15. Charon, The Pagan Ferryman Of The Christian Damned: INFERNO, Canto III, Lines 70 - 108
Charon has sailed right out of classical mythology and into a Christian poem.
We step out of the foyer and enter the second part of Canto III of INFERNO: the part about the storied Charon, the ferryman on Acheronte (or Acheron), as well as the souls waiting to be ferried into hell itself.
But before that, a spat between Virgil and our pilgrim. Something is always amiss when you're walking across the universe with your mentor. When the universe is a hierarchy, those on top have to hold their post. And those below have to try to get heard.
Besides, where else are you going to quarrel, if not on the shores of hell?
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The segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:28] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto III, Lines 70 - 108. If you'd like to read along, find a deeper study guide, or even continue the conversation with me, scroll down this page.
[03:31] Where are we? We're in a plot . . . which breaks into distinct scenes.
[7:10] The opening of the passage: the spat between the pilgrim and his guide. Why is Virgil irritated at his pupil?
[11:13] Why do I insist on calling the river by its name in the medieval Florentine, "Acheronte"?
[12:31] Some thoughts on the structure of hell . . . and even COMEDY as a whole.
[15:15] Who is Charon? How'd he step out of classical mythology into this most Christian poem?
[19:23] The "cinematography" of this passage: its lurid details and engaged plotting.
[20:11] And then the theological question. Why don't the damned just run away when Charon presents himself?
[23:40] Rereading INFERNO, Canto III, lines 70 - 108.
My English translation of INFERNO, Canto III, 70 - 108:
Then, setting my gaze to look beyond them,
I saw people on the shore of the big river—
Which made me say, “Master, let me know
“Who these are and what propensity makes them appear—
Or so I see them in this faded light—
So eager to cross over.
And he to me, “You will be told these things
When we stop our steps
At the sad shore of Acheronte.”
Thus, with lowered eyes and shame-filled,
Fearful because my words maybe offended him,
I stopped talking until we got to the river.
Behold, coming toward us in a boat,
I saw an old man, with thinning, white hair,
Crying out, “Curses on you, evil souls.
“Don’t ever hope to see heaven:
I come to transport you to the other shore,
To eternal darkness, full of heat and cold.
“And you, over there, you living spirit,
Get away from these who are dead.”
When he saw that I didn’t budge,
He said, “By another way, by other ports,
You will find a passage and cross, not here.
A lighter boat than mine must carry you.”
And my leader to him, “Don’t torture yourself, Charon.
This is willed where what is willed
Is what is done. Don’t question us anymore.”
At this, the ferryman’s shaggy jowls relaxed,
As he guided his boat across the bruised swamp,
Though his eyes were set into wheels of fire.
But those souls, exhausted and naked,
Changed color and gnashed their teeth
As soon as they heard his cruel words.
They cursed God and their parents,
The human race, the place, the time,
And the seed of their conception and even their birth.
Then they drew close together
With loud lamentation at the bad shore
That awaits each person who does not fear God.
FOR MORE STUDY
A translation problem:
When Virgil casts his spell to make Charon quiet down, the wording is a bit difficult to render in English. At lines 94 - 96, Virgil begins by saying, “Caron, non ti crucciare” (literally, “Charon, don’t torment yourself”). But the word “crucciare” is telling, even heretical. You can probably see the roots of “crucify” in it. Why would Virgil tell Charon not to “crucify” himself? Then Virgil goes on: “vuolsi così colà dove . . .” (literally, “it is willed as such where . . .”). It’s almost impossible to render the sing-song but also dissonant sound of these words from the Florentine. Look at the repeated “si" and those bashing consonants (ls, c, s, c, l, d), slipping between liquid sounds and grating percussives. Finally, Virgil offers the rational: “si puote/ ciò che si vuole” (literally, “is possible for itself whatever is willed for itself”). That last is hard to grok. First off, it’s inverted in the medieval Florentine: “ciò che si vuole” is the subject of the reflexive verb “si puote.” Secondly, “puote” and “vuole” offer an internal rhyme, making the thing seem even more like a spell. And third, it’s so concise as to be almost cryptic. We have to use many more words in English to make a similar sentence.
