Erisittone

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In the twenty-third canto of Purgatorio Dante places the name of Erisittone in a simile describing the thinness of the penitent souls. The authorized note on the passage clarifies that the figures in the scene appear "dreadfully thin, because of the perpetual hunger and thirst that constitutes their punishment"; the mention of Erisittone, drained by his own torment, thus serves to give a measure of the physical wasting away of those souls. Erisittone is therefore evoked solely as a mythical term of comparison, and is not presented as a character placed within a framework of Purgatorio: the text does not count him among the gluttons, but recalls him by analogy with their punishment.