Charon

He is the ferryman of the damned souls across the Acheron river and he appears at the threshold of Hell, in canto III. Shaking his oar threateningly, he forces a crowd of souls into his boat, strikes the most unruly and announces to them that they are about to enter eternal damnation, then crosses the river. Even before he comes back with his empty boat, a new crowd of souls has gathered on the opposite bank. In the classical myth, Charon is a minor god, the son of Erebus and of the Night, who ferries souls to Hades. Dante may have learnt about him from reading the Aeneid, where he is described as a hideous old man with an unkempt white beard and fiery eyes. Here he embodies the anticipation of the eternal darkness without hope that divine justice has allotted to the damned.

Charon, demoniac form,
With eyes of burning coal, collects them all,
Beckoning, and each, that lingers, with his oar
Strikes.
(Inf. III, vv. 109-111)

Cerberus

He is the guardian of the third circle, where the gluttons are punished and he appears in canto VI. He is a monstrous three-headed dog that barks a deafening bark and slashes the damned with his sharp claws. In the myth, he is already a creature with monstrous features: the son of Typhon and Echidna, he is a ferocious dog with three heads covered with coiling snakes. He guards the gates of Hades, making sure no one enters if they are not meant to, or that no one leaves if they are not allowed to return to the world above (such as the nymph Eurydice, abducted by Orpheus, who tamed Cerberus with music). In Dante he has a hybrid look half-way between beast and man: he has a beard, a fat belly and he even has hands, but he does not have the gift of speech; he symbolizes the bestial degradation of those who exceed in gluttony.

His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard,
His belly large, and claw’d the hands, with which
He tears the spirits, flays them, and their limbs
Piecemeal disparts.
(Inf. VI, vv. 16-18).

Plutus

He stands watch over the fourth circle in canto VII, where the avaricious and the prodigals are punished. The canto opens with his threatening utterance, which scares Dante. His words are incomprehensible, but they sound like an invocation to Satan meant to prevent Dante’s passage. The poet does not describe him, but he calls him “an evil wolf” (which reminds the readers that in canto I the she-wolf symbolizes greed, the cause of most evil), and a “cruel, savage beast”. He adds that he has “’nfiata labbia”, that is literally a “swollen mouth”. These traits make him the monstrous symbol of avarice, which corrupts and distorts everything, even the original aspect of this creature, which in the myth was the god of wealth, the son of Iasion and Demeter.

“Ah me! O Satan! Satan!” loud exclaim’d
Plutus, in accent hoarse of wild alarm
(Inf. VII, vv. 1-2).

Phlegyas

The mythical king of the Lapiths, Phlegyas is the son of the god Mars and of Chryse; he becomes the guardian of the fifth circle in canto VIII, where the wrathful and the sullen are punished. He travels on a boat, with which he plows the Styx, a swampy river where the damned are immersed. Dante does not explain his charge: may be he takes over the souls on the shore and carries them into the swamp; or else he might be the outpost guarding the city of Dis, which appears with its fiery towers in the following canto. His name is connected to the element of fire: it means “burning” in Greek. Fire is also at the center of his myth: in order to take revenge on the god Apollo who had seduced his daughter, he set fire to the god’s temple in Delphi. He represents the devastating consequences of uncontrolled anger.

Toward us coming, under the sole sway
Of one that ferried it, who cried aloud:
“Art thou arrived, fell spirit?”
(Inf. VIII, vv. 16-18)

The Centaurs

They are the guardians of the seventh circle, where the violent against others are punished; in canto XII they patrol the banks of the Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood. If the souls try to alleviate their pain by coming out of the blood, they strike them down with their arrows. Dante mentions three centaurs from classical mythology, who stand out in this small army of archers: Nessus, Chiron, son of Cronus and the nymph Philyra, the one who cured Achilles, and who is the most imposing and authoritative, and Pholus. Upon Chiron’s order, it is Nessus –the centaur who had caused Heracles’ death by giving his wife Deianira a poisoned robe for him– who carries Dante safe and sound across the river, after having shown him the most notable souls among the violent who are punished there.

