Purgatorio · Canto XIV ·
Purgatorio XIV — The Two Shades Leaning
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 48 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XIV
Before reading
This is the second canto of the terrace of envy. Sapia's confession from canto XIII was personal — one woman at one window in one day in 1269. The two souls the pilgrim meets here are doing something larger: they are using the canto to lay out the moral geography of an entire Italian region. The terrace of envy will close, by the end of this canto, having moved from one Sienese rooftop to the catalogue of every town between Falterona and Pisa, and from there to two voices flying overhead that name the original envious of human and pagan myth. The whole shape of the sin is being given to the reader in three steps.
Where the canto sits
The two souls who speak are Guido del Duca (died c. 1249), a Ghibelline gentleman of the Romagna who had served the courts of various noble houses, and Rinieri da Calboli (died 1296), a Guelph leader of Forlì from the great Calboli line. They had been on opposite sides of every faction war in their lifetimes. Here, with their eyes sewn shut and unable to see each other, they sit propped against the same wall, leaning on each other for support — Ghibelline and Guelph united in penance for the sin that had set their factions against each other in life. The composition is the doctrine.
The river the canto anatomises is the Arno, which rises in the Casentino on the slopes of Monte Falterona, runs east to Arezzo, swings west through Florence, and pours into the sea at Pisa. The four towns Guido names along its course — Casentino, Arezzo, Florence, Pisa — get four animals: hogs, curs, wolves, foxes. The descent of the river is the descent of the civic character of Tuscany. The Arno is the spine of everything Dante most loved and most hated.
What it helps to know
The cluster of place-names in Guido's longer lament — the catalogue of the houses of Romagna that were great and are now extinct — would have read, to a fourteenth-century Italian, the way a careful list of vanished farming villages reads to a country reader today. The names are local, particular, and elegiac. Mainardi, Carpigna, Traversaro, Anastagi, Fabbro, Bernardin di Fosco, Guido of Prata, Federigo Tignoso. Dante does not expect every reader to recognise every name; he expects the cumulative effect of so many specific extinct houses to do the work. The Romagna is being catalogued the way an old archaeologist catalogues a buried town.
The prophecy embedded in the canto names Fulcieri da Calboli, Rinieri's grandson, who would in 1303 (after the dramatic date of the poem but before its composition) become podestà of Florence and conduct a bloody political purge of the Whites and Ghibellines — exactly the faction Dante belonged to. Dante was writing this canto in exile, knowing that the grandson of the man weeping silently beside Guido had been the instrument of his own banishment. The grandfather, in penance for envy, is being made to listen as a damning prophecy of his own descendant's bloodshed is delivered. The cruelty of the structural irony is deliberate.
The two voices that fly past at the canto's close are the structural pair to the three voices of XIII. There, the voices carried examples of generosity — the virtue opposite envy. Here they carry the great examples of envy punished: Cain, who killed his brother Abel out of envy of God's favour and was condemned to wander the earth crying that anyone who found him would slay him; and Aglauros, the Athenian princess of Ovid's Metamorphoses II, who envied her sister Herse's beloved Mercury and was turned into a stone before the temple door.
What to read for
Notice the shape of Guido's two great speeches. The first runs down a river, naming a sequence of towns whose moral character deteriorates with the water. The second runs across a region, naming a catalogue of houses that have ceased to be. The canto is laying out envy's geography in two axes at once — vertical (along the river) and horizontal (across the Romagna).
Notice the line that gives the canto its theological key, late in Guido's speech: why do you set your heart where the thing must be denied to partnership. Envy, in Dante's diagnosis, is the result of loving a kind of good that cannot be shared. Earthly goods — money, position, fame — diminish when divided. Heavenly goods grow when shared. The whole Purgatorio's middle cantos circle this distinction.
Notice the silence of Rinieri. He never speaks. Guido speaks for both of them, and the most damaging prophecy of the canto — the one about Rinieri's own grandson — is delivered over Rinieri's silence to a stranger Rinieri cannot see. Pay attention to what cruelties the canto stages without comment.
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 continued the terrace of envy and changed its scale. Where XIII gave envy a single face — Sapia at her window — XIV gave it a region. Two propped shades whose names Italian readers knew as the faces of opposed factions sat leaning into each other, sewn-eyed and silent until one of them named the pilgrim, and then the speaker, Guido del Duca, delivered two of the longest sustained complaints in the Commedia: first the descent of the Arno through Tuscany, town by town, animal by animal; then the catalogue of vanished houses in his own Romagna, name by extinct name. Inside the second speech, almost unmarked, was a prophecy of bloody political violence in Florence to be carried out by the grandson of the man weeping silently at Guido's side. The canto closed with two voices passing overhead — Cain wandering after Abel's murder, Aglauros caught half-stone at the temple door — the two great examples of envy punished. The whole terrace's structural pattern was completed: examples of generosity heard, the sin's penance walked among, examples of the sin punished heard. The terrace had been taught by ear.
