[Notes by LKG]
This story is part of the Dante's Inferno unit. Story source: Dante's Divine Comedy, translated by Tony Kline (2002).
(illustration by William Blake)
Cantos 6 and 7: Cerberus and Plutus
When my senses return that closed themselves off from pity of those two kindred who stunned me with complete sadness, I see around me new torments and new tormented souls wherever I move or turn and wherever I gaze. I am in the third circle of eternal, accursed, cold and heavy rain: its kind and quality is never new. Large hail, tainted water, and sleet pour down through the shadowy air, and the earth is putrid that receives it.
Cerberus, the fierce and strange monster, triple-throated, barks dog-like over the people submerged in it. His eyes are crimson, his beard is foul and black, his belly vast, and his limbs are clawed: he snatches the spirits, flays, and quarters them. The rain makes them howl like dogs: they protect one flank with the other, often writhing, miserable wretches.
When Cerberus, the great worm, saw us, he opened his jaws and showed his fangs: not a limb of his stayed still. My guide, stretching out his hands, grasped earth and hurled it in fistfuls into his ravening mouth. Like a dog that whines for food and grows quiet when he eats it, only fighting and struggling to devour it, so did demon Cerberus's loathsome muzzles that bark, like thunder, at the spirits, so that they wish that they were deaf.
We circled along that road, speaking of much more than I repeat: we came to the place where the descent begins, where we found Plutus, the god of wealth, the great enemy.
The Fourth Circle: Plutus - The Avaricious
'Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe,' Plutus, began to croak, and the gentle sage, who understood all things, comforted me, saying: 'Do not let fear hurt you since, whatever power he has, he will not prevent you descending this rock.'
Then he turned to that swollen face and said: 'Peace, evil wolf! Devour yourself inside in your rage. Our journey to the depths is not without reason: it is willed on high, there where Michael made war on the great dragon's adulterating pride.'
Like a sail, bellying in the wind, that falls in a heap if the mast breaks, so that cruel creature fell to earth. In that way, we descended into the fourth circle, taking in a greater width of the dismal bank that encloses every evil of the universe.
O Divine Justice! Who can tell the many new pains and troubles that I saw, and why our guilt so destroys us? As the wave over Charybdis strikes against the wave it counters, so the people here are made to dance. I found more people here than elsewhere, on the one side and on the other, rolling weights by pushing with their chests, with loud howling. They struck against each other and then each wheeled around where they were, rolling the reverse way, shouting: 'Why do you hold?' and 'Why do you throw away?'
So they returned along the gloomy circle, from either side to the opposite point, shouting again their measure of reproach. Then each one, when he had reached it, wheeled through his half circle onto the other track. And I, who felt as if my heart were pierced, said: 'My Master, show me now who these people are: and whether all those, with tonsures, on our left were churchmen.'
The avaricious and prodigal churchmen
And he to me: 'They were so twisted in mind in their first life that they made no balanced expenditure. Their voices bark this out most clearly when they come to the two ends of the circle, where opposing sins divide them. These were priests, that are without hair on their heads, and Popes and Cardinals, in whom avarice does its worst.'
And I: 'Master, surely, amongst this crowd, I ought to recognise some of those tainted with these evils.'
And he to me: 'You link idle thoughts: the life without knowledge, that made them ignoble, now makes them incapable of being known. They will go butting each other to eternity: and these will rise from their graves with grasping fists, and those with shorn hair. Useless giving, and useless keeping, has robbed them of the bright world and set them to this struggle: what struggle it is, I do not amplify. But you, my son, can see now the vain mockery of the wealth controlled by Fortune for which the human race fight with each other, since all the gold under the moon, that ever was, could not give peace to one of these weary souls.'
Next: Fortune and Phlegyas
(800 words)