Between it and the rampart’s base,
On trail ran Centaurs, with keen arrows arm’d,
As to the chase they on the earth were wont.
(Inf. XII, vv. 55-57)

Geryon

Geryon appears in canto XVII at the entrance to the ravine within which the eighth circle lies; this circle is called Malebolge because it is divided into ten “bolge”, i.e. narrow ditches like pouches, where the fraudulent souls are punished, those who in various ways deceived others. In the myth, Geryon is one of the monsters Heracles faced: he is the king of the island of Erytheia, where he raised heifers; he was a giant with one body and three heads, six arms and six legs. Dante turns him into a hybrid being, who is half-way between man and beast, whose body is like a snake’s with a sting tail, and whose face is the image of deception, because it is that of an honest man, who inspires trust. It is he who carries Dante and Virgil on his back, flying down to Malebolge.

His face the semblance of a just man’s wore,
So kind and gracious was its outward cheer;
The rest was serpent all
(Inf. XVII, vv. 10-12)

The Giants

At first sight, in canto XXXI, the Giants appear to Dante as towers soaring around high walls, resembling those of Monteriggioni, a town near Siena where they are still visible today. The Giants are actually inside a well, and they stick out of it from the waist up, guarding the last circle, the ninth. Here are punished the traitors of those who trusted them, the most despicable souls in the world. The giants of classical myth were a people of demigods, the sons of Uranus and Gaia, the gods of heaven and earth. Dante names four of them: three come from classical myths, and one from the Old Testament, Nembrot, the protagonist of the episode of the tower of Babel. The others are Ephialtes, who led the rebellion against Jove, then Briareus and Antaeus, the one who deposits Dante and Virgil down to the ninth circle.

“Yet know,” said he, “ere farther we advance,
That it less strange may seem, these are not towers,
But giants. In the pit they stand immersed,
Each from his navel downward, round the bank.”
(Inf. XXXI, vv. 31-33)

Animals in the Divine Comedy

Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante shows to have great knowledge of the nature and habits of several animals, which he evidently loved to observe. Inferno V already provides an example, in comparisons whose focus is on starlings, cranes and doves, to which the souls of the lustful, and in particular of Francesca and Paolo, are compared, respectively in vv. 40-41, 46-47 and 82-84:

As, in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,

The starlings on their wings are borne abroad

As cranes,
Chanting their dolorous notes, traverse the sky,
Stretch’d out in long array

As doves
By fond desire invited, on wide wings
And firm, to their sweet nest returning home,

Cleave the air, wafted by their will along

Another bird to which Dante loves to refer is the stork, now less familiar to us, but which must have been much more common in the countryside in his time. He refers to the noise made by its long beak in order to describe the chattering of the traitors’ teeth, who are immersed in the ice of Cocytus, in Inferno XXXII, vv. 34-36;

So, to where modest shame appears, thus low
Blue pinch’d and shrined in ice the spirits stood,
Moving their teeth in shrill note like the stork.

Later, in Purgatorio XXV, vv. 10-12, he describes the young storks’ desire, which is mixed with fear, to take their first flight:

E’en as the young stork lifteth up his wing
Through wish to fly, yet ventures not to quit
The nest, and drops it

Another presence now less frequent in our summer nights are the fireflies, evoked in Inferno XXVI, vv. 25-29, next to flies and mosquitoes:

As in that season, when the sun least veils
His face that lightens all, what time the fly

Gives way to the shrill gnat, the peasant then,

Upon some cliff reclined, beneath him sees
Fire-flies innumerous spangling o’er the vale,
Vineyard or tilth, where his day-labor lies

In Inferno XXII, vv. 19-21, barrators immersed in boiling pitch are compared to dolphins who jump out of the water with their curved back in order to warn sailors when a storm is approaching:

As dolphins that, in sign
To mariners, heave high their arched backs,
That thence forewarn’d they may advise to save

Their threaten’d vessel

A little further on, in vv. 35-36, one of the pitch-covered barrators is compared to an otter, a small animal with an expressive snout, no longer frequent in our waterways:

grappling seized
His clotted locks, and dragg’d him sprawling up,
That he appear’d to me an otter

Dante’s love for animals and nature arises in consonance with his faith in the value of every little detail of God’s creation.

