Inferno — Canto V

So I came down out of the first circle
into the second — a smaller circle,
but with so much more grief that it drives the souls to wail.

There stands Minos, horrible, snarling.
At the entrance he examines each soul's sins,
judges, and dispatches it according to how he girds himself. Minos. In Greek myth, Minos was the king of Crete who ordered Daedalus to build the Labyrinth. Tradition then made him one of the three judges of the underworld, weighing souls after death. Dante reassigns him as the judge at the threshold of Hell proper: every damned soul, before being sent on, comes before Minos and confesses everything (next tercet). Minos then coils his serpent-tail around himself the number of times equal to the circle the soul should be sent down to — twice for the lustful, three times for the gluttonous, and so on — and the soul is hurled down. He is the first of several classical mythological figures Dante will repurpose as Hell's middle management — Charon at the Acheron, Cerberus in Canto VI, the Minotaur, the Furies. None of them are denied; all of them are subordinated to the Christian scheme.

I mean: when a soul born for evil
comes before him, it confesses everything;
and this expert sorter of sins

sees what place in Hell suits the soul,
and wraps his tail around himself as many times
as the number of circles down he wants it sent.

Many always stand before him at once.
One by one they go up to be judged;
they speak, they hear, and then they are hurled downward.

"O you who come to this house of grief,"
Minos said to me, the moment he saw me,
breaking off from the duty of his great office —

"watch how you enter, and whom you trust;
don't let the wide doorway deceive you."
And my guide answered him: "Why are you shouting too?

Don't block his fate-ordained journey.
This is willed where what is willed gets done.
Ask no more questions." The password. Virgil's exact words to Charon at the Acheron in Canto III, repeated here verbatim against Minos: "It is willed where what is willed gets done; ask no further question." The formula will appear again at the gates of the City of Dis in Canto VIII–IX, and elsewhere as needed. It functions as Hell's standardized credential — this comes from God; argue at your own risk. Every gatekeeper objects to the living man on principle. Every gatekeeper, on hearing this, lets him through.

And now the sorrowful sounds began
reaching my ears. Now I had come
to a place where lamentation hammered against me.

I had come into a place silent of all light,
a place that bellows like the sea in a storm
when contrary winds beat against each other.

The hurricane of Hell, which never rests,
drives the spirits forward in its plundering —
whirling them, striking them, abusing them. The contrapasso of lust. Each circle of Hell punishes its sin with a torment that is, in some way, the sin itself made literal — the principle Dante will name in Canto XXVIII as contrapasso. The lustful in life let themselves be swept along by passion against the steadier counsel of reason; in death, they are swept along by an actual storm that never stops. They are still, in a sense, in their passion.

This is the lightest of all the torments in Hell. There is no fire, no devil, no infernal weather worse than wind. Lust, for Dante (following Aristotle and Aquinas), is a sin of incontinence — failure of self-government — not of malice. The structurally sympathetic treatment of these souls runs through the whole canto.

When they reach the cliff edge,
that is where the shrieks and complaints and laments are —
that is where they curse the divine power.

I understood that this kind of torment
had been sentenced to the carnal sinners —
those who let their reason be ruled by appetite.

And the way starlings, in the cold months,
are carried along on their wings in dense crowds —
that's what the wind does to those cursed spirits. Starlings, then cranes. Within four tercets Dante reaches for two of his most famous bird similes. The lustful as starlings in winter — densely packed, swerving in massive flocks, helpless against the wind — captures the anonymity and helplessness of the punished. A few tercets from now they will become cranes chanting in a long line through the air — the same souls re-seen in a more orderly procession, lamenting as they go. The shift from one image to the other tracks Dante's own moving attention: he stops seeing them as a wind-blown swarm and starts noticing individual mourning souls.

It drives them this way and that, up and down —
no hope ever comforts them,
not of rest, not even of milder pain.

And the way cranes go calling their songs,
making a long line of themselves through the air,
that's how I saw approaching — uttering laments —

shades carried onward by that stress I just described.
At which I said: "Master, who are those people
whom the black air so harshly punishes?"

"The first of those you want to know about,"
he said to me,
"was the empress of many languages.

She was so given over to sensual vice
that she made lust legal in her own law,
so as to remove the blame she had drawn on herself.

She is Semiramis, of whom we read
that she succeeded Ninus and was his wife —
she ruled the land that now the Sultan rules. Semiramis. Legendary queen of Assyria. In medieval tradition (largely from the historian Orosius), she succeeded her husband Ninus on the throne of Babylon and ruled an empire that stretched across the territory medieval Europe knew as Egypt and the Near East — i.e., "the land which now the Sultan rules," meaning the Mamluk Sultanate of Dante's day. She was famed for sexual depravity and was said to have legalized incest in her own court so that her own affair with her son would not count as a crime. Dante uses her as the type of lust-as-policy: a regime that enshrines its own appetite as law. She is the first of the famous lustful — emperor-class, ancient, known largely by reputation.

