Purgatorio (108 page)

99–102.
   Some of the earliest commentators believe that the reference is to the precipitous escape from Herod’s decree and the flight of the holy family into Egypt (a misinterpretation that surfaced again in the Renaissance in the commentaries of Landino and Vellutello). However, beginning with Pietro di Dante (1340) the obvious citation of Luke 1:39 has been recognized as governing this example. Mary, having been told by Gabriel during the Annunciation of Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy in her old age (which will result in the birth of John the Baptist), “abiit in montana cum festinatione … et salutavit Elisabeth” (went with good speed into the hill country … and offered her salutation to Elizabeth).
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101–102.
   The Roman example paired with Mary is none other than Julius Caesar. It is notable that in Lucan (
Phars
. III.453), Caesar’s rushing off to do battle in Spain is not the result of military strategy but of his being bored
(inpatiens)
with the prolonged efforts to lay siege to Marseilles. Further, his eventual victory at Lerida is described by Lucan as being the result of fortunate changes in the weather (
Phars
. IV.48–49). Thus Dante’s praise of him here is clearly at odds with Lucan’s (always) withering scorn for the Great Man whom he so desperately despises. For the entire question of Dante’s divided view of Julius Caesar, in one view the first, God-sent emperor of Rome, in another the destroyer of the Republic and of Roman virtue, see Stull and Hollander (Stul.1991.1), pp. 33–43. This is one of Julius’s few positive moments in Dante’s poem; and Dante needed to disregard Lucan’s views in order to present him favorably. For Dante’s previous and next far less favorable references to Julius, see the notes to
Purgatorio
IX.133–138 and XXVI.76–78.
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103.
   On every other terrace the penitents have a prayer that they speak in common when they are not interrupted by other forms of observance or by conversation with Dante and Virgil (see
Purg
. XI.1–24; XIII.50–51; XVI.19; XIX.73; XXIII.11; XXV.121). The terrace of Sloth offers the only exception, as though the previous
acedia
of these penitents took from them the privilege of Christian prayer. The gloss of Carroll (1904) is interesting: “The idea seems … to be the danger of contemplation of good deeds, without an eager and immediate effort to imitate them. Mere ‘study’ of them may end in the ‘little love’ which produces sloth. It is only when ‘study’ is accompanied by action that it ‘makes grace bud again.’ ” For Dante, a man devoted to the pursuit of the morally engaged active life, certain occasions for prayer perhaps appeared to offer a potential escape from one’s civil and religious duty in the world. Men and women of such disposition are thus, here in their penitence, denied the comfort of prayer until such time as prayer will be totally zealous, not the occasion for a moment of repose from worldly responsibility or, for that matter, from proper monastic exertion.
Acedia
was frequently associated with improper monastic
otium
, a withdrawal from the world but from one’s duty to God as well, surely a great temptation in the relative ease allowed by monastic life.
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104–105.
   The phrase “per poco amor” (for lack of love) and the word “studio” (the Italian equivalent of the Latin word for “zeal”) combine to underline the defining vice and virtue of this terrace.
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107.
   Virgil’s “perhaps” is a gentle act of
politesse
on his part: these penitents were guilty of precisely what he describes.
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118–120.
   San Zeno, just outside the city of Verona (and, by common consent, one of the most beautiful churches in Italy), was also the site of a monastery. Its nameless abbot, who speaks here, is generally identified as “Gherardo II, who was abbot, in the time of the Emperor Frederick I, from 1163 till his death in 1187”
(T)
. Frederick Barbarossa, emperor from 1152 until his death in 1190 as Frederick I, was a grandfather of Frederick II (emperor 1215–50). Dante’s overall opinion of him is difficult to measure, since he so rarely refers to him, but in the two passages that do invoke him, here and in
Epistle
VI.20, his destruction of Milan in 1162 for its anti-imperial activities is clearly applauded. On the question of Dante’s views of Barbarossa see Nardi (Nard.1966.1).

