Poor Virgil, put in his place over and over again, ever since the fourth of the malebolge, the evil pouch of the fortune tellers, when he had to rewrite his own epic, THE AENEID. Four cantos of humiliation!

He's now had his final humiliation (for now) as he's learned that he shouldn't have ever trusted those demons. But the journey must go on! How? In those dear footprints we saw at the end of Canto XXIII, of course.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we begin to figure out way out of the sixth of the evil pouches, the pouch of hypocrisy in the big eighth circle of fraud; and as we make our way to the astonishing landscape of the seventh pouch. We start out in the strangest way: with a gorgeous bit of lyric poetry.

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

[01:20] My English translation of the passage: Inferno, Canto XXIV, lines 1 - 21. If you'd like to read along, you can find my translation on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[03:34] The sheer beauty of this passage: its structure, rhythm, and classical allusions.

[13:20] The peasant-shepherd who comes out of his hovel? Who exactly is he?

[14:44] The first answer is easy. The shepherd is Dante. Or is he?

[19:32] Who else is this shepherd? Jesus? God? Virgil?

[21:48] Although the peasant doesn't have much to steal, others have a lot--namely, Virgil and Ovid.

[23:03] Three possible interpretations--two common in commentary and the last my own--of this opening passage from Inferno, Canto XXIV.