Virgil And Dante's The Aeneid

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Recommended: Dante's layers of hell

Lane Johnson
Prof. Haley
Into to Literature
4-2-14
“Interpretive Argument”
In what ways does Dante use The Aeneid to write about the underworld that he creates? When Dante wrote the Inferno, his main source for reference was Virgil’s The Aeneid. Just about all of the hell that Dante creates is his own, but the parts that weren’t his own, he took from The Aeneid and made it special. While wanting to keep his hell on the same structure as the christian hell, he also incorporated Virgil’s underworld with a similar theme as to that of the christian hell, so as to make it unique. By doing this, he was able to describe an underworld that was of christian belief, but with the same properties as that of a paganistic hell.
Most people will agree that the two books seem very similar, but the two books are very different from one another. While Dante’s hell goes deeper and deeper into the earth as you go through the different levels, or as they are called in his book “Circles,” Virgil’s hell is more of just a flat plane of existence. To be honest, the books do seem very similar, even if they are completely different, Dante was inspired by Virgil when he created his hell, and when you add that factor, the books start to seem more and more similar to each other. Another thing that Dante used was all of the same characters that Virgil used in his stories, and he encounters them all in hell because of the time difference in the creation of the two books, because the books were written fourteen-hundred years apart from each other.
Another similarity that these books have is that both Dante and Aeneas ask for help from “other-worldly beings,” for in Dante’s journey, he asked help from Muses (which were ancient goddesses of art and poetry)...

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...ieve in God, and repent for what you have done, and show that you love God and that you do try to live a good life. That is the only way to receive forgiveness and live in paradise for eternity once you have died.
In conclusion, for these books, they are both extremely similar, and if you were given both of these books to read without knowing who wrote them, you may think that both were written by the same person, but with different religious beliefs. Many people that have read these books and even studied them will argue that they are not the same and that they are completely different, but just look at everything that was explained, they both have identical hells, they both have the same characters, they both use god(s) int the books, and both were centered around one persons journey through hell, so all in all, these books are the same in just about every way.

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