The Inferno Read Online

The heroes and heroines: All of these it must be noted were associated with the Trojans and their Roman descendants. (See note on AENEAS AND THE FOUNDING OF ROME. Canto II.) The Electra Dante mentions here is not the sister of Orestes (see Euripides’ Electra) but the daughter of Atlas and the mother of Dardanus, the founder of Troy.

2. The philosophers: Most of this group it made up of philosophers whose teachings were, at least in part, acceptable to church tcholarship. Democritus, however, “who ascribed the world to chance,” would clearly be an exception. The group is best interpreted, therefore, as representing the highest achievements of Human Reason unaided by Divine Love. Plato and Aristotle: Through a considerable part of the Middle Ages Plato was held to be the fountainhead of all scholarship, but in Dante’s time practically all learning was based on Aristotelian theory as interpreted through the many commentaries. Linus: the Italian is “Lino” and for it some Commentators read “Livio” (Livy).

3. The naturalists: They are less well known today. In Dante’s time their place in scholarship more or less corresponded to the role of the theoretician and historian of science in our universities. Avicenna (his major work was in the eleventh century) and Avverhoës (twelfth century) were Arabian philosophers and physicians especially famous in Dante’s time for their commentaries on Aristotle. Great Commentary: has the force of a title. ie., The Great Commentary as datinguished from many lesser commentaries.

The Saladin : This is the famous Saladin who was defeated by Richard the Lion-Heart, and whose great qualities as a ruler became a legend in medieval Europe.

Canto V

CIRCLE TWO

The Carnal

They find themselves on a dark ledge swept by a great whirlwind, which spins within it the souls of the CARNAL, those who betrayed reason to their appetites. Their sin was to abandon themselves to the tempest of their passions: so they are swept forever in the tempest of Hell, forever denied the light of reason and of God. Virgil identifies many among them. SEMIRAMIS is there, and DIDO, CLEOPATRA, HELEN, ACHILLES, PARIS, and TRISTAN. Dante sees PAOLO and FRANCESCA swept together, and in the name of love he calls to them to tell their sad story. They pause from their eternal flight to come to him, and Francesca tells their history while Paolo weeps at her side. Dante is so stricken by compassion at their tragic tale that he swoons once again.

So we went down to the second ledge alone;
a smaller circle of so much greater pain
the voice of the damned rose in a bestial moan.

There Minos sits, grinning, grotesque, and hale.
He examines each lost soul as it arrives
and delivers his verdict with his coiling tail.

That is to say, when the ill-fated soul
appears before him it confesses all,
and that grim sorter of the dark and foul

decides which place in Hell shall be its end,
then wraps his twitching tail about himself
one coil for each degree it must descend.

The soul descends and others take its place:
each crowds in its turn to judgment, each confesses,
each hears its doom and falls away through space. (15)

“O you who come into this camp of woe,”
cried Minos when he saw me turn away
without awaiting his judgment, “watch where you go

once you have entered here, and to whom you turn!
Do not be misled by that wide and easy passage!”
And my Guide to him: ”That is not your concern;

it is his fate to enter every door.
This has been willed where what is willed must be,
and is not yours to question. Say no more.”

Now the choir of anguish, like a wound,
strikes through the tortured air. Now I have come
to Hell’s full lamentation, sound beyond sound.

I came to a place stripped bare of every light
and roaring on the naked dark like seas
wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight (30)

of storm and counterstorm through time foregone,
sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge.
Whirling and battering it drives them on,

and when they pass the ruined gap of Hell
through which we had come, their shrieks begin anew.
There they blaspheme the power of God eternal.

And this, I learned, was the never ending flight
of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty
who betrayed reason to their appetite.

As the wings of wintering starlings bear them on
in their great wheeling flights, just so the blast
wherries these evil souls through time foregone.

Here, there, up, down, they whirl and, whirling, strain
with never a hope of hope to comfort them,
not of release, but even of less pain. (45)

As cranes go over sounding their harsh cry,
leaving the long streak of their flight in air,
so come these spirits, wailing as they fly.

And watching their shadows lashed by wind, I cried:
“Master, what souls are these the very air
lashes with its black whips from side to side?”

“The first of these whose history you would know,”
he answered me, “was Empress of many tongues.