In preparation for an Honours course, I am re-reading Dante
Alighieri’s astounding epic poem, the Commedia
Divina, in which Dante depicts himself visiting Hell (Inferno), and eventually Purgatory and Paradise – the archetypal
religious journey. I’ve taught Inferno before, but it feels like a new
piece every time. Partly that’s because
it’s so complex and layered that I forget a lot of it, and partly because I
keep reading new translations, each of which feels quite different.
The edition I’ve set this time is a wonderful compilation of
various poets’ versions, including such luminaries as the late Seamus Heaney,
Sharon Olds, W S Merwin, Amy Clampitt, and others, edited by Daniel Halperin. So every couple of cantos, or chapters, you
encounter a subtly different way of dealing with the compact resonances of
Dante’s fourteenth-century Tuscan. Some
try to follow the tight interlocking rhymes of the original; others adopt more
free-flowing ways of capturing the vivid drama rather than a more literal
rendition.
Because I’ve lately become more attuned to animal presences
in all kinds of literature, I started noting the quite numerous animal
references in the Inferno. There is lion and leopard, elephant and
whale, donkey and horse, frog and mouse – even a falcon losing touch with its
falconer (the source of the image in W B Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming”). There are real animals and allegorical
animals and wholly invented monsters like the dragon-ish Geryon, who grudgingly
carries the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil down the cliffs of Hell’s
seventh circle.
And quite a lot of dogs.
What are they doing there?
What can we make of Dante’s underlying attitudes towards animals in
general, and towards dogs in particular?
Apart from certain specific instances which every critic comments on,
the question doesn’t seem to have been thoroughly studied since Richard Thayer Holbrook wrote his book Dante and the Animal Kingdom – in 1902! Though he feels a little dated, Holbrook
is richly informative. In his view, by
the 1300s in Europe
the few approaches of Aristotle
and some other great minds of antiquity to a true knowledge of the animals were
almost forgotten, or converted slowly into fabulous shapes by fantasies
unchecked by observation, by a credulity without bounds.
Hence Dante had a long history of fantasy on which to base
his monstrous creatures in Inferno. This was intensified by a theology that
denied animals souls, intentions, capacity for abstraction or reason – that which
distinguished humans from ‘lower orders’ and gave them access to God. As for the animals themselves, Holbrook says,
their existence interests him only
in so far as it furnishes him with imagery to make us comprehend the actions of
men, of devils, and of angels, or in so far as the animals furnish lessons for
the guidance of man. He neither loves
nor portrays them wholly for their own sake.
Dante, like our own Shakespeare,
had small fondness for dogs. The great
intelligence they often possess, their loyalty even to a bad master, their
obvious delight in kindness, their gratitude, their histrionic qualities, their
wistful interest in human affairs – not one of these qualities appealed to
Dante.
Almost all the associations are negative. The first canid the pilgrim Dante (he is the
main character in his own fiction) encounters is a she-wolf which, along with a
lion and a leopard, harries him to the edge of Hell itself, where the ghost of
the Roman poet Virgil begins his role as guide.
The wolf is usually interpreted as representing the carnal appetites:
she is “so thin she looked/ as if all her appetites were gnawing at her”. Virgil explains:
Because this animal you are
troubled by
lets
no man pass but harasses him
until
she kills him by her savagery,
And she is so consumed by
viciousness
that
nothing fills her, and so insatiable
that
feeding only makes her ravenous.
There are many animals she
couples with
and
there will be more of them, until the Hound
shall
come and grind her in the jaws of death. (I. trans. Heaney)
One canid overcome by another: in the Christian narrative,
unbridled carnality will be eventually banished by the apocalypse and the Final
Judgement. This “Hound” is usually read
as the “Hound of Heaven”, a precursor of the Second Coming. Dante’s word is veltro, which is a boar-hound, something between a greyhound and a
Great Dane, used by the aristocracy for hunting. While Dante may have had the real veltro in the back of his mind, this
Hound is, as Holbrook says, “denatured by excessive allegory”.
This kind of divinely vengeful hunting-dog motif is repeated
in Canto XIII, where Dante finds himself in a forest, whose branches are
actually the transformed bits of human suicides. Weird!
It’s also a good venue for hunting, and sure enough along come hurtling
two misbegotten souls with a “roar ,/ Such as the hunter hears when he keeps
his stand,/ hearing the wild boar and the chase itself” and “Behind their
backs, the wood was growing full/ of black she-dogs, as eager and as swift as
greyhounds just unfastened from their chains” (trans. Charles Wright). The dogs tear the miscreants apart and carry
off their dismembered limbs.
So in this phantasmagoric terror-scape the dog images are
derived from real life but are given religious symbolic meaning, too. Dante had also obviously taken note of dogs
in the streets of his native Florence and other towns he was exiled to. Some people kept guard dogs, so at one point
Dante describes the pursuit of a guarding devil: “never was a dog set loose/ in
such a hurry to catch a thief” (XXI). Indeed,
a couple of these rather comical devils are compared to guard-dogs, being named
“Dog-Face” and “Dog-Scratcher” (or “Dog-Grabber”).
This echoes the earlier depiction of
Cerberus, the guardian of the third circle of Hell: this three-headed monster
out of Greek mythology barks dog-like from his three throats, presiding over tortured
souls who themselves “howl like dogs” (caninamente,
in Dante’s coinage). Virgil distracts
the monster by flinging gobbets of mud into its gullets: “Just as a dog which
yelps when it craves/ becomes quiet when snapping up its food,/ straining and
battling to devour it” (VI), Cerberus is momentarily subdued.
![]() |
William Blake's illustration of Cerberus |
Unlike the hunters’
hounds or aristocratic pets, most mediaeval Italian dogs probably lived unrestrained,
impoverished, vicious and scavenging lives.
So sinners suffering the punishment of being buried in burning sands,
Dante compares to
dogs
in summer
afflicted
at the muzzle and the paws
by gnats
and fleas, the gadfly’s bitterness. (trans. Stanley Plumly)
The nasty voraciousness of this dog-life Dante also uses
when he describes some souls condemned to tear each other to pieces. One of them, Ugolino, ceases speaking to the
pilgrims and bites into the head of a sinful Archbishop: he “sank his teeth
into that wretched skull/ And held on, as strong as a dog on a bone” (XXXIII,
trans. Robert Hass).
Animals being regarded fundamentally as inferior to humans
on the “Great Chain of Being”, Dante often reduces punished sinners to a
bestial level. For example, the pilgrim
Dante comes across the souls of Greek mythological characters (whom he treats equally
as real and un-Christian as actual humans), amongst them Hecuba who “began to
bark as though she were a dog,/ her mind undone by sufferings she had borne”
(XXX, trans. Alfred Corn).
But as Holbrook points out, Dante in the end has little
compassion for the suffering sinners, and none at all for the suffering of
dogs. He may have closely observed them,
but did not feel for them. Since animals
had neither souls nor reason, they certainly did not enter Heaven. I haven’t yet sought animals in the next two
books of the Commedia, but I suspect
that dogs will fade from sight through Purgatorio
into Paradiso, except as opportunistic
metaphors.
Artistically magnificent though the poem is, I confess I
struggle with the more vicious dimensions of a world-view so condemnatory and
ignorant of animal lives.