The next is the one who killed herself for love,
breaking faith with the ashes of Sichaeus;
then Cleopatra the voluptuous." "She who killed herself for love" is Dido — queen of Carthage, central character of the Aeneid, who fell in love with Aeneas and killed herself with his sword when he abandoned her to sail on to Italy. Her line in Virgil's poem is one of the most painful in Latin literature. Dante does not name her here; Virgil — Aeneas's poet — does not name her either. Both men know why. "Broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus" means: she had sworn lifelong fidelity to her dead husband Sichaeus, and broke that vow when she loved Aeneas.

Cleopatra needs no introduction — Egyptian queen, famous for her affairs with Caesar and Mark Antony, dead by suicide in 30 BC. Like Dido, a queen who let love unmake her. Both are quietly here, in a circle Virgil himself can only walk through but not leave.

I saw Helen, for whom so many cruel
seasons turned; and I saw the great Achilles,
who in his last hour fought a battle with Love.

I saw Paris, Tristan, and more than a thousand
shades he named and pointed at with his finger —
all of them souls Love had cut off from our life. The roll call of lovers. Helen of Troy — whose face launched the thousand ships, the Trojan war that destroyed a civilization and seeded the line that would found Rome. Achilles — the great Homeric warrior, killed (in medieval tradition) when he was lured to the temple of Apollo by his love for Polyxena, Priam's daughter. "Combated with Love at his last hour" is a beautiful phrasing for being undone by it. Paris — Trojan prince, the lover whose abduction of Helen began the war. Tristan — Cornish knight of the Arthurian cycle, lover of Iseult, killed by King Mark.

The list is deliberately mixed: classical mythology and medieval romance, the founding stories of two whole civilizations of love-and-loss. Dante is suggesting: this circle is the entire history of the love story. And we are about to meet two contemporaries.

After I had listened to my master
naming the ladies and knights of long ago,
pity overwhelmed me — I was nearly lost.

And I began: "Poet — gladly
would I speak with those two who go together,
and seem so weightless on the wind."

And he answered: "Wait until they're
closer to us. Then call to them
by the love that drives them, and they will come."

As soon as the wind swung them toward us,
I lifted my voice: "O weary souls —
come speak to us, if no one forbids it."

Just as doves, called onward by desire,
fly through the air to their sweet nest
on open, steady wings, carried by their own will,

that's how they came toward us from the flock around Dido,
crossing the malignant air to reach us —
so strong was the call of affection. Two of the most famous lovers in literature. Dante never names them in this canto, but the speaker of the next several tercets is universally identified as Francesca da Rimini, daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna. She was married — around 1275, in a political match — to Gianciotto Malatesta of Rimini, a man variously described as deformed, lame, or simply unattractive. She fell in love with his younger and handsomer brother, Paolo. According to the most-repeated tradition, Gianciotto found them together one day and killed them both with his own hand, around 1283–1285.

Dante would have heard the story directly: Francesca's nephew, Guido Novello da Polenta, hosted the exiled poet in Ravenna in the last years of his life, and Dante is buried there. The wind brings the lovers toward him "on the strength of his affectionate appeal." They fly to him from "the band where Dido is" — the lineage of women undone by love. The whole moment is staged so they come to him because they were loved.

"O kind and gracious living creature,
who comes through this dark air to visit us
who once stained the world blood-red,

if the King of the Universe were our friend,
we would beg him to give you peace,
since you have pity on our perverse misery.

Whatever you would like to hear and speak about,
we will hear, and we will speak about it with you,
while the wind is silent, as it is now.

The city where I was born sits
on the sea-coast where the Po comes down
to find rest with all its tributaries.

Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart,
seized this man for the beautiful body
that was taken from me — and the way of it still offends me. The three "Love" tercets. Francesca's defense of her own damnation is structured as three consecutive tercets, each beginning with the word Amor — Love:

"Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart..."
"Love, which exempts no one who is loved from loving back..."
"Love led us to one single death."

Each one is drawn directly from the love-poetry tradition Dante himself had been writing in as a young man — the dolce stil novo, the "sweet new style" of late-thirteenth-century Italian courtly love poetry, with its central doctrine that love comes for noble hearts, that the beloved must love back, that love and death are the same. Francesca is making a literary defense: it wasn't me, it was Love. The mode is so familiar to Dante that he is, in effect, listening to a victim of his own school of poetry. This is part of why he faints at the end. He is hearing his own poetics weaponized against him.

