Who He Is
The old man who guards the shore of Purgatory is a solitary with a long white beard, whose face the four stars that only the first men saw illuminate, to the point that it seems the sun lights him. The text gives him no name. It says that he left life at Utica and that he has a wife, Marcia, in the circle where he lives, and the tradition of commentators identifies him with Cato of Utica, the pagan whom the same tradition says killed himself rather than surrender to Caesar. It is this tradition, and not the verse, that fixes the name. What the poem shows of him in two cantos is an authority: he asks, listens, refuses the appeal to affection, obeys the order of heaven and gives what must be given. For Dante he is the first obstacle of the mountain and its first master, who teaches him through whom the passage opens and, in the next canto, what delay costs.
Trajectory
In Canto I of Purgatory, the old man sees two figures arrive at his shore and asks how they got out of the eternal prison against the course of the dark river, and whether the laws of the abyss were broken. Virgil makes Dante kneel and answers: a lady of heaven sent them, and the man he brings seeks liberty, as one knows who for its sake refuses life. Virgil invokes Marcia, who is in the circle where he lives, with chaste eyes, and still begs him with a look, and the old man separates two requests:
Ma se donna del ciel ti move e regge, / come tu di’, non c’è mestier lusinghe: / bastisi ben che per lei mi richegge, but if a lady of heaven moves you and guides you, as you say, there is no need for flattery: it is enough that you ask me in her name.
He yields to the name of the lady of heaven, not to affection. He orders Dante girded with a smooth rush and his face washed, so that he will not go before the first minister, who is of paradise, with his eyes covered in mist, and he explains that the island produces only rushes on soft mud, because no other plant resists the blows of the water. The rising sun will show the easier climb. Then he vanishes. It is Virgil who carries out the gesture, and Dante's wonder is at the plant that is reborn the same in the same place:
Quivi mi cinse sì com’ altrui piacque: / oh maraviglia! ché qual elli scelse / l’umile pianta, cotal si rinacque / subitamente là onde l’avelse, there he girded me as it pleased another; oh wonder! for just as he chose the humble plant, so it was reborn at once in the very place from which he had uprooted it.
In Canto II of Purgatory the old man returns, and it is his voice that scatters the festivity. Dante had asked Casella for the love song that eased his sorrows; the friend began, and Virgil, Dante and the newly arrived souls were so content that nothing else touched their minds, until the old man shouts. What he orders is not a path but a direction and a motive: to go to the mountain and strip off the crust that keeps God from being seen.
In the first day on the mountain, Dante meets again his musician friend Casella and asks him to sing to ease the weariness of the newly arrived soul; the whole company, Virgil included, stops to listen, forgetting the way, until Cato appears and rebukes the delay, in the first warning of the place: the beauty that consoles is not false, but it too can turn into delay, and there one does not stop even to hear a beautiful song:
Correte al monte a spogliarvi lo scoglio / ch’esser non lascia a voi Dio manifesto, run to the mountain to strip off the crust that does not let God be manifest to you.
The souls drop the song and flee toward the slope, like frightened doves in a pasture, not knowing where they will end up. Dante and Virgil leave as quickly as they do.
così vid’ io quella masnada fresca / lasciar lo canto, e fuggir ver’ la costa, / com’ om che va, né sa dove rïesca; / né la nostra partita fu men tosta, thus I saw that fresh throng leave the song and flee toward the slope, like one who goes without knowing where he will come out; and our departure was no less prompt.
Themes Embodied
Cato embodies Redemption as the discipline of haste: the mountain begins with the demand that one leave the shore and go. What weighs in him is time, and the Ante-Purgatory penance that the following cantos measure in years and in thirties is that of delay. Politics is in him through the name of Utica and the freedom that the text says he left in exchange for life. Purgatory therefore opens with a pagan and an order, and the order is the canticle's first lesson: to purge is to remove from oneself what keeps one from seeing God.
The guardian separates the request from the authority with precision: Marcia pleased him in life and no longer moves him; the lady of heaven is enough, spoken in her name. When he interrupts the song, he gives no path; he gives direction to the mountain and a motive. It is the opposite of Virgil's affection, which appeals to tenderness, and the poem places him at the gate precisely for this reason: the mountain does not open through flattery.
Divergent Readings
The text sustains two readings of what Dante seeks, when Virgil says liberty: the one the mountain gives, far from sin, or the one Cato defended with his life. The canto does not choose, and the poem does not explain why a pagan guards the door of a mountain of salvation. The identification is tradition's, and the reasons tradition establishes it belong to the commentary, not to the verse.
Relationships
- Virgil: the guide who appeals to him through tenderness and hears the authority, and who carries out the order of the rush.
- Dante: the living man whose arrival the old man finds strange, and who receives from him the rush and the washed face.
- Beatrice: the lady of heaven, whom the old man invokes without naming, and who opens the passage by name.