29

Dante’s weeping eyes have reminded commentators, beginning with Tommaseo, of biblical sources, particularly Isaiah 16:9 and 34:7, as well as Ezekiel 23:33. Durling (Durl.1996.1), p. 458, suggests an echo of a passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions (VI.8), when Alypius is described as becoming drunk at the sight of the blood spilled at the Roman games.

 

Virgil’s rebuke, reminiscent of that found in Canto XX (vv. 27–30), is particularly stern, as though Dante were guilty of the sort of appalling human ghoulishness that makes people today gather at the scenes of fatal accidents.

 

Virgil’s sarcastic thrust for the first time in the poem offers us a measurement of the size of one of the areas of hell: this bolgia is twenty-two miles in circumference. (We will discover, at Inf. XXX.86, that the next bolgia’s circumference is exactly half this one’s.) These two measurements were the cause of an orgy of calculating in the Renaissance, involving no less a figure than Galileo in absurd plottings of an implausibly huge Inferno. For an account of these see John Kleiner (Klei.1994.1), pp. 23–56.

 

Castelvetro hears the echo here of the Sibyl’s words in Aeneid VI.539: “nox ruit, Aenea; nos flendo ducimus horas” (Night is coming, Aeneas; we waste the time in weeping). He goes on to add that Servius, in his commentary to Aeneid VI.255, pointed out that only a single day was granted by the gods for Aeneas’s journey to the underworld. We understand that the same is true for Dante, whose voyage in hell takes exactly twenty-four hours.

 

Virgil’s lunar time-telling suggests that, since Inferno XXI.112, some six hours have passed, making it ca. 1:30 PM now and leaving less than five hours for the completion of the journey.

 

Defending himself against the charge of idle curiosity, Dante informs Virgil that he was looking for the shade of a relative among the schismatics. The exchanges shows that Virgil cannot in fact “read” Dante’s thoughts. See note to Inferno XXIII.25–30.

 

Virgil now adds some details to Canto XXVIII: he had seen Geri de Bello menace Dante while the protagonist was so preoccupied by Bertran de Born. This family drama runs as follows. Geri del Bello, Dante’s father’s cousin, was evidently something of a troublemaker (he was once cited for attacking a man in Prato in 1280). He was murdered, perhaps at about this time, by a member of the Sacchetti family, and revenge was only achieved by another member of the Alighieri clan ca. 1310 (perhaps just as Dante was finishing Inferno). The details are far from clear, and the accounts in the early commentators diverge. See Simonetta Saffiotti Bernardi and Renato Piattoli, “Alighieri,” ED, vol. 1, 1970.

 

For the delicate interplay between Dante’s aristocratic sense of the necessity of acting on behalf of his family’s honor and his Christian knowledge that vengeance is the province of God alone, see Pertile (Per.1998.1), pp. 378–84. Pertile also argues that Dante and Geri play out the roles of Aeneas and Dido in the underworld, when the guilty former lover fails to communicate with the shade of his offended dead paramour and leaves with his guilt unresolved (Aen. VI.450–476). Dante’s feeling pio—piteous toward Geri—would seem to connect him with Virgil’s pius Aeneas, who also honored his familiars.

 

The changes in setting, from one bolgia to the other, is more abrupt than usual. The first thirty-six verses of the canto have been a sort of personal addendum to the last canto; the rest of it will combine with the next one to present the final ditch of the Malebolge, devoted to the punishment of forgery, in various forms: of metals (all in Canto XXIX), of persons, of coins, of words (all in Canto XXX). For the “fraudulent” blending of metals by alchemists, those punished in the rest of this canto, see Meye.1969.1.

 

These “lay brothers” of the “monastery” of the forgers are piteous in their aspect and in their groans; the protagonist, now of sterner stuff than he had been under the influence of his relative’s unavenged murder, covers his ears (where he had feasted his drunken eyes at the beginning of the canto).

