Dante's Divine Comedy

This canto splits between two foci: Capaneus and the Old Man of Crete. Each of the two takes almost exactly half of the lines of the canto.

• 1. How are the first tercet of Canto XIV similar to that of Canto XIII?

Each provides a backward-looking reference to the previous canto.

What moves Dante to “gather the strewn fronds” of the unknown suicide?

He does so, moved by his love for Florence, not out of pity for the suicide.

What – if any – contrast do you see between the 2^nd Round of Circle 7 and the 3^rd Round?

The Second Round at least had vegetation, but in the Third nothing is allowed to grow. The desert landscape reflects the wasteland of the spirit.

• 2. What is the purpose of the apostrophe in lines 16-18?

Dante seems to suggest that at least one purpose of his poem is to inspire a fear of God’s vengeance, a fact made clear to Dante by observation.

What distinctions regarding the sinners and their particular punishments in the Third Round does Dante observe? Lines 19-24

He notes three groups of sinners distinguished by their particular punishments: some supine on the desert floor, some sitting, and some running.

Which group consists of the greatest number of souls? (line 25)

Those who run

Which group consists of the least number? (line 26)

Those who lie flat

What other distinction do those who lie flat exhibit? (line 27)

They are the most vocal and the loudest

How do lines 28-30 emphasize the unnaturalness of the sins punished in the fiery desert?

The fire falls from heaven, though its nature is to rise upward.

How do the falling flakes of fire double the pain of the blasphemers? (lines 37-39)

The falling flakes spark the desert itself into flame.

How do the sinners’ own bodies intensify their suffering? (lines 39-42)

They attempt to brush away the flakes of fire without letting up.

• 3. What draws Dante’s attention to the first sinner on which he focuses? (lines 46-48)

The sinner’s size (he is huge) and his apparent obliviousness to the punishment

Who is this defiant sinner? (line 62)

Capaneus, one of the Seven Against Thebes (cf. Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” (inspired by the Japanese film).

Though Dante asks Virgil who the sinner is, the sinner himself answers. How does his answer establish his blasphemy? (lines 49-60)

His defiance of Jupiter/Jove is absolute. In Hell he remains focused on his own pride which has driven him to a kind of madness.

Dante’s source, the Roman poet Statius, called Capaneus a scorner of the gods. His “faith” lay solely in his own bravery and weapon. He claimed that a god was a figment of man’s fear.

How do you interpret Virgil’s retort in lines 63-66)

Virgil tells Capaneus that the sinner’s pride had not lessened since the moment he was struck down by a lightning bold thrown by Zeus. He goes on to say that only Capaneus’ own rage generates his greatest pain. His whole spiritual drama is condensed is one act of never-ending rebellion, going on throughout eternity.

The representative sinner of blasphemy is drawn from classical mythology rather than from among Christians. How can blasphemy, one of the few “religious” sins punished in the Inferno, be represented by a pagan figure?

Virgil’s reference to God in lines 69-70 exemplifies Dante’s syncretism (“the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought”). Back in Canto I.72, Dante, a Christian poet, condemns the “false and cheating gods” of the ancient Romans, placing those words in Virgil’s introductory speech. Yet, in Purgatorio, the poet refers to the crucified Christ as “supreme Jove.” as though the pagan Romans had glimpsed part of the Christians’ truth. Dante the Poet portrays Capaneus as damned for his rebellion against God under the guise of Jove/ Zeus. (In Purgatorio we shall see a pagan Roman assigned by God a significant role because that Roman acknowledged the “ubiquity of God’s presence.”)

Again, Dante and Christian writers from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and even later use the Greco-Roman gods and other mythological beings to represent Christian concepts, values, and even beings.

From this episode, what can we conclude about Dante’s conception of blasphemy?

Blasphemy is NOT atheism but a denial of God’s supremacy and also a sin against the greatest of all commandments: ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and great commandment.”

• 4. Halfway through Canto XIV, the emphasis shifts from Capaneus to the Old Man of Crete. What geographical observation does Dante make in lines 77-84?

A narrow red-colored river flows from the Wood of the Suicides across the desert of the Third Round. Both the river’s bed and its embankments are made of stone.

Remember these facts. They will play an important role at the end of this canto and into the next.

What observation does Virgil make about this river?

He says “Nothing you’ve seen is as remarkable/as is this river here before your eyes,/which cools and quenches all the flames above it.”

Again, remember this fact. It, too, will play an important role later.

Note lines 91-93. What two things or concepts are begin compared in figurative language here?

Dante compare knowledge to food.

With what information does Virgil respond to Dante’s “begging”? (lines 94-142)

He explains the origins of the rivers of Hell and more,

Lines 103-120 detail the myth of the Old Man of Crete, a myth created by Dante himself. What do you make of the orientation of the statue?

Some think the statue’s orientation refers to the movement of the might of empire from east to west.

Others perceive the statue as gazing toward the destiny of Rome as the center of Christianity from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church.

Have you ever seen a similar statue in Scripture?

