Lakrasia Holloway April, 23,2009 English 230 Assignment 3 Cantos 7 Lakrasia Holloway April, 23,2009 English 230 Assignment 3

The entrance of circle 4-The Avaricious and Prodigal Cantos 7 The entrance of circle 4-The Avaricious and Prodigal The Fourth Circle is one of just three in all the circles of Hell in which Dante recognizes no one, so deeply did he feel that a life of concern with getting and spending destroys the soul. What he does recognize is how many leaders of the Church are in this circle; no wonder the world goes wrong, he says later in Purgatory, if those who are supposed to guide us all to the bliss of union with God are themselves obsessed with material things.

Characters that are in Cantos 7 At the beginning approaches the fourth circle, Plutus is a devil that guides the area. Virgil Dante Acheron Styx the river they crossed The three furies Medusa anyone look at her will turn into stones.

Plutus “The devil” Different Images of Plutus Location: Dark Woods Upper Point of Hell Crossing the Styx River

Dante and Virgil Meets Plutus Virgil and Dante continue down toward the Fourth Circle of Hell and come upon the demon Plutus. Virgil quiets the creature with a word and they enter the circle, where Dante cries out at what he sees: a ditch has been formed around the circle, making a great ring. Within the ring, two groups of souls push weights along in anger and pain. Each group completes a semicircle before crashing into the other group and turning around to proceed in the opposite direction. The souls condemned to this sort of torturous, eternal jousting match, Virgil explains, are those of the Avaricious and the Prodigal, who, during their lives, hoarded and squandered, respectively, their money.

Evil Spirits Dante's Plutus, guardian-symbol of the fourth circle (avarice and prodigality), is--like other infernal creatures--a unique hybrid of sources and natures. Often portrayed as the mythological god of the classical underworld (Hades), Plutus also appears in some cases as the god of wealth. Dante neatly merges these two figures by making Plutus the "great enemy" in hell with a special relationship to the sin most closely associated with material wealth. Dante similarly combines human and bestial natures in his conception of Plutus: he possesses the power of speech (though the precise meaning of his words--some sort of invocation to Satan--is unclear) and the ability to understand--or at least react to--Virgil's dismissive words, while at the same time displaying a distinctly bestial rage and probably animal-like features as well.

The End of Cantos 7 Plutus