Euphrates and Tigris

Description

In the XXXIII canto of the Purgatorio, Dante sees two streams springing up before him that remind him of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and the Tigris, which, according to the account in Genesis (2, 10-14), rose from the Earthly Paradise from a single spring, together with two other rivers, the Pishon and the Gihon. Dante himself, in the Commedia, reduces the four biblical rivers to two, giving them names of his own invention. The simile is in all likelihood inspired by a passage in Boethius's Consolatio philosophiae (V, prose I, vv. 3-4), where it is said that the Tigris and the Euphrates are born from one source only to divide into unjoined waters. Dante's mention therefore serves to express the wonder of one who beholds two twin rivers dividing after a common source, and it prefigures the description of their slow parting, compared to that of two friends who are reluctant to leave one another.