The affinity between Ciacco's pronouncement in Inferno 6 and Forese Donati's lines in Purgatorio 23 is not only generated by the repeated prophecy of Florence's demise. Just as the ostensible disconnect between Ciacco's sin and his speech organized a demonstration of the correlation between gluttony, identity, and civic duty, so too the peculiar selection of a place dedicated to punishing gluttons for a conversation about body and soul will reveal itself to articulate gluttony's crucial role in human reproduction and salvation. As Dante will learn when he nears the top of the purgatorial mountain, body and soul are first joined when God infuses a soul into the embryo—formed from male and female contributions that are themselves the result of the digestion of food. This explanation is delivered in a memorable and much-discussed monologue by the Roman poet Statius, who responds to the pilgrim's query about the shades’ bodies made thin by a lack of food, despite no longer requiring earthly sustenance: “Como si può far magro / là dove uopo di nodrir non tocca?” (How can thinness occur where there is no need for nourishment?; Purg. 25.20–21). At this prompting, Statius reveals a comprehensive embryology that demonstrates how the process of eating leads first to the production of human bodies, then to the infusion of human souls, then to the death of the body, the projection of souls into shades, and finally, to the reunification of body and soul at the end of time.