Commentary Inf XXXIV 121-126

Virgil's final words in Inferno create, as it were, the foundation myth of sin: how it established itself in the world that God had made good. Forti (Fort.1986.1), p. 246, refers to the passage as a 'genuine cosmological myth,' to the fall of Lucifer as 'the first event that occurs in time' (p. 259).

It is worth considering a similar passage in {Ovid.Metam.I.151-162}: Astraea, or justice, has just left the earth. The battle of Phlegra ensues (about which we have heard in [Inf XXXI 44-45], [Inf XXXI 91-96], [Inf XXXI 119-121]); once the giants are destroyed, mother Earth, Gea, forms man in their image, if smaller, out of their gore. But this new stock, too, is contemptuous of the gods. Soon enough Lycaon (the 'wolf-man') will commit the first murder, one that will eventually lead to the murder of Julius Caesar (v. 201).

Here, in the final moments of the final canto, we learn of the first things to occur in terrestrial time: Satan fell from heaven and crashed into our earth (see [Par XXIX 55-57]). To flee from him, all the land in the southern hemisphere hid beneath the sea and moved to the north of the equator, while the matter that he displaced in his fall rose up behind him to form the mount of purgatory.

Over the years there have been efforts to find contradictions to this view of the earth's 'geology' in Dante's later Questio de aqua et terra (1320). Bruno Nardi (Nard.1959.1) made a case for the contradiction. Freccero's review (Frec.1961.1) offered strong rebuttals to Nardi's main arguments. The magisterial edition produced by Mazzoni (Mazz.1979.2) convincingly presents the work as Dantean. Pasquazi (Pasq.1985.1) makes a strong case for the absence of any significant contradiction. More recently, Baranski (Bara.1997.2) also argues for authenticity. For a study of the wider question see Stabile (Stab.1983.1).