Paradiso · Canto XVII ·
Paradiso XVII — The Road of Others
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 84 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XVII
Before reading
This is the canto the Commedia has been moving toward for ninety cantos. Three earlier prophecies — Ciacco's in Inferno VI, Farinata's in Inferno X, Brunetto's in Inferno XV — told the pilgrim, in fragments and obliquely, that he would be exiled from Florence. Now, in Heaven, with his own great-great-grandfather, the prophecy will be given plainly. It is one of the half-dozen most directly autobiographical canto in any work of literature, and it is the Paradiso's deepest descent into personal grief. Read it slowly. It is short.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is still in the Heaven of Mars, still in front of the descended light of Cacciaguida, still inside the figure of the great cross of warrior-souls. The two cantos before this have set the table — XV with the autobiography of the ancestor, XVI with the catalogue of the lost city. This canto turns the conversation back to the pilgrim. Cacciaguida has not yet said what every previous prophecy was leading to. The pilgrim, finally, asks. He frames the question with the formality the question deserves: what is going to happen to me? And the ancestor, in Heaven, with absolute kindness, answers.
The structural model is again Aeneid VI — Anchises showing Aeneas the future of Rome — but the structural model is also the Old Testament prophets: a man who has been refusing to know is told, by an authority he cannot doubt, what he has been refusing to know. The canto's two-part form follows the prophetic pattern: the disclosure of the suffering, and then the commission. Both halves are necessary. The commission redeems the disclosure — the reason for the suffering, the canto says, is that the suffering produces the man who will write what he has seen.
What it helps to know
Three pieces of information will make the prophecy land. The first is the chronology. The journey is set in the spring of 1300 — Easter week. Dante's actual exile begins in January 1302, when, in his absence in Rome on a diplomatic mission, the Black Guelph coup under Corso Donati (with the connivance of Pope Boniface VIII) seized the city, condemned Dante in absentia first to a heavy fine and then, when he refused to return and pay it, to death by burning. He never re-entered Florence. He died in Ravenna in 1321. The poem is written, in the years after, from inside the exile. The prophecy is therefore a prophecy of something that has already happened to the writer. The poet is putting into the mouth of his ancestor the verdict on his own life.
The second is the politics. The bad and foolish company Cacciaguida names is the White Guelph faction in exile — the men Dante was banished with, who in the years 1302–1304 tried and failed to retake the city by force. Dante eventually broke with them. The poem's lines on the company are the public reckoning of that break.
The third is Can Grande della Scala. The great Lombard whose first hospitality will receive the exiled poet is the lord of Verona, head of the Scaliger house, whose coat of arms bore an eagle perched on a ladder — the holy bird upon the Ladder. Can Grande was perhaps eight years old in 1300, the year of the journey, and around twenty in 1308 when Dante took refuge in his court. The canto names him with the indirect courtesy the medieval poet owed his patron: not by name, only by his coat of arms. The youth Cacciaguida says the pilgrim will see at his side is Can Grande himself, the dedicatee of the Paradiso.
What to read for
Notice the calm. The prophecy is not bitter. Cacciaguida names what will happen with the steadiness of a man who knows the suffering has produced the poem the prophecy is part of. The whole canto is the Commedia's deepest argument that suffering, taken into a work, becomes the work's substance.
Notice the two great line-pairs. Thou shalt leave everything beloved most tenderly — tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta più caramente. Thou shalt prove how savoureth of salt the bread of others — tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui. They are among the most quoted lines in Italian. Let them land.
Notice the commission. After the prophecy of suffering comes the prophecy of work. Make manifest thy vision utterly, and let them scratch wherever is the itch — the writing of the Commedia itself, framed inside the Commedia as a divine commission. The poem is making the case, in front of the reader, for its own existence.
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 pilgrim asked. The ancestor answered. Between the question and the answer the Paradiso's most direct piece of autobiographical writing was delivered: the prophecy of exile that the Inferno had hinted at three times in three different mouths and that the Purgatorio had let pass without making explicit. Cacciaguida laid it out plainly — thou shalt leave everything beloved most tenderly, thou shalt prove how savoureth of salt the bread of others, the going down and up another's stairs, the bad and foolish company — and then, in the canto's structural turn, gave the prophecy a purpose. The suffering would produce the poet who could see what he had seen and write it. The commission — make manifest thy vision utterly — is the Commedia's most direct piece of self-authorisation. The poem you are reading is, the canto says, the commanded outcome of the suffering the canto is describing.
