The appalling fate of traitors, in Dante's Inferno

In the first of a non-chronological series on Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' we consider the punishments the great poet imagines for the various kinds of traitors.

Jul 08, 2025

Traitors frozen up to their chins in ice. Bottom right are Archbishop Ruggieri and Count Ugolino. By Gustave-Claude-Étienne Courtois - Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, CC BY-SA 4.0. As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases through our Amazon links. Click here for The WM Review Reading List.

In the first of a non-chronological series on Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' we consider the punishments the great poet imagines for the various kinds of traitors.

Why Dante?

In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri offers a rich presentation of Catholic doctrine—often specifically of the Thomist school—in poetic form.

In his 1921 encyclical In Praeclara Summorum, Pope Benedict XV wrote of the poet:

Wonderful, therefore, is the intellectual enjoyment that we gain from the study of the great poet, and no less the profit for the student making more perfect his artistic taste and more keen his zeal for virtue, as long as he keeps his mind free from prejudice and open to accept truth.
Indeed, while there is no lack of great Catholic poets who combine the useful with the enjoyable, Dante has the singular merit that while he fascinates the reader with wonderful variety of pictures, with marvellously lifelike colouring, with supreme expression and thought, he draws him also to the love of Christian knowledge, and all know how he said openly that he composed his poem to bring to all "vital nourishment."
And we know now too how, through God's grace, even in recent times, many who were far from, though not averse to Jesus Christ, and studied with affection the Divina Commedia, began by admiring the truths of the Catholic Faith and finished by throwing themselves with enthusiasm into the arms of the Church. […]
And you, beloved children, whose lot it is to promote learning under the magisterium of the Church, continue as you are doing to love and tend the noble poet whom We do not hesitate to call the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea. The more profit you draw from study of him the higher will be your culture, irradiated by the splendours of truth, and the stronger and more spontaneous your devotion to the Catholic Faith.

Written at what was, in many ways, the peak of our civilisation, it is a window into a more ancient world, animated by faith and thoroughly conversant with the mythos and wisdom of the classics. The latter two parts of his Comedy, Purgatory and Paradise, are beautiful and edifying monuments of literature which testify to the sublimity of the Catholic religion.

By contrast, the Inferno is a standing warning about the seriousness of sin, the contemptibility of the damned, and the reality of Hell. Most particularly, it testifies to the terrible possibility, which each one of us faces, of going there.

But Dante’s work can be intimidating, as it is full of allusions to history, medieval Italian politics, and the classical legendarium. While a grounding in the classics certainly makes it easier to appreciate the Comedy, a well-annotated and explained edition can open up that window and expand one’s mind, culture, and even virtue.

This is the first of several articles about the Comedy. It will not be a systematic or ordered explanation of the work: rather, we will publish overviews and comments on some of the most interesting parts of the work that seem relevant to our day.

If you like it, leave a comment and we’ll consider which aspect of the Comedy we could do next. Top contenders are:

Schismatics
The schema of Purgatory
Suicides.

The fate of traitors in Dante’s Inferno

It is no secret that we are living in an age of treachery: the Church is betrayed by those who claim to be her pastors; the nation is betrayed by those wo claim to be its rulers. Business is dominated by ruthless men, who treat others like the capital which they try to amass for themselves at all costs.

For this reason, it seemed fitting to start at the end of the Inferno, in the deepest ring of Hell, where the vilest sinners are punished: the traitors.

They are located at the centre of Dante’s vision of the earth, “supporting the converging weight of Hell” (32.3), is Cocytus—named after one of the rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology.

The poet opens the final three cantos by saying that he lacks “words grating and crude enough” to describe the “horrid hole” wherein traitors are subject to the eternal justice of God.

If I had words grating and crude enough
that really could describe this horrid hole
supporting the converging weight of Hell,
I could squeeze out the juice of my memories
to the last drop. But I don't have these words,
and so I am reluctant to begin.
To talk about the bottom of the universe
the way it truly is, is no child's play,
no task for tongues that gurgle baby-talk.

He says of those traitors within:

O misbegotten rabble of all rabble,
who crowd this realm, hard even to describe,
it were better you had lived as sheep or goats!

Dante’s Cocytus is not a river or a fiery pit, but a vast, frozen lake—chilled by the impotent flapping of Satan’s wings. Here, traitors are locked in ice and scourged by icy winds.

