21. Cataloguing The Greats You Know And The Ones You Wish You Knew: INFERNO, Canto IV, Lines 115 - 151
A whole yard full of those dead souls the poet wishes he could have known!
In this final passage in Limbo (INFERNO, Canto IV), our pilgrim lists off the great people he sees in the castle with its clear brook: Trojans, Romans, Julius Caesar, Aristotle, and even a few pre-Socratic thinkers.
Plus, there are a few others Dante points out who are almost mind-blowing, figures I didn't see in his list even after reading COMEDY for almost thirty years.
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The segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:37] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto IV, Lines 115 - 151. If you want to see it, find a deeper study guide, or drop a comment, scroll down this page.
[04:20] A bit about my history with COMEDY--and my apparent blindness to some of its details, despite reading it for so many years.
[05:26] The first pieces of this passage: questions about who the "we" is, questions about the description of the green grass in the castle ("enameled"?), and questions about the poet who never seems far behind the veil of these passages.
[07:40] The first list: Trojans, Romans, and (here it comes) an Islamic ruler. Also, a bit about the notion of "fiction v. history" in medieval writing.
[14:25] A second list, as the pilgrim lifts his eyes higher: philosophers, thinkers, writers, and physicians.
[18:03] A further listing, including poets among mathematicians and astronomers, with two Islamic scholars.
[22:43] Maybe there's an emotional component to listing off those you honor when you're on the run.
[26:58] The last lines of the passage--and the intrusion of the poet for one final time in a confession of his failure. The poet's never been far away in Limbo.
My English translation of INFERNO, Canto IV, Lines 115 – 151:
Then we moved over to one side,
To an open spot that was well-lit and high up,
So we could see everyone.
There in plain sight on the enameled green
The spirits of the great were shown to me.
To have seen all of them still lifts up my spirit.
I saw Electra with a big company,
That included Hector and Aeneas,
And Caesar, in armor and with falcon eyes.
I saw Camilla and Penthesilea,
And on the other side King Latinus
Who sat with his daughter Lavinia.
I saw Brutus who drove out Tarquin,
Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia—
And over by himself I saw Saladin.
When I lifted my eyes yet higher,
I saw the master of those who know,
Seated with his philosophical family.
All look at him and do him honor.
There I saw Socrates and Plato
Closest to him and in front of everyone else—
Also, Democritus, who says the world happened by chance,
Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and Thales;
Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Zeno.
And there I saw the great collector of things according to their qualities—
I mean, Dioscorides—and also Orpheus,
Cicero, Linus, Seneca the moralist,
Euclid the geometer and Ptolemy,
Hippocrates, Avicenna, and Galen,
Averroes, too, who made the great commentary.
I can’t possibly present all those there,
Because I’m pushed on by my long theme:
What I say doesn’t come close to what I want to say.
The company of six now dwindles to two,
And my wise guide leads me along another path
Out of the stillness and into the twitching air.
So that I come to a place where nothing is that shines.
FOR MORE STUDY
In the episode, I mentioned that there were some philosophic figures you might want to explore more. Here are links to YouTube videos (all attached to and clickable with these names, but no video is mine). These will help you explore some of these figures in more depth:
Dioscorides (this one is in Italian but it has great visuals of the manuscript tradition)
and Empedocles.
Two translation issues:
The line in which the poet claims to still be over the top with what he saw is quite emphatic: “che del vedere in me stesso m’essalto” (literally, “that which was seen in me still me exalts”). It’s the combination of that reflexive verb “m’essalto” with the prepositional phrase “in me.” So much me! The poet wants to claim that whatever happened here has been thoroughly internalized. In fact, you might forget for a moment that he’s making all this up.
The poet seems pressed by his work at line 146: “mi caccia il lungo tema” (literally, “me chased my long theme”—or “My long theme chased me”). It’s “caccia” that’s intriguing. It means “to hunt.” He was the prey of his own theme.
Two interpretive issues:
The tone of INFERNO, Canto IV, really shifts: from a quiet “realism” when the pilgrim first arrives in Limbo, to an almost lofty epic listing of the greats that starts when the four classical writers arrive, and on to a final, almost elegiac ending, as if the pilgrim would like to have hung around in Limbo a bit longer. In fact, this circle is the only infernal one in which he doesn’t feel relief when he leaves it behind. What can you make of that shifting tonality? Is it uneven craft? Or is the poet signaling something behind the text? And while we’re at it, which is the part that most reflects Virgil’s “high style” and which is the part that reflects Beatrice’s “soft and gentle” words? (If you asked me, I’d tell you that the “soft and gentle” parts, the parts more in Dante’s new style, are the opening lines of the canto. But maybe that’s overstated.)
There’s an odd bit at the end, when the four great writers leave them so that Virgil and Dante can walk on. The text says that “il savio duca” (“the wise leader”) moves the pilgrim “per altra via” (“toward another way”). First off, what is that way? Was there another path we didn’t know about? Is Limbo a side quest, a branch off the main path? And secondly, you get the idea they’re leaving behind the catalogue of all a human could know, including writers and thinkers the poet himself wished he had known first-hand. Does that mean that after it’s all said and done, Virgil and Dante are what’s left? In what sense? What then do they represent after this great encyclopedia of knowledge?