Inferno · Canto XXX ·
Inferno XXX — The Running Impersonators
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 30 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XXX
Before reading
This is the canto that fills out the bolgia of the falsifiers and then, in its last twenty lines, does something the Inferno has not done before: it shows the pilgrim caught up in the spectacle of damnation as entertainment, and it lets Virgil rebuke him for it. The rebuke is gentle. It is also one of the most important moments in the moral education of the pilgrim.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim and Virgil are still on the floor of the tenth and last bolgia of Malebolge, the bolgia of the falsifiers, which canto XXIX opened. Canto XXIX gave us the alchemists — the falsifiers of metal. Canto XXX completes the catalogue. Three further sub-types of falsification appear here: falsifiers of persons (impersonators), falsifiers of money (counterfeiters), and falsifiers of words (perjurers). Each sub-type carries its own disease. The bolgia is the Inferno's most exact piece of medical taxonomy.
What it helps to know
The canto opens with two double similes from classical mythology. Athamas, in Ovid's Metamorphoses IV, was driven mad by Juno's vengeance against the Theban royal house; he mistook his wife and children for a lioness and her whelps and dashed his elder son against a rock; his wife Ino, with the younger son still in her arms, threw herself into the sea. Hecuba, the widowed queen of Troy, was reduced after the fall of the city to seeing her last children killed before her — Polyxena sacrificed at Achilles' tomb, Polydorus murdered for his gold — and barked like a dog in her grief on the shores of Thrace. The two figures are matched at the opening of the canto because in this bolgia two souls run mad through the diseased bodies of the others, biting and tearing them — the impersonators, who in life took on faces and names that were not theirs.
The two raving souls Dante sees are Gianni Schicchi of Florence and Myrrha of Cyprus. Gianni Schicchi was a Florentine of the previous generation who, on the death of the wealthy Buoso Donati, was hidden by Buoso's heir in the dead man's bed; Schicchi impersonated the corpse, dictated a new will to a notary leaving most of the estate to Buoso's nephew (and leaving Schicchi himself a prize mare from the Donati stables), and so cheated the legitimate heirs. The fraud became proverbial in Tuscany; Puccini, six centuries later, would make a one-act comic opera of it. Myrrha was a princess of Cyprus who, in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, fell in love with her own father Cinyras and slept with him by disguising herself as another woman. Both took on a false identity to gain something not theirs.
The bolgia's named counterfeiter is Master Adam, an Englishman or northern Italian who in the 1280s, working for the Conti Guidi of Romena, struck false florins of debased metal that passed in trade until the fraud was discovered. He was burnt at the stake in 1281. Dante shows him on the bolgia floor swollen with the dropsy that the disease of money brings — I saw one made in fashion of a lute, the body so disproportioned by water that he has become a stringed instrument bent the wrong way. His thirst is unrelievable, and he spends his speech remembering the cool brooks of the Casentino valley where he was forged.
The two falsifiers of words who appear with Master Adam are Sinon, the Greek who lied to the Trojans about the wooden horse and persuaded them to drag it inside their walls (the second great Ulyssean fraud after the horse itself), and Potiphar's wife, the unnamed Egyptian noblewoman from Genesis 39 who lied to her husband about the chaste Joseph, accusing him of attempting her after he had fled her advances. Both are placed here for falsifying speech.
What to read for
Notice the quarrel scene. Master Adam and Sinon, propped close to each other on the bolgia floor, fall into a long shouted exchange of insults — each accusing the other of his own particular fraud — and the pilgrim stops to watch. He is, the canto admits, enjoying it. Virgil lets him watch and then quietly rebukes him: For a base wish it is to wish to hear it. The whole Inferno has been training the reader to enjoy the spectacle of the damned. This is the canto in which the Commedia turns and looks back at the reader.
Pay attention to Dante's own response to the rebuke. The shame is described from inside, in one of the canto's most psychologically precise passages. And as he is who dreams of his own harm, / Who dreaming wishes it may be a dream. The lines describe a state every reader will recognise.
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 completed the catalogue of the falsifiers — impersonators raving, counterfeiters bloated with dropsy, perjurers feverish and smoking — and then, in its last twenty lines, did something the Inferno had not done in twenty-nine cantos: it turned and looked at the reader. The pilgrim stood watching a quarrel between Master Adam and Sinon with absorbed pleasure, leaning forward to catch every insult, and Virgil interrupted him. The rebuke was quiet, the shame the pilgrim felt was acute, and the moral question the canto leaves open is the question of every poem that catalogues the suffering of the dead for the entertainment of the living. The Inferno has been training the reader for thirty cantos to enjoy the spectacle. Canto XXX is the canto in which the Commedia admits, for one tercet, that this is exactly what it has been doing.
