As we argued in Chapter 4, Dante does not just adopt ethical content from Peraldus’s De vitiis for his poetic treatment of Purgatory, but also appears to assume the role of vernacular preacher against vice. Approaching the first terrace of Purgatory with this context in mind, then, our leading question becomes: How does Dante-poet, as preacher, seek to convert his reader, a sinner, from pride to humility? The terrace of pride is particularly interesting in this regard, because the medieval Church arguably provides its implicit backdrop. This should not surprise us. Although medieval preaching did not occur exclusively within ecclesial walls, much of it did. Preachers used the church setting, liturgy, and the congregation of sinners – and not just the church’s architecture, wall paintings, and sculpture – to frame, support, and structure their sermons.

In the terrace of pride, Dante makes repeated references to church architecture and art. This is the terrace of ‘visibile parlare’ [visible speech], a familiar trope in theological discussions about the power of religious art to effect moral conversion of the heart.Footnote ¹ One thirteenth-century treatise emphasises that ‘pictures and ornaments in churches are the lessons and the scriptures of the laity … paintings appear to move the mind more than [verbal] descriptions; for deeds are placed before the eyes [of the faithful] in paintings, and so they appear to be actually happening’; another affirms that religious images ‘excite feelings of devotion, these being aroused more effectively by things seen than by things heard’.Footnote ² We know that Franciscan and Dominican preachers drew upon the ‘emotional intensity of religious paintings’ and even ‘used a repertoire of gestures known to their audience from paintings’.Footnote ³ Dante exploits this visual evangelism to the full, explicitly highlighting the empathetic effects of visual art on the viewer: ‘la qual fa del non ver vera rancura / nascere ’n chi la vede’ [so that what is not real causes real discomfort to be born in whoever sees it] (Purg. x, 133–34).

Dante not only stresses the power of ecclesial art in the terrace of pride, but also gives the terrace an architectonic substructure. The poet first opens the door of Purgatory (like the door of a church) to his reader (Purg. ix, 73–138). He then challenges his reader to imagine three carvings of humility on the cliff walls, carvings which evoke the sculptured reliefs of medieval churches (Purg. x, 28–96). The group of penitents are compared to corbels holding up a church roof (130–39), and the group’s posture is related to church rites of public penance.Footnote ⁴ Within this liturgical space, the souls (and the reader with them) recite the Pater noster (Purg. xi, 1–24), thereby praying for others (whether in this life or in Purgatory). In the governing analogy, the three souls whom Dante-character encounters are like the church’s congregation: they are exempla taken straight from life and immediate history (58–142).Footnote ⁵ The examples of pride, moreover, are compared to sculptured tombstones in a church (Purg. xii, 16–24).

Much as a medieval preacher would encourage the congregation to meditate on their own lives in relation to the lives of the saints, to fellow Christians on Earth and in Purgatory, and to the damned in Hell, so Dante encourages his readers to meditate upon their own lives in relation to the reliefs of humility, to the three penitent souls (near contemporaries of Dante) marked by pride, and to the damned or demonic exempla of pride on the terrace floor. This parallel is further strengthened by two particular characteristics of the terrace of pride. First, it is the only terrace of Purgatory in which the pagan example of virtue turns out to be a saint (we meet Trajan again in heaven). Second, Dante – as we shall see – deliberately excludes saved souls (such as Adam) from his examples of pride, all of whom are damned. In this way, Dante’s vision of the terrace of pride models an exercise in spiritual conversion. This, again, should not surprise us, as medieval preachers commonly spurred people to penance through visions of Purgatorial suffering.Footnote ⁶

The terrace of pride is framed by three examples of humility (Purg. x, 34–93) and twelve (or thirteen) examples of pride (Purg. xii, 25–63); its centrepiece is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls (Purg. xi, 37–142). These three groups fall into three different cantos, and scholars have typically addressed them on their own.Footnote ⁷ With each group, questions have arisen about Dante’s choice of exempla, and scholars have been particularly puzzled by Dante’s list, and ordering, of the exempla of pride (which has become recognised as a crux of its own). In this chapter, I read these three groups together as a triptych, and propose that Dante’s choice of exempla becomes understandable when we interpret them in relation to Dante’s moral purpose for the terrace as a whole. I argue that Dante invites his reader to reflect upon the three prideful souls identified (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani) and upon the three groups of prideful examples (delineated by the acrostic ‘VOM’) in counter-position to the three exempla of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan). By relating these three parts of the terrace and by drawing on a range of theological contexts, I show how Dante models a spiritual exercise of conversion from pride to humility.

In the first part of this chapter, I argue that the theology of the Incarnation underscores Dante’s depiction of the three examples of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan), and I show how Dante invites his reader into an empathetic engagement with them such that he may become, like Mary, a portatrix Christi [a Christ-bearer]. In the second part, I suggest that Dante sets up deliberate contrasts, and parallels, between Mary and Omberto; King David and Oderisi; and Trajan and Salvani.Footnote ⁸ In the third part, I argue that the three exempla of humility also provide counterfoils to the three groups of four prideful exempla and, indeed, that this organisational principle provides some possible interpretative solutions to Dante’s ordering of these exempla.

The Incarnation: Carving Humility into the Human Heart

Drawing upon familiar tropes in preaching and pastoral practice, Dante presents humility as the necessary gateway to the Christian moral life and to Purgatory proper. Describing the mountain of pride (‘mons superbiae’), Peraldus cites Jesus’s words to a humble man: ‘Behold, I have left an open door before you, which no one can close, because you have a little virtue.’Footnote ⁹ Peraldus interprets man’s little virtue (‘modica virtus’) as humility (‘idest humilitatem’), and proceeds to imagine what Jesus might have said to a proud man: ‘By contrast, he could say to a proud man: “Behold, I have left a closed door before you, which no one can open, because you have the greatest vice”, that is pride.’Footnote ¹⁰ The Scriptural door of new life – which is closed to the proud but opened to those who humbly submit to Christ – is embodied symbolically by the literal door of a medieval church and, I would suggest, by the entrance to Dante’s Purgatory. In medieval rituals of public penance, the church door could be literally closed to penitents: after a period of penance, they were forced to prostrate themselves before the church door as the bishop prayed over them and, only then, were given absolution and allowed to enter.Footnote ¹¹ In Dante’s Purgatory, the door first appears as just a crack (Purg. ix, 74: ‘un fesso’), and Dante-character must ask humbly for it to be unlocked (‘Chiedi / umilemente che ’l serrame scioglia’; 107–8).Footnote ¹² Where St Peter’s representative should err in opening rather than closing, a physical gesture of humility is underlined as the criterion sine qua non: ‘pur che la gente a’ piedi mi s’atterri’ (129).Footnote ¹³ In a thinly veiled allegory, Dante-character – like a penitent entering a church in rituals of penance – undergoes the sacrament of penance and, on absolution, enters through the door of Purgatory to begin his satisfaction for his sins (the ritually marked seven peccata).Footnote ¹⁴

Ascending to the terrace of pride itself, Dante-character immediately sees examples of humility carved onto the marble inner-bank of the cliff which, as Pietro Alighieri’s gloss suggests, bring to mind the reliefs on church walls. Dante is inviting the reader, in this way, to engage in a spiritual practice. The reader must bring to mind or memory (as to a wall) an image of humility. By prayerfully meditating upon the example of humility, it may become an antidote or remedy to the wound of pride.Footnote ¹⁵ Before turning to the moral and spiritual content of these exempla of humility, we should note that the very divine art itself is meant to inculcate in the souls of the terrace of pride, and imaginatively in Dante’s reader, a disposition of humility.

Both the three carvings of humility (Purg. x, 34–69) and the twelve carvings of pride (Purg. xii, 25–63) are framed by references to the disparity between the works of man, nature, and God: not only the greatest sculptor of antiquity, Polyclitus, but even Nature would be put to scorn (Purg. x, 32–33); no human artist could match these shadings and outlines which would cause even the most subtle mind to wonder (Purg. xii, 64–66); the dead seem truly dead, the living truly living (67).Footnote ¹⁶ At one level, Dante is alluding to the remarkable realism achieved by his contemporaries – the pulpits of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto, and the illustrated miniatures of Oderisi or Franco Bolognese.Footnote ¹⁷ Like the poetry of Dante itself, the works of these artists may still provoke a sense of awe and attendant humility before human greatness.Footnote ¹⁸ At a deeper level, Dante is emphasising that even the most sublime, novel, and wondrous of human accomplishments is effortlessly surpassed by He for whom nothing is new (‘colui che mai non vide cosa nova’; Purg. x, 94). Thus earthly pride is shown to be foolish not only through comparison to human greatness, but also, and primarily, through comparison to the power and majesty of God.Footnote ¹⁹ The works of Creation and of Divine artifice on mount Purgatory should cause man to wonder at the greatness of the Creator: this sense of marvelling, in turn, should lead to a disposition of chosen subjection to God rather than, as is the case with pride, the created being rebelling against the Creator (Inf. xxxiv, 35). It is in this sense that Dante, with Baudelarian sarcasm, challenges his readers to bloat themselves with pride after seeing the power and artistry of God: ‘Or superbite, e via col viso altero, / figliuoli d’Eva’ (Purg. xii, 70–71).

This framing focus on the supreme artistry of God adds the key theological dimension to the examples of humility. Thus, the Annunciation (the first example) is the site of not only Mary’s humility but also God’s paradigmatic humility.Footnote ²⁰ As Beatrice explains to Dante-character in Paradise, man could not descend with humble obedience so low as, disobeying, he had sought to rise upwards: ‘per non poter ir giuso / con umiltate obedïendo poi / quanto disobediendo intese ir suso’ (Par. vii, 98–100). Therefore, God (the highest rational being) became man (the lowest), humbling himself to take on flesh: ‘e tutti li altri modi erano scarsi / a la giustizia, se ’l Figliuol di Dio / non fosse umilïato ad incarnarsi’ (118–20). Through the Incarnation, God – the Creator – chose to become a small part of His creation: ‘il suo Fattore / non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura’ (Par. xxxiii, 5–6). In his depiction of the Annunciation, indeed, Dante allots as much space to the message of God’s humility in redeeming man through the Incarnation (Purg. x, 34–39) as to Mary’s humility in response (40–45).

The humility of Mary, as well as that of King David and Trajan, is therefore set within the context of God’s exemplary humility in condescending to become man.Footnote ²¹ The angel informs Mary that she is the highest in the order of grace (‘gratia plena’), that the Lord is with her (‘Dominus tecum’), and that he will be called the son of the most high (‘filius altissimi vocabitur’). And yet, Mary responds in utmost humility, as the servant of God (‘Ecce ancilla Deï … fiat mihi secundum voluntatem tuam’).Footnote ²² At the height of his regal and spiritual power, King David dances before the Ark of the Covenant.Footnote ²³ He is the humble psalmist (l’umile salmista’; Purg. x, 65) who sets himself in contempt before men – his wife, Micòl, looks down disdainfully and sadly from the grand palace – so as to submit himself to God: he is more than a king in the eyes of faith but less than King in the eyes of men (‘e più e men che re era in quel caso’; 66).Footnote ²⁴ At the height of Imperial power and pomp, Trajan condescends to do the will of the least of his subjects (‘la miserella’; 82).Footnote ²⁵ His dual motive for her redemption – justice and compassion (‘giustizia vuole, e pietà mi ritene’; 93) – echoes in the political sphere God’s motives for man’s redemption in the spiritual sphere. Whereas proud men vaunt their excellence, Dante shows that those who were greatest in the order of grace (Mary), of regal and spiritual kingship (David), and of nature (Trajan) humbly put themselves at the service of others and of God.

At this stage in the narrative, we are shown examples of humility without, explicitly, humility’s reward: ‘the humble shall be exalted’. Gregory the Great, however, had already provided an interpretation of Mary, King David, and Trajan that anticipated the reward for their humility. Dante, in turn, arguably embodies this Gregorian reading in Paradiso. In Moralia. 27, Gregory admires King David more for his humble dancing than for his military prowess in battle because, in the former, he defeats himself; in the latter, he conquers only his enemies.Footnote ²⁶ Having great cause for self-glory and pride, King David resisted, in other words, this primordial temptation. In the Heaven of Jupiter, Dante seems to have Gregory’s gloss in mind: David ‘il cantor de lo Spirito Santo / che l’arca traslatò di villa in villa: / ora conosce il merto del suo canto’ [the singer of the Holy Spirit who transferred the Ark from city to city: now he knows the merit of his singing] (Par. xx, 38–40). In Purgatorio x, 73–75, Dante explicitly identifies Gregory’s reading of Trajan’s act of humility. According to the popular tradition, Gregory was so moved by Trajan that he prayed fervently for his redemption.Footnote ²⁷ Gregory reads Trajan’s humility as foreshadowing the Incarnation and as reflecting a disposition to Christian faith. As we discover in Paradiso, Gregory’s prayers of living hope (‘di viva spene’) led to a miracle: Trajan is brought back to life temporarily and, believing in Christ, he experiences the true love (‘vero amor’) for Christ, such that he merits entry into Paradise: ‘fu degna di venire a questo gioco’ [he was worthy to come to this joy] (Par. xx, 117).Footnote ²⁸ Dante’s description of the ascent and apotheosis of Mary is also mediated through Gregory. In popular tradition, Gregory – meditating in procession upon an icon of the Virgin – heard the first three lines of the Regina coeli chanted by angels, to which he appended the fourth line.Footnote ²⁹ In Paradiso xxiii, the ascent and assumption of Mary as the queen of Heaven is seen as fulfilling the work begun at the Annunciation. As the portatrix of Christ (‘quia quem meruisti portare’), she merits her exalted status.

Mary’s role as portatrix Christi also highlights the way in which Dante encourages his reader to meditate empathetically on these examples of humility. In the tradition of the pseudo-Bonventurean fourteenth-century Meditationes Vitae Christi, the Christian is invited into a spiritual exercise: inhabiting imaginatively the role of Mary, the reader-viewer may become – like her – a vessel of Christ.Footnote ³⁰ As Conrad of Saxony highlights, Mary is the mirror through which Christians see the true image of God in themselves.Footnote ³¹ For Augustine, Mary’s Annunciation is a paradigm for each soul who conceives Christ in spirit as the seed of salvation: ‘just as the blessed virgin conceived Christ corporeally, so every holy soul conceives him spiritually’.Footnote ³² Indeed, Augustine contrasts the stubborn pride of the pagan philosophers with the humility of heart, piety, and fear of God, which are the first steps on the Christian journey to perfection.Footnote ³³ Mary’s Annunciation embodies the humility through which she, in spirit and in flesh, and man, in spirit, may receive Christ and enter the path to salvation and the new life in Christ. By empathetic meditation on Mary’s humility, therefore, sinners may become partakers in the fruit of the Incarnation.

As Gregory’s reading of the glorifications of the three exempla of humility – Mary, King David, and Trajan – is embodied through Dante’s depictions in Paradiso, so the glory of the reader-sinner who takes Mary as his model is also represented in the heavenly rose. Thus, in Paradiso, Beatrice directs Dante-character to Mary as the rose in which the divine Logos took flesh, and also to the lilies, the human souls who through Mary became spiritual vessels of Christ:

Dante’s image of human souls flowering in heaven is taken directly from the mosaics of the Florentine baptistry (where Dante had begun his own life of faith in baptism). This autobiographical resonance underscores the power of religious art imprinting itself on the viewer, and is reinforced immediately following this passage as Dante highlights his morning and evening devotion to Mary: ‘Il nome del bel fior ch’io sempre invoco / e mane e sera’ (88–89).

Three Living Confessions: Reading One’s Sin in the Mirror of Virtue

The centrepiece of the terrace of pride is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls. In the governing analogy between souls in Purgatory and the penitential community on Earth, these Purgatorial souls might be compared to a church’s congregation. As a medieval preacher would encourage his congregation to meditate on their own lives in relation to the lives of the saints, so Dante intends that we should meditate on the three prideful souls in relation to the three exempla of humility inscribed on the cliff.

A counter-position between the Virgin Mary (the first example of humility) and Omberto Aldobrandesco (the first soul stamped with pride) might seem, at first sight, strange. However, medieval preachers commonly attacked the folly of taking pride in one’s noble lineage by making reference to Eve and Mary. For example, Peraldus highlights that God did not make one Adam of silver (from whom all nobles descend), and another Adam of mud (from whom all ignoble people descend); instead, he made one man of mud from whom all descend. Therefore, either everyone is noble because of his blood, or everyone is base.Footnote ³⁴ Did not God create each one of us? Therefore our father is God, our mother Eve (‘Pater noster Deus est, mater nostra Eva’). How, then, can someone despise his brother?Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, Peraldus emphasises that – in the time of grace – God specifically chose persons who were ignoble and contemptible to the world.Footnote ³⁶ The second Eve, Mary – although least in the eyes of the world – becomes the mother of God and the queen of Heaven.

In this vein, Dante characterises Omberto’s pride in his lineage as a denial, or neglect, of this shared ancestry. In a captatio benevolentiae addressed to Omberto, Virgil refers to Dante-character’s body as the burden of Adam’s flesh (‘lo ’ncarco / de la carne d’Adamo onde si veste’; Purg. xi, 43–44). Omberto proceeds to define his prideful disdain – ‘Ogn’uomo ebbi in despetto’ (64) – as a failure to think of Eve, our shared mother: ‘non pensando a la comune madre’ (63).

