Inferno · Canto XVII ·
Inferno XVII — Geryon on the Verge
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 17 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XVII
Before reading
The creature that began to rise out of the abyss at the end of canto XVI is now fully named, and it is the most morally pointed image yet built into the Inferno. The canto opens with its description, holds the pilgrim at the edge for one more conversation among the damned, and then asks him to climb onto its back and ride it down into the eighth circle. The canto is short, dense, and unforgettable; it is also a deliberate piece of moral allegory about how fraud presents itself in the world.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is on the cliff that marks the lower edge of the seventh circle. The eighth circle — Malebolge, the Evil Pockets — opens below: a vast funnel of ten concentric ditches, each housing a different species of fraud. The geography of Hell shifts here from territories one walks across to ditches one looks down into. The canto is the Inferno's formal transition. The reader is being moved from the violent sins of the upper circles to the fraudulent sins of the lower, and Dante chose to mark the move with an emblematic creature rather than a plain descent.
What it helps to know
The creature is Geryon. In classical mythology Geryon was a three-bodied giant killed by Hercules; Dante keeps the name but rebuilds the figure from scratch. His Geryon has the face of a just man, the body of a serpent, the paws of a beast, a scorpion's sting in the tail, and a back painted in intricate ornamental knots and shields more various than any Tartar or Turk ever wove. He is, deliberately, an image of fraud: an honest face attached to a poisonous tail, the whole thing decorated to attract the eye. The reader is being given the iconography of deceit before being given a single deceitful soul. Dante is teaching the reader to recognise fraud first by its surface — the beautiful face, the beautiful pattern, the lethal stinger that no one looks at.
The conversation the pilgrim has, while Virgil negotiates with Geryon, is with the usurers — the third subgroup punished on the burning sand. Where the blasphemers lay supine and the sodomites walked, the usurers sit, weeping eyes fixed on small leather pouches hung around their necks. Each pouch bears a family coat-of-arms. The damned do not look at each other; they look at their crests. This is Dante's most savage small joke about the medieval usurer: in life he sat behind a counter looking at money; in death he sits on burning sand looking at his family's heraldry. The faces are anonymous; only the blazons are individual.
The blazons the pilgrim recognises are Florentine and Paduan banking families: the Gianfigliazzi (yellow with an azure lion), the Obriachi (red with a white goose), the Scrovegni of Padua (white with a pregnant azure sow). The Scrovegni were the family whose son Enrico built, two years before Dante wrote this canto, the great chapel in Padua decorated with Giotto's frescoes — an enormous private commission widely regarded as expiation for Reginaldo Scrovegni's enormous usury. The historical layer of this canto runs directly into the contemporary art history of the Commedia's own decade.
The figure named Vitaliano — who will have his seat here on my left-hand side — is the Paduan usurer Vitaliano del Dente, still alive when Dante wrote, and being publicly damned in advance. The unnamed sovereign cavalier who will bring the satchel with three goats is the Florentine Giovanni Buiamonte, head of the Becchi family (whose crest was three goats), also still alive. Dante is using the canto to announce two future arrivals in Hell.
What to read for
Notice the just face on the snake. The whole canto's moral pivot is built into this single facial detail. The poem is teaching the reader, in a single image, what fraud looks like before it strikes.
Listen for the silence of the usurers. They do not speak to each other and they barely speak to the pilgrim. The most damning small detail of the encounter is that they have nothing left to say.
And feel the descent itself. The flight down on Geryon's back is given as one of the most physical passages in the Inferno — the wind on the face, the slow circling, the falconer's lure, the gradual coming-into-view of fires below. The poem is teaching the reader, in advance, what the rest of Hell will feel like. From this point forward Inferno will be deeper, hotter, and crueller.
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 built one of the Inferno's great composite images and then used it as a vehicle. Geryon is shown in deliberate detail: the just face above, the serpent body below, the scorpion sting in the tail, the dazzling Tartar carpet of ornament on the back. The reader is taught the iconography of fraud before being introduced to any fraudulent soul. The canto then placed the pilgrim, alone, among the usurers — a small horror of silent men staring at their own coats-of-arms on small leather pouches — and finally lifted him onto Geryon's back for the slow descent into the eighth circle. The descent is given in the most physical sentences in Hell so far: the wind on the face, the slow circling, the gradual rising of distant fires. Three different formal effects in three different sections, all controlled, all turned to the same end: to install in the reader an absolute distinction between upper Hell (the sins of incontinence and violence) and lower Hell (the sins of fraud).
