Death in Florence - Paradiso 16

The history of Florence before and after Dante is so rich and fraught with conflicts, treacheries and a wide cast of players as to make it hard to keep even the general outlines clear. 

A helpful (and well written) summary can be found in the first chapter of R.W.B. Lewis's Dante: A Life, published years ago in the New York Times (the text might be marred by some coding, but it's worth it). 

Lewis's chapter is here, and begins with Cacciaguida:

As you walk across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence today, you come upon a plaque bearing a passage from Dante's Divine Comedy. The lines are spoken by Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida, whom the poet encounters in one of the higher spheres of heaven, among the warrior saints. They reflect grimly on an event that took place on that very spot in 1216, almost fifty years before Dante's birth, and plunged the city into decades of turmoil. The event was the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti . . . more . . ..

We last encountered Buondelmonte lying dead at the feet of "the mutilated stone that guards the bridge" - the ancient statue of Mars. Cacciaguida's depiction of early Florence climaxes in the tale of the failed attempt to unite two feuding families, the Amidei and the Donati, through marriage. An alliance with the daughter of the Amidei would have forged a bond of common interest between them. All Buondelmonte had to do was to accept the daughter and dowry offered. Instead he chose another bride from the wealthier Donati. 

Remembering an earlier time, Cacciaguida spoke of dowries before they had transformed brides into commodities:

Non faceva, nascendo, ancor paura
la figlia al padre, ché 'l tempo e la dote
non fuggien quinci e quindi la misura.

Not yet the daughter at her birth struck fear
Into the father, for the time and dower
Did not o'errun this side or that the measure. 

(Par. 15.103-05)

As a direct result of his open betrayal of his troth, Buondelmonte was struck as he came from his wedding. He was knocked from his horse, then stabbed to death in front of his new bride. 

Some nine decades later, the city is ruled and roiled by the irrepressible Corso Donati, fomenting faction at every turn.

In Paradiso 17, Dante will learn of his own exile, of "how hard is the way going down and up another man's stairs." The key figure behind his exile and expropriation was Corso, a relation through Dante's marriage to Gemma Donati, and the swashbuckling head of the black Guelfs, who opposed the Whites, headed by the Cerchi.

Corso married the daughter of a wealthy Ghibelline, which enraged many who had supported him. Eventually the citizens forced Corso to flee the city; he was soon captured nearby. While being led back to Florence, Corso fell or threw himself from his horse, whereupon a captor lanced him to death.

Death of Corso Donati

Dante must have pondered the striking resemblances between the fates of these two men. Both Buondelmonte and Corso chose wealthy brides, not modest maids. Their choices unhorsed them. In Cacciaguida's story, Florence itself had once been a modest maid, but now is festooned with jewelry, make-up, and dress. And the old man compares Dante to Hippolytus, exiled from his native city by a lie, dragged to his death by frightened horses.  (Dante turns out to be less Euripides' tragic Hippolytus than Ovid's, who returns from Hades to live a new life in Italy.)

Buondelmonte's death at the bridge divided the city into the factions which then first were called Guelfs and Ghibellines. Corso's death ended the contention between the city's Whites and Blacks. In both cases, Florentine blood was spilled by Florentines. 

The fates of these two men, almost a century apart, are uncannily alike -- almost as if one fate. They are root and branch of the same "seed plot." It's like an opera or Greek myth, not devised by literary artifice, but given by the history of Florence. From the same plot, but a different seed, Dante will be cut off from his city, but not from his "root." He'll complete his solar journey thanks to the clear oracles of Cacciaguida. 

Mirroring Centaurs and inverted medicines: Chiron and Nessus

Here's an odd example of unexpected symmetry in The Women of Trachis -- some might say it's a stretch, but bear in mind, the material of the myth was all one giant text to the Greeks.

Deianira is about to relate her discovery -- her dawning apprehension that Nessus gave her no love charm. She tells how she faithfully followed the dying Centaur's every instruction:

I let fall (παρῆκα) no part of the precepts which the savage Centaur gave me when he was hurting from the bitter barb in his side; they were in my memory, like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze.