The frame: Phaeton and Clymene
The canto opens with one of the Paradiso's most carefully chosen mythological allusions. Phaeton, the half-mortal son of the sun-god Helios, came to his mother Clymene to ask if Helios was really his father. The answer was yes; Phaeton then asked his father for one day of driving the sun-chariot; the sun-chariot, mishandled, scorched the earth, and Zeus killed Phaeton with a thunderbolt to save the world. The whole myth is in the canto's first three lines, telescoped into a single allusion. The pilgrim is being compared to Phaeton — a son going to his ancestor to ask the dangerous question — and the comparison is two-edged. Phaeton's question got him killed. The implication is that the question the pilgrim is about to ask might destroy him too; the prophecy that follows almost does. But the pilgrim survives where Phaeton did not, because — and this is the canto's quiet doctrine — the prophecy ends in a commission, not in a thunderbolt. The suffering is given a use; Phaeton's was not.
The allusion is the canto's first piece of self-knowledge. Dante knows the question he is asking; he knows it could undo him; he asks it anyway. The whole prophecy is licensed by the asking.
The disclosure
Cacciaguida does not soften. The conditional clauses of the earlier prophecies — Ciacco's thou shalt come, Farinata's thou shalt know how heavy is that art, Brunetto's thou shalt see thy fortune do thee such honour — are replaced by the simple future indicative. Thou shalt abandon every thing beloved most tenderly. The lover, the friends, the city, the language, the daily habit of the streets — all of these will go; this is the arrow which the bow of banishment shoots forth first. Then the more particular humiliations. Thou shalt prove how savoureth of salt the bread of others — Florentine bread was unsalted, the bread of other cities was salted, and the exile's tongue would know every meal it was eating someone else's. How hard a road the going down and up another's stairs — the stairs of patrons' houses, which the welcomed guest does not own. The two figures — bread and stairs — pin the exile to the body. It is not the abstraction of homelessness; it is the daily taste of a foreign loaf and the daily climb of someone else's steps.
The third blow is the company. The bad and foolish faction Dante was exiled with — the White Guelphs who in 1302–1304 tried and failed to retake Florence by force — turned, in Cacciaguida's account, all ingrate, all mad and impious against the man their own folly had ruined. Dante eventually broke with them; the historical record suggests the break was bitter and the responsibility distributed; the canto puts the public version on record. They, and not thou, shall have the forehead scarlet — they, not you, will have to blush for what happened. The line is one of the Commedia's rare pieces of pure self-defence.
The first hospitality
Then the kindness. The first house that will take the exile in will be the house of the great Lombard — Bartolommeo della Scala, lord of Verona — who upon the Ladder bears the holy bird. The Scaliger arms were an eagle perched on a ladder; scala itself means ladder. Cacciaguida names the patron by his coat of arms in the indirect courtesy a poet owed his benefactor. And then he names the patron's younger brother, the youth at his side — Can Grande della Scala, who would inherit the lordship and who would receive Dante for the longest of his exile's years. Can Grande was eight or nine in the year of the journey; the Paradiso is written as if the prophecy is reaching across a decade to greet a man who will, by the time the cantica is published, be Dante's settled host. The whole tercet about Can Grande — one who at his birth had so set on him this strong star, that of his deeds notable shall be the report — is the most direct gratitude one poet ever recorded toward a patron, and the cantica that contains it is dedicated to him.
The commission
Then the turn. The pilgrim, having heard the prophecy, asks the natural question — what should I do with what I have learned? If he writes plainly what he has seen in Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, he will offend half the people in the poem; if he writes obliquely, he loses his readers. Cacciaguida's answer is the canto's, and the Commedia's, single most direct piece of self-justifying speech:
Make manifest thy vision utterly, And let them scratch wherever is the itch. (Par. XVII.128–129)
Make manifest thy whole vision. Let them scratch wherever is the itch. The poet is to hide nothing, to spare no one; the readers who are scratched by what he writes will scratch themselves, and the scratching is their problem. The image — grattisi pur dove è la rogna — is rough and deliberate; it descends, in mid-canto, from the high mythological frame of Phaeton to the level of the medieval scratch of irritation. The drop in register is the canto's signature gesture. The commission to write the Commedia is given in the language of the village, not of the schools.
The canto's defence of the practice follows. The voice that says only easy things is not heard. The voice that says hard things is the wind that strikes the highest summits — and that is no slight argument of honour. The poem is justifying its own willingness to put real people in real Hells. The argument is not that the writer is right about everyone (the Paradiso will, in fact, contradict the Inferno in at least one stunning case — the pagan Trajan and the pagan Rhipeus in canto XX). The argument is that the writer must write what he has seen, even when what he has seen is unwelcome, because that is what the visionary owes the vision.
