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overthinking entertainment

Book: Inferno: Canto 34

Dante passes through the centre of the Earth.

In canto 33 of the Inferno by Dante Alighieri, the poets crossed the third region of the ninth circle. In canto 34, they come to the fourth and innermost region, Judecca, where:

Già era, e con paura il metto in metro,
là dove l'ombre tutte eran coperte,
e trasparien come festuca in vetro.

With fear I put it into metre, that now I was
where the spirits were completely covered,
but visible like straws in glass.

At the centre of the lake of ice the poets find a giant figure, Dis or Lucifer or Beelzebub, "the emperor of the sorrowful realm", trapped "in the ice up to the middle of the breast", with three faces and two bat-like wings. Each mouth bites on a sinner—the middle one on Judas Iscariot, the other two on Brutus and Cassius. The poets climb down Lucifer's furry thigh and find themselves climbing upwards, having passed "the point to which weights are drawn from all directions". They take a "hidden road" and emerge "to see again the stars".

You can read the poem in Italian; in the public-domain English translations by Cary (1805), Longfellow (1867), Sibbald (1884), Norton (1891), or Musgrave (1893); or from the Internet Archive you can borrow the English translations by Sayers (1949), Ciardi (1954), Mandelbaum (1980), Pinsky (1996), or Kirkpatrick (2006); or you can use the Columbia Digital Dante; or you can find one of the many other translations.
posted by cyanistes on Nov 28, 2025 at 1:52 AM

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There are so many wild ideas in this canto that I was not able to include in the summary! We learn that Cocytus is frozen because of the icy wind produced by the flapping of Lucifer's wings; that Hell itself was excavated when Lucifer was thrown out of Heaven and crashed into the Earth; that the Garden of Eden is in the southern hemisphere, from which a river flows down through caverns to the very centre of the Earth; that the Earth's land masses were formerly in the southern hemisphere, but fled from Lucifer to their current positions in the northern hemisphere; and that the inner parts of Earth also fled from him upwards, thus building Mount Purgatory.

I wonder if Dante's placement of the Garden of Eden in the southern hemisphere was in reaction to Augustine, who denies that this is possible:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. [...] For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [Augustine, City of God 16.9, translated by Marcus Dods (1871).]

There is one big question that stands out from this canto. No, not the question of whether Mount Purgatory time is twelve hours ahead or behind Jerusalem time, but rather, why did Dante choose Brutus and Cassius to suffer alongside Judas in the unholy mockery of the crucifixion? What was so good about Julius Caesar that his assassination was the second worst crime after the betrayal of Christ?

Caesar ought to be among the traitors to country in Antenora, the second region of the ninth circle, for his betrayal of the Roman Republic; or failing that, among the sowers of schism in the ninth ditch of the eighth circle, for starting a civil war; or among the thieves in the seventh ditch for his looting of the Roman treasury; or among the violent against their neighbours in the river Phlegethon, like Alexander, for his murderous campaigns against the Gauls, or among the lustful in the second circle, for his many liaisons. Dante even admits some of this, for he puts Gaius Scribonius Curio among the sowers of schism, for merely advising Caesar to cross the Rubicon. But Caesar himself is among the virtuous pagans in the first circle, "in a great company" with Hector, Aeneas, and Electra (the mother of Dardanus, not the daughter of Agamemnon).

To some extent this is the difficulty of trying to fit a real human being, someone with a mixture of virtues and vices, into the rigid allegorical schema of the Inferno, in which each figure is caught for all eternity in a single aspect. When we know nothing else about a figure, there's no difficulty—Filippo Argenti is wrathful, and that's all we know about him—but when a figure has a biography, we can see what's been left out. Dante places Cleopatra in the second circle with the lustful, but knowing something of her history, it seems more likely that her relationships with Caesar and Antony were motivated by political calculation than lust. So should she be in the second ditch of the eighth circle with the flatterers? In the ninth ditch with the sowers of schism for fighting a civil war against her brother Ptolemy? Or in the wood of the seventh circle for her suicide? In order to sort everyone into a catalogue of evil, the Inferno has to treat the spirits as types and not as people.

Dante's admiration for Caesar seems therefore not to be for his personal qualities, but for his role as the first Roman Emperor. In his De Monarchia (On Monarchy), Dante argued that:

It is better for the human race to be ruled by one than by many, and therefore there should be a Monarch, who is a single prince; and if it is better, it is more acceptable to God, since God always wills what is best. And since of these two ways of government the one is not only the better, but the best of all, it follows not only that this one is more acceptable to God as between one and many, but that it is the most acceptable. Therefore it is best for the human race to be governed by one man; and Monarchy is necessary for the welfare of the world. [Dante, De Monarchia 14, translated by F. J. Church (1879), page 206.]

