The Divine Comedy (Complete Annotated Edition). Dante Alighieri

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      Canto XX

       Table of Contents

      ARGUMENT.—The Poet relates the punishment of such as presumed, while living, to predict future events. It is to have their faces reversed and set the contrary way on their limbs, so that, being deprived of the power to see before them, they are constrained ever to walk backward. Among these Virgil points out to him Amphiaraüs, Tiresias, Aruns, and Manto (from the mention of whom he takes occasion to speak of the origin of Mantua), together with several others, who had practised the arts of divination and astrology.

      AND now the verse proceeds to torments new,

      Fit argument of this the twentieth strain

      Of the first song, whose awful theme records

      The spirits whelm’d in woe. Earnest I look’d

      Into the depth, that open’d to my view,

      Moisten’d with tears of anguish, and beheld

      A tribe, that came along the hollow vale,

      In silence weeping: such their step as walk

      Quires chanting solemn litanies on earth.

      As on them more direct mine eye descends,

      Each wondrously seem’d to be revers’d

      At the neck-bone, so that the countenance

      Was from the reins averted: and because

      None might before him look, they were compell’d

      To’ advance with backward gait. Thus one perhaps

      Hath been by force of palsy clean transpos’d,

      But I ne’er saw it nor believe it so.

      Now, reader! think within thyself, so God

      Fruit of thy reading give thee! how I long

      Could keep my visage dry, when I beheld

      Near me our form distorted in such guise,

      That on the hinder parts fall’n from the face

      The tears down-streaming roll’d. Against a rock

      I leant and wept, so that my guide exclaim’d:

      “What, and art thou too witless as the rest?

      Here pity most doth show herself alive,

      When she is dead. What guilt exceedeth his,

      Who with Heaven’s judgment in his passion strives?

      Raise up thy head, raise up, and see the man,

Before whose eyes1 earth gap’d in Thebes, when all

      Cried out, ‘Amphiaraus, whither rushest?

      ‘Why leavest thou the war?’ He not the less

      Fell ruining far as to Minos down,

      Whose grapple none eludes. Lo! how he makes

      The breast his shoulders, and who once too far

      Before him wish’d to see, now backward looks,

      And treads reverse his path. Tiresias note,

      Who semblance chang’d, when woman he became

      Of male, through every limb transform’d, and then

      Once more behov’d him with his rod to strike

      The two entwining serpents, ere the plumes,

      That mark’d the better sex, might shoot again.

      “Aruns, with rere his belly facing, comes.

      On Luni’s mountains ’midst the marbles white,

      Where delves Carrara’s hind, who wons beneath,

      A cavern was his dwelling, whence the stars

      And main-sea wide in boundless view he held.

      “The next, whose loosen’d tresses overspread

      Her bosom, which thou seest not (for each hair

      On that side grows) was Manto, she who search’d

      Through many regions, and at length her seat

      Fix’d in my native land, whence a short space

      My words detain thy audience. When her sire

      From life departed, and in servitude

      The city dedicate to Bacchus mourn’d,

      Long time she went a wand’rer through the world.

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