Inferno XXXIII: The Past and the Present in Dante's Imagery of Betrayal

Author(s): William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman

Source: Italica, Vol. 56, No. 4, Dante (Winter, 1979), pp. 377-383
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Italian
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/478665
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INFERNO XXXIII: THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

IN DANTE'S IMAGERY OF BETRAYAL
Surely one testimony to the richness of Dante is the
number of different kinds of sources he is able to use in a
complementary way. In canto XXXIII of Inferno the vexing question of cannibalism that is brought up there can only be fully
understood when the reader draws on contemporary history and
social theory, classical literature, and biblical figuralism, strands
that are woven together by Dante into a seamless whole. The
most striking image in the canto, and indeed one of the most
striking images of the entire Commedia, is the savage gnawing
by Ugolino, the Guelf Podesti of Pisa, on the head of Ruggieri, the Ghibelline bishop. Ugolino finishes his revelation
of the betrayal and treachery which have brought them to this
present state by saying that as he looked over the bodies of his
dead sons, " fasting did more than grief." " Here he is at least
suggesting to the reader the appaling possibility that, in the
midst of desperation, he ate his own children. Evidence from
the sources mentioned above implies two things: first, it
strongly supports that suggestion, and second, it presents ways
in which this cannibalism is part of a larger pattern, a pattern
linked directly to the vision of Satan at the end of Inferno,
which in turn is linked to Dante's strongest religious and
social concerns in the Commedia.2
In its outline, the story of Ugolino and Ruggieri is well
known.3 Ugolino was brought to Pisa as Podesta in the 1280's;
this predominantly Ghibelline city had recently been defeated
in battle by its Guelph neighbors, and it was necessary for
Pisa to have a Podestat who would be on good terms with her
neighbors.4 Ugolino's ambitious grandson came to be a co-leader
of Pisa, but Ugolino became jealous and through trickery took
control by himself, although later the two were temporarily
reconciled. Ugolino felt unstable because of the Ghibelline
majority in Pisa, so he formed an alliance with its Ghibelline
bishop Ruggieri. Ugolino left Pisa temporarily with the understanding that Ruggieri would rid Pisa of his grandson. However,
377

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378

W. R. COOK AND R. B. HERZMAN

Ruggieri used Ugolino's absence to have himself proclaimed

Podesta. Ugolino returned with an armed band, but Ruggieri
rallied the populace of the city against him, and he and his
sons and grandsons were captured.
Perhaps to Dante the two most serious problems of his
time were political factionalism (which finds its most explicit
statement in Inferno X) and ecclesiastical interference in secular
matters (described in Inferno XIX). These themes run through
the entire Commedia and the De Monarchia as well. These
themes come together in Inferno XXXIII. Both Ugolino and
Ruggieri betray their political factions by uniting with one
another. The consequences of political factionalism are not
merely the betrayal of party, however. Ugolino betrayed his
own family and his responsibility to those he ruled as an
official of the commune. For example, in a text from Pseudo
Brunetto Latini of particular relevance to the imagery of Inferno XXXIII, we find that, " this Count Ugolino was a man of
such a type that he caused the people of Pisa to die of hunger
and at this time although he had a great abundance of grain
was so cruel that a staio of grain cost seven pounds at Pisa." 5
Ruggieri, moreover was guilty of an equally serious betrayal-that of holy orders. Ruggieri was so totally involved
in the political affairs of Pisa that he assumed the office of
Podesta himself and killed his political rival. The poignancy
of the terrible punishment of these two betrayers of almost
everything becomes clearer when we realize that both the
kings of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New have
their offices described in terms of feeding their flocks. The
image of the shepherd feeding his sheep is common in the
prophecies of the Old Testament referring to the Hebrew
kings; this image of a king feeding his flock also exists in
works contemporary to Dante, such as Joinville's life of
Louis IX.6 In the New Testament, Christ is Himself the Good
Shepherd, and in John 21 he commands Peter to feed his sheep.
The stark image of the cannibalism both on earth and in hell
can only be fully understood both in the light of Dante's
concern with the political problems of his own time, and his

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INFERNO XXXIII: DANTE'S IMAGERY OF BETRAYAL

379

awareness of the biblical tradition of food as an image of

good rule.
The Old Testament is also a source for the image of
cannibalism itself. There are several texts in which God
through a prophet warns of the consequences of disobedience.7
Perhaps the one which is most likely the direct source for
Dante is Jeremiah 19. Dante felt a particular spiritual kinship
with the prophet who loved his city but who was treated as
a traitor, who fearlessly proclaimed God's wrath upon his
own people and city, who suffered humiliation and ultimately
exile. In Jeremiah 19, God commands the prophet to shatter
a jar and thus symbolically proclaim God's plan to destroy
Jerusalem. First, Jeremiah gathers representatives of both secular
and ecclesiastical authority just as Dante has members of these
estates present in Inferno XXXIII. Like Jeremiah, Dante is
primarily interested in instructing and warning the leaders of
society. Among Jeremiah's prophecies of doom is this most
stark one:
And I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at; Everyone
who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its
disasters. And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and
daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his neighbor in the
siege and in the distress, with which their enemies and those who
seek their life afflict them.8

