Inferno · Canto XIV ·
Inferno XIV — The Burning Sand
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 14 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XIV
Before reading
The canto crosses from the wood of suicides into the third and last ring of the seventh circle. From the trees, the pilgrim emerges onto a plain, and onto the strangest landscape Inferno has shown so far: a desert of dry sand on which a slow rain of fire is falling. After two cantos of dense vegetation and crowded encounter, the air opens and the air burns. The reader is meant to feel the change of climate.
Where the canto sits
The seventh circle's third ring punishes violence against God — and Dante divides that category, with characteristic precision, into three subgroups: blasphemers (direct violence against God's person), sodomites (violence against God's order in nature), and usurers (violence against God's order in human industry, since money was held not to breed of itself). All three groups share the same landscape — the burning sand and the falling flames — but they suffer it in three different postures. The canto establishes the landscape and introduces the first of the three categories. The next canto will pick up the sodomites; the canto after that, the usurers. Read this canto as the opening of a three-canto unit.
What it helps to know
The towering figure who refuses to flinch under the fire is Capaneus, one of the legendary Seven against Thebes, drawn here from Statius's Thebaid — a Latin epic Dante prized almost as highly as the Aeneid. In the Thebaid, Capaneus scaled the walls of Thebes shouting his defiance of the gods, and was struck down by a thunderbolt from Jupiter himself. He is Dante's archetype of the blasphemer: not a man who lapses into blasphemy under pressure, but a man whose entire posture toward divinity is contempt. Notice how the canto treats him. He is given the platform of his own voice, allowed to declaim against Jove at full length, and then dispatched by Virgil with a single hard sentence. The poem is interested in what unbroken arrogance looks like after death.
The canto then turns to the source of Hell's rivers. Virgil narrates the great allegory of the Old Man of Crete: a giant statue standing on Mount Ida, head of gold, breast of silver, trunk of brass, legs of iron, right foot of baked clay. The image is lifted out of the second chapter of the book of Daniel — Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the succession of empires — and Dante uses it as the mythical engine that produces Hell's water. The statue weeps, except from the head; the gathered tears run down through fissures into the underworld and form Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and (at the very bottom) Cocytus. The classical-Christian fusion is total: a Hebrew prophetic image filled with classical river-names, set on a Greek mountain.
A small but important note. The canto names the wife of King Saturn — Rhea — and remembers that on Mount Ida she hid her infant son Jupiter and had her attendants make noise to cover his cries. Dante is signalling that the human history of empire begins in Crete and that Hell's water is, in some sense, the runoff of that history.
What to read for
Notice how empty the canto feels. After the dense conversation of XIII, the camera now pulls back. Long descriptions of landscape; one big speech from Capaneus; one long allegorical narration from Virgil. The reader's attention is being deliberately reset before the harder encounters of the next two cantos.
Listen for Virgil's tone with Capaneus. He does not raise his voice in Inferno often. Note when he does.
And listen to the small geographical comment Virgil makes about the path through Hell. It will turn out to be the only piece of practical navigation he gives the pilgrim in the whole circle. The poem is grounding its cosmography here before it asks the reader to descend further.
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 canto reset the camera. After the dense vegetal interior of XIII, it opened the field of view onto a vast empty plain, gave the reader one big set-piece image — the slow snow of fire on dry sand — and then populated that image very lightly: three postures of damned, one single declaiming giant, two poets standing at the edge. The bulk of the canto is given not to the encounter with Capaneus (which is short, almost dismissive) but to Virgil's long allegorical narration of the Old Man of Crete. The pattern of the canto is announced in the opening tercet — gathered I the scattered leaves — and held to throughout: the canto is a gathering, a stocktaking, a brief settling of the poem's cosmography before harder going.
What Capaneus is doing here
Capaneus is the Inferno's archetype of unbroken pride. The giant on the wall of Thebes who scaled the rampart screaming his contempt at the gods and was struck by Jupiter's bolt — Statius gave Dante the scene almost word for word, and Dante installs him in Hell exactly as Statius left him: still defiant, still loud, still unable to recognise that the gods have won. What the canto adds is the small theological observation Virgil makes about him. In that is not extinguished thine arrogance, thou punished art the more. The Italian moralist hidden inside the poem is making a specific claim about the structure of hell-pain: the worst torment is not the falling fire but the interior posture that converts the fire into provocation. Capaneus's rage is his own punishment. He has been left able, eternally, to be himself.
Notice how briefly the encounter is handled. No tercets of pity, no closing courtesy. Capaneus is given his speech, Virgil shuts him down in two sentences, the poets walk on. The poem is signalling that some damned souls are not, in any sense, visitable. After the slow attention given to Pier in XIII, the brisk dispatch of Capaneus in XIV makes a tonal contrast that is part of the canto's design.
