It is said that Dante took his revenge upon his enemies by putting them in his Inferno and thus pilloried them for all time. According to Alphonse de Lamartine, for example, ‘le poeme exclusivement toscan du Dante était une espèce de satire vengeresse du poète et de l’homme d’Etat contre les hommes et le partis auxquels il avait voue sa haine.’ Lamartine's shallow Voltairian view is still vaguely held, for a modern writer has recently referred to Dante’s ‘vindictiveness which mars and prevaricates the truth.’ Carlyle, on the other hand, exclaimed, ‘What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy’s being a poor, splenetic, impotent, terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth ! ‘But the general impression among casual readers of the Commedia is that this was what he actually did.

The purpose, therefore, of this article is to enquire whether there is any evidence of ‘vindictiveness’ in the Inferno.

Now, apart from the crowd of mythological and scriptural and ancient historical personages, there are about sixty-seven persons, mostly contemporaries, mentioned by name or whose identity is undisputed. The supposed ‘vindictiveness,’ of course, could only be shown towards some of these. There are notorious Florentines, like Ciacco, the glutton, and Filippo Argenti, an arrogant and intolerant bully, of whom Boccaccio also tells us a characteristic Decameron story (ix, 8). There are common highway murderers like Rinier de Corneto and Rinier Pazzo. There are prodigals, like Lano of Siena, who in despair committed suicide, and Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea of Padua, who was executed for arson.