Inferno · Canto XVI ·
Inferno XVI — The Three in a Wheel
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 16 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XVI
Before reading
This is the third canto on the burning sand and the last encounter with the sodomites. Brunetto Latini, in the canto behind us, came alone and was tender. The three who approach now arrive together, as a deputation, and the canto is civic: a delegation of Florentine noblemen of the previous generation, asking after the state of the city. Where canto XV was a private grief, canto XVI is a public conversation. And it ends with the pilgrim at the edge of a cliff above the next circle, watching something appalling rise out of the abyss.
Where the canto sits
The canto sits at one of the Commedia's most important structural seams. The pilgrim has crossed the wood (XIII), met the blasphemers (XIV), met Brunetto (XV); the next pages will leave the seventh circle entirely and descend, on the back of a strange winged creature, into the eighth — the great ditched complex of Malebolge, where fraud is punished in ten bolge. The canto is therefore both an ending (the last conversation in the seventh circle) and a threshold (the summoning of the creature that will carry the pilgrim down). Read the canto with one ear on each.
What it helps to know
The three souls who approach are all dead Florentines of the mid-thirteenth century, all Guelphs, all of the political and military elite. Guido Guerra (c. 1220–1272) was the grandson of the Countess Gualdrada Berti, a figure of legendary virtue in Florentine memory; he was the commander of the exiled Florentine Guelphs at the battle of Benevento in 1266, the battle that broke the Hohenstaufen and returned the Guelphs to power. Tegghiaio Aldobrandi degli Adimari was the Florentine ambassador who, on the eve of the catastrophic battle of Montaperti in 1260, urged the Florentines not to march on Siena — advice the city did not take. Jacopo Rusticucci was a wealthy Florentine merchant of the previous generation, whose wife is one of the canto's quiet jokes — Jacopo blames her, by a brief aside, for his sin. All three are men whose names Dante had asked Ciacco about, ten cantos earlier in canto VI: Farinata and Tegghiaio, who were so worthy / Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca — tell me where they are, and let me know about them. Ciacco's answer was that they were among the blackest souls. The pilgrim is now meeting them.
The political question they ask is the canto's centre. Do valor and courtesy still dwell in our city, or have they wholly gone out of it? The pilgrim's answer is the most savage public utterance about Florence in the first half of the Inferno. The canto is partly a vehicle for that civic indictment.
The closing image — the figure swimming up out of the dark abyss — is one of the most famous and most carefully prepared scenes in the Inferno. The pilgrim, on Virgil's instruction, unwinds a cord from his waist and gives it to Virgil, who casts it into the pit; something is summoned. The cord is the canto's one open puzzle. Commentators have read it as the cord of St Francis (Dante was reported in some sources to have been a Franciscan novice), or as the cord of chastity, or as the rope of allegorical bondage — with which I had designed to take the panther with the painted skin, that is, the leopard of canto I. The poem does not resolve the puzzle. It simply uses the cord.
What to read for
Listen for the form of the three souls' approach. They run in a wheel, like wrestlers stripped for the bout, each turning his head to keep the pilgrim in view as his body keeps moving. The picture is one of the Inferno's most physical small inventions.
Listen for the pilgrim's tribute. He says he would have thrown himself down into the burning sand to embrace them, if not for the fire. The reverence offered to these three Florentines, in Hell, equals the reverence offered to Brunetto.
And listen for the canto's last line, which deliberately stops just before the creature's full shape is shown. The poem is teaching the reader patience. What rises out of the abyss will be named only in the next canto.
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 closed the seventh circle with a civic conversation and then turned, in its second half, into a threshold scene of unusual care. Three Florentine noblemen of the previous generation — military, diplomatic, mercantile — approached the dike in a wheel of running bodies and asked one question: is our city still what it was? The pilgrim's answer, delivered at full pitch, was the harshest public utterance about Florence in the Inferno so far. Then the conversation broke off, the three damned souls sprinted away across the sand, and the rest of the canto was given to the deliberate slow approach of the eighth circle: the cataract of Phlegethon falling into a void, the strange business of the unwound cord, and the first half-emergence of the creature who will, in the next canto, carry the pilgrim down. The canto did two large structural jobs at once: it finished one piece of the Inferno and prepared the elaborate entry into the next.
