Inferno XX — The Twisted Procession

Before reading

The fourth bolgia. After the simoniacs of canto XIX — heads driven into stone, feet sticking up — the canto continues the eighth circle's typology of bodily inversion as sin. The damned here have their heads twisted backward on their necks so that the chin sits on the chest from behind, and they walk in slow silence, weeping, looking only where they have already come from. They are the diviners, augurs, and astrologers — those who claimed to see the future, and whose punishment is to see only the past.

Where the canto sits

This is one of the Inferno's most internally focused cantos. After the political fireworks of XIX, the canto turns inward — the pilgrim looks down into the bolgia, weeps at the sight, is rebuked by Virgil for the weeping, and then receives one of the longest lectures Virgil delivers in the whole poem: a hundred-line geographical and historical excursus on the origins of Virgil's own birthplace, Mantua. The canto is therefore unusual in shape: less encounter than monologue, with Virgil at full length and the pilgrim mostly silent.

What it helps to know

The figures named in the canto are drawn from across the entire span of literary memory available to Dante. Four are from classical antiquity:

Amphiaraus, one of the Seven against Thebes — a prophetic king who tried to evade his foreseen death by hiding, was swallowed by the earth in front of the Theban host, and is here remembered from Statius's Thebaid.
Tiresias, the Theban seer transformed back and forth between man and woman — the canto's most enigmatic small portrait, lifted from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Aruns, an Etruscan diviner from Lucan's Pharsalia, who lived in a cave among the white marbles of Luni.
Eryphylus (Eurypylus), a Greek augur named in Virgil's own Aeneid who, with Calchas, advised the Greek fleet when to sail from Aulis for Troy. Virgil refers to him with a careful little phrase — so sings my lofty Tragedy in some part or other; that knowest thou well, who knowest the whole of it — which is the Comedy's only direct self-citation of one author by another inside the poem.

The next three are medieval, all named without elaborate introduction:

Michael Scott (c. 1175 – c. 1232), Scottish scholar at the court of Frederick II of Sicily — translator of Aristotle and Averroes from Arabic, astrologer, widely reputed magician.
Guido Bonatti, thirteenth-century astrologer at the court of Guido da Montefeltro, author of a Latin treatise on astrology.
Asdente (Toothless), a Parmesan shoemaker turned prophet, much resorted-to by twelfth- and thirteenth-century citizens of Parma — Dante's quiet joke that he should have stuck to his last.

And finally a category, not a name: the wretched ones who left the needle, the spool, and the rock — women who left their domestic crafts to practise fortune-telling with herbs and waxen images. The canto's social reach extends from epic kings to neighbourhood witches.

The middle of the canto is a long etiological story about the founding of Mantua. Virgil tells it because his own Aeneid (Book X) had a different version: in the Aeneid, Mantua is founded by an Etruscan king named Ocnus, son of Manto. Here, Virgil quietly rewrites his own poem. The Mantua of the Comedy is founded not by Manto's son but directly on her bones, by men who later happened upon the spot — and without other omen, that is, without divinatory consultation. The new story scrubs the city of any taint of having been founded by an augur. Why Virgil revises himself is the canto's deepest interpretive puzzle, and one of the Comedy's most discussed small mysteries.

What to read for

Notice that the canto opens with Dante weeping and Virgil rebuking him for weeping. This is the most explicit moment in the Inferno at which the master tells the pupil that pity for the damned is itself a kind of impiety. Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; who is a greater reprobate than he who feels compassion at the doom divine? It is a hard line. The poem is teaching the reader, here as elsewhere, that the moral education of the Inferno requires the withdrawal of one's natural sympathy.

Notice the canto's astonishing pacing. The pilgrim looks; he weeps; Virgil rebukes; Virgil names four classical figures; Virgil tells the Mantua story; Virgil names three medieval figures; Virgil announces it is dawn. Most of the canto is one long Virgilian speech. That is the form chosen for the canto on the augurs: the only voice we hear, almost without interruption, is the voice of the canto's guide.

And notice the closing remark: yesternight the moon was round already; thou shouldst remember well it did not harm thee from time to time within the forest deep. The reference is back to the wood of canto I. The moon — long the patron heavenly body of the very diviners the canto is punishing — is invoked here as a helper. The poem is leaving the bolgia of false sight on a quiet endorsement of the truth that astronomy actually tells.

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 eighth circle's typology of bodily inversion at full strength and added one more refinement to it. The simoniacs of XIX were planted upside-down in stone; the diviners of XX walk upright, but their heads are twisted backward on their necks so that they look only where they have already been. The contrapasso is the canto's signature. Those who claimed to see ahead now see only behind. Tears fall from the eyes down the back, not the front, of the body. The procession moves at the slow circular pace the Litanies assume — a religious procession the canto explicitly invokes, by name, as the rhythmic standard for the damned augurs. The canto is short of incident: the pilgrim looks; he weeps; Virgil rebukes the weeping; Virgil names seven figures in a hundred-line monologue that includes the canto's strangest passage, the rewriting of the Aeneid's own account of the founding of Mantua. The canto closes at dawn — the moon over Seville is just setting on the antipodes — and the poets walk on. Three structural jobs are done at once: a third bolgia is mapped, a Virgilian monologue refigures Virgil's relation to his own pre-Christian past, and the Inferno makes its most explicit statement about the moral wrongness of pitying the damned.

