Dante's Inferno

The flame of Ulysses and Diomedes goes quiet and departs, and another eagerly presents itself. The soul within has recognized Virgil’s Lombard dialect, and asks after news of their shared—and war-torn—native region. Virgil nudges Dante to speak to this soul, since he is an Italian. Dante delivers the bad news that Romagna is just as bloody as ever and describes some of the political turmoil recently happening there. When he asks this soul to tell his story, the soul replies with these words (famously quoted by T.S. Eliot at the beginning of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”):

If I believed that my reply were to a person who would ever return to the world, this flame would remain without further shaking; but since never from this depth has any one returned alive, if I hear the truth, without fear of infamy I answer you (61-66).

He tells his story. He was Guido da Montefeltro, a soldier who converted and became a pious Franciscan monk. He would have lived a good life if he had not been corrupted by “the high priest” (117)—that is, Dante’s nemesis, Pope Boniface VIII.

This corruption happened when he was an old man and should have been getting ready to retire. Boniface asked him to help to destroy the troublesome city of Palestrina, saying he would absolve Guido in advance for the crime of returning to the warlike ways he forsook when he became a monk.

Guido died not long after this assault. St. Francis, the founder of his order, came to collect his soul, along with a “black cherubim” who proclaimed that he would be taking Guido to Hell: “for he cannot be absolved who does not repent, nor can one repent and will together, because of the contradiction, which does not permit it” (118-20). Carting Guido’s terrified soul away, this demon sneered, “Perhaps you did not think I was a logician!” (122-23).

Thus, Guido, like Ulysses, is condemned to the bolgia reserved for transgressors, who falsely and pompously use the power of speech.

No one, Dante says, could ever describe the carnage he saw in the next bolgia, worse than the casualties of any number of terrible wars:

Surely a barrel losing centerpiece of half-moon, is not so broken as one I saw torn open from the chin to the farting-place. Between his legs dangled his intestines; the pluck was visible, and the wretched bag that makes shit of what is swallowed (22-27).

This is none other than Mohammad, who displays his innards to Dante while explaining: Here, the sinners are schismatics—those who sowed discord and division. They walk in an endless circle past an armed demon, who carves them up as they go; they heal on the walk back toward him, only to be maimed again.

He asks for an explanation of Dante’s presence, and Virgil’s truthful reply shocks the souls so much that a crowd stares up at them. A few more Italians give Dante warnings to take back to friends who will otherwise shortly follow them into this bolgia for treacherous backstabbing among noble families. Dante delivers bad news to them about defeats in their families.

Dante then sees a sight he can hardly credit in memory. A man is walking towards them holding his own head out like a lantern: “Of himself he made a lamp for himself, and they were two in one and one in two; how that can be, he knows who so disposes” (124-26). This ghastly figure introduces himself as Bertrand de Born, who sowed conflict among the English royal family, setting brother against brother and son against father. The division of his own head from his body, he says, is the “counter-suffering”—in Italian, the contrapasso—the ironically fitting punishment.

Dante is so horrified and stunned by this bolgia he wants to sit down and cry, but Virgil chastises him, telling him to stop staring: He did not stare like this in other places, and they have more to see. Dante tries to explain he has a good reason for staring: He thinks he sees one of his relatives, Geri del Bello, a murderous cousin. Del Bello makes a threatening motion at Dante, who could have been viewed as having a responsibility to avenge del Bello’s murder. Dante feels conflicted at this, pitying del Bello while knowing that taking vengeance into one’s own human hands tends to go poorly.

Dante and Virgil proceed into the next and final pocket of the Malebolge, where they hear weeping and wailing, and smell rotting flesh. Here, counterfeiters and falsifiers suffer punishment. They are heaped together in piles, swollen and disfigured with diseases, scratching desperately at their ulcerated flesh. Dante questions a few Italians and learns they were fraudulent alchemists, who promised more than they could deliver to various wealthy patrons. One, whom Dante has met before, explains himself: Though Dante might not immediately recognize him through his loathsome scabs, if he looks closely, “you will see that I am the shade of Capocchio, who falsified metals with alchemy; and you must remember, if I eye you well, how good an ape I was of nature” (136-39).

Dante continues his tale of the last bolgia with a lengthy classical allusion. Even figures like Athamas, whom the jealous Juno drove so crazy that he brained his own son; or Hecuba, who in her grief after the fall of Troy lost her power of speech and could only bark like a dog—even figures like these were not so bestial as the souls Dante saw next. Two of them run at Capocchio—the soul to whom Dante had been talking—like escaping hogs; one attacks Capocchio with his teeth, apparently rabid. This is Gianni Schicchi, a falsifier. Like the mythological Myrrha, who disguised herself in order to have sex with her own father, he dressed up and mimicked others to get what he wanted.

