Dante's Inferno

Dante, like the epic poets of the past, musters up his energy for the great literary task before him: “O muses, O high wit, now help me; O memory that wrote down what I saw, here will your nobility appear” (7-9). He launches into his memories of the approach to Hell. He asks Virgil why he, Dante, should be chosen to make this perilous journey. He thinks of the stories of other visitors to Hell—Virgil’s own legendary character Aeneas and the Apostle Paul—and wonders if he is really worthy to follow in such august footsteps? In so many words, Virgil tells Dante not to be a chicken and further encourages him by explaining how he was sent to be Dante’s guide in the first place.

Virgil was walking around in Limbo—the circle of Hell reserved for virtuous pagans—when a beautiful lady greeted him. She courteously addressed him, introduced herself as Beatrice, and told him that her friend Dante was in a bad way and needed his help. She had personally been sent from Heaven to speak to Virgil by Saint Lucia, who, in turn, had been sent by the Virgin Mary. Virgil was amazed that a heavenly spirit would descend to Hell to speak to him, but Beatrice assured him that part of being blessed is not being affected by the torments of Hell.

In light of this story, Virgil asks Dante why on earth should he be worried about his worthiness for the journey? Dante—heartened by news of his beloved Beatrice’s concern for him even after death—perks right up, likening his change in mood to how “little flowers, bowed on closed in the chill of night, when the sun whitens them straighten up all open on their stems” (127-29).

With that, the two reach the Gates of Hell, and Dante tells the reader, “I entered upon the deep, savage journey” (142).

Canto 3 begins with the inscription over the Gates of Hell. It reads:

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE GRIEVING CITY, THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE. JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER; DIVINE POWER MADE ME, HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME WERE NO THINGS CREATED EXCEPT ETERNAL ONES, AND I ENDURE ETERNAL. ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER (1-9).

Dante is frightened and puzzled by these words. Virgil tells Dante in order to make this journey, he is going to have to give up suspicion and cowardice. They will be travelling among people who have “lost the good of the intellect” (17-18), and Dante will need to have his wits about him not to do the same. He encourages Dante with a smile and a squeeze of the hand, and the two embark on their terrible journey.

Dante is greeted not by sights, but by a starless darkness and by horrible sounds. Terrified, he asks Virgil who’s doing all that screaming. Virgil replies that these souls on the outskirts of Hell are the lukewarm: those who lived only for themselves, making no commitment either to the goods of Heaven or the false goods of Hell. One of their punishments is to be eternally forgotten. Another is to run eternally after a banner, stung by wasps and flies, treading on worms who drink the blood that runs from their wounds. Dante watches in amazement as this horrific procession passes. There are more people here than he could have imagined had ever lived. He even recognizes one: Pope Celestine, who made “the great refusal” (56-57) by retiring from his post rather than dying in it.

Looking further, Dante sees souls gathered on the banks of a great dark river: the river Acheron. Here, the ferryman Charon—that same Charon from Greek and Roman mythology who was said to ferry souls to the underworld—waits on the banks to carry the souls of the newly dead to their proper places in Hell. Weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth, these new souls nevertheless willingly board Charon’s boat. As Virgil explains it, this is part of God’s justice: In going to their place in Hell, they are going to get exactly what they desired in life.

Charon is angry to see Dante there, for no living soul, and no good soul, crosses this river; Dante will have to take a different boat one of these days, he yells. Virgil tells Charon to suck it up: It is God’s will that Dante should pass here. Virgil tells Dante that if Charon does not want to carry him, that can only be a good sign. Dante, overwhelmed, passes out.

Dante is awakened by a thunderclap and finds himself past the Acheron and on the brink of the funnel-shaped pit of Hell, a deep, spiraling hole of decreasing circumference. Dante looks down into its depths and sees nothing. He notices Virgil looks frightened; Virgil assures him the paleness Dante reads as fear is in fact pity.

The two descend into Limbo, a place of “grief without torture” (28): the home of unbaptized babies and virtuous pagans, those who did not know God. Virgil explains that this is his place in Hell, where “without hope we live in desire” (42). Dante feels terrible for him and the other inhabitants of Limbo: Many worthy people live here. Virgil tells him that some of Limbo’s denizens, notable Old Testament figures, were rescued not long after his own death by a mysterious, powerful figure.

