The Old Man of Crete. One of the strangest passages in all of INFERNO. Virgil may have been excited about that burbling stream that comes out of the wood of the suicides. But nothing can compare to this bit of myth-making. Dante pulls out all the stops. Four classical/Biblical sources. Elliptical details. And an explanation of the hydraulics of hell.

This passage from INFERNO (Canto XIV, lines 76 - 93) is actually a transitional one as Dante and Virgil leave Capaneus behind on the sands and before something even wilder happens in Canto XIV. But it allows us to explore Dante’s growing poetic techniques and it offers us one knot: Virgil’s weird insistence that the stream that pours from the wood of the suicides is the most astonishing thing yet seen in INFERNO.

We finally get our blasphemer in the third ring of the seventh circle of INFERNO. A priest? A theologian? Some pesky Byzantine? Nope, a classical, even mythic figure, Capaneus, right out of Statius’ poem THE THEBIAD. Wait, can a figure who sought to overthrow Jove, a mythic diety, one of the “false and lying gods,” really commit blasphemy against the Christian God. Dante’s playing a wild game here!

Here’s a further, more detailed look at the naked souls in the third ring of the seventh circle of hell. Those who have been (or have tried to be) violent against God are prone, walking about, or hunched over. What’s the difference? So much. This is a complicated passage with references to New Testament epistles (Jude), Albert Magnus, Guido Cavalcanti, and even the Comedy itself. In other words, this is Dante at full steam ahead.

Our pilgrim, Dante, has stepped out of the wood of the suicides and caught his first glimpse of the burning sands of the blasphemers. This canto has a fascinating opening sequence: overlap with the canto just before, wild rhetorical strategies, glancing references to classical figures (Cato the Elder will come back to haunt us!), and a rare moment in which the Dante the poet seems insecure with his text.

Over the course of the episodes for WALKING WITH DANTE about Canto XIII from Inferno, I’ve had some great interactions with listeners about my interpretation of the poem and about my own biases when it comes to the text. I thought I’d share those questions with you because I think it’s important to discover more ways to see the poem than just my own from people who are walking with us.

Inferno’s Canto XIII gets wilder by the line. Now we get a second suicide, a bush torn apart by the squanderers and the dogs after them. But this guy’s even more of a problem than Pier delle Vigne. He offers a pagan explanation for Florence’s history. And he offers one last metamorphosis that settles this rhetorical tour de force into its emotional home.

Inferno, Canto XIII, is all about trust: putting your faith in your warlord to save you, putting your faith in Virgil to guide you, putting your faith in Dante to tell the truth, putting your faith in the suicides to speak clearly of their motivations. No wonder, then, that when Pier finishes speaking, we encounter a scene of utter chaos that challenges the very limits of our credulity. How far do we have to suspend belief to read COMEDY?

Pier delle Vigne’s second speech. After some hesitation—and the first words from our pilgrim, Dante, since Canto X—Pier sets into an explanation of how he became a bush and what will happen to his body in the resurrection. Seems like a simple metamorphosis of an Ovid text. And one of Jesus’s parables. And other New Testament passages. All while Virgil spouts heresy. In other words, brace yourself for sheer brilliance.

Dante, our pilgrim, has done what his guide advised: he’s torn a branch from a bramble to find blood and air—and words! Pouring out. A rhetorical flourish from one of the most engaging, troubling sinners in hell. A tour de force of language. All in a passage about how you can’t trust what you read. Which brings up uncomfortable questions about Dante’s poem. In other words, our poet’s playing with literary suicide.

Our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, have entered the wood of the suicides in the second circle of the seventh ring of hell. But there’s more than one sort of suicide. There’s also squandering everything you have. And then even more: There’s literary suicide. That is, writing a text that stretches credulity too far. Which seems to be the game our poet is playing. How can you trust his text, if seeing is believing?

Canto XIII of Dante’s INFERNO is one of the most brilliant in the entire hellscape. It rivals those with Francesca and Farinata. But before you can experience this tour de force, you need to know a couple of classical texts that rattle around in the canto. Here’s my take on a passage from Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES (book IX, the story of Dyope) and two passage from Book III of Virgil’s AENEID, the initial moments of Aeneas’ flight from burning Troy.

It’s taken us a long time to finally see those who have been violent against others—and it’s almost anticlimactic after a Minotaur and the centaurs. What’s going on in this very strange canto from Inferno? It might be the problem of corporeality in the poem. Or perhaps the poet’s own guilt. Or even the changing notion of who Dante the pilgrim is inside the magnificent poem.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil walk right up to the centaurs—who notice 1) that the pilgrim is in his body and 2) that Virgil is courtly to them. Virgil even flatters them with periphrasis. Would they get the reference to Beatrice? No, but we do. Which means that COMEDY is starting to refer back to itself in this passage which may shift in tone from deadly serious to tongue firmly in cheek.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil arrive on the shores of the boiling river of blood to meet, not the sinners, but their tormentors: the centaurs. But isn’t the focus supposed to be on the violent, on the evil being punished? This is a strange and complicated moment for the poet who seems to realize that surface and depth are not always an easy unity.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil have made it down the rock slide—and our pilgrim has gone noticeably quiet. Virgil thinks he knows why. He thinks Dante has questions about the landscape. Does he? Whatever the answer, Virgil then launches into more of his backstory, his life in the afterlife outside of COMEDY. It’s a curious passage that turns stranger by the line.

Dante and Virgil walk back out to the edge of the abyss and confront two roadblocks to the seventh circle of INFERNO, the first part of lower hell: the ruins of an avalanche and the Minotaur, the “infamy of Crete.” Both blocks are actually fraught for the COMEDY’s poetics and thematics. Our pilgrim needs to get down the slope. But first we need to know what it all means.

Over a century ago, an Italian scholar leveled a charge at the likes of me (and maybe you, too). People like us have killed Dante’s COMEDY by papering it over with too many footnotes. We’ve lost the artistry of this magnificent poem. So let’s stop and take a breath before we descend to the circle of the violent. Sure, we’re going to untie a lot of interpretive knots ahead. But for now, look how far we’ve come!

Our pilgrim, Dante, has a second question for Virgil concerning the old poet’s map of hell he’s laid out in INFERNO, Canto XI. What about those usurers? Why are they punished so far down at the bottom of the sins of violence? The answer is utterly unexpected: Virgil offers a theory of art. Truly, this is a map of the road ahead for our pilgrim as he walks across the known universe.

Virgil has completed his map of hell in INFERNO, Canto XI. But maybe he’s not the cartographer he thinks he is. Our pilgrim has questions. In this episode, the first of two. And Virgil? He seems to be furious. What’s more, he doesn’t seem to be the Virgil we first met many cantos ago. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore the changing theology and the changing narrative itself in this complicated passage from COMEDY.