What Geryon is
Dante kept the name Geryon from classical mythology, where it belonged to the three-bodied giant killed by Hercules in his tenth labour, but everything else about the creature is new. The classical Geryon was a giant; Dante's is a chimera. The body parts are chosen for their iconography. The face of a just man is the surface fraud wears in the world — the trustworthy expression on which deceit depends. The serpent body is the biblical serpent of Genesis, the original deceiver. The paws are the brute-animal nature beneath the human face. The scorpion sting is the lethal poison at the end — the part no one looks at because no one is meant to see it. The ornamented back is the showy display by which the fraud distracts the eye. Every body part has been chosen for what it teaches.
Notice that Dante swore an oath at the end of the previous canto — by the notes of this my Comedy — that what he saw really came up out of the abyss. The oath was not casual. The poet expects to be disbelieved on Geryon, and he asks the reader to believe him anyway. The reason: the figure is so absolutely the image of fraud-as-such that the Comedy depends on the reader granting its literal existence.
The usurers, the pouches, and the silence
Usury is the third sub-category of violence-against-God in Dante's scheme. The argument is the standard scholastic one, picked up from Aristotle by Aquinas: money does not naturally breed of itself, so to make money breed is to do violence against the natural order God established for human industry. The argument is no longer persuasive to most modern readers; but the picture the canto builds is still cold.
The usurers sit because they are too tired to walk or to lie. The eyes weep continuously. The hands move automatically, brushing flames off the body. And around each neck hangs a small leather pouch — a banker's purse — emblazoned with the heraldic shield of the dead man's family. The damned do not look at one another's faces; they look at one another's coats-of-arms. The implication is moral and savage at once. The usurer in life identified himself by his account-book; in death he is recognisable only by his family device, because his face has been burned and bowed past identification. Dante refuses to name a single one of them. They are reduced to their crests.
The three crests the canto identifies are the Gianfigliazzi of Florence (azure lion on yellow), the Obriachi of Florence (white goose on red), and the Scrovegni of Padua (azure pregnant sow on white). The third is the canto's most barbed historical detail. The Scrovegni family's wealth was built by Reginaldo Scrovegni's enormous money-lending; his son Enrico, two years before Dante wrote this canto, commissioned Giotto to fresco an entire chapel in Padua — partly, his contemporaries thought, in expiation. The greatest single work of early-fourteenth-century Italian painting is referenced here, sideways, as the family curse of a usurer. The fourth crest — three goats — belongs to the still-living Giovanni Buiamonte of Florence (Becchi), and the figure of Vitaliano del Dente of Padua is named as also incoming. Dante is using the canto to announce two future damnations of men still walking the Veneto.
The descent on Geryon and the cinema of Hell
The flight down is one of the Inferno's most carefully cinematographic passages. The pilgrim mounts Geryon trembling — such as he is who has so near the ague of quartan that his nails are blue already — and Virgil mounts behind him, embracing him from the back so the tail cannot reach. The departure is described as a small boat pushing back from shore. Then Geryon turns, extends like an eel, and begins to swim through the air. The pilgrim cannot tell that they are circling and descending; he perceives the motion only by the wind on the face and from below. The first thing he sees, as the funnel comes into view, is fires and the sound of laments. The two classical similes are perfectly chosen: Phaeton, who lost the reins of the sun-chariot, and Icarus, whose wax wings melted. Both are sons whose fathers warned them. The Latin pedigree of the comparison reinforces the epic register of the descent.
The end of the flight is given as a falconry image. The falcon who has flown long without finding lure or prey descends weary, sullen and disdainful — cento rote, a hundred circles — and lands far from his master. Geryon deposits the poets at the foot of the cliff and shoots away as arrow from the string. The arrival in lower Hell is given as a small social affront: the carrier is offended at having had to carry. Even the creatures of Hell, the canto suggests, take their work personally.
Famous and meaningful passages
The naming of fraud.
Behold the monster with the pointed tail, Who cleaves the hills, and breaketh walls and weapons, Behold him who infecteth all the world. (Inf. XVII.1–3)
Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza. The verb infect is the canto's central charge. Fraud is presented not as a discrete act but as a contamination of the whole world.
