The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno

CANTO XVII.

‘Behold the monster[496] with the pointed tail,
Who passes mountains[497] and can entrance make
Through arms and walls! who makes the whole world ail,
Corrupted by him!’ Thus my Leader spake,
And beckoned him that he should land hard by,
Where short the pathways built of marble break.
And that foul image of dishonesty
Moving approached us with his head and chest,
But to the bank[498] drew not his tail on high.
His face a human righteousness expressed,10
’Twas so benignant to the outward view;
A serpent was he as to all the rest.
On both his arms hair to the arm-pits grew:
On back and chest and either flank were knot[499]
And rounded shield portrayed in various hue;
No Turk or Tartar weaver ever brought
To ground or pattern a more varied dye;[500]
Nor by Arachne[501] was such broidery wrought.
As sometimes by the shore the barges lie
Partly in water, partly on dry land;20
And as afar in gluttonous Germany,[502]
Watching their prey, alert the beavers stand;
So did this worst of brutes his foreparts fling
Upon the stony rim which hems the sand.
All of his tail in space was quivering,
Its poisoned fork erecting in the air,
Which scorpion-like was armÈd with a sting.
My Leader said: ‘Now we aside must fare
A little distance, so shall we attain
Unto the beast malignant crouching there.’30
So we stepped down upon the right,[503] and then
A half score steps[504] to the outer edge did pace,
Thus clearing well the sand and fiery rain.
And when we were hard by him I could trace
Upon the sand a little further on
Some people sitting near to the abyss.
‘That what this belt containeth may be known
Completely by thee,’ then the Master said;
‘To see their case do thou advance alone.
Let thy inquiries be succinctly made.40
While thou art absent I will ask of him,
With his strong shoulders to afford us aid.’
Then, all alone, I on the outmost rim
Of that Seventh Circle still advancing trod,
Where sat a woful folk.[505] Full to the brim
Their eyes with anguish were, and overflowed;
Their hands moved here and there to win some ease,
Now from the flames, now from the soil which glowed.
No otherwise in summer-time one sees,
Working its muzzle and its paws, the hound50
When bit by gnats or plagued with flies or fleas.
And I, on scanning some who sat around
Of those on whom the dolorous flames alight,
Could recognise[506] not one. I only found
A purse hung from the throat of every wight,
Each with its emblem and its special hue;
And every eye seemed feasting on the sight.
As I, beholding them, among them drew,
I saw what seemed a lion’s face and mien
Upon a yellow purse designed in blue.60
Still moving on mine eyes athwart the scene
I saw another scrip, blood-red, display
A goose more white than butter could have been.
And one, on whose white wallet blazoned lay
A pregnant sow[507] in azure, to me said:
‘What dost thou in this pit? Do thou straightway
Begone; and, seeing thou art not yet dead,
Know that Vitalian,[508] neighbour once of mine,
Shall on my left flank one day find his bed.
A Paduan I: all these are Florentine;70
And oft they stun me, bellowing in my ear:
“Come, Pink of Chivalry,[509] for whom we pine,
Whose is the purse on which three beaks appear:”’
Then he from mouth awry his tongue thrust out[510]
Like ox that licks its nose; and I, in fear
Lest more delay should stir in him some doubt
Who gave command I should not linger long,
Me from those wearied spirits turned about.
I found my Guide, who had already sprung
Upon the back of that fierce animal:80

[496] The monster: Geryon, a mythical king of Spain, converted here into the symbol of fraud, and set as the guardian demon of the Eighth Circle, where the fraudulent are punished. There is nothing in the mythology to justify this account of Geryon; and it seems that Dante has created a monster to serve his purpose. Boccaccio, in his Genealogy of the Gods (Lib. i.), repeats the description of Geryon given by ‘Dante the Florentine, in his poem written in the Florentine tongue, one certainly of no little importance among poems;’ and adds that Geryon reigned in the Balearic Isles, and was used to decoy travellers with his benignant countenance, caressing words, and every kind of friendly lure, and then to murder them when asleep.

[497] Who passes mountains, etc.: Neither art nor nature affords any defence against fraud.

[498] The bank: Not that which confines the brook but the inner limit of the Seventh Circle, from which the precipice sinks sheer into the Eighth, and to which the embankment by which the travellers have crossed the sand joins itself on. Virgil has beckoned Geryon to come to that part of the bank which adjoins the end of the causeway.

