Daunte's Hell

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Dante was a very intellectual and provocative writer. He wrote the Divine Comedy, which has three poems in it. It has been said by many “The secret to originality is the ability to conceal one’s source.” Dante, when he wrote the Inferno, used many sources, but he never gave credit to those he quoted. Students today are taught that if they take somebody else’s ideas and use them as their own, it is intellectual thievery. Dante never got in any trouble when he concealed his sources by not giving credit to the others. Dante got the idea of the nine circles of hell from outside sources such as the Aeneid, and the Bible.

One important source that Dante used was Virgil’s Aeneid. Dante probably wanted somebody else’s opinion of what hell is like. So Dante looked at the Aeneid because he had a general idea that Virgil wrote something on hell. Since he could not meet Virgil face to face, he probably took some of Virgil’s ideas of hell and put them into his own words. Dante created a more specific idea of hell by giving it circles. I think that Virgil thought that hell was just one huge pla...

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