A note of contemporary polemic can be detected here. The object of Omberto’s arrogance – ‘L’antico sangue e l’opere leggiadre / d’i miei maggior’ [the ancient blood and noble works of my ancestors] (Purg. xi, 61) – bears a close resemblance to Frederick II’s definition of nobility – ‘antica possession d’avere / Con reggimenti belli’ [the ancient possession of wealth with pleasing manners] – a definition Dante had sought to confute in the thirty chapters of Convivio iv. Notably, in the relevant canzone (‘Le dolci rime d’amor’) – as in Purgatorio xi – Dante draws on Peraldus’s argument of common ancestry.Footnote ³⁷ However, he recognises in the Convivio that this argument depends upon a view – that there was a beginning to the human race – which is held by Christians but not necessarily by philosophers and gentiles (‘e dice cristiani, e non filosofi, ovvero gentili, [delli quali] le sentenze anco sono in contro’; Conv. iv, xv, 9). Aristotle posited, after all, that the world (and each of the species including man) is eternal. As Omberto intimates, his arrogance – ‘non pensando a la comune madre’ [forgetting our common mother] (63) – may thereby register an implicit scepticism, or at least indifference, towards Christianity. As Dante underlines in ‘Le dolci rime d’amor’, Christians simply cannot hold this genealogical view of nobility (‘Ma ciò io non consento / Nè eglino altresì, se son Cristiani’; Conv. iv, canz. iii, 72–73). Although Dante employs this auctoritas fidei in the canzone, in Convivio iv itself he confutes Frederick’s genealogical definition of nobility on purely philosophical grounds. He argues that true nobility consists in the excellence of the soul, and that while a virtuous person may ennoble a family tree, a person cannot derive nobility from his lineage.

It is surely significant, then, that the second prideful soul, Oderisi da Gubbio, conjures up the elevated world of Paris and Bologna (both referenced indirectly) in which honour (a term repeated three times in five lines), glory, and fame were apportioned according to intellectual and artistic excellence.Footnote ³⁸ Oderisi refers to the arts of illumination, painting, and poetry and, specifically, to Dante’s direct contemporaries (and, most probably, to Dante himself; Purg. xi, 99). These are excellences of soul which Dante advocates, celebrates, and exhibits in his writings.Footnote ³⁹ In Purgatory, Dante nonetheless registers that, from a Christian perspective, a grave spiritual danger of pride arises from pursuing excellence of soul (true nobility), man’s this-worldly felicity. As Oderisi confesses, the great desire of excellence (‘lo gran disio / de l’eccellenza’) impeded him during his life from being courteous to another miniaturist whom he desired to surpass: ‘di tal superbia qui si paga il fio’ [Here we pay the toll for such pride] (88). From the perspective of eternity, Oderisi now recognises his pursuit of honour and glory as entirely vain: ‘Oh vana gloria de l’umane posse! / com’ poco verde in su la cima dura’ [Oh vain glory of human powers! how briefly it stays green at the summit] (91–92).Footnote ⁴⁰ It is folly to prefer vainglory (which lasts for only an instant) to the eternal glory of Heaven, or to seek a transitory thing when we can have eternal beatitude.Footnote ⁴¹ As Dante’s treatment of the virtuous pagans eloquently testifies, excellence of soul has no salvific merit if it is not directed to the glory of God. Thus Oderisi confesses that had he not turned to God, he would be in Hell and not in Purgatory (89–90).

The example of King David, the ‘umile psalmista’, may provide a mirror through which the distortion of Oderisi’s pursuit of artistic excellence may be correctly perceived. It is in virtue of David’s humility, and his acknowledgement of his own sinfulness, that he becomes the vox Dei. Dante refers to King David, the purported author of the Psalms, as ‘[il] cantor che per doglia / del fallo disse “Miserere mei”’ [the singer who, grieving at his sin, said ‘Miserere mei’] (Par. xxxii, 11–12). Oderisi’s pride in artistic excellence (an excellence of the soul) is reflected, therefore, in the true mirror of Christian virtue by King David, who devotes his art to the service of God. It is also in the context of King David that the tacit allusion to Dante’s own poetic supremacy over Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti becomes clearFootnote ⁴²:

In contrast to the intellectual disdain of Guido Cavalcanti (‘ebbe a disdegno’; Inf. x, 63), Dante’s starting point here is not self-regarding vanity, but rather an awareness of his own sin and the need for God’s aid. In other words, Dante-character becomes, like King David, a sinner turned singer. Dante-character’s first words in the poem – in a strange conflation of vulgate Latin (‘Miserere’) and vernacular Italian (‘di me’) – fittingly echo the opening of King David’s penitential psalm. And Dante further asserts his credentials as a new David, a scriba Dei, through his vernacularisation of the Lord’s prayer in this terrace.

The third juxtaposition, then, is between the Emperor Trajan and Provenzan Salvani. In contrast to the ideal of universal empire, Salvani had sought to wield complete political power in Siena for his own ends: ‘fu presuntüoso / a recar Siena tutta a le sue mani’ (Purg. xi, 122–23). Whereas Trajan, at the height of his military power, had sought justice and mercy, Salvani, when leading the Imperial faction at Montaperti, sought to raze Florence to the ground. Like Farinata, who saved Florence on that occasion, he embodies the self-serving internecine power struggles of Ghibellines and Guelfs which Dante will castigate – to the full – in Paradiso vi, 97–111. But, unlike Farinata, Salvani – late in his life – was moved through love for a friend to put aside his pride:

Just as Trajan’s pity for the widow’s plight leads him to fulfil his Imperial mandate of Justice for all, so Salvani – in imitatio Christi – sacrifices his pride and station, undergoing the suffering and humiliation of beggary, to pay the ransom for his friend.

Thus, the three souls stamped by pride in Purgatory – Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani – may be read in light of the exempla of humility – Mary, King David, and Trajan. Omberto’s pride in his family line (an excellence, essentially, of the body) is contrasted with Eve, the communal mother, and Mary, of humble birth. Oderisi’s pride in artistic excellence (an excellence of the soul) is compared to King David, the model of the Christian sinner-singer who puts his art at the service of God. Salvani’s pride in political power (an external excellence) is contrasted with Trajan, who puts his universal power at the service of the powerless in the cause of justice.Footnote ⁴³ Crucially, we encounter Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani in a state of conversion: towards the ends of their lives, they did turn away from sin, and now – in Purgatory – they are still in a process of spiritual transformation. Most noticeably, perhaps, they begin to recognise the good in each other. Where Omberto and Oderisi confess their pride in their own voice, Oderisi speaks for Salvani. Oderisi’s newfound courtesy to Franco of Bologna (Purg. xi, 82–87) is thus seconded by his praise of Salvani. As Peraldus emphasises, praising others is a key remedy to vainglory. In nature, after all, the beholder takes delight in what is seen (as sight takes pleasure in a beautiful colour), but not vice versa (the beautiful colour does not taken pleasure in being seen). So, in human relations, a person should take pleasure from the good in others and not from the praise of others.Footnote ⁴⁴

Pride As Dante’s Sin

The confessions of Omberto Aldobrandesco, Oderisi da Gubbio, and Provenzan Salvani in Purgatory are also spiritually productive for Dante-character. He recognises in each of them an aspect of pride or vainglory in himself. In this way, Dante models in his own person a spiritual exercise for his reader. In response to Omberto’s speech, Dante-character humbly acknowledges this prideful tendency: ‘Ascoltando chinai in giù la faccia’ [Listening, I bent down my face] (Purg. xi, 73). Dante-character will display not only filial reverence, but a latent pride in family lineage, when he encounters Cacciaguida in Paradise (Par. xvi, 1–27). Moreover, it is clear that pride runs in the Alighieri blood: Dante’s great-grandfather has already spent more than one hundred years on the terrace of pride (Par. xv, 91–93).Footnote ⁴⁵ Dante’s pride in his own nobility of soul and excellence in poetry is even more pronounced. Dante-character acknowledges how Oderisi’s confession and discourse on vainglory have reduced his pride and instilled in its place good humility: ‘E io a lui: “Tuo vero dir m’incora / bona umiltà, e gran tumor m’appiani”’[And I to him: ‘Your true words instil good humility in my heart, and you reduce a great swelling in me’] (Purg. xi, 118–19). Rising to the apex of political power in Florence at the time of his journey through Purgatory (he would hold office as one of the six priors of Florence from 15 June to 15 August 1300), Dante-character learns through Oderisi’s prophecy that he will be able to gloss Salvani’s humiliation with his own future experience of exile (xi, 139–42).

These three souls – as part of the ecclesia of Purgatory – essentially function as living sermons for Dante-character: they lead him to become self-conscious of his own pride and to adopt, in response, the posture of humility. At the close of the dramatic sequence, Dante-character is described as side-by-side with Oderisi, like an oxen under a yoke: ‘Di pari, come buoi, che vanno a giogo / m’andava io con quell’ anima carca’ (Purg. xii, 1–2).Footnote ⁴⁶ Even when Virgil commands him to rise up, his mind remains humbled and bowed down in thought (8–9). Dante’s acute awareness of his own sinful pride, indeed, spills over into the next terrace of envy:

This is the only place in the poem that Dante explicitly identifies his own sins in this way: namely, he has sinned gravely in pride, and only lightly in envy. Indeed, he fears his future punishment for pride (when he returns to Purgatory after his death) so strongly that he can already feel the weight of the boulders. The relative gravity of his pride is also signalled when he ascends, much lighter, from the terrace of pride:

This passage further confirms pride as one of Dante’s gravest sins. At the same time, it makes a straightforward allusion to the structuring principle of the seven capital vices – namely, that pride is the source sin from which all the others flow. As Francesco da Buti emphasises, when a person in the humble state of penitence overcomes the great weight of pride, he or she may more easily defeat all the other sins.Footnote ⁴⁷ Or, in Velutello’s analogy, if one destroys the roots of a tree, all the branches, now dried of sap, are more easily broken.Footnote ⁴⁸

Pride and Spiritual Death

Like the souls in Purgatory, Dante’s reader, in the opening of Purgatorio xi, voices the Lord’s Prayer in its entirety. Through the acrostic VOM opening Purgatorio xii, the reader is also made to turn his eyes downwards – ‘Volgi li occhi in giuè’ (Purg. xii, 13) – as his eye scrolls down the page (rather than from left to right).Footnote ⁴⁹ The final stage of the conversion from pride to humility is, then, this meditation upon the twelve exempla of pride, carved on the path under the souls’ feet. Dante-author reinforces the overarching architectonic analogy of the episode by comparing these carvings to tombstones in a medieval church. As the first remedy to vainglory is the meditatio mortis, so the comparison to tombstones (evoking the infernal graveyard of Inferno x) sets into relief the perspective of eternity as a correlative to this-worldly pride. But, through the architectural analogy, Dante also indicates how his reader should engage with these exempla of pride. Alluding once more to the realism of late-thirteenth-century sculpture, Dante highlights that the effigies carved on tombstones may bear the exact resemblances of the dead persons buried: ‘le tombe terragne / portan segnato quel ch’elli eran pria’ (Purg. xii, 17–18).Footnote ⁵⁰ However, only those who recognise the souls (‘per la puntura de la rimembranza’; 20) truly feel renewed sorrow for their deaths. Similarly, the exempla of pride may provoke sorrow only in those readers who recognise in the exempla’s lives (and spiritual death) a sinful tendency of their own. As Pietro Alighieri comments, the twelve exempla display the tragic end of such pride, and so should move men to purge themselves of this vice and adhere to its curative virtue, humility.Footnote ⁵¹

Although it would be a forced reading to simply impose the prevailing scheme – of parallel exempla – onto these examples of pride, such an interpretation actually evolves naturally from the passage’s contextual background. Once again, Peraldus is important here. Of the twelve examples of pride that Dante gives as warnings to sinners, all six Scriptural exempla except for Nimrod (who replaces Adam) are found in the first seven examples listed by Peraldus: Lucifer, Adam, Saul, Rehoboam, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and Holofernes.Footnote ⁵² Whereas Peraldus’s list also includes exempla of pride who are nonetheless saved, such as Adam and St Peter, Dante chooses purely negative exempla from classical history and mythology: all Dante’s exempla came to a bad end (they are represented here, but inhabit Hell).Footnote ⁵³ The structure of Dante’s list of exempla has puzzled critics, with many attempts being made to find a symmetry or organising principle.Footnote ⁵⁴ It seems to me that Dante’s acrostic – the first four terzine begin with Vedea; the second quartet with O; the third with Mostrava – divides the list of twelve examples naturally into three groups of four.Footnote ⁵⁵ The same acrostic technique in the following terzina (the three lines spell VOM) naturally makes of Troy a separate, paradigmatic example. Delcorno has provided a further contextual rationale based on Dominican preaching manuals for dividing the list of twelve into three groups of four.Footnote ⁵⁶ Those scholars who have accepted this division have attempted to provide a theme, or aspect of pride, which might unify each group of exempla.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, they have not considered whether Dante might have set these three groups of prideful exempla in counterpoint with the three exempla of humility. Given the acrostic, the preaching context, and these implicit thematic schema, it seems likely that Dante intended these cantos to be read in parallel.

The emblematic contrast between Lucifer, the first example of pride, and Mary, the first example of humility, is reinforced through the figures of Briareus, the giants, and Nimrod. Whereas Lucifer, who raised himself above the Creator (Inf. xxxiv, 35), descended from the noblest to the least (Purg. xii, 25–26), Mary, who became the humble vessel of the Creator, ascended from the least to the most noble (Par. xxxiii, 4–7).Footnote ⁵⁸ In the works of Virgil, Statius, and Lucan, Briareus – a monstrous giant – presumes to challenge Jove, and Dante presents Jove as a pagan analogue to Lucifer.Footnote ⁵⁹ Heard of but not seen among the giants guarding the pit of Cocytus, ‘lo smisurato Brïareo’ (Inf. xxxi, 98) prefigures the appearance of Lucifer at the Earth’s centre (Inf. xxxiv, 28–57). By extension, the mythical battle between the Roman gods and the giants depicted in Purgatory may represent analogically the cosmic battle between the good and the bad angels (Purg. xii, 31–33). It also prefigures the attempt of King Nimrod to build a tower to heaven. Dante underscores this syncretism by presenting Nimrod, the king of Babylon (Gen. 10. 9–10), as a giant (Inf. xxxi, 67–81). The pride of Lucifer and the angels in their cosmic battle with God, and man’s prideful attempt to resist the will of God, therefore, find their inverse parallel in the humility and subjection of Mary.Footnote ⁶⁰ The drama of man’s mad attempt to become like God – to bridge the infinite gap between creature and Creator – is thus dramatized in the first quartet of examples.Footnote ⁶¹ The fact that all four examples date from before the coming of Christ highlights, once more, God’s humility at the Incarnation: it takes us back to the Annunciation, where Mary’s ‘AVE’ literally reverses, in a playful wordplay, the human pride of Eve (‘EVA’).Footnote ⁶²

Whereas the first quartet of exempla directly rebel against God, the principal fault of the second group is indifference or impiety towards God. Nïobe, Saul, Arachne, and Rehoboam fail to recognise that their own excellences – in beauty and fertility, political power, artistic ability, and dynastic line, respectively – are dependent on God. Saul and Rehoboam, the two Scriptural exempla, clearly counterpoise King David, the second example of humility. Saul loses kingship of Israel to David because he ignored the word of God: ‘quia proiecisti sermonem Domini, proiecit te Deus ne sis rex super Israel’ (1 Samuel 15:24–26). Rehoboam is King David’s successor and loses the inheritance of Israel: ‘recessit Israel a domo David’ (2 Kings 12:10–11). Rehoboam’s dynastic pride serves to accentuate the disparity with his own life and actions: Dante scornfully highlights Rehoboam’s baseless fear as he flees without being pursued (Purg. xii, 46–48). Saul, by contrast, serves as a particular warning to souls at the beginning of their Christian life (just as his exemplum is introduced here in the first terrace of Dante’s Purgatory). When he was humble, Saul was made a king; when he became proud, he was ejected from his throne.Footnote ⁶³ The mountain of Gilboa upon which Saul kills himself may be interpreted allegorically as the mountain of pride upon which the soul is damned.Footnote ⁶⁴ In such allegorical readings, Saul is the Old Adam, David the New; Saul is the Synagoga, David is the Ecclesia.Footnote ⁶⁵ Samuel’s words upbraiding Saul become, then, the words of a spiritual master to a backsliding Christian.Footnote ⁶⁶ On this allegorical reading, Israel signifies a man seeing God; he who neglects to live the Gospel, by contrast, is banished from God’s face.Footnote ⁶⁷

Whereas Saul and Rehoboam, in salvation history, counterpoise King David as just king of Israel, Nïobe and Arachne, from classical mythology, counterpoise King David as the humble cantor of the psalms. On account of her irreligion and impiety, Nïobe’s seven male and seven female offspring (the object of her presumptuous boasting) were annihilated by the goddess Latona’s two children (Apollo and Artemis).Footnote ⁶⁸ Arachne, in her self-conceit, sets up her artistry against God, disowning its Divine origin. Both inversely mirror King David, the ‘umile salmista’, who, acknowledging his sin and unworthiness, becomes the mouthpiece of God.Footnote ⁶⁹ By approaching these four examples as a group, the intended moral import of these stories on the reader also becomes clear. Ovid emphasises that Nïobe knew Arachne’s story and her fate, but she failed to imbibe the moral lesson. Now, the story of Arachne has become ‘true’ in her own life (Metamorphoses vi, 146–52). Similarly, Rehoboam failed to learn the appropriate moral lesson from Saul’s fate in the history of Israel. These failures of reading in the two Scriptural and the two pagan exempla reveal at the microlevel the danger for Dante’s readers if they do not relate the exempla to their own lives. Dante’s readers, like the people of Thebes after the annihilation of Nïobe’s children, must learn the moral lesson and be moved to religion and piety (Met. vi, 396–99).

