Inferno · Canto XV ·
Inferno XV — The Dike
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 15 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XV
Before reading
The pilgrim leaves the wood of suicides behind and walks now along a stone dike that runs across the burning sand of the third ring. The geography is the same as in XIV; the encounter is utterly different. After Capaneus declaiming up into the sky, the canto delivers one of the Inferno's most tender meetings — and one of its most awkward, because the soul who comes up out of the herd of the damned is a man the pilgrim loved.
Where the canto sits
This is the second of three cantos all set in the same landscape — the desert of falling fire that punishes those who did violence against God. Within that landscape, the sub-category Dante has reserved for this canto is the sodomites — souls he believed had done violence against the natural order. They walk in single file across the burning sand, forbidden to stop. The fire falls on them as it falls on the blasphemers behind and the usurers ahead, but their posture is motion — endless, restless, hungry circulation. The canto stages the encounter as one walking-soul stepping briefly out of the herd to speak with the pilgrim on the higher dike.
What it helps to know
The soul who recognises Dante is Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–1294) — Florentine notary, statesman, and most importantly, the city's most influential teacher of rhetoric in the generation before Dante's own. He wrote the encyclopaedic Trésor in French during his exile, and the Tesoretto in Italian; he was Florence's de facto minister of foreign affairs in the 1260s and 1270s; and he was, by Dante's own admission, the man who taught him how a man becomes eternal — that is, how a writer becomes a maker of lasting things. Dante's reverence for Brunetto runs through the canto unbroken, even though Brunetto is in Hell.
The placement of Brunetto here has been debated for seven centuries. Some readers take the assignment at face value: Dante believed Brunetto to be a sodomite, and orthodox Christian doctrine required the damnation of unrepentant sodomy. Other readers note that no other contemporary source accuses Brunetto of homosexual conduct, and read the placement as Dante's coded acknowledgement of a kind of intellectual perversion — Brunetto's preference for French over Italian, his secular Aristotelian rationalism, his political pragmatism that was at odds with the spiritual orthodoxy the Commedia is engaged in defending. The canto does not settle the question, and a careful reader will keep both possibilities open.
The geographical comparisons that open the canto are Flemish dikes and the embankments of the Brenta — protections built by industrious humans against rising water. The image is the canto's quiet praise of human industry, and it is laid down at the start because the canto is about to honour a man whose industry built the prose of an entire generation.
What to read for
Listen for the posture of the encounter. The pilgrim walks on the higher dike; Brunetto walks below him on the burning sand. The pilgrim cannot descend to walk level with the master because the rules of Hell do not permit it. He bows his head as he walks. The whole conversation is conducted by a student looking down at a teacher, because the teacher is in Hell. This visual is one of the Commedia's most painful images and the canto is built around it.
Listen for the canto's most famous single line, which the pilgrim delivers as a tribute. It is the line in which the Commedia's entire vocation as a writer's poem is summarised. You will know it when you hear it.
And notice the prophecy. Brunetto, like several other damned souls, foresees Dante's exile from Florence — and gives him, in advance, the harshest political analysis the poem has so far offered of his own city.
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 held the same landscape as XIV but changed everything about the human encounter inside it. After Capaneus's roaring defiance, the pilgrim met a man he could not bring himself to speak to without bowing his head. The whole canto is conducted across a level difference — the pilgrim on the safe stone dike, the master on the burning sand below — and the painful asymmetry of that geometry is the canto's central image. The conversation runs through tribute, prophecy, and a stoic acceptance of fortune to come; it closes on a simile that gives the damned soul, in his last moment on the page, the dignity of a winner running a footrace. The canto is the Inferno's clearest case of a damnation the poem cannot bring itself to feel as a damnation. The reverence is unmuted, and the cognitive dissonance is left for the reader to carry.
What Brunetto Latini was to Dante
Brunetto Latini was Florence's leading public intellectual in the generation before Dante's. He served as ambassador to the court of Alfonso X of Castile, returned to Florence after the Guelph victory at Benevento (1266), and served as chancellor of the commune. He wrote two encyclopaedic works: the Trésor (in French) and the Tesoretto (a poem in Italian) — between them an attempt to make available to a lay reading public the whole compass of medieval learning, from natural philosophy to the art of public speech. His prose was the prose of an entire generation of Florentine notaries. Dante grew up reading him, and almost certainly was taught the ars dictaminis — the formal rhetoric of public letters — under his influence if not directly under his hand.
When the canto's Dante calls Brunetto the dear and good paternal image of you, when in the world from hour to hour you taught me how a man becomes eternal — the line is not pious convention. It is a direct and specific statement: this man taught me how to be a writer, and what a writer can become. The Italian — m'insegnavate come l'uom s'etterna — is one of the most quoted phrases in the poem, and it sits in this canto, addressed to a man in Hell.
What the canto does not say about the sin
The damnation is, on the surface of the canto, the orthodox damnation of the medieval Church for sodomy. The herd is described as having shared the selfsame sin; the punishment is the burning sand and the falling fire. Brunetto names the others by their learning — Priscian the great Latin grammarian; Francesco d'Accorso the Bolognese jurist; an unnamed bishop transferred by the Servant of the Servants, that is, by the Pope, from the diocese of Florence (on the Arno) to that of Vicenza (on the Bacchiglione). The list reads as a roll of medieval clerics and men of letters. The orthodox reading: Dante is naming famous clerks whose homosexuality was widely rumoured.
