The Inferno

I’ve always put away reading Dante’s Inferno, but so glad I finally got to it. Accompanying Virgil and Dante, descending into hell, each circle represents increasingly severe sins. Hidden between the lines are Dante’s point of views, biases, critiques, judgement, and more. Dante cared less about sins of passion and more about sins of malice and treachery.

The logic of punishment

Dante describes punishment in contrapasso, poetic justice linking each sin to its punishment. Hypocrites wear beautiful coats lined with lead, the crushing weight represents their false appearances. Alchemists suffer from leprosy for falsifying substances. Thieves get bitten by serpents and burned to ash. Fortune tellers have their heads twisted backwards for trying to see the future. Dante spared no detail, and the visceral imagery sticks with you.

Dante’s extremely specific bias

Dante’s moral judgments are biased in ways I didn’t expect. Finding Odysseus (Ulysses) in the circle of Evil Counselors surprised me - this is a hero who would be celebrated in most contexts. Then it clicked: Dante is Italian, of Roman descent, claiming lineage back to Aeneas. Of course he’d place Greek heroes like Odysseus and Achilles in Hell while (presumably) putting Trojan heroes like Hector and Aeneas in Heaven.

I’m partial to the ancient Greek perspective myself. I consider the Trojan War a Greek triumph over an injustice, so Dante and I fundamentally disagree. A modern Greek poet would flip this script entirely.

The Christian bias runs even deeper. Placing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in Circle Eight for “religious discord” reveals Dante’s harsh medieval Christian worldview. He blames Islamic divisions for Christian schisms. It’s jarring but also historically revealing.

Julius Caesar’s placement is the most telling. He’s in Limbo - the first circle - with other pre-Christian souls. Not punished, not rewarded. But his assassins Brutus and Cassius are at the absolute center of Hell, eternally chewed in Satan’s mouth alongside Judas. Judas gets the center mouth. Brutus and Cassius get the side mouths. For Dante, Christ was the perfect manifestation of the divine, Caesar the perfect manifestation of the secular. Betraying either deserved Hell’s worst punishment. His fixation on Rome runs deep.

The bias didn’t pull me out of the work, I just didn’t agree with it.

The footnotes are a lifesaver, especially given the historical distance

Without footnotes, you won’t get this poem. Someone from Dante’s era would understand the political references, the classical allusions, the medieval Italian context. Modern readers need help. If you haven’t read The Iliad or studied ancient Greek and Roman history, many references will be lost. The footnotes make connections that are not obvious.

The footnotes probably took up half my reading time. The poem is dense - politically, historically, theologically. Especially when you start to get into the random (to us) Italian political and religious figures that we wouldn’t read or learn about normally today.

Dante’s language gets coarser as the descent continues, matching Hell’s increasing grotesqueness. In the deeper circles, demons play with sinners’ appendages. Boiling pits hide grafters. The violence becomes explicit. There’s brilliant wordplay too that I noted down such as “Cred’ io ch’ ei credette ch’io credesse” (“I think perhaps he thought that I was thinking”), I wish I could have read this in the original Italian.

I wish I could have read this in Italian. Even in translation, the writing is remarkable, but you can sense what’s being lost.

What stuck with me

The partnership between Virgil and Dante is great. Virgil, like Julius Caesar himself is condemned to Limbo for being pre-Christian, is the one to guide Dante through Hell with authority and occasional tenderness. At one point Virgil acknowledges that Dante’s rebuke of corrupt popes is justified. Later, when they need divine intervention to pass certain gates, we see the limits of human reason without grace.

The final image of three-faced Satan, a twisted inversion of the Holy Trinity, devouring Cassius, Brutus and Judas, stuck with me. Truly brutal, eternal punishment, even Satan is subject to give punishment to these three men that Dante deemed the worst of the worst, literally.

Overall thoughts

I might be slightly over-critical, but the bias and historical distance kept me from thinking this is a perfect piece of work, it felt like a hit piece at times. It has clearly lasted the test of time, and that’s because its brilliant depsite that bias point of view that Dante seeped in, and I think it resonated well in the place and time it was written and published. My partiality to ancient Greek perspectives means I disagree with some of Dante’s core judgments. That being said, I am glad I read it. The depiction of Hell, the structure of the descent, the imagery, the quality of the writing - it’s impressive, even as a translation. This shaped Western culture’s conception of damnation and moral judgment for seven centuries.

My advice is to get a good annotated edition, and don’t be afraid to brush up on some historical context as you read through to appreciate the cleverness and poetic.