1–21. In that part … of the mountain: With the opening of Canto 30, this is the most elaborate of the similes beginning cantos of the Malebolge (cf. Cantos 18, 21, 22, and 28). There is careful layering of levels of the cosmos: first the constellations (lines 1–3); then the earth (lines 4–6) subject to weather (lines 9–12); and finally the human figure is introduced in terms that emphasize its mutable passions (lines 10–15). Finally the foci of the simile emerge: the change of Virgil’s expression (lines 17–18), compared to the melting frost, and the pilgrim’s response (lines 18–21), compared to the peasant’s initial dismay and later hope. Changes in the “face of the world” (line 13) parallel those in the faces of Virgil and the pilgrim.
The commentators have observed that the simile broaches metamorphosis, the dominant theme of the next bolgia, reached in line 70. Medieval commentators on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on whom Dante draws heavily in the next cantos, note that the initial events of that poem (the creation of the world, of man, of the giants, etc.) and the changes observed in the world (the seasons, the birth and death of living things) are all instances of metamorphosis, broadly understood as the changes that occur in creatures over time.
2–3. the sun tempers its locks … are moving south: See Aen. 9.638: “crinitus Apollo” [long-haired Apollo] and Georgia 3.303–4: “cum frigidus olim/ iam cadit extremoque inrorat Aquarius anno” [when once-cold Aquarius is already setting and bedews the last of the year]. The sun is cooling (perhaps strengthening, as steel is tempered in cold water after forging) its rays in the cold waters of Aquarius, therefore the imagined date is between January 21 and February 21, if conventional dates are used. The nights (thought of as the ideal point opposite the sun; cf. 34.5, with note) turn south at the winter solstice, when the sun turns north along the ecliptic (the Italian al mezzo di sen vanno can also mean they “diminish to a half day,” but with less exactitude, since only at the vernal equinox have they diminished so far).
4–6. the frost … only briefly: The simile is drawn from writing: the hoarfrost is like an inscription on the surface of the ground, copied from that of the snow, but it fades as the day warms up, just as real writing loses definition when the pen (for Dante a goose quill or a sharpened reed) loses its sharpness, or “temper” (the same word as in line 2). Dante’s assemprare refers to copying into manuscripts (see Vita nuova 1). For parallel images see Lucan, Pharsalia 4.52–53, and Ex. 16.14–21. For other similes derived from writing, see line 100 and 25.64- 66, and see the reference to the poet’s pen at 25.143–44.
12. stores hope in his wicker basket: The import of the simile is hopeful; see also lines 20–21. By escaping from the Evil Claws the pair have overcome a serious danger (linked to the autobiographical content of the episode; see Additional Note 9). The phrase recalls Virgil’s earlier description of trust as something “put in one’s purse” (11.54).
13. the face of the world has changed: See Psalm 103.30: “Thou shall send forth thy spirit, and they shall be created: and thou shall renew the face of the earth”. See also lines 104–5 and 144, and 25.143, with notes.
15. drives the little sheep forth: The scene has put commentators in mind of the Bucolics and Georgics of Vergil (see the note to lines 2–4); Vergil was himself thought of as a “shepherd”. But the figure of “pastoral” care is also of course Christian: the shepherd of Psalm 23 [Vulgate 22] was understood to be Christ (cf. John 21.17: “feed my sheep,” and the note to 19.132).
21. at the foot of the mountain: Recalling Virgil’s original rescue of the pilgrim (1.63) emphasizes the hopeful tone. At lines 25–45 the wayfarers climb, rather than descend, perhaps foreshadowing the climb up the “mountain of virtue,” that of Purgatory (see line 55); for the same reason, perhaps, moral commonplaces encouraging perseverance are frequent in the canto.
22–27. After first having taken counsel… up to the top: Virgil exhibits prudence, discretion, and fortitude, as if demonstrating the so-called cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance).
24. took hold of me: Virgil will carry the pilgrim out of the sixth bolgia, that of the hypocrites, as he carried him into it when the wayfarers escaped from the Evil Claws (23.37–51) and as he did in the other case of descent into a bolgia (see 19.34–35).