The lake—“more like a sheet of glass than frozen water”—is divided into four regions, according to the specific kind of loyalty each sinner betrayed:

Caina: Family
Antenora: Nation/city
Tolomea: Guests
Judecca: Benefactors/masters.

Betrayers of family and of nation

Caina is the place of punishment for those who betrayed their families, especially in the bitter feuds common in Dante’s time.

The “frigid, livid shades” of the traitors here are frozen up to their necks. Dante vividly describes how “their teeth clicked notes like storks’ beaks snapping shut.”

In keeping with Dante’s idea of the “contrapasso”—where the punishment reflects and reveals the nature of the sin—he meets a pair of brothers who feuded until they eventually killed each other in a fight over their father’s inheritance. He is also told that Mordred, the son of King Arthur, is present in this place.

… him who had his breast and shadow pierced
with one thrust of the lance from Arthur's hand

Dante and his guide Virgil pass rapidly onto the second region, Antenora, to see those who betrayed their nation, and he describes what he saw there:

Farther on I saw a thousand doglike faces,
purple from the cold. That's why I shudder,
and always will, when I see a frozen pond.

At the end of Canto XXII, on the border between Antenora and Tolomea—where those who betray their guests are punished—Dante and Virgil meet two traitors whose treachery spans both regions.

These are the shades of Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri.

Episcopal treachery

This is one of the most celebrated parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but also one of the gruesome. Both Ugolino and Ruggieri are frozen in ice, but the treacherous Archbishop is further punished by having his head chewed and gnawed forever by the man he starved to death.

Dante describes the closeness of the two traitors, and Ugolino’s “enthusiastic” fury, as follows:

… I saw two souls
frozen together in a single hole,
so that one head used the other for a cap.
As a man with hungry teeth tears into bread,
the soul with capping head had sunk his teeth
into the other's neck, just beneath the skull.
Tydeus in his fury did not gnaw
the head of Menalippus with more relish
than this one chewed that head of meat and bones.

Given how these last cantos are characterised by stasis and immobility, this encounter is striking in its vigour.

Ugolino belonged to a noble family of Tuscany, which was involved with the Ghibelline faction at the time. However, he and his son-in-law conspired to bring the Guelf party to power in Pisa. He later engaged in another conspiracy—this time being a coup to oust his son-in-law—with Archbishop Ruggieri.

However, this treacherous Archbishop betrayed the treacherous Ugolino—having him eventually imprisoned in a tower with his sons and grandsons. There, they were starved to death.

At the end of Ugolino’s monologue comes a passage which has long been subject to critical debate—the question being whether the Count is presented as having been driven to cannibalism before he died:

The fourth day came, and it was on that day
my Gaddo fell prostrate before my feet,
crying: ‘Why don't you help me? Why, my father?’
There he died. Just as you see me here,
I saw the other three fall one by one,
as the fifth day and the sixth day passed.
And I, by then gone blind, groped over their dead bodies.
Though they were dead, two days I called their names.
Then hunger proved more powerful than grief.

Either way, after his monologue, the narrative continues:

He spoke these words; then, glaring down in rage,
attacked again the live skull with his teeth
sharp as a dog’s, and as fit for grinding bones.

Our current crisis in the Church has largely been caused by bishops betraying the faith which they had been charged to preach to all nations.

But Ruggieri is not punished for this: he is punished for betraying a layman on a personal level. His “evil machinations” are condemned without qualification. Dante even calls for the islands of Capraia Gorgona to block the Arno River, and flood Pisa in vengeance for such crimes.

There is no hesitation or excuses made based on Ruggieri’s episcopal status—as if a bishop has a right to betray a mere layman. In fact, such treachery by a bishop is worse, given the exalted status of such a traitor.

As the man with the fullness of Holy Orders, he is responsible for preaching the truth revealed by God; this is why St Paul says that he must be “blameless,” for how can one preach truth, whilst engaged in deceit and treason? Similarly, he gives St Timothy requirements for others in Holy Orders—for example, saying that deacons should not be “double tongued,” and should instead be found “holding the mystery of faith in a pure conscience.” (1 Tim. 3.8-9)

Importantly, St Paul charges St Timothy of these, and of all who put themselves forward for Christian ministry: “Let these also first be proved: and so let them minister, having no crime.” (1 Tim. 3.10). Although a juridical “proving” is proper to superiors of such men, we are capable of forming cognitive judgments when we see treachery—whether of the faith, or of persons—and acting accordingly, especially when the good of others are involved. As St Thomas Aquinas himself says, specifically of treason and heresy:

