Inferno (Cantos 1–34) · The Divine Comedy

Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what that wood was, savage and harsh and dense, which even in thought renews the fear! So bitter is it that death is little more.

I cannot well say how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I abandoned the true way. But when I had come to the foot of a hill, where that valley ended, I looked up, and saw its shoulders clothed already with the rays of the sun. I began to climb. And there, almost at the start of the slope, a leopard, light and very swift, covered with a spotted hide, would not go from before my face; and then a lion, with head held high and raging hunger; and then a she-wolf, lean, laden with every craving, who has made many people live in misery — and she so pressed on me that I lost hope of the height, and fell back, little by little, to where the sun is silent.

The three beasts are usually read as three kinds of sin — perhaps lust, pride and avarice, or fraud, violence and incontinence.

As I was falling back into the low place, one appeared before me who seemed faint from long silence. "Have pity on me," I cried, "whatever you are, shade or living man!" He answered: "Not a man; a man I was once." He had been born in Mantua, under Julius, and lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of the false and lying gods; he had been a poet, and sung of the just son of Anchises who came from Troy. It was Virgil. "Are you then that Virgil, that fountain which spreads so wide a river of speech? You are my master and my author; you alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honour."

Virgil told me I could not pass the she-wolf; I must go by another way. He would be my guide, through an eternal place where I would hear the despairing cries and see the ancient spirits in pain; and then I would see those who are content in the fire, because they hope to come, whenever it may be, among the blessed; and then, if I wished to rise to those, there would be a soul more worthy than he to lead me — for he, who had lived without the Christian faith, could not enter there.

I was afraid. Who was I, to make such a journey? I was not Aeneas, I was not Paul. Then Virgil told me why he had come. A lady from Heaven had come down to him in Limbo — Beatrice, the woman I had loved on earth, who had died — sent by the Virgin Mary and Saint Lucy, to save me; she had wept as she asked him. "I am Beatrice, who send you; I come from a place where I long to return; love moved me, and makes me speak." Then my courage came back, like flowers that the night's frost has closed and bowed, which, when the sun whitens them, straighten all open on their stems. "Now go, for one will is in us both: you are my leader, you my lord, my master." And I entered on the deep and savage way.

Over a gate I saw these words written in dark colour:

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE GRIEVING CITY; THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN; THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE. JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER; DIVINE POWER MADE ME, THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS CREATED BUT ETERNAL THINGS, AND I ENDURE ETERNAL. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

Inside, sighs, laments and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first I wept. Here, just inside the gate, were the souls of those who had lived without infamy and without praise — those who were never for anything, neither for God nor against him, mixed with the angels who were neither rebels nor faithful, but were for themselves. Heaven drives them out, so as not to be less fair, and deep Hell does not receive them. They run forever after a whirling banner, stung by wasps and hornets. "The world allows no fame of them to live; mercy and justice despise them. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass."

We came to the river Acheron, and the ancient boatman Charon, with eyes of fire, ferried the souls across; the earth shook, and a red light flashed, and I fell senseless like a man seized by sleep.

I woke on the brink of the valley of the abyss. Hell, Virgil explained as we went, is a great funnel sunk into the earth, in circles narrowing downward, each for a worse sin, to the centre of the earth, where the worst sinner of all is fixed.

The first circle was Limbo. There was no weeping there, only sighs: here were the souls of those who had not sinned, but had not been baptised, or had lived before Christ — virtuous pagans, unbaptised infants. Their only punishment was that, without hope, they live in longing. Virgil himself was one of them. In a noble castle, in a meadow of fresh green, I saw the great poets — Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan — who welcomed me as the sixth among them; and the heroes and philosophers: Hector and Aeneas and Caesar, Aristotle, "the master of those who know," with Socrates and Plato beside him, and Euclid and Ptolemy and Avicenna and Averroës.

