"I Am Not Aeneas, I Am Not Saint Paul": False Modesty In Inferno, Canto II, Lines 1 - 42

We were almost underway, but important things must happen before we can go any farther.

On this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we start the Canto II of INFERNO and discover that the Dante-the-pilgrim is almost undone by his doubts.

How does he get rid of them? He decides to play a rhetorical game with his poetic master, Virgil. As they say, if you want to get famous, punch up! And Virgil is definitely up from this poet who has written a book, a few lyric poems, and stopped in the middle of a treatise. That's all he's got to his name. So the best way the advance yourself is to challenge someone above you to a game you might be able to win.

Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:02] My English translation of the passage for this episode: INFERNO, Canto II, Lines 1 - 42.

[03:14] A review of the plot so far--and an overview of what's ahead in Canto II of INFERNO.

[05:08] The opening lines of Canto II, with particular attention to the questions of temporality. Or to put it another way, Dante-the-pilgrim is out of sync with the world.

[08:03] The first invocation of COMEDY. It's a prayer. Not to God. To the classical muses. And particularly to memory. (Bonus material: thereby further asserting the "realism" of COMEDY, affirming that Dante-the-pilgrim REALLY went on this walk.)

[10:30] Dante-the-pilgrim's first big speech. It's to Virgil. It raises literary issues. Am I good enough as a poet to do this? And it raises religious issues. Who's good enough to see the afterlife?

[16:38] More about periphrasis. We walked about this in a previous episode: the technique of walking around something without exactly naming it. For lots of reasons. Including, well, flattery.

[20:12] Who permits it? The biggest question of COMEDY! Who permits Dante to do this? Or write this? What if he sets out on this walk (or starts writing this poem) and it all turns out to be mad folly. You gotta face your fears. And Dante does. But only by turning back to his mentor, not on his own two feet.