The Divine Comedy (Illustrated Edition). Dante Alighieri
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in this strain I answer’d: “Tell me now,
What treasures from St. Peter at the first
Our Lord demanded, when he put the keys
Into his charge? Surely he ask’d no more
But, Follow me! Nor Peter7 nor the rest
Or gold or silver of Matthias took,
When lots were cast upon the forfeit place
Of the condemned soul.8 Abide thou then;
Thy punishment of right is merited:
And look thou well to that ill-gotten coin,
Which against Charles9 thy hardihood inspir’d.
If reverence of the keys restrain’d me not,
Which thou in happier time didst hold, I yet
Severer speech might use. Your avarice
O’ercasts the world with mourning, under foot
Treading the good, and raising bad men up.
Of shepherds, like to you, th’ Evangelist
Was ware, when her, who sits upon the waves,
With kings in filthy whoredom he beheld,
She who with seven heads tower’d at her birth,
And from ten horns her proof of glory drew,
Long as her spouse in virtue took delight.
Of gold and silver ye have made your god,
Diff’ring wherein from the idolater,
But he that worships one, a hundred ye?
Ah, Constantine!10 to how much ill gave birth,
Not thy conversion, but that plenteous dower,
Which the first wealthy Father gain’d from thee!”
Meanwhile, as thus I sung, he, whether wrath
Or conscience smote him, violent upsprang
Spinning on either sole. I do believe
My teacher well was pleas’d, with so compos’d
A lip, he listen’d ever to the sound
Of the true words I utter’d. In both arms
He caught, and to his bosom lifting me
Upward retrac’d the way of his descent.
Nor weary of his weight he press’d me close,
Till to the summit of the rock we came,
Our passage from the fourth to the fifth pier.
His cherish’d burden there gently he plac’d
Upon the rugged rock and steep, a path
Not easy for the clamb’ring goat to mount.
Thence to my view another vale appear’d
Footnotes
1 The apertures in the rock were of the same dimensions as the fonts of St. John the Baptist at Florence, one of which Dante had broken to rescue a child that was playing near and fell in. He intimates that his motive for breaking the font had been maliciously represented by his enemies.
2 The spirit mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII (who was then alive, and not expected to arrive so soon, a prophecy predicting the death of that pope at a later period. Boniface died in 1303.
3 Nicholas III of the Orsini family, whom the Poet therefore calls “figliuol dell’ orsa,” “son of the she-bear.” He died in 1281.
4 Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who succeeded to the pontificate in 1305, as Clement V. He transferred the Holy See to Avignon in 1308 (where it remained till 1376), and died in 1314.
5 “But after the death of Seleucus, when Antiochus, called Epiphanes, took the kingdom, Jason, the brother of Onias, labored to be high-priest, promising unto the king, by intercession, three hundred and threescore talents of silver, and of another revenue eighty talents.”—Maccab. b. ii. ch. iv, 7,8.
6 Philip IV. See G. Villani, lib. viii. c. lxxx.
7 Acts of the Apostles, ch. i. 26.
8 “The condemned soul.” Judas.
9 Nicholas III was enraged against Charles I, King of Sicily, because he rejected with scorn his proposition for an alliance between their families. See G. Villani, Hist., lib. iii.
10 He alludes to the pretended gift of the Lateran by Constantine to Sylvester, of which Dante himself seems to imply a doubt, in his treatise “De Monarchâ.”
Canto XX
ARGUMENT.—The Poet relates the punishment of such as presumed, while living, to predict future events. It is to have their faces reversed and set the contrary way on their limbs, so that, being deprived of the power to see before them, they are constrained ever to walk backward. Among these Virgil points out to him Amphiaraüs, Tiresias, Aruns, and Manto (from the mention of whom he takes occasion to speak of the origin of Mantua), together with several others, who had practised the arts of divination and astrology.
AND now the verse proceeds to torments new,
Fit argument of this the twentieth strain
Of the first song, whose awful theme records
The spirits whelm’d in woe. Earnest I look’d
Into the depth, that open’d to my view,
Moisten’d with tears of anguish, and beheld
A tribe, that came along the hollow vale,
In silence weeping: such their step as walk
Quires chanting solemn litanies on earth.
As on them more direct mine eye descends,
Each wondrously seem’d to be revers’d
At the neck-bone, so that the countenance
Was from the reins averted: and because
None might before him look, they were compell’d
To’ advance with backward gait. Thus one perhaps
Hath