Inferno: Canto 13 -- Circle 7, Round 2

Harpies, defilers of all they touch, harbingers of death and damnation, half-women, half-birds, the last of the semi-human guardians we'll find in hell, who, the myth relates, "were originally goddesses with beautiful hair and wings until they were reduced to such fearsome monsters [this is like the Gorgons we saw on the walls of Dis, for Medusa was originally a beautiful woman but was turned into a hideous monster with a gaze that could turn one to stone]. They were also referred to as 'robbers,' 'snatchers,' and 'those who seize,' meaning that they would steel [sic]anything that did not belong to them. They snatched food from their victims or left a loathsome stench rendering it unedible" (Monsters.monstrous.com).



The harpies guard something in this wood that Dante takes a while to discover, for he can see no souls in torment and wonders at all the cries of pain. Like Cerberus, who slavers over the sinners he guards, the harpies rip and tear at the souls of those they guard, souls who have lost their bodies because in life they discarded them. (Another example of our state of being in life being carried over into death--what we've been called all along, contrapasso.)

That Virgil treats the soul of Pier del Vigne with a great deal of contrition after Dante breaks off one of his limbs is a point of interest to us when we contrast it against his earlier praise of Dante for the treatment of Filippo Argenti. Virgil says, "O wounded soul,/ could he have believed before what he has seen/ in my verses only, you would yet be whole,/ for his hand would never have been raised against you./ But knowing this truth could never be believed/ till it was seen, I urged him on to do/ what grieves me now; and I beg to know your name,/ that to make you some amends in the sweet world/ when he returns, he may refresh your fame" (46-53). This nine-line statement is the longest apology we have in the Inferno, which shows not only contrition on the part of the poets for having added to the despair of a soul, but also an appropriate grief for the state of being into which such despair has been articulated.

The souls in this wood are those who have lost hope twice and live a double damnation, for they deliberately destroyed themselves in a state of hopelessness, having abandoned hope in life shortly before reaching the gate (through which we oddly didn't see any of them enter) that was late in its admonition. The worst these sinners did, then, was take their own lives -- they were not guilty of hurting others (outside of what grief their own deaths may have caused), for were that the case, they would have been assigned further below. They may have been guilty of incontinence in the world above since suicide is a greater sin, so their reasons for committing suicide could have derived from an excess of the passions (not, however, an excess of love since Dido and Cleopatra are in the second circle -- even in hell, love indemnifies) overcoming their reason and driving them into despair. (What would Dante have said to Filippo Argenti, then, had, out of wrath and rage, he turned himself into an object of pity by committing the greater sin and being hurled into this wood?) That we see evidence of wasters running through the wood pursued and ripped apart by black mastiffs is further proof of the incontinental disposition of this circle's population -- Dante sets them apart by allowing them to briefly keep their bodies for the space it takes for those bodies to be ripped apart and reformed. (That suicidal wasters alone share this fate and not suicidal hoarders is a testament to the idea that wasting one's substance is worse than hoarding it because wasting is a suicide of the ability to thrive -- the hoarders, then, ought to be a little better off in the 4th circle though they balance the spectrum there with the wasters.) This is not to discount, moreover, the other reasons a person might take his or her life, being compelled to do so by the actions of those who lie beneath them, so that the sin of fraud and its compounds must also bear the weight of all those who destroyed themselves because of its machinations.



The sadness of this realm is further compounded by the fact that not only will the souls not be bodily resurrected ("for it is not just/ that a man be given what he throws away" (104-5), but they will also bear the dead weight of their bodies hanging limply on their branches and likely share in that weight's torment, fulfilling Virgil's explanation of pain's perfection after the Judgment. These sinners now suffer only the half of it.

Dante the poet concludes the canto with one last act of kindness, that of restoring to the unknown Florentine suicide the leaves he lost in the mastiff's attack on Jacomo da Sant' Andrea. Dante's satisfaction of this wish will contrast greatly with his breaking his promise to fulfill the wish of Friar Alberigo in Ptolomea. This leaves us with an interesting question--what is an appropriate response to the griefs and horrors of hell?

S.