The Divine Comedy (Illustrated Edition). Dante Alighieri

but wheresoever chance

      Hurls it, there sprouting, as a grain of spelt,

      It rises to a sapling, growing thence

      A savage plant. The Harpies, on its leaves

      Then feeding, cause both pain and for the pain

      A vent to grief. We, as the rest, shall come

      For our own spoils, yet not so that with them

      We may again be clad; for what a man

      Takes from himself it is not just he have.

      Here we perforce shall drag them; and throughout

      The dismal glade our bodies shall be hung,

      Each on the wild thorn of his wretched shade.”

      Attentive yet to listen to the trunk

      We stood, expecting farther speech, when us

      A noise surpris’d, as when a man perceives

      The wild boar and the hunt approach his place

      Of station’d watch, who of the beasts and boughs

      Loud rustling round him hears. And lo! there came

      Two naked, torn with briers, in headlong flight,

      That they before them broke each fan o’ th’ wood.

      “Haste now,” the foremost cried, “now haste thee death!”

      The’ other, as seem’d, impatient of delay

Exclaiming, “Lano!3 not so bent for speed

      Thy sinews, in the lists of Toppo’s field.”

      And then, for that perchance no longer breath

      Suffic’d him, of himself and of a bush

      One group he made. Behind them was the wood

      Full of black female mastiffs, gaunt and fleet,

      As greyhounds that have newly slipp’d the leash.

      On him, who squatted down, they stuck their fangs,

      And having rent him piecemeal bore away

      The tortur’d limbs. My guide then seiz’d my hand,

      And led me to the thicket, which in vain

      Mourn’d through its bleeding wounds: “O Giacomo

Of Sant’ Andrea!4 what avails it thee,”

      It cried, “that of me thou hast made thy screen?

      For thy ill life what blame on me recoils?”

      When o’er it he had paus’d, my master spake:

      “Say who wast thou, that at so many points

      Breath’st out with blood thy lamentable speech?”

      He answer’d: “Oh, ye spirits: arriv’d in time

      To spy the shameful havoc, that from me

      My leaves hath sever’d thus, gather them up,

      And at the foot of their sad parent-tree

Carefully lay them. In that city’5 I dwelt,

      Who for the Baptist her first patron chang’d,

      Whence he for this shall cease not with his art

      To work her woe: and if there still remain’d not

      On Arno’s passage some faint glimpse of him,

      Those citizens, who rear’d once more her walls

      Upon the ashes left by Attila,

      Had labour’d without profit of their toil.

I slung the fatal noose6 from my own roof.”

      Footnotes

1 A wild and woody tract, abounding in deer, goats, and wild boars. Cecina is a river not far to the south of Leghorn; Corneto, a small city on the same coast, in the patrimony of the Church.

2 “I it was.” Piero delle Vigne, a native of Capua, who from a low condition raised himself, by his eloquence and legal knowledge, to the office of Chancellor to the Emperor Frederick II. The courtiers, envious of his exalted situation, forged letters to make Frederick believe that he held a secret and traitorous intercourse with the Pope, who was then at enmity with the Emperor. He was cruelly condemned to lose his eyes. Driven to despair by his unmerited calamity he dashed out his brains against the walls of a church, in the year 1245.

3 Lano, a Siennese, who being reduced by prodigality to a state of extreme want, found his existence no longer supportable; and having been sent by his countrymen on a military expedition to assist the Florentines against the Aretini, took that opportunity of exposing himself to certain death, in the engagement which took place at Toppo, near Arezzo. See G. Villani, Hist. lib. vii. c. cxix.

4 Jacopo da Sant’ Andrea, a Paduan, who, having wasted his property in the most wanton acts of profusion, killed himself in despair.

5 “——— Florence, that city which changed her first patron Mars for St. John the Baptist.”

6 “I slung the fatal noose.” We are not informed who this suicide was; some calling him Rocco de’ Mozzi, and others Lotto degli Agli.

      Canto XIV

       Table of Contents

      ARGUMENT.—They arrive at the beginning of the third of those compartments into which this seventh circle is divided. It is a plain of dry and hot sand, where three kinds of violence are punished; namely, against God, against Nature, and against Art; and those who have thus sinned, are tormented by flakes of fire, which are eternally showering down upon them. Among the violent against God is found Capaneus, whose blasphemies they hear. Next, turning to the left along the forest of self-slayers, and having journeyed a little onward, they meet with a streamlet of blood that issues from the forest and traverses the sandy plain. Here Virgil speaks to our Poet of a huge ancient statue that stands within Mount Ida in Crete, from a fissure in which statue there is a dripping of tears, from which the said streamlet, together with the three other infernal rivers, are formed.

      SOON as the charity of native land

      Wrought in my bosom, I the scatter’d leaves

      Collected, and to him restor’d, who now

      Was hoarse with utt’rance. To the limit thence

      We came, which from the third the second round

      Divides, and where of justice is display’d