Inferno XXIV — The Climb — History in Books

Before reading

This is a canto of two halves. The first half is one of the longest similes in the Inferno and the hardest physical climb the pilgrim has yet made. The second half drops the two travellers into the bolgia of the thieves — a pit of serpents — and gives the Commedia one of its most surprising metamorphoses. Read the climb slowly. The poem is doing more than describing exertion.

Where the canto sits

The pilgrim and Virgil have just escaped from the ditch of the hypocrites by way of a collapsed bridge. They are still walking the ridges of Malebolge, the eighth circle, and they now have to scramble up a wall of broken stone to look down into the seventh bolgia, the bolgia of the thieves. The crossing is laborious — Virgil himself is breathing hard at the top — and the canto opens by likening Dante's brief alarm at his guide's troubled face to a peasant's despair at finding frost on the ground when he had expected pasture, and then to the same peasant's quick recovery of hope. The simile is the first hint that this canto will keep turning hope into despair and back again.

What it helps to know

The bolgia they look down into is filled with serpents. The list of varieties Dante names — chelydri, jaculi, phareæ, cenchres, amphisbænas — is taken straight from the Pharsalia of Lucan (book IX), one of the two Latin poets the canto will quietly challenge by the time it ends. Dante is announcing, at the start of the bolgia, the source he intends to outwrite.

The first soul named in the bolgia is Vanni Fucci, a real Pistoian of Dante's own generation — illegitimate (a mulo, a half-breed, in the abusive register the canto picks up), a man of the Black Guelph faction in Pistoia, infamous for sacking the sacristy of San Iacopo in the cathedral and for letting an innocent man hang for the crime. Dante knew of him as a man of blood and wrath, not as a thief; what surprises the pilgrim is finding him here, in the bolgia of theft, rather than further up among the violent. The detail tells the reader something about how the Commedia judges: Vanni's deepest sin was not the brawling that made him famous but the quiet sacrilege that found him out.

The prophecy Vanni delivers at the end of the canto is one of several Dante plants in the Inferno about his own coming exile. It is in code — vapours from Val di Magra, the tempest over Campo Picen — and refers to the rising of the Black Guelphs of Pistoia and the defeat, in 1302, of the Whites (Dante's faction) of Florence. The prophecy is given by a man who hates Dante and wants to hurt him. Dante is acknowledging, in advance, that his coming homelessness will be the work of people of exactly Vanni's character.

What to read for

Listen for Virgil's exhortation as the climb begins. The line for sitting upon down, / Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame is one of the most quoted in the Inferno and one of the few in which Virgil sounds like a Roman moralist rather than a guide of souls. The whole Commedia turns at moments like this on the small Latin virtue of not sitting down.

Notice the metamorphosis at the bolgia's centre. A naked thief is bitten by a serpent and instantly burns to ashes, then reconstitutes himself out of the ashes like the phoenix. The image will be one-upped, deliberately, in canto XXV. Both cantos are building toward Dante's open challenge to his Latin sources.

The canto ends on a curse. Pay attention to how the curse is delivered — the soul lifts both hands at God with both the figs. The gesture will earn its punishment in the opening lines of 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 is two distinct things bolted together. For its first half it is a study in physical exhaustion — the longest, slowest, most laborious climb the pilgrim has yet made, and the canto in which Virgil for the first time has to argue him into not stopping. For its second half it is the entry into the bolgia of the thieves, a pit of serpents in which the punishments are not blows but transformations: a man bitten by a snake combusts on the spot, is reduced to a small pile of ash, and reconstitutes himself out of the heap to stand naked again as if nothing had happened. The two halves of the canto rhyme. The climb teaches the pilgrim that he must keep moving by his own will; the bolgia shows him a soul that has nothing left in it but the involuntary reconstitution of a self that cannot rest. The contrast is the canto's argument.

The simile of the peasant

The opening twelve lines are one of the most elaborate similes in the Inferno. A peasant rises to find what looks like snow on the ground, beats his flank in despair (the forage is dead), goes back inside, then looks again and discovers it was only hoar-frost — already melting, the world has changed, hope returns. The whole apparatus of farmstead detail is given over to one small psychological action: Dante saw a worried look on his guide's face and was briefly afraid; the look passed and the fear passed with it. The simile is doing far more than describing a brief disturbance. It is a model for how the Commedia expects the reader to read it — every despair in the poem is a frost that may pass; every panic must be sat with for a moment before it is acted on; the husbandman who beats his flank and then hope revives again is the figure of every reader at every difficult passage.

The Roman exhortation

When the climb begins in earnest, Virgil delivers what may be the most Roman speech in the Inferno:

Now it behoves thee thus to put off sloth, My Master said; for sitting upon down, Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame, Withouten which whoso his life consumes Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth, As smoke in air or in the water foam. (Inf. XXIV.46–51)

There is no Christian register in this. The reward Virgil holds out is fama — the imperial Roman virtue of leaving a mark, vestige, on the earth. The penalty is anonymity, the soul that consumes its life and leaves smoke in air or… water foam. This is the ethics of the Aeneid and of Roman Stoicism, and it is the ethics by which Virgil himself lives in Limbo. The pilgrim hears it and obeys, and the obedience is genuine — he straightens, climbs, gets to the top. But the reader is invited to notice what the speech does not say. There is no mention of grace, no mention of love, no mention of the amor that moved Beatrice in canto II. The guide can only offer the encouragements his own range allows. The whole Commedia is the slow education of the pilgrim into motivations Virgil cannot voice.

