Dante Homer Machiavelli Beowulf Grendel Gilgamesh Term Paper

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Dante's Inferno And The Heroic Quest

Like Homer's "The Odyssey," and "The Iliad," Dante's "The Inferno" begins with a kind of god's eye view of the world. However, rather than the gods looking down and squabbling about the morality of humans they see, Dante begins with his hero's face-to-face encounter with the divine, or at least a representative of the divine, the pagan poet Virgil. Virgil will be the poet's first guide through the world of the dead. Virgil is a pagan and thus cannot enter the Christian version of heaven, so he will guide Dante through "The Inferno." Virgil cannot enter heaven even though he is a 'good' pagan because he is being punished for being born before Jesus came to teach and suffer upon the earth. The good pagans are punished for being able to envision nothing beyond the existence of Homer's gods, essentially.

The hero of Dante's quest, however, is not an abstract 'he' but the poet himself.

Unlike Virgil's own "Aeneid," and Homer's epics, where the poet appears mainly to invoke the muse, it is the poet's own soul and view of the world that form the narrative core of the poem, rather than a nationalist epic where the poet talks about the gods and heroes of old. There is a geographical meandering as occurs in Homer's "Odyssey," but the protagonist's own spiritual development, after being in a wood, wandering and lost, is the ultimate focus of interest in "The Inferno.

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" Although both Odysseus and Dante strive homeward, and have a divine intermediary (for Dante in the form of Virgil and for Odysseus, Athena) to help them in their quest, Dante does not experience a physical reward at the end, of a wife and a kingdom. Rather the benefits for Dante are spiritual in nature and comes to his heart and mind through understanding.

Like the titular, nationalist hero of the anonymous author of "Beowulf," thus Dante as a poet must slay a kind of beast. But the beast that must be slain exists within the poet's own spirit and mind, rather than anything that exists in the outside world. The monsters Dante sees as he….....

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