In the second circle, Minos, the judge of the dead, stood at the entrance, and wrapped his tail around himself as many times as the number of the circle to which each soul must go. Here were the lustful, those who had subjected reason to desire; and they were swept round forever by a hellish storm that never rests, as they had let themselves be swept away in life. Among them were Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan. I asked to speak to two who went together, and seemed so light upon the wind. They came, like doves called by desire. It was Francesca da Rimini, who had been married to one brother and loved the other, Paolo; her husband had found them together and killed them both.

"Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart, seized this one for the fair body that was taken from me — and the manner still offends me. Love, which pardons no one loved from loving, seized me so strongly with delight in him that, as you see, it does not leave me even now. Love led us to one death." I asked her how it had begun. "There is no greater sorrow than to remember the happy time in misery." One day, she said, they were reading together, for pleasure, of Lancelot, how love bound him; they were alone, and without suspicion. Many times that reading made their eyes meet, and drained the colour from their faces; but one point alone overcame them: when they read how the longed-for smile was kissed by such a lover, this one, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth, all trembling. "That day we read no further." While she spoke, the other wept; and I, from pity, swooned as if I were dying, and fell as a dead body falls.

In the third circle, the gluttonous lay in a filthy, freezing rain, guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus; a Florentine named Ciacco ("Hog") prophesied to me the coming strife in our city. In the fourth, the avaricious and the prodigal rolled great weights against each other, crying "Why do you hoard?" and "Why do you waste?" — many of them clergy, popes and cardinals. In the fifth, in the black marsh of Styx, the wrathful fought each other in the mud, and the sullen lay beneath it, gurgling. The boatman Phlegyas carried us across, and a furious Florentine, Filippo Argenti, tried to grab the boat; the others tore him to pieces, and he turned his teeth upon himself.

Then we came to the walls of the city of Dis, red-hot, where the fallen angels would not let us in; the Furies appeared on the towers and called for Medusa to turn me to stone, and Virgil covered my eyes. Then a messenger from Heaven came, walking dry-shod over the Styx, and opened the gate with a little wand, and rebuked the rebels; and we went in.

Inside, in the sixth circle, the heretics lay in burning tombs with their lids open. From one of them a great soul rose up, from the waist, as if he held Hell in great disdain: Farinata degli Uberti, leader of the Ghibelline party in Florence, my family's enemies, who asked me haughtily who my ancestors were — and, from the same tomb, the father of my dearest friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti, rose and asked me, weeping, why his son was not with me, and if he were still alive; and when I hesitated, fell back and was seen no more. Farinata, unmoved, foretold my exile.

The damned, Dante learns, can see the future but not the present.

Virgil explained the order of Hell. The upper circles, which we had passed, punished sins of incontinence — weakness, appetite. Below lay the sins of malice: violence, in the seventh circle; and, worst of all, fraud, in the eighth and ninth — for fraud is man's own peculiar evil, and so more displeasing to God.

In the seventh circle, guarded by the Minotaur and the centaurs, the violent against others boiled in a river of blood, Phlegethon, as deep as their guilt — tyrants and murderers. In a wood of twisted, black, thorny trees, where the Harpies nested, were those who had been violent against themselves: the suicides, turned into trees. I broke off a little branch, and it bled and cried out: "Why do you tear me?" It was Pier delle Vigne, minister of the Emperor Frederick II, who had killed himself when he fell into disgrace. And on a burning plain, under a slow rain of fire, lay or ran or sat those who had been violent against God, against nature, and against art: blasphemers, those condemned in Dante's age for sins against nature, and usurers. Among them I found, to my sorrow, my old master Brunetto Latini, who had taught me "how man makes himself eternal"; he praised me and foretold my fame and my exile, and then turned and ran across the burning sand like one who wins the race.

The second group under the fiery rain are those whom the Church of Dante's time condemned for "sodomy"; Dante treats Brunetto with deep love and respect.

