Commentary Par IV 4-5

The second vehicle of the simile seems, from what one may find in the commentary tradition, not to have a discernible source anywhere. If that is true, what we have here is pure Dantean invention, a post-Scholastic paradox added to Thomas's. Whereas in the first tercet Dante the questioner is likened to a hungry man unable to decide between two equally tempting foods (for so long a time that he will, undirected by external agency, die), in these two lines he becomes the potential victim of his lupine questions, unable to decide which one to run from, since each looks equally fierce. While this part of the extended comparison surely seems askew, given the fact that Dante must choose which question to ask rather than which to avoid, the passage does impart something that will later be brought back into play (at verse 27): these questions are potentially destructive, and thus like (or at least not unlike) ravening wolves. And so, after initial puzzlement, a reader must admit that the apparently otiose comparison does pay its passage in the greater scheme. Angiolillo (Angi.1986.1) complains about the 'incongruity' of this comparison, since it portrays immobility, not indecision; passivity, not aggression. But this is to miss Dante's point: Solutions of his two doubts seem equally attractive and, potentially at least, the concerns that give rise to each of them are equally destructive. For one hypothesis relating to Dante's own broken vow, which may account for the poet's 'overkill' in this simile, offering a sense of what makes the questions both attractive and dangerous, see the second paragraph of C.Par.IV.139-142.