Dante's Inferno Essay

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The Inferno: Cantos IV



The epic poem The Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, tells the story of the author on Good Friday in the 14th century. Lost in the forest, he encounters the spirit of the poet Virgil, who promises to reunite him with his beloved. In order to do so, they must take a path through hell. The Inferno is Dante’s tale of the underworld and subtle commentary on sin. There is much that is revealing regarding all the separate parts of this epic poem. This paper will discuss the many themes of the fifth Cantos. This Cantos shows us Dante’s panache for mixing history and myth as a means of confusing the reader, making the backdrop of hell appear more hellish. Also the relative innocuousness of the sins of the sinners of this level of hell also gives the entire presentation of hell the guise of being a fully merciless place.



The fifth cantos in the Inferno takes the reader with Dante and Virgil to the second circle of hell, which is overseen by the creature Minos. We soon learn that this level of hell is the place where the damned are sent to their particular modes of suffering. Minos has the power to determine which circle of hell each sinner must descend to. The fifth Cantos is so significant in this regard as it has the Minos character, which is at once a character from history, but also can be found within mythology.

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Minos’s very description and presence forces the reader to wonder about this personage and representation. For those familiar with world history, Minos was the official king of Crete. However, his overlap onto mythology finds him to be one of the judges within the underworld. Minos reappears within the genre of classical mythology, as one of the sons of Zeus, who is as oppressive and fiery as his father. However, Minos can be viewed as having been a real person, as there is textual evidence throughout history that refers to him. Yet Minos has this odd overlap within mythology and then later here, in Dane’s Inferno, as the judge of the sinners who are forced to the underworld, known as Hades. His very presence within the Inferno asks the reader to make sense of him being there. His location is very telling: He is at the technical entrance to hell, as Cantos Five describes the second circle of hell.

While the reader cannot be certain how Dante intends for Minos to look, it is likely that he intends for him to appear beastly and monstrous. Consider the following: “There standeth Minos horribly, and snarls;/ Examines the transgressions at the entrance;/ Judges, and sends according as he girds him/ I say, that when the spirit evil-born/ Cometh before him, wholly it confesses;/ And this discriminator of transgressions/ Seeth what place in Hell is meet for it; Girds himself with….....

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Works Cited

Dante, Alighieri, and Frederick Crombie. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. George Routledge & Sons, The Broadway , Ludgate ; New York, 1867.

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