Love, which exempts no one who is loved from loving back,
seized me with delight in this man so strongly
that, as you see, it has not deserted me yet.

Love led us to one single death.
Caina is waiting for the one who quenched our life."
These words came over to us from them. Caina. Named for Cain, who in Genesis killed his brother Abel. The deepest pit of Hell — Cocytus, the lake of ice at the very bottom of the universe — is divided into four zones, the first of which is Caina, where traitors against family are imprisoned in ice. We will not see it for nearly thirty cantos. But Francesca already knows: her husband Gianciotto, who killed his own brother Paolo when he killed her, is on his way there. From inside her own punishment she names her killer's destination. The line is a flash of cold fury inside a love story — a reminder that the gentlest soul in this canto is also a wronged woman, and has not forgiven.

As soon as I had heard those tormented souls,
I lowered my face, and held it lowered so long
that the Poet finally said: "What are you thinking?"

When I answered, I began: "Alas —
how many sweet thoughts, how much longing,
led these two to the sorrowful crossing."

Then I turned to them, and I spoke,
and I began: "Francesca — your sufferings
fill me with sorrow and pity, almost to tears.

But tell me — back in the time of those sweet sighs,
by what means and signs did Love allow you
to recognize what each of you was uncertainly desiring?"

And she to me: "There is no greater sorrow
than to remember a happy time
when you are in misery — and your teacher knows it. "There is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in misery." The original Italian — "Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria" — is one of the most quoted lines in European literature. Tennyson took it nearly verbatim into Locksley Hall: "a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."

Boethius, six centuries before Dante, had said something similar in the Consolation of Philosophy — which is probably what Francesca means by "and your teacher knows it." Boethius (c. 480–524 AD) wrote his Consolation in prison while awaiting execution; it became one of the most-read books of the medieval West, and Dante had clearly absorbed it. Francesca, addressing Virgil obliquely, is reaching for a piece of philosophical authority older than her own story.

But if you so deeply want to know
the earliest root of our love,
I'll do as one who weeps while speaking.

One day, for our pleasure, we were reading
of Lancelot — how Love had bound him fast.
We were alone, and unsuspecting. What they were reading. The book is the medieval Old French romance Lancelot du Lac — the great cycle of stories about the Arthurian knight Lancelot's adulterous love for Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur. Reading romance about adultery led, predictably, to adultery. The detail is autobiographical for the kind of literature Dante's whole reading culture had been steeped in: courtly-love narratives circulated everywhere, in Italian as well as French, and the moralists kept warning that reading them turned readers into Lancelots and Guineveres. Francesca and Paolo are the ultimate proof of the warning.

Many times that reading drew our eyes together
and drove the color from our faces;
but one moment in particular was the one that undid us.

When we read of how the much-longed-for smile
was kissed by such a noble lover,
this one — who shall never be parted from me again —

kissed me on the mouth, trembling all over.
The book was a Galeotto — and so was the one who wrote it.
That day we read no further." "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse." The most haunting line in the canto. Galeotto — Galahalt in English — is a character in the Lancelot romance: the knight who, in that very book, acts as the go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere, arranging their first kiss. So when Francesca says the book and its author were "a Galeotto," she means: they pandered for us. The book seduced. The author seduced.

And here we have to remember: Dante is writing a book. The reader of the Comedy is being warned, at exactly this moment, that the very kind of literature that brought Paolo and Francesca to Hell is the kind of literature he himself is producing. Dante is putting his own work on trial inside his own work — what later centuries would call auto-critique.

It is not an accident that the next thing he does is faint. He is hearing his own art in Francesca's mouth and cannot bear it.

And all the while one spirit was speaking,
the other one wept so much that — out of pity —
I fainted as if I were dying,

and I fell — the way a dead body falls. "And I fell, the way a dead body falls." Echo of the canto's structural pattern: every encounter at the top of Hell so far — the Acheron in Canto III, here in Canto V — ends with Dante losing consciousness. He never sees how he is moved between zones. The blackout is part of the poem's grammar: at moments of overwhelming compassion or terror, the living traveler's awareness goes out, and the impossible passage happens off-page.

Specifically here, the fainting is from pity. The whole canto has been a graduate course in pity: pity for the weight of suffering, pity for the love itself, pity for how easily Dante might have been one of these souls. He has been caught listening to Francesca with the same heart that wrote the kind of poetry that ended her life. He cannot stay upright. The next canto will pick him up again — on the cold mud of the third circle, in a cold rain.