Canto XX

“I was already bent over to gaze into the uncovered depth, which was bathed with anguished weeping” (20.4-6, 305)

Variations on the word “bathed” repeat throughout the canto, as do other references to water. This motif could serve to ground or limit the infernal soothsayers, who in life prophesied by gazing up at the stars. Alternatively, water could represent reflection here as it does elsewhere in the poem. (MC)

“Up in beautiful Italy there lies a lake…whose name is Benaco… A thousand springs, I think and more, bathe the land… There must fall whatever cannot stay in Benaco… where it falls into the Po… finding a depression in which it spreads out and becomes a swamp; and in the summer it is often noxious” (20.61-81, 307-309)

Dante uses the geography of Italy as a metaphor, basing the north-south dichotomy withing a good-bad paradigm. According to Cachey, "Dante places the map of Italy and the map of Hell, whose principal ethical orientation is defined by the rule that down is worse, into general alignment" (330). This can be seen in the progression of the good-to-bad connotations of the words in Virgil's speech: up (beautiful,) fall, and depression (swamp, noxious.) Later in line 96 of Canto XXXII, Bocca del Duca in fact calls hell a swamp. (MC)

“That other who is so slender in the flanks was Michael Scot” (20.115/116, 311)

As Martinez and Durling, Barolini, and other scholars have noted, Michael Scot was a 13th century translator and alchemist. He was for some time at the Toledo School of Translators, where he would have worked with the Arabic and Hebrew translations of important classical Greek texts that had been lost to medieval Europe. Dante could have been familiar with his translations of Aristotelian texts into Latin, especially De anima, which serves as the basis for Virgil's philosophical tangent in Canto XVIII of Purgatorio. That Dante would categorize him as a magician and fraud in the fourth bolgia instead of an alchemist in the ninth bolgia is part of an interesting trend in which Dante interprets the sins of various historical and fictional figures to greater or lesser degrees. (MC)