The contrapasso

The punishment is the Inferno's most graphic image of the contrapasso — the principle (later named in canto XXVIII) by which Hell's punishments are the measured opposite of the sins they answer. To see the future is, in the Comedy's theology, to attempt to usurp God's providence — the only seeing that legitimately runs forward in time. The damned therefore have their biological sight forcibly redirected backward. The body, here, is the moral. The neck twisted, the face on the back, the tears watering the buttocks — the punishment is anatomical and the anatomy is theological. The image is grotesque; the grotesqueness is the point.

Notice that the damned move in silence and at the pace of the Litanies. The Litanies of the Saints, processed in slow chant during Holy Week and on rogation days, were the standard medieval Catholic procession rhythm. The augurs are walking in the rhythm of the rite they refused — slow Christian prayer — but with the head facing the wrong way. The visual joke is dense and the theology underneath it is dense as well.

Pity and the rebuke

The canto contains the Inferno's most direct philosophical statement about the moral education of its pilgrim. Dante weeps at the sight of the twisted heads, and Virgil rebukes him with extraordinary force:

Art thou, too, of the other fools? Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?

The line is one of the hardest things the Comedy asks of its reader. The orthodox reading: the pilgrim is being taught the difference between misericordia (human-mercy pity, appropriate to one's neighbour) and the recognition that divine justice has rendered its verdict and a Christian must consent to it. Pity for the damned is, in this reading, a small impiety because it implies one would prefer a different verdict. The harder reading: the Comedy notices itself making this demand and lets the demand stand uncomfortable. Dante weeps in the Inferno exactly four times — for the lustful in V (where he faints), for the suicides in XIII (briefly), here in XX, and for the falsifiers in XXIX. Each time the weeping marks a moment at which the pilgrim's natural sympathy and the poem's theology fall out of alignment. The Comedy never celebrates the rebuke; it administers it, and asks the reader to keep walking.

The Mantua story and Virgil's self-revision

The canto's most discussed passage is the long etiology of Mantua that Virgil delivers as part of his identification of the seer Manto. The story is a piece of geographical poetry: Lake Benaco (Lake Garda) sits at the head of Italy with a thousand springs feeding it; its overflow becomes the river Mincio; the Mincio passes through a marshy plain and spreads out; on a small island in that plain the Theban sorceress Manto stopped, lived, practised her arts, died, and left her empty body. Men later gathered around the natural fortification of the marsh, built a city over those dead bones, and called it after her. Mantua.

But Virgil's own poem — the Aeneid, X.198–203 — says something different. There Mantua is founded by Manto's son, the Etruscan king Ocnus, who named the city after his mother. Virgil here in the Inferno is rewriting his own line. He even closes the story with a warning: Therefore I caution thee, if e'er thou hearest / Originate my city otherwise, / No falsehood may the verity defraud. Do not let any other account, he says, defraud the truth.

Why? Seven centuries of commentators have argued about this, and three readings have emerged.

One: Virgil is correcting a youthful error in his own poem now that he knows more (a pious reading: the Aeneid was the work of a pagan in time; the Inferno's Virgil is a shade who has seen more).

Two: the canto is silently dramatising the fact that Virgil's own city was founded without an augur's omen — senza altra sorte, the canto specifies, without other omen — and that therefore Virgil is here clearing his birthplace of any association with the augury he is now condemning. The augur Manto is in Hell; her bones are still under Mantua, but the founding of the city was clean. The Mantuan poet is keeping his city's honour.

Three: Virgil is protesting too much. The very insistence with which he revises his own poem signals an anxiety. Manto founded Mantua in the Aeneid; Virgil cannot bring himself, now that he knows where she ends up, to leave his city's name attached to hers in the originary way. The reader is meant to notice the revision and to wonder what else the Aeneid may have said wrongly.

The Comedy leaves all three readings open.

The other figures: Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Aruns, Eryphylus, and the medieval three

The four classical figures are catalogued in Virgil's own epic register: he speaks the Theban war, the Trojan war, the Etruscan diviners as if from inside his own Aeneid and Statius's Thebaid. The most striking moment is the line on Eryphylus — so sings my lofty Tragedy in some part or other; that knowest thou well, who knowest the whole of it — which is the only place in the Comedy where one classical author cites another classical author by direct internal reference. Virgil quotes his own work to the man who has memorised it. The gesture is intimate.

