cond,
Flatterers, begrimed with ordure; in the third, Simonists, who were
stuck like plugs into circular apertures, with their heads downwards,
and their legs only discernible, the soles of their feet glowing with a
fire which made them incessantly quiver. Dante, going down the side of
the gulf with Virgil, was allowed to address one of them who seemed in
greater agony than the rest; and, doing so, the sufferer cried out in a
malignant rapture, "Aha, is it thou that standest there, Boniface?[25]
Thou hast come sooner than it was prophesied." It was the soul of Pope
Nicholas the Third that spoke. Dante undeceived and then sternly
rebuked him for his avarice and depravity, telling him that nothing but
reverence for the keys of St. Peter hindered him from using harsher
words, and that it was such as he that the Evangelist beheld in the
vision, when he saw the woman with seven heads and ten horns, who
committed whoredom with the kings of the earth.

"O Constantine!" exclaimed the poet, "of what a world of evil was that
dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor of the church into a
rich man!" [26] The feet of the guilty pope spun with fiercer agony at
these words; and Virgil, looking pleased on Dante, returned with him
the way he came, till they found themselves on the margin of the fourth
gulf, the habitation of the souls of False Prophets.

It was a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent and
weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies. Their faces were
turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their heads came foremost,
and their tears fell on their loins. Dante was so overcome at the sight,
that he leant against a rock and wept; but Virgil rebuked him, telling
him that no pity at all was the only pity fit for that place.[27] There
was Amphiaraus, whom the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes; and
Tiresias, who was transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in
a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on
the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses
over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived
in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and
Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus,
the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut
away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face
over his swarthy shoulders. Gu