Quote 34
…so, not by fire but by the art of God,
below there boiled a thick and tarry mass
that covered all the banks with clamminess.
I saw it, but I could not see within it;
no thing was visible but boiling bubbles,
the swelling of the pitch; and then it settled…
And then in back of us I saw a black
demon as he came racing up the crags.
Ah, he was surely barbarous to see!
And how relentless seemed to me his acts!
His wings were open and his feet were lithe;
he had slung a sinner, upward from the thighs;
in front, the demon gripped him by the ankles…
He threw the sinner down, then wheeled along
the stony cliff: no mastiff’s ever been
unleashed with so much haste to chase a thief.
The sinner plunged, then surfaced, black with pitch;
but now the demons, from beneath the bridge,
shouted: "The Sacred Face has no place here;
here we swim differently than in the Serchio;
if you don’t want to feel our grappling hooks,
don’t try to lift yourself above that ditch." (Inf. XXI, 16-51)
This passage represents contrapasso on a number of levels. As barrators, these corrupt politicians carried on their crimes in secret; thus, the pitch in which they are immersed is so dark that Dante "[can]not see within it." Tar, as a sticky substance, here represents another link that binds individual human beings to one another (like language, love, and money). By dishonestly buying and selling political offices, the barrators compromise the cohesion of the political system. Also, the barrators’ plight – unlike many other sinners’ – is not depicted in sympathetic terms, but in a comedic, almost slapstick, manner. The demons’ verbal taunting of the sinners illustrates this. The irreverent tone here suggests a personal vendetta against barrators on Dante’s part, which is plausible given his alleged history with grafters.
Quote 35
Attacking one of them, it pierced right through
the part where we first take our nourishment;
and then it fell before him at full length…
The serpent stared at him, he at the serpent;
one through his wound, the other through his mouth
were smoking violently; their smoke met…
Let Ovid now be silent…
I do not envy him; he never did
transmute two natures, face to face, so that
both forms were ready to exchange their matter.
These were the ways they answered to each other:
the serpent split its tail into a fork;
the wounded sinner drew his steps together.
The legs and then the thighs along with them
so fastened to each other that the juncture
soon left no sign that was discernible.
Meanwhile the cleft tail took upon itself
the form the other gradually lost
its skin grew soft, the other’s skin grew hard…
And while the smoke veils each with a new color,
and now breeds hair upon the skin of one,
just as it strips the hair from off the other,
the one rose up, the other fell; and yet
they never turned aside their impious eyelamps,
beneath which each of them transformed his snout:…
his tongue, which had before been whole and fit
for speech, now cleaves; the other’s tongue, which had
been forked, now closes up; and the smoke stops.
The soul that had become an animal,
now hissing, hurried off along the valley;
the other one, behind him, speaks and spits. (Inf. XXV, 85-138)
Thieves fail to recognize the boundaries between their own property and that of others. To Dante, this indicates a basic flaw in their humanity; they lack the human reason to distinguish between what is theirs and what belongs to others. This blatant misuse of their intellects renders them more animal than human. Thus, in the Eighth Circle, they mutate into hideous pseudo-serpentine creatures. And because they did not honor the boundaries of property in life, they "exchange their matter" with each other, merging and morphing into the bodies of other thieves. In this way, they can hardly retain their own identities and have thus come to embody their sin.
Quote 36
No barrel, even though it’s lost a hoop
or end-piece, ever gapes as one whom I
saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart:
his bowels hung between his legs, one saw
his vitals and the miserable sack
that makes of what we swallow excrement.
While I was all intent on watching him,
he looked at me, and with his hands he spread
his chest and said: "See how I split myself!" (Inf. XXVIII, 22-30)
Dante’s idealistic vision of man living in peace and unity informs his depiction of the ninth pouch. Because these sowers of scandal and schism have caused social discord and divided people into warring factions, their bodies are now sliced in half. Mohammed, featured here, suffers disembowelment from a laceration that runs vertically down his entire chest. Others endure slit throats, dismembered hands or ears, and even decapitation. The dissent they’ve triggered in their lifetimes comes back to haunt them in their afterlives.