When Punishment Becomes Performance — Divine Comedy

The chapter opens with two classical disasters held up as comparisons: Athamas driven mad by Juno's curse, killing his own son and watching his wife drown herself with the other; and Hecuba, widowed, seeing her daughter slaughtered and her son's body on the beach, running barking like a dog. Neither, Dante says, was as cruel as what follows. Two naked, pale shades burst through the chasm running and biting. One sinks its fangs into Capocchio's neck and drags him across the stone. Griffolino identifies it: Gianni Schicchi, who impersonated a dead man to forge a will and claim a prize mare for himself. The other is Myrrha, who disguised herself to commit incest with her father. Both are here for impersonating others, counterfeiters of persons. Further in, Dante sees a spirit shaped like a lute, the groin swollen by dropsy into a disproportionate mass. This is Master Adam, a Florentine counterfeiter who stamped the florins with three carats of alloy and was burned at the stake in Romena. He craves one drop of water and cannot have it; the streams of Casentino flow forever before his mind's eye, the very streams near where he committed his crime, taunting him more than the disease itself does. He would rather see the Guidi counts who commissioned the fraud than drink from Branda's spring. Beside him, smoking with fever, are Potiphar's wife, who falsely accused Joseph, and Sinon, the Greek who deceived Troy with the horse. Sinon taunts Adam; Adam hits back. Sinon punches Adam's bloated belly like a drum; Adam smacks Sinon's face in return with an arm he notes is still free, even if his legs are not. They trade insults, thirst versus fever, false coin versus false testimony, the horse versus the belly, in an argument that accomplishes nothing and repeats forever. Dante watches transfixed until Virgil interrupts with anger. The shame Dante feels, "as remember'd yet / Confounds me", is one of the poem's most honest self-indictments. Virgil's rebuke is precise: a worse fault than yours could be expiated with less shame; to enjoy such wrangling is a mark of a vulgar mind. The chapter's cost is paid by the watcher, not just the watched.