Dantes Divine Comedy

Aeneas’ first concern is with the fate of his friends, then with meeting his father once more: the philosophical and religious significance of sin and death is nothing to him, and there is no moral judgment implied in the fate of the departed. In Dante’s Inferno, on the other hand, there is a systematic differentiation of the landscape, and each progressively lower circle of hell implies a deadlier sin. The quality of punishment given out to the sinners is thus increased as Dante’s descend, and Dante’s compassion for the dead lessens as he moves downward to the bottom of hell.

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In each mouth he crushed a sinner with his teeth as with a heckle and thus kept three of them in pain…(885) As if to balance his references to the Christian and classical worlds, Dante places Cassius and Brutus alongside Judas in the mouth of Satan, as all are betrayers. Judas is encountered in the lowest circle of hell, being ground between the teeth of Satan. (878)

Yet Dante is only at the beginning of a long and complex series of encounters, each of which represents a more completely and painfully damned group of sinners. At one point, Dante is so moved that he faints: While the one spirit said this the other wept so that for pity I swooned as in death and dropped like a dead body. Most important of all, however, is the knowledge that the living Aeneas will go on to found Rome and create a line of Caesars. Unlike Virgil, Dante makes explicit moral judgment on each of the individuals he meets, and the damned encountered range from historical figures, to contemporary popes and poets, to the greatest sinner of them all: Judas Iscariot.

A central concern of many of Aeneas encounters is whether or not the burial rituals have been carried out; the unburied are not even allowed to cross the River Styx, and those whose rituals have not been properly performed seem to suffer some kind of anguish on that account. The main purpose of Aeneas’ visit to the underworld is to see his father, and the encounter with Anchises is one of the high points of the Aeneid. (877) After entering hell, Dante leads the reader downward through circles whose degree of damnation is based strictly on the sins committed in life.

For example, there are periodic challenges to the living as they walk through hell, and the boatman warns Virgil, “It breaks eternal law for the Stygian craft to carry living bodies. There are many similarities between Virgil and Dante’s hells. (831)

Virgil’s first descriptions of the underworld are dramatic and turbulent, and there is even a series of symbolic fates that are medieval in their abstraction: And pale Diseases and sad Age are there. But all Virgil’s dead are condemned to the same hopeless fate, and it is only the memory of life, which torments them. Conscious of this, Aeneas apologizes to Dido for deserting her at the behest of the gods; unfortunately, Dido repudiates him and joins Sychaeus, her former mate.

Significantly, the damned are rigorously classified and placed in circles according to the serious the their sin, as interpreted by the theology of the church in the Middle Ages.

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Approximate Word count = 1278
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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