Yes, in Daniel 2:32-33.

³¹ “You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was awesome. ³² This image’s head was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, ³³ its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

How is the description in Daniel different from Dante’s in lines 106-111?

How is the condition of the statue different between Daniel’s and Dante’s images? (lines 112-114)

The Old Man of Crete has a rotten fissure running from the chest to the feet formed by “trickling tears” that gather into a stream which in turn become a stream that erodes a tunnel through the cave and down into Hell.

Ultimately, what does the stream of tears become in Hell? (lines 115-120)

The three rivers of Hell: the Acheron, the Styx, the Phlegethon, and the lake called Cocytus

Though now possessing more knowledge, Dante still has a question. What is the question, and what is Virgil’s answer? (lines 121-129)

Dante wants to know why they haven’t seen this stream that prompted his question before.

Virgil responds by explaining that Hell is round (in fact, funnel-shaped). Though they have come a long way, Dante and Virgil have not yet gone completely around its circumference.

Ever curious, Dante has yet another question. What is the question, and what is Virgil’s answer? (lines 130-138)

Dante wants to know where the Lethe and the Phlegethon are. (Remember that he knows the names of the rivers of Hell because Virgil names and demonstrates all of them in the Aeneid.)

Virgil, like a good teacher, says that “all your questions bring delight to me,” but he also points out that Dante should have been able to identify the location of the Phlegethon on his own. He explains the boiling red nature of the stream in question should make the Phlegethon’s location clear. He has already seen the Phlegethon: it constitutes the First Round of the Seventh Circle. This stream flows directly from it through the Wood of the Suicides and the desert of the Third Round.

Virgil goes on to explain that Dante will see the Lethe but not in Hell. It is where the repentant dead will bathe and have their sins washed away (in the Earthly Paradise at the top of Mt. Purgatory.)

What can we further make of the Old Man of Crete?

Both Pliny the Elder in his Natural History and Augustine in his City of God mention that subsequent to an earthquake on Crete, a gigantic man was discovered inside a mountain in Crete.

It is also worth noting that Ovid in his Metamorphoses follows the account of the creation with a detailing of the Four Ages of Man:

• the golden age (“though ignorant/of laws, yet of its own will, uncoerced,/fostered responsibility and virtue”)
• the silver age (a time when men lived in caves and began to farm)
• the bronze age (“crueler in nature and much more disposed/to savage warfare, but not yet corrupt”)
• the iron age (“all forms of evil burst upon this time . . . modesty, fidelity,/and truth departed; in their absence, came/fraud, guile, deceit, the use of violence,/and shameful lusting after acquisitions.”

Of course, Dante’s Christian belief could not/would not accept such a downward cycle. He might conceive of Eden before the Fall as a Golden Age, but the advent of sin goes directly to the sinfulness of man, skipping any intermediary ages. He accepted Augustine’s six division:

• Adam to Noah
• Noah to Abraham
• Abraham to David
• David to the Babylonian Captivity
• The Babylonian Captivity to the Incarnation of Christ
• Christ to the Present (the Age of the Church)

Daniel interprets the statue in his vision politically:

¹⁹ Then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision. So Daniel blessed the God of heaven.

²⁰ Daniel answered and said:

“Blessed be the name of God forever and ever,
For wisdom and might are His.
²¹ And He changes the times and the seasons;
He removes kings and raises up kings;

Some critics have also made a political interpretation of Dante’s Old Man of Crete:

• The head (the golden age}: the Augustan era that commenced the Pax Romana throughout the Mediterranean world
• The iron age: begun with the split between the western and eastern empires (symbolized by Dante’s extension of iron to the bifurcation in the groin)
• The tears represent the consequences of this political degeneration
• The feet represent civil discord

Still, we have no evidence that Dante saw the history of the empire as a steady degeneration.

The most likely interpretation is to view the Old Man as “the Old Adam.”

Since Dante is well-understood to have possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of medieval culture, it is difficult for modern interpreters to match his understanding and therefore understand, at first glance, what shaped his ideas in the Commedia.

For those critics who attempt a deeper dive, the Old Man is allegory of the state of man, corrupted by original sin:

• The head (gold) represents man’s free will, immune from Adam’s sinful heritage
• The limbs (silver) represent the corruption of man’s reason by error
• The belly (bronze) represents man’s will undermined by militia, “malice”)
• The left foot (iron) represents man’s irritable appetite, subject to infirmity
• The right foot (terra cotta) represents man’s desirable appetite, subject to avarice
• The tears represent the effects of original sin

In this interpretation, Dante places the blame for human suffering not on the devil but on men and women themselves. Some also see the Old Man in Crete, when viewed from this perspective, as the antithesis of the crucified Christ from whose wounds flow salvation.

This interpretation does not preclude an interpretation of the statues feet among the critics as representing the papacy (the right foot of terra cotta) and the empire (the left foot of iron). Dante regarded the Church and the Empire as sharing responsibility for addressing the effects of man’s sinful nature.