What the Arno does
Guido's denunciation of the Arno is one of the Commedia's most savage civic poems. The river is named not at first — Dante uses a streamlet that is born in Falterona — and is identified only by its course, as if naming it would dignify it. As it descends, the moral character of each town is given as an animal. The Casentino in the high valley breeds hogs, fit for acorns rather than human food; Arezzo, the next major town, breeds curs that snarl beyond their strength and whose stream the river turns its muzzle from in disdain; Florence — the city of Dante's birth and exile — breeds wolves, predators worthy of the long maledict and misadventurous ditch the river has by then become; and Pisa, at the mouth, breeds foxes so replete with fraud that no hunter's cunning can master them. Hogs, curs, wolves, foxes: the four-stage descent of the central river of Tuscany into a sequence of beasts, each more dangerous than the last. The diagnosis is not surprising in itself — every Italian moralist of the period was a denouncer of his neighbours — but the form is exact. The river that should water the civilisation of Tuscany has become its sewer, and the people who live along it have stopped being human in proportion to the river's degradation. Geography is destiny when the geography has been poisoned.
The prophecy spoken over Rinieri
The longest single act of cruelty in the canto is structural rather than verbal. Rinieri da Calboli sits next to Guido throughout the canto and never speaks. Guido takes over the speaking for both of them. In the course of his long lament he tells Dante that the Calboli house is extinct in its virtue, and inside that complaint he places a prophecy: I behold thy grandson, who becomes a hunter of those wolves upon the bank of the wild stream, and terrifies them all. The grandson is Fulcieri da Calboli, who would become podestà of Florence in 1303 and would conduct, in that office, the bloody political purge of the White Guelphs — the faction to which Dante belonged and whose persecution drove him into the exile from which he was writing. The prophecy is delivered over the silent Rinieri, who cannot see Dante and cannot know that the future bloodshed of his own grandson is being detailed to a man it will help destroy. Bloody from the wretched wood it comes, leaves it in such case it for a thousand years to nature is restored not. The canto contains, in three tercets, both the announcement of Dante's own exile and the announcement that the man weeping silently in penance for envy is the grandfather of the man who will sign the exile order. The poem does not draw attention to the symmetry; it lets the reader find it.
The diagnosis that the whole terrace was building toward
In the middle of his lament Guido speaks the line that gives the entire terrace of envy its theological key: O human race! why dost thou set thy heart where interdict of partnership must be? The phrase translates a precise scholastic distinction. Earthly goods — wealth, position, fame, victory in a faction war — are by their nature finite and therefore exclusive. The more I have, the less is available for you. The mathematics of the goods is the mathematics of envy: your gain becomes my loss, and so I grieve at your gain. Heavenly goods — love, knowledge, the vision of God — are by their nature infinite and therefore shared without diminishment. The more love is given, the more there is. Envy is the soul's mistake of treating the second kind of good as if it obeyed the rules of the first. Sapia in XIII envied her city's victory because she thought of victory as a finite quantity she had been denied. Guido and Rinieri envied each other's faction because they thought of political honour the same way. The terrace's whole pedagogy is the slow correction of that mathematical mistake.
Cain and Aglauros — the two doors of envy's history
The two voices that fly past at the end of the canto are precisely matched to the two voices that opened the terrace's instruction in XIII. The opening pair were generosity at its most extreme — Pylades dying for Orestes, Christ loving his enemies. The closing pair are envy at its most extreme — Cain killing his brother out of envy of God's favour, Aglauros petrified for envy of her sister's beloved. Scripture and pagan myth again, as in XIII. The two traditions are held in equipoise: the canto refuses to treat the Christian example as more authoritative than the classical one. Both are summoned as voices; both are heard as warnings; neither is given a body. The terrace closes with the pilgrim taking a step backward into Virgil's side, the only physical reaction the voices have provoked. Envy, in this poem, is the sin whose punishment is heard rather than seen — and whose most extreme historical exemplars are not even given the dignity of being shown.
Famous and meaningful passages
The two shades introduce each other.
Who is this one that goes about our mountain, Or ever Death has given him power of flight, And opes his eyes and shuts them at his will? (Purg. XIV.1–3)
The first words of the canto come from sewn-eyed shades who cannot see the pilgrim and ask each other about him. Their bewilderment that a living man's eyes open and close at will is the canto's first picture of how blind they have become.