For the less than likely possibility that the adjective “buon” (good) that precedes his name is here to be taken ironically, see Tommaseo (1837) on this passage. One may add that the thirty occasions in the
Commedia
on which a reader finds the epithet combined with a name or title (e.g., “buon Marzucco,” “buon maestro”) do not reveal a single one in which an ironic reading seems warranted.
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121–126.
   Dante, welcomed by the Scaligeri family to Verona in 1303–4, there enjoyed the first happy time of his exile. His memories of those rulers of the city give rise to a
post-eventum
prophecy. Alberto della Scala was lord of Verona until his death in 1301, by which time he had appointed his lame, illegitimate son, Giuseppe (1263–1313), to serve as abbot of the monastery (in 1292), for the rest of his days. Alberto was succeeded by his eldest legitimate son, Bartolommeo, nearly certainly Dante’s first host in Verona. Upon Bartolommeo’s death, in 1304, Alberto’s second son, Alboino, became lord (many believe that Dante and Alboino did not get along, thus explaining Dante’s departure from Verona around 1304), a position he held until his death in 1311, when he was succeeded by Cangrande della Scala, the third legitimate son and Dante’s patron and host when the poet returned to Verona ca. 1314.
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127–129.
   The nameless abbot is moving so quickly that Dante cannot tell whether he has finished speaking or has simply moved too far ahead to be heard while continuing to speak—a nice final touch to convey the zeal with which he pursued his penitence.
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133–135.
   The first example of the sin of Sloth indicates the Hebrews who, having made the passage through the Red Sea, grew restive under Moses’ guidance and died of plague before the completed exodus across Jordan into the Promised Land accomplished only by Joshua and Caleb. See Numbers 14:1–38 and Deuteronomy 1:26–40.
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136–138.
   Similarly, some of Aeneas’s companions, egged on by Iris, disguised as the wife of Doryclus, rebelled against the leadership of Aeneas and chose to remain in Sicily. The matrons set fire to the ships and Aeneas, having saved all but four of them from destruction, allows all who wish to stay behind to do so (
Aen
. V.604–761). Padoan (Pado.1967.1), p. 686, argues that Dante’s treatment of
Aeneid
V here differs from that found in
Convivio
IV.xxvi.11, but the difference can be explained by the fact that in the earlier passage Dante focuses on the willingness of Aeneas to allow the discouraged to stay behind found in Virgil’s text itself, while here he judges the malingerers from a different vantage point, the divinely sanctioned imperative to found new Troy in Latium.
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141–142.
   The protagonist’s
novo pensiero
(new thought) has puzzled his commentators. Is it one triggered by what he has seen and heard? Or is he anticipating the matters he will rehearse in his dream in the next canto? Or is the poet merely describing, generically, the way in which the mind works as it flits from subject to subject on the way to sleep (a view that is much present in the commentaries)? In the next canto, a similar phrase will refer to a mental image already experienced (the
novella visïon
of XIX.56) in his previous dream. Thus here it is at least possible that the “new thought” is a response to what he has seen or heard. Could he have wondered whether he was himself more like the backsliding Hebrews and Trojans than he is like Joshua or Aeneas? This would seem possible, but not demonstrable. In any case, this unreported thought leads to still others, and these are clearly—because the text tells us so—the matter of his dream.
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143.
   The verb Dante uses to describe his floating state of consciousness,
vaneggiai
(rambled), picks up an earlier phrasing, when he compares himself to one who
sonnolento vana
(rambles in his drowsy mind—verse 87) after Virgil has finished his explanation of love and free will. There he is falling into a fatigue that mirrors the sin purged on this terrace. Here he finally gives in to that weight of somnolence.
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145.
   Dante’s purgatorial dreams are described in cantos IX, XIX, and XXVII, but the second occurs here, in a single line, “e ’l pensamento in sogno trasmutai” (and I transformed my musings into dream). Since in
Vita nuova
he presents his age as having been nine, eighteen, and twenty-seven for his three main “encounters” with Beatrice, the poet perhaps wanted to retain those three nine-based and nine-spaced numbers for his three dreams that lead back to her now. For this calculation see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), p. 145.
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1–3.
   Dante apparently believed that the rays of the moon, in his time considered a “cold planet” (e.g., by Jacopo della Lana [1324]), enhanced the natural nocturnal cooling of the earth, its temperature further decreased whenever another “cold” planet, Saturn, was visible above the horizon. The hour is just before dawn on Tuesday, the beginning of Dante’s third day at the antipodes. For an earlier Dantean reference to the coldness of Saturn see
Convivio
II.xiii.25.
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4–6.
   The early commentators who deal with the problems encountered here are in fairly close accord. Beginning with Benvenuto da Imola they indicate the following: geomancers are diviners who create charts based on random points on the earth’s surface and drawn in the sand (and later copied onto paper or in sand on a tabletop) that can be linked in such a way, by joining various of these points with lines, to create a number of figures (Daniello [1568], following Landino, names sixteen of these). The facts behind the passage seem to be pretty much as Grandgent (1909) said: “ ‘Geomancers’ foretold the future by means of figures constructed on points that were distributed by chance. Their specialty was the selection of favorable spots for burial. They were the first in Europe to use the compass. One of their figures, called
fortuna major
, or ‘greater fortune,’ resembled a combination of the last stars of Aquarius and the first of Pisces. As these constellations immediately precede Aries, in which the sun is from March 21 to April 21, the figure in question can be seen in the east shortly before sunrise at that season.” The name geomancer reflects the fact that such an adept draws his figures in the sand (or earth—Greek
ge
) and that he is a diviner (Greek
mantis
). The configuration known as
Fortuna maior
is illustrated by Benvenuto and others as shown here:

