Dante's Divine Comedy

• 1. What act or acts qualify Count Ugolino for placement in Antenora?

Most broadly is a betrayer of party or country, but Dante allows other, more specific, interpretations.

In lines 85-88, Dante refers to 1) Ugolino’s betrayal of Pisa, 2) his betrayal of the Ghibelline faction into which he was born, thereby allowing Guelf forces to gain advantage in Tuscany; or 3) his betrayal of Ghibelline leadership, since the castles were strategic Ghibelline strongholds.

Many commentators see in lines 4-6 an echo of both Aeneas’ lines to Dido in the Aeneid as well as Francesca speaking in Canto V.

Do you agree?

This is an OPEN QUESTION.

How may lines 7-9 be connected to Jesus’s words in Matthew 7:15-20?

This is an OPEN QUESTION.

Alternatively, how may those same lines connect to the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 8:4-11?

The metaphor of “my words must be the seed to sprout/infamy for the traitor” is complex: it amounts to saying that Ugolino accepts the pact with the pilgrim who is to repeat his story among the living. At that point Ruggieri will gain infamy. The application may be understood in this manner:

• Ugolino’s words are to be the seed
• The pilgrim’s memory is to be the soil in which the seed is planted
• The text of lines 4-75 are the plant
• Infamy is to be the fruit

Compare line 9 here to v.127.

Both Ugolino and Francesca weep and speak simultaneously (each of them in imitation of Aeneas’s imagined hardened soldier who would have to speak through tears if he had the fall of Troy to narrate).

Both Ugolino and Francesca are accompanied by a companion who does not speak in Dante’s presence.

Based on lines 19-21, what is the purpose behind Ugolino’s relating his story to Dante?

His purpose is to justify his own sin by comparing it to Ruggieri’s.

He is a man who has experienced death in the company of his children; we do not even hear of them at first, since his attention is fixed entirely on himself.

Compare lines 40-42 to lines 49-50. What does their lack of weeping reveal about each man: Dante and Ugolino?

Dante, unlike most readers, has evidently found a moral vantage point from which there seems something wrong with this narration. Since we have seen him weep for other apparently less sympathetic figures, his lack of compassion might serve as a clue to us about his own reactions

Ugolino’s heart is so hard at the moment of realizing his sons’ starvation that he focuses on this wrath toward Ruggieri more than toward his pity for his sons. Ugolino remains focuses on himself in focusing on his wrath against Ruggieri. This reality is the chief basis for the argument that his speech is cynically self-aggrandizing.

What do you make of line 78?

Either it means

A Friend Comes at Midnight

⁵ And He said to them, “Which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; ⁶ for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; ⁷ and he will answer from within and say, ‘Do not trouble me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give to you’? ⁸ I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs.

Keep Asking, Seeking, Knocking

⁹ “So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ¹⁰ For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ¹¹ If a son asks for ^[a]bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? ¹² Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? ¹³ If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”

hunger overcame his grief, and he fed on the children’s bodies, or he simply succumbed to death from hunger.

Compare and contrast lines 37-39 to Luke 11:5-13. Do you see antithetical correlations?

In the parable, a man is visited by a friend at midnight and goes to the house of another friend to seek bread in order to feed his guest. The importuned friend replies, “Trouble me not, the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give you.” In Christ’s explanation, he insists that persistence will yield the desired result.

The various details of the parable, in a form that is both parallel and antithetic to the action recounted by Ugolino: the knocking on the door echoed in the hammer blows nailing up the prison, the man in bed with his children behind a locked door, and the father who will not give his son a stone when he asks for bread. Ugolino, however, gives his sons exactly that, aa stony silence.

In the end, are you sympathetic with Ugolino?

This is an OPEN QUESTION.

• 2. What rhetorical device is Dante employing in lines 79-91?

It is an apostrophe directed to the city of Pistoia.

With whom do these lines sympathize?

All of Dante’s sympathy is lodged with the children, none for Ugolino. (This attitude is true for both Dante the Pilgrim and Dante the Poet; it is supported especially by lines 85-87).

• 3. The distinction between Caina and Antenora is manifested by the positioning of the heads of the sinners in each. Those in the former ring are frozen up to their necks with their heads bent downward. In the latter are frozen in the ice with their heads raised, facing outward rather than downward. How are the sinners in Ptolomea oriented?

Only their faces protrude upward from the ice while their tears freeze over their eyes, sealing them in a living tomb. In fact, Dante describes them as lying supine, with only their face above the ice. Their upturned faces transform their eye sockets into cups in which the tars of the sinners become small basins of ice. (lines 91-108).