The three medieval figures are dispatched in three lines each. Michael Scott — the Scottish translator at Frederick II's court — is rendered as slender in the flanks, the body of a courtier-magician. Guido Bonatti, court astrologer of Forlì, is named without epithet. Asdente of Parma — the toothless shoemaker who left his last to peddle prophecies — is given the canto's only small humorous note: who now unto his leather and his thread / would fain have stuck, but he too late repents. The literary catalogue narrows from epic kings to small-town fortune-tellers in fifteen lines.

The last category is gendered. The wretched ones, who left the needle, / The spool and rock, and made them fortune-tellers; / They wrought their magic spells with herb and image. The women who left domestic crafts for divination. Dante's social range, here, runs the entire vertical of medieval European society. Whoever claimed to see what cannot be seen is in this trench.

Famous and meaningful passages

The opening of the new canto, naming itself.

Of a new pain behoves me to make verses And give material to the twentieth canto Of the first song, which is of the submerged. (Inf. XX.1–3)

One of the Inferno's few moments of explicit canto-by-canto self-reference. Dante names the canto by number from inside the poem. The procedure is unusual.

The contrapasso.

As lower down my sight descended on them, Wondrously each one seemed to be distorted From chin to the beginning of the chest; For tow'rds the reins the countenance was turned, And backward it behoved them to advance, As to look forward had been taken from them. (Inf. XX.10–15)

The visual signature of the canto: the head twisted, the face on the back, the necessity of walking backward.

The address to the reader on the weeping.

As God may let thee, Reader, gather fruit From this thy reading, think now for thyself How I could ever keep my face unmoistened, When our own image near me I beheld, Distorted so, the weeping of the eyes Along the fissure bathed the hinder parts. (Inf. XX.19–24)

Nostra effigie — our own image, the human form — is what makes the canto unbearable to the pilgrim. The distortion is human anatomy played as wrongness.

Virgil's rebuke.

Art thou, too, of the other fools? Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine? (Inf. XX.27–30)

The hardest moral line in the Inferno. Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta. Pity here is alive only when it is wholly dead. The reader is meant to flinch.

Amphiaraus.

Lift up, lift up thy head, and see for whom Opened the earth before the Thebans' eyes; Wherefore they all cried: Whither rushest thou, Amphiaraus? Why dost leave the war? (Inf. XX.31–34)

The Theban host's cry to the king the earth was swallowing in front of them. Lifted from Statius's Thebaid VII–VIII.

Tiresias's transformations.

Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed, When from a male a female he became, His members being all of them transformed; And afterwards was forced to strike once more The two entangled serpents with his rod, Ere he could have again his manly plumes. (Inf. XX.40–45)

Ovid's Metamorphoses III, in three tercets. The seer who knew both sides of human sex is condemned to know only the past.

Manto and the founding of Mantua.

Passing that way the virgin pitiless Land in the middle of the fen descried, Untilled and naked of inhabitants; There to escape all human intercourse, She with her servants stayed, her arts to practise, And lived, and left her empty body there. (Inf. XX.82–87)

The body left in the marsh; the city later raised over the bones; the name preserved without other omen.

They built their city over those dead bones, And, after her who first the place selected, Mantua named it, without other omen. (Inf. XX.91–93)

Sanz'altra sorte — without other omen. The phrase carries the canto's revision of the Aeneid.

The warning to keep the new story.

Therefore I caution thee, if e'er thou hearest Originate my city otherwise, No falsehood may the verity defraud. (Inf. XX.97–99)

The author of the Aeneid asks his pupil to prefer the new version to the old. The poem is opening a small space between the two Virgils — the one who wrote the Aeneid and the one who walks here.

Eryphylus and the self-citation.

Eryphylus his name was, and so sings My lofty Tragedy in some part or other; That knowest thou well, who knowest the whole of it. (Inf. XX.112–114)

The Comedy citing the Aeneid by internal reference. Virgil's epic is called tragèdia — the elevated style — and Dante is reminded that he has read every line.

The closing dawn.

But come now, for already holds the confines Of both the hemispheres, and under Seville Touches the ocean-wave, Cain and the thorns, And yesternight the moon was round already. (Inf. XX.124–127)

The medieval man in the moon was Cain, exiled with his bundle of thorns. The moon is at the western horizon over Seville; dawn is breaking on the Hebrew side of the world. The astronomical reference closes the canto on the bolgia of false sight with a piece of true sky-reading.

What to watch for

Watch the next canto. The fifth bolgia — the barrators, the corrupt politicians — will be the Inferno's longest tonal departure, a sequence of two cantos played almost as low comedy with a cast of named devils. Inferno is about to take a strange turn.

Watch the figure of Manto. She will be named again — by Statius, in Purgatorio XXII — and the matter of who founded Mantua will be quietly reopened. The Comedy does not forget its own loose ends.

Watch the moon. The astronomical references in Inferno tend to come at canto-boundaries. The poem keeps track of celestial time even when its setting is in the deepest dark.

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.