Then, on the back of the monster Geryon — with the face of a just man and the body of a serpent, the image of fraud — we were carried down through the dark air to the eighth circle: Malebolge, the "evil pouches," ten concentric ditches of stone. In them were the fraudulent: panders and seducers, whipped by horned demons; flatterers, sunk in excrement; simoniacs, who had sold the things of the Church for money, stuck head-down in holes in the rock with their feet on fire — among them Pope Nicholas III, who mistook me for Pope Boniface VIII, come early to take his place; fortune-tellers, with their heads twisted round on their necks, so that they had to walk backwards, weeping down their backs; corrupt officials, plunged in boiling pitch, and hooked by a troop of comic, vicious devils; hypocrites, walking slowly forever under cloaks gilded outside and lead within; thieves, bitten by serpents and turned into serpents themselves; and evil counsellors, wrapped each in a flame.

In a double flame I found Ulysses and Diomedes; and Ulysses, from the greater horn of the flame, told me how he had died. After his return from Troy, not his love for his son, nor his old father, nor his wife Penelope could overcome the passion he had to gain experience of the world, and of men's vices and their worth. With a few old companions he sailed out through the Pillars of Hercules into the open ocean. "Consider your origin: you were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge." For five months they sailed south and west, until they saw a mountain, dark with distance, higher than any they had ever seen — and a whirlwind rose from it, and turned the ship three times round, and the fourth time sank it, as pleased Another, till the sea closed over us.

The mountain Ulysses saw was the mountain of Purgatory, which no living man may reach by his own effort.

Further down were the sowers of discord and schism, cut and split open by a devil's sword, healed as they walked round, and cut again. Among them, in the medieval Christian manner, Dante places Muhammad, as the founder of what Christians of his time regarded as a schism; and the troubadour Bertran de Born, who had set the son of the King of England against his father, carrying his own severed head by its hair like a lantern. Last of all were the falsifiers — alchemists, impersonators, counterfeiters, liars — struck with loathsome diseases.

The tortures of Malebolge are described by Dante in vivid and often grotesque detail; they are summarised here. Dante's treatment of Muhammad reflects the hostility of medieval Christendom to Islam, and is given here only as a fact of the poem.

At the bottom of Malebolge stood giants, chained in the well that leads down to the last circle; one of them, Antaeus, set us down in the hollow of his hand on the floor of the pit.

The ninth circle was ice: the frozen lake of Cocytus, made by the wind of the great wings of Lucifer. Here were the traitors, frozen in the ice up to their necks, or wholly under it — traitors to their kin, to their country, to their guests, and to their lords. Two were frozen together in one hole, one gnawing the skull of the other: it was Count Ugolino of Pisa, gnawing the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, who had betrayed him. He raised his mouth from his savage meal, and told me his story: how the Archbishop had shut him in a tower with his sons and grandsons, and nailed up the door, and left them to starve; how the children had died one by one before his eyes; and how, at the last — "then hunger did what grief could not." He went back to his gnawing.

Ugolino's last line is ambiguous: it may mean that hunger killed him where grief had failed, or something more terrible. The scene is summarised here.

And at the very centre of the earth, frozen in the ice to his breast, stood the Emperor of the sorrowful kingdom: Lucifer, once the most beautiful of the angels, now monstrous, with three faces — red, yellow and black — and six great bat-like wings, whose beating froze the lake; and in his three mouths he chewed the three greatest traitors: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ; and Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Caesar. "But night is rising again, and now we must depart, for we have seen it all."

Virgil took me on his back and climbed down the shaggy sides of Lucifer, through a gap in the ice; and at the centre of the earth he turned himself upside down, with great effort, and we began to climb up — for we had passed the centre of gravity, and were now going up towards the other hemisphere. By a hidden path, following the sound of a little stream, we climbed, without any care for rest, he first and I second, until through a round opening I saw some of the beautiful things that heaven bears. And thence we came out, to see again the stars.