The third quartet of exempla highlights the effect of an individual’s pride on society as a whole. The folly of vanity in corporeal beauty and possessions is embodied by the first sinner of Dante’s third group, Eriphyle, who betrayed her husband, sending him to a certain death, to gain a necklace intended for a goddess (‘lo sventurato addornamento’). Eriphyle’s vanity also causes, albeit indirectly, the Theban war, just as Helen’s vanity had led, ultimately, to the destruction of Troy. The contrast with Trajan is, in this context, striking: Trajan prefers the administration of justice on behalf of a poor widow to the vanity of Imperial pomp. Moreover, the widow who demands justice for her son’s death inverts the story of Eriphyle, whose son, avenging his father’s death, made his mother’s necklace truly dear (‘caro’) by taking her life (Purg. xii, 49–51).Footnote ⁷⁰ The three Imperial and military leaders who follow – Sennacherib (king of Assyria), Cyrus (emperor of Persia), and Holofernes (Assyrian general) – also provide clear counter-examples to the just Emperor Trajan. Gregory the Great emphasises that a king’s pride leads to the destruction of his people.Footnote ⁷¹ A scourge of God’s providence (2 Kings 19:25), Sennacherib and his army are miraculously annihilated because of his presumption against the God of Israel. Just as Eriphyle’s betrayal led to the destruction of Thebes, so Sennacherib sought to destroy the city of Jerusalem. Also like Eriphyle (his pagan foil), Sennacherib is murdered by his sons.Footnote ⁷² The matricide of Eriphyle and the patricide of Sennacherib are immediately followed by the twin decapitations of Cyrus and Holofernes. Cyrus is another failed emperor: his conquests for Persia are presented as entirely bloodthirsty.Footnote ⁷³ Most significantly, Cyrus’s savage decapitation serves as the pagan analogue to the decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes by the Jewish widow Judith.Footnote ⁷⁴ Whereas Israel is saved from Sennacherib’s army by God’s direct intervention, Israel is saved from Holofernes by the virtue and courage of Judith.

The two outside enemies of Israel (Sennacherib and Holofernes) thus balance the two failed leaders of Israel (Saul and Rehoboam). The backdrop to these four Scriptural examples is, in other words, Jerusalem. This is particularly significant given the climax to the sequence of exempla, Troy:

Troy’s prideful fall leads to the foundation of the Roman imperium by Aeneas, whose arrival in Italy – in Dante’s syncretic view of global history – coincides with the birth of King David (Conv. iv, v, 6). The temporal power of Israel, however, is ultimately subjected to the Roman Empire because, in the Christian era, the true Jerusalem is in Heaven. The final image of the city of Troy in ashes and ruins is, therefore, also a pagan analogue for the earthly Jerusalem which – for its proud rejection of Christ and its continued belligerence against Rome – was destroyed by Titus (Par. vi, 82–93).Footnote ⁷⁵

These parallels between the three ‘quartets’ of prideful examples and the three exempla of humility are striking and, in each case, illustrate both sides of the comparison. We better understand King David as a model of humility in kingship (Purg. x, 49–72) in relation to his predecessor Saul and successor Rehoboam, and as a model of humble artistry in relation to Nïobe and Arachne (Purg. xii, 37–48). The same is true for the counterpoint between Mary and Omberto, King David and Oderisi, and Trajan and Salvani. In this way, medieval preachers used exempla to articulate the true path of the Christian moral life, as well as the potential stumbling blocks along the way. Reading Purgatorio x–xii as a triptych does not just provide possible interpretative solutions to particular hermeneutic cruces in individual cantos, then. Instead, from the perspective of penitence, this ‘parallel reading’ illustrates how a sinner (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani were Dante’s near contemporaries) might reflect upon his or her own life in relation to models of virtue. Dante-character embodies this process for the reader, recognising aspects of his own pride through the lives of the three souls he encounters. As we see Dante adopting in Purgatory the role of a vernacular preacher against vice, it is clear that Dante does not intend that we, as readers, simply provide a detached theological reading of the terrace of pride. Rather, at every point in the narrative, Dante seeks to engage his readers directly, to provoke the prick of conscience that might lead to conversion. Auerbach was surely right, then, when he saw in the opening poem of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal an echo of Dante’s address to his reader as ‘hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Dante explicitly associates himself with the sin of pride (Purg. xiii, 133–38), and scholars have emphasised, in particular, the temptation to pride in the composition of the Commedia itself.Footnote ¹ By contrast, Dante makes no such explicit association between himself and the sin of sloth. Sloth might seem a strange sin to ascribe to the poet whose magnum opus, he informs us, had made him for many years lean (Par. xxv, 3).The terrace of sloth, nonetheless, is privileged by Dante: structurally, it is at the literal centre of Purgatorio and thus of the poem as a whole; narratively, it is midway (nel mezzo del cammin) both through Purgatory (the fourth of seven terraces) and through the afterlife (the fourth day on the pilgrim’s seven-day journey); thematically, it includes the discourses on ordered and disordered love as the Christian principles of moral good and evil respectively. Moreover, the very first group of souls whom Dante encounters on his journey through Hell (the ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii, 35) are partly characterised by sloth, as are the ‘sad souls’ (tristi) who emit the ‘accidioso fumo’ of Inferno viii.Footnote ² Sloth dominates the moral colour of Ante-Purgatory (Purgatorio i–viii), a region invented by Dante and occupied specifically by those who delayed, albeit in different ways, their conversions to the path of Christian holiness and penitence.Footnote ³ Likewise, sloth is associated with the very first group of blessed souls whom Dante-character encounters in Paradise, the ‘slowest sphere’ of the Moon (Par. iii, 30). In each of the three canticles, therefore, the first group of souls is characterised – at least in part – by the vice of sloth. Moreover, after his Christian conversion, sloth was the dominant sin – we learn in Purgatory – of the poet Statius, one of the important autobiographical ‘cyphers’ for Dante in the Commedia. Most significantly, there is good reason to believe, as I shall argue, that sloth is Dante-character’s first sin in the dark wood of Inferno i, and a key to his dramatic confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.

Critics have nonetheless paid very little attention to sloth in Dante’s moral vision and, with few exceptions, have ruled out the possibility that Dante might have considered himself as guilty of this sin.Footnote ⁴ Why this comparative lack of critical attention? A first reason is that Dante’s terrace of sloth (Purg. xvii, 79–139 – xix, 1–69) has rarely been considered as a narrative unit. This is, in part, a familiar consequence of the ‘lectura Dantis’ canto-by-canto interpretative tradition (the terrace spans three cantos).Footnote ⁵ But, it is also because this central section of Dante’s poem is typically read in terms of the ‘four doctrinal cantos’ (Purgatorio xv, xvi, xvii, and xviii) – a grouping that detaches the ‘doctrine’ from the ‘narrative’ of the terrace of sloth, and reinforces a prevalent interpretation of its final section, the dream of the Siren (Purgatorio xix, 1–69), as an afterthought or a mere transition episode.Footnote ⁶ This perspective is especially problematic because, of the seven terraces of Purgatory, Dante devotes the least number of lines (278) to the terrace of sloth, with less than a quarter of these (68) being devoted to the encounter with the slothful souls who rush past in a flash (Purg. xviii, 76–139).Footnote ⁷ Only one slothful soul, the Abbot of San Zeno, is identified, and his speech lasts just fourteen lines (Purg. xviii, 112–26). Detach the ‘doctrinal passages’ and the dream of the Siren from the terrace of sloth, and very little is left. A second reason for the lack of scholarly discussion of sloth, then, is that critics summarily pass over Dante’s extremely terse description of the slothful souls precisely due to its brevity.

This chapter is, therefore, a reappraisal of Dante’s treatment of sloth. I start by demonstrating how Dante’s poetic representation of sloth is profoundly influenced by Peraldus’s treatise ‘De acedia’.Footnote ⁸ Using Peraldus as a gloss, I first reinterpret the encounter with the slothful souls (xviii, 88–138), whose ‘acute fervour’ for God impels them to run swiftly around the terrace and past Dante-character and Virgil. Second, I show that the slothful souls’ physical movement and liturgical cries (xviii, 88–138) interrupt the other (but typically overlooked) narrative drama of the terrace: namely, Dante-character’s intellectual movement from ignorance to knowledge, a quest for wisdom in tension with his severe physical and mental exhaustion (xvii, 73–xviii, 87; and xviii, 139–xix, 69).Footnote ⁹ Third, I argue that the dream of the Siren (xviii, 139–xix, 69) represents symbolically and poetically the doctrinal content of Virgil’s three lectures in the first part of the terrace (xvii, 73–xviii, 87). Finally, I consider the recurring presence of sloth in Dante’s moral vision as a whole, in particular with regard to Dante-character’s first sin and the alleged sloth of the ‘Christian’ Statius.

Reading Peraldus on Sloth

In addressing Dante’s reliance on Peraldus, Wenzel points out ‘that Dante’s son Pietro, in commenting upon Purgatorio xvii, quoted Peraldus’s rationale, though without acknowledging the author’.Footnote ¹⁰ Wenzel proceeds to present the apposite passages from Peraldus’s treatise and Pietro’s commentary side-by-side, adequately substantiating his claim that ‘the verbal similarities between the two texts are so great as to cancel any doubt that Pietro’s was derived from Peraldus’.Footnote ¹¹ Somewhat surprisingly, in turning to Dante’s poetic depiction of sloth in his magisterial study The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature, Wenzel does not explore further correlations with Peraldus in any detail.Footnote ¹² Moreover, Wenzel does not make the connection between Dante’s rationale occurring in the terrace of sloth and Peraldus’s rationale occurring in a passage immediately following on from his own treatment of sloth.Footnote ¹³ Most significantly, Wenzel relies exclusively on the first of three versions of Pietro d’Aligheri’s commentary for his influential account.Footnote ¹⁴

The first version (dated to 1340–42) and the second version (dated to 1344–55) of Pietro’s commentary are almost identical in their treatment of sloth.Footnote ¹⁵ But Pietro’s third version (dated to 1359–64) is much longer than the previous two in general and strikingly different in its treatment of sloth.Footnote ¹⁶ In the first two versions, Pietro provides an extremely brief introduction to the terrace of sloth.Footnote ¹⁷ In versions 1 and 2, he then proceeds to explicate Virgil’s doctrinal lecture through Peraldus’s rationale – albeit, in Wenzel’s words, reducing ‘the redundant and clumsy phrasing of Peraldus’s scholastic Latin to a more classical elegance’.Footnote ¹⁸ By contrast, in his third version, Pietro opens his commentary on the terrace of sloth by directly quoting a series of passages from Peraldus’s treatise on the vice.Footnote ¹⁹ Notably, Pietro [3] names ten of the seventeen vices of sloth in exactly the same order as Peraldus: ‘tepiditas, mollities, somnolentia, otiositas, dilatio, tarditas, negligentia, [imperfectio sive imperseverantia, remissio, dissolutio, incuria], ignavia, [indevotio], tristitia, taedium vitae, [desperatio]’.Footnote ²⁰ Like Peraldus, Pietro [3] also highlights that the first species of sloth is ‘tepidity’, noting that all the other vices of sloth flow from tepidity, as from a root, (‘tepiditas prima species radix dicitur accidiae, et ex ea nascuntur omnia praemissa vitia’).Footnote ²¹

Even stronger proof that Pietro [3] is following Peraldus more closely, however, appears in the next part of his commentary. Having defined tepidity as insufficient love of the good (‘tepiditas est parvus amor boni’), Peraldus emphasises that tepidity provokes the ‘vomit’ of God, as he has already demonstrated (‘primo Deo vomitum provocat, ut prius ostensum est’).Footnote ²² In his commentary, Pietro [3] defines tepidity as ‘amor parvus boni magni’ and then supplies, with only very slight changes, the earlier section of Peraldus’s treatise referred to (the beginning of part II, chapter 3):

These ‘verbal similarities’ between Peraldus and Pietro [3] with regard to sloth, like those identified by Wenzel between Peraldus and Pietro [1] with regard to the rationale, are ‘so great as to cancel any doubt that Pietro’s was derived from Peraldus’.Footnote ²⁵

If this suggests that Dante himself was following Peraldus’s text closely, his own poetic treatment – as we shall see – would seem to confirm it. Remarkably, thirteen of the seventeen vices of sloth delineated by Peraldus may be identified – whether as directly named, substantial allusions or verbal echoes – in Dante’s terrace of sloth, alongside the opposing vice of indiscreet fervour: tepiditas (Purg. xviii, 108); mollities (xviii, 136–37); somnolentia (xvii, 87–88); otiositas (xviii, 101–2); dilatio (xvii, 90); tarditas (xvii, 87); negligentia (xviii, 107); imperfectio sive imperseverantia (xviii,137); remissio, dissolutio (xvi, 73 and xviii, 124–25); incuria (xviii, 85–86); ignavia, indevotio, tristitia (xviii, 123); taedium vitae (xviii, 121); and desperatio (xviii, 120).Footnote ²⁶ The cumulative impression is that Peraldus’s preaching material provides the key resource for Dante’s poetic treatment. A comparative examination of Peraldus’s treatise and Dante’s terrace of sloth suggests, then, possible interpretative solutions to passages, lines, and individual words in these cantos which have puzzled scholars in the critical tradition. Just as significantly, it opens up the depth and breadth of the contemporary understandings of acedia that informed Dante’s thinking, enabling us to understand sloth as a scholar’s and a poet’s sin.

Purging Sloth

Arriving at the terrace of sloth as night falls, Virgil informs Dante-character that here the souls, in penance, make up for lost time, plying and plying again the badly slowed oar (‘il mal tardato remo’; xvii, 87). Slothful in life, the souls had been like oarsmen who had known where they were heading (their goal) but had lacked due energy and care. More technically, Virgil defines the quiddity of sloth as ‘l’amor del bene, scemo / del suo dover’ [the love of the good falling short of its proper duty] (85–86). In a second definition, he makes more explicit that this good is God, while emphasising again the metaphor of speed – their love, in being deficient, is slow: ‘lento amore a lui veder vi tira / o a lui acquistar’ [slow love draws you to see him [God] or to acquire him] (130–31). Sometime later, when the group of penitent souls rush past Virgil and Dante-character, it comes as no surprise, then, that they cry out:

Thus, like Peraldus, Dante describes and defines the genus acedia by its primary species – namely, tepidity or lukewarmedness, the insufficient love of a great good (amor parvus boni magni).Footnote ²⁷ Following Peraldus, Dante also treats tepidity as the root of the other vices of sloth, as is evident from Virgil’s address to the penitent slothful:

Virgil understands the slothful souls’ negligence (‘negligenza’; 107) and delay (‘indugio’; 107) to have arisen from their tepidity (‘tepidezza’; 108), while the souls themselves acknowledge that their previous time-wasting (‘il tempo non si perda’; 103) occurred because of a lack of love (‘per poco amor’; 104).

The souls expiate their sloth by first urging each other to value and conserve time (103). From a Christian perspective, as Peraldus emphasises, time is a precious gift from God that must be used well to provide for the eternal life that awaits: a person ‘sows eternity from time, that it may be harvested in the future’.Footnote ²⁸ Christians, then, are debtors to God for their time on Earth and will be called to account for how they have used it.Footnote ²⁹ Dante’s visualised eschatology itself preaches two of Peraldus’s reasons for conserving time: that there is a place (Hell) in which one hour for doing penitence would be loved more than all the world’s gold, and that in just one hour (on Earth) a man may merit the remission of his eternal punishment, of all his sins, and – with God’s grace – eternal glory.Footnote ³⁰ Dante’s parallel representation of Guido and Buonconte da Montefeltro (Inferno xxvii and Purgatorio v) is, of course, just the most obvious instance of him driving this message home.