Whose is the only speaking sinner in Ptolomea?

Fra Alberigo

Under what misapprehension does he speak?

He believes Dante and Virgil are two sinners headed to their destination in Judecca, the final ring of Cocytus.

What makes this sinner and the other denizens of this ring unique among those condemned to Hell?

Though their souls are in Hell, their bodies are now alive on Earth inhabited and animated by demons. (ll. 122-123)

How do you feel about Dante’s deal with Fra Alberigo?

Dante’s agreement with Alberigo is utterly cynical. He has no intention of helping this sinner in any way, and says what he says only to get the sinner to disclose himself, swearing a misleading oath in order to reassure him (of course he is going to the “bottom of the ice,” but not as a sinner for eternal punishment, but as a very privileged visitor.

What rhetorical device is Dante using in lines 151-157?

It is an apostrophe directed against Genoa. An apostrophe against Pisa ended at the border between Antenora and Ptolomea. This one ends at the border between Ptolomea and Judecca.

• 4. Satan’s beating wings produce a constant wind, or – perhaps – the wind is an iteration of his breath as Robert Hollander thinks. In either case, how does the wind itself contribute to Satan’s depiction a parody of God?

Critic Joan Ferrante speaks of “Lucifer, who emits no sound but sends for the a silent and freezing wind of hate, a parody perhaps of the love-inspiring tongues of flame brought to the Apostles by the Holy Spirit.”

Alternatively, the wind may recall the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters in Genesis 1.2.

What is the name of the Fourth Ring of Cocytus and what sin is punished there?

In Judecca those who betrayed benefactors (some critics include masters) are punished.

• 5. Read line 21. Compare it to III.3-15.

Line 21 echoes Virgil’s admonition to Dante to be courageous upon entering Hell. Now the Pilgrim faces the very embodiment of evil and must “arm himself with fortitude.”

Read lines 22-27. This is the seventh and final apostrophes to the Reader in Inferno. (The previous six occurred in IX.61-63 (a warning that what was to follow would require sound intellect), XVI.19-21 (a preparation for the appearance of Geryon), XVII.1-3 (the actual introduction of Geryon), XXII.183-123 (an explanation that he is about to recount the grotesque battle between the devils and the grafters), XXV.46-48 (a challenge to believe the astonishing metamorphoses of the thieves). How do you interpret the Poet’s purpose in this final apostrophe?

Francesco Torricelli (1794-1864) sees these lines as Dante’s passing from a state of death to the state of living in God’s forgiveness.

Ernesto Trucchi (1864-1934) asserts that this is the moment in which, in the protagonist, the fear of Hell becomes the fear of God.

Robert Durling (1929-2015) and Ronald Martinez (1943-present) propose that “the moment is the culmination of the penitential imitation of Christ in the descent into Hell, symbolically the pilgrim’s death to sin, that is, the death of the ‘old man,” leading to the reversal of direction from descent to ascent.” [They give credit to John Freccero in his essay “The Sign of Satan” for the idea.]

In the essential metaphysics to which Dante subscribed, evil is not a positive quality but a defect, a lack of good, thus of being. That Satan is the most evil of creatures means for Dante that he possesses the least reality; insofar s he does have positive existence, however, Satan, like everything else, is good (for Dante, this means that Satan carries out God’s justice and, in his elaborate, parodic parallels with God and the crucified Christ, is a chief “sign” of the divine.” The pilgrim’s loss of strength when confronted with Satan expresses in part the paradoxical power of Satan’s “lack” (deprived in line 27 alludes to the idea of evil as privation).

• 6. Read lines 37-67.

• 7. Consider lines 68-69. It is now evening of Holy Saturday. How long has the journey taken?

24 hours

Why does Virgil turn around while climbing down Satan’s body and begin to climb up?

He and Dante have passed the center of the universe, the focal point of all gravity. He must now climb upward to return to the Earth’s surface.

What path do the two travelers follow to return to the surface?

They follow the River Lethe (which flows from the top of Mt. Purgatory where the saved are bathed to forget their sins. Therefore, we may reason that as the Lethe flows down Mt. Purgatory, it carries those sins with it. Ultimately the Lethe, along with those sins, empties into Cocytus where it contributes to the punishing ice.

Where are they in line 139?

They have emerged at the foot of Mt. Purgatory.

What is the significance of the final word in that line, the final word of Inferno?

The word is “stars,” symbolizing the hope with which Inferno ends. All three canticles end with the same word.