So, in Dante's view, Caesar, whatever his failings, attempted to establish a universal monarchy, and this, more than the man, is what Brutus and Cassius betrayed when they murdered him.

You can see how the unending murderous civil violence of the Republic of Florence might have led Dante to the conclusion that only monarchy can ensure peace. In fact, throughout the Inferno you can see Dante trying to figure out what went wrong in his native city, using the tools that came to hand, namely the theology of the Catholic church and the ethical theories of Cicero and Aristotle.

*
I hope I was able to motivate you to read (or re-read) the poem, and if you did, it's not too late to comment! The posts remain open and I'm interested in reading your responses. Thanks to phooky in particular for some great comments.

I found this complaint in a recent post on Reddit:

What I don't get is why people still act so enraptured by it [the Divine Comedy] in English. Its... Fine. People say "oh, the imagery" or "how it's about love" but that's just so vague I can't help but wonder if people really read the book or just wanted to say they did to sound smart.

This kind of challenge is hardly answerable—no-one can make you appreciate a work of art—but when I read the Divine Comedy it makes me want to find out more about the things Dante put in the poem. He gives the impression of throwing everything that he knew into it: history, theology, classics, psychology, philosophy, astronomy and all. Thus, inspired by the Inferno I translated a sonnet by Pier delle Vigne to learn more about a man memorialized as a bleeding tree; I read Lucan's Pharsalia to find out how Erichtho might have summoned the spirit of Virgil out of Limbo; I read the Old French Mort de roi Artu to find out how Mordred's shadow was split; I read Aquinas' Summa Theologica to find out what the scholastic philosophers thought about pity, anger, astrology, contrition, and the salvation of pagans. Not every work of literature has this kind of effect.
posted by cyanistes at 1:57 AM

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Purgatorio next?
posted by Melismata at 5:48 AM

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...why did Dante choose Brutus and Cassius to suffer alongside Judas in the unholy mockery of the crucifixion? What was so good about Julius Caesar that his assassination was the second worst crime after the betrayal of Christ?

Yeah, putting both Brutus and Cassius in Satan's mouths right up there with Judas always seemed odd to me - yet another personal grudge Dante inserted into his poem - so thank you for the thoughtful explication.

Purgatorio next?

cyanistes addressed that in the previous canto's post:

I like Purgatorio even more than Inferno, but it is a more difficult poem for me to write about as there is less classical reference and more medieval history and scholastic theology. So if I do go ahead (and I am not promising!), I will need a break and to take it more slowly.
posted by mediareport at 6:38 AM

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Why did Dante choose Brutus and Cassius to suffer alongside Judas in the unholy mockery of the crucifixion?

The ninth circle is commonly taken to include traitors of various stripes. One way to read the final canto (though by no means the only reading) is that Lucifer's own crime was "treachery against his master", which means--unless Dante wants to allow for the possibility of people being more sinful than Satan--that this type of treason would have to be classified as the worst of all sins. As you point out, this results in some bizarre consequences: lots of people in history have attempted to overthrow their superiors. It seems faintly ridiculous to label them all as "maximally evil" just because it bears resemblance to the myth of Lucifer, even it it does allow Dante to neatly categorize them all together at the very bottom. (Then again, this is the same man who wrote of demons using fart-signals not long earlier, so.)

What was so good about Julius Caesar that his assassination was the second worst crime after the betrayal of Christ?

Earlier on, in the circle of Lust, there are a pair of lovers who admit that they were sinful in life, while also hinting (maybe wishfully, maybe not) that the man who murdered them is destined for a much deeper level of hell. If they weren't saints, then still less was their assassin. Under Dante's rigid hierarchy, two wrongs don't make a right. In a way, it doesn't matter what kind of person Caesar was: the author will cheerfully condemn both the Emperor and the people who killed him. As you say, even if Caesar is listed among the first circle's "virtuous pagans", he's still in hell.

(But yeah, this being the case, I have no idea why Caesar didn't end up lower than the first circle. Your quote from De Monarchia would explain a lot.)

_{Long-time lurker, first-time commenter. Thanks for posting these.}
posted by queen anne's remorse at 11:04 PM

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