Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe

The line is a shout by Plutus. Plutus was originally the Roman god of wealth, but in the , Dante has made Plutus into a repulsive demon who guards the fourth circle, where souls who have abused their wealth through greed or improvidence are punished. The full strophe, plus the following four, which describes Dante's and Virgil's entire meeting and confrontation with Plutus reads: The scant information that can be gleaned from the text is this: • Virgil understands the meaning ("And that benignant Sage, who all things knew..."), and is replying. • That the line is just the beginning of something else ("Thus Plutus with his clucking voice began..."). • It is an expression of anger ("And said: "Be silent, thou accursed wolf / Consume within thyself with thine own rage."). • That it has the effect of a threat to Dante ("And that benignant Sage, who all things knew, / Said, to encourage me: "Let not thy fear / Harm thee; for any power that he may have / Shall not prevent thy going down this crag."). ==Possible explanations==

The only word with fairly obvious meaning is "", namely Satan; which comes from the Hebrew word (), which translated literally means "the adversary". The earliest interpretations Some interpretations from the earliest commentators on the Divine Comedy include: • The word "pape" might be a rendering of Latin , or from Greek (). Both words are interjections of anger or surprise, attested in ancient authors (comparable to the English "damn!", or just "oh!"). • The word "" could be an Italian version of the word for "", the Hebrew letter () (compare Phoenician and Greek ). The consonant shift here is comparable to that in , the Italian version of the name Joseph. In Hebrew, also means "number one" or "the origin that contains everything". It may also be interpreted as a metaphor for the "head", "the first and foremost". This was an attribute for God in late medieval expressions, meaning "the majesty" (of God). "Alef" was also a medieval interjection (like "Oh God!"). Abboud Rashid's theory Abboud Abu Rashid, the first translator of the Divine Comedy into Arabic (1930–1933), interpreted this verse as a phonetic translation of the spoken Arabic, "", meaning "The door of Satan, the door of Satan, proceed downward!". According to some scholars, although Dante did not speak Arabic, he could have drawn some inspiration from Islamic sources. Doubts arise, however, because the meaning of this interpretation does not really match the reaction of Dante and Virgil (anger and fear), nor Virgil's answer, and Dante directly indicts Muhammad (or Mahomet) as a spreader of religious schism. The Hebrew theory Some commentators claim that the sentence is phonetic Hebrew, "". This would be the opposite of the sentence that Jesus spoke in the Gospel according to St Matthew 16:18, "...and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it". The meaning of this utterance would be that Hell (Satan) has conquered. The second interpretation, elaborating on the first, is: "" ("No peace, Satan! No peace, Satan! To the sword!"). According to Giovanni Ventura, Dante's intention was to hide Philip IV of France behind Plutus, god of greed, and that was the reason why Plutus was made to speak French instead of Greek. This interpretation implies a transposition of the tonic accent, for metrical purposes, from the 11th to the 10th syllable, from "" to "", similarly to what happens at line 28, where the tonic accent shifts from "pur lì" to "pùr li". asserts that the words are the phonetic transcription of a sentence in the medieval Flemish dialect of Bruges (), written as "" or "" and pronounced as "" or "" (This pronunciation, characteristic of Bruges and its region of West Flanders, is attested since 1150–1200 until the present day.) Dante would clearly indicate that he heard these words "with clucking voice" because of the guttural pronunciation of "" (especially the "L" — in Flemish/Dutch as in English, "" is indeed the ""), typical of that dialect. By the phenomena known as anaptyxis and perhaps paragogy, typical of the Tuscan dialect of his day (as in "salamelecco" from As-salamu alaykum, also in modern Italian usage, and in "amecche" from Hebrew "amech" or "amcha" in Inf., XXXI, 67), Dante arrives at the transcription found in the poem. Dante might have used specifically the Flemish dialect of Bruges because of the intense commercial relationships that existed between Florence and Bruges since the 13th century (Plutus being the god of wealth). The poem includes two references to Bruges and further references to the Tuscan families involved in business there. The meaning in Flemish would be "Father Satan, father Satan, help!", where "Pape" refers to the priest at the head of a parish. (The word for "Pope" would be , but it is very unlikely that Dante would have known Flemish.) The verse would then allude to the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 16 and Matthew 21–23), and its intended meaning would be to condemn the exercising of temporal power by the Western Church. ==Sources==