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.12 Ye have made you a god of gold and silver: and what difference is there between you and the idolater save that he worships 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!"13
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 passage from the fourth to the fifth dyke. Here softly he laid down his burden, softly because of the ragged and steep crag, that would be a difficult pass for goats. Thence another great valley was discovered to me.
Footnotes
1 The next bolgia or pit.
2 "My beautiful Saint John" is the Baptistery at Florence. In Dante's time the infants, born during the year, were all here baptized by immersion, mostly on the day of St. John Baptist, the 24th of June. There was a large circular font in the middle of the church, and around it in its marble wall were four cylindrical standing-places for the priests, closed by doors, to protect them from the pressure of the crowd.
3 The whole of the Eighth circle slopes toward the centre, so that the inner wall of each bolgia is lower, and is less sharply inclined than the outer.
4 Such criminals were not infrequently punished by being set, head downwards, in a hole in which they were buried alive.
5 This is Nicholas III., pope from 1277 to 1280; he takes Dante to be Boniface VIII., but Boniface was not to die till 1303. Compare what Nicholas says of "the record" with Farinata's statement, in Canto X, concerning the foresight of the damned.
6 The Church, to which Boniface did outrage in many forms; but worst by his simoniacal practices.
7 Nicholas was of the Orsini family.
8 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.
9 The story of Jason, "that ungodly 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.
10 "He who rules France" was Philip the Fair.
11 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.
12 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.
13 The reference is to the so-called Donation of Constantine, the reality of which was generally accepted till long after Dante's time.
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
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 God 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 buttocks 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.2
Who is more wicked than he who feels compassion at the Divine Judgment? Lift up thy head, lift up, and see him 3 for whom the earth opened before the eyes of the Thebans, whereon they shouted all, 'Whither art thou rushing, 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.
"See Tiresias,4 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. Aruns5 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.
"And she who with her loose tresses covers her breasts, which thou dost not see, and has on that side all her hairy skin, was Manto,6 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.7 Through a thousand founts, I think, and more, between Garda and Val Camonica, the Apennine is bathed
