Inferno · Canto VI ·
Inferno VI — Cerberus in the Rain
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 6 of 100 · Inferno, Canto VI
Before reading
This is the third circle, the circle of gluttony, and it does two things at once that the Commedia will keep doing: it punishes a familiar sin in an unfamiliar way, and it interrupts the cosmic geography with a brutally local political diagnosis. The pilgrim has woken from his faint at the end of canto V; he wakes into rain.
Where the canto sits
The first three circles of Hell are the lightest sins of appetite — Limbo, the carnal, the gluttonous. Each has its own weather. Limbo had sourceless light and silence; the carnal had a hurricane of wind; the gluttonous have a cold black rain. The pattern is sharpening. Each sin will be given the climate it deserves. Notice that the physical sensation of the punishment matches the sin: the carnal who let themselves be moved by passion are now moved by air; the gluttonous who let themselves be made formless by appetite are now bodies sunk in formless mud.
What it helps to know
The beast at the threshold is Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the Greek underworld — lifted, as Charon and Minos were, out of Aeneid VI. In Virgil's Aeneid, the Sibyl quiets Cerberus by throwing him a honey-and-drugged cake. Watch the small but pointed change Dante makes to that scene. The substitution is doctrinal.
The single soul who speaks is Ciacco — the pig. The name may be a nickname (perhaps for Giacomo) or simply the noun for a hog; the suggestion is unflattering and the suggestion is part of his punishment. He was a real Florentine — apparently a well-known one of Dante's generation, a man of some wit and some appetite — and Boccaccio later included him in the Decameron. He is the first contemporary Florentine the pilgrim meets in Hell, and through him the poem makes its first long political prophecy.
The Florentine politics of 1300 — the year the journey is set — needs a small note. The city was ruled by the Guelph party (papal allies, against the Holy Roman Emperor), but the Guelphs had split into two factions: the White Guelphs, more moderate, less papal, less ferocious about excluding the old Ghibelline families — and the Black Guelphs, more papal, more aristocratic, more aggressive. Dante was a White. In 1301, while Dante was away on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII, the Blacks (backed by Charles of Valois, sent in by the Pope) seized the city and exiled the Whites. Dante never returned to Florence. The prophecy in this canto, set in 1300 but written years later from exile, foretells what is about to happen to Dante himself. The poem treats Florentine factional violence as a personal catastrophe and a cosmic one.
A short list of names will be asked about later: Farinata, Tegghiaio, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, Mosca. Do not try to remember them. The pilgrim is asking after a generation of past Florentines he revered. Several will appear in the cantos to come — including Farinata in canto X.
What to read for
Notice the pivot in the middle of the canto from gluttony to politics. The third circle is set up; Cerberus is pacified; Ciacco speaks; and then for fifty lines the canto stops being about gluttony at all and is instead about Florence. The structural ratio is the argument. Dante is saying that the city's factional appetite is the same sin, on a larger scale.
Notice the question Ciacco asks and the question he answers. The pilgrim asks one thing; the soul answers something larger; and the soul's answer is the one the poem wanted asked.
Listen at the canto's close for the small philosophical exchange about pain and the resurrection of the body. It is one of the Commedia's quiet doctrinal moments — the kind of thing Dante slips in between two more dramatic scenes.
The closing line names the next gatekeeper. He will be silenced, in canto VII, by yet another method.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The third circle is the Commedia's first fully developed exercise in contrapasso — punishment that mirrors the sin in physical form — and the canto stages it without lingering on it. The gluttonous, who in life made themselves formless by appetite, lie indistinguishable face-down in a cold black mud, the contour of one body indistinguishable from the contour of the next. Above them barks a three-throated dog. Cerberus is pacified in three lines, Ciacco rises from the mud in a few more, and then the canto pivots, hard, into politics. More than half of its length is taken up by a prophecy about Florence — the city the pilgrim has just left and the city the poet has been exiled from. The structure is the argument: gluttony as a sin of one body is set inside gluttony as a sin of one city. The factional appetite that is about to tear Florence apart is the same appetite the third circle punishes. The canto closes with the doctrine that resurrection will increase, not diminish, the suffering of the damned, and with the name of the next gatekeeper. The pilgrim has been given a political prophecy, a piece of theology, and a slap.
What Dante does to Virgil's Cerberus
In Aeneid VI the Sibyl puts Cerberus to sleep by tossing him a honey-and-poppy cake. In Dante, Virgil bends, fills both hands with the mud of the circle's own floor, and hurls it into the dog's three throats. The substitution is doctrinal. Cerberus is no longer pacified with confection; he is pacified by being made to choke on the very substance that the souls beneath him are made to lie in. The gluttonous mud silences the appetite that polices them. It is the Commedia's first instance of Hell's machinery feeding itself.
Ciacco and the first political prophecy
The pilgrim's first contemporary Florentine in Hell is named after a pig. Thou wert made before that I was unmade, Ciacco says — a single tercet that establishes both that the soul knew Dante in life and that the encounter is private. The pilgrim asks, in essence, three questions: what will become of Florence, why is it so divided, and where are the great old citizens. Ciacco answers all three. He foretells in compressed terms the events of 1300–1302: the Whites and Blacks will come to bloodshed, the rustic party (the Whites, identified by their less aristocratic origins, in particular Vieri de' Cerchi) will drive the Blacks out, and within three years (before two suns have set) the Blacks will return with foreign help (the one who tacks at present, almost certainly Pope Boniface VIII) and will hold the others under heavy burdens. The prophecy is exact: Boniface dispatched Charles of Valois to Florence in November 1301, the Blacks took the city, and on 27 January 1302 Dante was condemned to two years' exile and a fine; on 10 March 1302 the sentence was made permanent under penalty of being burned alive if he returned. Ciacco is foretelling, in 1300, the catastrophe that produced the poem the reader is holding.