 

The Valdichiana and Maremma, in Tuscany, and Sardinia were all characterized by malarial outbreaks in the summer. Commentators speak of the special hospitals set up in the Valdichiana to deal with outbreaks of the disease.

 

They cross the last bridge, now seen as an entity, the long span (interrupted over the sixth bolgia) that traverses the extent of Malebolge.

 

God’s unerring justice is portrayed as the punishing agent of the counterfeiters. But what does it mean that she records or “registers” them? And where is “here”? Most early commentators argued that “here” referred to the bolgia. Beginning in the Renaissance, the majority believe that it refers to this world. But what sense does it make to say that justice “registers” sinners in this world? The image is of writing down a person’s name in a book. For a review of the debate over the line (57) see Hollander (Holl.1982.1), proposing that “here” means “this book,” i.e., Dante’s Inferno, a solution put forth (although never discussed by later commentators) by John of Serravalle in the fifteenth century. Dante will once again (and only once again) use the verb registrare: see Purgatorio XXX.63, when his name, “Dante,” is “registered here,” i.e., in his text.

 

Details from Ovid’s lengthy account of the plague, sent by Juno, on the island of Aegina (Metam. VII.523–657) is here used in simile to describe the falsifiers, who have become plague-blasted shades of humans because of their counterfeiting, in which that which is worth less is made to seem worth more. That their affliction is an infernal version of leprosy (some commentators believe it is scabies [see v. 82]) is attested by Bosco/Reggio (commentary to this verse) on the basis of medieval medical treatises, some of which report that scabies is a secondary symptom of leprosy. Capocchio, the second of the two sinners revealed here, is described as “leprous” (v. 124).

In verse 63 Dante takes mere poetic fictiveness to task (in Conv. IV.xxvii.17 he had referred to this story as a favola [fable]). His “real” sinners may resemble the plague-victims in Ovid’s fanciful tale; unlike them, however, they are not present in a fable, but in a truthful narrative. Here Dante’s insistence on the veracity of what he relates is so challenging that we can see the wink in his eye.

 

The three rapid comparisons are the very stuff of homely poetry: pans on a stove, stable boys currying horses, cooks’ helpers cleaning fish. We have seen precisely this stylistic range before, paired similetic passages describing the same thing in two very different registers, that of classical myth deployed alongside that of “scenes from everyday life.” Among other things, this second register, with its ordinary, even ugly, names of things in the real world, helps us “believe” that Dante’s poetry is in fact “true,” while Ovid’s is not—even as we acknowledge that Dante is as much a fabulist as was Ovid.

 

Even Virgil’s ironic captatio, his attempt to win Griffolino’s goodwill, reflects the low style of things in this scene.

 

Griffolino d’Arezzo was in fact burned at the stake for a charge of heresy brought by Albero di Siena, ca. 1270. Thus he was put to death for a sin he did not commit, but condemned by God for the one he did: falsifying metals. Dante obviously enjoyed telling this tale of buffoonish credulity, in which Griffolino failed in his role of Daedalus to Albero’s Icarus, and which would have fit a novella of Boccaccio, even though it is irrelevant to the sin punished here.

 

Florentines love to belittle the Sienese; Italians love to belittle the French. Dante gets two for one.

 

Capocchio was burned alive as an alchemist in 1293. As was the case when we listened to Griffolino, what we first hear about from him does not concern falsification, but another topic altogether—the luxurious living of the Sienese, down to their overindulgence in the use of cloves to season their food. This is exemplified in Stricca the spendthrift; Niccolò the gourmet; and Caccia d’Asciano who, with Abbagliato, was part of the notorious brigata spendereccia (Spendthrift Brigade) of Siena, which liked to gather to eat and drink and then destroy the plates and service while they were at it.

 

Capocchio was, according to some early commentators, known to Dante in their early days as students. He was supposedly a particularly adept imitator of the words and gestures of others, a talent which he later extended to “alchemical” malfeasance, to his cost. For the concept of the ape as mimic, see Curtius (Curt.1948.1), pp. 538–40.