Ugolino's situation while on earth is an exact parallel to

the situation described in Jeremiah. Ugolino has lived out the
results of this prophecy, results intended for those who have
broken their covenant with the Lord. He has been reduced to
such straits by his enemy that he has been compelled to eat
his sons as the prophecy foretells. A subject such as cannibalism was not foreign to God's way of writing. Dante, writing
in imitation of God's way of writing, uses this subject to talk
about a broken covenant in his own world.
Moreover, it is clear that Dante was familiar with examples
of cannibalism in general and eating one's children in particular from several classical sources; Ovid, Seneca, and Horace
are three that he definitely knew.9 The banquets of Thyestes

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380

W. R. COOK AND R. B. HERZMAN

and Procne were well known to him, and in fact he makes an

allusion to the story of Procne in Purgatorio IX. These stories
too provided a richness that he was able to mine for Inferno
XXXIII, seeing in them examples of the same extreme cruelty
he describes in the story of Ugolino and Ruggieri.
For people living in the early fourteenth century, cannibalism was more than a biblical or classical image, or a
uniquely cruel punishment in a bitter factional quarrel. Historians such as David Herlihy have convincingly argued that the
population of Europe reached its medieval high in Dante's
time (Tuscany alone had perhaps two million people). Food
prices soared because of great demand. There was a Malthusian
crisis which only resolved itself in mid-century with the advent
of the Black Death. At this time of high food prices and
frequent shortages, there existed not only the practice of hoarding in the manner of Ugolino, but also the stark reality of
people driven to eating human flesh. During the famine of
1315-1317, for example, there were reports of cannibalism;
and certainly rumor if not the reality of cannibalism was
common in the overpopulated Europe of the early fourteenth
century.1' A knowledge of this fact will help us see how Dante
can take a social reality of his day, develop it by drawing on
biblical and classical uses of the same image, and place it
in a context which explains and expands its meaning to his
society. Dante of course maintains the fiction that he is writing
according to God's own way of writing, that is, he sees in the
events of his own time the same possibility for figural realism
that biblical events had in the Middle Ages. It is both the
actual reality of his own time and the biblical reality of the
prophecy of Jeremiah which are mirrored in the savagery of
Ugolino and Ruggieri in Inferno XXXIII. Biblical imagery
could live in Dante's work all the more strongly because the
reality which the biblical image described was also present in
Dante's own time. Thus the source of Dante's realism in this
case is both the Bible and present day reality. The interconnection between them must have provided Dante with a strong
support for his plan of following God's way of writing.
Ugolino and Ruggieri both in the sordid drama they

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INFERNO XXXIII: DANTE'S IMAGERY OF BETRAYAL

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re-enact in hell and in Ugolino's account of their previous life

on earth look forward to another cannibalistic meal in Inferno.
The first betrayers in circle nine point forward to the last.
For the vision of Satan that is Dante the pilgrim's last glimpse
of hell shows the three mouths of Satan gnawing on each of
the three great traitors-Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. That the
punishment of these three is another example of cannibalism
has perhaps not been given sufficient attention. Once seen in
this light, however, the consistency of Dante's treatment of
betrayal becomes apparent.
Judas, headfirst in the central mouth (Brutus and Cassius
are feet first in the two other mouths), is described by Dante
in more detail than the others. This is appropriate, for Judas
is the archetypal betrayer, having sold his master Christ for
thirty pieces of silver. It is significant that there is a rich
tradition, originating in scripture, which associates his betrayal
with the banquet of the Last Supper. For Judas, as Thomas
Aquinas puts it, " What is good (referring to his reception
of the eucharist) becomes evil to him, as happens to them who
received Christ's body unworthily." " Thomas refers specifically
to John 13:26 where one reads, " After the morsel, Satan
entered him." 12 After Satan entered him, of course, he went
out and betrayed his master. Now in hell, the one through
whose mouth Satan entered by a false reception of the eucharist,
in a singularly exact punishment, enters the mouth of Satan
and is eaten by him for all eternity.
In presenting Satan's cannibalistic meal as a parody of
the eucharistic banquet, Dante reminds his reader that the
eucharist is the ideal of love, God's supreme gift to man, and
that this ideal is inverted through the hatred of betrayal.
Thus Ugolino's eating of his children can be seen in direct
relationship to Judas' betrayal because it too is an inversion
of the eucharist. The literal eating of the bodies of his sons
should be seen as a reminder of the spiritual eating of the body
of the Son given by the Father. Here too hatred and treachery
are defined through an inversion of supreme love.
The image of Satan eating Brutus, Cassius, and Judas is
thematically connected to what we have said about Ugolino

