The fourth bolgia: the diviners and soothsayers walk in silence, weeping, their heads twisted completely backward on their necks — their faces looking toward their backs, unable to see forward. They must walk backward to go forward. Those who claimed to see the future are denied sight of the present. The image is exact and grotesque: the body itself becomes a living negation of the sin's pretension. Dante weeps at the sight — and Virgil rebukes him sharply: is pity alive here? Compassion for the condemned is a form of impiety, a second-guessing of divine justice. The rebuke is one of the harder moments in the poem and has troubled readers ever since: does Virgil mean it, or is this itself a kind of infernal distortion of right feeling?
Virgil catalogs them: Amphiaraus the seer of Thebes, who was swallowed by the earth; Tiresias, who was changed to a woman and back; Aruns the Etruscan haruspex; the prophetess Manto, whose story Virgil uses to give an extended account of the founding of Mantua — his own city — with particular emphasis that it was founded without augury, as if to distance his native city from the sin of divination. Eurypylus, Michael Scot the wizard, Guido Bonatti, Asdente the cobbler. Virgil urges haste: the moon is already setting, and they have work to do.