Why the prophecy is in the Paradiso
The deepest fact about canto XVII is its placement. The prophecy could have been delivered anywhere — by Virgil at the start of the Inferno, by Beatrice at the top of the mountain in Purgatorio. It is delivered, instead, in the middle of Paradiso, by an ancestor in Heaven, after the elegy for the lost city and the catalogue of the lost families. The placement is the prophecy's argument. The exile, the bread, the stairs, the bad and foolish company — these are not delivered as wounds the pilgrim is to brace himself against. They are delivered as the substance of a vocation. The man who has lost the city is the man who can see what the city is. The man who has eaten the bread of others is the man who can write the bread of his own. The Paradiso is in this sense the canto's vindication: the exile was the precondition of the vision, and the vision is the reason the exile was endurable. The poem is not saying that suffering is good. It is saying that this suffering produced this poem, and that the producing was the suffering's only meaning.
Famous and meaningful passages
The mythological frame.
As came to Clymene, to be made certain Of that which he had heard against himself, He who makes fathers chary still to children, (Par. XVII.1–3)
Phaeton compressed into a single periphrasis — he who makes fathers chary still to children, the cautionary tale every father since has remembered. The pilgrim is the new Phaeton; the question is asked at the same cost.
The arrow.
Thou shalt abandon everything beloved Most tenderly, and this the arrow is Which first the bow of banishment shoots forth. (Par. XVII.55–57)
Ogne cosa diletta più caramente — everything beloved most tenderly. The single line that has carried the exile of Dante through seven centuries of readers.
The bread and the stairs.
Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt The bread of others, and how hard a road The going down and up another's stairs. (Par. XVII.58–60)
The two figures of daily life under exile. Sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui. The taste is the whole grief.
The company.
And that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders Will be the bad and foolish company With which into this valley thou shalt fall, (Par. XVII.61–63)
Dante's most public reckoning with the White Guelphs of the failed return.
The self-defence.
For all ingrate, all mad and impious Will they become against thee; but soon after They, and not thou, shall have the forehead scarlet. (Par. XVII.64–66)
The blushing forehead they will wear, not you. The poem putting the verdict on record while the historical witnesses are still alive.
The first refuge.
Thine earliest refuge and thine earliest inn Shall be the mighty Lombard's courtesy, Who on the Ladder bears the holy bird, (Par. XVII.70–72)
The Scaliger arms named, the patron honoured indirectly, the gratitude registered through heraldry.
Can Grande.
Who such benign regard shall have for thee That 'twixt you twain, in doing and in asking, That shall be first which is with others last. (Par. XVII.73–75)
The reversal of the gift-economy: the patron will give before the poet asks. The closest thing in medieval poetry to a private letter of thanks written out loud.
The commission.
Make manifest thy vision utterly, And let them scratch wherever is the itch. (Par. XVII.128–129)
The two-line authorisation of the Commedia itself, given by an ancestor in Heaven to a poet in exile.
The wind on the summits.
This cry of thine shall do as doth the wind, Which smiteth most the most exalted summits, And that is no slight argument of honour. (Par. XVII.133–135)
The doctrine of why the writer must name names. The wind reaches the tallest things; that is what it is for; the tall things will know they have been touched.
The closing tercet.
Because the spirit of the hearer rests not, Nor doth confirm its faith by an example Which has the root of it unknown and hidden, Or other reason that is not apparent. (Par. XVII.139–142)
Four lines where the grammar of the canto would expect three. The orphaned-fourth-line ending again — the structural signature of the Cacciaguida cantos. The reader's mind cannot rest on a hidden example; that is why the poet must speak. The line trails into the silence of the next canto without quite finishing.
What to watch for
Watch the figure of witness. The commission to make manifest thy vision utterly is the Paradiso's framing of itself as testimony, and the next several cantos will mount a steady argument that what the poem says about specific people is the verdict of Heaven. The eagle of Jupiter in cantos XVIII–XX is the great institutional figure of this testimony: justice with one voice.
Watch Can Grande. The cantica that contains the canto is dedicated to him by the famous Letter to Can Grande (whose Dantean authorship has been disputed but whose function in the cantica is plain). The whole Paradiso is in some sense a long thank-you letter to the patron whose hospitality made the writing possible.
Watch the next ascent. The pilgrim leaves the Heaven of Mars and rises to Jupiter, the sphere of just rulers. The reader who has just heard the prophecy of exile will arrive in the heaven where the verdict on the unjust rulers — including the popes who connived at the exile — is delivered in letters of fire across the sky.
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.