I- 3. Of a strange … those submerged: Note the parallel with the opening of Canto 19; there is a close relation between simony (which pretends that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, of which one is prophecy, can be sold) and soothsaying. The frequency of self-conscious canto openings in the Malebolge is pointed out in the note to 18.1–18. Here Dante for the first time in the poem writes of its subdivision into canticles (cantiche) and cantos (canti).
1. strange new: The Italian nova has both meanings (see the notes to 6.4 and 13.73).
3. canticle: That is, the Inferno, translating cantica though Dante’s term here is canzon (Latin cantio), possibly treated as an augmentative of canto (line 2); the cognate term chanson is used of long poems in Old French, as in chanson de geste (for the use of these terms in the early manuscripts and commentaries, see Pertile 1991). For the issue of the literary genre of the Comedy, see the note to 16.127–29.
3. which is of those submerged: That is, the first canticle is about the damned; Hell is often referred to as the abyss or, figurally, the Red Sea; this figural relation is made most fully explicit at the beginning of the Purgatorio.
9. at the pace taken by litanies: Litanies were typically religious processions begging God and the saints for help; their pace was very slow. The ironic point of the reference would seem related to the fact that the soothsayers characteristically take the future as already determined. See Additional Note 8.
II- 12. marvelously twisted … the beginning of the chest: The violence of the distortion is partly conveyed by the order of the description, as if the head had been held still and the rest of the body twisted.
14–15. they were forced … taken from them: The contrapasso (discussed in the note to lines 37–39) is already implicit, as well as the idea that in life the soothsayers’ superstition and fraudulence obstructed their capacity for accurate natural foresight.
19–25. So may God permit… Surely I wept: Lines 19–22 are the fourth apostrophe of the reader in Inferno (see the note to 8.94–96). The pilgrim’s weeping here has been the subject of discussion, some commentators taking it as reflecting a specific sympathy for the diviners. We take it as expressing the pilgrim’s grief at the distortion of the human body (made in the image of God), sufficient grounds for his weeping and for the reader’s meditation. The mention of the pilgrim’s weeping also allows time for the considerable force of our empathic discomfort to set in. See Additional Note 8.
26–30. so that my guide said … to God’s judgment: Virgil’s rebuke, too, has been variously interpreted, depending on the significance assigned to line 30. Most commentators take it as we do, as rebuking the pilgrim’s grief at the punishment; other possibilities are discussed in Additional Note 8.
28. Here pity lives when it is quite dead: The commentators point to the considerable theological literature available to Dante on the nature of true compassion, appropriate only toward the living or toward the souls in Purgatory, who can change.
29–30. who is more wicked … God’s judgment: To bring passion to God’s judgment would seem to be “to refuse to accept it calmly or with satisfaction.” But the meaning of line 30 is disputed; the issue is whether the lines are directed against the nature of the sin or against Dante’s weeping. See Additional Note 8.
31. Raise your head, raise it: That is, stop weeping and try to understand the nature of this sin (Ramat 1976).
31–36. the one for whom … Minos: Amphiaraus, one of the Seven against Thebes, known to Dante in Statius’s Thebaid. One of Statius’s noblest figures, he is commanded by the king of Argos to perform augury (foretelling the future from the flight of birds) on the outcome of the war against Thebes. Later, he is the first of the Seven to die, as the earth opens and he rides in his chariot down to Hades and confronts Pluto, god of the underworld (7.688–8.126). Dante’s lines conflate two passages, the words of Pluto to Amphiaraus, “quo ruis?” and the taunts of the Thebans. Amphiaraus is discussed further in Additional Note 8.
33. Where are you rushing: There is a taunting reference to the fact that Amphiaraus, having foreseen the defeat of the Greeks, including the deaths of six of the seven heroes, including himself (3.460–551), at first refuses to participate in the war against Thebes; he is compelled to do so by his greedy wife, who accepts a bribe (Dante refers to the incident in Purg. 12.49–51). Italian rui can mean both “fall” and “rush, hasten.”
37–39. Look how … a backward path: In these lines the contrapasso is made explicit. The emphasis on the physical distortion of the punishment is repeated in the case of each of the five classical figures (Tiresias and Arruns, lines 40–46; Manto, lines 52–55; and Eurypylus, lines 106–13); with the moderns the insistence is dropped. For “a backward path,” see Purg. 10.121–29.