The classical openings and the modern bolgia
The canto's first eighteen lines are two double similes drawn from Ovid: the madness of Athamas (book IV of the Metamorphoses) and the dog-barking grief of Hecuba on the shores of Thrace (book XIII). Each ancient mad figure is held against the two raving impersonators who run through this bolgia tearing and biting the diseased — and in both pairings the modern Italian damnation is allowed to outdo the classical mythological grief in sheer ugliness. Athamas killed one son and sent his wife and the other to drown; Hecuba lost everything Troy contained and went mad in stages. The two damned souls of the bolgia, by contrast, are not driven mad by loss; they are mad because they took on faces that were not theirs, and the punishment leaves them as identityless beasts.
The two named impersonators are Gianni Schicchi (the Florentine who impersonated the corpse of Buoso Donati to dictate a fraudulent will, and walked off with a prize mare for his pains) and Myrrha (the Cypriot princess who seduced her own father by disguising herself as another woman). The crime is the same — appropriation of an identity not one's own — and the medical punishment is appropriate to it: a soul without a stable face, run mad through the bolgia hunting bodies to wear.
Master Adam, the lute-shaped body
The bolgia's central figure is Master Adam, the counterfeiter of florins for the Conti Guidi, burnt at the stake in 1281. Dante's portrait of him is one of the Inferno's most precise pieces of physical description:
I saw one made in fashion of a lute, If he had only had the groin cut off Just at the point at which a man is forked. The heavy dropsy, that so disproportions The limbs with humors, which it ill concocts, That the face corresponds not to the belly, Compelled him so to hold his lips apart As does the hectic, who because of thirst One tow'rds the chin, the other upward turns. (Inf. XXX.49–57)
The body becomes its own punishment in shape. The counterfeiter's sin was the production of debased coin — metal that had been falsified by being mixed with cheaper alloys until it weighed correctly but did not contain what it claimed. The punishment is dropsy: the body itself swollen with falsified humours, water mistaken for blood, the man bloated by precisely the kind of adulteration he had practised on the coin. And the thirst, which is the dropsical patient's signature, is the Inferno's most cruel small detail. Master Adam, who debased the gold florin that was the currency of medieval Tuscan trade, spends his eternity in the memory of cool water:
The rivulets, that from the verdant hills Of Cassentin descend down into Arno, Making their channels to be cold and moist, Ever before me stand, and not in vain; For far more doth their image dry me up Than the disease which strips my face of flesh. (Inf. XXX.62–67)
Memory itself becomes a torment. The water the counterfeiter once drank fresh in the Casentino is, in damnation, more dehydrating than the disease — because remembering the relief that is no longer available is worse than the original deprivation. It is one of the Commedia's sharpest images of a punishment located not in the flesh but in the imagination.
The quarrel and the rebuke
The canto's most consequential passage is its quietest. Master Adam, propped on the bolgia floor, falls into an exchange of insults with Sinon — the Greek perjurer who lied to the Trojans about the wooden horse. Master Adam reproaches Sinon for his Greek lies; Sinon reproaches Master Adam for the false florins; each strikes at the other (Sinon by punching the swollen belly, Master Adam by hitting Sinon in the burning face); the insults sharpen; the canto gives the quarrel forty lines of unbroken back-and-forth. And the pilgrim leans in to listen, absorbed. Then Virgil speaks:
In listening to them was I wholly fixed, When said the Master to me: Now just look, For little wants it that I quarrel with thee. When him I heard in anger speak to me, I turned me round towards him with such shame That still it eddies through my memory. And as he is who dreams of his own harm, Who dreaming wishes it may be a dream, So that he craves what is, as if it were not; Such I became, not having power to speak, For to excuse myself I wished, and still Excused myself, and did not think I did it. (Inf. XXX.130–141)
The simile of the dream is one of the most precise psychological notations in the Inferno. The dreamer who fears that what is happening may be real, and at the same time longs for it to be a dream, craves what is, as if it were not — the verb-tense gymnastics of shame at its sharpest. The pilgrim cannot speak; he wants to excuse himself; he is in the act of excusing himself without knowing he is doing it. And then the rebuke, in three of the Commedia's most quietly moral lines:
Less shame doth wash away a greater fault, The Master said, than this of thine has been; Therefore thyself disburden of all sadness, And make account that I am aye beside thee, If e'er it come to pass that fortune bring thee Where there are people in a like dispute; For a base wish it is to wish to hear it. (Inf. XXX.142–148)
Ché voler ciò udire è bassa voglia. The wish to hear the quarrel is itself a base wish. The Inferno has been training its reader for thirty cantos to enjoy the spectacle of the damned trading insults, and here Virgil interrupts the training. The canto's ethical sentence is delivered against the pilgrim — and, by clear implication, against any reader who has been enjoying the canto the way the pilgrim was enjoying the quarrel. The Commedia is willing, just once, to turn the moral instrument it has built on its own audience.
