[501] Arachne: The Lydian weaver changed into a spider by Minerva. See Purg. xii. 43.
[502] Gluttonous Germany: The habits of the German men-at-arms in Italy, odious to the temperate Italians, explains this gibe.
[503] The right: This is the second and last time that, in their course through Inferno, they turn to the right. See Inf. ix. 132. The action may possibly have a symbolical meaning, and refer to the protection against fraud which is obtained by keeping to a righteous course. But here, in fact, they have no choice, for, traversing the Inferno as they do to the left hand, they came to the right bank of the stream which traverses the fiery sands, followed it, and now, when they would leave its edge, it is from the right embankment that they have to step down, and necessarily to the right hand.
[504] A half score steps, etc.: Traversing the stone-built border which lies between the sand and the precipice. Had the brook flowed to the very edge of the Seventh Circle before tumbling down the rocky wall it is clear that they might have kept to the embankment until they were clear beyond the edge of the sand. We are therefore to figure to ourselves the water as plunging down at a point some yards, perhaps the width of the border, short of the true limit of the circle; and this is a touch of local truth, since waterfalls in time always wear out a funnel for themselves by eating back the precipice down which they tumble. It was into this funnel that Virgil flung the cord, and up it that Geryon was seen to ascend, as if by following up the course of the water he would find out who had made the signal. To keep to the narrow causeway where it ran on by the edge of this gulf would seem too full of risk.
[505] Woful folk: Usurers; those guilty of the unnatural sin of contemning the legitimate modes of human industry. They sit huddled up on the sand, close to its bound of solid masonry, from which Dante looks down on them. But that the usurers are not found only at the edge of the plain is evident from Inf. xiv. 19.
[506] Could recognise, etc.: Though most of the group prove to be from Florence Dante recognises none of them; and this denotes that nothing so surely creates a second nature in a man, in a bad sense, as setting the heart on money. So in the Fourth Circle those who, being unable to spend moderately, are always thinking of how to keep or get money are represented as ‘obscured from any recognition’ (Inf. vii. 44).
[507] A pregnant sow: The azure lion on a golden field was the arms of the Gianfigliazzi, eminent usurers of Florence; the white goose on a red ground was the arms of the Ubriachi of Florence; the azure sow, of the Scrovegni of Padua.
[508] Vitalian: A rich Paduan noble, whose palace was near that of the Scrovegni.
[509] Pink of Chivalry: ‘Sovereign Cavalier;’ identified by his arms as Ser Giovanni Buiamonte, still alive in Florence in 1301, and if we are to judge from the text, the greatest usurer of all. A northern poet of the time would have sought his usurers in the Jewry of some town he knew, but Dante finds his among the nobles of Padua and Florence. He ironically represents them as wearing purses ornamented with their coats of arms, perhaps to hint that they pursued their dishonourable trade under shelter of their noble names—their shop signs, as it were. The whole passage may have been planned by Dante so as to afford him the opportunity of damning the still living Buiamonte without mentioning his name.
[510] His tongue thrust out: As if to say: We know well what sort of fine gentleman Buiamonte is.