Dante's Inferno and the Number Three
Dante’s Inferno and the Number Three Durante degli Alighieri, mostly referred to as Dante, was a major Italian poet of the middle Ages. Dante as an author uses numerology a lot. Almost everything in Dante’s work has a number and some numbers appear more often than others do. He is the author of an epic poem, Dante’s Inferno, which is said to be one of the greatest works of world literature. In Dante’s Inferno, Dante made use of the number three. Almost everything that occurred in this story revolved around the number three, even if it meant three times three to make nine because nine was a multiple of three. The number three was important to Dante simply because it was considered holy – since the father (God), the son (Jesus), and the Holy Ghost comprise the Trinity (AngelFire.) “It has been said that no shape is as powerful as the triangle, and as much use as Dante makes of numbers in the Comedia, no digit gets nearly the amount of attention that the number three does, except perhaps for its multiples. Threes provide a structure not only for the poetry and overall design of Dante’s work but also for its landscape, for the attributes of creatures that will populate the Inferno, and finally for the punishment of sinners that are damned eternally.” (Agoodmixture.) Dante’s Comedia was made up of three books, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paridiso. Each book was made up of thirty-three cantos, which were each written in tercets. A tercet is a unit or group of three lines of a verse. The poems rhyme scheme was in a three letterform; aba, bcb, cdc, and so on (Agoodmixture.) In Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil take a three-day journey through hell. The number three is everywhere after this, starting with Dante’s first encounter after entering the hell. Dante sees three beasts in the first Canto, which were a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. These three beasts all corresponded to the three divisions of Dante’s hell. The she-wolf represented the Upper Hell, which were