by William Murchison

About the author: William Murchison is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Dallas Morning News.

Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil's coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree.The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier delle Vigne, who had been counselor to the emperor Frederick II. How, then, did he become a tree? The envy of others brought him down. "Glad honours turned to obloquies" (as the Dorothy L. Sayers' translation would have it).

So, in a scornful spirit of disgust, And thinking to escape from scorn by death, To my just self I made myself unjust.

Killed himself, in...