What the three Florentines represent
The three are the deputation the pilgrim has been waiting for since canto VI. Ten cantos earlier, in the upper Hell of the gluttons, the Florentine Ciacco named them — Farinata and Tegghiaio, who were so worthy / Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca — and said they were among the blackest souls. Farinata has been met among the heretics in canto X. Tegghiaio Aldobrandi (the diplomat who urged Florence not to march on Siena and was overruled) and Jacopo Rusticucci (the wealthy merchant blamed by no source but himself, in this canto's quietest joke, on his savage wife) come up now. Guido Guerra — the great Guelph commander of the previous generation, victor of Benevento, grandson of the legendary Countess Gualdrada — joins them, even though Ciacco did not name him. Three generations of Florentine public virtue stand on the burning sand, asking after the city they served.
The pilgrim's tribute to them, I should have thrown myself among you, is the most concrete expression of the Comedy's reverence for the previous generation of Florentine public life. The poem will, when it is finished, have indicted contemporary Florence at every opportunity; one of the rhetorical functions of the Inferno's damned Florentines is to provide a better Florence — one that existed in living memory — against which the present city can be measured. The three of XVI are the canto's contribution to that previous-generation pantheon. That they are damned does not interfere with the political point.
The savage Florence indictment
Asked whether valor and courtesy still dwell in Florence, the pilgrim does not soften the answer. Pride and extravagance, he says — gente nuova e i sùbiti guadagni, the new inhabitants and the sudden gains — have engendered themselves in the city, and Florence is already weeping for it. The line La gente nuova e i subiti guadagni is one of the Inferno's most quoted political tercets and the seed of Dante's later diagnosis of his city's collapse: the influx of new wealth into the old commune, the displacement of the old families by parvenus, the substitution of money for honour. The political theology is consistent with what Brunetto delivered in XV. The cantos are building a single Florentine indictment in three voices: the teacher's (XV), the soldiers' and merchants' (XVI), and the pilgrim's own.
The cataract and the cord
The geography of the canto's second half is precise. The little red rivulet the poets followed out of canto XIV is in fact Phlegethon, and it has been running across the burning sand all this time. At the edge of the seventh circle it falls — at a single leap, the canto insists, where for a thousand there were room enough — into the eighth. The cataract is one of the few audible phenomena in Inferno: the canto says explicitly that speaking we should hardly have been heard. Hell has been mostly a place of voices; here, for one moment, the place is too loud for voice.
The business with the cord is the canto's deepest puzzle. The pilgrim is wearing a cord around his waist — a detail given here, in passing, and not previously mentioned in the poem, as if it had been there all along — with which, he says, he had once thought to take the panther with the painted skin. The panther is the leopard of canto I, the first beast on the slope, the figure of fleshly incontinence. Some early commentators read the cord as the Franciscan cord (a fourteenth-century tradition, not confirmed by any contemporary document, that Dante had taken Franciscan novice vows); others as the cord of chastity in a general moral sense; others as the rope of intellectual binding by which one captures a moral threat by knowing its name. The canto does not adjudicate. It simply has Virgil take the cord, throw it into the abyss, and summon something with it. The cord's meaning is left for the next canto to begin to disclose — and the next canto will not finish disclosing it either.
What the cord does is establish a fundamental procedural truth of the lower Hell: descent here is no longer by foot. The geography stops being walkable, and from this point forward the poets will be carried — first on the back of the creature now rising out of the void, then by other means down through Malebolge, finally on Lucifer's own body at the bottom. The cord is the small signal that walking is over.
Famous and meaningful passages
The recognition by clothing.
Stop, thou; for by thy garb to us thou seemest To be some one of our depraved city. (Inf. XVI.8–9)
The three recognise the pilgrim as a Florentine by the cut of his cloak. Italian civic identity is announced as visual before it is announced as moral.
