Inferno — Canto IV

A heavy thunder broke the deep stupor in my head,
and I jolted upright,
like a man yanked awake against his will. Picked up directly from the end of Canto III. Dante had fainted at the edge of the river Acheron at the close of the previous canto, and so we never saw how he was carried across the river of the dead. The opening of Canto IV picks up exactly there — but the awakening is no relief. He is now on the other side of the Acheron, with the entire descent ahead of him. The thunder that wakes him is the sound of Hell itself.

I rose to my feet, and with eyes that had been resting
I looked all around me, gazing carefully,
trying to figure out where I was.

The truth is, I was standing at the very edge
of the abyss — the valley of grief —
where the thunder of countless wailing voices is gathered.

It was dark, deep, and hazy —
so that no matter how hard I stared,
I could make out nothing at all in its depths.

"Now let's go down into the blind world,"
began the Poet — and he had gone deathly pale.
"I'll go first; you follow." The master goes pale. One of the most surprising moments in the poem so far. Virgil — the supremely confident guide who took Dante's hesitation apart through all of Canto II — has himself gone deathly white at the prospect of going down into Limbo. Dante notices, and presses him on it (next tercet). It turns out, two tercets from now, that the pallor is not fear: it is pity, for the souls Virgil is about to walk among. He belongs to those souls. Going home, for him, means returning to the place he has not been allowed to leave.

And I, having seen the color drain from his face,
said: "How can I come along if you yourself are afraid —
you, who are usually the one who calms my fears?"

And he answered me: "The anguish of the people
who are down there is showing in my face —
what you took for terror is pity.

Let's go on — the long road is pressing us forward."
And so he went in, and brought me in with him,
into the first circle, the one that rings the abyss.

There — as far as I could tell from listening —
there were no lamentations, only sighs,
and the eternal air trembled with them.

This came from sorrow without torment —
the sorrow of the great crowds gathered here,
crowds of infants, and women, and men.

My good master said to me: "Aren't you going to ask
who these spirits are that you're seeing?
Before you go any farther, I want you to know:

they did not sin; and even if they had merits,
that wasn't enough, because they had no baptism —
and baptism is the gateway to the Faith you hold.

And if they lived before Christ came,
they didn't worship God in the right way.
I am one of them. The line that opens the canto. Virgil has just explained why the souls here are here — they were not baptized, or they lived before Christ. Then, almost in passing: "And among such as these am I myself." The poem's guide, the man whose voice we have been listening to since Canto I, lives here. Permanently. He gets to walk Dante through Hell and Purgatory, but he cannot follow him into Heaven, and he cannot leave this circle when the trip is over. Every tender touch we will see Virgil offer Dante across the next thirty cantos has to be read against this fact. The canto's whole emotional register tilts on this single line.

For such failings — and for no other fault —
we are lost; and our only punishment
is that we live in desire forever, without hope." "Without hope we live in desire." The original Italian — "sanza speme vivemo in disio" — is one of the most quoted lines in Inferno. The souls in Limbo are not tortured. There is no fire here, no devil, no infernal weather. Their punishment is purely interior: an eternal yearning for a God they will never reach, with no hope of reaching him. Dante is careful to mark this as the lightest punishment in Hell — but emotionally it may be the heaviest, because it falls on people who did nothing wrong. The doctrine he is reporting is the orthodox medieval one (no baptism = no salvation), but the poetry registers a deep moral discomfort with it. The whole circle is the poem's quiet protest against its own theology.

Great grief seized my heart when I heard this,
because I knew people of real worth
who were held in suspension here in Limbo.

"Tell me, master — tell me, my lord," I began,
wanting to be certain
of the Faith that overcomes every error,

"Has anyone ever left this place —
by his own merit, or by another's — and been blessed afterward?"
And he, understanding the question I was hinting at,

answered: "I was a newcomer here
when I saw a Mighty One arrive,
crowned with the sign of victory. The "Mighty One" is Christ; the event is the Harrowing of Hell. Christian tradition (drawn from 1 Peter 3:19 and an apocryphal text called the Gospel of Nicodemus) held that between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, Christ descended into Hell and led out the souls of the righteous Old Testament figures who had been waiting for salvation since their deaths. Until that moment — Virgil tells us in tercet 21 — no human being had ever been saved. Heaven was empty of human souls; everyone who had ever lived virtuously was being held here in Limbo. The Harrowing is the founding moment of Christian salvation as Dante understands it. Virgil, who died in 19 BC, has been here long enough to remember it: he says "I was a novice in this state" when it happened. He had been dead about fifty years. The list that follows — Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, Jacob (Israel), Rachel — is the patriarchs of Genesis and the founding figures of Israel. They were taken up. Virgil was left behind.

