DanteS Inferno Essay Research Paper Dante

Dante`S Inferno Essay, Research Paper

Dante’s Canto XXVIII

Dante begins the opening of Canto XXVIII with a rhetorical

question. Virgil and he have just arrived in the Ninth Abyss of the

Eighth Circle of hell. In this pouch the Sowers of Discord and Schism

are continually wounded by a demon with a sword. Dante poses a

question to the reader:

Who, even with untrammeled words and many

attempts at telling, ever could recount

in full the blood and wounds that I now saw. (Lines 1-3)

The rhetorical question draws the reader into the passage

because we know by this point in the Divine Comedy that Dante is a

great poet. What is it that Dante sees before him on the brink of the

Ninth Abyss that is so ineffable that he, as a poet, feels he cannot

handle.

In the following lines Dante expands on this rhetorical

position. He elaborates on why it is important for any man to offer a

good description of what he sees. No poet can achieve this

description: .Each tongue that tried would certainly fall short….

(L. 4) It is not just poetic talent that is at stake; poets do not

have the background to give them the poetic power for such

description. His reasoning is “the shallowness of both our speech and

intellect cannot contain so much.” (Lines 5-6) Once again the reader

is intrigued; how could a man of Dante’s stature criticize language

which is the very tool he uses to create the epic work of La Commedia

. If we cannot take Dante seriously with these opening statements, we

must pose the question of what Dante is trying to do by teasing us

with this artificial beginning to Canto XVIII.

Dante will now contradict himself and try to describe what he

says is impossible. But, if he were to go right into a description of

the Ninth Abyss, it would deflate his rhetorical position. Instead,

Dante first sets up a quite lengthy comparison of the sights he has

just witnessed with examples of bloodshed throughout human history.

Were you to reassemble all the men

who once, within Apulia1’s fateful land,

had mourned their blood, shed at the Trojans’ hands,

as well as those who fell in the long war

where massive mounds of rings were battle spoils–

even as Livy write, who does not err–

and those who felt the thrust of painful blows

when they fought hard against Robert Guiscard;

with all the rest whose bones are still piled up

at Ceperano–each Apulian was

a traitor there–and, and too, at Tabliacozzo,

where old Alardo conquered without weapons;

and then, were one to show his limb pierced through

and one his limb hacked off, that would not match

the hideousness of the ninth abyss. (Lines 7-21)

Dante gives historical examples of the destruction of war.

This is in contrast to the heroic qualities of war which Dante’s

predecessors most often focus on. Dante is acting less as a poet and

more as an historian. He takes the reader on a mini journey through

these wars. His first stop are the Trojan wars (Line 9). These wars

Dante refers to actually represent the final books of Virgil’s Aeneid.

Part of my experience in reading the Inferno, has been that there is a

great connection between the Inferno and the Aeneid. Furthermore,

Dante’s guide through hell is the author of the Aeneid, Virgil. (While

this topic is much too broad to address in these pages, it is

important too take note of this relationship.) On the one hand it is

important that Virgil is Dante’s first example because it is necessary

for him to leave the world of the poet (poets do not have enough

talent) and move to the world of the historian, whose objectivity is

supposedly more trusted in front of this horror. By this time the

reader can see the irony of what Dante is doing in this opening

passage. Dante the poet must give up to historical fact, but the

reader knows that Dante the poet is playing this game to entice the

reader into listening to him.

Dante moves on to the wars at Carthage in his next example.

This is material which Virgil deliberately does not deal with in the

Aeneid because this was a battle which the Romans barely come out

intact. The historian Livy is used as the narrator of these events.

Livy describes the destruction at Carthage:

The attention of all was particularly attracted by a living Numidian

with his nose and ears mangled, stretched under a dead Roman, who lay

over him, and who, when his hands had been rendered unable to hold a

weapon, his rage being exasperated to madness, had expired in the act

of tearing his antagonist with his teeth. (Livy, Book XXII)

Dante is legitimizing his poetry with these references from history.

In line twelve Dante writes “…even as Livy writes, who does not

err–.” He is explicitly giving credit to Livy for the ability to

describe the bloo

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