The Old Man Of Crete PART ONE--A Statue Rises From Four Other Texts: Inferno, Canto XIV, Lines 94 - 120

Walking With Dante · Jun 23, 2021 · 27m

We come to one of the strangest moments in INFERNO. While Virgil may have claimed that stream burbling out of the wood of the suicides was the most astonishing thing seen so far, we've never encountered anything like Virgil's explanation for the hydraulics of hell.First off, there's a giant statue. It's in Crete. In Mount Ida, to be exact. It's made out of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and terra cotta. But it's really made out of passages from the prophet Daniel, Ovid, Virgil himself, and St. Augustine.There's nothing quite like the Old Man of Crete. He's certainly the most difficult bit of…