For certain secret sins are hurtful to our neighbour either in his body or in his soul, as, for instance, when a man plots secretly to betray his country to its enemies, or when a heretic secretly turns other men away from the faith.
And since he that sins thus in secret, sins not only against you in particular, but also against others, it is necessary to take steps to denounce him at once, in order to prevent him doing such harm, unless by chance you were firmly persuaded that this evil result would be prevented by admonishing him secretly. (IIa IIae, Q. 33, A. 7)

The clergy too can betray the faithful—not just as a class, nor only in matters of faith, but on a personal level with individual laymen. And, as Dante shows, they too can damned for doing so.

We are all responsible for our personal integrity and respecting bonds of loyalty, whether to laymen or clerics, and whether we are laymen or clerics ourselves.

However, this is not the only instance of clerical treachery encountered in these final cantos of the Inferno.

Friar Alberigo and the premature loss of the soul

The more intimate and vile forms of betrayal, with the more chilling consequences, are punished further into the frozen lake and the closer to Satan.

As they progress through these colder and colder parts of Cocytus, they encounter the traitors of Tolomea, who are frozen with upturned faces, their tears frozen into hard shells over their eyes by the bitter wind.

Here, the weeping puts an end to weeping,
and the grief that finds no outlet from the eyes
turns inward to intensify the anguish:
for the tears they first wept knotted in a cluster
and like a visor made for them in crystal,
filled all the hollow part around their eyes.

Dante and Virgil pass another shade who calls out to them, asking them to break away the frozen crust for some momentary relief—“at least until the new tears freeze again.” Dante promises to do so, if the shade tells his story.

The story of the shade is a harrowing warning for all those who are engaged in any kind of treachery today.

His name was “Friar Alberigo.” Engaged in a family feud, he had invited his main enemies to his home for a meal, as a pretended gesture of reconciliation. However, when he gave the signal, his men murdered these guests and family members.

Dante expresses surprise, as he thought that Alberigo was still alive. Alberigo explains that certain forms of treachery cause a person’s soul to descend immediately into Hell, with a demon animating their body until the time of natural death.

"Oh, then!" I said. "Are you already dead?"
And he to me: "Just how my body is
in the world above, I have no way of knowing.
This zone of Tolomea is very special,
for it often happens that a soul falls here
before the time that Atropos should send it.
And that you may more willingly scrape off
my cluster of glass tears, let me tell you:
whenever a soul betrays the way I did,
a demon takes possession of the body,
controlling its maneuvers from then on,
for all the years it has to live up there,
while the soul falls straight into this cistern here;
and the shade in winter quarters just behind me
may well have left his body up on earth.”

Alberigo then refers to another two traitors—Ser Branca D’Oria and his accomplice—who had been absent from his body for so many years, that Dante accuses him of lying.

This Branca D’Oria murdered his father-in-law, Michel Zanche, when he was his guest. The vileness of treachery is made clear by Alberigo’s insistence that, while Zanche was also damned for other sins, Branca D’Oria and his accomplice left their bodies on earth and arrived in Tolomea before Zanche arrived in his allotted place.

This special punishment for such traitors is presented not as a rare anomaly, but as the norm. Regardless of whether this is theologically and philosophically possible, it serves as a stark illustration of the gravity of such sins, and a warning of the consequences.

The deepest pit: betrayal of benefactors and masters

In the final canto, the pilgrims move from Tolomea to Judecca, in which those who have betrayed benefactors or masters are completely encased under ice, in various contorted poses.

This final canto is one of immobility and impotence. Unlike the other sinners the pilgrims have encountered, the damned in Judecca are unable to speak or move. They are immobile and “fixed under ice,” having had all love or goodness extinguished within them.

Dante spends no time talking with such wretches: the betrayal of a benefactor is simply too vile and contemptible even for his usual denunciations. But given the rest of the poem, this silence is very noticeable—if not deafening.

The pilgrims simply walk over the frozen damned until they reach the terrible, three-headed person of Satan himself who sits at the center and bottom of Hell—and in fact of the whole of Creation—chewing the souls of Judas Iscariot, along with Brutus and Cassius (who were responsible for the murder of Julius Caesar).

