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This is what I think of at 2 AM for a paper due at 9AM.
DISCUSS EATING YOUR OWN CHILDREN IN ORDER TO SURVIVE AS AN ABSENCE OF FREE WILL.
The latter circles of Hell hold much different characters than the beginning layers. Dante’s Hell works on a progressing scale where the harsher crimes are, respectively, more cruelly punished. Most of these crimes are ones of obvious choice and wrongfulness. There is one final, disturbing, account to observe. This is story is that of Count Ugolino. In 1284, Ugolino had become the “tyrannical master of Pisa”. After successfully defending Pisa from the attacking Genoa, the Count began to aggravate and argue with his allies, ultimately leading to him being convicted of treason by the Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. His punishment, in the physical world, was that he was locked in a room in a castle with his two sons to starve to death. (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Gherardesca family”)
After his death, Dante places him in the final, ninth Circle of Hell, not far removed from the great Satan himself. In Canto XXXIII, Ugolino is found gnawing on the skull of the very Archbishop that sentenced him to death, freezing in the ghastly cold that is the Ninth Circle. Soonafter, he tells his tale of how he landed so deep in Hell, starting from his sentencing. He describes the days and his sons’ cries for help and of hunger. He then describes watching each one of his sons die before him, eventually coming to a point he “…started groping over each; / and after they were dead, I called them for / two days; then fasting had more force than grief." (Canto XXXIII, 72-75) This is how the telling of the story ends, but Dante’s genius writing leaves us with the idea that the Count gave in to the forces of hunger through the use of foreshadowing previously in the passage. At one point, Ugolino tells Dante that his sons had said, “…Father, / it would be far less painful for us if you / ate of us; for you clothed us in this / sad flesh – it is for you to strip it off.” (Canto XXXIII, 59-62)
This crime is sickening in its own right, but it brings along with it an extremely interesting point. This man was ravaged by hunger, a feeling that most of humanity can relate to in some manner. Obviously Ugolino had experienced this feeling to an extreme extent – where he was “now blind” with hunger. One cannot honestly say that this action comes out of free will, as his primal instincts kicked in. All of humanity may find this act reprehensible, but very few people have come to a situation where they have been as wretchedly hungry as he was. Ugolino acted out of his purest and most primal of emotions, much like those who came before him in the earlier levels of Hell. What is the difference between being caught up in a moment of passion and love and a moment of fear and extreme hunger? Both parties act not based on rational thinking, which they both obviously possessed previous to this circumstance, but on pleasure principles. Ugolino was doing what he needed to do to survive, and as disturbing as that is to just about anyone reading, he did not choose to do so in any fashion.
DISCUSS EATING YOUR OWN CHILDREN IN ORDER TO SURVIVE AS AN ABSENCE OF FREE WILL.
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