing in scorn as he departed; and the serpent,
which had become the man, spat after him, and spoke words at him. The
new human-looking soul then turned his back on his late adversary, and
said to the third spirit, who remained unchanged, "Let Buoso now take to
his crawl, as I have done."
The two then hastened away together, leaving Dante in a state of
bewildered amazement, yet not so confused but that he recognised the
unchanged one for another of his countrymen, Puccio the Lame. "Joy to
thee, Florence!" cried the poet; "not content with having thy name
bruited over land and sea, it flourishes throughout hell."
The pilgrims now quitted the seventh, and looked down from its barrier
into the eighth gulf, where they saw innumerable flames, distinct from
one another, flickering all over the place like fire-flies.
"In those flames," said Virgil, "are souls, each tormented with the fire
that swathes it."
"I observe one," said Dante, "divided at the summit. Are the Theban
brothers in it?"
"No," replied Virgil; "in that flame are Diomed and Ulysses." The
sinners punished in this gulf were Evil Counsellors; and those two were
the advisers of the stratagem of the Trojan horse.
Virgil addressed Ulysses, who told him the conclusion of his adventures,
not to be found in books: how he tired of an idle life, and sailed forth
again into the wide ocean; and how he sailed so far that he came into a
region of new stars, and in sight of a mountain, the loftiest he ever
saw; when, unfortunately, a hurricane fell upon them from the shore,
thrice whirled their vessel round, then dashed the stern up in air and
the prow under water, and sent the billows over their heads.
"Enough," said Virgil; "I trouble thee no more." The soul of Guido di
Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak in a Lombard dialect,
asked him news of the state of things in Romagna; and then told him how
he had lost his chance of paradise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at
once absolve him from his sins, and use them for his purposes.[34] He
was going to heaven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on
purpose to fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his
absolved, indeed, but unrepented victim. "To repent evil, and to will
to do it, at one and the same time, are," said the dreadful angel,
"impossible: therefore wrong me not."
"Oh, how I shook," said the unhappy Guido, "when he laid his hands upon
me!" And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself about for
agony, and so took its way.
The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, where the
Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and Founders of False
Religions, underwent the penalties of such as load themselves with the
sins of those whom they seduce.
The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open his own bowels,
and calling out to them to mark him. Before him walked his son-in-law,
Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin; and the divisions in the church
were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place. They
all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on
their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a
sword. The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims
warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his
mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish
speedily to follow him.[35]
Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of
dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and
Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Cæsar to cross
the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and
one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up
the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face. "Remember
Mosca," cried he; "remember him, alas! who said, 'A deed done is a thing
ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation."
"And death to thy family," cried Dante.