[4] Ironical; these youths all being members of the company known as the brigata godereccia or spendereccia, the joyous or spendthrift brigade. [5] The use of rich and expensive spices in cookery. CANTO XXX. Eighth Circle: tenth pit: falsifiers of all sorts.—Myrrha.—Gianni Schicchi.—Master Adam.—Sinon of Troy. At the time when Juno was wroth because of Semele against the Theban blood, as she showed more than once, Athamas became so insane, that seeing his wife come laden on either hand with her two sons, cried out, “Spread we the nets, so that I may take the lioness and the young lions at the pass,” and then he stretched out his pitiless talons, taking the one who was named Learchus, and whirled him and struck him on a rock; and she drowned herself with her other burden. And when Fortune turned downward the all-daring loftiness of the Trojans, so that together with the kingdom the king was undone, Hecuba, sad, wretched, and captive, when she saw Polyxena dead, and woeful descried her Polydorus on the sea-bank, frantic, barked like a dog,—to such degree had grief distraught her mind. But neither the furies of Thebes, nor the Trojan, were ever seen toward any one so cruel, whether in goading beasts or human limbs,[1] as I saw two shades pallid and naked who, biting, were running in the way that a boar does when from the sty he breaks loose. One came at Capocchio, and on the nape of his neck struck his teeth, so that dragging him he made his belly scratch along the solid bottom. And the Aretine,[2] who remained trembling, said to me, “That goblin is Gianni Schicchi, and rabid he goes thus maltreating others.” “Oh,” said I to him, “so may time other not fix his teeth on thee, let it not weary thee to tell who it is ere it start hence.” And he to me, “That is the ancient soul of profligate Myrrha, who became her father’s lover beyond rightful love. She came to sinning with him by falsifying herself in another’s form, even as the other, who goes off there, undertook, in order to gain the lady of the herd,[3] to counterfeit Buoso Donati, making a will and giving to the will due form.” [1] No mad rages were ever so merciless as those of these furious spirits. [2] Griffolino. [3] Buoso Donati had died without making a will, whereupon his nephew suborned Gianni Schicchi to personate the dead man in bed, and to dictate a will in his favor. This Gianni did, but with a clause leaving to himself a favorite mare of Buoso’s, the best in all Tuscany. And after the two rabid ones upon whom I had kept my eye had disappeared, I turned it to look at the other miscreants. I saw one made in fashion of a lute, had he but only had his groin cut off at the part where man is forked. The heavy hydropsy which, with the humor that it ill digests, so unmates the members that the face corresponds not with the belly, was making him hold his lips open as the hectic does, who for thirst turns one toward his chin, the other upward.