Why this rebuke matters
The pilgrim's shame at the end of canto XXX is the inverse of his pity at the end of canto V. There, after Francesca's speech, he had wept and fainted; the Inferno taught him that pity for the damned could be a snare. Here, after Master Adam and Sinon, he has been amused; the Inferno teaches him that amusement at the damned is also a snare, and a baser one. Between the two cantos the Commedia has built the architecture of a moral education that the reader is meant to take with him out of the poem. The damned are not entertainment. They are not pity-objects either. What they are — and the canto leaves the question open for the climbs of Purgatory and Paradise to address — is something more difficult to specify than either response captures.
Famous and meaningful passages
The Athamas opening.
'Twas at the time when Juno was enraged, For Semele, against the Theban blood, As she already more than once had shown, So reft of reason Athamas became, That, seeing his own wife with children twain Walking encumbered upon either hand, He cried: Spread out the nets, that I may take The lioness and her whelps upon the passage; And then extended his unpitying claws, Seizing the first, who had the name Learchus, And whirled him round, and dashed him on a rock; And she, with the other burthen, drowned herself. (Inf. XXX.1–12)
The classical madness in twelve lines. The simile is the canto's first invitation to compare ancient grief and modern fraud — and to find the modern fraud worse.
Master Adam as lute.
I saw one made in fashion of a lute, If he had only had the groin cut off Just at the point at which a man is forked. The heavy dropsy, that so disproportions The limbs with humors, which it ill concocts, That the face corresponds not to the belly, Compelled him so to hold his lips apart As does the hectic, who because of thirst One tow'rds the chin, the other upward turns. (Inf. XXX.49–57)
The face corresponds not to the belly — che 'l viso non risponde a la ventraia. The body has become two unrelated objects. The image is anatomy carried into typography.
The two perjurers.
I found them here, replied he, when I rained Into this chasm, and since they have not turned, Nor do I think they will for evermore. One the false woman is who accused Joseph, The other the false Sinon, Greek of Troy; From acute fever they send forth such reek. (Inf. XXX.94–99)
The biblical perjurer and the classical perjurer share the same fever. The bolgia of the falsifiers is one of the few in the Inferno to draw equally from sacred and secular history.
The rebuke and the dream.
In listening to them was I wholly fixed, When said the Master to me: Now just look, For little wants it that I quarrel with thee. When him I heard in anger speak to me, I turned me round towards him with such shame That still it eddies through my memory. And as he is who dreams of his own harm, Who dreaming wishes it may be a dream, So that he craves what is, as if it were not. (Inf. XXX.130–138)
The dream simile is one of the Inferno's most precise psychological notations. He craves what is, as if it were not — brama quel ch'elli è, come non fosse. The shame is exact because the desire to undo what one has just done is exact.
The lesson.
Less shame doth wash away a greater fault, The Master said, than this of thine has been; Therefore thyself disburden of all sadness, And make account that I am aye beside thee, If e'er it come to pass that fortune bring thee Where there are people in a like dispute; For a base wish it is to wish to hear it. (Inf. XXX.142–148)
Ché voler ciò udire è bassa voglia. The single sentence in the Inferno that names the reader's appetite for damnation and calls it base.
What to watch for
Watch how the canto changes the temperature of the reading. From this point on, the pilgrim is more circumspect about the souls he attends to — he will speak less, ask less, gaze less. The lesson is not announced again, but it is observed. By the bottom of Hell, in the ninth circle, the pilgrim's reactions will be sober rather than absorbed.
Watch the architecture. Malebolge ends with this canto. The next canto opens on the wall of the ninth circle and on the giants — the transitional figures who guard the edge of Cocytus. The bolge are behind; the frozen lake is ahead. The geography is sliding toward the bottom.
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.