Virgil Out Of His Depths--Or Maybe Out Of Dante's: PURGATORIO, Canto I, Lines 49 - 84 (Part One)

Walking With Dante

We have come to one of the strangest moments so far in COMEDY: the moment we recognize the lone old man is in fact the Roman pagan Stoic suicide Cato. This moment breaks COMEDY in so many ways that we're going to spend two episodes of the podcast looking at this passage from PURGATORIO.

In this episode, we're going to focus on Virgil and (to a lesser extent) Dante in the passage (thereby saving Cato and his wife Marcia for the next episode). What does this long speech tell us about Virgil's possibly changing place in the poem? What is Dante the poet up to?

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

[00:58] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto I, Lines 49 - 84. If you'd like to read along, print it off, or drop a comment, please go to my website, markscarbrough.com.

[05:06] Virgil in Purgatory: still a strange idea, although we may (or may not) have been set up for it.

[08:55] The structure of PURGATORIO, Canto I: mostly a conversation between two father figures, Virgil and Cato. But Virgil's presence still causes lots of problems.

[12:17] Making Dante the pilgrim show obeisance: a mistake or a change in the dynamics in the poem?

[17:28] What is Virgil doing when he apparently paraphrases Dante the pilgrim to Cato?

[20:13] Dante's folly is like Pier delle Vigne's and Ulysses'--except Dante's folly happened before COMEDY, not in COMEDY.

[22:28] Humor in the passage, but maybe mean-spirited and at Virgil's expense.

[24:58] Freedom: the guiding principle of PURGATORIO (until we get to Beatrice).

[27:14] The law--that is, how Virgil and Dante got here.

[29:08] Flattery: Does it get the job done?