Dante sees a soul lying on the ground, so swollen with dropsy that his belly resembles a lute. Through parched, panting lips, he introduces himself as Master Adam, a counterfeiter who served a powerful Italian family. Rich in life, he now cannot even have the water he craves. In a strangely beautiful passage, he describes how he always sees before him the little rivers that come down the hills around Florence, though he cannot taste a drop. Besides this thirst, he longs mostly for revenge; he would like to see his enemies suffer even more than he would like a drink.

Near him lie two other falsifiers: Potiphar’s wife—who accused the Biblical Joseph of rape after he refused her advances—and Sinon, who persuaded Troy to accept the Trojan Horse. Master Adam remarks on the terrible stink that comes from this pair, and Sinon, overhearing, hits him in his swollen belly. The two get into a slapping match, and trade insults. Dante is caught up in this sordid drama when Virgil thunders: “Now keep looking, for I am not far from quarreling with you!” (131-32). Dante is deeply ashamed to be scolded by his master for rubbernecking. Virgil sees Dante’s pain, and says, more gently, ‘Less shame washes away a greater fault [...] than yours has been; therefore cast off all sorrow” (142-44). Dante, however, should remember this moment if he is ever tempted to listen in on something like this fight again: Such voyeurism is beneath him.

Dante and Virgil move out of Malebolge into a great darkness, in which Dante can see little. But he hears, in the distance, the harrowing sound of a trumpet, like a war-horn. He begins to see the outlines of what he thinks are huge towers, but Virgil, taking his hand to encourage him, gently tells him that these are actually giants, who mark the deepest places in Hell, standing up to their waists in the final pits. As they draw closer, Dante sees this is true: the giants stand evenly spaced like the towers of a fortress. They are terrifyingly vast. Dante compares them to well-known pieces of architecture, like St. Peter’s stone pinecone sculpture in Rome.

The first giant is the Biblical king Nimrod, babbling nonsense words. Virgil rebukes him: “Foolish soul, be content with your horn, give vent with that, when anger or some other passion touches you!” (70-72). Nimrod, he explains, as the king who built the overweening Tower of Babel, has been deprived of the power of language.

Virgil and Dante pass and encounter Ephialtes—a giant who tried to depose Jove and whose striking arm is now disabled—and Antaeus who fought with Hercules. Dante also wants to see the famous Briareus, another rebel giant, but Virgil merely points him out at a distance. It is Antaeus who will provide passage down to the lowest pits.

Virgil addresses Antaeus in his usual high classical manner, telling him to lift them down to the pit in which he stands; Dante will spread his name around in the over-world in return. Antaeus obliges, lifting Virgil, who lifts Dante, thus making “one bundle of himself and me” (135). Antaeus slowly deposits them in the depths of Hell.

Dante starts this canto reflecting on the limitations of his own poetry: He does not even have words ugly enough to communicate what he encounters in Cocytus, the lowest division of Hell. The task, he says, is not for “a tongue that calls mommy or daddy” (9). He invokes the help of the Muses to tell this part of his story as well as he can.

At the bottom of the pit, Dante is still gazing in awe at the giants when he hears a voice beneath him calling, “Watch how you step! Walk so that you do not trample with your feet the heads of your wretched weary brothers” (19-21). He looks down to discover that the ground here is a plain of ice, with sinners frozen in it up to the neck. They are turning their heads away, trying to hide their faces. This is Caina, the division of Cocytus where those who betrayed family are punished.

Two of them are so closely frozen their hair tangles together. Dante asks who they are, and they begin crying; their tears freeze. Another soul provides their identity: They are the two sons of the Italian Count Alberto, who killed each other in a dispute over their inheritance. This soul points out a few others who murdered family members, and then introduces himself as Camiccion de’ Pazzi, who committed this same crime. He is not even as bad as his relative Carlino, who, he grimly predicts, will be here soon.

Dante looks around and sees thousands of traitors, whose faces have become bestial; even now, he says, the memory makes him shiver when he crosses frozen rivers. As he and Virgil continue their journey to “the center toward which all weight collects,” he accidentally kicks one of the souls in the face (73-74). The soul refuses to reveal its name. Dante offers him what other damned souls have wanted—fame in the living world—and the soul is disdainful: That is the opposite of what souls in Cocytus want. Dante seizes him by the hair and shakes him, but he will not submit. Another soul betrays him, revealing that he is Bocca degli Abati, who played a decisive role in the Guelph-Ghibelline battle of Montaperti; he marks the edge of Antenora—the division of Cocytus for political traitors. Bocca vengefully reveals the identities of many Italian traitors around him.