Limbo is not torturous—just sad. It has woods and bright green grass and even a castle, though all of these are lit by a melancholy, artificial light. The company is pretty good. Dante and Virgil are greeted by the greatest poets of the pagan world: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. These are Virgil’s buddies, and Dante is honored to fall in with them as a sixth among their number. Together they walk to the castle, which is surrounded by a little stream they can cross as if it is solid ground. Inside the castle they find more heroic classical figures, both historical and mythical: Orpheus, Penthesilea, Aeneas, Euclid, and Avicenna are only a few of the notables in Limbo.

At last, Dante and Virgil leave behind their poet friends and pass out of Limbo into deeper Hell: “a place where no light shines” (151).

Dante is confronted by the terrifying Minos, a bestial figure who judges newly-arrived souls, coiling his tail around himself to signify to which level of Hell these spirits are condemned. Like Charon, Minos is displeased to see Dante here, and again Virgil tells him to back off, for Dante’s passage is fated.

Dante and Virgil continue into the second circle of Hell, where the lustful are punished. Here, “all light is silent,” and an “infernal whirlwind, which never rests, drives the spirits before its violence” (28-32). Inside this dank whirlwind, lustful lovers fly around like birds in a storm: They include Dido, Cleopatra, Paris, and Tristan. Dante chooses to speak not to any of these legendary figures, but to an Italian couple—Paolo and Francesca—whom he knows from regional gossip. Virgil encourages him to call them over.

Francesca greets Dante with elaborate courtesy, telling him that if only the king of the universe were her friend, she would pray to Him for Dante’s peace, since he takes pity on them. She then romantically describes how she and her lover Paolo ended up here:

Love, which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart, seized this one for the lovely person that was taken from me; and the manner still injures me. Love, which pardons no one loved from loving in return, seized me for his beauty so strongly that, as you see, it still does not abandon me. Love led us on to one death. Caina awaits him who extinguished our life (91).

Francesca is still bitter about her murder and predicts that her murderer will be condemned to Caina—a lower circle of Hell, reserved for those who betray family.

Rather pruriently, Dante presses her for more details. She explains: She was married to Paolo’s brother, but she and Paolo started to become fond of each other. One day, they sat reading together from a book of Arthurian legends, which described that Lancelot and Guinevere began their affair with the help of a go-between, Galehaut. When they read the story of the great lovers’ first kiss, their eyes met, and they threw aside the book to do what the book described. Paolo, listening to this story, weeps piteously. Dante himself is overwhelmed; again, he faints, falling “as a dead body falls” (142).

Dante recovers and finds himself and Virgil walking through the third circle of Hell, where gluttony is punished. Here, they confront another mythological figure—the three-headed beast Cerberus who howls like a dog but has the beard and hands of a man. Virgil throws Cerberus a handful of dirt to quiet him, and the two pass among the souls of the gluttonous, who lie down in filthy mud under eternal dirty weather. These are incorporeal figures, taking the shape of humans without possessing real bodies of their own.

One spirit speaks up, asking whether Dante recognizes him. Dante does not, so the spirit introduces himself: He is Ciacco (meaning “hog”), a famous glutton, and as a Florentine, a fellow citizen of Dante’s region. Dante asks Ciacco if he knows what will become of Florence, which is war-torn between the Blacks and Whites—two rival factions of a political group known as the Guelphs. Ciacco delivers an encoded prophecy (here translated a little more explicitly): Through bloody battles, the two factions will exchange power over the city, but at last, the Whites—the faction to which Dante belonged—will fall when Pope Boniface VIII secretly helps the Blacks make a treacherous attack while pretending to seek peace. Dante gravely accepts this prophecy, and asks after other dead souls who have been important in Florentine politics. Ciacco tells him all these figures are deeper down in Hell.

Ciacco makes one request, begging Dante to carry news of him to the world above. Then he falls back into the mud. Virgil tells Dante Ciacco will never rise again until Judgment Day, when he will get his body back—and therefore even more painfully suffer his torments.

The next border guardian is Plutus—another mythological figure, but a more obscure one, who may be a god of wealth or may be connected with Pluto, god of the underworld. He babbles nonsense, and Virgil shouts at him to be quiet, again invoking the will of God.

