Purgatorio

Canto XXII

The Sixth Circle—The Gluttonous—The Mystic Tree.

Already was the Angel left behind us,¹The Angel who to the sixth round had turned us,Having erased one mark from off my face;And those who have in justice their desireHad said to us, “Beati,” in their voices,²With “sitio,” and without more ended it.And I, more light than through the other passes,Went onward so, that without any laborI followed upward the swift-footed spirits;When thus Virgilius began: “The loveKindled by virtue aye another kindles,Provided outwardly its flame appear.Hence from the hour that Juvenal descended³Among us into the infernal Limbo,Who made apparent to me thy affection,My kindliness towards thee was as greatAs ever bound one to an unseen person,So that these stairs will now seem short to me.But tell me, and forgive me as a friend,If too great confidence let loose the rein,And as a friend now hold discourse with me;How was it possible within thy breastFor avarice to find place, ’mid so much wisdomAs thou wast filled with by thy diligence?”These words excited Statius at firstSomewhat to laughter; afterward he answered:“Each word of thine is love’s dear sign to me.Verily oftentimes do things appearWhich give fallacious matter to our doubts,Instead of the true causes which are hidden!Thy question shows me thy belief to beThat I was niggard in the other life,It may be from the circle where I was;Therefore know thou, that avarice was removedToo far from me; and this extravaganceThousands of lunar periods have punished.And were it not that I my thoughts uplifted,When I the passage heard where thou exclaimest,As if indignant, unto human nature,‘To what impellest thou not, O cursed hunger⁴Of gold, the appetite of mortal men?’Revolving I should feel the dismal joustings.⁵Then I perceived the hands could spread too wideTheir wings in spending, and repented meAs well of that as of my other sins;How many with shorn hair shall rise again⁶Because of ignorance, which from this sinCuts off repentance living and in death!And know that the transgression which rebutsBy direct opposition any sinTogether with it here its verdure dries.Therefore if I have been among that folkWhich mourns its avarice, to purify me,For its opposite has this befallen me.”“Now when thou sangest the relentless weaponsOf the twofold affliction of Jocasta,”⁷The singer of the Songs Bucolic said,“From that which Clio there with thee preludes,⁸It does not seem that yet had made thee faithfulThat faith without which no good works suffice.If this be so, what candles or what sunScattered thy darkness so that thou didst trimThy sails behind the Fisherman thereafter?”⁹And he to him: “Thou first directedst meTowards Parnassus, in its grots to drink,And first concerning God didst me enlighten.Thou didst as he who walketh in the night,Who bears his light behind, which helps him not,But maketh wise the persons after him,When thou didst say: ‘The age renews itself,¹⁰Justice returns, and man’s primeval time,And a new progeny descends from heaven.’Through thee I Poet was, through thee a Christian;But that thou better see what I design,To color it will I extend my hand.Already was the world in every partPregnant with the true creed, disseminatedBy messengers of the eternal kingdom;And thy assertion, spoken of above,With the new preachers was in unison;Whence I to visit them the custom took.Then they became so holy in my sight,That, when Domitian persecuted them,Not without tears of mine were their laments;And all the while that I on earth remained,Them I befriended, and their upright customsMade me disparage all the other sects.And ere I led the Greeks unto the riversOf Thebes, in poetry, I was baptized,But out of fear was covertly a Christian,For a long time professing paganism;And this lukewarmness caused me the fourth circle¹¹To circuit round more than four centuries.Thou, therefore, who hast raised the coveringThat hid from me whatever good I speak of,While in ascending we have time to spare,Tell me, in what place is our friend Terentius,¹²Caecilius, Plautus, Varro, if thou knowest;¹³Tell me if they are damned, and in what alley.”“These, Persius and myself, and others many,”¹⁴Replied my Leader, “with that Grecian are¹⁵Whom more than all the rest the Muses suckled,In the first circle of the prison blind;Ofttimes we of the mountain hold discourseWhich has our nurses ever with itself.Euripides is with us, Antiphon,¹⁶Simonides, Agatho, and many other¹⁷Greeks who of old their brows with laurel decked.There some of thine own people may be seen,Antigone, Deiphile and Argìa,¹⁸And there Ismene mournful as of old.There she is seen who pointed out Langìa;¹⁹There is Tiresias’ daughter, and there Thetis,²⁰And there Deidamia with her sisters.”²¹Silent already were the poets both,Attent once more in looking round about,From the ascent and from the walls released;And four handmaidens of the day already²²Were left behind, and at the pole the fifthWas pointing upward still its burning horn,What time my Guide: “I think that tow’rds the edgeOur dexter shoulders it behoves us turn,Circling the mount as we are wont to do.”Thus in that region custom was our ensign;And we resumed our way with less suspicionFor the assenting of that worthy soulThey in advance went on, and I aloneBehind them, and I listened to their speech,Which gave me lessons in the art of song.But soon their sweet discourses interruptedA tree which midway in the road we found,²³With apples sweet and grateful to the smell.And even as a fir-tree tapers upwardFrom bough to bough, so downwardly did that;I think in order that no one might climb it.On that side where our pathway was enclosedFell from the lofty rock a limpid water,And spread itself abroad upon the leaves.The Poets twain unto the tree drew near,And from among the foliage a voiceCried: “Of this food ye shall have scarcity.”Then said: “More thoughtful Mary was of making²⁴The marriage feast complete and honorable,Than of her mouth which now for you responds;And for their drink the ancient Roman womenWith water were content; and Daniel²⁵Disparaged food, and understanding won.The primal age was beautiful as gold;²⁶Acorns it made with hunger savorous,And nectar every rivulet with thirst.Honey and locusts were the alimentsThat fed the Baptist in the wilderness;Whence he is glorious, and so magnifiedAs by the Evangel is revealed to you.”

