Divine Comedy: Dante Puts the Hell in Hellenism

Divine Comedy: Dante Puts the Hell in Hellenism

Ever since they were created Greek heroes and their stories have found a perpetual home in the minds and imagination of everyday people. There they grow to new height through art and literature. Dante Alighieri includes famous Greek characters throughout the first book of his Divine Comedy: Hell. From the famed philosophers and personages who fill Limbo to the very last circles of Hell where the giants inhabit, Dante uses as images of different sins, and punishment for individuals sins famous Greek monsters, lovers, and heroes.

Throughout history monsters and hideous beasts have been used to terrify men. Dante uses beasts not only to terrify, but to be images of individual sins as well as tormentors of these sins. "Most of the monstrous organisms by which the functions of Hell are discharged are taken from Greek and Roman mythology. They are neither devils nor damned souls, but the images of perverted appetites, presiding over the circles appropriate to their natures" (Dante 89). The Furies, images of empty remorse that never repents, serve as guards to Circles V and VI. In classical mythology they eternally pursued the guilty, haunting him wherever he journeys and therefore driving him insan...

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..., the popular hero who returned to his wife after ten years of wandering, in the Inferno with the Counselors of Fraud. Dante places him here because he is responsible for the theft of the great Palladium, the ancient image of Pallas Athena, an idol that, as long as it remained in Troy, prevented the city from being taken. Dante shows the reader that it matters not how great one is on earth, the price of one's sins must be paid. Dante uses as icons of different sins, and punishment for these sins Greek monsters, lovers, and heroes.

Work Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Divine Comedy: The Inferno. Viking Penguin. October 1983.