Walking along the embankment above the burning plain, Dante is recognized by a shade who reaches up to clutch his garment. The face is so scorched he can barely see it — but the voice unmistakably belongs to Brunetto Latini, the great Florentine notary, encyclopedist, and rhetorician who was, in every sense that mattered, Dante's intellectual father. The encounter is one of the most emotionally complex in the poem. Dante's instinct is reverence: he wants to sit with this man, not stand over him. But Brunetto explains: if he stops moving, he must lie for a hundred years without brushing the fire, exposed. He runs beside the embankment, looking up at Dante, his face turned backward from its direction of travel — a secondary contrapasso for a sin that inverted nature.
Brunetto prophesies Dante's exile — the ingratitude of Florence toward its best citizens is an old pattern; Dante should be honored by their hostility, not broken by it. He is told to follow his star: his destiny is already written. Then Brunetto commends to Dante his own Tesoro — his encyclopedic book, his life's great intellectual work — saying: let my Tesoro live, in which I still live. The pathos is enormous: the man who shaped Dante is here, disfigured, running in Hell. What Dante owes him cannot be repaid or undone. The encounter ends as the group of sodomites approaches and Brunetto runs off with them — quickly, like a man running a race, like a winner, not a loser. The dignity he preserves in Hell is its own kind of grace, or at least its own kind of character.