Classical Horror in Dante's Inferno XXV
             Dante Alighieri's Inferno is a piece of classical literary horror, influenced primarily by the classical writers Ovid and Virgil. Alighieri, as a poet, refined the classic techniques of horror to an art.[01] A shrewd and imaginative poet, he used graphic images to appease the appetite of the common reader while not neglecting their need for imaginative cultivation. His unique blend of image and substance is demonstrated best in two cantos in the Inferno, Canto XIII (The Wood of the Suicides) and Canto XXV (The Den of the Snake-Thieves), and it is in these two cantos that we see Alighieri as the master of the art of horror.
             In discussing Alighieri's technique of creating horror in these two cantos, one would also note that he was greatly influenced by the image-evoking techniques of Ovid, Virgil, and other classical poets.
             Canto XXV is the second of two cantos in this part of hell, the den of thieves. It is important to realize Aliqhieri's poetic motives for creating a torture for petty thieves as painful and grotesque as this one. Fraud, as Virgil explained in canto XI, is a basic degeneracy of God's gift of intelligence for private gain. Theft, being a type of fraud, is, in Alighieri's mind, a subversion of God one of the worst types of fraud (as it is one of the lower levels of hell). The punishment that Alighieri chooses for the thieves is horrifying and ironic. In two different situations t thief horribly mates with serpent, and either mutates or transmutates. It is ironic that Alighieri portrays the thief as similar to the serpent in nature: as the thief uses his stealth and cunning to steal material goods, the snake uses his guile and deceit to kill. We can also see that Alighieri wanted to suggest that the thieves, who, in their lifetimes stole many things, are now given the punishment t!
             hey so richly deserve: to have their most valuable possessions taken away from them, their i...