1. What the Inferno? Burning Questions about Dante’s Hell

2. “Who is the narrator?” 0 Dante cast himself in this role. It would be no different if you wrote a short story and decided to make yourself the main character in it. (Perhaps with awesome talents or skills you do not normally possess.)

3. “Who is Master?” 0 The Master is Virgil. 0 He was the greatest of the Roman poets. 0 His Aeneid provided the pattern for the structure of Dante’s Hell. 0 Virgil was chosen as Dante’s guide through hell because Dante saw him as his master and inspiration for Dante’s poetic style.

4. “What circle is Canto 34?” 0 Canto 34 is the last segment in Inferno. It covers the 9 th circle of hell (the worst one), meeting Satan (aka Lucifer), and the escape back into the real world.

5. “How does Dante get in hell?” 0 Inferno opens on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300. 0 Traveling through a dark wood, Dante Alighieri has lost his path and now wanders fearfully through the forest. Here he encounters the ghost of Virgil, the great Roman poet, who has come to guide Dante back to his path, to the top of the mountain. 0 Virgil says that their path will take them through Hell and that they will eventually reach Heaven, where Dante’s beloved Beatrice awaits.

6. “Why/How can Dante leave hell?” 0 Simply put: he’s not dead. Thus, no judgment yet on his soul. He’s just visiting. 0 To escape hell, Virgil leads Dante on a climb down Lucifer’s massive form, holding on to his frozen tufts of hair. Eventually, the poets reach the Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) and travel from there out of Hell and back onto Earth. They emerge from Hell on Easter morning, just before sunrise.

7. “Why does the world seem to flip on Dante when he leaves hell?” 0 He passed through the center of the earth. So he’s climbing to the surface on the other side of it (in the Southern Hemisphere. 0 Dante, using Virgil as a mouthpiece, describes the center of the Earth as the point to which all weight falls. This depiction, and Virgil and Dante’s turnabout at the center, forms a fairly accurate account of gravity; such an understanding eluded many of Dante’s contemporaries.

8. “Who is the Devil Eating?” 0 Each of Lucifer’s 3 mouths holds a sinner— the three greatest sinners of human history, all “Traitors to a Benefactor.” 0 In the center mouth dangles Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. 0 In the left and right mouths hang Brutus and Cassius, who murdered Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate. 0 Brutus and Cassius appear with their heads out, but Judas is lodged headfirst; only his twitching legs protrude. The mouths chew their victims, constantly tearing the traitors to pieces but never killing them.

9. “ “Why are Brutus and Cassius being eaten by the devil?” 0 They murdered Julius Caesar. History tells us that these men did betray and murder Julius Caesar, but Caesar’s status as a great benefactor remains disputed. The explanation for their presence lies in Dante’s belief that Rome is the sovereign city, destined to rule the world both physically and spiritually. Just as Christ, whose church is centered in Rome, was the perfect manifestation of religion, Dante feels that Caesar was the perfect manifestation of secular government, as the emperor of Rome at the height of its power.

10. “What’s up with Judas being eaten head first?” 0 Judas has committed the greater sin (over Brutus and Cassius), and his head, rather than his legs, feels the constant chewing of Lucifer’s teeth. This would be more uncomfortable. 0 However, the fact that Brutus and Cassius suffer a punishment only slightly less harsh demonstrates Dante’s belief that church and state play equally important roles, each in its own sphere. Throughout Inferno, Dante has expressed the view that church and state should remain separate but equal. Thus, he finds an arrangement for the final circle of Hell that both completes his vision of the moral hierarchy and makes one last, vivid assertion of his politics.

11. “Why is Lucifer upside down?” 0 When Lucifer fell from Heaven, he plunged headfirst into the planet; his body stuck in the center [of the Earth]. Think of it like diving off a diving board into water…with the diving board being up in heaven.

12. “What is ‘Dis’?” 0 Lucifer, Dis, Satan—no one name does justice to his terrible nature. So he’s got several of them.

13. “What’s up with the levels & punishments?” 0 The punishments of the sinners are symbolic and always constructed so as to correspond allegorically to the sins that they committed in life. The Lustful, for example, who were blown about by passion in life, are now doomed to be blown about by a ferocious storm for all of time. 0 Dante’s narration follows strict doctrinal Christian values. Dante considers violence less evil than fraud: of these two sins, fraud constitutes the greater opposition to God’s will. God wills that we treat each other with the love he extends to us as individuals; while violence acts against this love, fraud constitutes a perversion of it. A fraudulent person affects care and love while perpetrating sin against it.

14. “If it’s hellfire, why is there ice??” 0 Just as fire can be extremely unpleasant, so can freezing to death. 0 Ice also freezes people – literally. You cannot move and are stuck in place. It is a prison. Symbolically, this signified how even the Devil is “stuck.” If he moved around, he could break the ice and perhaps escape.

15. “Why levels and rings?” 0 The guiding principle of the levels and punishments is one of balance. Sinners suffer punishment to a degree befitting the gravity of their sin, in a manner matching that sin’s nature. The design of the poem serves to reinforce this correspondence: in its plot it progresses from minor sins to major ones (a matter of degree); and in the geographical structure it posits, the various regions of Hell correspond to types of sin (a matter of kind). 0 Stands to reason the worse the sin, the deeper you are in the earth, and the farther away from heaven.

16. “What was the point in writing this?” 0 Dante did not set out to write a philosophical text; the intention was not to think critically about evil but rather to teach and reinforce the relevant Christian doctrines. 0 Dante saw the story as a warning to those who were sinning in life. A Cautionary Tale. 0 Another significant part of Dante’s aim in writing Inferno was to offer a large- scale commentary on the political nightmare of fourteenth-century Florence.