Dante's Inferno Greek Analysis

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante Alighieri writes himself as a traveler who is traversing through the realm of the underworld with the Roman poet Vergil as his guide. In documenting his journey, Dante continually references and encounters both fictional characters and historic figures from the Greek, Roman and Catholic canon. In doing so, he brings the characters and figures back to life, allowing him to rewrite them in his own context and perspective. By reviving these characters and melding the philosophy and canon of Catholicism with the stories of Greek and Roman mythology, he is able to assess and reimagine the Greek and Roman characters through his Catholic lens. Through including the famous writers and poets themselves, particularly including Vergil as his guide, Dante tries to legitimize his reinvention of the existing canon.
In the world of Dante’s Inferno, components of real history and Greek and Roman mythology exist simultaneously. An excellent example of Greek and Roman myth and …show more content…
Characters that helped the progress of Rome or Catholicism are looked more favorably upon in the text. Aeneas’s founding of Rome versus Ulysses attack on Troy explain their drastically different fates. Similarly, the Hebrew Biblical figures rising to heaven versus the Greeks and Romans condemned to Limbo further exemplifies this point. The inverse is also true. The three most tortured people in all of hell are Judas, Cassius and Brutus. The first “who has to suffer most” committed the ultimate betrayal against Jesus Christ in the New Testament (61;313). The second two committed a great betrayal against Julius Caesar, a Roman emperor. By placing them in the lowest depth of hell and giving them a unique punishment that only they receive, Dante establishes that there is no sin worse than betraying Rome or God. It is through this lens that all the characters in the book are