The Old Man Of Crete PART ONE--A Statue Rises From Four Other Texts: Inferno, Canto XIV, Lines 94 - 120

Walking With Dante

We come to one of the strangest moments in INFERNO. While Virgil may have claimed that stream burbling out of the wood of the suicides was the most astonishing thing seen so far, we've never encountered anything like Virgil's explanation for the hydraulics of hell.

First off, there's a giant statue. It's in Crete. In Mount Ida, to be exact. It's made out of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and terra cotta. But it's really made out of passages from the prophet Daniel, Ovid, Virgil himself, and St. Augustine.

There's nothing quite like the Old Man of Crete. He's certainly the most difficult bit of symbolism since those three beasts on the hill that Dante-the-pilgrim tried to climb in Canto I of INFERNO.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for the first of two podcast episodes on this elliptical and ultimately baffling passage from INFERNO. Seven hundred years of commentary haven't been able to solve it. We won't either. But we'll start with a look at the statue itself and its source background. Sounds dry? No way! This is Dante. It's all surprising.

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

[01:11] My English translation of this passage: INFERNO, Canto XIV, lines 94 - 120. If you want to find them written out, they're on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[03:30] The first source for the Old Man of Crete: the prophet Daniel. (Particularly Daniel 2:31ff.)

[06:09] Dante-the-poet's specific alterations to the text from Daniel.

[07:20] Biblical interpretations for the passage from Daniel in the medieval (and patristic) age.

[10:28] The second source for the Old Man of Crete: Ovid's Metamorphoses.

[11:35] The third source: Virgil's own Aeneid.

[13:00] The fourth source: St. Augustine's recounting of a tale from Pliny the Elder's Natural History.

[14:03] Two strange details about the statue: its terra cotta foot and its turn away from Damietta.

[22:18] Many commentators see this as the first time Dante, our poet, fully engages in myth-making. No way!

[24:11] In the end, Dante's vision of hell has a human component: the tears of the Old Man of Crete. Which explain the hydrolics of the underworld! And give it a human dimension.