31. a cloak: An ironic reference to the hypocrites’ leaden cloaks in Canto 23.
46–57. From now on … that it may help you: Virgil’s exhortation is based on the commonplace of the choice of Hercules at the crossroads: between the steep mountain of virtue, or the wide, inviting plain of vice; there is also an explicit reference to the climb up the mountain of Purgatory (“a longer ladder”) where the notion of a mountain of virtue will be brought in more forcefully. For Hercules, see 9.98 and 25.32, with notes.
49–51. whoever consumes his life … foam in water: See Aen. 5.740, of Anchises’ ghost: “tenuis fugit ceu fumus in auras” [he fled like thin smoke into the air]. But the moralizing tone of Virgil’s images is biblical: see, for example, Wisdom 5.15: “For the hope of the wicked is … as a thin froth which is dispersed by the storm: and a smoke that is scattered abroad by the wind” (cf. Psalm 36.20). For additional images of smoke, see 25.22, 92–93, and 135, with notes.
53. the spirit … the heavy body: See Aen. 6.730–34 (quoted in the note to 10.58) and Wisdom 9.15: “For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind. ..”. Although the ideas are commonplace, Dante’s mention of the relation of spirit and body, just before entering the bolgia of metamorphosis, is significant.
55. A longer ladder: The climb from the bottom of Hell to the surface of the earth (34.127–39); or the climb to the top of Purgatory; or both (cf. 34.82).
64–66. I was speaking … unapt to form words: The first information about the seventh bolgia, like the last (see 25.136–42, with notes), relates to speech.
69. moved to anger: The Italian can also mean “in motion”; we think the ambiguity is probably intentional, but there is an interesting textual problem here: see “Textual Variants”.
82. a terrible crowding of serpents: The appropriateness of the snakes to the punishment of thieves of course derives from the account of the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve in Gen. 3.1–7. The archetypal thief is the devil, who stealthily entered the Garden and the serpent in order to steal mankind from God (cf. Augustine, De Cenesi ad litteram 28–29); Adam’s sin included all others (murder because it caused his and Eve’s deaths, theft because the fruit was forbidden, and so forth). In the Confessions, Augustine devotes most of Book 2 to explicating his adolescent theft of pears from a neighbor’s orchard as a type of Adam’s sin and of sin in general. In Jesus’ parable of the sheepfold (John 10.1–18), the thief is regularly identified as the devil. See Additional Note 10.
84. the memory still curdles my blood: The early commentators understand Dante’s term here (scipa) in various ways, taking it to mean either “divide, curdle” or “spoil”.
85–90. Let Libya brag … the Red Sea: In the Middle Ages, Libya, Ethiopia, and Arabia (to the west, southeast, and east of Egypt, respectively) were considered inhospitable to human life because of the heat of the torrid zone (for the fabulous origin of the desert, see 17.106–11, with note). In Aristotle’s works on natural science and in Pliny’s Natural History, these areas are said to teem with often monstrous creatures; Ovid (Met. 4.604–20) and Lucan (Pharsalia 9.696–727) relate that as Perseus flew over the Sahara with the head of Medusa, the drops of its blood generated a multitude of types of serpent.
86–87. chelydri … amphisbaenae: This list of serpent species is taken from Lucan’s list in Pharsalia 9.708–27 (fifteen species in twenty lines). Grandgent notes: “The chelydri make their path smoke, the jaculi are swift as darts, the pharee furrow the ground with their tails, the chenchres never follow a straight line, the amphisbaena has two heads”.
88. pestilences: Lucan repeatedly uses the term pestis of the Lybian serpents that attack Cato’s men (Pharsalia 9.614, 723, 734, and 844).
93. a crevice or a heliotrope: The Italian word for “crevice,” pertugio, suggests an opening through which thieves might escape. Medieval lapidaries ascribe to the heliotrope-stone (the name means “sun-turner” or “sun-changer”) the power of rendering its bearer invisible; in the early Italian prose Novellino and in Boccaccio’s Decameron 8.3 it is imagined to permit thieves to steal with impunity. See Additional Note 10.
