Dante's Inferno and Classical Mythology
Dante’s descent into Hell in Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, tells of the author’s experiences in Hades as he is guided through the abyss by the Roman author, Virgil. The text is broken into cantos that coincide with the different circles and sub-circles of Hell that Dante and Virgil witness and experience. Inferno is heavily influenced by classic Greek and Roman texts and Dante makes references to a myriad of characters, myths, and legends that take place in Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Some of the most important references, however, are the most obvious ones that are easily overlooked simply because of the fact that they are so blatant. Dante is being escorted through Hell by the poet Virgil, and this is Dante’s first homage to Greco-Roman mythology. The second reference is the actual descent into the underworld. This reference is pulled directly from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante constructs his vision of the underworld with the help of Virgil’s seminal text. Because there are so many classical references in Inferno, the other references that are focused on in this paper are ones that show Dante’s breadth of allusion, as he draws on mythology described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other parts of the Aeneid. Dante first encounters his future guide as he fearfully finds his way through the landscape in the growing dark of Canto 1. Virgil introduces himself to Dante saying, “I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of / Anchises who came from Troy, when proud Ilion / was destroyed by fire” (Dante 1.73-5). Virgil is referencing both the Aeneid and the Iliad in these few lines of poetry. He is alluding to Aeneas, the son of Anchises, and he is also referencing the Trojan War when he talks about Ilion burning. This initial reference is an interesting one because in his own work Virgil attempted to link the Roman Empire to the battles of Troy. This attempt to link the current work
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