Inferno Notes—Cantos XXXII – XXXIV (32-34)
Canto XXXII (32):
Circle Nine: Cocytus (Compound Fraud)
Round One: Caina (The Treacherous to Kin)
Round Two: Antenora (The Treacherous to Country)
Describe the lake (Cocytus). These treacheries represent the denial of what feeling?
Why are they punished as they are?
Know that Caina is named for Cain. These treacheries involved .
Note too that the sinners here are as far away from God as possible and that this is part of their punishment.
Be ready to describe the fate of the sinners in Caina.
The second round is Antenora, named for Antenor. Who was Antenor? The treacheries in this realm involved .
Be ready to describe the fate of the sinners in Antenora.
Whose head does Dante accidentally kick?
Who are the muses? Who is Amphion? This information can be found in the footnotes on p. 1131.
Note this description: “We stood now in the dark pit of the well, / far down the slope below the Giant’s feet, / and while I still stared up at the great wall, / I heard a voice cry: ‘Watch which way you turn: / take care you do not trample on the heads / of the foreworn and miserable brethren.’ / Whereat I turned and saw beneath my feet / and stretching out ahead, a lake so frozen / it seemed to be made of glass. So thick a sheet / never yet hid the Danube’s winter course, / nor, far away beneath the frigid sky, / locked the Don up in its frozen source: / For were Tanbernick and the enormous peak / of Pietrapana to crash down on it, / not even the edges would so much as creak” (16-30).
Now a wonderful metaphor that also describes the sinners’ fates:
“The way frogs sit to croak, their muzzles leaning / out of the water, at the time and season / when the peasant woman dreams of her day’s gleaning--/ Just so the livid dead are sealed in place / up to the part at which they blushed for shame, / and they beat their teeth like storks. Each holds his face / bowed toward the ice, each of them testifies / to the cold with his chattering mouth, to his heart’s grief / with tears that flood forever from his eyes” (31-39).
This is pretty cool: “…I saw two clamped together / so tightly that the hair of their heads had grown together” (41-42).
And this vivid description (something I want you to emulate): “They strained their necks, / and when they raised their heads as if to reply, / the tears their eyes had managed to contain / up to that time gushed out, and the cold froze them / between the lids, sealing them shut again/ tighter than any clamp grips wood to wood, / and mad with pain, they fell to butting heads / like billy-goats in a savage mood” (44-52).
Know who Mordred was (mentioned as “not him whose breast and shadow a single blow / of the great lance of King Arthur pierced with light” in the footnotes).
Again, here is a part that reminds me of the Suicides (and the subsequent Wizard of Oz):
“As we approached the center of all weight, / where I went shivering in eternal shade, / whether it was my will, or chance, or fate, / I cannot say, but as I trailed my Guide / among those heads, my foot struck violently / against the face of one. Weeping, it cried: ‘Why do you kick me? If you were not sent / to wreak a further vengeance for Montaperti/ why do you add this to my other torment?’” (73-81).
Who is this sinner? How does Dante respond to this plea/ complaint? How is it different from the way he treated the suicides?
Note how Dante and this sinner fight:
“’And who are you who go through the dead larder / of Antenora kicking the cheeks of others / so hard, that were you alive, you could not kick harder?’ / ‘I am alive,’ I said, ‘and if you seek fame, / it may be precious to you above all else/ that my notes on this descent include your name.’ / ‘Exactly the opposite is my wish and hope,’ / he answered. ‘Let me be; for it’s little you know / of how to flatter on this icy slope.’ / I grabbed the hair of his dog’s ruff and I said: / ‘Either you tell me truly who you are, or you won’t have a hair left on your head.’ / And he: ‘Not though you snatch me bald. I swear / I will not tell my name nor show my face. / Not though you rip me until my brain lies bare’” (88-102).
Who does this guy turn out to be?
Great description: “Leaving him then, I saw two souls together / in a single hole, and so pinched in by the ice / that one head made a helmet for the other. / As a famished man chews crusts—so the one sinner / sank his teeth into the other’s nape / at the base of the skull, gnawing his loathsome dinner” (124-129).
Note Dante’s manipulations: “’You there,’ I said, ‘who show so odiously / your hatred for that other, tell me why / on this condition: that if in what you tell me / you seem to have a reasonable complaint / against him you devour with such foul relish, / I, knowing who you are, and his soul’s taint, / may speak your cause to living memory, / God willing the power of speech be left to me’” (133-140).
Canto XXXIII (33):
Circle Nine: Cocytus (Compound Fraud)
Round Two: Antenora (The Treacherous to Country)
Round Three: Ptolomea (The Treacherous to Guests and Hosts)
Remember what a big deal it was to the Greeks—that whole thing about guests and hopes? It looks like Dante thought it was important too. The abuse of such relationships happens in “Macbeth.” Remember, poor King Duncan gets killed by his host—Macbeth!
Know about Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri. Know about their fates now.
Who was Ptolomaeus of Maccabees? What did he do? Be specific.
How are those in Ptolomea punished?
Who were Friar Alberigo and Branca D’Oria? What was their sin on earth? How are they punished in Ptolomea?
Note: this is the only time that Dante has a sinner in Hell—one whose body is still walking the earth. You cannot do this—but how does Dante explain it?
Note how this sinner speaks reluctantly: “The sinner raised his mouth from his grim repast / and wiped it on the hair of the bloody head / whose nape he had all but eaten away. At last / he began to speak: ‘You ask me to renew / a grief so desperate that the very thought / of speaking of it tears my heart in two. / But if my words may be a seed that bears / the fruit of infamy for him I gnaw, / I shall weep, but tell my story through my tears. / Who you may be, and by what powers you reach / into this underworld, I cannot guess, / but you seem to me a Florentine by your speech’” (1-13).
Who is this guy? How did he and his sons die? (It’s in the footnotes). Note that he recognizes Dante by his Florentine accent.
Dante even makes us feel sorry for him: “’The father and sons had raced / a brief course only when they failed of breath / and seemed to weaken; then I thought I saw / their flanks ripped open by the hounds’ fierce teeth. / Before the dawn, the dream still in my head, / I woke and heard my sons, who were there with me,/ cry from their troubled sleep, asking for bread. You are cruelty itself if you can keep / your tears back at the thought of what foreboding/ stirred in my heart; and if you do not weep,/ at what are you used to weeping? –The hour when food / used to be brought, drew near. They were now awake, / and each was anxious from his dream’s dark mood. / And from the base of that horrible tower I heard / the sound of hammers nailing up the gates:/ I stared at my sons’ faces without a word./ I did not weep: I had turned stone inside. / They wept. “What ails you, Father, you look so strange,” / my little Anselm, youngest of them cried. / But I did not speak a word nor shed a tear: / not all that day nor all that endless night,/ until I saw another sun appear’” ( 33-54 ).
What subsequently and began to happen to the members of this family?
As Virgil and Dante pass into Ptolomea, the sinners’ fates differ somewhat. How do they differ? Be specific.
Know about Friar Alberigo. This is the only place where someone that walks the earth is already in Hell. Note how Dante manipulates him:
“And I to him: ‘If you would have my service, / tell me your name; then if I do not help you / may I descend to the last rim of the ice’” (115-117).
“’What! Are you dead already?’ I said to him. / And he then: ‘How my body stands in the world / I do not know. So privileged is this rim / of Ptolomea, that often souls fall to it / Before dark Atropos has cut their thread. / And that you may more willingly free my spirit / of this glaze of frozen tears that shrouds my face, / I will tell you this: when a soul betrays as I did, / it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place, ruling the body till its time is spent’” ( 121-130).
Who is Atropos? It is in the footnotes.
Canto XXXIV (34):
Circle Nine: Cocytus (Compound Fraud)
Round Four: Caina (The Treacherous to Their Masters)
The Center: Satan
Describe Satan as Virgil and Dante see him from a distance.
Know how sinners are punished here.
Who is this realm (Judecca) named for? What sin does this represent?
How is Satan’s appearance “a grotesque parody of the Trinity”? Describe him.
Note that the poets use Satan as a kind of ladder. C. S. Lewis describes this as the first work of science fiction.
Note how scared Dante is: “Do not ask, Reader, how my blood ran cold / and my voice choked u with fear. I cannot write it: / this is a terror that cannot be told. / I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath: / imagine for yourself what I became, / deprived at once of both my life and death” (22-28).
Note the wonderfully vivid description of Satan: “The Emperor of the Universe of Pain / jutted his upper chest above the ice; / and I am close r in size to the great mountain / the Titans make around the central it,/ than they to his arms. Now, starting from his part, / imagine the whole that corresponds to it! / If he was once as beautiful as now / he is hideous, and still turned on his maker, well may he be the source of every woe! / With what a sense of awe I saw his head / towering above me! for it had three faces: one was in front, and it was fiery red; / the other two, as weirdly wonderful, / merged with it from the middle of each shoulder / to the point where all converged at the top of the skull; / the right was something between white and bile; / the left was about the color that one finds / on those who live along the banks of the Nile. Under each head two wings rose terribly, / their span proportioned to so gross a bird: / I never saw such sails upon the sea. They were not feathers—their texture and their form/ were like a bat’s wings—and he beat them so / that three winds blew from him in one great storm: / it is these winds that freeze all Cocytus. / He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins/ the tears ran mixed with bloody froth and pus. In every mouth he worked a broken sinner / between his rake-like teeth. Thus he kept three / in eternal dinner” (28-58).
Which of the three souls suffers the most and why?
What are the names of the other two? What did they do to end up here?
This is the science-fiction moment: “Then, as he bade, I clasped his neck, and he, / watching for a moment when the wings / were opened wide, reached over dexterously / and seized the shaggy coat of the king demon; / then grappling matted hair and frozen crusts /from one tuft to another, clambered down. / When we had reached the joint where the great thigh / merges into the swelling of the haunch, / my Guide and Master, straining terribly, / turned his head to where his feet had been/ and began to grip the hair as if he were climbing;/ so that I thought we moved toward Hell again./ ‘Hold fast!’ my Guide said, and his breath became shrill/ with labor and exhaustion. ‘There is no way / but by such stairs to rise above such evil.’ / At last he climbed out through an opening in the central rock, and he seated me on the rim; / then joined me with a nimble backward spring. / I looked up, thinking to see Lucifer / as I had left him, and I saw instead / his legs projecting high into the air” (70-90).
Where are Dante and Virgil when they emerge?
What do they see?
Dante makes an allusion to Lethe. What is Lethe, in classical mythology? What does it symbolize here?
Again, note the vivid description of Satan: “’O My Master, / explain to me my error in all this: / where is the ice? And Lucifer—how has he / been turned from top to bottom: and how can the sun / have gone from night to day so suddenly?” / And he to me: “You imagine you are still / on the other side of the center where I grasped / the shaggy flank of the Great Worm of Evil / which bores through the world—you were while I climbed down, / but when I turned myself about, you passed/ the point to which all gravities are drawn’” (102-112).
“’You have your feet upon a little sphere / which forms the other face of the Judecca. / There it is evening when it is morning here. / And this gross Fiend and Image of all Evil / who made a stairway for us with his hide / is pinched and prisoned in the ice-pack still. / On this side he plunged down from heaven’s height, / and the land that spread here once hid in the sea/ and fled North to our hemisphere for fight; / and it may be that moved by that same fear, / the one peak that still rises on this side / fled upward leaving this great cavern here./ Down there, beginning at the further bound / of Beelzebub’s [another devil] dim tomb, there is a space / not known by sight, but only by the sound / of a little stream descending through the hollow / it has eroded from the massive stone / in its endlessly entwining lazy flow” (118-135).
What special holy day is it when Dante and Virgil emerge?