He then says, almost as a footnote: the just are two, and are not understood there. Two just men in all of Florence. Whether the two are specific (Dante and someone else? — commentators have argued for centuries) or merely a small remnant in the prophetic sense, the line is one of the cruellest small judgments in the Commedia. The diagnosis of the city's sins follows: envy, arrogance, and avarice are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled. The list maps onto the three beasts of canto I — the leopard, the lion, the she-wolf — and confirms what was suggested there. The political reading of the beasts was not metaphorical decoration. It was the same diagnosis.
The great old Florentines
When the pilgrim asks after Farinata, Tegghiaio, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca — five men of the generation before his own, all of them admired in his youth as figures of public worth — Ciacco's answer is brief and brutal: they are among the blackest souls; a different sin downward weighs them to the bottom. All of them are in Hell, all of them deeper than the third circle. The pilgrim asks; the poet has already answered. Farinata will appear in canto X (heresy); Tegghiaio and Rusticucci in canto XVI (sodomy); Mosca in canto XXVIII (sowers of discord). The whole architecture of lower Hell is foreshadowed in one tercet. The poem is preparing the reader to encounter, in detail, the damnation of the men the pilgrim's own youth would have called noble.
The body at the resurrection
After Ciacco sinks back into the mud, Dante asks Virgil whether the pains of these souls will grow, lessen, or stay the same at the Last Judgment. Virgil answers with a small piece of Aristotelian physics: as the thing more perfect is, the more it feels of pleasure and of pain. At the resurrection the souls will be reunited with their bodies; perfected, their capacity to feel will be greater; their suffering will increase. The doctrine is delivered without comment by the narrator. It is one of the Commedia's starkest moments — Hell is a state that gets worse — and the canto lets it pass as the kind of thing a teacher might say in walking.
Famous and meaningful passages
The third circle.
In the third circle am I of the rain Eternal, maledict, and cold, and heavy; Its law and quality are never new. (Inf. VI.7–9)
The whole climate of the third circle as a definition. Its law and quality are never new — there is no variation, no relief, no weather inside the weather.
The substance of the rain.
Huge hail, and water sombre-hued, and snow, Athwart the tenebrous air pour down amain; Noisome the earth is, that receiveth this. (Inf. VI.10–12)
Three forms of falling water, all foul. Noisome the earth is that receiveth this — the ground itself is offended by what falls on it.
Cerberus.
Cerberus, monster cruel and uncouth, With his three gullets like a dog is barking Over the people that are there submerged. (Inf. VI.13–15)
The dog of Aeneid VI as Dante found him. Submerged — the gluttons are below the dog as the dog is below the rain.
The pacifying.
Took of the earth, and with his fists well filled, He threw it into those rapacious gullets. (Inf. VI.26–27)
The doctrinal change. Virgil's Aeneid fed Cerberus honey; Dante's Virgil feeds him mud.
Ciacco's diagnosis.
Thy city, which is full Of envy so that now the sack runs over, Held me within it in the life serene. (Inf. VI.49–51)
La tua città, ch'è piena d'invidia sì che già trabocca il sacco. The city as a sack overflowing with its own envy. One of the Inferno's sharpest urban metaphors.
The prophecy.
They, after long contention, Will come to bloodshed; and the rustic party Will drive the other out with much offence. (Inf. VI.64–66)
The Whites driving out the Blacks in 1301. Then, in the lines that follow, the Blacks' return and the permanent exile of the Whites — the catastrophe that produced the Commedia.
The two just.
The just are two, and are not understood there; Envy and Arrogance and Avarice Are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled. (Inf. VI.73–75)
Giusti son due, e non vi sono intesi. The three vices map onto the three beasts of canto I. The city has been Hell since the prologue.
The roll-call of the great damned.
Farinata and Tegghiaio, once so worthy, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca, And others who on good deeds set their thoughts, (Inf. VI.79–81)
Five names of admired Florentines; the canto will confirm that all are damned. The pilgrim's affection for his city's recent past is being slowly stripped from him.
The resurrection.
Return unto thy science, Which wills, that as the thing more perfect is, The more it feels of pleasure and of pain. (Inf. VI.106–108)
Aristotle through Aquinas through Virgil. Suffering increases with perfection of being. The damned will be more themselves at the Resurrection, and therefore more in pain.
The next gatekeeper.
There we found Plutus the great enemy. (Inf. VI.115)
The canto's closing word names the next obstacle. Plutus — the classical god of wealth, made by Dante into a snarling beast — will be silenced, in the next canto, by yet another formula.
What to watch for
Watch the names from Ciacco's list. All five will reappear in deeper circles. The poem is teaching the reader to keep a small mental catalogue of who is where.
Watch the small theology at the close. The resurrection of the body in this poem is not a relief from suffering. It is its amplification. Hold that in mind for Paradiso, where the same doctrine will work in the opposite direction — the resurrection of the body will amplify joy.
Watch the way each circle's gatekeeper is silenced. Charon and Minos got the same formula; Cerberus is silenced by mud; Plutus, in canto VII, will be silenced by Virgil's most direct theological speech-act. The variation is the Commedia's argument about which kinds of evil require which kinds of language to defeat.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.