The ascent to the Sixth Circle, where the sin of Gluttony is punished. ↩
Matthew 5:6:— “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.” ↩
The satirist Juvenal, who flourished at Rome during the last half of the first century of the Christian era, and died at the beginning of the second, aged eighty. He was a contemporary of Statius, and survived him some thirty years. ↩
Aeneid, III 56:— “O cursed hunger of gold, to what dost thou not drive the hearts of men.” ↩
The punishment of the Avaricious and Prodigal. Inferno VII 26:— “With great howls / Rolling weights forward by main force of chest.” ↩
Dante says of the Avaricious and Prodigal, Inferno VII 56:— “These from the sepulchre shall rise again / With the fist closed, and these with tresses shorn.” ↩
Her two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, of whom Statius sings in the Thebaid, and to whom Dante alludes by way of illustration. Inferno XXVI 54. See also note 383. ↩
Statius begins the Thebaid with an invocation to Clio, the Muse of History, whose office it was to record the heroic actions of brave men, I 55:— “What first, O Clio, shall adorn thy page, / The expiring prophet, or Aetolian’s rage? / Say, wilt thou sing how, grim with hostile blood, / Hippomedon repelled the rushing flood, / Lament the Arcadian youth’s untimely fate, / Or Jove, opposed by Capaneus, relate?” Skelton, “Elegy on the Earl of Northumberland”:— “Of hevenly poems, O Clyo calde by name / In the college of musis goddess hystoriale.” ↩
Saint Peter. ↩
70, Virgil’s Bucolics, Ecl. IV, 5, a passage supposed to foretell the birth of Christ:— “The last era of Cumaean song is now arrived; the great series of ages begins anew; now the Virgin returns, returns the Saturnian reign; now a new progeny is sent down from the high heaven.” ↩
The Fourth Circle of Purgatory, where Sloth is punished. Canto XVII 85:— “The love of good, remiss / In what it should have done, is here restored; / Here plied again the ill-belated oar.” ↩
Some editions read in this line, instead of nostro amico—nostro antico, our ancient Terence; but the epithet would be more appropriate to Plautus, who was the earlier writer. ↩
Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, the three principal Latin dramatists; Varro, “the most learned of the Romans,” the friend of Cicero, and author of some five hundred volumes, which made St. Augustine wonder how he who wrote so many books could find time to read so many; and how he who read so many could find time to write so many. ↩
Persius, the Latin satirist. ↩
Homer. ↩
Mrs. Browning, “Wine of Cyprus”:— “Our Euripides, the human— / With his droppings of warm tears; / And his touches of things common, / Till they rose to touch the spheres.” But why does Dante make no mention here of “Aeschylus the thunderous” and “Sophocles the royal”? Antiphon was a tragic and epic poet of Attica, who was put to death by Dionysius because he would not praise the tyrant’s writings. Some editions read Anacreon for Antiphon. ↩
Simonides, the poet of Cos, who won a poetic prize at the age of eighty, and is said to be the first poet who wrote for money. Agatho was an Athenian dramatist, of whom nothing remains but the name and a few passages quoted in other writers. ↩
Some of the people that Statius introduces into his poems. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus; Deiphile, wife of Tideus; Argìa, her sister, wife of Polynices; Ismene, another daughter of Oedipus, who is here represented as still lamenting the death of Atys, her betrothed. ↩
Hypsipile, who pointed out to Adrastus the fountain of Langìa, when his soldiers were perishing with thirst on their march against Thebes. ↩
Of the three daughters of Tiresias only Manto is mentioned by Statius in the Thebaid. But Dante places Manto among the Soothsayers, Inferno XX 55, and not in Limbo. Had he forgotten this? ↩
Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and Deidamia, the daughter of Lycomedes. They are among the personages in the Achilleid of Statius. ↩
Four hours of the day were already passed. ↩
Cowley, “The Tree of Knowledge”:— “The sacred tree ’midst the fair orchard grew, / The phoenix Truth did on it rest / And built his perfumed nest, / That right Porphyrian tree which did true Logic show; / Each leaf did learned notions give / And th’ apples were demonstrative; / So clear their color and divine / The very shade they cast did other lights outshine.” This tree of Temptation, however, is hardly the tree of Knowledge, though sprung from it, as Dante says of the next, in Canto XXIV 117. It is meant only to increase the torment of the starving souls beneath it, by holding its fresh and dewy fruit beyond their reach. ↩
John 2:3:— “And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.” ↩
Daniel 1:12:— “Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat and water to drink. … And Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.” ↩