Water, air, fire and earth in medieval philosophy

Dante proves himself to be an attentive observer of natural phenomena, which were produced by the combination of the four elements that according to the philosophy of his time made up the universe. The notion came mainly from the philosopher Aristotle and had been passed down with some variations until scholastic philosophy, which in a way represented for its time what would correspond to science today. Water was the liquid matter that made up rivers, lakes and seas; air was the gaseous matter from which the winds originated; fire was the substance of light, the source of lightning, while as a flame it always went upwards; earth was the solid matter of which our planet is made up.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante shows his knowledge, which can be defined as “scientific” in reference to his time, when he describes with competence various natural phenomena in which the four elements interact. Here are some examples. The formation of the rainbow, into which air and water combine, in Purgatorio XXV, vv. 91-93:

And as the air, when saturate with showers,
The casual beam refracting, decks itself
With many a hue

The phenomenon of light reflection, in which the elements of fire, water and earth interact, in Purgatorio XV, vv. 16-21:

As when the ray,
Striking on water or the surface clear

Of mirror, leaps unto the opposite part,

Ascending at a glance, e’en as it fell,
And as much differs from the stone, that falls
Through equal space, (so practic skill hath shown)

The halo formed by humid air around the moon, due to the interaction of air, water and fire, in Paradiso XXVIII, vv. 22-24:

Perchance, as is the halo from the light
Which paints it, when most dense the vapour spreads

Canto V of Purgatorio presents some scenes where nature and its phenomena are in the foreground; vv. 4-6 describe how the shadows of human bodies are formed, by the interaction of fire and earth:

“See, how it seems as if the light not shone

From the left hand of him beneath, and he,
As living, seems to be led on.”

Vv. 37-38 compare the speed of the souls in Antipurgatory to that of lightning bolts, defined as “lit vapors” because they are formed by air and fire, when they come down from the sky at nightfall:

Ne’er saw I fiery vapors with such speed
Cut through the serene air at fall of night,

And finally vv. 115-120, with great narrative power, describe the unleashing of a storm, so violent as to cause a tributary of the Arno, the Archiano, to overflow; here water and air rage on the earth, but the cause of their fury is not a natural fact but rather a devil’s anger, who did not succeed in snatching to Hell the soul of Buonconte da Montefeltro, who repented on the verge of death.

Thence the valley, soon
As day was spent, he cover’d o’er with cloud,

From Pratomagno to the mountain range;

And stretch’d the sky above; so that the air

Impregnate changed to water. Fell the rain;
And to the fosses came all that the land

Contain’d not

In Hell as described by Dante, the elements earth, fire and water interact, and the first predominates, while light has no place, because God himself, asserting his own justice, has ruled that the damned be deprived of his light, which is eternal bliss. The shape of Purgatory makes it similar to the part of the planet where human beings live: however, it is the only dry land in the hemisphere of water, and its top, where the Garden of Eden blooms with vegetation, is not subject to the laws of earthly atmosphere. In Heaven, instead, the dominant element is air, which is understood as divine energy and permeates and illuminates everything of itself.

The socio-political context of the story of Francesca and Paolo

Francesca da Rimini is the main character in Inferno V. Born in Ravenna in the second half of the 13th century, she was the daughter –the only daughter of seven children– of Guido da Polenta the Elder (also called Minore, born before 1250), who established his lordship over the city and ruled it until 1310, the year of his death. The marriage between Francesca and Giovanni Malatesta the lord of Rimini (ca. 1245-1304), known as “il Ciotto”, i.e. “the lame”, due to a physical disability, took place between 1275 and 1282. As it was common at the time among noble families, their marraiage had a political value: in this case it was meant to strengthen the alliance between the two cities. The Polenta family belonged to the Guelph faction, as did the Malatesta; Giovanni supported Guido’s seizure of power over Ravenna and opposed the Ghibelline lord of Urbino Guido da Montefeltro. There is no precise historical data on the duration of this marriage, out of which a daughter, named Concordia, was born; it is a fact, though, that after 1286 Giovanni Malatesta already had a new wife, Zambrasina Zambrasi from Faenza.

