Dante Serves Revenge Cold
If you’re a writer with a Facebook account, you’ve seen the meme that says “Be nice to me or I’ll put you in my novel.”
Literary revenge is as old as writing. As far back as 121AD, Suetonius was dishing political dirt with his book The Twelve Caesars, which chronicled the lives of twelve Roman emperors from Julius Caesar through Domitian in the kind of gossipy detail that feels more like the Enquirer than your average high school history text.
Durante degli Alighieri (Dante to his friends and all of history) had, from the age of 25, been immersing himself in the political life of his native Florence, but was driven out just 12 years later, exiled from his home and for the next 5 years, he travelled from town to town as his political enemies chased Florentines out of one Italian city after another. Dante’s first books (after Vita Nuova, about his love for Beatrice, published in 1295), were philosophical and political—a reflection of Dante’s unhappiness with how Florentines were being treated by the Black Guelphs who had taken over Florence.
It was during his exile from Florence that he began what would become The Divine Comedy. He completed The Inferno in 1312, peopling it not just with famous historical figures, from Homer and Socrates in the first circle of Limbo to Judas Iscariot for whom the final ring of the ninth circle of Hell is named, but with the very people who had chased him from his beloved Florence.
The tortures Dante imagined for the denizens of Hell were creative and fitting. Pope Celestine V, a former hermit wholly under the sway of Dante’s political enemies, ends up among the angels who took no sides in Satan’s rebellion against God, forever racing around the shores of the Acheron being stung by wasps and hornets, as Dante decided those who would not commit to one side or another must be stung by their own consciences. Francesca da Rimini married Giovanni Malatesta, a leader who captured the town of Pesaro and ruled it until his death. But she fell in love with Malatesta’s younger brother, and Giovanni killed them both. Francesca is damned with the other lustful sinners to be pummeled by a terrible storm as she was carried away by passion in life. Ciacco, thought to be a contemporary of Dante’s who was on the side of the Black Guelphs, is made to wallow with the gluttonous in a pit of disgusting slush and be pelted by foul, icy rain while Cerberus (which I like to think of as being pronounced like “Care Bear Us,” because it makes him sound friendly and snuggly) rips into him with his claws.
These aren’t the cerebral, comedy of manners kinds of punishments that later playwrights and novelists portray as Hell. Think of the popular television show The Good Place, where Hell is portrayed as a Heaven where the inhabitants all have some kind of horrible nagging feeling that they don’t belong there. This kind of gentle, humorous Hell is the kind we envision for ourselves, since we know in our hearts that we’re mostly good people with mostly good intentions. On the other hand, we also know that our enemies (people who troll us on social media, people with different political views who seem unable to see reason, people who refuse to afford us the respect we deserve) are irredeemably and willfully ignorant, debased, indifferent, and generally all-around creeps who deserve to fight each other in the mucky waters of the Styx with the wrathful, be immersed in a river of boiling blood with the murderers, or have fire rained upon them with the blasphemers.
But at the very deepest depths of Hell, Dante turns away from the fire and brimstone that we normally associate with damnation. The very deepest pits of Hell are, according to Dante, cold. The ninth circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, and it is a vast frozen lake, each level named after a famous traitor. Here, the traitorous are immersed in ice, and here, Dante takes his most vicious and personal revenge. Vanni de’Cancellieri (who murdered a family member of Dante’s) is in the outermost circle of traitors, while men who directly betrayed the Ghibellines (Dante’s political faction) receive actual beatings from the fictional Dante, who kicks at their heads while their bodies are immersed in the ice.
At the very center of Hell, where Lucifer is encased in ice weeping tears that freeze and rain down on the damned, each of his three mouths endlessly devours a sinner. Between the two men who murdered Caesar is Judas Iscariot whose head is devoured as his body is torn apart by Lucifer’s claws.
While modern readers have long enjoyed the imaginative meting out of punishment, the difficulty inherent in reading The Inferno is the amount of homework one has to do to get through all the personal vendettas Dante scores against those who had wronged him. But as readers, and as writers, we forgive Dante, because he was the first to truly give us permission to use our art to revenge ourselves on our own enemies.
Lise Quintana

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