As the souls purging sloth make clear, their ‘conservation of time’ (103) has a purpose: they are eager to do well (‘studio di ben far’; 105), so as to make up for their previous ‘indugio’ [delay] (106). This highlights the importance of the offshoot vice of ‘negligence’ (107): its opposing virtue is not ‘activity’ per se, but rather diligence or ‘doing well’. As Peraldus notes, the negligent man does not care how well his work is done (whether good or bad), but just wants to get it out of the way.Footnote ³¹ The diligent person, by contrast, strives for excellence in the work that he has begun.Footnote ³² Thus, the slothful souls’ ‘studio di ben far’ (105; 108) translates Peraldus’s definition of ‘diligence’ (‘studeat ut opus inchoatum bene fiat’) and corrects, as Virgil rightly notes, their previous negligence (‘negligenza’; 107).Footnote ³³

Where diligence is the corresponding virtue to the subordinate slothful vice of negligence, the corresponding virtue to tepidity is zeal. At the vanguard of the crowd of penitent slothful, two ‘weeping’ souls cry out two examples of zeal:

Notably, in his treatment of zeal, Peraldus gives examples both of those saintly men and women who loved God, and of those noble pagans who loved the world.Footnote ³⁴ In the first category, we find Dante’s Biblical example: Mary’s haste in going to visit her cousin Elizabeth.Footnote ³⁵ Dante’s second example, Julius Caesar, corresponds to Peraldus’s second category: the extraordinary accomplishments of pagans out of love for the world (qui amant mundum) serve to upbraid Christians who, in their sloth, accomplish so little through their love of God despite the promise of eternal bliss.Footnote ³⁶ Glossing Matthew 11:12, Peraldus comments that whereas the Christian martyrs assault the kingdom of Heaven with their virtue, the same cannot be said of the lazy and slothful (‘acediosi et pigri’); moreover, he warns the Christian that if he is slothful in this life, he will lose a place in heaven.Footnote ³⁷ Dante will turn to precisely this passage in the heaven of Justice (‘Regnum celorum vïolenza pate’ [The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence]; Par. xx, 94) to warn that many Christians who will cry ‘Christ, Christ’ at the final judgement will be less close to Him than a man who does not know Christ at all; in this way, the Ethiopian (pagan) will damn the Christian (Par. xix, 106–11).Footnote ³⁸ The driving force of this encounter in the terrace of sloth, therefore, is the souls’ ‘fervore’ [fervour] (106) – their unrelenting speed to make up for lost time, as reflected in the temporal adverbs ‘subitamente’ [suddenly] (89), ‘tosto’ [at once] (97), and ‘ratto, ratto’ [quickly, quickly] (103), and the triple repetition of the verb ‘to run’ (‘correndo … corse … corse’; 97, 100, 102).

In the context of Peraldus’s treatise, Virgil’s qualifying reference to the souls’ ‘fervore’ [fervour] as ‘aguto’ [ardent or acute] (106) is, however, significant. For Peraldus, the two capital vices of avarice and sloth have opposing vices of excess: prodigality is a reckless giving away of goods, whereas indiscreet fervour is an exaggerated zeal.Footnote ³⁹ Dante’s equine metaphor – ‘falca […] cui buon volere e giusto amor cavalca’ [gallop those whose good will and righteous love ride them] (94–96) ? is used by Peraldus to describe ‘indiscreet fervour’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Highlighting the danger of this indiscreet haste (‘ista [indiscreta] festinatio’), especially in novices (‘in novitiis’), Peraldus notes that he who vexes his horse too much in the morning does not make a good diet in the day: the soul must have a bridle as well as a spur, and the body is not to be broken but rather to be ruled (‘corpus non frangendum sed regendum est’).Footnote ⁴¹ It is then doubly significant, as with the qualifier ‘aguto’ [ardent] in ‘fervore aguto’ [ardent fervour], that Dante employs the adjectives ‘buon’ [good] and ‘giusto’ [just] to qualify the ‘volere’ [will] and ‘amor’ [love] that ride the penitent soul (96). Similarly, Mary runs (‘corse’) with haste (‘con fretta’, translating the Latin vulgate ‘festinatio’), but not – it should be underlined – with indiscreet haste (‘festinatio indiscreta’).Footnote ⁴²

Peraldus’s chapter on indiscreet fervour may even underly a further, peculiar description of the penitent souls’ movement:

Citing the interlinear gloss on Ecclesiastes, ‘Noli esse iustus multum’ [Be not just to excess], Peraldus notes that there are some ‘who do not in any way want to condescend to the demands of the flesh’, of whom ‘justice is a great injustice’ (‘iustitia magna iniustitia est’).Footnote ⁴³ The Abbot of San Zeno is similarly concerned lest the souls’ justice (‘nostra giustizia’; 117) will seem villainous to Dante and Virgil, because they do not pause in their journey.

The first part of the encounter concerns the whole group of slothful souls (xviii, 88–117), spans ten terzine, and includes the two exempla of virtue (97–105). The second part concerns just three penitents: the Abbot of San Zeno and two other souls ‘behind all the others’ (‘di retro a tutti’; 133); it spans seven terzine, and includes the two exempla of vice (130–38). Whereas the first part concerns the vice of sloth in general, the second part’s theme is arguably more specific: the way in which sloth particularly afflicts contemplatives. This narrative structure may itself have been suggested by the order of Peraldus’s treatise, in which the chapter on conserving time is immediately followed by a section on how sloth corrupts the most beautiful part of the church (‘ipsa inquinat pulchriorem partem Ecclesiae’), which is the contemplatives (‘scilicet viros contemplativos’).Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, having treated the seventeen species of sloth in seventeen chapters, Peraldus inserts an extra chapter specifically on the sloth of the cloistered religious (‘de acedia claustralium’).Footnote ⁴⁵

Scholars have puzzled about the actual identity of the Abbot of San Zeno, and questioned why Dante did not choose a more infamous cleric to counter-balance Hugh Capet (the founder of the Capetian dynasty) in the terrace of avarice.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dante appears to present the Abbot of San Zeno (Purg. xviii, 118) as the only interlocutor to emphasise just how many religious leaders succumb to the vice of acedia, as pars pro toto.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is certainly the interpretation of Dante’s son, Pietro [3], whose discussion of sloth in contemplatives is taken verbatim from Peraldus.Footnote ⁴⁸ Peraldus has scathing words for religious men and women who day and night consume the king’s food (the word of God) but are unrestored by it, and who converse with God but do not open their hearts’ eyes to see with whom they are speaking.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is a marvel (‘est mirum quod’) that those – the contemplatives – are the most slothful who least ought to be so (‘illi sunt magis acediosi qui minus esse debuerunt’).Footnote ⁵⁰

Peraldus highlights an even stranger feature (‘satis admirandum est’) of the contemplatives: when they should be most fervent (‘quod ferventiores esse deberent’) and full of zeal – that is, when closest to death, judgement, and eternal damnation or salvation – they become colder (‘frigidiores’) and more slothful.Footnote ⁵¹ In illustrating this puzzling back-sliding of religious (Peraldus is speaking only of ‘the religious’ in the sense of those in a religious order; i.e., as opposed to the laity) even when near to reaching their goal, Peraldus uses the example of the Israelites (‘sicut accidit filiis Israel’) who erred for thirty-eight years in the desert and, when they believed themselves closest to the promised land, moved farther from it.Footnote ⁵² This is precisely Dante’s Biblical example of sloth, cried aloud by the last two slothful penitents:Footnote ⁵³

The two descriptive clauses of Dante’s second example of sloth – those followers of Aeneas who, weary of his mission to found Rome, are left behind in Sicily – reflect three further aspects of Peraldus’s treatment:

The impatience of hardship (‘che l’affanno non sofferse’; 136) is the quiddity of the sub-vice of mollitia [weakness]: ‘mollis est ille qui cedit duris, idest, tribulationibus secumbit’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This leads, in turn, to the further vice of inconsummatio or imperseverantia [imperseverance]: the failure to complete a task to the end (‘fino a la fine’; xviii, 137).Footnote ⁵⁵ Notably, Peraldus associates ‘mollitia’ with an effeminate weakness, an insinuation Dante picks up by explicitly blaming the Trojan women (‘quella’; 136).Footnote ⁵⁶ The second descriptive clause, ‘sé stessa a vita sanza gloria offerse!’ [they chose a life without glory]’ (138),Footnote ⁵⁷ reflects Peraldus’s admonition that sloth takes the goods of glory away, because these are promised only to the strenuous and the vigilant (‘Bona gloriae aufert, quia illa promittuntur solis strenuis et vigilantibus’).Footnote ⁵⁸

We have seen how Dante’s description of the slothful souls closely follows the theoretical exposition of Peraldus’s treatise. We are now in a position to summarise some key features: Dante defines sloth as tepidity (an insufficient love for God), and sees this lukewarmedness as the root of a whole series of other offshoot vices; his treatment highlights the importance of conserving time, of diligence, and of zeal (albeit not to the excess of indiscreet fervour). Dante perceives sloth as a particularly strong temptation in the contemplative life, and he sees the back-sliding of sloth as endangering one’s salvation (the journey to the promised land) and any hope of the good of glory. With these points in mind, let us turn to Dante-character’s zealous intellectual movement from ignorance to knowledge on the terrace (Purg. xvii, 73–xviii, 87), which the slothful souls’ sudden appearance (xviii, 88–138) briefly interrupts.

Pursuing Wisdom

Where Virgil does not have a body and, therefore, is not subject to physical tiredness, Dante-character’s soul is still embodied (he travels alive through the land of the dead!). Consequently, when he reaches the terrace of sloth at nightfall (Purg. xvii, 70–72), he is so tired that he literally cannot move his feet:

Dante’s peculiar use of the Latinism deliquescere (‘ti dilegue’; 73) evokes how tiredness, although not in itself a sin, can lead to sloth.Footnote ⁵⁹ The etymological sense of the verb – to liquify – suggests the weakness (mollitia) of sloth: ‘the weak man’, Peraldus notes, ‘is like a snowman who, in the fire of tribulation, liquifies and is turned into nothing’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, the meaning – Dante’s strength dissolves – evokes the vice of ‘dissolutio’:

This is precisely the situation of Dante and Virgil here, who are compared to a beached ship (‘ed eravamo affissi / pur come nave ch’a la piaggia arriva’; 77–78). Moreover, Virgil’s language alludes to the two specifically temporal sub-vices of sloth: tarditas [slowness] (87) and dilatio [delay] (90).

Despite knowing full well that Dante is absolutely exhausted, Virgil decides to digress, and to deliver an extremely long scholastic lecture – so long, in fact, that it spans two cantos (Purg. xvii, 88–xviii, 75). The psychological drama, then, is that Dante-character is caught between tiredness and the desire to make good use of his time through growth in wisdom. Dante, in other words, is struggling against sloth because, as Peraldus (citing Matthew 26) comments, ‘to stay awake with the Lord’ (‘cum Domino vigilare’) means to beware of the drowsiness of sloth following His example.Footnote ⁶¹ Virgil’s doctrinal speeches are not, therefore, parenthetical to the terrace of sloth. As Peraldus highlights, wisdom (‘sapientia’) is to a man’s laziness (‘pigritia’) as a goad (‘stimulus’) is to a horse’s slowness (‘tarditas’), urging him to do good (‘verba sapientum … excitant hominen ad bonum’).Footnote ⁶² Even more significantly, Peraldus argues that in the order of the church, the light of wisdom (‘lumen sapientiae’) is to be preferred to the cross of penitence (‘crux penitentiae’).Footnote ⁶³ This confirms how Dante-character’s doctrinal lesson should itself be understood as correcting sloth, and it helps explain the apparent lack of an external punishment inflicted on the slothful penitents in this terrace. It is their own wills which lead them to move physically, just as it is Dante-character’s desire for knowledge (embodied in his questions to Virgil) which leads him to move forward intellectually.

It is a remarkable testament to his virtuous zeal that, even when forced to wait, Dante-character is eager for time not to be wasted: ‘Se i piè si stanno, non stea tuo sermone’ [Although our feet stand still, let not your speech do so] (xvii, 84). Moreover, it is his ‘thirst’ for wisdom (xviii, 4) that keeps him alert and awake. Dante emphasises that only after he has taken in Virgil’s responses to his questions does he again become sleepy:

In this way, Dante shows that he has not fallen into the slothful vice of carelessness (‘de vitio incuriae’) which Peraldus specifically associates with the acquisition and conservation of knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rather, exhibiting the opposing virtue of ‘industria’, Dante has harvested ‘some good fruit’ (alcun buon frutto) from Virgil’s lecture.Footnote ⁶⁵

Notably, Dante’s somnolence – a term repeated twice in two lines (‘stava com’ om che sonnolento vana / Ma questa sonnolenza; 87–88) – occurs after this strenuous intellectual activity, and after a vigil prolonged by Virgil’s lectures and by the arrival of the slothful penitents.Footnote ⁶⁶ Dante’s sleep is clearly motivated by bodily necessity; this is Peraldus’s only valid justification for sleep, which otherwise would be considered a waste of time (‘somnus absque necessitate est temporis amissio’).Footnote ⁶⁷ The Christian anxiety about the moral dissolution consequent upon sleep, even when following strenuous work, is evident from Peraldus’s warnings about the many evils that may arise during slumber. Peraldus’s first three examples all concern a man being murdered or delivered to death by a woman in his sleep (Jael killed Sisara; Dalila delivered Samson to his enemies; Judith murdered Holofernes). In Dante-character’s own dream, he is affronted by the Siren, the ‘ancient witch’ (antica strega), and saved from her clutches only by Virgil’s awakening of him (Purg. xix, 34–36). Given Dante’s extreme tiredness up to this point, the dream of the Siren (1–15) is clearly not an afterthought at all; rather, it is the narrative climax of Dante-character’s ‘intellectual drama’.

Virgil’s Doctrine and the Dream of the Siren

This reappraisal of the terrace of sloth brings out two narrative dramas: the acute fervour of the penitent slothful and, framing this, Dante-character’s intellectual zeal for knowledge. With a ternary structure in mind, we can see that the dream of the Siren (in Purgatorio xix) is the second major stage of Dante’s intellectual drama. In so doing, we discover that Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures in the first part (xvii, 73–xviii, 87) – on the moral structure of Purgatory, on the nature of love, and on free will and moral responsibility – are represented symbolically by the dream of the Siren in the second part (xviii, 130–45 and xix, 1–69).

Virgil’s first lecture (Purg. xvii, 91–139) expounds on love and its disorder as the very foundation of the moral structure of Purgatory. Virgil states that the soul’s love can be disordered in two main ways: the love of an evil (‘per male obietto’) or the unmeasured love of a good (‘o per troppo o per poco di vigore’). Virgil then categorises pride, envy, and anger as three ways by which we come to love the evil of our neighbour; sloth as the deficient love of God; and avarice, gluttony, and lust as three forms of excessive love for lesser goods. The first triad of vices concerns internal spiritual blindness, which sets man off on the wrong course and leads him to hatred of his neighbour. This internal blindness is corrected on the three corresponding terraces: proud eyes are bent low, envious eyes stitched up, and wrathful eyes plunged into impenetrable darkness (‘buio d’inferno’). The second triad of vices concerns disordered attraction of external, sensible things: the avaricious seek to possess all they see; the gluttons are possessed by the taste of foods and drinks; and the lustful constantly seek the touch of sexual pleasure. The Siren arguably embodies this transition from the two triads of vices, from the ‘internal’ to the ‘external’, from the ‘spiritual’ to the ‘carnal’: she does not just distract man from his true course or entice him to slow his oar (the specific vice of sloth), but also seduces him to follow unworthy worldly cares and distractions.Footnote ⁶⁸ In classical illustrations of the Siren, her closed arms may depict avarice; her fish’s tail gluttony; and her virginal face lust.Footnote ⁶⁹ Virgil emphasises that the ‘antica strega’ (the Siren) is the only thing wept for on the three final terraces of the mountain.

