I know not if here I was too audacious that I only answered him in this strain, “Pray now tell me how much treasure our Lord desired of Saint Peter before he placed the keys in his keeping? Surely he required nothing save ‘Follow me.’ Nor did Peter or the others require of Matthias gold or silver, when he was chosen to the place which the guilty soul had lost. Therefore stay thou, for thou art rightly punished, and guard well the ill-gotten money that against Charles[1] made thee to be bold. And were it not that reverence for the Supreme Keys that thou heldest in the glad life still forbiddeth me, I would use words still more grave; for your avarice saddens the world, trampling down the good and exalting the bad. Of you shepherds the Evangelist was aware, when she that sitteth upon the waters was seen by him to fornicate with kings: that woman that was born with the seven heads, and from the ten horns had evidence, so long as virtue pleased her spouse.[2] Ye have made you a god of gold and silver: and what difference is there between you and the idolater save that he worships one and ye a hundred? Ah Constantine! of how much ill was mother, not thy conversion, but that dowry which the first rich Father received from thee!”[3] [1] Charles of Anjou, of whom Nicholas III, was the enemy. He was charged with having been bribed to support the attempt to expel the French from Sicily, which began with the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. [2] Dante deals freely with the figures of the Apocalypse: Revelation vii. The woman here stands for the Church; her seven heads may be interpreted as the Seven Sacraments, and her ten horns as the Commandments; her spouse is the Pope. [3] The reference is to the so-called Donation of Constantine, the reality of which was generally accepted till long after Dante’s time. And, while I was singing these notes to him, whether anger or conscience stung him, he violently quivered with both feet. I believe, forsooth, that it had pleased my Leader, with so contented look be listened ever to the sound of the true words uttered. Thereupon with both his arms he took me, and when he had me wholly on his breast, remounted on the way by which he had descended. Nor did he tire of holding me clasped till he had borne me up to the summit of the arch which is the passage from the fourth to the fifth dyke. Here softly he laid down his burden, softly because of the ragged and steep crag, that would be a difficult pass for goats. Thence another great valley was discovered to me. CANTO XX. Eighth Circle: fourth pit: diviners, soothsayers, and magicians.—Amphiaraus.—Tiresias.—Aruns.—Manto.— Eurypylus.— Michael Scott.—Asdente. Of a new punishment needs must I make verses, and give matetial to the twentieth canto of the first lay, which is of the submerged.[1] [1] Plunged into the misery of Hell.