Although the bolgia is deep in Hell, Dante creates the impression of a desert landscape under a pitiless sun as the appropriate place of punishment for thieves, whose Latin name (fur), Isidore says, derives from the word for “dark” (furvo, fusco). Concealment is an essential part of Aquinas’s definition of theft (Summa theol. 2a 2ae, q. 1, a. 66): “theft is … the concealed seizure of what belongs to others”. Here detection is constant, inevitable (see lines 127, 130, and 132).
94–96. their hands were bound … knotted in front: The thieves’ hands (with which they stole) are bound by the snakes. The motif of penetration and the knotting of snaky bodies suggest copulating serpents (Aristotle, On the generation of animals 1.7.718al8–19: “Serpents copulate by twisting round each other”). For other violent “couplings” in the bolgia, see 25.51–72 and 100–135.
98. transfixed him … to the shoulders: The serpent bites the shade at the crossing point of the spine and the shoulders (cf. 23.100–102, with note), also close to where the spinal column enters the brain. Ovid’s Pythagoras, in his summary of the forms of metamorphosis, cites the belief that snakes can be formed from the spinal marrow of corpses; see Met. 15.389–90: “sunt, qui …/ mutari credant humanas angue medullas” [some believe that … the human marrow changes into a snake]. The reciprocal attacks of the thieves will recall another archetypal conflict: the war between serpents and humankind decreed in Gen. 3.15, as the early commentators point out.
97–111. And behold … its winding sheet: In the first actual metamorphosis of the bolgia, one of the thieves is burned to ashes and immediately reconstituted. See Gen. 3.19: “for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return,” quoted in the burial service and in the Office for the Dead; see also Eccles. 17.31 and 41.13, Psalm 103.29–30, and the note to lines 106–11.
100. neither O nor I has ever been written so fast: Dante compares the quickness of the transformation to the time it takes to write two simple letters, which of course spell io (the first-person-singular pronoun, as well as the name of Io, a lover of love’s transformed into a cow: Met. 1.584; see Derby Chapin 1971). The reference to writing recalls lines 4–6.
101. caught fire … falling, to ashes: Snake venom was often thought to include the element of fire, as in Aen. 7.349–56, and Pharsalia 9.741–42 (cf. also the note to 26.58–60).
105. became the same one again: See Vergil, Georgics 4.444: “in sese redit” [he returned to himself], of Proteus returning to his “original” shape after many transformations.
106–11. the great sages profess … its winding sheet: With the conflagration in line 100, Dante juxtaposes an antithetical comparison with the mythical Phoenix, which lives for 500 years and then immolates itself on a pyre of spices, to be reborn from its ashes. Dante’s principal source is Ovid, Met. 15.392–407, where the Phoenix is one of Pythagoras’s examples of immortality through transformation:
Una est, quae reparet seque ipsa reseminet, ales: Assyrii phoenica vocant; non fruge neque herbis, sed turis lacrimis et suco vivit amomi.
[One bird there is, which renews and re-sows itself, called Phoenix by the Assyrians; on neither grain nor grass it lives, but on tears of incense and balsam-oil.] (392–94)
A famous poem by Lactantius (ca. 260-ca. 325) interpreted the Phoenix as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. The implication is that, like other punishments in Hell, that of the thieves is a distorted imitation of the Crucifixion.
109. neither grass nor grain: See the quotation from Ovid in the previous note and compare Inf. 1.103: “Questi non cibera terra ne peltro” (of the greyhound, the veltro).
112–14. like one who falls … can bind a man: That is, Vanni’s thunderstruck attitude is like that of one who has suffered demonic possession or an epileptic fit. Christ exorcises a “dumb spirit” in possession of a boy (Mark 9.17): “Who, wheresoever he taketh him, dasheth him, and he foameth, and gnasheth with the teeth, and pineth away”.
114. occlusion: Buti identifies this as a “gathering of humors, or their vapors, that enter the passageways between the heart and the brain; once these are closed, the man falls and becomes insensible”. Albertus Magnus (De animalibus 25.7) notes that some snake poisons work “by closing the passages for the breath in the body with the thickness of its cold substance”. See Additional Note 10.