From here he drew out the shade of the First Father,
and that of his son Abel, and of Noah,
of Moses the lawgiver, and obedient

Abraham the patriarch, and David the king,
Israel with his father and his children,
and Rachel, for whose sake he did so much,

and many others — and he made them blessed.
And you should know: before them,
no human soul had ever been saved."

We did not stop walking while he was speaking,
but kept moving forward through the forest —
a forest, I should say, of densely crowded shades.

We had not gone very far yet on this side of the summit
when I saw a fire
pushing back a hemisphere of darkness. A pocket of light in Limbo. The first circle of Hell is otherwise dark, but a single fire burns in one quarter of it, illuminating a "hemisphere" of the surrounding darkness. Inside that lit region stands a great seven-walled castle — il nobile castello — with seven gates and a stream running around it. This is Dante's invention: a kind of pagan Elysium tucked inside Limbo, reserved for the noblest of the unbaptized. The seven walls are usually read as the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) — the foundation of medieval education. The castle is, in this reading, the home of natural human reason at its highest pitch: as far as the unaided mind can go without revelation. Limbo's gentle protest against its own theology is loudest here. Heaven is closed to these souls. But Dante has built them a castle.

We were still some distance from it,
but close enough that I could partly make out
that honored souls held that place.

"You who honor every art and science —
who are these whose dignity is so great
that it sets them apart from all the rest?"

And he answered: "The honored name
that still rings of them up there in your living world
earns them grace in Heaven, and that grace lifts them above the rest."

In the meantime a voice reached me:
"All honor to the supreme Poet —
his shade is coming back, the one who left us."

When the voice had finished and silence returned,
I saw four great shades approaching us;
their faces were neither sorrowful nor glad.

My gracious master began to point them out:
"See the one with that sword in his hand,
coming ahead of the other three like their lord —

that's Homer, sovereign of poets.
The next is Horace the satirist,
the third is Ovid, and the last is Lucan. The four greatest pre-Christian poets, by Dante's reckoning. Homer (Greek, ~8th century BC) — author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, whom Dante calls il poeta sovrano, the sovereign poet. (Dante did not actually read Homer; the Homeric epics were not yet available in Latin in his time. He honors him by reputation, through Virgil and Horace.) Horace (65–8 BC) — Roman poet of the Odes, Epistles, and Satires, the great moral satirist of Imperial Rome. Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) — author of the Metamorphoses, the storyteller-poet, source of much of the classical mythology Dante deploys. Lucan (AD 39–65) — author of the Pharsalia, an unfinished epic on the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey. With Virgil, this is Dante's canon of pagan poetry. He is about to do something audacious: place himself among them.

The name that solitary voice spoke
belongs to each of them, and to me as well —
so they do me honor, and they do right to."

And so I saw, gathered together, the noble school
of that supreme lord of song —
the one who soars above the rest like an eagle.

When they had talked together for a while,
they turned to me with gestures of greeting,
and seeing this, my master smiled.

And then they did me an even greater honor —
they made me one of their company —
so that I became the sixth, among such great minds. One of the boldest claims in literature. Dante — a Florentine in political exile, writing in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, with no large public reputation as a poet — declares himself a peer of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. He is il sesto tra cotanto senno: the sixth among such great minds. We are sixty lines into Limbo, and the canto has done two enormous things: it has revealed Virgil's permanent exclusion from Heaven, and it has placed Dante in the line of the great pagan poets. The Comedy from now on will be in part Dante's argument that he has earned this place.

And so we walked together as far as the light,
saying things which it is right to keep silent about here,
just as it was right to say them there.

We came to the foot of a noble castle,
encircled seven times by high walls
and protected all around by a beautiful stream. Seven walls, seven gates. The standard reading is that the seven walls represent the seven liberal arts — the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) — the seven disciplines that fenced and structured medieval education. To enter the castle, a soul has to pass through them all. Some commentators read the walls instead as the seven cardinal virtues (the four classical — prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance — plus the three theological), or as the seven branches of philosophy. The stream is sometimes read as eloquence, the rivulet of fine speech that ran through pre-Christian learning. None of the readings is forced: this is gentle allegory, not a strict puzzle.

We crossed the stream as if it were dry ground,
and through seven gates I entered with those sages,
coming out into a meadow of fresh greenery.

There were people there with solemn, slow-moving eyes,
great authority in their bearing.
They spoke rarely, and softly when they did.

We withdrew off to one side
into a clearing, luminous and high,
from which all of them could be seen.

There opposite us, on the green enamel,
the mighty spirits were pointed out to me —
and I feel exalted just from having seen them.