Passing into the fourth circle, Dante and Virgil find the avaricious and the prodigal: people who hoarded or wasted wealth. They are collectively doomed to slam their bodies into massive stones over and over, colliding with each other and angrily shouting. Many of these, Virgil tells Dante, were religious figures, sinfully attached to money.

Dante suspects he might meet some people he knows here, too, but Virgil explains that since these people lived oblivious lives, unable to correctly weigh the value of earthly wealth, they are now indistinct and unrecognizable. These people, Virgil continues, loved Fortune as a god, rather than seeing Fortune’s true nature. Dante, curious, asks what Fortune really is. Virgil, exasperated by human ignorance, explains that Fortune is an angelic power—like those who move the stars around the heavens and equally distribute light. Fortune, similarly, is in charge of distributing goods, transferring luck and wealth here and there according to her own inscrutable sense of balance. No human can understand or control her. She takes much blame from humans, “but she is blessed in herself and does not listen: with the other first creatures, she gladly turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness” (94-96).

With that, Virgil hurries Dante along, for their journey has a strict time limit. The pair find the source of the ugly, dark-watered River Styx. Dante sees souls in the swampy river viciously attacking each other. These are the souls of the wrathful, Virgil explains, adding that there are also souls Dante cannot see here: the sullen, who wallow under the surface, saying:

‘We were gloomy in the sweet air that the sun makes glad, bearing within us the fumes of sullenness: now we languish in the black slime.’ This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for they cannot fully form the words (121-26).

Walking along the banks of the Styx, Dante and Virgil see a high tower.

Dante sees two little signal flames burning at the top of the aforementioned tower, and a distant third burning in response. These herald the arrival of Phlegyas, the boatman of the Styx; like the other guardians, he threatens Dante, and Virgil rebukes him. Dante and Virgil climb aboard his boat, and Dante notices that his weight makes the boat ride low in the water. The immaterial souls do not weigh it down so much.

As they travel, a soul rises from the murky water and confronts Dante, asking who he is. Dante replies he might ask the soul the same, and the soul describes himself merely as one who weeps. Dante recognizes him: This is the proud Florentine nobleman Filippo Argenti, known for his vicious and ill-judged quarrelling. Dante insults him, and Argenti tries to reach into the boat for revenge, but Virgil shoves him away. Virgil turns to Dante and embraces him, praising him for having showed correct disdain to this damned soul; in so doing, Dante has shown virtuous rather than sinful anger. As the boat moves away, Dante sees the other grappling spirits of the Styx tearing Argenti to pieces, aided in this task by Argenti himself, who “turned on himself with his teeth” (63).

The boat approaches the tower, which is a wall of the City of Dis: the capital of Hell, marking the beginning of the circles of Violence. Here, a crowd of angry spirits try to turn Dante away. Virgil speaks to them, but his usual argument does not seem to work and the spirits threaten to imprison Virgil in deeper Hell and force Dante to try to find his way back to earth alone. “Think, reader,” says Dante, “if I became weak to the sound of those cursed words, for I did not believe I would ever return here” (94-96). Virgil reassures Dante and goes off to argue it out with these spirits a little further, but whatever he says does not work. The spirits run inside the gates of Dis and bar the door against the travelers.

Virgil is shocked and frightened, but resolute. He did not expect to meet this kind of resistance, but he is determined to find a way through. This has happened once before, he says: These demonic spirits used to stand at the outer gate of Hell and were driven further down when the powerful figure who rescued the Old Testament heroes from Limbo appeared.

And by now, Virgil adds, help is on the way.

Dante is still scared, and his fear also affects Virgil, who must take a moment to pull himself together. He seems to be listening for something and mutters to himself that help is taking an awfully long time to arrive. Dante asks him if anyone else from Limbo has made a journey down this far into Hell, and Virgil tells him it is rare—but that he personally has been here once before when a sorceress named Erichtho commanded him to descend to the lowest circle of Hell, Judecca—named for the treacherous Judas—to bring someone back from there.

Virgil does not have time to explain further before the three mythological Furies, terrifying women, appear on the battlements of Dis. Medusa-like, they have hair of writhing snakes—and in fact, they summon Medusa herself, threatening to turn Dante to stone. Virgil tells Dante to cover his eyes, “and he did not stop with my hands, but closed me up with his own as well” (59-60).

