Commentary Inf XVIII 1-18

The extended introductory passage interrupts the narrative in order to set the new scene: Malebolge, the eighth Circle, with its ten varieties of fraudulent behaviors. Only in Inferno does an equal number of cantos (17 and 17) create a precise center for a cantica in the space between two cantos, and we have just passed it. The last canto ended with a sort of 'comic' conclusion to Dante's dangerous voyage on Geryon. He has now traversed precisely half of the literary space devoted to the underworld. Thus, fully half of the cantica, cantos XVIII to XXXIV, is dedicated to the sins of Fraud. That division tells us something about the poet's view of human behavior, namely that it is better typified by the worst of sins than by the lesser ones.

Robert Durling has developed the schematic idea that all of hell is depicted as having a structure parallel to that of the human body, with Malebolge representing the belly (Durl.1981.1 -- and see Durl.1996.1, pp. 552-55; 576-77).

The poetry of Malebolge, studied by Sanguineti (Sang.1962.1), is strikingly self-confident. One has the feeling that Dante, having finished his apprenticeship, now has achieved a level of aesthetic performance that may have surprised even him. In the seventh canto he had conjoined two kinds of sinners, the avaricious and the prodigal; but these are two sides of the same sin. Here for the first time, as something of a tour de force, he includes two entirely separate categories of sin in a single canto, one of them itself subdivided into two groups, as in Canto VII -- all of this in 115 lines. The precision of the operation is noteworthy, and may be represented as follows:

For the self-conscious, deliberately Virgilian opening of the canto ('Locus est' is found several times in the Aeneid marking the transition from one poetic place to another), see Barchiesi's long article (Barc.1967.1), a meditation on Dante's narrative technique, including a substantial discussion of this passage.

The hellscape offers a grey stone circular wall surrounding a stone 'field,' which in turn surrounds a pit (the 'keep' of this 'castle'); the field is divided into ten valleys, which resemble moats set around a castle. The analogy is complete, but works in reverse, since a castle rises above its surroundings, while this 'castle' is a hole leading into hell. Our first view of Malebolge (the name is a Dantean coinage made up of words meaning 'evil' and 'pouches') makes it seem like a vast, emptied stadium, e.g., the Colosseum, which Dante might have seen in 1301 if he indeed visited Rome then, or the arena of Verona, which he probably saw at least by 1304. The former hypothesis is attractive in that the second image of the canto is also modeled on Roman architecture: the bridge over the Tiber between the Vatican and the city.