Winners, Losers, And Beggars: PURGATORIO, Canto VI, Lines 1 - 24

Help support WALKING WITH DANTE to keep it sponsor-free. Click here for a PayPal link to donate and help me cover licensing, hosting, streaming, and research fees.

Having heard three stories of those who died violent deaths unshriven, Dante the pilgrim is besieged by requests from others. A crowd forms around him, all begging for prayer, including six individuals singled out from the crowd.

But something's amiss. Someone has won at a game of dice--and someone has lost. Who's the winner and who's the loser?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore this final episode to those who died violent deaths yet are among the souls slowly (!) ascending to heaven.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:26] My English translation of this passage: PURGATORIO, Canto VI, lines 1 - 24. If you'd like to read along or print it off to make notes, please go to my website: markscarbrough.com.

[04:09] PURGATORIO, Canto VI as a whole: an introduction to its structure.

[06:19] The six souls who accost the pilgrim Dante: three named and three unnamed (or, better, named periphrastically).

[15:49] Why does Dante the poet feel the need to obscure three of these pressing souls?

[19:08] An Arabic game of dice opens Canto VI--and may be a meta-statement about COMEDY as a whole.

[24:18] Who is the winner of this game? Dante the pilgrim, of course. But who is the loser? Probably Virgil!