What It Is
Cocytus is the lake of ice at the bottom of Hell, the last river of the infernal hydrography. In it the shadows are held fast up to the point where shame appears, livid, chattering their teeth like storks, each with its face turned downward; the mouth bears witness to the cold, and the eyes to the sorrowful heart. In Canto XXXII of Inferno, Dante sees no water on the ground, he sees a lake that the ice makes look like glass, and neither the Danube in Austria nor the Don under the cold sky ever wove in winter such a veil. The ice divides into zones that follow betrayal: Caina, Antenora, Ptolomea and Judecca, and the souls pass from having their faces turned downward, in Caina and Antenora, to lying on their backs, in Ptolomea, and at last to being covered entirely, transparent like straw in glass. At the center, with the upper half of the chest above the ice, stands Lucifer.
Where It Appears
The origin of Cocytus is told in Canto XIV of Inferno, in the story of the old man of Crete, a statue of metals whose cracks drip tears that together pierce the cave and descend forming the rivers of Hell, down to Cocytus:
da indi in giuso è tutto ferro eletto, / salvo che ’l destro piede è terra cotta; / e sta ’n su quel, più che ’n su l’altro, eretto. / Ciascuna parte, fuor che l’oro, è rotta / d’una fessura che lagrime goccia, / le quali, accolte, fóran quella grotta., from there downward it is all chosen iron, except for the right foot, which is baked clay; and it stands more upon that one than upon the other. Every part, except the gold, is cracked by a fissure that drips tears, which, gathered together, pierce that cave.
In Canto XXXII of Inferno, the poet confesses that he does not have the harsh and hoarse rhymes that befit the sad pit on which all the other rocks rest:
S’ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce, / come si converrebbe al tristo buco / sovra ’l qual pontan tutte l’altre rocce, / io premerei di mio concetto il suco / più pienamente; ma perch’ io non l’abbo, if I had harsh and hoarse rhymes, as would befit the sad pit upon which all the other rocks rest, I would press out the juice of my conception more fully; but since I do not have them.
In the same canto, Bocca refuses the only coin that the condemned of the earlier cantos asked of Dante, the remembrance of their name:
Del contrario ho io brama. / Lèvati quinci e non mi dar più lagna, / ché mal sai lusingar per questa lama, of the opposite I have desire. Get away from here and give me no more pain, for you know poorly how to flatter in this mire.
In Canto XXXIII of Inferno, the cold prevents the weeping from coming out: the first tears freeze and, like crystal visors, fill the whole hollow under the brow, and the grief, with no way out, turns inward and grows. Fra Alberigo asks Dante to remove the hard veils from his face, and Dante promises and does not do it. In Canto XXXIV of Inferno, the wind of Lucifer is the cause of the ice:
sì che tre venti si movean da ello: / quindi Cocito tutto s’aggelava. / Con sei occhi piangëa, e per tre menti / gocciava ’l pianto e sanguinosa bava, so that three winds were moving from him: from there all Cocytus was freezing. With six eyes he wept, and through three chins the tears dripped and the bloody slaver.
What It Means
After thirty cantos of fire, blood and strife, the bottom of Hell is cold and ends in silence, and the punishment is to be motionless. The ice makes betrayal the inverse figure of the heat of the passions that the upper Hell punishes: here the bond that was broken is that of blood, of country, of guests and of benefactors, and whoever broke it remains held in the place where he put himself. The origin in the tears of the statue gives Cocytus a second reading, that of a grief that history accumulates and that, as it descends, solidifies.
The ice explains the question that runs through the final part: what it means to place in the same lake the pity that Ugolino arouses and the hardness that Dante shows toward Bocca and Alberigo. In the cold, the pity that toppled the pilgrim in Canto V of Inferno no longer counts as his virtue, and it is Ugolino himself who demands it from Dante. The text supports both readings: the ice is the place where the rule of the place imposes itself on whoever passes through, or it is where the poet lets the pilgrim fall into contempt for the traitor.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Loyalty and betrayal, Sin.
- Themes of the work: Loyalty and betrayal, Sin.
- Characters: Lucifer, Ugolino, Dante.
- Neighboring symbols: the storm of the lovers, the punishment of element of the second circle, and Medusa, the other way of petrifying the gaze and the body.