The wheel of the three.
As soon as we stood still, they recommenced The old refrain, and when they overtook us, Formed of themselves a wheel, all three of them. As champions stripped and oiled are wont to do, Watching for their advantage and their hold, Before they come to blows and thrusts between them, Thus, wheeling round, did every one his visage Direct to me, so that in opposite wise His neck and feet continual journey made. (Inf. XVI.19–27)
One of the Inferno's most physical small inventions. Three damned bodies turning in a wheel like wrestlers in the palaestra, every head twisted backward to keep the living man in view as the bodies keep walking.
Guido Guerra named.
He in whose footprints thou dost see me treading, Naked and skinless though he now may go, Was of a greater rank than thou dost think; He was the grandson of the good Gualdrada; His name was Guidoguerra, and in life Much did he with his wisdom and his sword. (Inf. XVI.34–39)
The legendary commander of the Florentine Guelphs introduced with the formula naked and skinless, but of greater rank than you would think. The reverence for the previous generation in eight lines.
The pilgrim's tribute.
Could I have been protected from the fire, Below I should have thrown myself among them, And think the Teacher would have suffered it. (Inf. XVI.46–48)
He would have leapt down into Hell to embrace them. The most direct expression of the Inferno's civic reverence.
The famous indictment of Florence.
The new inhabitants and the sudden gains, Pride and extravagance have in thee engendered, Florence, so that thou weep'st thereat already! (Inf. XVI.73–75)
La gente nuova e i sùbiti guadagni / orgoglio e dismisura han generata, / Fiorenza, in te, sì che tu già ten piagni. The line on which every later page about Florence in the Commedia rests.
The damned ask to be remembered.
Therefore, if thou escape from these dark places, And come to rebehold the beauteous stars, When it shall pleasure, thee to say, I was, See that thou speak of us unto the people. (Inf. XVI.82–85)
The most modest of the damned requests. The Florentines ask only that the pilgrim say I was — that the verb be conjugated in the past tense and the names be spoken in the world.
The cataract.
Thus downward from a bank precipitate, We found resounding that dark-tinted water, So that it soon the ear would have offended. (Inf. XVI.103–105)
The single great noise of Inferno. The poem has been mostly voices; here it is hydraulics.
The cord, the panther, the throw.
I had a cord around about me girt, And therewithal I whilom had designed To take the panther with the painted skin. After I this had all from me unloosed, As my Conductor had commanded me, I reached it to him, gathered up and coiled, Whereat he turned himself to the right side, And at a little distance from the verge, He cast it down into that deep abyss. (Inf. XVI.106–114)
The mysterious sequence on which the next canto turns. Three things to notice: the cord was with the pilgrim from the start, the leopard of canto I was the thing he had once meant to take with it, and Virgil casts it to the right side — the right being, throughout Inferno, the side of unusual divinely-sanctioned manoeuvre.
The address to the reader.
Aye to that truth which has the face of falsehood, A man should close his lips as far as may be, Because without his fault it causes shame; But here I can not; and, Reader, by the notes Of this my Comedy to thee I swear, So may they not be void of lasting favor, Athwart that dense and darksome atmosphere I saw a figure swimming upward come. (Inf. XVI.124–131)
The Comedy's second direct address to the reader. Dante swears, on the lasting favour of the poem itself, that what he is about to describe really happened. The oath is the canto's preparation for an image so strange that the poet expects to be disbelieved.
What to watch for
Watch the figure rise. The next canto opens with the creature fully named — Behold the monster with the pointed tail — and the cord business is partly explained. Watch what the cord turns out to be.
Watch the descent procedure. From here on, the pilgrim does not walk down; he is carried, lowered, climbed across. The geography of Hell stops being terrestrial and starts being something the poem invents from scratch.
Watch gente nuova. The phrase will reappear, transformed, in the great Florentine speeches of Paradiso — the most extensive being Cacciaguida's, where the previous generation's Florence is given a full elegiac description. The diagnosis begun here will be developed there.
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.