Compare the description of the Golden Age in Ovid, Metamorphoses, I:— “The golden age was first; when man, yet new, / No rule but uncorrupted reason knew, / And, with a native bent, did good pursue. / Unforced by punishment, unawed by fear, / His words were simple, and his soul sincere; / Needless was written law, where none opprest: / The law of man was written in his breast: / No suppliant crowds before the judge appeared, / No court erected yet, nor cause was heard: / But all was safe, for conscience was their guard. / The mountain-trees in distant prospect please, / Ere yet the pine descended to the seas; / Ere sails were spread, new oceans to explore; / And happy mortals, unconcerned for more, / Confined their wishes to their native shore. / No walls were yet: nor fence, nor mote, nor mound, / Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet’s angry sound: / Nor swords were forged; but, void of care and crime, / The soft creation slept away their time. / The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough, / And unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow: / Content with food, which nature freely bred, / On wildings and on strawberries they fed; / Cornels and bramble-berries gave the rest, / And falling acorns furnished out a feast. / The flowers unsown in fields and meadows reigned; / And western winds immortal spring maintained. / In following years, the bearded corn ensued / From earth unasked, nor was that earth renewed. / From veins of valleys milk and nectar broke, / And honey sweating through the pores of oak.” Also Boethius, Book II Met. 5, and the Ode in Tasso’s Aminta, Leigh Hunt’s Tr., beginning:— “O lovely age of gold! / Not that the rivers rolled / With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew; / Not that the ready ground / Produced without a wound, / Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew; / Not that a cloudless blue / Forever was in sight, / Or that the heaven which burns, / And now is cold by turns, / Looked out in glad and everlasting light; / No, nor that even the insolent ships from far / Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than war: / “But solely that that vain / And breath-invented pain, / That idol of mistake, that worshipped cheat, / That Honor—since so called / By vulgar minds appalled— / Played not the tyrant with our nature yet. / It had not come to fret / The sweet and happy fold / Of gentle human-kind; / Nor did its hard law bind / Souls nursed in freedom; but that law of gold, / That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted, / Which Nature’s own hand wrote—What pleases, is permitted.” Also Don Quixote’s address to the goatherds, Don Quixote, Book II Ch. 3, Jarvis’s Tr.:— “After Don Quixote had satisfied his hunger, he took up an handful of acorns, and, looking on them attentively, gave utterance to expressions like these:— “ ‘Happy times, and happy ages! those to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because gold (which, in this our iron age, is so much esteemed) was to be had, in that fortunate period, without toil and labor; but because they who then lived were ignorant of these two words, Meum and Tuum. In that age of innocence, all things were in common; no one needed to take any other pains for his ordinary sustenance, than to lift up his hand and take it from the sturdy oaks, which stood inviting him liberally to taste of their sweet and relishing fruit. The limpid fountains, and running streams, offered them, in magnificent abundance, their delicious and transparent waters. In the clefts of rocks, and in the hollow of trees, did the industrious and provident bees form their commonwealths, offering to every hand, without usury, the fertile produce of their most delicious toil. The stout cork-trees, without any other inducement than that of their own courtesy, divested themselves of their light and expanded bark, with which men began to cover their houses, supported by rough poles, only for a defence against the inclemency of the seasons. All then was peace, all amity, all concord. As yet the heavy coulter of the crooked plough had not dared to force open, and search into, the tender bowels of our first mother, who unconstrained offered, from every part of her fertile and spacious bosom, whatever might feed, sustain, and delight those her children, who then had her in possession. Then did the simple and beauteous young shepherdesses trip it from dale to dale, and from hill to hill, their tresses sometimes plaited, sometimes loosely flowing, with no more clothing than was necessary modestly to cover what modesty has always required to be concealed; nor were there ornaments like those nowadays in fashion, to which the Tyrian purple and the so-many-ways martyred silk give a value; but composed of green dock-leaves and ivy interwoven; with which, perhaps, they went as splendidly and elegantly decked as our court-ladies do now, with all those rare and foreign inventions which idle curiosity hath taught them. Then were the amorous conceptions of the soul clothed in simple and sincere expressions, in the same way and manner they were conceived, without seeking so much depreciate, confound, and perartificial phrases to set them off. Nor secute her, not daring then to disturb as yet were fraud, deceit, and malice or offend her. As yet the judge did intermixed with truth and plain-dealnot make his own will the measure of ing. Justice kept within her proper justice; for then there was neither bounds; favor and interest, which now cause nor person to be judged.’ ” ↩