Here, Dante instructs the reader to pay close attention: “O you who have sound intellects, gaze on the teaching that is hidden beneath the veil of the strange verses” (61-63). It is important to him that the readers carefully read what follows, seeking meaning beyond the surface level.

A dramatic crashing sound comes from across the river, shaking the earth like a windstorm shakes the trees. Virgil uncovers Dante’s eyes and directs him to look out across the water. There, Dante sees damned souls fleeing like frogs before a mysterious figure arrives, walking across the water and waving the stinking smoke of Hell away from his face. Dante can tell this is an angel, and he looks to Virgil in awe; Virgil indicates Dante should bow. The angel walks to the gates of Dis, taps them with a wand, and the doors fly open. He lectures the city’s inhabitants, accusing them of claiming too much power and fighting against God’s inexorable will. With that, he turns and scornfully strides away again, without speaking to the travelers.

Within the walls of Dis, Dante sees what looks to him like a massive cemetery. It is full of burning stone tombs. The lids of the tombs are open, and within them, souls are wailing. Virgil tells Dante this is where the heretics are punished.

Dante and Virgil proceed through the burning tombs. Dante wonders why the tombs are all open, and Virgil tells him when Judgment Day comes and the damned all have their bodies back, they will be properly sealed in their tombs. He also expands on the definition of heresy: Those entombed here did not believe in the immortality of the soul, fixing their attention on earthly things instead.

Dante thanks Virgil for his knowledge, but is interrupted by an abrupt greeting: “O Tuscan who through the city of fire, alive, walk along speaking so modestly, let it please you to stop in this place” (22-24). A spirit has recognized Dante by his accent. This is the proud Farinata—the leader of a Ghibelline faction of the Guelph/Ghibelline conflict that raged all through Dante’s life and therefore an enemy of Dante’s family, which had Guelph loyalties. Farinata was the unlikely savior of Florence: After his forces conquered the city, he refused to allow his fellow Ghibellines to raze it, thus preserving its beautiful art and architecture. Farinata appears rising proudly out of his tomb, looking, Dante says, like he has a great disdain for Hell and everyone in it.

Farinata quizzes Dante on his ancestry, and observes that Dante’s family are his enemies, and that he beat them several times in battle. Dante brings him the unwelcome news that his people regrouped several times and won out in the end.

At this, another shade rises from the same tomb. This is someone Dante personally knows: Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, the father of his earthly best friend, Guido. Cavalcante looks around desperately, as if expecting to see his son there with Dante, and questions him, “If through this blind prison you are going because of height of intellect, where is my son, and why is he not with you?” (58-60). Dante replies he is not here because of his intellect, but because of the will of God—a God for whom the atheistic Guido has no respect. Misinterpreting Dante’s words, Cavalcante believes his son has died and falls back into his tomb in despair before Dante can say more.

Farinata is still stuck on the Guelph/Ghibelline issue, and vengefully prophecies that even if Dante’s ancestors beat his people in the end, Dante will personally suffer very soon. He asks Dante for more news from Florence, and reflects on his own rescue of that city. Dante asks him how he can predict the future but not know what is happening in the present, and Farinata tells him that that is how it is for souls in Hell: They can dimly see the future, but the present is locked to them. Thus, on Judgment Day, when time ends, they will be completely and eternally blind to what is happening elsewhere.

Dante asks Farinata to tell Cavalcante that Guido is in fact still alive, and Virgil hurries Dante along.

Virgil asks Dante why he seems so troubled, and Dante relates Farinata’s prophecy. Virgil reassures him: Farinata may be able to see the pains of Dante’s earthly life, but Beatrice will tell Dante about the joys of his eternal life.

They descend into a valley from which a terrible stench rises.

Dante and Virgil pause at the edge of a cliff, needing a minute to adjust to the atrocious stench of the valley below. Dante asks Virgil to tell him more about Hell so their waiting time will not be wasted. Virgil explains the structure of Hell. Hell is made of many circles, but they are split into three major divisions. The deepest circles of Hell punish various kinds of fraud; fraud is the worst of sins because it is the most human, abusing humankind’s God-given intellect. Fraud can mean anything from hypocrisy to full-on treachery. Above the realm of fraud is the realm of violence, divided into three parts: the violent against themselves, others, and God. Violence is a complex concept. Violence against others can attack people or property, while violence against God can mean either scorn for God or scorn for Nature, which God made.

