Dante's Damned Flatterers

Readers find many things in Dante’s Inferno strange. But they find Dante’s treatment of the sin of flattery incomprehensible. Dante place flatterers far down in his hell, in the eighth of nine circles. How can flattery be worse than murder? Why did Dante place flatterers so far down in hell? What Dante terms flattery (and what we might call sycophancy) lands the sinners deeper in hell than sins such as tyranny, heresy, or even murder. How, we might ask, is Thaïs worse than Attila the Hun or Alexander the Great, tyrants who “plunged their hands in blood and plundering” (Inf. 12.105), but whose crimes are punished above in the seventh circle of hell?

Dante’s hell does not present sycophancy as a separate category of sin. Malebolge, the eighth circle of hell, has ten divisions, which include panderers and seducers, flatterers, thieves, sowers of schism, falsifiers, and hypocrites, among other sinners. The modern conception of sycophancy combines many of Dante’s categories of fraud. Modern readers of the Inferno recognize sycophantic behavior in the two flatterers named in this circle—Alessio Interminei, a courtier from Lucca, and Thaïs, a courtesan in Terence’s comic play, Eunuchus.

Dante’s punishment for flattery—immersion in feces—exploits the long-standing association of flattery with excrement. Full of crap while alive, in death flatterers are plunged into it. While the passage devoted to flatterers is short, it’s memorably pungent. Dante mocks Interminei’s filthy condition by quipping, “I have seen you before / with your hair dry,”[i] and the sinner’s response—to pat his crap-laden head—heightens the jest. The description of Thaïs is no less disgusting. Virgil, the Roman poet who guides Dante through hell, directs his charge’s attention to the besmirched Thaïs who scratches herself with her filthy nails.

Virgil adds that when Thais’s lover asks his servant if she expressed any gratitude for the gift he just sent her, the servant responds, “Yes, enormous." Her flattery lies in her boundless exaggeration. Simple thanks would have been sufficient, but the flatterer, ever intent on currying favor with the target, always inflates her response. She exaggerates her thanks for her lover’s gift in the hopes that an excess of gratitude may yet elicit more gifts in the future.

Dante, as he consigns sinners to grisly punishments on his descent through Hell, is often graphic in his descriptions. But his language in this section of the poem is downright crude. Excrement abounds in this episode, but Dante casts even harsher light on Thaïs as he describes the prostitute scratching herself with nails dripping with excrement. Even the word Dante uses for excrement—“merda”—is a dramatic departure from the usual language of epic poetry. The crudity of the language shows Dante’s contempt for flatterers. His language mirrors his disgust. Flattery inspires a coarser treatment and coarser language.

Dante, whose sense of community was powerful, reminds us of other ways of thinking of human experience. The poet’s lessons are as salient today as they were in his time. A recent article in the Washington Post, “Why Brown-nosing is the new norm,” makes this very point. Sins that are variants of fraud—lying, hypocrisy, flattery—have effects that go beyond the immediate situation. Fraud creates a culture in which all interaction is suspect, in which simple frank exchange cannot be taken for granted. For Dante, this kind of fraud not only injures the person deceived by a flatterer; it also affects the larger community. Flattery diminishes the trust on which the social order is based, and it ultimately threatens this order.