XXXIII. 90 CANTOS and blood. It would show us also that to Ugolino XXXII. 70- himself the worst torture of Hell was not the ice, but the haunting intolerable memory, never to be shaken off, of the unnatural crime to which famine drove him. Obviously Dante means to represent him as a man who, in spite of his sins against his country, was deeply and tenderly attached to his own offspring. We can see the stony anguish of his face as he watches his children die round him of starvation. In the grey morning of the second day he bites his hands in agony, and then calms himself 'not to make them more sad.' The cry of 'my darling little Anselm' sounds in his ears yet. His sons are so tenderly attached to him, that they offer him their flesh to eat. To such a man the memory of so unnatural a crime would be unbearable; and his one relief would be to exercise this inhuman and brutish appetite upon the wretch who had created it. The moment his story is ended, he turns to his 'fierce repast': Was the Count a Traitor to his Country? When he had said this, with eyes distorted He seized again the wretched skull with his teeth, There is also considerable doubt as to the precise treachery of which the Count was guilty. Some writers regard it as the driving of his grandson, Nino Visconti, into exile; but in that case he should rather be in the preceding Ring. It is plain that the Pisans 1 Against this interpretation Rev. H. F. Tozer says: After eight days' fasting eating flesh is an impossibility, as a competent medical authority has definitely stated. Besides this, Buti, himself a Pisan, relates that after eight days-i.e. at the expiration of the time mentioned by Dante--the bodies were taken out dead, and he gives no hint of any of them having been mutilated.' themselves regarded the cession of their castles to Florence and Lucca as an act of treachery to the city, although Dante speaks doubtfully of it: If Count Ugolino had the fame Of having betrayed thee of thy castles. The truth seems to be that we are not to look for the treason in this particular act or that; it consisted in the way in which Ugolino used the misfortunes of his country for the ends of his own ambition, and intrigued with whichever party, Guelph or Ghibelline, promised at the moment to support his power. It is indeed questionable whether, in spite of the horror of his end, we should waste much pity on him. He was, says Napier, 'stained with the ambition and darker vices of his age; like other potent chiefs he sought to enslave his country and checked at nothing in his impetuous career: he was accused of many crimes; of poisoning his own nephew, of failing in war, making a disgraceful peace, of flying shamefully, perhaps traitorously, at Meloria, and of obstructing all negotiations with Genoa for the return of his imprisoned countrymen. Like most others of his rank in those frenzied times he belonged more to faction than his country, and made the former subservient to his own ambition." Obviously Dante regards the Archbishop as his fellow in treachery, and more than his fellow in cruelty; and it is probable that he chose the two, not because they were much worse than others of their rank, but simply because they were well-known examples of 1 Florentine History, Bk. 1. chap. xii. CANTOS XXXII. 70XXXIII. 90 CANTOS XXXII. 70 XXXIII. 90 God's Judgment threatened upon Pisa. the way in which, in every city of Italy, noble and churchman alike betrayed country and party in the high game which they played for place and power. Nevertheless, it is to be noticed that the betrayed city is not relieved of its own responsibility. Dante turns indignantly upon Pisa, whose citizens had supported the Archbishop in his inhuman cruelty. Granted that the Count had the name of having betrayed his city in the cession of her castles, was that any reason, he asks, for destroying his innocent sons? He calls it the 'new Thebes," a city constantly referred to in the Commedia on account of the horrors of bloodshed and cruelty of which it was the scene. Since her neighbours are slow to punish this disgrace to the people of the fair land where the "si" doth sound,"2 Dante summons Nature herself to become the minister of justice: let the islands Capraia and Gorgona opposite the mouth of the Arno, block up the river and drown every soul in the sinful city! Nature, of course, went on her careless way, unmoved by the invocation; nevertheless there were many who saw in the misfortunes which soon befell Pisa the judgment of God upon such crimes. Villani, after relating the story of Ugolino's doom, adds: 'For this cruelty the Pisans were strongly blamed by the whole world, wherever it was known, not so 1 'The tradition runs that Pisa was founded by Pelops, son of King Tantalus of Thebes, although it derived its name from "the Olympic Pisa on the banks of the Alpheus "' (Longfellow). 2 That is, of course, Italy. In De Vulg. Eloq. i. 8-10, Dante after distinguishing three of the Romance languages by their affirmative particles, oc, oil, and sì, claims superiority for the last because the founders of grammar have taken sic as the adverb of affirmation, which seems to confer a kind of precedence on the Italians, who say sì,' CANTOS XXXII. 70 much for the Count, who for his crimes and treasons was perhaps worthy of such a death, but for his sons XXXIII. 90 and grandsons, who were young lads, and innocent; and this sin, committed by the Pisans, did not go unpunished, as in due time hereafter may be found." Whether in consequence of such crimes or not, it is certain that from this time forward Pisa gradually sank. Her maritime power never recovered from the disaster of Meloria, and after a long and stubborn struggle she succumbed to the superior strength of her great neighbour and rival, Florence. On such a decline and fall Dante would assuredly have looked with the eyes of the Hebrew prophets, never for a moment doubting that it was the just and inevitable judgment of God upon such inhuman crime as is narrated in this Canto. We shall see in the closing lines that Genoa, Pisa's conqueror on the sea, is similarly denounced, and this by no accident. The two great rivals may struggle as they please for supremacy, but to Dante's mind they have within the breasts of their citizens a corruption of cruelty and treachery which will at last sink both into a common decay. 1 Villani, vii. 128. CHAPTER XXVIII CIRCLE IX.-THE LAKE OF COCYTUS: TRAITORS CANTO XXXIII. 91-157 Third Ring- III. Tolomea: Traitors to Friends and Guests. WE pass now to the Third Ring, close to the edge of which the Count and the Archbishop are frozen, as if they almost belonged to it. It is called Tolomea, and is the prison of Traitors to Friends and Guests. Its name, as we have seen, is probably taken from Ptolomeus, whose treachery is narrated in 1 Maccabees, xvi. 11-17. It was, indeed, treachery of a double dye, the victims being at once his kindred and his guests. This Ptolomeus was at the time 'captain in the plain of Jericho,' and in the hope of gaining the country for himself he determined to clear out of his path his father-in-law, Simon the High Priest, and his two sons Mattathias and Judas. Accordingly he invited them to a great banquet, and when Simon and his sons had drunk largely, Ptolomee and his men rose up, and took their weapons, and came upon Simon into the banqueting place, and slew him, and his two sons, and certain of his servants. In which doing he committed a great treachery, and recompensed evil for good.' In Dante's judgment, the treachery to them as guests was a more heinous sin |