"He said to me: 'Thy City which is filled
With envy, like a sack that overflows,
Once held me in its tranquil life, well skilled
In dainties, and a glutton, and by those
Who dwelt there Ciacco called, but now the blows
Of this fierce rain avenge my wasteful sin.
Sad as I am, full many another knows
For a like crime like penalty within
This circle', and more word he spake not." (VI, 49.)
In the fourth circle the poet sees the souls of the prodigal and avaricious rolling heavy stones, against each other with mutual recriminations:
"Almighty Justice! in what store thou heap'st
New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld,
Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this?
E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising
Against encountered billow dashing breaks;
Such is the dance this wretched race must lead
Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found."
(VII, 19.)
The next is the circle of the wrathful and the sullen. Following is the circle of the materialists and heretics, all covered with burning sepulchres:
"Soon as I was within, I cast around
My eyes and saw extend on either hand
A spacious plain, that echoed to the sound
Of grief and torment sore; as o'er the land
At Aries where Rhone's vast waters stagnant stand
Or Pola, near Quarnero Bay, that bounds
And bathes the line of Italy, expand
Plains rough and heaving with supulchral mounds,
'Tis thus the plain, wherein I stood, with tombs abounds,
Save that the buried were more grimly treated.
For twixt the graves were scattered tongues of fire
By which to such a pitch the place was heated
That iron could no fiercer flame require
For art to mould it: lamentation dire
Issued from each unlidded vault, and seemed
The voice of those in torment."
From one of these fiery tombs, the Florentine freethinker, the haughty Farinata, rises "with breast and brow erect, as holding Hell in great contempt," and tells Dante that the souls of the lost have no knowledge concerning things that are actually passing on earth, though they know the past and see the future. He foretells the duration of the poet's exile and boasts that he himself saved Florence from being razed to the ground.
"When all decreed that Florence should be laid
in ruin I alone with fearless face defended her."
(X, 91.)
In the seventh circle Virgil leads Dante to the river of blood, "in which boils every one who by violence injures others." Centaurs, half horses and half men, are there. "Around the fosse they go by thousands, piercing with their arrows whatever spirit wrenches itself out of the blood farther than its guilt has allotted for it." (XII, 73.) With characteristic realism the poet describes Chiron, one of the leaders of the Centaurs, pushing back with an arrow his beard as he prepares to speak:
"Chiron took an arrow, and with the notch put back his beard upon his jaws. When he had uncovered his great mouth, he said to his companions: 'Have ye perceived that the one behind (Dante) moves what he touches? The feet of the dead are not wont to do so.'" (XII, 76.)