ἐγὼ γὰρ ὧν ὁ θήρ με Κένταυρος, πονῶν
πλευρὰν πικρᾷ γλωχῖνι, προυδιδάξατο
παρῆκα θεσμῶν οὐδέν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐσῳζόμην
χαλκῆς ὅπως δύσνιπτον ἐκ δέλτου γραφήν.

She is thinking of Nessus as if he were a teacher, not a rapist. She adheres to his formula for making the charm as if it were a medicine she is learning to compound from a learned pharmacist. This of course should remind us of Chiron, the one Centaur who was learned in many arts, including medicine. (Chiron was a giver of the gift of knowledge not unlike Prometheus, only he did not suffer the wrath of Zeus for having stolen sacred fire.)

The irony is that Heracles killed both Nessus and Chiron with the same poisoned weapon -- though in the case of Chiron, it was an accident. At least one well-known tale goes this way:

Chiron had been poisoned with an arrow belonging to Heracles that had been treated with the blood of the Hydra . . . this had taken place during the visit of Heracles to the cave of Pholus on Mount Pelion in Thessaly when he visited his friend during his fourth labour in defeating the Erymanthian Boar. While they were at supper, Heracles asked for some wine to accompany his meal. Pholus, who ate his food raw, was taken aback. He had been given a vessel of sacred wine by Dionysus sometime earlier, to be kept in trust for the rest of the centaurs until the right time for its opening. At Heracles' prompting, Pholus was forced to produce the vessel of sacred wine. The hero, gasping for wine, grabbed it from him and forced it open. Thereupon the vapors of the sacred wine wafted out of the cave and intoxicated the wild centaurs, led by Nessus, who had gathered outside. They attacked the cave with stones and fir trees. Heracles was forced to shoot many arrows (poisoned with the blood of the Hydra) to drive them back. During this assault, Chiron was hit in the thigh by one of the poisoned arrows. (Wikipedia)

The tale continues with Chiron, who was immortal, suffering so greatly that he wished to die. Heracles then brokered an exchange by which the Centaur was permitted to die and Prometheus was freed from his savage punishment.

Heracles, then, killed both the noblest Centaur and the worst of them, and used knowledge gained from Chiron (about the poison) to do it. When Nessus tells Deianira that he can give her a potent charm, he is imitating Chiron's instruction of Heracles. And when he is struck by the Hydra-tainted arrow, he replicates the death of Chiron. Deianira, then, could have been misled by a kind of chiastic mirroring:

Chiron - teacher of Heracles - wounded by Heracles' poisoned arrow:

<> 

:Nessus - mortally wounded by Heracles - teacher of Deianira

The similarities are superficial. Upon closer consideration one might realize that if anyone could have used the Hydra's poison to good purpose, it would have been Chiron, but he couldn't. Chiron gave men medicine to preserve life and knowledge to make the best of it. Nessus, the doppelganger, gives a charm that horribly takes life. And the charm takes the form of a shirt, a copy, or replica, of the human form beneath.

Chiron certainly gave Centaurs an aura of primal learning - an air of authority and respectability which even someone as intelligent as Deianira might mistakenly attribute to all Centaurs.

The balanced structure of the myth would surely have fascinated the Greeks: Heracles was brought up and became who he was thanks to the illumination and humane tutelage of Chiron. And then he was brought down thanks to the prescription of a fraudulent beast who resembled him superficially. That doubleness, the real and the mere copy -- is itself underscored by the reality that Chiron and Nessus are "like" each other precisely in being dual creatures, double natures. And the difference between the dual natures lies precisely in the gift of benign culture -- of teaching, paideia.

We are not far from the Phaedrus's lesson in the differences between true knowing and mere writing. And writing is indeed present in Deianira's account of how she faithfully followed Nessus's precepts:

they were in my memory, like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze.

In a coming post we'll look at the charm itself in the Women of Trachis.