Purgatorio · Canto XXII ·
Purgatorio XXII — Three Poets Walking
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 56 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XXII
Before reading
This is the canto in which the secret revealed at the end of XXI gets its full unfolding. Statius is now walking with Dante and Virgil. The fifth angel has erased the fifth P from the pilgrim's forehead with the Beatitude of those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. As they climb toward the sixth terrace, Virgil — who has just learned that the man walking beside him is a poet who counts Virgil as his teacher — asks the question the courtesy of the previous canto had prevented him from asking: how could a man of Statius's wisdom have fallen into avarice? The answer Statius gives reorganises everything the reader had assumed about him, and contains the canto's most consequential revelation: he was converted to Christianity by reading Virgil's Fourth Eclogue.
Where the canto sits
The canto opens at the gate of the fifth terrace and closes at the foot of a strange tree growing on the sixth. Between those two boundaries, the three poets walk together through one of the Purgatorio's most relaxed passages — a literary conversation in motion. Statius does almost all of the talking. Virgil asks; Statius answers; Dante listens. The canto is, in form, the calmest in the cantica's upper mountain, a piece of pure poetic friendship-talk between three writers between two penances.
What it helps to know
The reversal Statius reveals comes in three stages.
First, he was not on the terrace of avarice for avarice. He was on it for prodigality — the opposite sin, which the Purgatorio's economy treats as a co-tenant of the same purgation. The doctrine is one of Dante's structural cleverness: many of the sins are organised in pairs of excess and defect, and the same penance cures both. Avarice (too tight) and prodigality (too loose) are both disorders of the love of money; both lie face-down on the same pavement; both rise when their measure has been recovered. Statius confesses, with a small piece of poetic wit, that he had to be cured of being too generous — and credits Virgil's own line from the Aeneid with rebuking him: Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? — to what dost thou not drive the appetite of mortals, O cursed hunger of gold? Statius read the line and, properly understood, applied it to himself as a warning against every disorder around money, including its loose expenditure.
Second, he was a Christian. The historical Statius died around AD 96 a pagan, and Dante's invention here is one of his most consequential. The mechanism Dante gives is precise. Statius lived under the Emperor Domitian (reigned AD 81–96), during whose late reign Christians were persecuted; he met and admired the persecuted Christians; he was drawn to their faith; he was baptised in secret; but he never publicly confessed his Christianity and continued to pose as a pagan to escape Domitian's persecution. He died a secret Christian, and for his secrecy — for the cowardice of remaining hidden — he spent more than four hundred years on the terrace of sloth before reaching the terrace of avarice/prodigality. The portrait is one of medieval Christianity's most generous: a man who never publicly believed is treated by the Commedia as saved, though his secret faith cost him an extra cantica's worth of penance.
Third, the mechanism of his conversion was Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. The Fourth Eclogue, written in 40 BC for Asinius Pollio, prophesies the birth of a child who will bring back the Golden Age — iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto, now returns the Virgin, the Saturnian reigns return, now a new offspring is sent down from high heaven. The poem was almost certainly Virgil's celebration of an expected Roman child of political importance. Medieval Christians, beginning with Constantine in the fourth century, read it as a Sibylline prophecy of the coming of Christ — the Virgo as the Virgin Mary, the new offspring as the Christ child. Statius, reading Virgil, hears the prophecy, finds it confirmed by what the early Christians are saying around him, and is brought to faith.
The line Statius will deliver — per te poeta fui, per te cristiano, through you I was a poet, through you a Christian — is the Commedia's most consequential single tribute to the salvific power of pagan literature. It is also, by deliberate cruelty, addressed to a man who is himself damned. Virgil, who saved Statius without knowing it, did not save himself. The deepest irony of the Comedy is staged here.
What to read for
Notice the form of the canto. It is structured as a correction of error — Virgil's wrong assumption about Statius's sin, then his wrong assumption that Statius is a pagan. Each correction is delivered by Statius with maximum tact, and each is, in fact, a small gift to Virgil: you were wrong about the sin, and you were also the cause of my conversion. The canto is a piece of poetic conversation in which every turn deepens the unspoken bond between the speakers.
