Knowledge of Dante Wins It All

Last night, I was delighted to see, on a Jeopardy re-run, that the Final Jeopardy answer, in the final episode of the 2006 Tournament of Champions, involved Dante.

The Final Jeopardy category was World Literature. The answer* posed to the final three champions was:

"Poet, by that God to you unknown,
lead me this way. Beyond this present ill
and worse to dread, lead me to Peter's gate
and be my guide through the sad halls of Hell."

(That is John Ciardi's translation; I think Jeopardy used a different one, and also elided some of the text.)

The correct response was "What is The Divine Comedy?" Only one champion got it right -- Michael Falk, a research meteorologist from Milwaukee. The other two guessed Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost. Mr. Falk had wagered enough on Final Jeopardy that his knowledge of Dante won the whole tournament, bringing him a prize of $250,000.

The giveaway in the quote, for those who know anything about The Divine Comedy, is the address to a "Poet." The Roman poet Virgil leads Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory, before Beatrice takes over as his guide. The precise location of the quoted lines is Canto I, ll. 130-35, of The Inferno, the first of the three books that make up The Divine Comedy. In Dante's words:

. . . "Poeta, io ti richeggio
per quello Dio che tu non conoscesti,
a cio ch'io fugga questo male e peggio,

che tu mi meni la dov' or dicesti,
si ch'io veggia la porta di san Pietro
e color cui tu fai cotanto mesti."

*As Jeopardy fans know, the "answers" on the show are really questions, and vice versa.