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.