Filippo Gianferrari
(Ph.D. Candidate,
University of Notre Dame)
May 12, 2016


Pride and Tyranny: An Unnoted Parallel between Purgatorio 12 and Policraticus 8.20-21

In his groundbreaking essay on Dante e Peraldo, Carlo Delcorno draws attention to a crucial gap in the scholarship on the purgatorial exempla: “Di fatto i commentatori antichi e solitamente anche quelli moderni non si pongono il problema di eventuali intermediari mediolatini.”[1] For example, Delcorno demonstrates that the section De superbia of William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus includes five of the same biblical examples later used by Dante on the cornice of pride in Purgatorio 12 (Lucifer, Saul, Rehoboam, Sennacherib, Holofernes).[2] In proposing this possible model, Delcorno also warns scholars that rather than investigating the sources of individual exempla they should search for antecedents to entire sequences of examples. Building upon this suggestion, I propose to integrate Delcorno’s finding with another possible source of inspiration for Dante’s selection of examples of pride, namely Book 8 of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. As I will argue, this source introduces an innovative perspective on Dante’s representation of pride.

In Policraticus 8.20-21, John argues in favor of the lawful duty to kill a tyrant by providing an encyclopedic list of examples of tyrannicide, drawn from pagan and Christian sources. Among others, John includes the biblical examples of Nimrod, Saul, Holofernes, Sennacherib, and the non-biblical one of Cyrus.[3] In Purgatorio 12 Dante presents the following biblical exempla of pride: Lucifer, Nimrod, Saul, Rehoboam, Sennacherib, Cyrus, and Holofernes. Policraticus 8.20-21 therefore features nearly the same series of biblical examples – and almost in the same order.[4] John of Salisbury’s series is nearly identical to that of Peraldus and Dante and chronologically it may represent the primary source. Most importantly, it is the first and only instance, at least before Dante, in which these particular biblical stories are presented as examples of the tyrant’s ill end. The parallel between the biblical examples of Policraticus 8.20-21 and Purgatorio 12 illuminates a political dimension of Dante’s illustration of pride that has been largely overlooked – with the exception of mythological giants and female characters, all of his examples of pride are tyrants.

Several critics in the past have argued for Dante’s familiarity with John of Salisbury’s work, which would dovetail with the popularity of the Policraticus in fourteenth-century Italy, especially among juridical theorists.[5] Furthermore when one considers John of Salisbury’s theological and moral characterizations of tyranny, more similarities with Dante’s representation of pride appear. John argues that a good prince is imago quaedam divinitatis, whereas a tirannus is the Luciferianae pravitatis imago.[6] Like Lucifer, the tyrant commits the crime of betraying God’s majesty.[7] The fact that Dante identifies the origin of pride with Lucifer’s rebellion against God may reveal an intriguing nexus between the moral vice of pride and the political vice of tyranny. John elaborates on the relationship that unites the two vices. When commenting on Judith’s prayer to God, John points out that Judith desires not merely to cut off Holofernes’s head but his very superbia.[8] According to John, the tyrant is prideful because he replaces God’s kingship with his own kingship, whereas the good princeps is humble because he accepts his role as God’s minister, at the service of the common good.[9] Dante introduces the same contrast between rex iustus and tyrannus in his double set of examples on the first purgatorial ledge – he first proposes David and Trajan as examples of humility in Purgatorio 10 and then, in opposition to them, he presents the series of tyrants as examples of pride in Purgatorio 12. Furthermore, through his examples John elucidates that the end of the tyrant is always confusion and misery.[10] Dante seemingly repeats John’s conclusion first by representing Nimrod as “quasi smarrito,”[11] and then by providing the same examples of the violent ends met by famous prideful individuals–like Saul, Rehoboam, Sennacherib, Holofernes, and Cyrus–that are also in John’s list of tyrants.

A ‘vertical’ reading of this canto’s co-numeraries also supports such a political reading of Dante’s representation of pride in Purgatorio 12:[12] Inferno 12 is the canto of the tyrants, punished in the river Phlegethon, whereas Dante’s celebration of Christian philosophers and theologians in Paradiso 10-14 culminates in Paradiso 13.95-96 with the model of the wise king, Solomon, who was “re, che chiese senno / acciò che re sufficïente fosse.” The tyrants in Inferno are punished chiefly for their violence against others, i.e. for their actions. Purgatorio 12 would thereby complete Dante’s overview of tyranny by explaining the vicious intentio behind the tyrants’ violence, namely, their prideful desire to replace God’s kingship with their own. Instead, in Paradiso Dante presents wisdom as the source of good kingship and endorses the belief that kings should be philosophers.[13] Such a notion is also central to John of Salisbury’s political theory.