The Arno not yet named.
Through midst of Tuscany there wanders A streamlet that is born in Falterona, And not a hundred miles of course suffice it. (Purg. XIV.16–18)
Guido refuses to name the Arno. The river is given a source, a length, a region — and no name. The withholding is contempt. The line is one of Dante's quietest acts of authorial scorn.
The hogs.
Mid ugly swine, of acorns worthier Than other food for human use created, It first directeth its impoverished way. (Purg. XIV.43–45)
The Casentino is swine country. The line is one of the Commedia's most savage descriptions of an Italian region, and it is delivered without specifying the human beings the swine stand for. The animal is the people.
The curs.
Curs findeth it thereafter, coming downward, More snarling than their puissance demands, And turns from them disdainfully its muzzle. (Purg. XIV.46–48)
Arezzo, the city of mere bark. More snarling than their puissance demands is the poem's diagnosis of the small Italian commune that is loud beyond its strength.
The wolves.
It goes on falling, and the more it grows, The more it finds the dogs becoming wolves, This maledict and misadventurous ditch. (Purg. XIV.49–51)
Florence is the wolves. The same animal that emblematised the deepest sin of the Inferno — the she-wolf of canto I — has now become the people of Dante's own city. The line is a moment of authorial coldness. The exile is speaking.
The foxes.
Descended then through many a hollow gulf, It finds the foxes so replete with fraud, They fear no cunning that may master them. (Purg. XIV.52–54)
Pisa is the foxes. The descent ends where the river ends — in the most cynical of the four cities. The animal scheme has been complete: hog, dog, wolf, fox. Each more capable of harm than the last.
The prophecy.
Thy grandson I behold, who doth become A hunter of those wolves upon the bank Of the wild stream, and terrifies them all. (Purg. XIV.58–60)
Fulcieri da Calboli. Three lines. Spoken across Rinieri to a man whose exile Fulcieri will help arrange. One of the canto's most quietly devastating moments.
Guido names himself.
Know, then, that I Guido del Duca am. My blood was so with envy set on fire, That if I had beheld a man make merry, Thou wouldst have seen me sprinkled o'er with pallor. (Purg. XIV.81–84)
The classical face of envy: pallor at the sight of another's joy. Livid, the colour of the terrace itself, is the colour of the envious face. The penitent is named in the same breath in which he names the symptom.
The diagnosis.
From my own sowing such the straw I reap! O human race! why dost thou set thy heart Where interdict of partnership must be? (Purg. XIV.85–87)
The line on which the whole terrace rests. Where interdict of partnership must be — dove è mestier di consorte divieto — earthly goods divided shrink, heavenly goods divided grow, and the soul that grieves at another's prosperity has misjudged which kind of good it is dealing with.
Cain.
Shall slay me whosoever findeth me! And fled as the reverberation dies If suddenly the cloud asunder bursts. (Purg. XIV.133–135)
The cry of Cain after he killed Abel and was condemned to wander the earth. Genesis 4:14 in three lines. The simile of the thunderclap that dies into echo is Dante's: the voice is past before the pilgrim has registered what it said.
Aglauros.
I am Aglaurus, who became a stone! And then, to press myself close to the Poet, I backward, and not forward, took a step. (Purg. XIV.139–141)
Aglauros of Athens, sister of Herse, petrified for envy at the threshold of Mercury's temple — Ovid, Metamorphoses II. The single line of her voice; then the pilgrim's small unmistakable physical recoil. The terrace ends on a step backward.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto open with the angel. The terrace of envy will close, like the terrace of pride, with an angel singing a Beatitude that corrects the sin just purged. Pay attention to which Beatitude is given to this terrace; the answer is one of the Purgatorio's most beautiful small theological choices.
Watch the structural rhyme between the terraces. Pride: carvings on wall, carvings on pavement, angel. Envy: voices flying, sewn-eyed penitents, voices flying, angel. Each terrace will run this triple pattern, but with the materials shifted — Wrath will use smoke, Sloth will use running, Avarice will use prostration. The pattern is the deep architecture of the cantica.
Watch the prophecy. Dante's exile, here briefly named through Fulcieri da Calboli's coming violence, will be foretold three more times before the end of Paradiso. The most extended version is Cacciaguida's. The grandson of an envious shade has just predicted, in passing, the calamity that will define the rest of Dante's life — and the prediction is delivered, with the cruelty that is the canto's whole atmosphere, over the silent body of the grandfather.
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.