Inferno, Canto 17

The Text of Canto 17 (Open PDF)

Summary

Geryon, the monster called up from the Circles of Fraud, alights on the edge of the precipice. While Virgil talks to him, Dante goes to look at the shades of Usurers seated on the Burning Sand, The Poets then mount on Geryon's shoulders and are carried down over the Great Barrier to the Eighth Circle.

The Prepatory Lecture

Click here if video doesn't appear.

Questions for Reflection

• What is Geryon? Why make the avatar of Fraud a polymorphic creature? Is Geryon an infernal parody of God?
• What is the sin of usury? How is it a form of violence? How is it related to the intemperate sin of avarice? And how does Dante’s depiction of usury’s punishment challenge contemporary economics?
• Why do you think there is a chasm separating the circle of Violence from that of Fraud? Is Fraud that much more of a descent into evil than Violence is?
• How does Dante’s language on his descent with Geryon confuse and disorient the reader’s sense of space and location? Why might that be an appropriate response to the new circle we as readers find ourselves in?

Canto 17, © Jan Hearn

The Images

Geryon. In Greek mythology, Geryon was a monster who was killed by Hercules, He was usually represented as having a human form with three heads, or three conjoined bodies; but Dante has given him a shape compounded of three natures - human, bestial, and reptile. In the allegory, he is the image of Fraud, with “the face of a just man” and an iridescence of beautiful colour, but with the paws of a beast and a poisonous sting in his serpent’s tail - an image which scarcely calls for interpretation.

The Usurers. These, as we have seen, are the image of the Violent against Nature and the Art derived from Nature; they sit looking upon the ground, because they have sinned against that and against the labour that should have cultivated its resources. The old commentator Gelli observes brilliantly that the Sodomites and Usurers are classed together because the first make sterile the natural instincts which result in fertility, while the second make fertile that which by its nature is sterile - i.e. they “make money breed”. More generally, the Usurers may be taken as types of all economic and mechanical civilizations which multiply material luxuries at the expense of vital necessities and have no roots in the earth or in humanity.

Mark Vernon's Lecture