Strofades

Description

In Canto XIII of the Inferno Dante mentions the Strophades in a mythological comparison: just as the Trojans were driven from those islands by the Harpies, so the suicides are forced to flee continually through their own wood, tormented by those same monsters. The note to verse 10 clarifies the reference to the Virgilian episode (Aeneid III 209-257), in which the Harpies befoul with their excrement the tables of the Trojans who have stopped on the Strophades islands, forcing them to flee. The name of the Strophades, pronounced by Virgil in a passage that describes the very Harpies who in Canto XIII infest the wood of the suicides, thus serves to root the infernal landscape in a precise classical precedent.