Dante is satisfied by this explanation, but curious about the sins of the people in the higher circles of Hell they have just passed through. Virgil scolds him mildly: “Why does your wit [...] so wander from its usual course? Or where does your mind gaze mistaken?” (76-78). He refers Dante back to his classical education and study of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle divides sin into three divisions: “incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality” (82). Incontinence—a disordered relationship to things that are good—is the least bad of these; for instance, lust is a disordered relationship to sex, which is, in itself, a good. Dante is pleased with this explanation. He asks further about something Virgil said earlier, when he classed usury—extortion—as a form of violence.

Virgil replies usury is violence against nature, for a complicated reason. Nature is the child of God, taking its form from God’s “divine intellect and art” (100). Human art strives to imitate Nature as much as possible, making art God’s grandchild. Usury is an offense to nature because money should not breed money; that is not how nature works. Usury is therefore punished next to sodomy—any kind of sex without the possibility of reproduction—and blasphemy or explicit insult to God.

Having explained, Virgil dusts himself off and urges Dante on. He can sense the stars moving in the heavens and knows they must quickly carry on to keep to their schedule.

There is a massive landslide just beneath the cliff where Virgil and Dante have been sitting, and they climb down the broken rock. The mythological Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, is the guardian here; Virgil taunts him until he flies into a fury. Virgil encourages Dante to run past him while he is too angry to focus.

As they clamber down the fallen rocks, Virgil tells Dante this landslide is a relatively new feature of Hell. The cliff broke, he says, during a big earthquake just before the powerful stranger appeared in Limbo to take away the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. Here, Virgil is unknowingly referring to the Christian tradition that a massive earthquake shook the world at the Crucifixion. Virgil describes this earthquake thus: “I thought the universe must be feeling love” (41).

At the bottom of the landslide, they find a river of boiling blood. Between the cliff and the river, centaurs armed with bows and arrows run, shooting at any soul who emerges from the bloody river. One of the centaurs, the famous Chiron—known for raising Achilles—notices Dante, observing in a scholarly way that his feet move what they touch. Virgil tells Chiron why Dante is there and on whose authority. Chiron offers the services of another centaur, Nessus, to guide them and carry Dante past the river of blood.

As they go, Dante sees souls sunk up to their foreheads in the boiling blood. Among them are many famous tyrants, including Alexander and Dionysius. Some of these murderers were themselves murdered.

The further the party goes along the river, the less submerged the shades are, until the river is only ankle-deep. Nessus points the other way and says the river gets deeper and deeper until it completely covers the worst of the violent against others. Then he drops Dante and Virgil off and returns to his shooting duties.

Dante and Virgil find themselves in a dreadful wood. Here, nothing is green; all the trees are black and twisted and thorny. Harpies nest in the tangled branches, wailing and crying. Virgil tells Dante to keep a careful eye out: Now that he knows the structure of Hell, he can guess what kind of violent person they are going to find here.

Dante hears screams all around him, but cannot find their source. He thinks there must be people hidden somewhere in the trees. But Virgil instructs him to break off a twig from one of the trees if he wants to understand what is going on here. Dante does and the tree begins to ooze blood. It shrieks, “Why do you pluck me? Have you no spirit of pity at all? We were men, and now we have become plants: truly your hand should be more merciful had we been the souls of serpents” (35-39). Dante sees blood sputtering from the tree as it speaks. Virgil apologizes on Dante’s behalf, telling the tree that Dante could have guessed what would happen if he only believed what Virgil had written in the Aeneid about the underworld. But as things stand, seeing is believing. Virgil encourages the tree-soul to explain himself, so Dante can carry a report of him back to the world above.

The tree tells its story. He was once Pier della Vigna, the former loyal counselor to the Emperor Frederick. He loved Frederick, and served him with all his energy. But Frederick’s envious court turned against him and falsely accused him of treason. Della Vigna was imprisoned, and in despair he killed himself in jail. Now, he swears by his own roots that he never broke faith with Frederick and begs Dante and Virgil to carry this report back to the world.

Virgil tells Dante to ask any questions he wants, but Dante is frozen with horror and pity. Virgil asks instead, wondering how souls come to be imprisoned in trees this way. Della Vigna explains: Minos throws the souls of suicides into the wood and they sprout as seeds. The Harpies eat their leaves, causing them horrible pain and allowing them to speak, for the trees can only speak when they are wounded. When Judgment Day comes and the bodies of the damned return, the suicides’ souls will remain in the trees, but their rotting bodies will dangle from their branches.

