whom the Poet therefore calls “figliuol dell’ orsa,” “son of the she-bear.” He died in 1281.
4 Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who succeeded to the pontificate in 1305, as Clement V. He transferred the Holy See to Avignon in 1308 (where it remained till 1376), and died in 1314.
5 “But after the death of Seleucus, when Antiochus, called Epiphanes, took the kingdom, Jason, the brother of Onias, labored to be high-priest, promising unto the king, by intercession, three hundred and threescore talents of silver, and of another revenue eighty talents.”—Maccab. b. ii. ch. iv, 7,8.
6 Philip IV. See G. Villani, lib. viii. c. lxxx.
7 Acts of the Apostles, ch. i. 26.
8 “The condemned soul.” Judas.
9 Nicholas III was enraged against Charles I, King of Sicily, because he rejected with scorn his proposition for an alliance between their families. See G. Villani, Hist., lib. iii.
10 He alludes to the pretended gift of the Lateran by Constantine to Sylvester, of which Dante himself seems to imply a doubt, in his treatise “De Monarchâ.”
Canto XX
ARGUMENT.—The Poet relates the punishment of such as presumed, while living, to predict future events. It is to have their faces reversed and set the contrary way on their limbs, so that, being deprived of the power to see before them, they are constrained ever to walk backward. Among these Virgil points out to him Amphiaraüs, Tiresias, Aruns, and Manto (from the mention of whom he takes occasion to speak of the origin of Mantua), together with several others, who had practised the arts of divination and astrology.
AND now the verse proceeds to torments new,
Fit argument of this the twentieth strain
Of the first song, whose awful theme records
The spirits whelm’d in woe. Earnest I look’d
Into the depth, that open’d to my view,
Moisten’d with tears of anguish, and beheld
A tribe, that came along the hollow vale,
In silence weeping: such their step as walk
Quires chanting solemn litanies on earth.
As on them more direct mine eye descends,
Each wondrously seem’d to be revers’d
At the neck-bone, so that the countenance
Was from the reins averted: and because
None might before him look, they were compell’d
To’ advance with backward gait. Thus one perhaps
Hath been by force of palsy clean transpos’d,
But I ne’er saw it nor believe it so.
Now, reader! think within thyself, so God
Fruit of thy reading give thee! how I long
Could keep my visage dry, when I beheld
Near me our form distorted in such guise,
That on the hinder parts fall’n from the face
The tears down-streaming roll’d. Against a rock
I leant and wept, so that my guide exclaim’d:
“What, and art thou too witless as the rest?
Here pity most doth show herself alive,
When she is dead. What guilt exceedeth his,
Who with Heaven’s judgment in his passion strives?
Raise up thy head, raise up, and see the man,
Before whose eyes1 earth gap’d in Thebes, when all
Cried out, ‘Amphiaraus, whither rushest?
‘Why leavest thou the war?’ He not the less
Fell ruining far as to Minos down,
Whose grapple none eludes. Lo! how he makes
The breast his shoulders, and who once too far
Before him wish’d to see, now backward looks,
And treads reverse his path. Tiresias note,
Who semblance chang’d, when woman he became
Of male, through every limb transform’d, and then
Once more behov’d him with his rod to strike
The two entwining serpents, ere the plumes,
That mark’d the better sex, might shoot again.
“Aruns, with rere his belly facing, comes.
On Luni’s mountains ’midst the marbles white,
Where delves Carrara’s hind, who wons beneath,
A cavern was his dwelling, whence the stars
And main-sea wide in boundless view he held.
“The next, whose loosen’d tresses overspread
Her bosom, which thou seest not (for each hair
On that side grows) was Manto, she who search’d
Through many regions, and at length her seat
Fix’d in my native land, whence a short space
My words detain thy audience. When her sire
From life departed, and in servitude
The city dedicate to Bacchus mourn’d,
Long time she went a wand’rer through the world.
Aloft in Italy’s delightful
