Canto 31 opens with a row of towers. Except a second glance reveals they’re not towers at all, but giants. They stand perfectly still at the border of the 9th circle, infernal guardians and humbled sinners, stripped bare of the hubris that led them here.
The 9th circle - the last circle - punishes betrayal, a sin that expresses both the duplicity of fraud and the cruelty of violence, the two categories of sins found in lower hell. Below lies Lucifer himself, the first traitor, who rebelled against his father out of jealousy, too proud to accept the same amount of love as humans.
The choice of the giants as guardians of the 9th circle anticipates the final encounter with Lucifer and the sin he represents. Pride, audacity and the arrogance of thinking that one can be God-like is the reason they are all here.
Dante dedicates a few verses at the beginning of the canto to the description of the new landscape: covered by a mist that confounds the air and makes everything inscrutable, not quite night but no longer daylight.
Suddenly a horn is heard in the distance and, looking in the direction of the sound, Dante makes out the shape of what looks like the towers of a fortress in the distance. It looks, he says, like the walled town of Monteriggioni, which sits on top of a hill and is surrounded by turrets that make the hill look like it’s wearing a crown (the town still exists and they make great wine - would recommend).
Confused, Dante turns to Virgil:
‘Master, what city is this?’
It’s not a city and those aren’t towers, Virgil says. They are giants, submerged waist-deep in the well that surrounds the 9th circle.
The vast majority of the giants placed here are of Greek mythology origin. Dante calls them “the dreadful giants, who are under threat/ from highest Jove whenever he wields thunder.”
This description is in reference to the Gigantomachy, the war between the giants and the Olympians. When Zeus slayed his father, the Titan Chronos, and released his siblings from the father’s bowels (Chronos ate his kids, it’s a long story), a battle between the Olympians and the Titans - also called Titanomachy - ensued. The Olympians defeated the Titans and took over control of the universe. Shortly after, the giants rose up against the Olympians in a second struggle for power, which also ended with the victory of the Olympians.
But the first giant we meet is Nimrod, the mythical king of Mesopotamia, who in the Bible is known as the great-grandson of Noah. Some non-biblical sources identify him as the king who ordered the construction of the Tower of Babel, a building that would reach the heavens to prove that there was no place humans couldn’t reach, and subsequently that they were just as good as God. The story goes that God sees what they’re doing and confounds their speech so that they can no longer cooperate, and the tower remains unfinished.
The story is mainly an origin myth meant to explain the existence of multiple languages, but in the Christian tradition, it has become about hubris in the vein of the fall of Lucifer narrative.
Dante keeps the language element - about which he writes extensively in one of his other works, De Vulgari Eloquentia. He describes Nimrod as halfway submerged into the circular well that surrounds the 9th circle and chained. Upon seeing the two travellers, Nimrod tries to say something, warn them to turn back probably, but only gibberish comes out of his mouth.
The other giants can’t speak at all.
After Nimrod utters whatever he can manage, Virgil essentially tells him to shut his dumb mouth and guides Dante towards another even bigger giant, this time a speechless one. He is chained from the neck to the waist - and probably all the way down, although Dante can’t see the rest of his body because it’s inside the well. The giant struggles against his chains, fiercely, though to no avail. His name is Ephialtes, Virgil explains, and he is here because he “in pride, was quick to prove his power against the majesty of Jupiter.”
This is in reference to the legend that Ephialtes went to Macedonia to move the mountains of Ossa and Pelion, pile them one on top of the other, and climb on them to reach Olympus and challenge the gods.
Like we saw with blasphemy, where Capaneus was punished for cursing against Zeus and not the Christian God, Ephialtes is also being punished for rising up against Zeus, which once again brings into question the “christianity” of the poem.
The other giants are here for the same reason.
Dante tells Virgil that he would like to speak to Briareus, who in the classical tradition was said to have 50 heads and 100 arms. But Virgil denies him this pleasure, explaining that Briareus is on the other side of the circle and that he has been reduced to human form anyway.
This detail work in part as an explanation as to why Dante doesn’t spend more of the poem on the giants as well as a further exploration of the punishment that these guardians/sinners are subjected to.
Since pride was at the root of their deeds, they are now stripped of everything that gave them reason to think themselves worthy of divinity.
Dante and Virgil move on to a third giant, Antaeus, who according to legend was born too late to play a central role in the Gigantomachy, so he is not bound by chains and is still able to speak. He is nonetheless here because he was known for ruining crops and attacking cattle in the valley of Zama in northern Africa. He was eventually defeated by Hercules, who picked him up and held him above his head so that he could no longer touch the earth, which is where he drew his strength from.
Virgil asks Antaeus to pick him and Dante up and lay them on the other side of the well in the 9th circle. To secure this favour, he leverages Dante's status as a living poet who will go back into the world and write about those who helped him in his journey. It’s unclear if this detail has any effect on Antaeus, but he does offer his hand and places them in the land of Lucifer and Judas.