8, 698: “ equos brevi moderari ac flectere,” Caes. 8, 367: “ geminas acies huc,” to turn, direct, Verg. 4, 265 “ 10, 236: lumina a gurgite in nullam partem,” id. In gen.: “ animal omne membra quocumque vult, flectit, contorquet, porrigit, contrahit,” Cic. Just as the loser sits behind, “repeating the throws,” so too is Virgil tracing the footsteps of a path that could have been his had the dice been different.1. Thus, there is a constrast as stark as that between the winner and the loser in a game of dice as there is between Dante and Virgil in this moment, and every step along the journey of The Divine Comedy. However, lest we forget, that is the realm in which Virgil properly belongs, a realm in which prayer is “disjoined from God.” Virgil explains to Dante that “there where I affirmed that point, default couls not be amended by prayer, because the prayer was disjoined from God” (“ e la dov’ io fermai cotesto punto,/ non s’ammendava, per pregar, difetto, perche ‘l priego da Dio era disgiunto” VI.40-42). This is made explicit further on when Dante asks if his prayers can do them any good, because he recalls a line in Virgil’s Aeneid in which the Sybil tells Palinurus to “cease to dream that heaven’s decrees may be turned aside by prayer” (“ desine fata deum flecti sperare precando” VI.376, qtd. It makes sense, then, that they should abandon Virgil just the way the onlookers do in the simile, for he cannot provide them this service. The “earnings” which the souls are soliciting from Dante are prayers to speed them on their way up Mount Purgatory upon his return home.
I would argue that associating Virgil with the a zara loser is the implicit third term in this epic simile. While mechanically, this statement certainly holds true - there is no formal assignment of a character to the figure of the loser in the simile - we know that there is one more character present during this scene. In his commentary on these opening twelve lines, Singleton comments that “ figure of the loser, thouhg serving to make the whole scene more graphic, finds no correspondence in the second term of the simile” (114). In the tercet which follows Dante’s description of these events, he likens himself to the winner and the souls of those who died by violence to the onlookers seeking a share of his earnings. Meanwhile, the loser is left behind, “disconsolate, repeating the throws and sadly learns” (“ dolente, repetendo le volte, e tristo impara” VI.2-3).
He does not stop, but listens to this one and that one each to whom he reaches forth his hand presses on him no longer, and this from the throng he defends himself” (“ qual va dinanzi, e qual di dietro il prende,/ e qual dallato li si reca a mente / el non s’arresta, e questo e quello intende / a cui porge la man, piu non fa pressa e cosi da la claca si difende,” VI.5-9). Dante opens Canto 6 of Purgatorio with an epic simile about a pair of gamblers who have just finished a game of dice, the medieval version of which was called a zara. Dante describes how everyone who was standing around watching the game crowds around the winner: “one goes in front, one plucks him from behind, and at his side one brings himself to mind.
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