Virgil And Dante Essay Research Paper In — страница 2

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body is in store” drink from the waters of forgetfulness. In Virgil’s scheme, the virtuous dead are reborn through the device of cleansing their memories, through a vague process of purification at Elysium. Most important of all, however, is the knowledge that the living Aeneas will go on to found Rome and create a line of Caesars. In contrast to the broad landscape of Virgil’s underworld, Dante’s Hell is a more highly structured and directed place and Dante’s entry into the Inferno is the occasion of great fear and anxiety. Dante’s fear is calmed greatly when he learns that his companion is to be the great Latin poet who had himself described the underworld in his own epic: Art thou then that Virgil, that fountain which pours Forth so rich a stream of speech?… O

glory and light Of other poets, let the long study and great love that Has made me search thy volume avail me. Thou are my Master and my author. (Sinclair, p. 27) After entering hell, Dante leads the reader downward through circles whose degree of damnation is based strictly on the sins committed in life. We learn that Virgil and in fact all the ancients whose lives were unstained by sin (the virtuous pagans) are confined to the first layer of hell, where they go unpunished and suffer only from the knowledge that they missed salvation by an accident of chronology. There are some other resemblance’s between the hell of Virgule and that of Dante, most of which can be attributed to the direct literary influence of the Roman author. The challenges that greet the living visitor to

the world of the dead are similar in Dante, and we could draw a comparison to the photos of Dido and Sychaeus in the moving story of Paolo and Francesca, the two lovers whose infidelity condemns them to the eternal frustration. But Dante’s reaction to the scenes before him is much more violent, and the plight of the damned in The Inferno is much more intense because their sufferings seem more physical and emotional. 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. (Sinclair, p. 79) 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. In comparison with

Virgil’s experience, Dante’s journey is an epic in itself, and the arrangement and order of Dante’s journey is an epic in itself, and the arrangement and order of Dante’s hell is complex enough to justify a study in itself. 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. Unlike Virgil, Dante makes explicit moral judgement 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. Judas is encountered in the lowest circle of hell, being ground between the teeth of Satan. Satan is a bizarre figure who is more pagan than

Christian in his appearance as of Dante had to resort to primitive images to convey the ugliness of the anti-Christ. Satan has three heads and needs all of them to inflict pain on his victims: With six eyes he was weeping and over three chins Dripped tears and bloody foam. In each mouth he crushed A sinner with his teeth as with a heckle and thus kept Three of them in pain…(Sinclair, p. 423) 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. Dante’s hell is a closed system, with no escape for the damned, whereas Virgil’s open underworld encompasses purgatory and paradise as well. There are many similarities between Virgil and Dante’s hells. However it is

evident they had different views of the afterlife ? Fitzgerald, Robert. The Aeneid. Translation of Virgil’s “The Aeneid”, New York: Random House, 1983. ? Sinclair, John D. The Divine Comedy of Dante: Vol: Inferno. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. ? Payton, Rodney J. A Modern Readers Guide to Dante’s Inferno. New York: P. Lang, 1992. ? Virgil, The Aeneid. ? Dante, The Divine Comedy.