Walking With Dante25 Mai 2025

Placing And Misplacing Your Classical Ancestors: PURGATORIO, Canto XXII, Lines 94 - 114

At the end of their first conversation, Virgil and Statius reconstruct limbo. They transform it into a neighborhood where all the lost, classical writers live.

They also transfer limbo's sighs from the damned to the poet Dante and potentially to his reader. Where have these great authors gone?

And if their texts are one way to God, how many ways to redemption have then been lost with them?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for the ironic and complex conclusion to Virgil and Statius' conversation in PURGATORIO, Canto XXII. We end at a place of the final misreading and misquotation: that of COMEDY itself.

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

[02:25] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XXII, lines 94 - 114. If you'd like to read along or continue the conversation with me, please find the comment section for this episode on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[04:31] The reconception of limbo over the course of COMEDY.

[09:56] The Roman authors in the list of those lost.

[17:48] The Greek authors in the list of those lost;.

[21:02] The characters from Statius' poems who are apparently in limbo.

[24:55] The displacement of Manto in COMEDY: the final misreading and misquotation in a canto full of them.

[27:57] Rereading the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XXII, lines 94 - 114.

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