I saw Electra with many companions,
among whom I recognized Hector and Aeneas,
and Caesar in armor, with falcon eyes. The Trojan-Roman cluster. Dante is showing us the noblest of the unbaptized, organized in three rough waves. The first wave — this tercet and the next — is the legendary lineage of Troy and Rome. Electra, mother of Dardanus and ancestral matriarch of Troy. Hector, prince of Troy and its great defender, killed by Achilles. Aeneas, who fled the burning city to found Italy. Caesar, founder of the empire that would carry Rome forward in history. Dante is drawing a single line of legendary descent from Troy through Aeneas to the Caesars — the genealogy of empire, which for him is a kind of providential history.

I saw Camilla and Penthesilea
on the other side, and I saw King Latinus
sitting with his daughter Lavinia. The Trojan war's other great souls — and a household of Italy's founders. Camilla, the warrior maiden killed leading the Italian resistance to Aeneas (Dante named her once before, in Canto I's Greyhound prophecy). Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, killed in single combat by Achilles at Troy. King Latinus and his daughter Lavinia: she would marry Aeneas and become the matriarch of the Roman line. The whole tableau is taken from Virgil's Aeneid — the poem that has just been described as the work of the man walking beside Dante through Limbo.

I saw the Brutus who drove out Tarquin,
and Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia,
and — alone, apart from the rest — the Saladin. Roman republicans, and a Muslim sultan, alone. Brutus here is Lucius Junius Brutus — the Brutus who in 509 BC drove out the last Roman king, Tarquin the Proud, and founded the Roman Republic. (Not the Marcus Brutus who killed Julius Caesar — Dante puts that Brutus in Lucifer's mouth at the very bottom of Hell.) Lucretia, whose rape by Tarquin's son triggered Brutus's revolt; Julia, Caesar's daughter; Marcia, wife of Cato the Younger; Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi — four legendary Roman matrons.

And then, set apart from everyone: Saladin. Salah al-Din (1138–1193), the Kurdish-Muslim sultan who took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders in 1187. He died only a hundred years before Dante was writing. He is the only post-classical figure in this entire roll call, and the only Muslim — and Dante places him alone, in dignified solitude, neither among the heroes of Troy nor among the philosophers but in a category of his own. It is one of the most generous gestures in the poem: a Muslim conqueror, sworn enemy of Christian Europe, in the noblest precinct of Hell.

When I lifted my eyes a little higher,
I saw the Master of those who know
sitting with his philosophical family. "The Master of those who know" is Aristotle. The phrase — il maestro di color che sanno — is one of the most famous in the whole poem. For medieval Christendom, Aristotle was simply The Philosopher: his works on logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics were the foundation of every European university curriculum. Thomas Aquinas — the dominant Christian theologian of Dante's century — had built his entire synthesis on Aristotle. To put Aristotle here, surrounded by his disciples, is Dante's way of admitting, openly, that Western thought rests on a pagan foundation, and the pagan who laid that foundation cannot enter Heaven. Around him are Socrates and Plato, his great predecessors, standing closer to him than any of the others.

They all look at him; they all give him honor.
There I saw both Socrates and Plato,
standing closer to him than the others.

Democritus, who explains the world by chance,
Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Thales,
Zeno, Empedocles, Heraclitus.

And the good collector of qualities,
known as Dioscorides; and I saw Orpheus,
Cicero, Livy, and Seneca the moralist,

Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy,
Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna,
and Averroes, who wrote the great Commentary. Two Muslim philosophers in the company of the great pagans. Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037) — Persian polymath, author of foundational works in medicine and philosophy. His synthesis of Aristotle with Islamic theology shaped Latin Christian thought through translation. Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) — Andalusian-Muslim philosopher whose long commentaries on Aristotle (il gran comento, the great Commentary, which the line names) were so important to medieval European universities that scholars sometimes simply called him the Commentator. Putting these two figures here — and the Saladin a few tercets back — is Dante quietly demonstrating that the company of natural reason is not a Christian club. The gates of Heaven are closed to all of them. But the gates of the Noble Castle are open.

I cannot describe all of them in full —
the long subject is driving me onward,
and again and again my words fall short of the fact.

The company of six divides into two:
my wise guide leads me down a different path,
out of the quiet, into the trembling air —

and I come to a place where nothing shines. End of Limbo. The journey out of the castle's lit hemisphere is described in a single, devastating line: e vegno in parte ove non è che luca — and I come to a place where nothing shines. Limbo had a fire; the next circle has none. Hell from here on out will be progressively darker, louder, and more violent. The gentle ambivalence of Limbo — its dignified pagans, its quiet conversations, its single illuminating fire — is being left behind. The next canto introduces Minos, judge of the damned, and the storm of the lustful.