SOURCE: Cioffi, Caron Ann. “The Anxieties of Ovidian Influence: Theft in Inferno XXIV and XXV.” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 77-100.

In the following essay, Cioffi analyzes Ovid's influence on Dante, focusing on Dante's adaptation of images of transformation from the Metamorphoses in two cantos of The Divine Comedy.

Ogne primaio aspetto ivi era casso: due e nessun l'imagine perversa parea; e tal sen gio con lento passo. 

(Inferno xxv, 76-78)

“… somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs. …” 

(Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

Many critics of Inferno xxiv and xxv focus on Dante's engagement with Ovid,¹ and rightly so. Although Dante merely meets Ovid in a crowd in Inferno iv, in Inferno xxv the Florentine poet issues a boast to the author of the Metamorphoses that separates him from...