The Divine Comedy Volume I Part 9

Such I became as those that, not comprehending that which is replied to them, stand as if mocked, and know not what to answer.

Then Virgil said, "Tell him quickly, I am not he, I am not he thou thinkest." And I answered as was enjoined on me; whereat the spirit quite twisted his feet. Thereafter, sighing and with tearful voice, he said to me, "Then what dost thou require of me?

If to know who I am concerneth thee so much that thou hast crossed the bank therefor, know that I was vested with the Great Mantle; and verily I was a son of the She-Bear,[1] so eager to advance the cubs, that up there I put wealth, and here myself, into the purse. Beneath my head are stretched the others that preceded me in simony, flattened through the fissures of the rock. There below shall I likewise sink, when he shall come whom I believed thou wert, then when I put to thee the sudden question; but already the time is longer that I have cooked my feet, and that I have been thus upside down, than he will stay planted with red feet; for after him will come, of uglier deed, from westward, a shepherd without law,[2] such as must cover him and me again. A new Jason will he be, of whom it is read in Maccabees;[3] and as to that one his king was compliant, so unto this he who rules France shall be."[4]

[1] Nicholas was of the Orsini family.

[2] Clement V., who will come from Avignon, and in a little more than ten years after the death of Boniface. Nicholas had already "cooked his feet" for twenty years. The prophecy of the death of Clement after a shorter time affords an indication that this canto was not written until after 1314, the year of his death.

[3] The story of Jason, "that unG.o.dly wretch and no high-priest"

who bought the high-priesthood from King Antiochus, is told in 2 Maccabees iv. Its application to the Pope was plain.

[4] "He who rules France" was Philip the Fair.

I know not if here I was too audacious that I only answered him in this strain, "Pray now tell me how much treasure our Lord desired of Saint Peter before he placed the keys in his keeping?

Surely he required nothing save 'Follow me.' Nor did Peter or the others require of Matthias gold or silver, when he was chosen to the place which the guilty soul had lost. Therefore stay thou, for thou art rightly punished, and guard well the ill-gotten money that against Charles[1] made thee to be bold. And were it not that reverence for the Supreme Keys that thou heldest in the glad life still forbiddeth me, I would use words still more grave; for your avarice saddens the world, trampling down the good and exalting the bad. Of you shepherds the Evangelist was aware, when she that sitteth upon the waters was seen by him to fornicate with kings: that woman that was born with the seven heads, and from the ten horns had evidence, so long as virtue pleased her spouse.[2] Ye have made you a G.o.d of gold and silver: and what difference is there between you and the idolater save that he wors.h.i.+ps one and ye a hundred? Ah Constantine! of how much ill was mother, not thy conversion, but that dowry which the first rich Father received from thee!"[3]

[1] Charles of Anjou, of whom Nicholas III, was the enemy. He was charged with having been bribed to support the attempt to expel the French from Sicily, which began with the Sicilian Vespers in 1282.

[2] Dante deals freely with the figures of the Apocalypse: Revelation vii. The woman here stands for the Church; her seven heads may be interpreted as the Seven Sacraments, and her ten horns as the Commandments; her spouse is the Pope.

[3] The reference is to the so-called Donation of Constantine, the reality of which was generally accepted till long after Dante's time.

And, while I was singing these notes to him, whether anger or conscience stung him, he violently quivered with both feet. I believe, forsooth, that it had pleased my Leader, with so contented look be listened ever to the sound of the true words uttered. Thereupon with both his arms he took me, and when he had me wholly on his breast, remounted on the way by which he had descended. Nor did he tire of holding me clasped till he had borne me up to the summit of the arch which is the pa.s.sage from the fourth to the fifth d.y.k.e. Here softly he laid down his burden, softly because of the ragged and steep crag, that would be a difficult pa.s.s for goats. Thence another great valley was discovered to me.

CANTO XX. Eighth Circle: fourth pit: diviners, soothsayers, and magicians.--Amphiaraus.--Tiresias.--Aruns.--Manto.--Eurypylus.-- Michael Scott.--Asdente.

Of a new punishment needs must I make verses, and give matetial to the twentieth canto of the first lay, which is of the submerged.[1]

[1] Plunged into the misery of h.e.l.l.

I was now wholly set on looking into the disclosed depth that was bathed with tears of anguish, and I saw folk coming, silent and weeping, through the circular valley, at the pace at which lltanies go in this world. As my sight descended deeper among them, each appeared marvelously distorted from the chin to the beginning of the chest; for toward their reins their face was turned, and they must needs go backwards, because they were deprived of looking forward. Perchance sometimes by force of palsy one has been thus completely twisted, but I never saw it, nor do I think it can be.

So may G.o.d let thee, Reader, gather fruit from thy reading, now think for thyself how I could keep my face dry, when near by I saw our image so contorted that the weeping of the eyes bathed the b.u.t.tocks along the cleft. Truly I wept, leaning on one of the rocks of the hard crag, so that my Guide said to me, "Art thou also one of the fools? Here pity liveth when it is quite dead.[1]

Who is more wicked than he who feels compa.s.sion at the Divine Judgment? Lift up thy head, lift up, and see him [2] for whom the earth opened before the eyes of the Thebans, whereon they shouted all, 'Whither art thou rus.h.i.+ng, Amphiaraus? Why dost thou leave the war?' And he stopped not from falling headlong down far as Minos, who seizes hold of every one. Look, how he has made a breast of his shoulders! Because he wished to see too far before him, he looks behind and makes a backward path.

[1] It is impossible to give the full significance of Dante's words in a literal translation, owing to the double meaning of pieta in the original. Qui viva la pieta quando e ben morta.

That is: "Here liveth piety when pity is quite dead."

[2] One of the seven kings who besieged Thebes, augur and prophet. Dante found his story in Statius, Thebais, viii. 84.

"See Tiresias,[1] who changed his semblance, when from a male he became a female, his members all of them being transformed; and afterwards was obliged to strike once more the two entwined serpents with his rod, ere he could regain his masculine plumage.

Aruns[2] is he that to this one's belly has his back, who on the mountains of Luni (where grubs the Carrarese who dwells beneath), amid white marbles, had a cave for his abode, whence for looking at the stars and the sea his view was not cut off.

[1] The Theban soothsayer. Dante had learned of him from Ovid., Metam., iii. 320 sqq., as well as from Statius.

[2] An Etruscan haruspex of whom Lucan tells,--Arens incoluit desertae moenia Lanae. Phars. i. 556.

"And she who with her loose tresses covers her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which thou dost not see, and has on that side all her hairy skin, was Manto,[1] who sought through many lands, then settled there where I was born; whereof it pleases me that thou listen a little to me. After her father had departed from life, and the city of Bacchus had become enslaved, long while she wandered through the world. Up in fair Italy lies a lake, at foot of the alp that shuts in Germany above Tyrol, and it is called Benaco.[2] Through a thousand founts, I think, and more, between Garda and Val Camonica, the Apennine is bathed by the water which settles in that lake. Midway is a place where the Trentine Pastor and he of Brescia and the Veronese might each give his blessing if he took that road.[3] Peschiera, fortress fair and strong, sits to confront the Brescians and Bergamasques, where the sh.o.r.e round about is lowest. Thither needs must fall all that which in the lap of Benaco cannot stay, and it becomes a river down through the verdant pastures. Soon as the water gathers head to run, no longer is it called Benaco, but Mincio, far as Governo, where it falls into the Po. No long course it hath before it finds a plain, on which it spreads, and makes a marsh, and is wont in summer sometimes to be noisome. Pa.s.sing that way, the cruel virgin saw a land in the middle of the fen without culture and bare of inhabitants. There, to avoid all human fellows.h.i.+p, she stayed with her servants to practice her arts, and lived, and left there her empty body. Afterward the men who were scattered round about gathered to that place, which was strong because of the fen which surrounded it. They built the city over those dead hones, and for her, who first had chosen the place, they called it Mantua, without other augury. Of old its people were more thick within it, before the stupidity of Casalodi had been tricked by Pinamonte.[4] Therefore I warn thee, that if thou ever hearest otherwise the origin of my town, no falsehood may defraud the truth."

[1] The daughter of Tiresias, of whom Statius, Ovid, and Virgil all tell.

[2] Now Lago di Garda.

[3] Where the three dioceses meet.

[4] The Count of Casalodi, being lord of Mantua about 1276, gave ear to the treacherous counsels of Messer Pinamonte de Buonacorsi, and was driven, with his friends, from the city.

And I, "Master, thy discourses are so certain to me, and so lay hold on my faith, that the others would be to me as dead embers.

But tell me of the people who are pa.s.sing, if thou seest any one of them worthy of note; for only unto that my mind reverts."

Then he said to me, "That one, who from his cheek stretches his beard upon his dusky shoulders, was an augur when Greece was so emptied of males that they scarce remained for the cradles, and with Calchas at Aulis he gave the moment for cutting the first cable. Eurypylus was his name, and thus my lofty Tragedy sings him in some place;[1] well knowest thou this, who knowest the whole of it. That other who is so small in the flanks was Michael Scott,[2] who verily knew the game of magical deceptions. See Guido Bonatti,[3] see Asdente,[4] who now would wish he had attended to his leather and his thread, but late repents. See the forlorn women who left the needle, the spool, and the spindle, and became fortune-tellers; they wrought spells with herb and with image.

[1] Suspensi Eurypylum scitantem oracula Phoebi Mittimus. Aeneid, ii. 112.

[2] A wizard of such dreaded fame That, when in Salamanca's cave Him listed his magic wand to wave, The bells would ring in Notre Dame.

Lay of the Lost Minstrel, Canto ii.

[3] A famous astrologer of Forli, in the thirteenth century.

[4] Dante, in the Canvito, trattato iv. c. 16, says that if n.o.bLE meant being widely known, then "Asdente, the shoemaker of Parma, would be more n.o.ble than any of his fellow-citizens."

"But come on now, for already Cain with his thorns [1] holds the confines of both the hemispheres, and touches the wave below Seville. And already yesternight was the moon round; well shouldst thou remember it, for it did thee no harm sometimes in the deep wood." Thus he spoke to me, and we went on the while.

[1] The Man in the Moon, according to an old popular legend.

CANTO XXI. Eighth Circle: fifth pit: barrators.--A magistrate of Lucca.--The Malebranche.--Parley with them.

So from bridge to bridge we went, speaking other things, which my Comedy careth not to sing, and held the suffimit, when we stopped to see the next cleft of Malebolge and the next vain lamentations; and I saw it wonderfully dark.

As in the a.r.s.enal of the Venetians, in winter, the sticky pitch for smearing their unsound vessels is boiling, because they cannot go to sea, and, instead thereof, one builds him a new bark, and one caulks the sides of that which hath made many a voyage; one hammers at the prow, and one at the stern; another makes oars, and another twists the cordage; and one the foresail and the mainsail patches,--so, not by fire, but by divine art, a thick pitch was boiling there below, which belimed the bank on every side. I saw it, but saw not in it aught but the bubbles which the boiling raised, and all of it swelling up and again sinking compressed.

While I was gazing down there fixedly, my Leader, saying, "Take heed! take heed!" drew me to himself from the place where I was standing. Then I turned as one who is slow to see what it behoves him to fly, and whom a sudden fear unnerves, and delays not to depart in order to see. And I saw behind us a black devil come running up along the crag. Ah! how fell he was in aspect, and how rough he seemed to me in action, with wings open, and light upon his feet! His shoulder, which was sharp and high, was laden by a sinner with both haunches, the sinew of whose feet he held clutched. "O Malebranche[1] of our bridge," he said, "lo, one of the Ancients of Saint Zita[2] put him under, for I return again to that city, which I have furnished well with them; every man there is a barrator,[3] except Bonturo:[4] there, for money, of No they make Ay." He hurled him down, and along the hard crag he turned, and never mastiff loosed was in such haste to follow a thief.

[1] Malebranche means Evil-claws.