At this point, della Vigna is interrupted by a ruckus in the woods. Dante sees two naked men fleeing through the trees, pursued by ravenous black dogs. One hides in a thorn bush, but the dogs find him and rip him to shreds. This was Jacopo di Santo Andrea, famous for having cavalierly destroyed whole palaces for a lark. The tree his remains have landed in addresses him, lamenting that it—the tree—has been damaged for someone else’s sins. Dante questions this tree, who asks him to gather up all its fallen leaves. The tree explains he was a Florentine, and Florence made a mistake when it switched its patron from Mars to John the Baptist. He concludes, simply, that he “made a gibbet for myself of my houses” (151).

Wanting to help his fellow citizen, Dante gathers the unnamed Florentine suicide’s fallen leaves. He and Virgil walk out of the wood into a burning desert. Here, weeping souls either lie down, sit, or walk endlessly under “broad flakes of fire, like snow in the mountains without wind,” which make the ground burn where they fall (29-30). This is where blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers—people who were violent against God or Nature—are punished.

Dante sees one soul scornfully brushing flames from his body, and questions Virgil about him; the soul overhears and answers himself. He is Capaneus, a proud warrior who challenged Jupiter himself (and suffered the consequences). Even now, he is still raging against God. Virgil grimly notes that Capaneus’s lingering pride makes his punishment all the worse.

Virgil and Dante gingerly proceed along the edge of the burning plain, and come to the source of a red stream. This, Virgil says, is the most notable thing they have seen so far. He tells Dante the story of the Old Man of Crete, a massive statue inside Mount Ida. Its head is made of gold, its arms and chest are silver, its pelvis is brass, and its legs and feet are iron—except for its load-bearing right foot, made of clay. Each part of his body is cracked and drips tears that form the rivers of Hell: Acheron (the first), Styx (the second), and Phlegethon (the third, the river of blood). These rivers merge and form Cocytus, the lowest region of Hell. The trickle they see here is the point from which these rivers emerge.

Dante asks why the source emerges here in particular, if it is flowing all the way down from the upper world. Virgil tells him that, as he should have noticed, Hell is circular and they have been making a corkscrew descent down it, always turning left, so it should not be a surprise when they come across something new. Dante also asks about Lethe, another classical river, and Virgil explains that he will see it, but not here. Lethe runs “where the souls to be washed once their repented guilt has been removed” (137-38)—that is, at the top of Mount Purgatory.

At last, they come to a place where they can cross into the burning plain by way of a raised culvert.

Dante and Virgil walk along their raised path deep into the plain, protected from the burning sands, until they encounter a group of souls walking alongside them, squinting up. One grabs the hem of Dante’s clothing and says, “What a marvel!” (24). Dante looks on his charred face and recognizes him with shock: “Are you here, ser Brunetto?” (30).

This is Brunetto Latini—Dante’s teacher and a father figure to him. He asks Dante if he can walk with him a while. Dante is deferential, offering to stop for Latini and even thinking he would like to climb down and walk with him. Since he does not dare, he walks with his head bowed respectfully as they talk.

Ever the scholar, Latini asks Dante how he got here, and Dante explains. Praising his old pupil, Latini says, “If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port, if I perceived well during sweet life” (55-57). He gives Dante more prophetic bad news: Dante’s just behavior will create a lot of enemies among the unjust, and he will suffer for it. But, Latini says, do not worry about them: Dante is bound for honor and glory.

Dante replies with a strange speech of equivocal respect and dismay, wishing that Latini were not in Hell. He remembers well Latini’s fatherly care in teaching him “how man makes himself eternal” (85). He promises he is keeping good notes on his experiences and that when he reaches her, Beatrice will help him to interpret what he has seen.

Latini tells Dante about the other people walking on the burning plain. They are not only all sodomites, but sodomites of a particular social class: literary men and noblemen.

Latini is forced to interrupt himself when he sees a less desirable crowd approaching. He asks Dante to remember his great work, the Tesoro—or the “Treasure,” an encyclopedia—and takes off running, looking, Dante says, like the winner of a footrace.