In closing, I would like to point out that the importance of Policraticus 8.20-21 for interpreting Dante’s selection of examples in Purgatorio 12 exceeds–though it does not transcend–the question of its direct influence upon the poet’s representation of pride. The ideological model of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus discloses the political message of Dante’s representation of pride – a tyrant is the political manifestation of pride and a powerful indicator of the moral corruption of human society. According to the Policraticus, God allows a tyrant to dominate a people in retaliation for his subjects’ moral decay. As a result, the tyrant could be overthrown through the spiritual means of repentance and penance.[14] Although such a spiritual understanding of tyranny reaches far beyond John’s Policraticus, as it was rooted in the Bible and the Glossa ordinaria, John’s work had the crucial role of giving it systematic treatment.[15] Dante was likely aware of this theory and, through the canti of humility and pride, he draws the reader’s attention to the devastating political results that derive from a lack of timor Dei in human communities, as well as to the social and political significance of each citizen’s moral discipline. Finally, the political perspective on Dante’s treatment of pride suggested by the Policraticus explains the reason for the puzzling definition of this vice as the desire to diminish one’s neighbor that Virgil provides in Purgatorio 17.115-117: “il superbo, appunto per esser suo vicin soppresso, / spera eccellenza, e sol per questo brama / ch'el sia di sua grandezza in basso messo.”[16]

By foregrounding the potential interference between ethical and political determinants in Dante’s choice of exempla, my note is intended as an invitation to further inquiries into the still understudied influence that John of Salisbury’s Policraticus exerted on Dante’s political thought – in particular, as it relates to Dante’s development of a theory of monarchy and tyranny across the Purgatorio and the Monarchia.


[1] Carlo Delcorno, “Dante e Peraldo,” in Exemplum e letteratura: tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bologna: Mulino, 1989), 195-257, 204. See also Delcorno,“Dante e l’exemplum medievale,” Lettere italiane 35 (1983): 3–28; and Delcorno, “Dante e il linguaggio dei predicatori,” Letture Classensi 25 (1996): 51–74.

[2] Delcorno, “Dante e Peraldo,” 210-12.

[3] Citations from the Policraticus and references in notes are from the edition by Clemens C. J. Webb, Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive nugis curialium et vestigis philosophorum (1909: reprinted Frankfurt a.M.: Minerva, 1965), 2 vols.

[4] Two major differences in the Policraticus’s series of examples are: 1) John’s series is enriched by several other examples that are not mentioned by Dante; 2) Holofernes is mentioned after Saul rather than after Cyrus.

[5] See, for instance, Umberto Bosco, “Adrian IV and V,” in Dante vicino (Caltanissetta-Rome: Sciascia, 1979), 378-391, Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1953), 364; André Pézard, “Du Policraticus à la Divine Comédie,” Romania 70 (1948): 1–36; Martín González Fernández, “Corona in capite. Juan de Salisbury y Dante Alighieri,” Revista española de filosofía medieval 10 (2003): 207–218; Diego Quaglioni, “Commento” to Dante, Monarchia 1.12.12, in vol. 2 of Opere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 2014), 1016; and, in the same volume, Claudia Villa, “Commento” to Dante, Epistola 11.4, 1559. On the late medieval diffusion of the Policraticus see Ammon Linder, “The Knowledge of John of Salisbury in the Late Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali 18 (1977): 315–66; Diego Quaglioni, “‘Nembroth primus fuit tyrannus.’ ‘Tiranno’ e ‘tirannide’ nel pensiero giuridico-politico del Trecento italiano: il Commento a C. 1,2,16 di Alberico Da Rosate (c. 1290-1360), Annali dell’Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici 6 (1979): 83–103; and Walter Ullmann, “The Influence of John of Salisbury on Mediaeval Italian Jurists,” English Historical Review 59 (1944): 382–97.

[6] Pol. 8.17,778a. An excellent contextualization of John’s distinction within the medieval political thought is in Lidia Lanza, “Luciferianae pravitatis imago: il tiranno tra alto e basso Medioevo,” in “Ei autem qui de politia considerat…” Aristotele nel pensiero politico Medievale (Barcelona-Madrid: FIDEM, 2013), 139-180, see in particular 141-153. For the analysis of the historical and political circumstances that might have influenced John’s theory of tyrannicide see Giancarlo Garfagnini, “Legittima ‘potestas’ e tirannide nel Policraticus di Giovanni di Salisbury,” Critica Storica 4.14 (1977): 575-610.

[7] Pol. 3.15,512d.

[8] Pol. 8.20,795c.

[9] Pol. 3.15,512c; 8.17,778d; 8.18,785d–786c; and 8.21, 800b.

[10] Pol. 8.21, 797a.

[11] Purg. 12.35. As Simone Marchesi reminds me, in Inferno 31.74 Virgil calls Nimrod “anima confusa.”

[12] On the definition of ‘vertical reading’ see George Corbett and Heather Webb eds., Vertical Readings in Dante’s “Comedy” (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publisher, 2015).

[13] Dante already discusses this notion in Convivio 4.6.17-19 and 4.16.5.

[14] Pol. 8.21, 797a.

[15] See Quaglioni, “Nembroth.”

[16] For a more comprehensive discussion of Dante’s peculiar representation of pride see Fiorenzo Forti, “Superbia e superbi,” in ED, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/superbia-e-superbi_%28Enciclopedia-Dantesca%29/ (access March 30, 2016).