Notice the catalogue of pagans Statius asks Virgil about. Where are Terence, Caecilius, Plautus, Varius? Virgil names them all and adds Persius and Homer; he names also the Greek tragedians and the women of the Thebaid by name. The exchange is the Commedia's longest literary roll-call, and it is delivered as two writers swapping favourite authors on a walk.
Notice the strange tree at the canto's close. The terrace of gluttony, which the pilgrim is about to enter, is signalled by a tree that grows upside-down — its trunk widest at the top, tapering downward, so no one can climb it. From its leaves a voice cries the canto's first example of temperance: Mary at Cana, who thought of making the marriage feast honourable rather than of her own mouth. The terrace of gluttony, like the terrace of envy, will be taught by voices in the air and by a fragrance that is also a torment. Pay attention to the direction of the tree — Purgatorial things go in the opposite direction from earthly things.
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 walked the three poets up the stair between the fifth and sixth terraces and let the secret of Statius unfold in two steps. First, Statius corrected Virgil's natural assumption that his sin had been avarice: it had been the opposite, prodigality, the loose expenditure that the same penance cures. Statius credited Virgil's own line from the Aeneid — Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? — as the rebuke that had set him right. Second, and far more consequentially, Statius revealed that he had been a Christian. The mechanism was Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, the prophecy of the coming child that medieval Christianity had read for a thousand years as a Sibylline prefiguring of Christ. Statius had read it, had been brought to faith by it, had been baptised in secret, had remained a secret Christian out of fear under Domitian's persecution, and had paid for that cowardice with more than four hundred years on the terrace of sloth before reaching the terrace of avarice/prodigality. The canto's keystone line — per te poeta fui, per te cristiano — was delivered to Virgil himself: through you I was a poet, through you a Christian. The exchange that followed was a long literary roll-call in which Virgil named the great Latin and Greek poets and the women of Statius's own Thebaid by name. The canto closed at the foot of a tree growing upside-down, fragrant fruit unreachable in its high canopy, and a voice from within the leaves crying out the canto's first example of temperance — Mary at the wedding at Cana, who cared more for the honour of the feast than for her own mouth. The terrace of gluttony had begun.
The structural cleverness of the avarice/prodigality pairing
Dante's mountain is built with a number of structural elegancies, and one of the most beautiful is the way several of the terraces hold two sins at once. The terrace of pride was a single penance, but the terraces of avarice, gluttony, and lust each hold a pair of opposed disorders that share the same penance. Avarice and prodigality are both disorders of the love of money — the one too tight, the other too loose — and both lie face-down on the same pavement to be cured of immoderation in either direction. The doctrine refines the Inferno's own pairing of the hoarders and the spendthrifts in circle four, where they roll boulders against each other for eternity. The Purgatorio's version is gentler: both groups recover their proper measure on the same stone floor.
Statius's confession that he was on the terrace for prodigality is one of the canto's small pleasures. The man Dante is meeting is not the miser he might have been; he is the open hand whose generosity ran past the measure that prudence would have set. The medieval reader, who knew the Thebaid's lavish descriptions of feasts and triumphs, would have found the confession plausible. The poem rewards Statius for the gift of his self-correction by attributing the moment of insight to Virgil's own line. Why dost thou not, O cursed hunger of gold, control the appetite of mortals? Statius reports that he heard the line as if Virgil were rebuking every disorder around money, not only the obvious one. The line had been written by Virgil to denounce a murder for gold (the killing of Polydorus in Aeneid III); Statius, reading it broadly, applied it to himself. The interpretive generosity is one of the canto's small models of how a great line of poetry can save someone its writer never imagined.
The conversion mechanism and the depth of the irony
The Christian conversion of Statius is the Commedia's most consequential historical invention. The historical Statius was a pagan who died around AD 96 with no record of any Christian commitment. Dante makes him a Christian for one reason: to dramatise the doctrine that pagan literature can be a vehicle of grace even when its author does not know it. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, written in 40 BC almost certainly for a child of political significance, became in the fourth century AD a Christian text — a Sibylline prophecy of the birth of Christ. The line iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto — now a new offspring is sent down from high heaven — was quoted by Constantine, by Augustine, by Dante himself in the Convivio, as evidence that even the pagan Virgil had been used by Providence as a prophet without his own knowledge.
