He is “still goaded by new thirst” (XVIII, 4). Reluctantly, he draws his “unquenchable sponge out of the water” (XX, 3). “A thousand longings burning more than flames” compel his eyes (XXXI, 118). Guido Guinizzelli burns for an answer “in fire and thirst” and lets Dante know that Guinizzelli’s fellow shades thirst for that answer “more than / an Indian or Ethiopian / thirsts for cool water” (XXVI, 18–22). When Dante asks the Muses for recompense (“O Virgins, sacrosanct, if I have ever, / for your sake, suffered vigils, cold, and hunger, / great need makes me entreat my recompense”: XXIX, 37–39), the hunger seems not only the hunger of indigent exile but the hungering and thirsting of this work.

That force of longing is, of course, only abetted by the nearness now, in Purgatory, of Beatrice, by the ten years of thirst between her death in 1290 and the date of the fictive voyage, and the even longer span between her death and Dante’s writing of the Purgatorio (XXXII, 1–9):

                       My eyes were so insistent, so intent

                       on finding satisfaction for their ten-

                       year thirst that every other sense was spent.

                       And to each side, my eyes were walled in by

                       indifference to all else (with its old net,

                       the holy smile so drew them to itself),

                       when I was forced to turn my eyes leftward

                       by those three goddesses because I heard

                       them warning me: “You stare too fixedly.”

It is this uncontainable desire that presses against the container. So, too, do the ways of envisioning that Purgatorio spans. If what Dante sees here is less varied than what he saw in the Inferno, his modes of vision are much more various. He sees with the sensual waking eye (both seeing directly and seeing mimetic artifacts), with the “intellect’s sharp eyes” (XVIII, 16), with the “shut…eyes” of dream (XVIII, 144–145): and in “ecstatic vision” (XV, 86), he sees images that are impressed upon—or have “rained” into—his “fantasy” and “imagination” (XVII, 13–45). Dante comments on these latter modes as if he were providing us with one aspect of the poetics of his larger fiction through his anatomy of these partial envisionings of fantasy (these “not false errors”: XV, 117): “At this, my mind withdrew to the within, / to what imagining might bring; no thing / that came from the without could enter in” (XVII, 22–24). Another direction, another aspect of Dante’s poetics, his emphasis on mimetic credibility, is reinforced by the firmness with which he asserts the accuracy of the wall reliefs and pavement reliefs he sees on the first terrace, “carvings / so accurate—not only Polycletus / but even Nature, there, would feel defeated” (X, 31–33): “What master of the brush or of the stylus / had there portrayed such masses, such outlines / as would astonish all discerning minds? / The dead seemed dead and the alive, alive: / I saw, head bent, treading those effigies, / as well as those who’d seen those scenes directly” (XII, 64–69).

Dante will also examine attentively the points of passage between waking vision, sharp thought, random thought, reverie, dream, and fantasy, and the paralimnions of each state (even as he had examined the shoreline of Purgatory):

“I was so drawn from random thought / to thought that, wandering mind, I shut / my eyes, transforming thought on thought to dream” (XVIII, 144–145); “And when this image shattered of itself, / just like a bubble that has lost the water / beneath which it was formed…” (XVII, 31–34); and, “Even as sleep is shattered when new light / strikes suddenly against closed eyes and, once / it’s shattered, gleams before it dies completely, / so my imagination fell away” (XVII, 40–43).

In this last passage, “new light” almost becomes an emblem of Dante’s own light, a light that is both more abruptly shattering and more darting than the light of Virgil’s Aeneid: whatever limits Dante sets for himself in the Purgatorio, his is a more restless light than Virgil’s—a modern light, the light of the “immense desire” that made the need for Purgatorio’s “curb of art” so imperative.

