The Noun Mena in the Divine Comedy

Abstract

THE noun mena occurs twice in the Divine Comedy; and its Latin etymon minae is found in Dante's Epistle VI. In Inferno, xvii, Vergil suggests that, while he himself is making final arrangements for aerial transportation to the circle below, Dante take a look at the souls of the Usurers, who are frantically trying to beat out and brush off the steadily falling flakes of fire that torture them and to ease themselves from the burning sand on which they are sitting; he says to Dante: 'Go, and see their mena.'l With the sorry picture of their agonized gestures in mind, it is not surprising that mena, here, has struck a number of commentators as almost selfevidently having the sense of the cognate nouns dimenamento and dimen'o and the verb dimenare; namely, (often wild) waving of the hands and thrashing about. This is the stage in the semantic development of minae Classical Latin for 'impending juts' or 'overhangs' in which it meant threatening gesticulations used in driving live-stock: giving finally dimenamento, dimenio and dimenare on the one hand, which preserve the lively picture of manual motions, and on the other hand the weakened significations of merely 'leading, conducting, taking' of modern Italian menare, French mener. Whatever meanings the noun mena may have had in the transitional period, it now retains little, if any, trace of the vivid connotations still preserved in dimenamento, dimento and dimenare (and French se de'mener); and has taken on the more abstract and rather sinister import of the French mene'e, that is, 'machination, scheming, intrigue, underhand dealing.' The overwhelming majority of modern Italian commentators assert, or assume, that the word in Dante's time and usage did not have the force of dimenamento or dimenso; in fact Tommaseo seems to have been the last Dante scholar of importance who so explained it without reservation.2 The meanings usually given by commentators are quite abstract, ranging from 'condition, nature, state, quality' through 'manner, custom' to the more concrete 'occupation.' This last meaning, and related ones,3