124–25. Bestial life … Vanni Fucci the beast: Vanni Fucci was a violent member of the White Cancellieri faction of Pistoia (see the note to line 129). See Psalm 31.9: “Do not become like the horse and the mule, who have no understanding”. Vanni’s nickname of “beast” suggests an implied “moral” transformation (Vanni “acts” like a beast) (see Convivio 2.7.4).
126. Pistoia was a worthy lair for me: For thieves as beasts with lairs or dens, see the words of Christ, expelling the money changers from the Temple (Matt. 21.13): “you have made it a den of thieves”. Dante is punning on Pistoia and peste [pestilence], used of the snakes in line 88 (cf. 25.10–12, with note).
127. Tell him not to sneak off: The action would be characteristic of the thief.
129. a bloody, wrathful man: Vanni Fucci was responsible for a number of crimes and acts of violence, the most serious being the murder, in 1293 or 1294, of Bertino de’ Vergiolesi; Bertino was a relative of Foccaccia (Vanni) de’ Cancellieri, a prominent White Guelf of Pistoia (see 32.63, with notes), and was killed when Foccaccia could not be found.
130. did not feign: Dante insists on the inevitable visibility of the thief here (see the note to line 93).
132. covered with sad shame: Compare Jer. 2.26: “As the thief is confounded when taken… “. Compare this with Virgil’s cheerful expression in lines 20–21.
137. I stole: The first explicit mention of theft in the canto. For the typology of thieves in this bolgia, see the note to 25.50–138.
138. the beautiful appointments from the sacristy: Vanni Fucci’s crime was theft of sacred objects Jwrftwi rex sacrae (an established legal category). In January 1293, Vanni Fucci and others broke into the church of San Zeno in Pistoia and stole, or attempted to steal, two silver tablets with images of the Virgin and the apostles from the chapel of San Iacopo.
139. falsely blamed on others: Arrested and held for Vanni Fucci’s crime was one Rampino di Francesco Foresi; he was only set at liberty in 1295, after Vanni Fucci informed on an accomplice (Vanni della Monna), with whom the treasure had been deposited; Vanni della Monna was then executed in place of Rampino. This “substitution of persons” may be related thematically to the action of the bolgia; see the note to 25.50–138.
142–50. open your ears … will be stricken by it: This deliberately obscure prophecy refers to some phase of the struggle between the Tuscan Whites and Blacks. First the Blacks are driven out of Pistoia (1301), and then Florence drives out the Whites and changes its laws (the Black coup of 1301- 1302; see 6.64–72). Commentators are agreed that the “hot wind” is Moroello Malaspina, from the Val di Magra, in Lunigiana, northwest of Tuscany, and that the “roiling clouds” refer to the Tuscan Whites. Beyond that, the prophecy perhaps refers to the taking by Malaspina of the fortress of Serravalle, part of the Pistoian defenses, in 1302, perhaps to the taking of Pistoia itself by the Blacks, led by Malaspina, in 1306. The prophecy is more devastating if the definitive defeat of 1306 is meant, since the Pistoian Blacks succeeded in securing reentry into their city, whereas the Florentine Whites did not (see the note to 32.69).
In Vanni Fucci’s meteorological allegory, the “hot wind,” containing fire (hot and dry), and the “roiling cloud,” containing water (cold and moist), collide to produce a storm. Medieval commentators on Ovid’s Metamorphoses posit the combination and strife of elements as one of the most “basic” natural metamorphoses; concluding the canto with a meteorological one balances its opening.
144. Florence makes new its laws and people: Note the language of metamorphosis, used ironically of the change in population with the expulsion of the Whites and the hasty revision of legislation to favor the Blacks, as if Florence were a Phoenix (see 25.143 and note).
148. above Campo Piceno: Dante and his contemporaries took the ager Picenum, named by Sallust as the place where Catiline was defeated in 63 B.C., to be a field near Pistoia, the scene of one of Malaspina’s sorties against the Pistoian Whites.