Francesca, being Ostasio da Polenta’s sister, was the aunt of Guido Novello da Polenta (1275 circa-1333), lord of Ravenna from 1316, who would become Dante’s host from 1318 until the poet’s death, since he greatly valued Dante’s qualities as a man of letters and a politician. Moreover, Dante may have personally met both Paolo Malatesta, who held the position of Captain of the People in Florence between February 1282 and February 1283, and Guido da Polenta the Elder, who was podestá of Florence for a few months in 1290. Surely the tragic story of adultery and double murder must have circulated widely, not only in noble and political circles, even though it left no traces in chronicles and documents of the time. Dante’s Inferno V is the earliest source of this story of love and death, which accounts for Francesca’s falling in love with Paolo, a young handsome man, and the killing of both by Gianciotto, her husband and Paolo’s brother. All subsequent fictional versions of the story stem from commentaries on Inferno V, above all from Giovanni Boccaccio’s.

Perhaps Dante, who shows great respect towards Francesca, felt close to her also because of her kinship with the lord who recognized his worth and hosted him with unfaltering patronage after the poet had been wandering for so long. The end of Dante’s life coincided with a political success in Guido Novello’s service: it was probably thanks to Dante’s diplomatic mission that Guido Novello managed to establish good relations with Venice between 1321 and 1322, putting an end to years of conflict between the two cities.

The lustful of Purgatory, for Inferno V

Amos Nattini, illustration of Purgatorio XXVI

In Inferno V Dante narrates the story of Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta, who were lovers. The setting alludes to French chivalry novels, which were still influential at the time, thereby showing how the ideals of courtly love morally allowed one to indulge in romantic relationships outside wedlock. It is no coincidence, then, that Tristano, who is tasked with accompanying Isotta to his uncle King Mark of Cornwall to whom she is bretothed, appears amongst the lustful souls. Their passionate love resembles that between Paolo and Francesca: in both instances, a noble family provides the backdrop to a love that is kindled in the lovers’ hearts, despite the fact that they are not married to one another. Moreover, in Francesca’s story mention is made of another famous story of the Arthurian literary cycle, the one narrating Lancillotto’s mutual love for Ginevra, who was King Arthur’s wife.

The story of Francesca soon became legendary partly on account of Dante’s canto, which created an aura inspiring innumerable artistic representations including paintings and sculptures, alongside poems, tragedies, operas, comic parodies, films, ballet performances, even rap music and comic strips. All of these art forms added details to the narrative ultimately reinventing its interpretation to one where Francesca is a heroic figure epitomising unhappy love and the liberty of falling in love.

When Dante sets down to write the Comedy, however, he cannot any longer agree with the rules of courtly love in that they transgress God’s laws. And in fact Francesca is a damned soul because of her misguided love, of which she never repented. Further proof of Dante’s stance lies in the fact that the souls of the lustful whom Dante encounters in Purgatory belong to two poets whose sin consisted, among other things, in elougising courtly love in their poetry. In canto XXVI Dante enters into a dialogue with Guido Guinizzelli (1235 circa-1276), the poet from Bologna he defines as the «father» of the Dolce Stil Novo (Sweet New Style), and the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel (born around 1150 -he was still alive in 1181), who speaks in his native toungue. The latter probably was the the model for Dante’s Rime petrose, four erotic-themed poems dedicated to a lady named Pietra.

Unlike the lustful in Hell, the spirits in Purgatory are very peaceful, despite their suffering. They acknowledge their guilt, of which they repented while they were still alive. Totally immersed in fire in the seventh and last ditch, they are divided according to their sexual orientation: homosexuals in one group, heterosexuals in the other. The two groups walk along the ditch in opposite directions. When they meet they start quoting examples of lustful behaviour which was punished: Sodoma and Gomorra, and Pasife too. In explainining their penance, Guinizzelli describes Julius Caesar as a notorious case of sodomy.