FOOTNOTES:
[293] Pape, etc.: These words have exercised the ingenuity of many scholars, who on the whole lean to the opinion that they contain an appeal to Satan against the invasion of his domain. Virgil seems to have understood them, but the text leaves it doubtful whether Dante himself did. Later on, but there with an obvious purpose, we find a line of pure gibberish (Inf. xxxi. 67).
[294] Plutus: The god of riches; degraded here into a demon. He guards the Fourth Circle, which is that of the misers and spendthrifts.
[295] Wolf: Frequently used by Dante as symbolical of greed.
[296] Pride: Which in its way was a kind of greed—that of dominion. Similarly, the avarice represented by the wolf of Canto i. was seen to be the lust of aggrandisement. Virgil here answers Plutus’s (supposed) appeal to Satan by referring to the higher Power, under whose protection he and his companion come.
[297] The half circle: This Fourth Circle is divided half-way round between the misers and spendthrifts, and the two bands at set periods clash against one another in their vain effort to pass into the section belonging to the opposite party. Their condition is emblematical of their sins while in life. They were one-sided in their use of wealth; so here they can never complete the circle. The monotony of their employment and of their cries represents their subjection to one idea, and, as in life, so now, their displeasure is excited by nothing so much as by coming into contact with the failing opposite to their own. Yet they are set in the same circle because the sin of both arose from inordinate desire of wealth, the miser craving it to hoard, and the spendthrift to spend. In Purgatory also they are placed together (see Purg. xxii. 40). So, on Dante’s scheme, liberality is allied to and dependent on a wise and reasonable frugality.—There is no hint of the enormous length of the course run by these shades. Far lower down, when the circles of the Inferno have greatly narrowed, the circuit is twenty-two miles (Inf. xxix. 9).
[298] Clerks: Churchmen. The tonsure is the sign that a man is of ecclesiastical condition. Many took the tonsure who never became priests.
[299] I ought, etc.: Dante is astonished that he can pick out no greedy priest or friar of his acquaintance, when he had known so many.
[300] Dimming, etc.: Their original disposition is by this time smothered by the predominance of greed. Dante treats these sinners with a special contemptuous bitterness. Scores of times since he became dependent on the generosity of others he must have watched how at a bare hint the faces of miser and spendthrift fell, while their eyes travelled vaguely beyond him, and their voices grew cold.
[301] Ruined locks: ‘A spendthrift will spend his very hair,’ says an Italian proverb.