[499] Knot and rounded shield: Emblems of subtle devices and subterfuges.

[500] Varied dye: Denoting the various colours of deceit.

[501] Arachne: The Lydian weaver changed into a spider by Minerva. See Purg. xii. 43.

[502] Gluttonous Germany: The habits of the German men-at-arms in Italy, odious to the temperate Italians, explains this gibe.

[503] The right: This is the second and last time that, in their course through Inferno, they turn to the right. See Inf. ix. 132. The action may possibly have a symbolical meaning, and refer to the protection against fraud which is obtained by keeping to a righteous course. But here, in fact, they have no choice, for, traversing the Inferno as they do to the left hand, they came to the right bank of the stream which traverses the fiery sands, followed it, and now, when they would leave its edge, it is from the right embankment that they have to step down, and necessarily to the right hand.

[504] A half score steps, etc.: Traversing the stone-built border which lies between the sand and the precipice. Had the brook flowed to the very edge of the Seventh Circle before tumbling down the rocky wall it is clear that they might have kept to the embankment until they were clear beyond the edge of the sand. We are therefore to figure to ourselves the water as plunging down at a point some yards, perhaps the width of the border, short of the true limit of the circle; and this is a touch of local truth, since waterfalls in time always wear out a funnel for themselves by eating back the precipice down which they tumble. It was into this funnel that Virgil flung the cord, and up it that Geryon was seen to ascend, as if by following up the course of the water he would find out who had made the signal. To keep to the narrow causeway where it ran on by the edge of this gulf would seem too full of risk.

[505] Woful folk: Usurers; those guilty of the unnatural sin of contemning the legitimate modes of human industry. They sit huddled up on the sand, close to its bound of solid masonry, from which Dante looks down on them. But that the usurers are not found only at the edge of the plain is evident from Inf. xiv. 19.

[506] Could recognise, etc.: Though most of the group prove to be from Florence Dante recognises none of them; and this denotes that nothing so surely creates a second nature in a man, in a bad sense, as setting the heart on money. So in the Fourth Circle those who, being unable to spend moderately, are always thinking of how to keep or get money are represented as ‘obscured from any recognition’ (Inf. vii. 44).

[507] A pregnant sow: The azure lion on a golden field was the arms of the Gianfigliazzi, eminent usurers of Florence; the white goose on a red ground was the arms of the Ubriachi of Florence; the azure sow, of the Scrovegni of Padua.

[508] Vitalian: A rich Paduan noble, whose palace was near that of the Scrovegni.

[509] Pink of Chivalry: ‘Sovereign Cavalier;’ identified by his arms as Ser Giovanni Buiamonte, still alive in Florence in 1301, and if we are to judge from the text, the greatest usurer of all. A northern poet of the time would have sought his usurers in the Jewry of some town he knew, but Dante finds his among the nobles of Padua and Florence. He ironically represents them as wearing purses ornamented with their coats of arms, perhaps to hint that they pursued their dishonourable trade under shelter of their noble names—their shop signs, as it were. The whole passage may have been planned by Dante so as to afford him the opportunity of damning the still living Buiamonte without mentioning his name.

[510] His tongue thrust out: As if to say: We know well what sort of fine gentleman Buiamonte is.

[511] By stairs like this: The descent from one circle to another grows more difficult the further down they come. They appear to have found no special obstacle in the nature of the ground till they reached the bank sloping down to the Fifth Circle, the pathway down which is described as terrible (Inf. vii. 105). The descent into the Seventh Circle is made practicable, and nothing more (Inf. xii. I).

[512] Heaven was fired: As still appears in the Milky Way. In the Convito, ii. 15, Dante discusses the various explanations of what causes the brightness of that part of the heavens.

[513] A terrific roar: Of the water falling to the ground. On beginning the descent they had left the waterfall on the left hand, but Geryon, after fetching one or more great circles, passes in front of it, and then they have it on the right. There is no further mention of the waters of Phlegethon till they are found frozen in Cocytus (Inf. xxxii. 23). Philalethes suggests that they flow under the Eighth Circle.

[514] Lure: An imitation bird used in training falcons. Dante describes the sulky, slow descent of a falcon which has either lost sight of its prey, or has failed to discover where the falconer has thrown the lure. Geryon has descended thus deliberately owing to the command of Virgil.

Clyx.com