The Old Man of Crete and the geography of Hell's water
The Old Man is the Inferno's most ambitious single allegorical image. The statue is a refurbishing of the dream-image in Daniel 2 — head of gold, breast and arms of silver, thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay — which Daniel interprets as the succession of empires (Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome) destined to be broken by a stone cut without hands. Dante repurposes the image. The metals still descend in value, but in the Commedia they read as the descent of human history from a golden age to the present iron age, and the cracked clay foot on which the statue leans is the unstable foundation of present politics. Where the head looks — Rome — is where the gaze of empire is still fixed. Where the back is turned — Damietta, in the Muslim East — marks the limit of Christian time. The statue weeps from every fissure except the head, and the gathered tears, falling through Mount Ida, become all the rivers of Hell. Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus at the bottom are not natural waters; they are the runoff of human history. Hell is, literally, what humanity has cried away.
The image is fused from three traditions at once. Daniel supplies the Christian-prophetic frame; Ovid and Hesiod supply the descending-ages mythology; Statius and Virgil supply the river-names. That a single statue can hold all three is part of what the Commedia's syncretism means. The reader is being shown, in one icon, that all the streams of literary memory available to a late-medieval Italian poet are running in the same direction — and downward, into the same pit.
What the river of blood actually is
The canto closes on a piece of practical hydrography. The little red rivulet the poets follow out of the wood is part of Phlegethon — already met as the boiling river of blood in canto XII. The water has flowed from the wood, across the burning sand, and it will keep flowing down into the bottom of Hell. Notice Virgil's careful note that Lethe, the river of forgetting, is not here but outside the moat, in Purgatory, where the souls who have repented go to wash. The geography is being kept tidy. The water of Hell is anger, weeping, blood; the water of Purgatory, when we get to it, will be forgetfulness.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening gesture.
Because the charity of my native place Constrained me, gathered I the scattered leaves, And gave them back to him, who now was hoarse. (Inf. XIV.1–3)
The pilgrim picks up the leaves of the unnamed Florentine suicide. The charity of my native place — a tenderness for a fellow Florentine, even one in Hell. Florence remains the moral magnet of the poem.
The strangeness of the new landscape.
The dolorous forest is a garland to it All round about, as the sad moat to that; There close upon the edge we stayed our feet. (Inf. XIV.10–12)
The wood frames the desert the way the bloody moat framed the wood. Hell is built in concentric rings, and the canto names them.
The falling fire.
O'er all the sand-waste, with a gradual fall, Were raining down dilated flakes of fire, As of the snow on Alp without a wind. (Inf. XIV.28–30)
The single image the canto is built around. Fire falling as slowly and steadily as alpine snow on a windless day — terror given by the patience of the motion.
Capaneus, mid-defiance.
Such as I was living, am I, dead! If Jove should weary out his smith, from whom He seized in anger the sharp thunderbolt, Wherewith upon the last day I was smitten, ... He would not have thereby a joyous vengeance. (Inf. XIV.51–54, 60)
The whole speech in four lines: the boast of consistency, the catalogue of mythology, the conclusion that the gods will never have the satisfaction of his surrender. Capaneus has frozen at the moment of his death and refused to thaw.
Virgil's rebuke.
O Capaneus, in that is not extinguished Thine arrogance, thou punished art the more; Not any torment, saving thine own rage, Would be unto thy fury pain complete. (Inf. XIV.63–66)
The structural claim of the Inferno in four lines: the worst torment is the maintained posture of the sinner himself.
The Old Man of Crete, established.
In the mid-sea there sits a wasted land, Said he thereafterward, whose name is Crete, Under whose king the world of old was chaste. (Inf. XIV.94–96)
Crete is given as the geographical centre of the Mediterranean and the temporal centre of the lost golden age. The location is doctrinal as much as cartographic.
The statue described.
A grand old man stands in the mount erect, Who holds his shoulders turned tow'rds Damietta, And looks at Rome as if it were his mirror. His head is fashioned of refined gold, And of pure silver are the arms and breast; Then he is brass as far down as the fork. From that point downward all is chosen iron, Save that the right foot is of kiln-baked clay, And more he stands on that than on the other. (Inf. XIV.103–111)
Every detail is doing work. The averted shoulders (the Christian East abandoned), the mirroring gaze (Rome as the self-image of empire), the descending metals (the descending ages), the clay foot on which the weight rests (the unsound foundation of the present). One of the densest emblems in the poem.
The doctrine of Hell's water.
Each part, except the gold, is by a fissure Asunder cleft, that dripping is with tears, Which gathered together perforate that cavern. From rock to rock they fall into this valley; Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon they form. (Inf. XIV.112–116)
Hell's rivers are gathered human grief. Only the golden age — the unfissured head — does not weep.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto's encounter with Brunetto Latini. The terrain remains the same — the burning sand, the falling fire — but the encounter will be one of the most tender in Hell. The landscape is being kept constant precisely so that the human encounters inside it can vary.
Watch the river. The little red rivulet the poets are about to walk along is the same Phlegethon they met in XII, and it will lead them all the way to the cliff above the eighth circle. Hell's geography is being kept tightly continuous.
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.