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The Cambridge Quarterly 1993 XXII(1):1-24; doi:10.1093/camqtly/XXII.1.1
© 1993 by Cambridge Quarterly
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A Journey through Hell Dante's Inferno Re-visited: The magnificent contrapasso- Canto XIX

H.A. Mason

(in which Dante sees below him a place full oj holes, and in each a man guilty of simony inserted upside down with flames burning the soles of his feet. When Dante expresses a wish to interview the one who seems to be the principal sinner, Virgil obligingly carries Dante down to the hole in the ground. It instantly appears that the sinner takes Dante to be the pope Boniface, come down before the appointed time. When, at Virgil's request, Dante disabuses him, the sinner confesses that he was in life Pope Nicholas III. He tells Dante that all the popes guilty of simony have been planted one on top of the other, and that the pile of inverted sinners will not be complete until the arrival of Clement V.

Dante cannot restrain his indignation as he is made to contemplate the foul succession of papal sinners, descendants spiritually of Simon the Sorcerer, who wanted to buy the power to work miracles. Dante's vision extends to comprehend all who in the history of the world have misused money to tread down the good and raise up the bad. In particular, he laments the consequences of the grant of power to the pope by the Emperor Constantine. Virgil approves Dante's plain speaking and carries him back up to the top of the arch connecting the fourth to the fifth dyke. Then he gently sets Dante down on the stony eminence.)


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