He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins
were dripping tears all mixed with bloody slaver.
In each of his three mouths he crunched a sinner,
with teeth like those that rake the hemp and flax,
keeping three sinners constantly in pain;
the one in front—the biting he endured
was nothing like the clawing that he took:
sometimes his back was raked clean of its skin.
“That soul up there who suffers most of all,”
my guide explained, “is Judas Iscariot:
the one with head inside and legs out kicking.
As for the other two whose heads stick out,
the one who hangs from that black face is Brutus—
see how he squirms in silent desperation;
the other one is Cassius, he still looks sturdy. […]”

Caesar was Cassius’ friend and comrade, and Brutus’ benefactor—having pardoned and spared him after defeating him at Pharsalus. While these two sinners are punished for their treason, they also represent treason against the temporal power—which, like spiritual authority, is established by God and demands our loyalty and obedience.

Similarly, Judas is punished for betraying Christ, whilst also representing those who betray God, and the spiritual power of the Church. Dante is not equating Caesar with Christ, nor temporal with spiritual authority. But he draws an analogy between them to illustrate the enormity of treason in general, and against masters, benefactors and both divinely-established orders in particular.

Like the souls under ice, Satan is also presented as completely impotent. Just as evil is the absence of good, the most evil sinners in Dante’s schema—those who have betrayed their benefactors—are deprived of so much that made them rational in the first place. This recalls the Virgil’s words in Canto III:

“We are at the place where earlier I said
you could expect to see the suffering race
of souls who lost the good of intellect.”

Although his words really refer to the possession of God, the voluntary and complete rejection of “the good of intellect” seems to have led to a complete paralysis of the rationality on the part of these sinners. From a distance, Dante mistakes him for a windmill, rather than a living being—and when they draw near him, he is drooling and crunching the traitors without any sense of awareness of the pilgrims.

From those completely frozen under the ice, to Satan himself and those in his mouth, this kind of betrayal of ones benefactors and masters leads to the ultimate destruction of awareness of others, and of the human soul itself. Treachery—and, in fact, all sin—leads to a freezing of the soul, which destroys not only charity but even reason itself.

Although the vision is terrifying, the mindless Satan passively allows them to crawl down his gigantic hairy body in order to reach the exit of Hell and proceed to Mount Purgatory.

Conclusion

The Inferno stands as a warning to all of us, both in its general presentation of Hell, and in the punishments for particular kinds of sinners.

In a world as ruthless as ours, even many Catholics blind themselves—like the shades in Tolomea—convincing themselves that certain lines of conduct are necessary, justified, or too expedient to omit.

These cantos put a name on such “machinations”—treachery, treason, betrayal—and it places the traitors who pursue such machinations in the lowest, terrible and most contemptible part of Hell.

Dante shows the most extreme forms of treachery, often leading to murder—but lesser betrayals too can be grave, and even damnable.

Such treachery is aggravated when one betrays those with a special demand on our loyalty—such as family, countrymen, guests, masters or benefactors.

In the modern age, our masters might be comparable to our employers; our benefactors might be those who have given us opportunities, taken chances on us at their own expense, advanced us in our careers, helped us in time of need, defended our good name when under attack—and so on. Although these are old-fashioned words, they remain a reality today.

Pope Benedict XV concludes his encyclical on the importance of Dante’s work by pointing out deploring any system of education that banishes religion, or acts as if it is irrelevant:

If then Dante owes so great part of his fame and greatness to the Catholic Faith, let that one example, to say nothing of others, suffice to show the falseness of the assertion that obedience of mind and heart to God is a hindrance to genius, whereas indeed it incites and elevates it. Let it show also the harm done to the cause of learning and civilization by such as desire to banish all idea of religion from public instruction. Deplorable indeed is the system prevalent today of educating young students as if God did not exist and without the least reference to the supernatural.
In some places the “sacred poem” is not kept outside the schools, is indeed numbered among the books to be studied specially; but it does not bring to the young students that “vital nourishment” which it should do because through the principle of the “lay [secular] school” they are not disposed towards the truths of the Faith as they should be.

Because of this system of education, Dante’s work is prevented from achieving the “one purpose” he intended for it, as quoted by the pope:

[The] one purpose in his poem was “to raise mortals from the state of misery,” that is from the state of sin, “and lead them to the state of happiness,” that is of divine grace.

Like the whole work, these final cantos on the fate of traitors are a call to such persons—if their souls are still in their bodies—to repent, and to “sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee.” (John 5.14).

If you like this sort of thing, leave a comment and we will consider what part of Dante’s journey we could cover next: