Inferno, Canto 32

The Text of Canto 32 (Open PDF)

Summary

The Tenth Circle is the frozen Lake of Cocytus, which fills the bottom of the Pit, and holds the souls of the Traitors. In the outermost region, Caina, are the betrayers of their own kindred, plunged to the neck in ice; here Dante sees the Alberti brothers, and speaks with Camicion dei Pazzi. In the next, Antenora, he sees and lays violent hands on Bocca degli Abaii, who names various other betrayers of their country; and a little further on he comes upon two other shades, frozen together in the same hole, one of whom is gnawing the head of the other.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• Why is the bottom of hell frozen (both narratively and thematically)?
• Why does Dante need the assistance of the Muses in lines 10-12? How does Dante’s use of the “ineffability topos” heighten the horror of the final circle of hell?
• What Christian sign of peace and reconciliation is being parodied in lines 46ff?
• The bottom of hell is far more silent than most of the previous circles. Why might this be? Why would the worst sinners tend to be more anonymous, less verbose? How does Dante read the spiritual condition of the damned in their eyes?
• Is there any irony in the damned being frozen in the mythological river Cocytus (the river of wailing and lamentation)? Why would Dante deny the damned here the ability to weep?
• What causes Dante to kick a sinner in the face? What does this say about Dante becoming an instrument for divine justice?

Canto 32 © Jan Hearn

The Images

Cocytus. Beneath the clamour, beneath the monotonous circlings, beneath the fires of Hell, here at the centre of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence and the rigidity and the eternal frozen cold. It is perhaps the greatest image in the whole Inferno. “Dante," says Charles Williams, “scatters phrases on the difference of the place. It is treachery, but it is also ... cruelty; the traitor is cruel" (The Figure of Beatrice, p. 143). A cold and cruel egotism, gradually striking inward till even the lingering passions of hatred and destruction are frozen into immobility - that is the final state of sin. The conception is, I think, Dante’s own; although the Apocalypse of Paul mentions a number of cold torments, these are indiscriminately mingled with the torments by fire, and their placing has no structural significance. (It is interesting, however, that in the seventeenth century, the witches who claimed to have had to do with Satan sometimes reported that he was ice-cold.)

Cocytus, the “river of mourning", is the fourth of the great infernal rivers. Caina is named from Cain who slew his brother (Gen. iv.);  Antenora, from Antenor of Troy who, according to medieval tradition, betrayed his city to the Greeks.

Mark Vernon's Lecture