
The analogy between towers and giants casts the nobles who built the urban towers of Duecento cities as prideful and arrogant, men who pursued a will to dominance like that of the giants. The feet of the giants are on the floor of the ninth circle, while their torsos and heads stick up over the far edge of the eighth circle, thus giving the appearance of towers. Instead what he sees are the enormous figures of the giants who stand in a circle around the “well” - “pozzo” ( Inf. But what the pilgrim sees in the distance are not towers. This is not a surprising error, for fortified towers belonging to rival magnate families were a hallmark of Duecento cities. Seeing tall structures in the distance, the pilgrim thinks that he sees towers. As a group, the giants function as anticipations of Lucifer: while not as evil as the king of Hell, the giants too are guilty of having rebelled through hubris against an all-mighty divinity. Some of the giants - not Nembrot, however - are to some small degree still capable of the “reasoning of the mind” (“argomento della mente” in verse 55). They are not animate death, as Lucifer is. The giants are less completely estranged, less completely devoid of cognition and understanding, less completely consigned to the category of hulking and unthinking brute matter than Lucifer. Inferno 31 features giants, classical and biblical, who are lesser approximations of Lucifer (named for the first time in Inferno 31.143 and for the second and last time in Inferno 34.89). Inferno 31 also serves to anticipate the very bottom of Hell, the lowest point of the universe toward which all matter - all “weight” - tends: “lo mezzo / al quale ogne gravezza si rauna” (the center to which all weight is drawn ). Inferno 31 is a transitional canto, a pause in the downward journey that marks the transition to the ninth and lowest circle of Hell. the social analogue to the linguistic fall is betrayal: the misuse and corrosion of the bonds that tie humans into social and familial consortia.however, Dante punishes Nembrot not with linguistic diversity, as in all previous versions of the story, but by assigning him a non-language that communicates non-sense.linguistic diversity, “confusion of tongues”, is the punishment meted out to Nembrot and his followers for their presumptuous building of the Tower of Babel: thus, in these texts - in Genesis, in City of God, and in De vulgari eloquentia - difference is punishment.the story of the Tower of Babel and of the linguistic differentiation that followed: from Genesis 11:1-9, to Augustine ’s City of God 16.4, to Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia 1.7.the presence, among the giants, of Nimrod (Nembrot for Dante), the biblical builder of the Tower of the Babel.the interweaving of classical and biblical in the presentation of the giants (this is the same pattern that we will find in the presentation of the exempla of the vices and virtues in Purgatorio).the Garisenda tower of Bologna and Dante’s early sonnet Non mi poriano.towers - like the fortified towers of the magnate families in Duecento cities - are symbols of power, of the will to dominance and of overweening pride.Inferno 31 anticipates Inferno 34 the giants are anticipations of Lucifer.