Virgil’s first lecture leads Dante-character to question him about the nature of love: ‘that you expound love for me, to which you refer every good action and its contrary’ (‘Però ti prego, dolce padre caro, / che mi dimostri amore, a cui reduci / ogne buono operare, e ’l suo contraro’; xviii, 14–15). Virgil’s second scholastic discourse (xviii, 19–39), appealing directly to Dante’s intellect (16–18), is both a constructive explication of ‘rational love’ (‘d’animo’) and how it may err, and a refutation of the opposing thesis that ‘every love in itself [is] a praiseworthy thing’ (‘ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa’; 35–36), ‘the error of the blind who claim to lead’ (‘l’error de’ ciechi che si fanno duci’; 18).Footnote ⁷⁰ As a qualification of the courtly love rhetoric of Francesca da Rimini (Inf. v), Virgil’s discourse situates Dante’s views on love as a mean between those of the two Guidos (‘l’uno e l’altro Guido’) referenced on the terrace of pride (Purg. xi, 97–99).Footnote ⁷¹ For Guido Cavalcanti, love is a passion which ultimately impedes man from the perfect good of philosophical contemplation; in contrast, Guinizelli indiscriminately exalts love as the source of perfection. Dante, however, both defends love as leading man to the highest good (contra Calvalcanti) and shows how particular loves may lead to evil as well as to good (contra Guinizelli). Dante-character presents himself as being corrected, then, of this counter-thesis.Footnote ⁷²

Virgil first explains the basic psychology of love to Dante. The underlying premise is that, created by God, the human soul is naturally disposed to love (xviii, 19). The mind’s first movement passes through two stages: first the mind is stimulated (‘awakened into act’) by the pleasure given by the perception of a desirable object (21), and then it naturally inclines towards this object (20). In more scholastic terminology (22–24), the power of perception (‘vostra apprensiva’) presents the image (‘intenzione’) of an external object to the mind; if the object is pleasure-giving, the mind naturally inclines towards it (‘sì che l’animo ad essa volger face’). Where the first movement is a natural inclination (a ‘turning’), Virgil here reserves the term ‘love’ to specify a second ‘spiritual movement’ (‘moto spiritale’), the bending (‘piegar’) of the mind towards this object: ‘if, having turned [first movement], the mind bends towards it [second movement], that bending is love’ (‘e se rivolto inver’ di lei si piega / quell piegare è amor’; 25–26). As the captured mind enters into desire (‘l’animo preso entra in disire’; 31), it cannot rest until it possesses the desired object. In this way, Virgil refutes the thesis that ‘every love is itself a praiseworthy thing’. Although the natural disposition to love (the wax) is always good, the mind may choose to bend towards a pleasure-giving object (a seal), which, for an individual, may be an apparent but not an actual good.Footnote ⁷³

Dante’s dream of the Siren, in its first phase (Purg. xix, 1–24), enacts the way in which the mind may bend in love towards this kind of delectable but ultimately false object. Indeed, the string of five adjectival phrases describing the Siren embodies the five kinds of false earthly happiness delineated by Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy:

On this interpretation, ‘balba’ (stuttering) indicates the vanity of fame or human glory (gloria) which exists on the stuttering tongues of men; ‘ne li occhi guercia’ [cross-eyed] denotes the imperfection of honours (dignitates) which stand before men’s eyes; ‘sovra i piè distorta’ [crooked on her feet] indicates that men walk unsafely and unstably on riches (divitiae); ‘le man monche’ [the stunted hands] represent the imperfection of the works committed through temporal authority over lands (regna); and ‘di colore scialba’ [pallid colour] represents the vanity of sensual pleasures (voluptates) which rest only in appearance (as colour is only an accidental property of a substance).Footnote ⁷⁴ That Dante is the object of the main clause (‘mi venne’) reflects that the Siren, as yet an unnamed subject ‘una femmina’ [female], is presented to him, initially, as she is.

In the next terzina, by contrast, the subject–object relationship is inverted:

As Dante, the subject, actively gazes on her, the Siren is transformed: his gaze, like the sun warming cold limbs, gives colour to her face, loosens her tongue, and straightens her distorted features. Through Dante’s gaze and seconded by the movement of love (‘com’ amor vuol’), the ‘femina balba’ (a stuttering, ugly, pallid, female) is transformed into the ‘dolce serena’ (the sweet, blushing, rosy Siren). This sequence may reflect how the five kinds of false earthly happiness represented by the ‘femina’ come to appear delectable because of man’s false estimation: men believe, mistakenly, that fleeting glory (gloria) will not stutter, but bring lasting renown (celebritas); honours, not imperfect, will bring reverence (reverentia); wealth (divitiae) will bring not danger, but rather the security of sufficiency (sufficientia); lands (regna) will bring not the frustration of governance in inefficiency, compromise, and corruption, but rather true authority and power (potentia); and pleasures (voluptates) will produce not vanity and emptiness, but joy (laetitia).Footnote ⁷⁵ The Siren so captivates men that any drawn to her rarely leave (‘e qual meco s’ausa / rado sen parte’; 23–24); at an allegorical level, whoever falls in love with imperfect worldly goods becomes enchanted by, or habituated to, them. The transformation of the ‘femina balba’ into the ‘dolce serena’, thereby renders poetically Virgil’s second doctrinal discourse on the nature of love, and how a person may love an ultimately false good (Purg. xviii, 19–39).

Virgil’s third discourse (xviii, 46–74) is rendered poetically, then, in the second stage of the Siren episode (xix, 25–33). This doctrinal lecture responds to Dante’s question that, if love comes from outside the soul (‘s’amore è di fuori a noi offerto’; xviii, 43), and the soul follows only this attraction (‘e l’anima non va con altro piede’; 44), how is the soul to blame for following good or evil? (‘se dritta o torta va non è suo merto’; 45). Virgil clarifies that our first appetites are determined (just as a bee is made to make honey) and, therefore, this first desire deserves neither praise nor blame (‘e questa prima voglia / merto di lode o di biasmo non cape’; 59–60) – a doctrine reiterating the central discourse on love in Purgatorio xvii (‘Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore’; 94). Nevertheless, Virgil again emphasises that, aside from these natural desires, man has reason which counsels, giving or withholding assent to the desire (‘la virtù che consiglia / e de l’assenso de’ tener la soglia’; 62–63). Finally, man has free will (‘la nobile virtù … lo libero arbitrio’; 73–74) which enables him to act upon what reason counsels. Even, therefore, if all desires arose through necessity (‘di necessitate / surga ogne amor’; 70–71), man – with reason and free will – has the power and, therefore, the responsibility of moral action. This conclusion also echoes, of course, Marco Lombardo’s discourse in Purgatorio xvi (‘in voi è la cagione’; 83).

Now consider the second phase of the Siren episode. Immediately after Dante is seduced by the Siren’s speech, a lady prompts Virgil to rip the Siren’s clothes and expose her belly (‘il ventre’):

In light of the parallels with the doctrinal discourse in Purgatorio xviii (which Virgil emphasises is according to reason; ‘quanto ragion qui vede / dir ti poss’ io’; 46–47) and the Boethian echoes in the Siren episode thus far, it does seem natural to identify ‘la donna … santa e presta’ (xix, 26) as Lady Philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Dantean allegory, the lady’s eyes represent the demonstrations of her science. Here, Lady Philosophy’s doctrine (and, perhaps, specifically the text of Boethius’s Consolation) demonstrates to reason the baseness and trickery of the five false earthly goals represented by the Siren. The lady asks Virgil who the Siren is (‘chi è questa?’; 28); that is, she compels Dante-character to consider intellectually the Siren’s essence (her quiddity) and not how she may appear through accidental properties which are subject to change (as the pallid ‘femmina balba’, through Dante’s desire, becomes the blushing ‘dolce serena’). Exposed for what she truly is, the Siren vanishes as Dante is awoken from his dream by her foul stench (‘col puzzo che n’uscia’; 33).Footnote ⁷⁷

The dream of the Siren continues to weigh on Dante’s mind until Virgil’s final rebuke in which he names her not as the ‘femmina balba’ (as she first appears to Dante in his dream) or the ‘dolce serena’ (as she presents herself), but rather as the ‘antica strega’: ‘antica’ (ancient) because she existed from the beginning of the world, and ‘strega’ (witch) because she still succeeds in enticing people to follow her temptations. The exasperation of Dante’s early commentators, let alone Virgil, on this point is evident: even though wise authorities from antiquity have warned against the false kinds of earthly happiness, people continue to be seduced by the Siren’s song.Footnote ⁷⁸ Therefore, when Virgil says ‘vedesti come l’uom da lei si slega’ [you have seen how one frees oneself from her] (xix, 60), this may refer both to the poetical episode of the Siren in the first half of Purgatorio xix and to Virgil’s doctrinal passages in Purgatorio xviii.

Looking back retrospectively, it is clear that the Siren was present implicitly throughout the terrace of sloth. The nautical image comparing Dante and Virgil to a beached ship on their arrival at the terrace is reinforced through the two examples of sloth: those Trojan women who burnt Aeneas’s ships and chose to remain on Sicily’s shores, and the Israelites who crossed the Red Sea but, complaining, hearkened back to life in Egypt (a life of sin).Footnote ⁷⁹ The actual appearance of the Siren in Dante’s dream, therefore, simply makes explicit her powerful presence in, or even influence over, the terrace of sloth as a whole.

Sloth As Dante’s First Sin in Inferno I

If we consider that Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures in the terrace of sloth embody, for Dante, the very structure of the Christian moral life in terms of ordered and disordered love, this may suggest – beyond the terrace itself – a heightened autobiographical and poetical significance for the vice of sloth. Could sloth, in fact, be the very first sin of Dante-character on his moral journey?Footnote ⁸⁰ This is not to suggest another symbolic interpretation of the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf. Rather, even before he encounters the three beasts, Dante-character had attempted (and failed) to leave the wooded valley behind him and to ascend the high mountain of virtue.Footnote ⁸¹ What sin caused, then, this failure?

On the terrace of sloth, Virgil upbraids Dante, informing him that the soul walks not only by love, but also ‘with the other foot’ (‘con altro piede’) of the intellect (Purg. xviii, 44).Footnote ⁸² The stationary foot (‘’l piè fermo’; Inf. i, 30), then, is the pes affectus. At the beginning of his ascent up the mountain, Dante-character’s love is deficient, holding him back from pursuing the upwards path of holiness directed by his intellect (the pes intellectus).Footnote ⁸³ Dante exhibits, in other words, the vice of tepidity, the ‘love of the good’ that falls ‘short of its proper duty’.

More precisely, we may identify Dante’s first sin as the sub-species ‘ignavia’, the slothful vice of the person who chooses to remain in great misery rather than to undertake the work necessary to escape it.Footnote ⁸⁴ Peraldus’s description of the ‘ignavi’ captures, in my view, Dante’s exact moral predicament at this early stage in his journey:

It is only after this failure, therefore, that Dante-character is assailed by the other vices (the ‘three beasts’), turning back to the ‘dark wood’ or ‘perilous sea’ of sin. As Peraldus notes, the ‘ignavi’ choose their own death (the ‘sea of Hell’) through the waters of riches and other snares, rather than journeying to the door of life through ‘the dry earth of poverty’ – imagery directly picked up by Dante in his poetic treatment.Footnote ⁸⁶

What remedy, then, is there for those in Dante-character’s predicament? Peraldus’s second and third remedies against sloth are the consideration of future pain (consideratio poenae futurae) and of eternal reward (consideratio aeternae praemii). He tells an anecdote from the Life of the Desert Fathers in which the abbot counsels both these remedies to a monk struggling with sloth:

In response to Dante’s cry for help, Virgil first upbraids him for not climbing the mountain, as he should:

Virgil then presents precisely the abbot’s remedy: he shows Dante the desperate cries (‘le disperate strida’) of the damned, those content in the fire of Purgatory, and the blessed people (‘le beate genti’) in heaven (Inf. i, 115–20).

The retellings of the opening scene through the eyes of Virgil, Beatrice, and Lucia in Inferno ii reinforce this interpretation. Appealing to Beatrice, Lucia says that Dante loved her so much that he left the vulgar herd (‘t’amò tanto / c’uscì te de la volgare schiera’; Inf. ii, 104–5), which Guido da Pisa glosses as the wise man abandoning the study of secular sciences and turning, instead, to sacred theology that leads to beatitude:

Dante’s spiritual model, of course, is St Augustine, whose desire for God ultimately surpassed all other desires, whether in his early sensual life, or in his study of ‘worldly’ rhetoric and philosophy.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a vivid description of the procrastination, delaying, and back-sliding characteristic of sloth, Virgil suggests it was ‘viltade’ [pusillanimity] (45) or ‘tema’ [fear] (49) that turned Dante – marred by ‘other thoughts’ (37–42) – from his ‘honourable undertaking’, leading him to see a ‘beast’ where there was only a shadow (40). This is why, returning to the ‘lost road’ of holiness (the via munditiae) at the shore of Purgatory, all other journeying seems to Dante in vain.Footnote ⁹⁰

It is notable, in this respect, that the first groups of souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise dramatize, in different ways, this laggardness towards the religious life. The ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii who live ‘without praise or blame’ allude to the Biblical topos (Revelation 3. 15–16) of those who are ‘neither cold nor hot’, and whom Christ will therefore ‘vomit out of my mouth’. Peraldus – as we have seen – directly associates this passage with tepidity: ‘tepidity is the only sin that provokes God to vomit’.Footnote ⁹¹ The unnamed cleric, Pope Celestine V, by abdicating, failed in the most dramatic way to follow his call from God to lead the faithful in the religious life. Dante’s original realm of Ante-Purgatory is peopled by those who delayed the religious life of penance; as a punishment for delaying, they must wait for the purifying fire (the poena corrigens) of Purgatory. The two souls we encounter in the slowest sphere of the Moon were contemplative sisters (of the order of St Clare) who, upon being forcibly removed from their cloister, failed to insist (even unto martyrdom) on their religious vocation, instead assenting (albeit against their desire) to a worldly life. In Dante’s moral vision, the fourth terrace of sloth is halfway between God (in the Empyrean) and Satan (in the depths of Hell): the sin of sloth is arguably the nexus, then, between the call to ‘belong to God’ and to ‘belong to the world’ (1 John 4).

The Sloth of Statius, Dante’s Autobiographical Cypher

Given these moral and meta-poetic levels, it is striking that Dante delineates ‘sloth’ as, alongside prodigality, the dominant sin of his autobiographical cypher, the poet-scholar Statius:Footnote ⁹²

Statius did 500 years in Purgatory for prodigality (xxi, 68) and 400 years for sloth (xxii, 92), leaving a little more than 300 years for his stints in Ante-Purgatory and the terraces of pride, envy, and wrath combined (Statius died in 96 AD, and the date of the poem is 1300). Dante presents Statius as passing through two conversions. The first is moral: a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid showed Statius the error of his prodigal ways (xxii, 37–54). The second is spiritual: Virgil’s prophetic fourth Eclogue, resonating with the ‘new preachers’ of the gospel, converted him from paganism to Christianity.Footnote ⁹³ Crucially, prodigality was Statius’s dominant sin when he was still a pagan, whereas ‘sloth’ was his dominant sin after his second conversion to Christianity. Sloth is, therefore, the sin of Statius as a Christian.

What was the consequence of sloth for the poet-scholar Statius? And why might this be particularly relevant to Dante? Statius’s tepidity (he was a ‘closed Christian’) suggests that an implied Christian sense must be read out of Statius’s otherwise ‘closed’ Thebaid. Thus, in a medieval allegorical interpretation, the seven assailants who enter the gates of Thebes may represent the seven deadly sins who enter the seven apertures of humanity, while the compassionate intervention of Theseus in establishing the altar of mercy may foreshadow the saving work of Christ.Footnote ⁹⁴ Dante, in turn, must surpass the model of Statius, and make God the explicit goal of his moral life and his poetry: his own Christian faith should not be veiled as in the Vita Nova but explicit as in the Commedia. But there is also a more pressing warning for Statius’s fellow scholar-poet, as is evident from Statius’ own self-presentation:

The insinuation, passed over in the scholarship, is that Statius left his second major work the Achilleid incomplete due to his sloth (and not simply due to his death).Footnote ⁹⁵ The poet Statius, as Dante knew well, liked to play on the meaning (and puns) of proper names: here, the circumlocution ‘Statius people back there call me still’ is, as with the famous case of Ciacco, a nod to the nomen significans rei [the name signifies the thing]: Statius is a delayer, one who stayed (from the Latin status).Footnote ⁹⁶ Statius, therefore, failed to complete the journey of his second poem ‘fino a la fine’ (the slothful vice of inconsummatio); he failed to carry the ‘burden’ of his poem (imperseverantia). In consequence, a part of his potential glory is taken away. That Statius is a cypher for Dante is undisputed, so clear are the autobiographical parallels.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is surely no accident that Dante – at the halfway mark of Purgatorio and the Commedia as a whole – should draw attention to his own battle against the vice of sloth – a battle necessary for him to carry, unlike Statius, his own burden (the ‘ponderoso tema’; Par. xxiii, 64; DVE ii, 4) to completion.Footnote ⁹⁸

As an early illustration of Peraldus’s treatise suggests, the virtuous life may be envisaged and framed, first of all, as a lifelong battle against the vices.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the terrace of sloth, Dante represents his own pursuit of wisdom as in continual conflict with the dragging pull of sloth. Moreover, the very beginning of his afterlife journey (and his poetic masterpiece) is driven by a remedy against tepidity (and its offshoots of ignavia and pusillanimity). Dante’s extraordinary achievements – as a poet, statesman, philosopher, and theologian – do not undermine the importance of sloth in his life (and in his Christian moral vision as a whole), but rather enforce and provide evidence for it. As a contemplative poet-scholar especially, Dante’s life was a heroic battle with the vice of sloth, a battle in which – at least in relation to the Commedia – he was victorious, completing his magnum opus shortly before his own death in 1321.

Modern critics have been reluctant to contemplate the possibility that Dante might have represented himself as guilty of avarice, even though the early commentators held no such qualms.Footnote ¹ After all, some of the most sustained invectives of the Commedia are against avarice, and, in his prose works, avarice is the great enemy of individual nobility and of society. But, as with acedia, we should not equate the strength of Dante’s attack against a vice with the weakness of its hold on himself. Moreover, we should emphasise that sinning in avarice does not imply any legal wrongdoing such as the barratry, or corruption, of which Dante was unjustly accused. Given the breadth of medieval understandings of avarice – including a love of power as well as of wealth, and its opposing vice of prodigality – it would be impossible for any Christian, even in a better-governed world, not to fall subject to it to some extent. Reflecting on himself at the height of his political power as one of the six priors of Florence in 1300, it is highly plausible that Dante might have acknowledged that, alongside having failed to enter fully the ‘new life’ of Christian penitence, he had also become seduced by the ‘perilous sea’ of wealth and power.

