Day 13: Harpies and Forests

So we are still amongst those who have sinned violently, but these are the sinners who defile themselves through suicide.  Dante and Virgil, with Nessus guiding them away from the blood river find themselves among a dark forest.  Sounds familiar doesn't it.  I was reading the notes from Hollander's Inferno translation, which has some very insightful analysis.  I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to connect the dark forest from Canto 1, with this dark forest.  Sometimes we need someone with much more knowlege than ourselves to see the forest through the trees (sorry, the bad joke was just screaming out).  Is Dante trying to tell us something about how bad his state of mind was when he began this journey?  Before we jump to that, let me explain a little about this particular dark forest. 
Perched throughout these trees are the harpies.  The harpies play a fairly memorable role in Virgil's Aenid. Aeneas and his crew land on the small island of Strophades.  Once landed they proceed to begin slaughtering the abundant livestock on the island, and prepare them for a feast.  These animals, however, have protectors on the island in the form of the harpies.  Virgil descibes them as having heads of women and bodies of birds, and twice while Aeneas and his crew are trying to eat do they swarm in and attack them and, in a move any city dwellar dealing with pigeons can relate to, defectate all over the feast.  The harpies in Canto 13 feed upon the leaves of the trees in the grove.  What is horrific, and what Dante finds out by accident when he breaks off a thorn of a tree, is that these trees actually entomb the souls of suicides. When the thorn breaks off, a rivulet of blood trickles down and Dante is forced into a conversation with the soul inhabitting that tree.  So then the harpies are actually consuming parts of the soul trees, which echoes the animalistic nature consuming the the human nature in Canto 12.
But back to Dante and the dark woods.  The question that Hollander poses is a fascinating one.  Is Dante suicidal when he is having his mid-life crises?  It would be hard to imagine that it is an act that he would pursue beyond having the impulse.  In fact, i'd argue it was pretty amazing that Dante would even admidt to having such thoughts.  In medieval Europe, suicide was considered one of the gravest sins.  Now this wasn't always the case.  In ancient greece and during Caesar's time in Rome, the act of defiant suicide was a form of heroism.  One would rather end one's life than be subserviant to a ruler or cause, and this would be a form of honor.  Dante knows this and holds Cato, the most famous of the Roman suicides, with respect and gives him an honored place in the afterlife (he acts as the guide to souls entering purgatorio.  kind of like Charon in Inferno).  But clearly during Dante's time, suicide is a one way ticket to hell, with no chance of escape.  Also interesting in his commentary, Hollander posits that trees hold a special place in the sacrificial imagery of Christianity.  After all, a cross is nothing but a tree.  So would Dante consider his own martyrdom the ultimate act of sacrifice?  It is a bit nebulous as far as what exactly Dante the poet's role is compared to Dante the protagonist.  It sure does seem to me that Dante's use of forests both in the beginning and here is not coincidence.