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W. R. COOK AND R. B. HERZMAN

and Ruggieri in political and social terms as well. Obviously,

Brutus and Cassius perceived Roman politics in factional terms,
thus being guilty of the same crime as Ugolino; furthermore,
the result was the same-further factionalism, political chaos,
and the failure of the state to provide peace and the material
necessities of life to its people. Judas is related to Ruggieri
since he betrayed his priestly office for the sake of worldly
considerations. And as the betrayals of Brutus, Cassius and
Judas are related to those of Ugolino and Ruggieri, so are
their punishments. The relationship between these two sets
of traitors reminds the reader that just as these ultimate
betrayals took place in the past, so too are ones like them
taking place in Dante's Italy. By linking the historical and
contemporary betrayals, just as Dante uses the contemporary
reality of cannibalism and links it to the past by drawing on
the bible and the classics, he is presenting his audience with a
view of its society which is far more powerful than either a
contemporary example or a historical antecedent alone could
do. Dante's vision at the end of Inferno embodies a timeless
depiction of the nature of absolute evil in a timely and urgent
prophecy to his own day.
WILLIAM R. COOK
RONALD B. HERZMAN
State University of New York, Geneseo

1 " Poscia, piji che '1 dolor, pote '1 digiuno," 1.75. Text and translation are from The Divine Comedy, trans. and comm. Charles S. Singleton,
Bollingen Series LXXX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
2 The controversy over whether or not Dante implies that Ugolino
ate his sons is of course long standing. Singleton, who strongly disagrees
with the cannibalistic interpretation, gives a partial bibliography of the
controversy in his note for the line in his commentary on Inferno, p. 617.
The cannibalistic reading is supported by recent studies by Gianfranco
Contini, " Philology and Dante Exegesis," Dante Studies 87 (1969), 1-33,
and Marianne Shapiro, " An Old French Source for Ugolino? " Dante
Studies, 92 (1974), 129-147, and the same author's " Addendum: Christological Language in Inferno XXXIII." Dante Studies, 94 (1976), 141-143.
A paper given at the Twelfth Conference on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo,
Michigan and forthcoming as an article in Dante Studies gives additional evid-

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INFERNO XXXIII: DANTE'S IMAGERY OF BETRAYAL

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ence for the cannibalistic reading: Ronald B. Herzman, " Cannibalism and
Communion in Inferno XXXIII."
3 The following
paragraph is derived from Grandgent's notes. La
Divina Commedia ed. C. H. Grandgent and rev. Charles S. Singleton
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 288-290.
4 This necessity to pacify Pisa's Guelf neighbors explains why Ugolino handed over two castles to the Guelfs; Dante refers to this incident in
Inferno XXXIII, 11.85-87.
5 Quoted in David Herlihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance:
A Study
in Urban Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 109.
Saint Louis trans. Rene Hague and ed. Richard Kay
6 Joinville's
(Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1968), p. 44.
e.g. Isaiah 49:26, Ezekiel 5:10, and Deuteronomy 28:53.
8 Jeremiah 19:8-9 RSV.
' Dante refers to the
appropriate sections of Horace and Seneca in
the Epistle to Can Grande. For Dante's knowledge of Seneca and Horace
see Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's Commedia (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969), p. 238. See Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica,
Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926),
pp. 459-466; Seneca's Tragedies, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1917), II, 172-178; Ovid, Metamorphoses,
Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1916),
II, 332-334.
10 Much of Herlihy's research is to be published soon. Some population figures are given in his The Family in Renaissance Italy (St. Charles,
Missouri: Forum Press, 1974), p. 4. On reports of cannibalism and the
severity of the 1315-1317 famine, see Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of
Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1969), pp. 25-26. One example of the seriousness of the shortage of food
in pre-plague Europe is the fact that in 1347 approximately 4000 Florentines died of hunger during a famine; see M. Mollat and P. Wolff, The
Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages trans. A.L. Lytton-Sells
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 106.
11 Summa Theologica, III, quest. 81, art. 2, obj. 3, and rep. obj. 3.
12 In the Middle Ages, this image also appears in the visual arts.
Among several examples of Judas appearing with a devil at the Last
Supper, a manuscript illumination from the Salzburg Book of Pericopes
(c. 1140) shows Satan entering the mouth of Judas. See Gertrude Schiller,
Iconography of Christian Art, Volume 2, The Passion of Christ, tr. Janet
Seligman (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1972), plates
89-94. For the iconography of " Christ Pointing Out the Traitor," see
Schiller, pp. 35-37.

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