The Importance Of Three Beasts In Dante's Divine Comedy

Dante’s Divine Comedy has a focus on sin and throughout the poem he has the benefit of seeing the punishments for all the different divisions of sin. Before even seeing the punishments for particular sins, in canto I Dante is climbing a hillside and winds up spotting three beasts before him that have a more significant meaning than just instilling fear in Dante. The three beasts, the leopard, lion and she-wolf, all represent different things in what is to be seen during Dante’s journey. In this scene, the reader is given an idea of what is to come during Dante’s journey through Hell while also making a big point with his response to the encounter. The beasts that Dante encounters on the hillside are the leopard which represents lust, the lion, pride and the she-wolf, greed. In the passage in which Dante meets the beasts he states that the lion has its “head held high,” displaying why it is the symbol of pride (I, 5.46). The she-wolf represents greed due to the way in which Dante describes it as carrying “every craving in her leanness” (I, 5.50). This quote …show more content…
When looking deeper, it is clear that the three beasts represent their own sins and are to be feared and avoided to ensure they evade eternal damnation. It is also made clear that Dante is only fearing the three beasts by what Beatrice told Virgil that the beasts have “hindered in his path along that lonely hillside,” which mentions nothing of temptation of committing sin but that he has only been “turned aside by terror” (II, 15.62-63). This once again helps prove that Dante’s fear rather than attraction of the beasts was the reaction that God desired and is the reason that he is not one of the damned in Hell that he goes onto witness in the first