Commentary Purg IX 34-42

The poet describes the narrator's awakening in terms that recall Statius's text (Achilleid I.247-250), describing the stratagem employed by Thetis, Achilles' mother, in order to keep him from being 'drafted' into the Trojan war.  Taking him from the care of his tutor, the centaur Chiron (see [Inf XII 71]), Thetis carries him in her arms, sleeping, to the island of Scyros.  Again Dante adverts to a mythic narrative that has a tragic result; Thetis's benevolent caution will not prevent the coming of Ulysses and Diomedes to Scyros and the eventual death of Achilles in the war.  Dante's 'comic' reality counters the Statian tragedy: Achilles is carried down from his mountain homeland to an island from which he will go off to his death; Dante is carried up a mountain situated on an island toward his eventual homeland and eternal life.  Rarely in the Commedia is the contrast between classical and Christian views, between tragedy and comedy, more present than in these classicizing passages that open this canto.  It is also true that the protagonist, as he experiences these new things, behaves very much as the 'old' man that he still is, and assumes that terror is a valid response to these miraculous events that, the reader can see, speak only of God's love and protection for even such a sinner as Dante.