Statius reports the mechanism precisely. He read the Fourth Eclogue; the prophecy of the novus ordo saeculorum struck him as describing what the new Christian preachers around him were declaring fulfilled; the alignment was enough to bring him to faith. Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano — through you I was a poet, through you a Christian. Statius offers Virgil the canto's most beautiful tribute: he owes both his vocation and his salvation to a man he never met.
The depth of the irony is the canto's centre. Virgil himself is damned. He saved Statius without knowing it; he could not save himself; he resides in Limbo, where Dante left him in Inferno IV, permanently barred from the heaven he prefigured. The Fourth Eclogue, in Dante's logic, was given to Virgil by Providence as a vehicle — a prophecy he wrote without understanding — and it functioned exactly as such a vehicle should: it brought a reader to faith. The writer remained outside the city the writing helped build.
There is an additional small detail the canto hints at and does not quite say. Statius compares Virgil, in the most poignant simile of the canto, to one who walks at night carrying a lantern behind him — illuminating the path for those who follow without illuminating his own. The image works only if the lantern is behind. Virgil's Aeneid, the Eclogues, every great pagan text of the late Republic and the Augustan age, became Christian after Virgil's death, by being read by Christians who could find in them what the author had not put there knowingly. The lantern shines forward; the man carrying it sees only the dark behind. The simile is one of the Commedia's most heartbreaking small images of the dignity and the limit of pagan virtue.
The literary roll-call
The canto then permits itself one of the Commedia's most relaxed passages. Statius, having delivered his great revelation, asks Virgil about the other Latin poets of the Republic and early Empire — where are Terence, Plautus, Caecilius, Varius? Virgil names them. He names also Persius. He names Homer. He names the Greek tragedians Euripides, Antiphon, Simonides, Agathon. He even names some of the women of Statius's own Thebaid — Antigone, Argia, Ismene, Hypsipyle, Manto, Deidamia. The list is the longest sustained literary roll-call in the Commedia, and it is delivered as two writers walking up a mountain comparing notes on their bookshelves. The whole passage is one of the cantica's quietest pleasures: the high doctrine has been delivered, and now the poets are simply talking shop.
The upside-down tree and the start of gluttony
The canto closes at the threshold of the sixth terrace, which is signalled by a tree growing in the opposite direction from earthly trees: narrow at the ground, broad at the canopy. The fruit hangs visibly but is unreachable. From within the leaves a voice cries the canto's first example of temperance — Mary at the wedding at Cana, who thought more of making the marriage feast complete and honourable than of her own mouth. The Marian example is exact: at Cana, Mary was the one who noticed that the wine had run out and arranged the miracle; her concern was for the guests' enjoyment, not for her own consumption.
The tree's inverted growth carries the canto's deepest small image. On earth, trees grow upward toward the sun, and their fruit hangs at climbable height. On Purgatory's terrace of gluttony, the tree grows away from the eaters, and the fruit is suspended where no hand can reach it. The penitents on this terrace, the next canto will reveal, are emaciated to the point of skeletal — the fragrance of the fruit and the falling spray of the nectar fall on bodies that cannot consume. The penance is the inverse of the sin: those who ate too much in life will not even smell the fruit without yearning it cannot satisfy.
Famous and meaningful passages
The Beatitude of the just.
And those who have in justice their desire Had said to us, Beati, in their voices, With sitio, and without more ended it. (Purg. XXII.5–7)
The angel of avarice sings the fourth Beatitude — blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. The hymn is given in two Latin fragments: Beati and sitio, I thirst. The Beatitude that answers avarice is the thirst for justice, the disorder that pulls the will away from money and toward the higher good.
Virgil's question.
