Inferno XXV — The Figs Against God

Before reading

This is the canto in which Dante openly challenges Lucan and Ovid — the two Latin poets of physical transformation — and tries, line for line, to outwrite them. The bolgia of the thieves continues; the serpents continue. What changes is the kind of transformation Dante shows, and the boldness with which he stops the action to compare himself to his sources.

Where the canto sits

The pilgrim and Virgil are still standing at the rim of the seventh bolgia of Malebolge, the pit of the thieves. Canto XXIV ended on the prophecy of Vanni Fucci, the thief of Pistoia, delivered as a curse against Dante. Canto XXV opens, without a break, on the next gesture Vanni makes — an obscene gesture against God Himself. The two cantos are one continuous scene, divided only by the numbering. The serpents Dante catalogued from Lucan at the start of canto XXIV are about to do work no Latin poet has yet asked of them.

What it helps to know

The gesture Vanni makes — the figs, le fiche — is a coarse Italian obscenity in which the thumb is thrust between two closed fingers. It was understood in Dante's Italy as an unambiguous insult, and to direct it at God was the most provocative blasphemy a body could perform. The serpents respond instantly. The cantos of the thieves are, among other things, a meditation on the body as the instrument by which one steals: hands gesture, hands grip, hands take. The bolgia takes the hands away.

The Pistoia mentioned in the opening curse was, in Dante's reading of Italian history, a city originally founded by the survivors of Catiline's conspiracy — the most famous Roman conspiracy of the late Republic, crushed by Cicero in 63 BC. The throwaway etymology is doing work: Pistoia, Vanni's worthy den, was thieves' country from the beginning.

The three souls Dante watches transform in this canto are all real Florentines of his own generation: Agnel (Agnello Brunelleschi), Buoso (probably Buoso degli Abati or Buoso Donati), and Puccio Sciancato ("Lame Puccio") of the Galigai. Brunelleschi and the Donati were major political families of the city; Dante is filling the bolgia of the thieves with his own neighbours. The fourth named soul, Cianfa Donati, has entered the bolgia in the form of the six-footed serpent that opens the metamorphosis sequence. The fifth, Francesco Cavalcanti (called Guercio), is the small serpent who will do the final transformation. The reader does not need to track the family politics. What matters is that Dante is naming his own city's leading citizens, in his own city's leading families, and turning them into reptiles.

The classical models the canto deliberately challenges are two:

In Lucan's Pharsalia (book IX), two Roman soldiers named Sabellus and Nasidius are killed by African serpents — Sabellus dissolves into liquid, Nasidius swells until he bursts his armour. The metamorphoses are outward: bodies destroyed by transformation.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Cadmus is turned into a serpent (book IV) and the nymph Arethusa is turned into a fountain (book V). The metamorphoses are one-way: one being becomes another.

Dante claims to do something neither of them attempted: two natures front to front — a man and a serpent exchanging substance simultaneously, each becoming the other while still in motion.

What to read for

Listen for the moment the narrator steps out of the action. Henceforth be silent Lucan… Be silent Ovid. The pilgrim is not present in these tercets; the poet is. The whole Commedia trades on the proposition that what Dante saw is truth and what the classical poets fabled was fable. The challenge is open and the canto is the proof.

Watch the third metamorphosis carefully. The smoke between man and serpent, the eyes that change colour, the tongue that splits, the legs that fuse — Dante is taking his time because every detail is a piece of the case he is making. Do not skim it. The slowness is the argument.

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 opened on Vanni Fucci's obscene gesture against God and was immediately overrun by serpents. The thief was bound silent; the serpents coiled around his neck and arms; the centaur Cacus thundered through with his fire-breathing dragon to hunt him down. And then the canto stopped being a punishment scene and became a poetics lesson. Five Florentine thieves were named, three serpents arrived as agents of metamorphosis, and across forty deliberately slow lines Dante put two of his own neighbours through transformations he claims neither Lucan nor Ovid ever managed: a man and a serpent exchanging substance face to face, each becoming the other while the other was becoming him. The pilgrim said almost nothing. The poet did the work. Canto XXV is the Commedia's most open boast about its own ambition.

Pistoia and the curse

The first six lines extend Vanni Fucci's curse into a curse on Pistoia itself: Henceforth I was the foe of serpents! Then to Pistoia would I that she burn / Herself in ashes, since she lasteth more than her own seed. The throwaway etymology — Pistoia founded by the survivors of Catiline — is doing political work. The city of Vanni Fucci's birth is a thieves' city from its Roman origin, and Dante is announcing, on the way into the centrepiece of the bolgia, that the deeper subject of the canto is the moral character of certain Italian cities. The bolgia of the thieves is filled with men from Florence and Pistoia. The poem is naming.