We should remember the venerable Christian adage that just as demons are fallen angels, so saints are converted sinners. Indeed, the greatest saint of Dante’s age, St Francis (canonised in 1228), was a prodigal prior to his conversion.Footnote ² On climbing to the sixth terrace of gluttony, Dante-character recognises how much lighter he is after the sin of avarice has been erased: ‘E io più lieve che per l’altre foci / m’andava’ [And I walked lighter than after the other outlets] (Purg. xxii, 7–8).Footnote ³ The obvious way to interpret this, as Benvenuto’s gloss registers, is that Dante-character is acknowledging that he has been purged of a heavy sin (gravissimum pondus), while the next two sins – namely, gluttony and lust – are much lighter (he did not much sin in gluttony and lust), an implication which modern commentators appear to have ignored.Footnote ⁴ In this chapter, I argue that both the early commentators (in identifying avarice as Dante’s sin in Inferno i) and the modern commentators (in eschewing such a connection) are right and wrong in different respects: the poet does imply that Dante-character, overthrown by the she-wolf, was guilty of avarice but, as we learn subsequently through Statius, he was guilty of its subspecies, and extreme opposing vice, of prodigality.

This chapter demonstrates, therefore, the significance of avarice in Dante’s Christian ethics and in his own moral autobiography. Using Peraldus as a gloss, I draw out the spiritual dimension of Hugh Capet’s speech, a speech typically read as political polemic. I suggest, by contrast, that Hugh is atoning in the afterlife for the particular nature of his sin (arguably the original sin of the Capetian line) in the occasion of amor filiorum [the love of children]. I argue that love of one’s children, and its negative potential as an occasion to avarice, is an interpretative key to Purgatorio xx as a whole, which is structured around Hugh’s confession at its centre (Purg. xx, 40–96). The innermost frame of the examples of poverty (16–33) and avarice (97–123) all concern the impact of poverty on family dependents. The further frame of the she-wolf (4–15) and the poor shepherds (124–41) highlights how Christ’s contemporary pastors fail to protect His flock from avarice. The prologue (1–3) and epilogue (142–51) concern the extension of avarice to truth: the cupidinous desire for knowledge. For Dante, as for Peraldus, two opposing vices spring from the disordered love for wealth and power: avarice and prodigality. In the chiastic structure of the terrace as a whole, Hugh Capet (and Purgatorio xx) is framed by the figures of Pope Adrian V (Purgatorio xix), an exemplar of avarice, and Statius (Purgatorio xxi–xxii), an exemplar of prodigality. I suggest that Dante sets up his own ‘father-role’ as a Christian poet within the genealogy of ethical poets, in contrast to the genealogy of popes and the genealogy of ancestral line highlighted by Pope Adrian V and Hugh Capet, respectively. In the fourth part, I argue that Statius is a poetic cypher for Dante in relation to the sin of prodigality as well as to the sin of sloth.

Hugh Capet and Amor filiorum (Purg. xx, 43–96)

In one sense, Hugh Capet is a vehicle for Dante’s extremely partisan, and in places wildly inaccurate, view of the role of France in medieval European history. The canto (Purgatorio xx) and wider episode of which Hugh Capet is a central figure (the terrace of Avarice) are undoubtedly, at one level, political propaganda on Dante’s part: the polemical message, in a nutshell, is that the greed of the French kings has destroyed the peace and balance of power, which only a universal emperor might justly enforce. What better spokesperson and other-worldly authority for such a biased, anti-French view of history than the very progenitor of the line of French kings from 987 to the time of Dante? It may seem cruel that Dante makes Hugh Capet call his father ‘a butcher’ – an impious insult and complete slander: his father was Hugh the Great, the duke of the French (dux Francorum), who for many years had been the power behind the French throne.Footnote ⁵ It may seem entirely inappropriate, moreover, that Hugh Capet should be forced utterly to condemn his own ancestral line: Robert Bartlett memorably compared Hugh Capet praying for the defeat of his descendants to Elizabeth I praying for the defeat of the English by Napoleon or Hitler.Footnote ⁶ But, at a political level, so be it: this all serves Dante’s anti-French propaganda, and Hugh Capet can go to Hell.

Except, of course, that Hugh Capet is not in Hell but rather in Purgatory. Most readings of the Hugh Capet episode have focused, in one way or another, on its obvious political dimension, an approach recently exemplified by Prue Shaw: ‘The energy of this sustained denunciation by the founding father of the French dynasty makes it unmatched as political invective. This is as close as Dante ever comes to using a character in the afterlife simply as a mouthpiece for his own views.’Footnote ⁷ But what happens if we think of Hugh Capet as not just an ironic mouthpiece for Dante’s political programme? What happens when we consider the spiritual dimension of the episode? We should remember, after all, that the canto is also about the soul of Hugh Capet, and its process of penance and redemption. From such a perspective, Dante-poet may not seem as callous as on a narrowly political reading he might have at first appeared: less a political polemicist, perhaps, and more a confessor and counsellor. Even Hugh Capet’s diatribe against his own descendants, in this spiritual sense, may actually begin to seem strangely appropriate. This is because love of one’s children was seen in Dante’s time as a particularly insidious occasion – hidden under a good intention – for the sin of avarice.

In Moralia in Job, Gregory the Great discusses amor filiorum to exemplify the way in which a vice may attack us by concealing itself beneath a virtue. Someone who seems well defended against avarice, Gregory suggests, may be attacked covertly by the apparently sound motivation of providing for his family so that, while his mind is directed with seeming piety to the care of providing for them, he may be secretly seduced and pushed into sin by seeking after wealth.Footnote ⁸ Gregory’s emphasis is picked up by Peraldus, who devotes an entire section of his treatise on avarice to this danger.Footnote ⁹ Having treated all the different species of avarice in turn, Peraldus turns to the things which give occasion to avarice, affording the most space to amor filiorum:

To illustrate the avarice which may ensue upon love of one’s children, Peraldus tells a story of a hermit who, guided to Hell in a vision, finds his avaricious father and brother cursing each other in a well of fire:

Peraldus takes pains to stress the powerful pull of avarice: it is love, albeit misdirected, that binds sinners to it. He underlines avarice’s long-lasting effect not just on an individual but on his or her children because possessions (unlike, say, food and drink) are durable and outlive us. Even on nearing death, then, we are enchained by avarice because we love possessions not just for ourselves but for our children. No other vice, therefore, is as potent as avarice in drowning souls in the deep sea of Hell.Footnote ¹²

Avarice is the most serious spiritual illness, and the root of all others.Footnote ¹³ In teaching his children to love worldly things, Peraldus affirms, a father does to them what is commonly done to trap rats: covered with birdlime, rats move around in the straw and, by doing so, gather the material for their own burning. Likewise, the avaricious father ensnares his children with the love of temporal things (the birdlime of eternal torments) and, thus ensnared, they gather riches (the material of their own eternal burning).Footnote ¹⁴ Just as a burning coal lights up others, so a wealthy father aflame with the fire of cupidity inflames his family dependents and friends with the same.Footnote ¹⁵ We can summarise, then, four key points about this theoretical treatment of avarice. First, love of one’s children was well known in the Christian tradition as a particularly insidious example of occasions to sin. Second, the good intention of love for one’s children may lead not just the parent but also his or her children to avarice. Third, teaching a child to love worldly goods is, in fact, to condemn him or her to Hell. Fourth, avarice is the root of all evils and a very grave spiritual illness.

Let us consider, in this light, Hugh Capet’s self-presentation. On Dante’s account, Hugh Capet usurped the very kingdom of France to give to his son and heirs (Purg. xx, 52–60). Himself a son of a butcher (‘Figliuol fu’io d’un beccaio di Parigi’; 52), Hugh promoted his son to the widowed crown of France. On the spurious (for Dante) basis that he was going on crusade and might be killed, Hugh Capet made his son king the very year of his own coronation to secure the succession of his line (‘le sacrate ossa’ [the consecrated bones]; 60).Footnote ¹⁶ Hugh’s assumption of power is, then, the seed of the evil tree, the first drop of the blood which, in time, would be entirely sucked to the desires of the she-wolf of avarice. Hugh describes his own dynasty as the evil plant that overshadows all the Christian lands (‘la mala pianta / che la terra cristiana tutta aduggia’; 43–44). Capetian ambition obstructs, and seeks to supplant, the Holy Roman Emperor who, for Dante, is the Divinely ordained minister of justice in the world. Consequently, Rome is widowed not just of the papacy (in Avignon, consumed by avarice), but of the Emperor as well.Footnote ¹⁷ In an apostrophe to avarice ‘O avarizia’, Hugh Capet concludes that his offspring are so possessed by avarice that they do not even care for their own flesh, trading their daughters for money (82–84). Where Ottobono dei Fieschi (Pope Adrian V) had embodied avarice pure and simple (Purgatorio xix, 113–14), Hugh Capet embodies – in the most exemplary way – the love of children that can lead to avarice, with devasting social and political consequences.

With savage satire, Hugh Capet’s triple use of the word ‘ammenda’ (in rhyme position), in Purgatorio xx, describes the diabolic anti-justice of his descendant Charles of Anjou:

The Capetian dynasty acts ‘con forza e con menzogna’ [with force and fraud], the means – as Virgil spells out in Inferno xi, 22–24 – of injustice. Charles of Anjou ‘makes amends’ by murdering Curradino, the grandson of Frederick II (the last Holy Roman Emperor) and the last of the Hohenstaufen bloodline. Dante even claims that Charles of Anjou murdered Thomas Aquinas while en route to the Council of Lyons (1264) as if, presumably, Thomas was to indict him there. The triple anti-justice of the Capetian rulers on Earth narrated by Hugh Capet in Purgatorio xx is corrected, as Pope Adrian V highlights in Purgatorio xix, with the triple emphasis on God’s justice (‘giustizia … giustizia … del giusto Sire) in the afterlife:

The justice of ‘our just lord’ – embodied in the syntactical balance of Adrian’s speech (‘sì come … così … come … così … quanto … tanto’) – compensates in the afterlife for the avarice of the Capetian dynasty, and for the moral and spiritual abyss left by the eclipse of what were, for Dante, the two Divinely ordained institutions of Church and Empire.

In Purgatorio xix, however, Ottobono dei Fieschi no longer speaks as Pope Adrian V (as successor Petri) but as an equal brother (‘frate’; 133), a fellow servant (‘conservo sono’; 134), seeking the heavenly kingdom. Likewise, Hugh Capet, the progenitor regium Francorum, is learning to strip himself of his Earthly and familial ties and to become, instead, an equal brother in a shared fraternity that strives to live in conformity with God’s will. The words ‘neque nubent’ [neither shall they marry] (Purg. xix, 137) arguably apply, in this context, as much to Hugh Capet’s relationship to his descendants as to a pope’s pastoral relationship to his flock or to a man’s marriage to his wife. Crucially, just as the Emperor Constantine is not punished for the consequence of his donation – the earthly corruption of the papacy from its primitive poverty (Inf. xix, 115–17; Par. xx, 55–60) – so Hugh Capet is not punished for the consequence of his avarice: the Capetian line’s disastrous impact, in Dante’s view, on the political order of medieval Europe.Footnote ¹⁸ Rather, Hugh Capet is made to atone for the misdirected love of children which, according to Dante, led to his assumption of the French crown in the first place. Hugh’s outward renunciation of his family line, in other words, is directly penitential: as the love of his family had spurred him to the avaricious assumption of ever-greater power, wealth, and prestige, so he must renounce these to embrace spiritual poverty.

In the moral scheme of Purgatory, the fact that Hugh Capet castigates his descendants’ avarice to the extent that he desires their defeat in battle does not mean that he does not still love them with the tenderness of a father. Nor, as is clear from Solomon’s discourse on the resurrection of the body, does the kingdom of Heaven require a renunciation of family ties.Footnote ¹⁹ Nonetheless, from the other-worldly perspective of eternity, Hugh Capet’s acquisition of material wealth and secular power for his son and descendants does not appear such a good thing. In Purgatory, Hugh Capet recovers the primary duty of a Christian father: to lead his children not to worldly wealth, power, and success, but rather to eternal beatitude. The point is made more strongly by a comparison with Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti’s attitude to his son Guido in Hell: Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, an Epicurean in death as in life, still only cares about his son’s secular prowess and Earthly fame (Inf. x, 52–72).Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, in attacking his descendants’ avarice, and in even desiring their misfortune, Hugh Capet is urging them to live in accordance with God’s will: in Dante’s view, after all, the Capetian line’s illegitimate temporal ambitions conflict with God’s Divinely ordained Imperial order. As material misfortune was seen as a primary opportunity for spiritual conversion, Hugh Capet is also praying, at another level, for his descendants’ salvation. In other words, Hugh desires his family, so converted from avarice like him, to join him in Heaven; Earthly fame or even defamation, by comparison with the eternal beatitude of Heaven, is of little consequence. Where the avaricious father and son in Peraldus’s instructional novella on amor filiorum curse each other in Hell, the repentant Hugh Capet prays in Purgatory for his descendants’ secular failure precisely because this may become an occasion for their salvation: only damnation – and not Earthly misfortune – implies true disaster for the human individual. In the language of Cacciaguida (Dante’s own allotted ancestral father-figure), Hugh Capet’s denunciation of his descendants, although ‘painful at first taste’ (‘molesta nel primo gusto’), is actually the ‘vital nourishment’ (‘vital nodrimento’) that they need (Par. xvii, 131–32).

From the perspective of amor filiorum as a key occasion for avarice, the psychological depth of Hugh Capet’s first-person narrative thereby begins to surface. This, in turn, leads to a further consideration. Along with revealing Dante’s political motivation for foregrounding Hugh Capet (his polemical anti-French propaganda), this spiritual perspective sheds light on a deeply personal rationale. Why does Dante make Hugh Capet the central figure of the terrace of avarice? Why does he highlight this particular aspect: love of children as an occasion to avarice? Surely because love of his own children would have presented Dante with a pressing occasion for, and temptation to, avarice.Footnote ²¹ We need only remember that Petrarch criticised Dante’s refusal to accept the humiliating terms offered for his return to Florence precisely because of the effect of that refusal on the lives of his own children.Footnote ²² Seen from the perspective of amor filiorum, this episode takes on an intensely personal, autobiographical dimension: what better moral and spiritual counsel for Dante-character, at the height of political power during the time of his journey in 1300, than that warning him against this specific temptation to avarice, a temptation he would continue to experience, perhaps especially acutely, during his subsequent exile.

Poverty and the Family: Exemplars of Poverty (Purg. xx, 16–33) and Avarice (Purg. xx, 97–123)

In light of this emphasis on ‘love of children’ as the occasion of Hugh Capet’s avarice, it is striking that the examples of poverty and liberality all concern their direct impact on family and children. The extreme poverty of Mary is highlighted at precisely the point that she gave birth: ‘Povera fosti tanto / quanto veder si può per quello ospizio / dove sponesti il tuo portato santo’ [How very poor you were we can see by the shelter where you laid down your holy burden] (Purg. xx, 22–24). When parents would naturally feel most strongly the need to have acquired material comfort for their new child, the Christian archetypal family is presented as entirely poor, and wholly dependent upon the grace and mercy of God. The Christ child was born in a stable – a stark reality that had been recently emphasised in Franciscan spirituality (St Francis reportedly reconstructed the crib to underline the literal reality of the Holy Family’s poverty).Footnote ²³ The classical example of Fabricius, the incorruptible pagan Roman consul, further underlines poverty in relation to family. Fabricius preferred his poverty to riches, his virtue to vice. In the sources known to Dante, the emphasis of the exemplar is that Fabricius chose poverty despite its implications for his family and, in particular, despite the fate of his daughters left without dowries. His honourable example is presented, nonetheless, as a dowry greater than riches. Fabricius’s supreme virtue ultimately led the Roman state to endow his daughters on his behalf as well as to pay the expenses of his funeral (normally the duty of a family). This implicit reference to Fabricius’s daughters is made explicit in the Christian example of St Nicholas, who provided dowries for three impoverished sisters so that they might escape prostitution (Purg. xx, 31–33). Again, where providing for one’s children would seem a primary duty of a father, Dante emphasises that it cannot excuse the injustice and moral corruption which proceed from avarice. Instead, the primary duty of a father is to lead his children, by his example, to the eternal riches of heaven.

Hugh Capet must learn this lesson painfully in the afterlife: because of the intensity of his cries, he is the only soul (‘sola / tu’; 35–36) whom Dante hears crying out these examples of poverty.Footnote ²⁴ By contrast, Dante had been forced to learn the lesson painfully through experience in his own life. The temptation to have compromised his principles through his desire for his children’s wellbeing must have been as strong, as Dante’s inability to provide for them (living by others’ bread) would have caused him (and them) suffering.Footnote ²⁵ But, surely taking Fabricius as a model, Dante’s epistles of the period present himself to be as morally upright and steadfast as he admonishes others to be in his verse. Dante refused the amnesty offered to him in 1315 despite knowing full well the consequences for his family (the sentence of exile and death was extended to them). How could a man familiar with philosophy (vir phylosophiae domesticus) and preaching justice (praedicans iustitiam) so abase himself as to present himself as a criminal and offer money to those who have so unjustly injured him? Only if a way could be found which would not detract from his good name and honour would Dante return, and willingly so, to his native Florence.Footnote ²⁶ It is thus understandable that Dante-character should rejoice in the exempla of poverty – ‘O anima che tanto ben favelle’ [O soul who speaks of so much good] (34) – for he would certainly have needed such consolation in the years ahead.