How was it possible within thy breast For avarice to find place, mid so much wisdom As thou wast filled with by thy diligence? (Purg. XXII.22–24)
The courteous question that opens the canto's main movement. Virgil cannot understand how a wise man could be a miser. The premise is wrong — Statius was not a miser — and the wrong premise sets up the canto's first revelation.
The correction.
Therefore know thou, that avarice was removed Too far from me; and this extravagance Thousands of lunar periods have punished. (Purg. XXII.34–36)
Statius's correction. Avarice was too far from me; it was the opposite sin that I am here to purge. The structural pairing of avarice and prodigality on the same terrace is announced.
Virgil's line, read by Statius.
To what impellest thou not, O cursed hunger Of gold, the appetite of mortal men? (Purg. XXII.40–41)
The line from Aeneid III.56–57 in Latin in Statius's mouth: Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? The line was Virgil's denunciation of the Thracian king Polymestor's murder of Polydorus; Statius read it as a rebuke of every disorder around money. The interpretive generosity is the model of how great poetry saves its readers from sins its author never imagined.
The Fourth Eclogue prophecy.
The age renews itself, Justice returns, and man's primeval time, And a new progeny descends from heaven. (Purg. XXII.70–72)
The prophecy that converted Statius. Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in Italian and Latin. The lines that medieval Christianity read as a Sibylline prefiguring of Christ.
The line on which the canto rests.
Through thee I Poet was, through thee a Christian. (Purg. XXII.73)
Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano. Six Italian words. The most consequential tribute in the Commedia. The line is delivered to a man who is himself damned, who saved Statius without knowing it, and who can never receive the salvation his own writing gave away.
The hidden Christians.
Then they became so holy in my sight, That, when Domitian persecuted them, Not without tears of mine were their laments. (Purg. XXII.82–84, paraphrased)
Statius's account of his secret Christianity. He wept for the persecuted but did not declare himself; the cowardice cost him four hundred years on sloth. The canto reports the failure without softening it.
The Marian example at the tree.
More thoughtful Mary was of making The marriage feast complete and honourable, Than of her mouth which now for you responds. (Purg. XXII.142–144)
The first example of temperance, from within the canopy of the inverted tree. Mary at Cana, John 2 — the wedding at which she noticed the wine had run out and arranged the miracle. Her mouth speaks for her now, paradoxically, to recommend not the satisfaction of the mouth.
The Golden Age.
The primal age was beautiful as gold; Acorns it made with hunger savorous, And nectar every rivulet with thirst. (Purg. XXII.148–150)
The canto's third example of temperance, from the leaves of the tree. The pagan Golden Age of Saturn, when acorns satisfied hunger and rivulet-water satisfied thirst. The most Virgilian image in the canto — and the most pointed, given that Virgil's own Fourth Eclogue had prophesied the return of the Saturnian age.
The Baptist's diet.
Honey and locusts were the aliments That fed the Baptist in the wilderness; Whence he is glorious, and so magnified… (Purg. XXII.151–153)
The fourth example, from Matthew 3:4. John the Baptist's wilderness fare, and his consequent glory. The terrace of gluttony's first examples are Christian, classical, and Baptist — the same equipoise that has organised every terrace.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto reveal the penitents. XXIII will show the gluttonous as men whose skin is drawn over their bones so that they read as letters of the alphabet on their own faces — the OMO (man) spelled out by the brow-and-cheek-bones of starvation. Dante will recognise an old friend, Forese Donati, in one of them. The terrace of gluttony will give the Commedia's most physical pictures of the body wasted.
Watch Statius continue. He will walk with the pilgrim and Virgil for the next five cantos, all the way to the summit. Pay attention to which doctrinal questions are now assigned to Statius and which remain with Virgil. The Christian poet will be given the questions about Christian doctrine; the pagan poet will be given the questions about poetics and natural reason.
Watch Virgil's lantern image return. The simile of the man who illuminates the path for those who follow without illuminating his own way will, in the cantica's structural memory, prepare the deepest grief of the Purgatorio: Virgil's silent disappearance at the top of the mountain. The lantern has been carried as far as it can be. The light is for the man behind.
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.