40–45. See Tiresias … his male plumage: Dante knew of Tiresias’s change of sex through Ovid, Met. 3.324–31, which he echoes in sembiante (“shape,” line 40; cf. Met. 3.331),femmina (“female,” line 41; cf. 3.326), ribattere and riavesse (“to strike again” and “to regain,” lines 43 and 45; cf. 3.327, 331: rursus [again], redit [returns]). In Ovid’s account, Tiresias of Thebes separates two copulating serpents with his staff and becomes a woman; seven years later he comes upon them again and again separates them, returning to male shape. When Jupiter and Juno have a dispute as to which sex has greater pleasure in intercourse, Tiresias declares that women do, whereupon Juno, angry at the revelation of the secret, blinds him. In compensation, Jupiter grants him to see the future. He was the most famous soothsayer of Greco-Roman tradition. See Additional Note 8.
45. regain his male plumage: That is, his beard; for feathers as beard, see Purg. 1.42, of Cato. There is also a pun on Italian pene [penis].
46–51. Arruns … the sea was not cut off: Arruns is a soothsayer in Lucan’s Pharsalia (1.585–638) who foresees from the entrails of an ox the disastrous consequences of the civil war betweeen Caesar and Pompey, but does not tell all he sees, wrapping his prophecies in ambiguities. According to Lucan, he lived in the ruins of the city Lucca; Dante places him in the nearby mountains of Luna, where his horizons were vast (lines 50–51), in ironic contrast to his present situation, where all he can see is Tiresias’s belly (Caccia 1967; Ramat 1976). His cave, too, would seem to anticipate his place in Hell.
52–56. And she who covers … where I was born: Tiresias’s daughter Manto figures largely in Statius’s Thebaid as his assistant. The idea that she “searched through many lands” apparently derives from Aen. 10.198–201, as interpreted by Servius:
Ille etiam patriis agmen ciet Ocnus ab oris,
fatidicae Mantus et Tusci filius amnis,
qui muros matrisque dedit tibi, Mantua, nomen,
Mantua dives avis… .
[He, too, calls forth his troop from his father’s shore,
Ocnus, son of fate-speaking Manto and the Tuscan river,
who gave walls to you, Mantua, and his mother’s name,
Mantua, rich in ancestors… .]
According to Servius, the Theban Manto came to Italy after her father’s death and gave birth to Ocnus by the river god Tiber (whose source is in Tuscany).
54. every hairy skin on the other side: That is, the long hair of her head, the hair of her armpits, and her pubic hair are all turned away from the pilgrim.
58–99. After her father departed … no lie defraud the truth: Virgil’s long digression on the foundation of his birthplace, Mantua (see 1.68–69), has excited much comment, since it has seemed to most critics to contradict the brief notice in the Aeneid cited in the previous note. See Additional Note 8. One of its effects is to contrast the vivid reality of the geography of Italy with the unreality of soothsaying, both ancient and modern.
58–59. After .. . the city of Bacchus was enslaved: After the war of the Seven against Thebes, the city was conquered by the Athenians under Theseus (Thebaid 12).
61–66. Up in beautiful Italy … collects in that lake: Benacus was the Latin name for the lake now known as the Lago di Garda, at the foot of the Tyrolean Alps. It is the easternmost and the largest of the lakes of northern Italy, thirty-two miles long and eleven miles wide at its widest point. Garda is a city on the eastern shore; Valcamonica is the largest of the alpine valleys north of Brescia (thus northwest of the lake); the Alps (in Dante’s term, Pennino) stand for the territory to the north of the lake.
67–69. In the center … if they made the journey: In other words, the boundaries of the three dioceses of Brescia (to the west), Trento (to the northeast), and Verona (to the southeast) all meet at a point in the center of the lake (usually identified as the island of Lechi), from which each of the bishops could officially bless, since their jurisdictions overlapped there. Like the reference to litanies in line 9, the reference recalls the theme of the efficacy of prayer.
70–72. Peschiera … where the shore around it is lowest: Peschiera is a city at the southernmost point of the lake, controlled in Dante’s time by the lords of Verona, the Scaligeri.
78. Governolo: Governolo is just over a mile north of the joining of the Mincio with the Po.
79–81. It has not flowed … often noxious: The swamp formed by the Mincio, eventually the site of Mantua, is about thirty-one miles south of Peschiera (some twelve miles farther, the Mincio flows into the Po). The site was unhealthy because of malaria.
