Crime Classification by Dante and the FBI
September 14, 2021* marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy. I read the Inferno to commemorate the occasion, and it struck me on this reading that Dante had created an early version of a hierarchical crime classification system. How does Dante’s system compare with that used by the FBI in the United States?
A Little Historical Background
The conflicts in Italy that led up to the Divine Comedy can be traced in part to the Investiture Controversy of 1076. This controversy concerned who should be able to install bishops, abbots, and popes. Should these appointments, which often came with a great deal of land and money, be made by the church or by the ruling nobility? The factions in Italy became known as the Guelphs, who supported the pope, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor.**
The fighting was especially fierce in Florence around the time of Dante’s birth in 1265. Each side, as it gained power, inflicted increasingly gruesome punishments on the other. In 1266, after previously been exiled twice (in 1248 and in 1260), the Guelphs, with help from papal and French armies, defeated the Ghibellines and expelled them from Florence.
You might think that by that point Florence would have been tired of conflict and lived in peace. But no—with the Ghibellines vanquished, in the 1290s the Guelphs split into “black Guelphs” and “white Guelphs.”*** Dante belonged to the latter group, which turned out badly for him when in 1301 the previously-exiled black Guelphs retook Florence. Dante was condemned (in absentia, since he wisely did not show up for the trial) to be burned to death on a trumped-up charge of taking bribes. He spent the remainder of his life in exile.
But Dante had his revenge. While in exile, he wrote a poem—a long, long poem—in which he consigned various black Guelphs and Ghibellines to eternal torment. So Vanni Fucci, a black Guelph who, according to Dante, stole holy objects from a sacristy and then stood by as another man was accused of the crime, is bitten by snakes, incinerated, and then brought back like a phoenix to be bitten again. If Dante had not written about him, no one would remember Vanni Fucci today (other than possibly a few scholars of medieval Italian history). Vanni lives on, more than 700 years later, thanks to Dante placing him the eighth circle of the Inferno.
Crime Classification by the FBI
Before getting to Dante’s classification, let’s look at how the FBI classifies crimes (you can read about this in my book Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics). The major crimes, ordered from most to least serious, in the system established by the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1929, are:
Criminal homicide
Rape
Robbery
Aggravated assault
Burglary
Larceny/theft
Motor vehicle theft (note that sometimes this is moved up in the hierarchy; if a car is stolen that contains a package on the back seat, the crime is counted as motor vehicle theft).
Other crimes, such as fraud or simple assault, are not tabulated in the system used from 1929 to 2020. These crimes are counted in the National Incident-Based Reporting System, the required format for crime reporting as of January 1, 2021. Although NIBRS does not use a hierarchical classification, the Crime Data Explorer, and cities that report crime statistics, still display crime statistics in this hierarchical order in which murder is the most serious crime, theft is less serious, and fraud is mentioned in a different category (if at all).
Dante’s Crime Classification
Figure 1. Map of the nine circles in the Inferno. Public domain.
Now let’s look at how Dante classified crime. Figure 1 shows a map of the nine circles in the Inferno, where the first circle represents the “least serious” sins and the ninth circle contains the persons who committed the heinous sin of treachery.
The sins corresponding to crimes that are tabulated in NIBRS are in the seventh and eighth circles (I shall skip sins that do not correspond to modern-day crimes). The categories are, from most serious (closer to the ninth circle) to least serious (closer to the first circle):
Falsification (cantos 29 and 30). The innermost ditch of the eighth circle includes alchemists (falsifiers of science), imposters (falsifiers of persons), counterfeiters (falsifiers of money), and perjurors (falsifiers of words).
Promoting fraud (cantos 26 and 27). The main example of a “counselor of fraud,” who used his position to advise others to engage in deceit, is Ulysses (remember, Dante was Italian and thought Rome was founded by Aeneas, who escaped Troy), who came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse.
Theft (cantos 24 and 25). Thieves such as Vanni Fucci are attacked by snakes and lizards. They stole other people’s sustenance during life; in the afterlife, their own sustenance (blood) is stolen by the snakes. The snakes are in fact other thieves, who have even their human form stolen from them as they transform into reptiles.
Public corruption (cantos 19, 21, 22, and 23). This includes graft, barratry (taking bribes or selling public office for profit), and simony (selling ecclesiastical offices for profit). These are not listed as crimes in NIBRS since most police departments do not handle them, but taking bribes is a felony under federal law.
Pandering and seduction (canto 18). Dante includes sex traffickers and seducers (who, it may be assumed, often committed sexual assaults) in the first ditch of the eighth circle. Dante appears to consider trafficking to be more a crime of avarice than a crime against women, but it seems fitting that Venedico Caccianemico, who sold his sister to a marquis to “have his way with her,” is scourged eternally by horned demons.
Violent crime (canto 12). Murderers and other violent criminals are immersed in a river of boiling blood.
Dante’s hierarchy is almost in reverse order from that of the FBI! Murder is the least serious of the crimes he mentions and is in the seventh circle along with other crimes of violence. The eighth circle contains crimes of fraud and deceit, which include sex trafficking and theft. The most serious crimes in the eighth circle, according to Dante, are promoting fraud and deceit (in the eighth ditch) and falsification (in the tenth ditch).
Figure 2. Dante and Virgil among the falsifiers, by Gustave Doré. Public domain.
Why did Dante consider fraud worse than murder? He tells us why, in lines 25-27 of canto 11 (Longfellow’s translation): “But, because fraud is man’s peculiar vice, / More it displeaseth God; and so stand lowest / The fraudulent, and greater dole assails them.” To Dante, fraud and deceit were uniquely human sins, perversions of the gifts of reason and speech. For that reason, the counterfeiters, perjurors, and spreaders of misinformation, who corrupted science and truth while alive, spend eternity with their bodies and minds corrupted by disease (Figure 2)—”such sicknesses as here there’d be if all contagions born of summer heat … were brought together in one single hole.”
Copyright (c) 2021 Sharon L. Lohr
Footnotes and References
*Some sources list the date as September 13, 1321 since Dante passed away sometime during the night.
**It’s unclear, though, as the conflict progressed, how many people who joined a faction knew which principles they were supposedly fighting for. The Guelphs tended to be merchants and the Ghibellines tended to be noblemen; some who joined a party merely labeled anyone they did not like as a Guelph or a Ghibelline.
***Apparently the white and black Guelphs were both pro-pope, but to differing degrees. The black Guelphs strongly supported the papacy, while the white Guelphs were against the church having too much temporal power. Note that Dante also included some white Guelphs in the Inferno, while some black Guelphs and Ghibellines were in the Purgatorio and Paradiso.
References
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated, edited, and introduced by Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin Books.
Dante Alighieri. The Inferno. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with an introduction and notes by Peter Bondanella. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics.
Digital Dante (2019). A multimedia collaboration between the Columbia University Libraries and Department of Italian. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/
Sharon Lohr (2019). Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Guy P. Raffa (2007). Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Inferno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Also see the multimedia website Danteworlds at the University of Texas.