Note 379 — CANTO XI.

Injury: They have left above them the circles of those whose sin consists in the exaggeration or misdirection of a wholesome natural instinct. Below them lie the circles filled with such as have been guilty of malicious wickedness. This manifests itself in two ways: by violence or by fraud. After first mentioning in a general way that the fraudulent are set lowest in Inferno, Virgil proceeds to define violence, and to tell how the violent occupy the circle immediately beneath them—the Seventh. For division of the maliciously wicked into two classes Dante is supposed to be indebted to Cicero: ‘Injury may be wrought by force or by fraud.... Both are unnatural for man, but fraud is the more hateful.’—De Officiis, i. 13. It is remarkable that Virgil says nothing of those in the Sixth Circle in this account of the classes of sinners.