In a journey as long as the Comedy, with its 14,233 lines and more than 650 similes, our memory not only commits paraphrase; it also misremembers, and dismembers the text through specific but highly selective recall, even as Dante himself—as Gianfranco Contini reminds us—recalls configurations of sound but uses those configurations in drastically altered contexts. Few readers of the Inferno will not tally up Francesca, Farinata, Pier della Vigna, Brunetto Latini, Ulysses. Sometimes these tesserae in the mosaic of memory are not personages but extended similes. Sometimes they are bits as swift as “the lightning-flash” of the lizard in Inf. XXV, or the plunging fish of Purg. XXVI. In edifying the Purgatorio, the mosaic of memory draws heavily on the rituals and repetitions noted above, and on the map of space and time that Dante is so careful to trace for the reader-voyager. But groupings of personages found in three divisions of the mountain, Ante-Purgatory, Purgatory proper, and the Earthly Paradise, can also serve as tesserae. (In the case of Purgatorio, memory can more easily contain the complete array of characters who speak; even hasty scrutinists can intuit the presence of fewer figures in the round than the Inferno presents, and Thomas Bergin’s demographic comparison of the three cantiche documents their intuition.)

In Inferno there was only one principal figure from antiquity other than Virgil: Ulysses, whose insatiable curiosity makes him a kind of counter-figure of Dante. In Purgatorio, Statius, another poet of antiquity, will join Virgil as a figure complementing, not countering, Dante. And antiquity also provides the guardian of Purgatory’s shores: Cato of Utica (95–46 B.C.).

Pagan and, after Caesar’s victories at Pharsalus in 48 B.C. and Thapsus in 46 B.C., a suicide at Utica in Africa, the intractable republican would have been a possible candidate for Limbo, where his widow Marcia is to be found, or for the Wood of the Suicides (Inf. XIII). But Dante had already, in his Convivio, glorified “the most holy breast of Cato” (IV, V, 16), and had asked and answered: “And what earthly man was was more worthy of signifying God than Cato? Certainly no one” (IV, XXVIII, 15). And in his Monarchy (very possibly composed after the Purgatorio), Dante speaks of “the ineffable sacrifice of the most intransigent champion of liberty, Marcus Cato…who showed how great liberty is by preferring to die rather than to live without it” (II, V, 15). Behind this image of Cato there lie Book IX of Lucan’s Pharsalia and Cicero’s De officiis; but it is a daring appropriator who, though he himself is a Christian and a pro-Imperial poet, mobilizes a pagan and an adversary of Caesar for the guardianship of Purgatory.

Cato hardly belongs to any Purgatorial lodge—of either ancients or moderns. Unlike the shades he superintends, he does not need the prayers of those still alive, and the cords that link Forese Donati to his widow Nella (XXIII, 85–93) are hardly present for Cato in relation to his Marcia (I, 85–90).

But with Casella in Canto II, we meet inhabitants of Purgatory who are more collegial and choral than Cato is. Casella, like Belacqua in Canto IV, Nino Visconti in Canto VIII, and Forese Donati in Cantos XXIII–XXIV, is a friend of Dante. And, as a musician, he joins Sordello (who appears in Cantos VI–VII–VIII not only as courtier but as fellow-Mantuan of Virgil and fellow-poet—in the “mother tongues”—of Dante) in the series of Purgatorio’s artists that will also include the miniaturist Oderisi of Gubbio (XI, 73–142) and the poets Bonagiunta da Lucca (XXIV, 19–21 and 34–63), Guido Guinizzelli (XXVI, 16–24 and 72–135), Arnaut Daniel (XXVI, 136–148), and Statius himself—as well as others who are referred to, evoked.

Casella’s affection and gentle, enrapturing singing of a setting for one of Dante’s own poems had been preceded by Cato’s austerity and is interrupted by Cato’s austerity (II, 118–123).

From the music of Casella, we move, in Canto III, to the violent death and dispersed bones of the excommunicate Manfred, the last great hope of the Imperial forces against the Papacy in the 13th century, a hope shattered when Manfred, illegitimate son of Frederick II, was defeated at Benevento in 1266. With the alternations characteristic of these opening cantos, Manfred’s bones bathed by rain give way to the languor of Belacqua, whose laziness is not without humor. He asks: “And have you fathomed how / the sun can drive his chariot on your left?” (IV, 119–120), addressing his question to his friend Dante, who had, with such fanatic energy, wondered why the sun was at his left as he faced east. In turn, the listless Belacqua is followed, in the next canto, by three shades who underwent violent deaths.

The death of Jacopo del Cassero (1260–1298), a distinguished warrior and politician, at the hands of Ezzo d’Este’s killers was so well-known to Dante’s contemporaries that Dante does not even need to name him (V, 64–84).

Buonconte da Montefeltro (born c.