82. the harsh virgin: Manto, a virgin as in Statius. This is the first departure from Vergil’s account in Aeneid 10, which has Manto mate with the river god Tiber.
87. her empty body: After her death her body was no longer filled with her soul (cf. 9.25: “My flesh had been naked of me …”).
88–93. The people … other augury: Virgil here corrects the Aeneid on two points: first, Tiresias’s line was extinct with Manto; there is no genetic connection between it and Mantua, and Manto had no other kind of connection with the inhabitants of the region, who were “scattered”; second, Mantua was founded without recourse to the sin of divination (as might seem implied by the account in the Aeneid); modern theories on the founding of Mantua see the name as indigenous. See Additional Note 8.
94–96. The people housed there … Pinamonte: The events referred to in these lines took place in 1291, when Alberto of Casalodi, ruler of Mantua, was tricked by Pinamonte de’ Buonaccolsi into withdrawing most of his (noble) supporters from the city. Pinamonte then, with the aid of the rebellious populace, took over the city and, according to the early commentators, had most of the noble families massacred.
97–99. Therefore I advise you … let no lie defraud the truth: Virgil’s curious self-correction is discussed in Additional Note 8.
106–14. That one … through and through: Eurypylus is mentioned by Sinon in Aen. 2.114 as sent by the Greeks to the Delphic oracle to learn the future of the war; in Sinon’s lying account, the oracle’s discouraging reply causes the Greeks to sail for home. That Eurypylus was a soothsayer, an associate of Calchas, is Dante’s reasonable enough inference from Vergil’s lines, since Sinon could only be naming him to increase the verisimilitude of his account; furthermore, Servius’s note can be read to mean that Eurypylus had access to the inner shrine of the Delphic temple, in which case he would have to be a priest of Apollo, like Calchas (D’Ovidio 1901).
108. when Greece was emptied of males: By the Trojan War.
110–11. along with Calchas … in Aulis: Dante knew from Vergil {Aen. 2.116–17), Servius, and Ovid (Met. 12.4–39) the story of how storms kept the Greek fleet in Aulis until the augur Calchas reveals that the anger of Diana must be appeased by the sacrifice of Iphigenia, young daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (Ovid’s passage includes an account of prophecy from birds by which Calchas predicts the outcome of the war; it is one of the sources of Statius’s account in Thebaid 3). It is tempting to think that Dante might have known Lucretius’s description of the sacrifice of Iphigenia as one of the chief crimes caused by pagan superstition (De rerum natura, 1.84–101).
113. my high tragedy: Virgil is of course referring to the Aeneid; the contrast between the two genres represented by his poem and the Comedy is implied again in 21.2.
115–17. That other … magic frauds: Michael the Scot was in the service of the emperor Frederick II and the author of numerous treatises and translations from Greek and Arabic; he was said to have died after 1290.
118. Guido Bonatti: Guido Bonatti of Forli was another famous astrologer and author, prominent among the Ghibellines of Romagna. Born around 1220, he served, successively, the empereror Frederick II, the Conti Guidi (see the note to 16.34–39), and Guido da Montefeltro (Canto 27); he seems to have been alive in 1296.
118–20. Asdente … repents too late: Dante mentions Asdente (the name probably means “toothless”), a cobbler who achieved fame as a soothsayer, as the most famous person in Parma (Convivio 4.16.6).
124–26. Cain with his thorns … touches the wave below Seville: That is, as seen from Jerusalem the moon is setting (crossing the horizon between the hemisphere of land and that of ocean) south of Seville; since according to line 127 the moon was full (i.e., directly opposite the sun) yesterday, the sun is now rising: it is the morning of Holy Saturday. Widespread popular tradition identified the image in the moon as that of Cain carrying a bundle of brambles on his back.
127–29. already last night… in the deep forest: The account of Dante’s night in the forest in Canto 1 does not refer to the moon. In actual fact, the full moon in April 1300 took place on April 3.
130. meanwhile: Dante’s word introcque (derived from Latin inter hoc) has occasioned comment because he cites it in De vulgari eloquentia 1.13.1 as a Florentine dialect word unworthy of the “tragic” or high style (see the note to 21.2).