VIRGILS INFLUENCE ON AND IN DANTES INFERNO

VIRGIL.S INFLUENCE ON AND IN DANTE.S INFERNO Essay, Research Paper

VIRGIL.S INFLUENCE ON AND IN DANTE.S INFERNO

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in 1265. In his life, he created two major

books of poetry: Vita Nuova and The Comedy. The Comedy, which was later renamed The

Divine Comedy, is an epic poem broken down into three books in each of which Dante recounts

his travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The first installment of The Comedy, Dante’s

Inferno, is an especially magnificent narrative. He narrates his descent and observation of Hell

through the various circles and pouches. An excellent poet in his own right, admired much about

Virgil (also spelt Vergil), revering him to such an extent that he turned him into the guiding

character, the teacher to Dante the pilgrim, in the Purgatory and Inferno. Dante borrowed from

Virgil much of his language, style, and content. While Dante improved upon Virgil’s works in

many respects, his changes in the theological content in particular, reveal the differences between

the conceptions of the afterworld/underworld of the two authors’ respective time periods. As

Erich Auerbach writes, with reference to Dante’s extensively ordered otherworld, “Dante had no

true precursors, except for the sixth book of the Aeneid.”(Auerbach, Erich . p. 88). A large

portion of Dante.s Inferno is merely an expansion of one book (VI -the Underworld) of Virgil.s

Aeneid. Though much of Dante’s Hell is original, he seemed to use the Aeneid as a base and that

which he did extract from the Aeneid, he carefully adapted for his own purposes and beliefs. In

pursuing his Christian vision of the afterlife, Dante created an otherworld theoretically and

doctrinally different from, yet still inescapably reminiscent of Virgil’s Underworld. Dante, of

course, structured his Hell to fit the confines and fundamentals of his Christian ideology, but still

used The Aeneid as his foundation. Thus, in order to portray the Christian universe and to

represent the afterworldly concepts of justice for one.s actions during life, Dante looked to

Virgil’s Aeneid for both, the inspiration to create and the tools to do so. Similarities between

Virgil.s Underworld and Dante.s Hell are quite noticeable to even the untrained eye.

The entrance or gate to Virgil’s Underworld in the Aeneid marks a sharp division, as also

found in The Inferno, between the land of the living and the land of the dead. A foreboding

vestibule precedes the entrance to the Underworld, purposely there not ease any journey toward

the heart of Hades, and help remind them that this is the afterlife they chose. Inhabiting Virgil.s

vestibule are the causes of death, incarnated into spiritual forms as agents of death (Virgil,

274-280), but they are not clearly seen forms, nor are any of the forms in both, Virgil.s and

Dante.s visions of Hell. All the Underworld in Dante.s and Virgil.s interpretations is portrayed in

a shadowy, colorless environment to create the illusion of death and hopelessness.

.I am the way to the doleful city, I am the way into eternal grief, I am the way to a forsaken race.

Justice it was that moved my great Creator; Divine omnipotence created me, and highest wisdom

joined with primal love.

Before me nothing but eternal things were made, and I shall last eternally. Abandon every hope,

all you who enter..-reading on Vestibule Gate (Dante, 89).

Virgil places high importance on this vestibule to delineate clearly one main difference between

the Underworld and the outside: the former has an unavoidably intangible, bodiless, and abstract

(nothing clearly defined) quality to it, compared to the latter.s concrete, physical reality. The

presence of the agents of death, most notably “Sleep the brother of Death” (Virgil, 278), are here

to symbolize the transition from the world of life outside the vestibule, to a room full of the causes

of death, and finally lead to the land of death itself (Hell itself). The vestibule can be considered

to be a no-man.s-land, your not completely in Hell yet, but there.s nowhere else to go except

down. Dante.s Hell is also preceded by a foreboding vestibule which is home to the souls who

could not decide to do good or evil with their lives. The angels who did not pick a side in the

fight between Michael (God’s general) or with Lucifer (Satan) in the battle of Heaven reside here.

This entrance of Hell begins the world of darkness and unidentifiable shades, colorless in their

symbolization of lifelessness. Dante compares the lifeless shades to ..dead leaves fluttering to the

ground in autumn., weightless and lifeless, as when falling leaves .detach themselves. from the

tree of life. All the souls descend .one-by-one., like leaves falling .first one and then the other..

(Dante, pp. 112-117). This simile that Dante uses is almost identical to Virgil.s description of the

souls as .…a multitude of leaves….(Virgil, p. 309).

In creating the environment for hi

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