Dante and Virgil proceed and come across two souls frozen together in one hole. Their position is comically gruesome: “one head was a hat to the other; and as bread is eaten by the starving, so the one above put his teeth to the other, there where the brain joins the nape” (126-29). Dante questions the upper soul in horror: Who are you, and why are you gnawing this man?

In a grotesque parody of courtesy, the gnawing soul wipes his mouth on the hair of the enemy whose head he has been eating, and replies. He is not too keen on telling Dante who he is and why he is here, but he will do it if it means shame and infamy for the enemy beneath him.

He introduces himself as Count Ugolino, and his enemy as Count Ruggieri. Ugolino was a bloodthirsty traitor betrayed by Ruggieri, who boarded Ugolino and his sons up in an abandoned tower and left them to die.

On his first night of his imprisonment, Ugolino dreamed of Ruggieri hunting a wolf and its cubs, his dogs ripping the wolves to shreds. He awoke to the piteous sound of his sons crying for food. If this story does not make you cry, Ugolino asks Dante, what will?

Ugolino continues: As he and his sons listened to their captors nailing up the doors below, his sons desperately wept but Ugolino was like a man of stone. He would not reply when his sons spoke to him but sat motionless and silent all day and night. When he awoke the next day in the same horrendous predicament, he bit his hands in rage; his sons, misinterpreting his gnawing as hunger, offered their own bodies for him to eat. The miserable Ugolino turned down this offer and fell silent again.

On the fourth day, Ugolino’s son Gaddo cried out to his father in words reminiscent of Christ’s at the Crucifixion: “My father, why do you not help me?” (69). Gaddo was the first of the children to die; the others followed over the next few days. Ugolino grieved among their bodies for a while longer. Thereafter, he grimly says, “fasting had more power than grief” (75). With that, his bestial expression returns, and he goes back to gnawing Ruggieri’s skull.

Dante decries the whole city of Pisa for allowing this misery: No matter what Ugolino did, the citizens should not have allowed him to be punished this way.

Dante and Virgil move on, and enter Ptolomea, the region for those who betrayed guests. Here they see sinners frozen ever more deeply in the ice, face-up and weeping so their eyes freeze over. Dante begins to feel a strange, frigid wind; Virgil tells him they will find its source soon enough.

One frozen soul asks Dante to break the crust of ice over his eyes, and introduces himself as Brother Alberigo, a corrupt friar who ordered the assassination of a whole banquet hall of his relatives. Dante is surprised to find him dead, and Alberigo tells him that his body might still be walking around up there for all he knows; his soul fell to Hell before his body died, which sometimes happens in Ptolomea. Demons possess the undead bodies remaining on earth. Another such undead soul is Branca Doria, who murdered his own father-in-law and lies frozen nearby. Dante again decries a whole city: this time, Genoa, for producing hideous souls like these.

Virgil tells Dante to look ahead: They are approaching the King of Hell himself. Dante peers into the darkness and sees a figure that at first reminds him of a windmill seen through mists. The frozen wind he earlier noticed is issuing from here. Terrified, he cowers behind Virgil. Around them are the souls of Judecca, who betrayed their leaders, completely submerged in the ice. All the while, they walk inexorably closer to the horrible figure in the distance.

Finally, they stand beneath Satan himself. Dante can barely recount this moment:

How then I became frozen and feeble, do not ask, reader, for I do not write it, and all speech would be insufficient. I did not die, and I did not remain alive: think now for yourself, if you have wit at all, what I became, deprived of both (22-27).

Satan is frozen up to his chest in the ice, and is massive—a giant to the giants. He has three hideous faces in red, yellow, and black. The winds of Cocytus come from his slowly fanning bat wings. His six eyes weep, his three mouths slobber; within his jaws writhe the traitors Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.

Virgil tells Dante, that is that: They have reached the bottom, and now must leave. He instructs Dante to hold onto his back, and timing his approach, he ducks under Satan’s fanning wings and clings to his hairy pelt. The two men laboriously climb down Satan’s side. When they reach the hips, Virgil does something strange: He turns himself upside-down, so Dante thinks they are retreating into Hell.

In fact, they have passed through the center of the earth, and gravity’s polarity has reversed. Virgil at last sets Dante on the edge of a hole in the rock, and Dante sees Satan’s legs extending upward above them. This, Virgil explains, is where Satan was embedded in the earth when he fell from Heaven. They have climbed his body into the unpeopled southern hemisphere of the globe. It is night in Italy, but here the sun is rising.

Together, Dante and Virgil make their way through a long tunnel, following the sound of a little stream. At last, Dante says, “I saw the beautiful things the heavens carry, through a round opening. And thence we came forth to look again at the stars” (137-39).