Dante’s programme for spiritual development in his vision of Purgatory directly mirrors and draws upon the kind of moral instruction which would have structured his own Christian life of penance. Peraldus’s De vitiis is again a direct influence here. The preaching manual lists eight remedies against avarice.Footnote ²⁷ To defend against an avaricious way of life, Peraldus writes, a person must reflect on death, the poverty of Jesus, the danger in which we live, and the misery connected with Earthly delights. To develop the correct Christian disposition towards material goods, a person must reflect on the eternal riches of heaven, associate with others who despise Earthly things, place faith in God, and obtain grace through almsgiving and prayer. Dante foregrounds all these aspects in the terrace of avarice: the meditatio mortis and the shortness of life (‘lo cammin corto / di quella vita ch’ al termine vola’ [the brief path of life that flies to its end]; Purg. xx, 38–39); the poverty of Jesus (xx, 19–24); the danger in which we live (xix, 103–5); and the misery connected with Earthly delights (xix, 108). Adrian V – who despises Earthly things after his late conversion (xix, 109–11) – admonishes Dante-character to reflect on Jesus’s parables about the eternal riches of heaven (xix, 136–38); repeated invocations are made to God (xx, 13–15; 94–96) while the souls in Purgatory, unable to obtain grace by almsgiving, nonetheless are stripped of their wealth and pray incessantly for God’s grace.

The penitent souls’ attention to the passage of time and history is a particularly striking feature of the terrace of avarice. From a spiritual perspective, this underlines the brevity of an individual life and the vanity of Earthly possessions and power. The movement through medieval history in Hugh Capet’s speech – from 941 to the present (1300), and then onwards into the future (perhaps as far as 1312 or 1314) – is reflected in the movement forwards and backwards across the sweep of providential history in Dante’s exempla of avarice. Indeed, the first two exempla are pagan (Pygmalion and Midas), the third from the Old Testament (Achan), the fourth twin example is from the New Testament (Ananias and Saffira); the fifth from the Old Testament (Heliodorus), and the sixth and seventh are classical (Polymnestor and Crassus). The resultant pairings create a temporal chiasmus, a chronological order highlighted by the sequence of temporal adverbs: ‘poi’ (xx, 109), ‘Indi’ (112), and ‘ultimamente’ (116).Footnote ²⁸ By repeating incessantly these examples of avarice, the souls must direct their gaze forwards and backwards across a vast stretch of time. The purpose of this spiritual exercise, then, is to free them from a narrow attachment to transitory worldly goods and power.

The key emphasis in Dante’s examples of avarice is that the love of gold (‘oro’ is punned on throughout the sequence) leads people to a whole messy gamut of evils.Footnote ²⁹ Thus Pygmalion’s greediness for gold (‘la voglia sua de l’oro ghiotta’; xx, 105) makes him a traitor, thief, and parricide (‘traditore e ladro e paricida / fece’; 104–5); moreover, his sins involved at least violence and fraud.Footnote ³⁰ Within the classical frame, the three Biblical examples (Achan, Ananias and Saffira, and Heliodorus) highlight that, although the love of gold is evil, gold itself is morally neutral. The three negative exempla throw into relief three Biblical figures who exemplify a correct use of money: Joshua had the soldier Achan stoned to death for theft, but saved the treasure to consecrate an altar to God (Joshua 6:17; 8:26); Onias, the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, jealously guarded the temple’s treasure against Heliodorus not for his own ends but to provide for widows and orphans (2 Maccabees)Footnote ³¹; and St Peter upbraided Ananias and Saffira for defrauding the Holy Spirit by holding back money which should have served the poor (Acts V:1–11; Matthew 10:21).Footnote ³² In this way, Dante’s three Biblical exempla not only underline the path to be avoided but, like the three exempla of poverty, point towards the path to pursue. The emphasis, in all the examples, is on chosen poverty and the avoidance of avarice even where this action may put a person’s own family in apparent jeopardy: each Christian must place his or her faith in God who will provide.

Dante exerts particular rhetorical weight on Polymnestor, the penultimate exemplar of avarice, an example which reinforces Dante’s special concern for the effect of avarice on family and on familial ties. The name of Polymnestor, we learn, circles the whole mountain of Purgatory in infamy (xx, 114–15) due to his murder of Priam’s youngest son, Polydorus. The latter’s fate recalls, of course, Dante’s transposition of this episode of the Aeneid onto the wood of the suicides in Inferno xiii. Polydorus echoes the figure of Pier della Vigna, who, like Dante, had been unjustly accused of corruption and embezzlement. But this example also highlights the errors of two fathers: Priam, who thought that a large sum of gold would protect his son (who, it turns out, would have been safer left in poverty), and Polymnestor, who betrayed Priam’s trust by murdering his son out of greed. The example is, at once, further incitement to remorse and penance for Hugh Capet – who now sees that, by securing wealth and power for his descendants, he led them, evermore avaricious, to spiritual perdition – and further consolation for Dante – who, unable to provide materially for himself and his children, nonetheless teaches them, through his poem, the path of Christian virtue. Beyond the political polemic, it is this spiritual dimension – located in the correct love of children – which is the true heart of the episode. This dimension makes sense of Hugh Capet’s especially intense suffering in the terrace of avarice, and also of the particular joy and consolation that Dante-character feels in response to the exempla of poverty.

The She-Wolf of Avarice (Purg. xx, 10–15) and the Poor Shepherds (Purg. xx, 124–44)

The moral exempla not only frame Hugh Capet’s narrative, but derive their psychological depth from it. As we work outwards from the examples of poverty and avarice, however, it is clear from the apostrophe to the she-wolf of avarice (Purg. xx, 4–15) that Dante’s contemporaries are not imbibing such necessary moral instruction and, from the implicit comparison with the poor shepherds (124–44), that the pastors of the Church are failing to live by or provide it. Where Dante had already described avarice as the bitterest vice on the mountain (xix, 117), he emphasises its ubiquity in Purgatorio xx: the terrace of avarice is so stricken with souls that Virgil and Dante-character must squeeze their way past them on the near side of the cliff (xx, 4–9).Footnote ³³ Avarice is perhaps viewed as the root cause not only of the incessant wars in the Italian peninsula but also of the infernal City of Dis itself: the blood of the Capetian dynasty (which is synonymous with avarice; xx, 83) plunders ‘con forza e con menzogna’ (64), reflecting the twofold division of malice in the city of Dis by violence and by fraud (‘o con forza o con frode’; Inf. xi, 24), while the lance of Judas (Purg. xx, 73–74) recalls the further division between simple and treacherous fraud in the Pit of Cocytus (Inf. xxxi–xxxiv).Footnote ³⁴ In a rhetorical crescendo echoed even at a micro level – ‘mal pugna’ (1); ‘il mal’ (8); ‘maladetta’ (9) – the she-wolf of Inferno i returns in Purgatorio xx to be identified explicitly as avarice:Footnote ³⁵

The souls on the terrace must weep out ‘a goccia a goccia’ [drop by drop] the evil of avarice that, Dante emphasises, fills the world (‘il mal che tutto ’l mondo occupa’; xx, 7–8).Footnote ³⁶

It is striking that the earthquake, representing an individual’s purgation from avarice, should usher in Statius (as yet unidentified) as a ‘figura Christi’ (xx, 124–41). In the Inferno, Dante’s Christian allegorical reading of the Thebaid represents Statius’s Thebes as an embodiment of Augustine’s corrupt Earthly city, with Florence and Pisa as its modern-day counterparts.Footnote ³⁷ This may underpin the significance of the analogy to the shepherds who ‘first heard the song’ announcing the birth of Christ, and were entrusted by the angel as its messengers (xx, 139–42; Luke 2:8–18).Footnote ³⁸ Here it is Dante and Virgil, who, standing ‘immobile and in suspense’ (‘immobili e sospesi’; 139), are entrusted with the ‘good news’ of the Incarnation. And it lends credence to Benvenuto’s interpretation of the Latona myth (130–32): the two brightest lights (the Sun and the Moon) that Delos sent into the sky may stand for Dante and Statius, the two renowned poets (one modern and one ancient), who, rising to Heaven, may guide the Christian flock.Footnote ³⁹ On such a reading, Dante is establishing himself and Statius as Christian shepherds who will provide true ethical guidance against the she-wolf of avarice where the modern-day pastors of the Church (as exemplified by Pope Adrian V in the previous canto) have failed.Footnote ⁴⁰ In precisely the canto in which ‘love of children’ is shown as a dangerous occasion for avarice, Dante dramatizes – through Statius and Virgil – his own vocation to assume, as poet, the mantle of pastor and ‘father of faith’, thereby helping to safeguard Christians from the she-wolf of avarice and to direct them to Heaven.

The Cupidity for Knowledge (Purg. xx, 1–3 and 142–51)

To be an ethical guide requires Dante to pass on to others the fruits of his own contemplation. Notably, Peraldus treats the avarice for knowledge (avaritia scientiae) as the last species of avarice, worse even than the avarice for money.Footnote ⁴¹ Whereas the miser does not want to share the light of his candle, the miser of knowledge does not want to communicate the light of his wisdom.Footnote ⁴² As Delcorno has suggested, this may be the inspiration for Dante’s metaphor for Virgil, who lit up the way for others but not for himself.Footnote ⁴³ The other vice of knowledge strongly associated with avarice (as well as with sloth) is curiosity.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the prologue and epilogue of Purgatorio xx, we witness Dante-character practising temperance not with respect to the cupidity for gold, but rather with respect to the cupidity for knowledge: the canto’s opening (xx, 1–3) refers back to the closing dialogue of Purgatorio xix, which had roused Dante-character’s curiosity, while its ending (xx, 145–51) refers forward to Purgatorio xxi, 1–6 as, seemingly more ‘desirous to know’ (‘desideroso di sapere’) than at any other point in his life, Dante-character seeks to understand the earthquake event.

The metaphor underlining the first terzina is particularly significant: Dante’s will is a sponge which is left unsatiated by the water (speech) of Adrian V (the well): ‘trassi de l’acqua non sazia la spugna’ [I drew my sponge unsated from the water] (xx, 3). If the water is a gloss on the reference to his niece Alagia (xix, 142–45) and the evildoings of the Fieschi, the implication is that – like the Samaritan woman at the well (xxi, 1–6) – Dante must turn from Earthly matters to the spiritual nourishment of Christ. If the water is, instead, the very Holy Scripture to which Pope Adrian had also just alluded (the ‘santo evangelico suono / che dice “neque nubent”’; xix, 136–37), a further double priority is implied: for Adrian, penance trumps even his obligation to preach the Gospel; for Dante, charity trumps even his curiosity about spiritual matters (as St Gregory highlights: ‘Non curiositatem acuit, sed charitatem accendit’).Footnote ⁴⁵ Dante-character’s internal spiritual battle with curiosity is underlined even at a micro level by the opening chiasmus, with three verbal pairs in just two lines: ‘Contra miglior voler voler mal pugna; / onde contra ’l piacer mio, per piacerli’ (Purg. xx, 1–2). Dante’s own will (‘voler’) and pleasure (‘il piacer mio’) are framed by the better will (‘miglior voler’) of his neighbour, Ottobono dei Fieschi, whom Dante pleases (‘per piacerli’) by leaving to continue his penance.Footnote ⁴⁶ As Francesco da Buti’s gloss on this passage suggests, alongside the chiastic outwards movement from the self (‘my pleasure’) to the neighbour (‘pleasing him’), the metaphor of the sponge seems to anticipate the perfect accord of the individual will in God’s will reflected by Piccarda’s ‘E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace’ (Par. iii, 85).Footnote ⁴⁷

Significantly, Dante-character’s desire at the close of Purgatorio xx is framed with regard to Christian wisdom rather than to worldly knowledge. At this point, Dante unmistakably calques the book of Wisdom – ‘in magno viventes inscientiae bello’ [they live in a great war of ignorance] – to identify his desire: ‘Nulla ignoranza mai con tanta guerra / mi fé desideroso di sapere’ [No ignorance ever assailed me with so much desire to know] (Purg. xx, 145–46; Wisdom 14:22). As we discover, his natural thirst (‘la sete natural’; Purg. xxi, 1) is satisfied only by the wisdom of Christ: ‘con l’acqua onde la femminetta / samaritana domandò la grazia’ [with the water of which the poor Samaritan woman begged the gift] (xxi, 1–6; John 4: 5–15).

Framing Conversions: Pope Adrian V (Purg. xix) and Statius (Purg. xxi–xxii)

Dante frames the canto of Hugh Capet (Purg. xx) with his encounter with Pope Adrian V (Purg. xix, 97–114) and with Statius’s encounter with Virgil (Purg. xxi–xxii), a narrative sequence highlighted by Priamo della Quercia in his single illustration of the three episodes.Footnote ⁴⁸ However surprising such a pairing of encounters might initially appear, Dante deliberately presents them in antithesis through precise textual and narrative parallels. Virgil cannot believe that avarice could have found a place within Statius’s breast (xxii, 23–25). As matters turn out, it did not: Statius was subject to its opposite extreme, prodigality. Crucially, Dante uses the same triple rhyme set in exactly the same order (‘vita / partita / punita’) to describe Pope Adrian V’s avarice (‘del tutto avara; / or, come vedi, qui ne son punita’; xix, 113–14) and Statius’s prodigality (‘Or sappi ch’avarizia fu partita / troppo da me’; xxii, 34–35). At a narrative level, Dante represents Statius’s conversion as the mirror image of Pope Adrian V’s conversion: where everyone might suppose that Ottobono dei Fieschi, because of his outward ecclesiastical career culminating as a ‘successor Petri’, would be one of the elect (the ‘eletti di Dio’), it turns out that he is saved in a last-month conversion despite being a cleric and despite having been pope. Whereas Statius gave no ostensible indication that he was anything other than a pagan, Dante presents him as a secret convert to Christianity. Dante invites us to read these two conversion narratives, therefore, in counterpoint as two moral exempla.

Born in the second decade of the thirteenth century when the papacy was consolidating its temporal power under Pope Innocent III, Ottobono dei Fieschi rose quickly through the clerical ranks due, in no small part, to family connections (his uncle was Pope Innocent IV).Footnote ⁴⁹ Under the influence of Hugh Capet’s descendant Charles of Anjou, Ottobono became the third pope elected in 1276, the year of the four popes; he lasted just over a month (‘un mese e poco più’; xix, 103), from 12 July to 18 August. In Dante’s polemical account, Ottobono’s end of life is presented in polarised terms as a dramatic psychological conversion from love of temporal power and wealth to love of God:

For the entirety of his ecclesiastical career (‘fino a quel punto’; 112), Ottobono had served not God but unrelenting avarice: he had been ‘misera’ [wretched], ‘partita / da Dio’ [separated from God], and ‘del tutto avara’ [entirely avaricious]. Only upon reaching the highest possible station attainable in the medieval world did Ottobono recognise the vanity of temporal goods and begin to love the heavenly city.Footnote ⁵⁰ A good argument for the failure of temporal things to satisfy human desire, in other words, is to have them. Thus, the Latinism of Ottobono’s speech ‘non s’acquetava il core’ echoes the famous opening of Augustine’s Confessions: ‘inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te’ [my soul is restless until it rests in you]. The moral lesson of his exemplum for the ordinary Christian is clear: even the highest power, wealth, and prestige (as achieved by a medieval pope) will not fulfil your desire. Speaking to Ottobono at the height of his own political career as one of the six priors of Florence, this is surely a lesson that Dante-character knows from his own experience. Like Ottobono, he has also discovered on his journey through the afterlife (the prophecies of Inferno vi, x, and xv) how short-lived and potentially destructive such power can be.

