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Halfway through is life, Dante finds himself wandering alone in a dark forest, having lost his way on the true path. He encounters three angry beasts - a lion (represents violence), a she-wolf (represents greed) and a leopard (represents fraudulent and malicious) that forces him to turn back. On his way back, he sees the spirit of Virgil. Virgil is sent to guide Dante through Hell and represents reason and wisdom. Charon brings Dante and Virgil into Hell through the river Acheron. The structure of Dante’s Inferno has 34 cantos. It is arranged in three main groups and occupies nine circles. The first circle is the widest and the ninth circle is the smallest; each circle is set aside for a different category of sinners but all are no essentially equal in the degree or nature of their sin. The ante-Hell is a place where those who refused to choose between right and wrong. The Upper Hell is called the Incontinent and contains limbo, lust, gluttony, avarice and anger. The first circle is Limbo where the virtuous pagans reside. They are excluded from Heaven because they knew nothing of Christ and His religion but they are not tormented and their spirits suffer no punishment. Their only pain is that they have no hope. They are noble heroes, wise philosophers, and inspired poets of the ancient and medieval pagan world. Dante encounters the ancient philosophers and poets – Homer, Horace, Ovid and Luncan and they make Dante the sixth man in their company. Circle Two is the carnal (lust) and here begins the torments. Blocking the way is Minos, the dread and semi-bastial judge of the damned who assigns each soul its eternal torment. The sins in this circle are sins of the flesh. Their punishment is to be forever spinning around in the tempest of Hell, forever denied the light of reason and of God. Circle Three is gluttony and everything about this Circle suggests a gigantic garbage dump. The souls here lie in the icy paste of disgusting waste, swollen and obscene, and Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Hell, stands guard over them. In life they made no higher use of the gifts of God than to wallow in food and drink. If they try to move out of the sewage, Cerberus rips and eats them like they ate during their life. Ciacco, a citizen of Florence (Dante’s town) gives Dante the first prophecy of his future exile. In Circle Four, the sinners are made up of two groups, the hoarders and the wasters also known as the avaricious and prodigals. In life they lacked all moderation; they destroyed the light of God within themselves by thinking only of money, and so in death their souls are burdened by dead weight and cannot move very easily.
Approximate Word count = 1765
Approximate Pages = 7.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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