The bolgia and the challenge to Lucan and Ovid

The bolgia floor is a catalogue of serpent species lifted from Lucan's Pharsalia — chelydri, jaculi, phareæ, cenchres, amphisbænas — and a serpent-bite that turns a man instantly to ash and back again. The whole choreography is set up so that the next canto can make its open boast: Henceforth be silent Lucan, be silent Ovid. Dante is reading Latin epic the way a younger poet reads an older one — with reverence, and with the conviction that he can do it better. The phoenix simile in the middle of the canto — the burnt soul reborn / Then of itself, when the five hundredth year / Is close at hand — is a deliberate set-piece against the Metamorphoses. The serpent-bite in canto XXIV is the warm-up; the man-into-serpent and serpent-into-man metamorphosis of canto XXV is the main event. The two cantos are a single long argument with the canonical Latin sources.

Vanni Fucci

The named soul of the canto is Vanni Fucci, an illegitimate son of a Pistoian noble house, a leader of the Black Guelph faction in his city, and a man whom Dante would have known by reputation as a brawler and a killer. The pilgrim's surprise is that Vanni is not in the seventh circle, the bolgia of the violent. He is here, in the bolgia of the thieves, for a less glamorous and more revealing sin: the robbery of the sacristy of the cathedral of San Iacopo in Pistoia, a sacrilege for which an innocent man was hanged. The canto is making, by placement, a small ethical judgment. The blood Vanni shed in the streets damned him less than the lie that let another man die for what he did. The bolgia of the thieves is not for the takers of goods but for the takers of trust.

The prophecy and the bitten poet

At the end of the canto Vanni delivers a coded prophecy of the political catastrophe that will, in 1302, exile Dante from Florence: the rising of the Blacks of Pistoia, the storm out of Val di Magra, the tempest over Campo Picen. The prophecy is delivered by a man who hates Dante and adds, in the last line, And this I've said that it may give thee pain. It is one of three or four prophecies of Dante's exile scattered through the Inferno, and it is the cruellest of them. The poem is doing something delicate. Dante is allowing his own coming homelessness to be foretold by exactly the kind of man whose victory in the world will cause it — and is recording, by the cruelty of the delivery, the cost of the kind of clarity the Commedia claims. The prophet of Dante's exile is a damned thief who wants to wound him. The wound is the truth.

Famous and meaningful passages

The opening simile.

In that part of the youthful year wherein The Sun his locks beneath Aquarius tempers, And now the nights draw near to half the day, What time the hoar-frost copies on the ground The outward semblance of her sister white, But little lasts the temper of her pen, The husbandman, whose forage faileth him, Rises, and looks, and seeth the champaign All gleaming white, whereat he beats his flank, Returns in doors, and up and down laments, Like a poor wretch, who knows not what to do; Then he returns, and hope revives again, Seeing the world has changed its countenance In little time, and takes his shepherd's crook, And forth the little lambs to pasture drives. (Inf. XXIV.1–15)

A long pastoral simile in a poem of damnation. The peasant who beats his flank and then sees that the world has changed its countenance is the reader of the Commedia in miniature.

The Roman exhortation.

Now it behoves thee thus to put off sloth, My Master said; for sitting upon down, Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame, Withouten which whoso his life consumes Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth, As smoke in air or in the water foam. And therefore raise thee up, o'ercome the anguish With spirit that o'ercometh every battle, If with its heavy body it sink not. (Inf. XXIV.46–54)

Smoke in air or in the water foam — come fummo in aere o in acqua la schiuma. The Roman picture of a wasted life.

The phoenix.

And lo! at one who was upon our side There darted forth a serpent, which transfixed him There where the neck is knotted to the shoulders. Nor O so quickly e'er, nor I was written, As he took fire, and burned; and ashes wholly Behoved it that in falling he became. And when he on the ground was thus destroyed, The ashes drew together, and of themselves Into himself they instantly returned. (Inf. XXIV.97–105)

The simile of the writing of an O or an I — the two simplest pen-strokes — is the scribe-poet measuring the impossible quickness of the burn. Notice that the resurrection is of themselves: the soul does not will it. The reconstitution is mechanical; the self is reassembled because it cannot escape itself.

Vanni Fucci names himself.

Whence he replied: I rained from Tuscany A short time since into this cruel gorge. A bestial life, and not a human, pleased me, Even as the mule I was; I'm Vanni Fucci, Beast, and Pistoia was my worthy den. (Inf. XXIV.122–126)

The self-naming is also a self-cursing — bestia, mulo, Pistoia mi fu degna tana. Dante's habit, when the soul does the work for him, of letting the damned indict themselves in their own first sentence.

The prophecy of Dante's exile.

Pistoia first of Neri groweth meagre; Then Florence doth renew her men and manners; Mars draws a vapor up from Val di Magra, Which is with turbid clouds enveloped round, And with impetuous and bitter tempest Over Campo Picen shall be the battle; When it shall suddenly rend the mist asunder, So that each Bianco shall thereby be smitten. And this I've said that it may give thee pain. (Inf. XXIV.143–151)

The cruellest of the Inferno's prophecies of Dante's coming exile. The pilgrim asked for nothing; the soul gave the news as a weapon. The poem has just told the reader, in a damned thief's voice, the political event that will define the author's adult life.

What to watch for

Watch the opening of the next canto. Vanni Fucci's final gesture — both the figs against God — is not in the canto we have just read but in the first line of the next, and the punishment that follows is instantaneous. The two cantos are continuous: XXIV and XXV are one bolgia rolled across two canto-numbers.

Watch Virgil's voice. The fama speech is the high-water mark of his Roman moral authority. From the metamorphoses of canto XXV onward, the Commedia will begin to overrun what its guide can either understand or describe — and the first sign of it will be Dante, in his own voice as poet-narrator, stepping past Virgil to challenge Lucan and Ovid directly.

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.