The challenge to Lucan and Ovid

The set-piece passage is the only place in the Commedia where the poet steps fully out of the pilgrim's experience and addresses his own classical sources by name:

Henceforth be silent Lucan, where he mentions Wretched Sabellus and Nassidius, And wait to hear what now shall be shot forth. Be silent Ovid, of Cadmus and Arethusa; For if him to a snake, her to a fountain, Converts he fabling, that I grudge him not; Because two natures never front to front Has he transmuted, so that both the forms To interchange their matter ready were. (Inf. XXV.94–102)

The claim is precise. Lucan made bodies dissolve and explode; Ovid made one being become another. Neither attempted what Dante claims he is about to perform: two natures front to front, a simultaneous reciprocal exchange in which the human and the reptile are, for the duration of the change, equally present and equally unfinished. The classical poets fabled; Dante reports. The whole Commedia trades on this distinction, but only here does the poet announce it in his own voice and at his sources' expense.

It is worth noticing what the boast is also saying about Dante's reading. He had Lucan and Ovid by heart; he had measured what was possible in each and decided he could do more. The reverence of canto I — thou art my master, and my author thou — coexists, in the same poem, with this calm willingness to outpace the masters. The Commedia is faithful to Latin epic in the way a son is faithful to a father he is preparing to surpass.

The bodies as instruments of theft

The bolgia of the thieves works the body as the bolgia of the hypocrites worked the cloak. The hypocrite's sin was the divergence of outside and inside; his punishment was a cloak whose outside and inside diverged eternally. The thief's sin was the appropriation by his body of what was not his; his punishment is to lose the body itself, repeatedly, to serpents that take his shape, give it back, take it again. The hands that stole are bound first — Vanni's hands and arms are tied behind his back by the serpent at his throat — and then the entire form is dissolved and reassembled. The thief cannot keep anything, not even himself. Property is what the bolgia denies; the soul that took what was another's loses every claim to its own outline.

The named Florentines

The five named souls are not famous figures from outside Florence: they are Dante's own city. Cianfa is a Donati, of the same great Black Guelph family that included Corso Donati, Dante's principal political enemy. Agnello is a Brunelleschi. Buoso is most likely a Donati or an Abati. Puccio Sciancato is a Galigai. Francesco Cavalcanti (called Guercio) was killed by the men of the village of Gaville, in the Val d'Arno — Dante refers to the killing in the canto's final lines and notes that the village is mourning him still, a piece of bitter chronicle. The bolgia of the thieves is a roll call of Florentine families and Dante is filling it with his neighbours. The whole Inferno is, among other things, a settling of Florentine accounts, and this canto is one of its most concentrated registers of the score.

Famous and meaningful passages

The opening blasphemy.

At the conclusion of his words, the thief Lifted his hands aloft with both the figs, Crying: Take that, God, for at thee I aim them. (Inf. XXV.1–3)

The first three lines are a single completed gesture. The hands rise, the obscenity is made, the curse is spoken — and the serpents arrive in the very next tercet.

The six-footed serpent.

Behold! a serpent with six feet darts forth In front of one, and fastens wholly on him. With middle feet it bound him round the paunch, And with the forward ones his arms it seized; Then thrust its teeth through one cheek and the other; The hindermost it stretched upon his thighs, And put its tail through in between the two, And up behind along the reins outspread it. Ivy was never fastened by its barbs Unto a tree so, as this horrible reptile Upon the other's limbs entwined its own. (Inf. XXV.49–59)

The ivy fastened by its barbs is the canto's first reach for a precision Lucan and Ovid did not attempt. The bodies do not merely meet; they are inwoven. The simile is being lined up for the boast nine tercets later.

The challenge to the classical poets.

Henceforth be silent Lucan, where he mentions Wretched Sabellus and Nassidius, And wait to hear what now shall be shot forth. Be silent Ovid, of Cadmus and Arethusa; For if him to a snake, her to a fountain, Converts he fabling, that I grudge him not; Because two natures never front to front Has he transmuted, so that both the forms To interchange their matter ready were. (Inf. XXV.94–102)

Memorise this. There is only one passage like it in the Commedia. It is the moment Dante stops being a pilgrim reporting what he saw and stands up, in the same poem, as a poet measuring himself against the canonical masters. The verb be silent — taccia — is imperative and twice repeated. The masters are not corrected; they are silenced.

The exchange of substance.

And backward draws the ears into his head, In the same manner as the snail its horns; And so the tongue, which was entire and apt For speech before, is cleft, and the bi-forked In the other closes up, and the smoke ceases. (Inf. XXV.130–135)

The detail is anatomical and ruthless — ears like a snail's horns, tongue cleft, the other's tongue closes up — and the closing line, the smoke ceases, marks the end of the metamorphosis the way the cessation of a chemical reaction marks the end of an experiment. Dante is writing as a natural historian of damnation.

What to watch for

Watch the poet's voice. The challenge to Lucan and Ovid is the high-water mark of Dante's open authorial intervention in the Inferno. It will not happen again so directly. From the next canto on, the Commedia returns to the discipline of letting the pilgrim do most of the seeing.

Watch the cities. Florence and Pistoia have now been named twice each in cursing tones — the apostrophe of canto XXVI is about to open on Rejoice, O Florence. The bolge are arranged so that the moral inventory of the Italian cities accumulates as the pilgrim descends.

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.