A second reading has had advocates from the early commentators onward. None of Brunetto's surviving works mention a homosexual life, and no other Florentine source accuses him. The placement may be Dante's coded judgement on something else — a perceived intellectual perversion in the Aristotelianising, secular, Frenchified strain of late-thirteenth-century learning that Brunetto represented. The herd as a herd of clerks makes that reading possible; the long final tribute — Commended unto thee be my Tesoro, in which I still live — confirms that what Dante most associates with Brunetto is his book. The canto does not adjudicate between the two readings, and a careful reader keeps both open.
The prophecy of exile
Brunetto is the first of three damned souls in the Inferno who will foretell Dante's exile from Florence. The other two are Ciacco (canto VI) and Farinata (canto X); the most extended prediction will be Cacciaguida's, far ahead in Paradiso XVII. Brunetto's version is the harshest political analysis the poem has yet given of Florence itself. The Florentines, he says, are the descendants not of the Roman founders of the city but of the Fesolani — the people of the hill town of Fiesole, said to have been settled by the defeated army of Catiline — and they still smack of the mountain and the granite. They are avaricious, envious, proud, and they will turn on the man whose good deeds threaten them. The political theology Brunetto delivers — Roman virtue contaminated by Fiesolan rusticity — will be developed across the rest of the poem. The fact that Florence's most authoritative teacher delivers it from Hell gives it doctrinal weight even from the damned.
Dante's reply is one of the noblest moments of the Inferno. He says, in effect, that he has already accepted the worst Fortune can do: let Fortune turn her wheel around as it may please her, and the churl his mattock. The stoicism is the canto's quiet inheritance from Brunetto himself — the secular Aristotelian moral philosophy that taught the Florentine notarial class how to bear public reverses. The student is showing the master that the lesson has been learned.
Famous and meaningful passages
The encounter announced.
Thus scrutinized by such a family, By some one I was recognized, who seized My garment's hem, and cried out, What a marvel! (Inf. XV.22–24)
The damned hand reaching up to grip the hem of the pilgrim's cloak is one of the most physical small images in the Inferno.
The recognition.
And I, when he stretched forth his arm to me, On his baked aspect fastened so mine eyes, That the scorched countenance prevented not His recognition by my intellect; And bowing down my face unto his own, I made reply, Are you here, Ser Brunetto? (Inf. XV.25–30)
The disfigurement does not defeat the recognition. The pilgrim bows down to meet the eyes of the man below him. The single line Are you here, Ser Brunetto — Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto? — is one of the most quoted in the poem, a moment of disbelief delivered with the formal you of teacher-pupil address.
The line on which the canto rests.
For in my mind is fixed, and touches now My heart the dear and good paternal image Of you, when in the world from hour to hour You taught me how a man becomes eternal. (Inf. XV.82–85)
M'insegnavate come l'uom s'etterna. The Commedia's most direct statement of its own vocation as a writer's poem. The teacher who taught Dante how to become eternal is in Hell; the teaching held.
Brunetto's political prophecy.
But that ungrateful and malignant people, Which of old time from Fesole descended, And smacks still of the mountain and the granite, Will make itself, for thy good deeds, thy foe. (Inf. XV.61–64)
The Fiesolan curse of Florence, delivered with the authority of the city's own pre-eminent teacher.
Dante's stoic reply.
Such hansel is not new unto mine ears; Therefore let Fortune turn her wheel around As it may please her, and the churl his mattock. (Inf. XV.94–96)
The Aristotelian moral philosophy of his teacher returned to the teacher as the student's reply.
Virgil's quiet endorsement.
My Master thereupon on his right cheek Did backward turn himself, and looked at me; Then said: He listeneth well who noteth it. (Inf. XV.97–99)
Bene ascolta chi la nota. Virgil's six-word approval of the pilgrim's reply. The poem's quiet way of saying that the lesson — both lessons — have been understood.
The closing tribute.
A people comes with whom I may not be; Commended unto thee be my Tesoro, In which I still live, and no more I ask. (Inf. XV.118–120)
The damned man asks one thing only — that his book be commended. The teacher whose writing made him eternal is asking the student to keep the writing alive. Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro. The most poignant single sentence in the canto.
The runner of Verona.
Then he turned round, and seemed to be of those Who at Verona run for the Green Mantle Across the plain; and seemed to be among them The one who wins, and not the one who loses. (Inf. XV.121–124)
The closing simile gives the damned man the dignity of the winner. The Palio of the Green Mantle was the great Veronese footrace; Dante had likely watched it during his exile. The runner who wins — not the runner who loses — is what Brunetto looks like, in the pilgrim's last view, as he sprints to rejoin his herd. The canto refuses, at the end, to leave its master image undignified.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto pick up the same landscape with a different cast. Three more Florentine sodomites — Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, Jacopo Rusticucci — will approach the dike. Where Brunetto came alone and was tender, the three of XVI will arrive as a deputation and be civic. The cantos are organised in pairs: tender and civic, intimate and public.
Watch the Tesoro. Brunetto's book is now under Dante's care — and the poem the pilgrim is walking through will eventually contain everything the Tesoro tried to contain, but reordered. The student is going to surpass the master, and the master, in Hell, asks him to do it.
Watch what happens to the line of the herd. In every canto on the burning sand, the herd keeps walking; only individuals are allowed to step out. The structural constraint that Brunetto can only stay a moment is the canto's deepest grief.
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.