Whatever the precise nature of the practices of geomancers, it seems clear that Dante has not taken six lines to indicate that the time was shortly before dawn without purpose. Surely the unpleasant and unsavory connotations of coldness and of divination (we remember the treatment of diviners in
Inferno
XX) color our reception of the dream that shortly follows. We should also remember that this dream occurs on the terrace of Sloth, thus suggesting that it may reflect Dante’s own former tardiness in seeking the good. Insofar as that affliction also encouraged his involvement in cupidity, the dream may also look back to some sort of misdirected love.
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7–9.
   This second purgatorial dream is at least as difficult to interpret as the first (see note to
Purg
. IX.19). For a brief and cogent review of classical, scriptural, patristic, and scholastic views of the nature of dreams see Armour (Armo.1990.1), pp. 13–16.

Small seas of ink have been poured out in the quest for the source and meaning of this unpleasant woman. The far from convincing results previously obtained probably should warn anyone against advancing an opinion. On the other hand, it seems to some that the problem is easier to understand than are the attempts to solve it. The poem itself, in the words of Virgil, tells us precisely who the stammering woman is: she represents the conjoined sins of excessive love, avarice, gluttony, lust—the sins of the flesh or, in the language of Dante’s first
cantica
, the sins of incontinence. (See Virgil’s words at vv. 58–59: “You saw … that ancient witch / who alone is purged with tears above us here.”) Dante’s dream, nonetheless, must surely also have specific meaning for him. If the woman is the object of his affection, she must have particular reference to lust, since the poem nowhere offers any indication that Dante considered himself ever to have been avaricious (or prodigal, for that matter) or gluttonous. The “good that fails to make men happy” (
Purg
. XVII.133), in Dante’s case, must then nearly certainly be understood as involving wrongful sexual desire.

Consideration of the
femmina balba
(stammering woman) has caused readers to seek out some fairly recondite sources. For a general analysis of this passage see Cervigni (Cerv.1986.1), pp. 123–35.

What has rarely been noted in modern commentaries (but see Mattalia [1960] and, citing him, Giacalone [1968]) is the fact that
balbus
is the contrary of
planus
, the word that describes Beatrice’s speech in
Inferno
II.56 (see the note to
Inf
. II.56–57). Cf. the entry
balbus
in Lewis and Short’s
Latin Dictionary
, where this view is confirmed.
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