Ottobono dei Fieschi’s conversion from the sin of avarice (Purg. xix) is mirrored, then, by Statius’s conversion from prodigality (Purg. xxi). Where Dante had some historical evidence for Ottobono’s avarice, however, the same can barely be said of Statius’s prodigality. In the accessus to the commentaries on Statius’s Thebaid circulating in Dante’s time, a passage from Juvenal’s seventh satire introduced (and was the key source for) his biography:Footnote ⁵¹

Juvenal seems to be implying that Statius, needing money, prostituted his poetic talent to write a pantomime for an actor, Paris, the one-time favourite of the Emperor Domitian. Dante would have been loath to follow such an insinuation about Statius’s character, given his conviction that all those who write for money are not even litterati at all.Footnote ⁵³ By contrast, Dante seems to have inferred that Statius’s prodigality reduced him to the misery and humiliation of going hungry (esurit; 87).Footnote ⁵⁴

It is important to emphasise that Dante had no more evidence that Statius was a prodigal than that he was a secret convert to Christianity. Indeed, Dante entirely invents the story of Statius’s conversion from prodigality – namely, that, after reading a passage of Virgil, he realised the error of his ways:

Statius understands the Virgilian dictum to entail a condemnation of both prodigality and avarice. In my view, this is because Dante considered that sinners may hunger for gold either to give it away (the vice of prodigality) or to retain it (the vice of avarice) but, in both cases, he perceived this craving to be accursed (sacer) and detestable (execrabilis).Footnote ⁵⁵ For Dante, indeed, the hunger for gold is always an evil, even though he considered gold itself to be morally neutral.Footnote ⁵⁶

Moral and Spiritual Fatherhood: Pope Adrian V (Purg. xix) and Virgil (Purg. xxi)

Just as Dante sets up a counter-position between the twin conversion narratives of Pope Adrian V (from avarice) and Statius (from prodigality) through a precise textual correspondence (the triple rhyme), so he sets up a juxtaposition between two father figures, Pope Adrian V and Virgil, through parallel genuflections.Footnote ⁵⁷ In terms of posture, Dante-character’s mistaken genuflection before Ottobono at the close of Purgatorio xix clearly parallels Statius’s correct genuflection before Virgil at the close of Purgatorio xxi. Dante kneels before Ottobono not because he has led him to God, but simply to show reverence to the papal office (‘per vostra dignitate’; xix, 131). Addressing Dante as ‘frate’, Ottobono tells him to rise up (‘lèvati sù, frate’; 133), explaining that temporal hierarchies and Earthly dignities no longer apply in the afterlife. He then fulfils the role he should have performed as pope (the Earthly leader of the Christian faithful) by directing Dante-character to the ‘santo evangelico suono’ [the holy sound of the Divine Scriptures] (136), a sound explicitly contrasted with the Siren’s song (‘al canto mio’; 23). By contrast, Statius kneels to show reverence to Virgil precisely because it was through him – through a pagan poet – that he became a Christian (‘Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano’; xxii, 73).Footnote ⁵⁸ Likewise addressing him as ‘frate’, Virgil does not, however, correct Statius (the reverence is not wrong), but simply says that such reverence is in vain (‘ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi’; xxi, 132).

It is difficult to imagine a more powerful indictment of the medieval papacy’s failure to fulfil its Divinely ordained role to lead men to God than that Statius’s moral conversion from prodigality, and his secret conversion to Christianity, should have been brought about by the poet Virgil – by a pagan, and by a pagan (although, for Dante, prophetic) text, the Aeneid. Moreover, Dante’s idiosyncratic invention of both Statius’s prodigality and his hidden Christianity strongly suggests autobiographical projection: Dante-character, confronted by the she-wolf of avarice in Inferno i, was similarly answered not by a priest or by a pope, but by the same pagan Virgil. An autobiographical motivation, in my view, also lies behind Dante’s presentation of three different kinds of paternal love, and three different species of genealogy, in the terrace of avarice. Ottobono identifies himself within a spiritual line of papal succession as the successor of Peter (‘Scias quod ego fui successor Petri’; xix, 99); Hugh Capet is the root of the Capetian line, a genealogical or familial bloodline (‘Io fui radice de la mala pianta’; xx, 43); and finally Statius identifies himself within a poetical line, with Virgil (‘la divina fiamma’; xxi, 95) as the ‘mother’ and ‘nurse’ of his poetry (97–98). Although Dante cannot pass temporal goods to his children, he can, following Virgil, assume the most important paternal role in passing on moral and spiritual wisdom not only to his children, but to all through his poetry.Footnote ⁵⁹

Prodigality As Dante’s Florentine Sin

By having Virgil claim that he learned about Statius through Juvenal (Purg. xxii, 10–24), Dante provides, as Peter Heslin points out, ‘an explicit footnote for the reader: for information about Statius life’s, cf. Juvenal’. Moreover, Dante’s Statius introduces himself with the words ‘tanto fu dolce mio vocale spirto’ (Purg. xxi, 88), directly alluding to Juvenal’s ‘tanta dulcedine’ and ‘ad vocem iucundam’ (Satire 7:84, 2).Footnote ⁶⁰ Why, then, does Dante explicitly signpost Juvenal in this way?Footnote ⁶¹ The theme of Juvenal’s seventh satire is the woeful predicament of poets in the absence of aristocratic patronage.Footnote ⁶² Juvenal satirises the distinguished and well-known poets (‘celebres notique poetae’) who, lacking patronage, now lease a bathhouse or a bakehouse; even the muse Clio, in her hunger (esuriens; 7), has deserted the springs and moved to the salesroom (3–7). Juvenal goes on to ask how we can expect great poetry from the poverty-stricken poets of today (59–65). The poets are victims of the avaricious rich (dives avarus; 30), who, giving praise and nothing more (tantum laudare; 31), nonetheless spend extravagantly in prodigal Rome (prodiga Roma; 138). In addition, Juvenal claims that in such a corrupt city, prodigality is ironically necessary to get commissions (‘et tamen est illis hoc utile’; 135). By signposting Juvenal, therefore, Dante is perhaps underlining the mitigating circumstances of Statius’s alleged prodigality: Statius was in good company in going hungry – Statius’s esurit (87) echoing Clio’s esuriens (7) – while he suffered from bad company in Rome, in which prodigality had become a virtue, and ostentatious display necessary for advancement in a career.Footnote ⁶³ Just as Statius’s post-conversion sin of acedia is understandable in light of Domitian’s persecutions (an open faith would have demanded the extreme vigour of martyrdom), so his pre-conversion prodigality is understandable in the context of a prodigal Rome (prodiga Roma) characterised by avaricious rich (dives avarus) and impoverished poets.

Dante’s castigation of modern Florence in relation to the old Florence of Cacciaguida (‘Fiorenza dentro de la cerchia antica’; Par. xv, 97) strongly echoes Juvenal’s pejorative comparison throughout the satires between the new and ancient Rome.Footnote ⁶⁴ If ‘prodigal Rome’ might be in part to blame for Statius having fallen prey to the ‘sacra fame de l’oro’ [accursed hunger of gold], might a corrupt Florence be a mitigating circumstance for Dante-character having been overthrown by the she-wolf, whose hunger is without end (‘la tua fame sanza fine’; Purg. xx, 12) and who, after feeding, is hungrier than before (‘e dopo ’l pasto ha più fame che pria’; Inf. i, 99)?

If we bear in mind that all the early commentators understood Dante-character’s first sin (represented by the she-wolf in Inferno i) to have been avarice, Virgil’s perplexity with regard to Statius’s avarice would also represent, at a meta-poetical level, a reader’s potential perplexity with regard to the avarice of Dante-characterFootnote ⁶⁵:

This comparison is authorially invited through unmistakable cross-references back to the moment in limbo where Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil make Dante-character the sixth in their company: ‘sì ch’io fui sesto tra cotanto senno’ [so that I was sixth among such wisdom] (Inf. iv, 102):

The correspondences are striking: the same triple rhyme in reverse order (‘cenno / fenno / senno’); Statius’s smile (Purg. xxii, 26) paralleling Virgil’s smile (Inf. iv, 99); the ‘caro cenno’ of Virgil (Purg. xxii, 27) paralleling the ‘salutevol cenno’ of Virgil’s company (Inf. iv, 98); and, most importantly, the displacement of ‘sì ch’io fui sesto’ [so that I was sixth] (Inf. iv, 102) with ‘loco avarizia’ [avarice a place] (Purg. xxii, 22) before ‘tra cotanto senno’ [among such wisdom]. Moreover, Dante frames the whole discussion of Statius’s prodigality in Purgatorio xxii by making two explicit references to Limbo: ‘nel limbo de lo ’nferno’ [in the Limbo of Hell] (Purg. xxii, 14) and ‘nel primo cinghio del carcere cieco’ [in the first circle of the blind prison] (103). Although overlooked by scholars, the implication is, I think, clear: just as Virgil is surprised that avarice could have had a place in Statius ‘tra cotanto senno’ (Purg. xxii, 22), so Dante expects his reader to be surprised that he (apparently guilty of the sin of avarice) should have been welcomed in Limbo ‘tra cotanto senno’ (Inf. iv, 102).

Statius’s explanation for being on the terrace of avarice, therefore, also serves as Dante’s explanation for being overthrown by the she-wolf in Inferno i:

The key point is that neither Statius nor Dante was guilty of the genus of avarice after all; instead, they were guilty of its species, and opposite vice, prodigality. Dante clearly had a horror of avarice – but in reacting excessively against a vice, it was a commonplace that one was liable to fall prey to its opposite (as we saw with regard to tepidity and indiscreet fervour on the terrace of sloth).Footnote ⁶⁶ But just as ‘over-eagerness’ seems less ignoble than tepidity, so prodigality (as an excess in liberality) indicates a more generous disposition than avarice.Footnote ⁶⁷ Most importantly, the sin of prodigality associates Statius and Dante with the conversion story of the most celebrated saint (the ‘alter Christus’) of Dante’s time, St Francis.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the lives of St Francis of Assisi, he is described, prior to his conversion, as ‘very rich and prodigal. He was a squanderer of his possessions, a cautious businessman, but a very unreliable steward.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Seeking to cultivate the aristocratic virtues of courtesy and liberality, Francis ‘was neither avaricious nor a hoarder of money; he was a very kindly person, easy and affable’.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Michael Robson notes, Thomas of Celano’s whole biography of the saint is shaped by the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). Forgetting his Divine father, Francis sought to accomplish ‘great deeds of worldly glory and vanity’.Footnote ⁷¹ Francis’s tendency to prodigality, nonetheless, disposed him to his Christian conversion: ‘He [Francis] came to realise that generosity to friends was not enough but that, out of love for God, he should be generous to the poor.’Footnote ⁷² In embracing voluntary poverty following his conversion, St Francis came to exhibit a ‘noble prodigality’:

In making Statius, his autobiographical cypher, a prodigal, Dante is arguably associating his own conversion story with that of St Francis. However, whereas St Francis was led to almsgiving and, subsequently, to the ‘noble prodigality’ of a holy beggar, the implication is that both Statius and Dante were guilty of his pre-conversion prodigality (a vice). Nonetheless, and crucially, this pre-conversion vice is still seen – through the lives of St Francis – as an excess in the chivalric virtues of courtesy and liberality, and as evidence of a benign, generous nature, itself potentially disposing a person to Christian conversion.

If we turn to Peraldus, it is similarly apparent that ‘prodigality’ had a much broader meaning in Dante’s immediate context than simply a wastefulness with money. Peraldus considers that prodigality leads to a disdain for spiritual goods.Footnote ⁷³ He also sees prodigality as a symptom of pride or vainglory. Indeed, Peraldus begins his discussion of prodigality by affirming that the prodigal does not give things away; rather, the wind of vainglory (ventus vanitatis) takes them away.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, he explicitly counterpoises the prodigal life with the life of preaching: where the prodigal son feeds pigs, glossed by Peraldus as the gluttonous and the luxuriant (‘porcos: id est, homines gulosos et luxuriosos’), preachers feed human souls, following the example of the Son of God Himself.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is especially noteworthy, in this context, that Statius, clearly not indifferent to the wind of worldly fame (Purg. xi, 100–1) in presenting himself as ‘very famous’ (‘famoso assai’; Purg. xxi, 87), says that he would prefer to be on Earth again with Virgil than to be on his way to Heaven:

Where Christians should give money (a temporal good) in alms as an indulgence to reduce the time of a soul’s suffering in Purgatory (a spiritual good), Statius says he would be willing to increase his time of suffering in Purgatory, in exchange for a temporal good (time with Virgil on Earth). Statius thereby exhibits a love for Virgil, even over and above the spiritual good, that Dante-character himself would memorably echo in the Earthly Paradise, when even the recovery of Eden does not prevent him from weeping at the departure of his ‘dolcissimo patre’ [most sweet father] (Purg. xxx, 43–75; 50). As I argued in Chapter 6, Dante appears to confess, in this way, an excessive love for Virgil, even to the neglect of spiritual wisdom.Footnote ⁷⁶

Furthermore, it seems plausible that Dante may have associated his own pre-exile life with the prodigality of late-thirteenth-century Florence. Although emphasising that he was not guilty of the miserly sin of avarice, he may be confessing through Statius to having neither lived the life of sobriety apparently characteristic of ancient Rome or Cacciaguida’s Florence nor exhibited the exemplary almsgiving of St Francis.Footnote ⁷⁷ One need only consider that the next person whom Dante-character encounters after, and with, Statius is Forese Donati. In that encounter, he similarly looks back to his Florentine years with profound regret:

Dante’s Florentine vices are amply glossed by the early commentators in terms of the worldly life of a lay citizen.Footnote ⁷⁸ If we read his confession in light of the conversion narrative of St Francis and the biblical topos of the prodigal son, this ‘worldliness’ is embodied in the sin of prodigality. In this respect, it is notable that Dante-character highlights Statius’s conversion (from prodigality) to Forese at the conclusion of the canto (Purg. xxiii, 131–33).Footnote ⁷⁹ Moreover, most scholars interpret this passage as also a refutation of the tenzone, with Dante making up, in the afterlife, for his scurrilous insinuations in the poems about Forese’s wife Nella.Footnote ⁸⁰ But, as Fabian Alfie rightly insists, Dante’s terrace of gluttony is certainly not a wholesale retraction of the content of the tenzone: the mutual insinuations about gluttony, prodigality, and poverty still stand.Footnote ⁸¹ Dante claims in the tenzone that Forese’s fondness for delicacies (‘petti delle starne’ [partridge breasts]) will lead him to penury; Forese, in response, ‘insinuates that Dante had foolishly squandered his own finances’, leading to his own involuntary poverty.Footnote ⁸² It is this ‘ugly truth’, in Alfie’s words, which makes Dante’s memory of his former times heavy (‘grave’). Just as Dante identifies two distinct stages in Statius’s moral life – the prodigality of his pre-conversion years, and the tepidity of his post-conversion years – so he associates the sin of prodigality with his Florentine years and the sin of tepidity, in particular, with his years as a poet-scholar in exile.

Juvenal As Ethical Model for the Exiled Poet

Although critics cite Satire 7:82–87 for Dante’s presentation of Statius, the lines immediately following draw attention to another poet who lived in ‘prodigal Rome’ at the time of Statius but apparently did not fall prey to prodigality – namely, the satirist Juvenal himself:

The medieval lives of Juvenal (in the accessus commentaries) located in these very lines Juvenal’s reason for writing the Satires at all – with their subject matter (‘the vices of the Romans’) and their purpose (‘to draw his reader from the clutches of the vices’) – as well as the very cause of Juvenal’s subsequent exile from Rome:Footnote ⁸³

This episode provides, through Juvenal, a counter-example to Statius. Although not a Christian and therefore not (like Statius) in Purgatory, Juvenal, as we learn from Virgil, was a virtuous pagan and thus not guilty of avarice or prodigality (Purg. xxii, 10–18).Footnote ⁸⁶

Juvenal’s seventh satire gives an ideal poetic model for Dante:

But Juvenal also underlines in his satire that Virgil could not have written the Aeneid without his patron, Augustus:

It is not difficult to see how Juvenal’s satire would have rung true for the author of De vulgari eloquentia, bewailing the absence of an Imperial court, and struggling to find patronage. In his letters, as well as in the poem itself (notably the Cacciaguida episode), Dante makes reference to the anxiety caused by his poverty in exile. It is, he writes, his poverty that prevented him from attending the funeral of Count Alessandro in 1304: ‘Nec negligentia neve ingratitudo me tenuit, sed inopina paupertas quam fecit exilium’ (Epist. ii, 3). Moreover, Dante pointedly interrupts his gloss on Paradiso i in the dedication letter to his patron Cangrande to highlight the urgency of his poverty, as well as his anxiety about his domestic affairs: ‘urget enim me rei familiaris angustia’ (Epist. xiii, 32). Arguably associating his pre-exile life in Florence with the ‘prodigality’ of Statius, Dante-character could perhaps find in Juvenal comfort for the poverty, and struggle for adequate patronage, that he subsequently had to endure in exile.

By depicting Statius’s prodigality through Juvenal’s seventh satire (concerning the misery of authors in ‘prodigal Rome’), Dante is reflecting both on his worldly life pre-exile and on his predicament as an impoverished poet in exile, struggling to provide for his own needs and those of his family. Dante-character, however, clearly takes comfort from the exemplum of Hugh Capet, the terrace of avarice’s central protagonist. Although ‘love of one’s children’ is natural and good, it is also a dangerous occasion to avarice. In Hugh Capet’s case, it led to the spiritual perdition of his descendants and, indeed, to a whole gamut of political evils for society as a whole. In antithesis to this exemplar, Dante constructs through the examples of poverty and liberality a parental identity that, in imitation of Fabricius, prefers honourable poverty to corrupt riches (despite the suffering that this may cause one’s family) and, in imitation of Mary, trusts in God’s provision. Moreover, Dante establishes his own primary role, as parent and ‘father in faith’, to pass on true riches – namely, Christian wisdom and holiness – to his children and, within the genealogy of poets, to society at large. These are the spiritual riches that Ottobono dei Fieschi neglected and that, in Dante’s view, the contemporary Church – espoused to ‘cupidity’ and not to ‘poverty’ – fails to communicate to her flock. Dante’s conviction that a lukewarm love for God leads inexorably to a disordered attachment to the world does not just underpin his critique of the clergy, however; rather, as I have argued, Dante understood the pivotal dynamic between sloth and avarice as lying at the heart of the Christian moral life in general. In his own life and in his Christian ethics, Dante saw sloth and avarice as the two cardinal vices. It is therefore no accident that sloth and prodigality (the extreme opposing vice of avarice) are the two principal vices of Statius, Dante’s poetic cypher.