The just face.
The face was as the face of a just man, Its semblance outwardly was so benign, And of a serpent all the trunk beside. (Inf. XVII.10–12)
The single most morally pointed tercet in the canto. The honest expression on which deception depends.
The ornamented back.
The back, and breast, and both the sides it had Depicted o'er with nooses and with shields. With colors more, groundwork or broidery Never in cloth did Tartars make nor Turks, Nor were such tissues by Arachne laid. (Inf. XVII.14–18)
The reference to Arachne — the human weaver punished by Athena for her pride — sets the ornament inside a classical frame: fraud as the spider-weave of cosmic ambition.
The usurers' grief.
Out of their eyes was gushing forth their woe; This way, that way, they helped them with their hands Now from the flames and now from the hot soil. (Inf. XVII.46–48)
The hands and the eyes, working independently of each other. The picture of automatic, exhausted self-protection.
The pouches.
When I had turned mine eyes upon the faces Of some, on whom the dolorous fire is falling, Not one of them I knew; but I perceived That from the neck of each there hung a pouch, Which certain color had, and certain blazon; And thereupon it seems their eyes are feeding. (Inf. XVII.52–57)
The faces are unrecognisable; the pouches are individual. The damned's eyes feed on the family crest. The most savage small economic observation in the canto.
The Paduan speaks.
A Paduan am I with these Florentines; Full many a time they thunder in mine ears, Exclaiming, Come the sovereign cavalier, He who shall bring the satchel with three goats. Then twisted he his mouth, and forth he thrust His tongue, like to an ox that licks its nose. (Inf. XVII.70–75)
The only spoken interaction with a usurer in the canto. He complains about being kept company by Florentines and announces a future arrival. The closing gesture — the tongue thrust out like an ox licking its nose — is the canto's most reductive small portrait. Money has reduced him to a bovine.
The mount.
I seated me upon those monstrous shoulders; I wished to say, and yet the voice came not As I believed, Take heed that thou embrace me. But he, who other times had rescued me In other peril, soon as I had mounted, Within his arms encircled and sustained me. (Inf. XVII.91–96)
Virgil's arms around the pilgrim from behind. One of the canto's small tender details — and one of the Inferno's clearest pictures of how the master rescues the pupil before the pupil knows how to ask.
The flight.
Even as the little vessel shoves from shore, Backward, still backward, so he thence withdrew; And when he wholly felt himself afloat, There where his breast had been he turned his tail, And that extended like an eel he moved, And with his paws drew to himself the air. (Inf. XVII.100–105)
The motion of Geryon launching off the cliff is one of the great single physical descriptions in the poem. The backward departure, the turning of the body so the tail is now forward, the swim through air. Three different mechanical observations in one tercet.
The fear in classical register.
A greater fear I do not think there was What time abandoned Phaeton the reins, Whereby the heavens, as still appears, were scorched; Nor when the wretched Icarus his flanks Felt stripped of feathers by the melting wax. (Inf. XVII.106–110)
Two sons whose fathers warned them. The pilgrim's terror is given the classical pedigree of every cautionary myth at once.
The falcon simile.
As falcon who has long been on the wing, Who, without seeing either lure or bird, Maketh the falconer say, Ah me, thou stoopest, Descendeth weary, whence he started swiftly, Thorough a hundred circles, and alights Far from his master, sullen and disdainful. (Inf. XVII.127–132)
Geryon as a sullen falcon. The arrival in lower Hell is given as a small piece of bad service.
What to watch for
Watch the architecture of Malebolge open. The next canto will name the ten bolge by sin and walk the pilgrim into the first two. The eighth circle is built like a concentric amphitheatre, and the canto-by-canto progress through it is the Inferno's most architectural passage.
Watch the figure of the carrier. From here on, the pilgrim does not walk between circles. Geryon was the first carrier; there will be others. The descent through the lower Hell is, increasingly, by means — bridge, ladder, devil's claw, frozen body.
Watch the just face. Every fraudster the pilgrim meets in the next ten cantos will be a human version of Geryon — an honest surface attached to a poisonous interior. The face has been established as the moral hinge of the eighth circle before any of the eighth circle's inhabitants have been met.
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.