Hell’s Vineyard: Introduction to Inferno 13

Stopped at the gate of Dis by the Furies and Medusa, Dante and Virgil have to wait for the intervention of the angelic messenger in order to be admitted into the city of Dis (canto 9), or lower Hell, whose walls enclose the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth circles, where heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery respectively are punished. After passing through the sepulchers of the cemetery in the sixth circle, where heresy is punished, and encountering Farinata degli Uberti, belonging to the opposite Florentine political faction to Dante’s own (canto 10), Dante and Virgil resume their journey and Virgil explains the structure of Hell (canto 11): in the first section of Hell, incontinence is punished. That can be defined as an irrational lack of control over an excess of wrongly directed love and bodily appetites for ephemeral goods such as with lust (second circle), gluttony (third circle), avarice and prodigality (fourth circle), and anger and sullenness (fifth circle). Lower Hell, instead, is characterized by sins of malice, a conscious intention to commit evil and resulting into violence, fraud, and treachery. Violence is punished in the seventh circle and its three rings (1^st ring: violence against neighbor [homicides, tyrants, and plunderers]; 2^nd ring: violence against self [suicides and spendthrifts]; 3^rd ring: violence against God [blasphemers, homosexuals, and usurers]) are guarded by the Minotaur and the Harpies, between cantos 12-17.

After crossing the Phlegethon, the river of blood, protected by the Centaur Nessus (canto 12), Dante and Virgil, at the beginning of canto 13, get to the wood of suicides, presided over by the Harpies, monstrous women-birds from the classical tradition, where dead souls become thorn bushes. Those who despised their own body in life are now eternally deprived of it and assigned a degraded vegetal body. There, they encounter Pier delle Vigne (c. 1190-1249) who had been judge of the Supreme Court of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Sicily Fredrick II (1194-1250) and one of the kingdom’s prominent diplomats. Pier delle Vigne had probably contributed to the redaction of the Constitutions of Melfi, a legal code for the Kingdom of Sicily promulgated by Frederick II in 1231 and to the development of the writing style used for the composition of legal documents at Frederick’s chancery. He had also been a poet among other poets and artists who had made Frederick’s court an incredibly lively center of culture. Accused of corruption and arrested, he committed suicide in prison. The soul of Dante’s Pier in canto 13 is trapped inside the thorn bush he has become, as Dante finds out when Virgil encourages him to detach a twig from it and the bush speaks words mixed with blood. In a speech organized according to the elaborate rhetorical code typical of public speaking and writing in the Middle Ages, Pier presents himself as

‘[…] the one who held both keys

To Frederick’s heart, and I could turn them,

Locking and unlocking, so discreetly

I kept his secrets safe from almost everyone.

So faithful was I to that glorious office

That first I lost my sleep and then my life.

(Inferno XIII 58-63)

Led to suicide by unjust accusations, Pier delle Vigne’s (and Dante-poet’s) goal in this speech is to restore Pier’s own honor:

‘By this tree’s new-sprung roots I give my oath:

Not once did I break faith

With my true lord […]’.

(Inferno XIII 73-74)   

Dante-pilgrim and exile, on the path to restore his own reputation against the accusations that had caused his banishment from Florence, deeply identifies with Pier’s character, to the point that the pity he feels prevents him from being able to continue the conversation with Pier. On the other hand, the limitations of Pier’s moral horizon are clear compared to Dante’s own: Pier, in order to ‘escape from scorn’ though just towards his office turned unjust against himself and God’s law by committing suicide. Dante, placed in the same situation, accepts the hard path of exile.

3 minutes