Three interpretive issues:
Let’s go back to Virgil’s irritation at lines 76 - 78. I offered three rationales for them in the episode: Virgil is already tired of being the guide, Virgil is hesitant about what’s ahead, and Virgil is rebuking an over-zealous Dante. That last is the standard interpretation. But there may be more. First off, Virgil has repeatedly chastised the pilgrim for being a coward. So if Dante steps up to the plate now, what’s wrong with that? Second, we might not know Virgil’s words are stern unless we read the next lines about the pilgrim’s lowering his eyes. Is the pilgrim taking it too hard? And finally, is Virgil irritated because this has all happened before . . . in his own poem. The descent to the underworld and the arrival of Charon are right out of THE AENEID (Book VI, lines 298 - 320). Is Virgil piqued because he’s having to rehearse his own poem? And he’s not cast as Aeneas or the hero but as some minor character from one book of his epic?
While we’re at it, what do you make of Dante’s plagiarism? Or maybe that’s too big a word. How about this: the ways he’s cribbing this initial descent to the “real” hell from THE AENEID? Even the way the damned rush to the shore at ll. 106 - 108 is out of THE AENEID (although sieved through Christian theology). Is the poet insecure? Or confident in his source material? Is he trying to show off how much he knows? Or is he still not fully engaged imaginatively? There are no final answers. But there’s a great opportunity for speculation, using the words of the text.
At lines 103 - 105, the curse, which the damned utter, is exhaustive. In the Florentine and in this order, they curse God, their parents, the human race, the place, the time, and the semen of their insemination that led to their birth. (The passage was cleaned up by many a Victorian translator!) Think about that range: from the upper heavens with God right down to the biology in the bed. But you’ll notice the one thing they don’t curse: themselves. Are they blaming everyone else for their fate? Or are they so lost that they have no more self to curse? And while we’re at it, who is the audience for this curse? Charon? Does he care? Themselves? Or is this a curse intended for no ears? And is that part of damnation? To speak, even to yell, without being heard?
Charon, a background problem:
He’s a mythic figure, shadowy until the Roman Empire, although he has had with a long life beyond the West’s classical age. But first, a correction. I mentioned Charon in relation to Homer’s poetry during the podcast episode. Untrue! Sorry about that! I believe I was thinking about other Greek sources. Oysseus does get around or across or at least stand near the river Styx (the geography is not clear) so he can talk with the prophet Tiresias but Charon is not involved. (Thanks to at least two listeners for catching this gaffe.) I believe I’d muddled Homer’s poetry with the sixth-century BCE fragmentary Greek epic MINYAS (well, my notes are a bit of a mess right at this point, to be honest). In the MINYAS, Charon is indeed a ferryman for the dreaded crossing. (Just as a side note, the first-century-BCE Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily believed that Charon was imported from Egyptian myths of the soul’s journey after death, although there’s little other evidence to suggest that origin.) Charon shows up on ancient Greek funerary urns; he is also mentioned as connected to the river Acheron by several Greek writers, including Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, and Pindar. Virgil seems to follow their lead by putting him at Acheron but also at Styx, a fusion of the two rivers in THE AENEID. It could be that Virgil sees Acheron as the river’s name above ground (there is indeed such a named river in Greece) and Styx as its name once it descends to the underworld. Other Roman poets—Propertius, Ovid, and Statius—put Charon at Styx, not Acheron. Dante wouldn’t necessarily know the finer distinctions here because of his limited access to original source material. He may have seen the two rivers in THE AENEID and divided them of his own accord (we will get to Styx on down in hell). Or Dante may have read enough secondary material to know these are actually two rivers, not two names for one river. One important note: In THE AENEID and many other sources, even on those funerary urns, Charon often requires some sort of payment for the crossing. In THE AENEID, the dead who show up without a coin are forced to wander around for a hundred years on the river’s shore before the ferryman will let them take the journey. It’s interesting that Dante drops this characteristic feature of Charon’s job. (There may, however, be a hint of it early on in PURGATORIO when we meet a figure who had to wait at another river for a long while before he could get on the boat for Mount Purgatory.) For post-Dante artistic renderings of Charon, see his figure down in the lower right of Michelangelo’s LAST JUDGMENT on the back wall of the Sistine Chapel; Joachim Patinir’s wildly dreamy, almost Bosch-ian representation of the river crossing from the early 1500s (now in the Prado); and José Benlliure y Gil’s romantic, early-twentieth century, oil-on-linen painting of Charon and his boat in the museum of art in Valencia, Spain.
A journaling prompt:
INFERNO is a blended poem: one foot in the classical world, one foot in the Christian. Do you come from a blended background? Were your parents, say, from different religious traditions or social conditions or educational backgrounds? How has that affected you? What’s it like to live in their intersection? How have you made peace with it? Have you made peace with it?