If Not Critical by Griffiths Eric; Johnston Freya; & Freya Johnston

Author:Griffiths, Eric; Johnston, Freya; & Freya Johnston [Griffiths, Eric & Johnston, Freya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

But may those women lend assistance to my verse who lent assistance to Amphion when he closed up Thebes …18

Footnoters such as the excellent Natalino Sapegno rightly tell you that Amphion ‘closed up’ Thebes in the sense that he built its protective circle of walls by playing his lyre, to the sound of which, with the help of the Muses, stones assembled themselves in the desired order, and they refer you to Horace and Statius for parallel passages.19 Marvellous, give that boy a bun, but the question remains, ‘why single out this one of the Muse’s many helpful acts to mention here?’ and it remains unanswered because unasked in footnotes. The answer once again, I think, is that the framing discourse—what Dante says about his own task of writing as contrasted to the tale he tells and the tales others tell him within that tale—is subtly and alertly responsive to what it frames. This is not the only reference in Inferno 32 to the protective walls of a city, so massively important in Dante’s time—they were integral to the defensive system, like nuclear submarines today—and which bulk so large in his poem, because at Inferno 32, ll. 121–3, a reverse-Amphion is named: ‘… e Tebaldello, / ch’aprì Faenza quando si dormia’ (‘… and Tebaldello who opened up Faenza while it slept’);20 ‘aprì’ here reverses the ‘chiuder’ of the Amphion passage as Tebaldello betrayed the city of Faenza by, so to speak, circumventing its walls (he opened the city gates at night to the Bolognese enemy), whereas Amphion protected Thebes in erecting its walls. Both Amphion and Tebaldello are relevant to the central case of Inferno 32 and 33, the case of Ugolino, because, as Dante brings out towards the end of the count’s story, Ugolino was accused of having betrayed Pisa by damaging its defensive network: ‘Che se’l conte Ugolino aveva voce / d’aver tradita te de le castella’ (‘Even if Count Ugolino was said to have betrayed you by handing over your castles’).21 All this interaction between the story and Dante’s conduct of that story is concentrated at the great moment when Ugolino says that he did not weep but turned to stone inside (l. 49)—a long history of defensiveness from ancient Thebes to contemporary Pisa, humans within their circles of stone, implodes into the figure of the petrified father who couldn’t defend his own children (note the echo of Dante’s appeal, ‘Ma quelle donne m’aiutino’, in the futile plea of little Gaddo, ‘Padre mio, ché non m’aiuti?’, ‘You’re my father, why don’t you help me?’), walls within walls and at the heart another wall of stone.22

Another very characteristic happening in the poem comes a few lines further into Inferno 32:

dicere udi’mi: ‘Guarda come passi:

va sì, che tu non calchi con le piante

le teste de’fratei miseri lassi.’

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