Examples Of Greed In Dante's Inferno

“Abandon every hope, all you who enter” (3.9). In Dante’s Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, this quote is inscribed above the gate to Hell. In the abode of the damned, Dante meets various hopeless souls who tell Dante their sad stories. As Dante observes the punishments of these sinners, he cries and pities them. From listening to the sinner's past, it appears that the souls are being unjustly punished. When listening to the sorrowful souls in the ninth bolgia, Virgil tells Dante “to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!” (30.148). Virgil is telling Dante that his fascination and pity of the damned will lead him to sin and despair. These hopeless souls do not care about the well-being of the living and deceive Dante, hiding the beauty of God’s

The second circle is the circle of the lustful, here Dante meets Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo. When Dante asks for their story, Francesca states that she and Paolo were reading Lancelot, and at the part where Lancelot kisses Guinevere, Paolo kisses her. When her husband found out, she and Paolo were killed, and Francesca claims “Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it" (5.137). Yet Francesca’s story is deceiving, since Guinevere was actually the one who kissed Lancelot in the book. In the notes of Mark Musa, he states that since the story of Lancelot is parallel to Francesca’s experience, that “if the passage in the romance inspired their kiss, it must have been she, as it was Guinevere, who was responsible” (118). This distortion of Lancelot’s story reflects on Francesca’s character, showing that she is a liar who takes advantage of Dante’s vulnerability and sympathy toward her. She deceived him, saying that the book and Paolo’s pursuit of a kiss led them to sin, when it was really her and her unhappy marriage. Francesca continues to deceive Dante by talking about love, when it was really desire and lust that she had for Paolo, which led her to Hell. Therefore Francesca’s lies lead Dante to believe in her innocence, causing him to sympathize and pity her so much that he

The ninth circle is the circle of the traitors where Dante meets Friar Alberigo. Friar Alberigo invites his opponents to dinner and calls for fruit as the sign for the assassin to kill his guests. He claims “dates are served me for the figs I gave” (33.120). With this statement, Friar Alberigo shows how he pities himself and attempts to deceive Dante. He is saying that “he is suffering more than his share” (Musa 377). Friar Alberigo uses imagery of fruit to convey that as dates are more valuable than figs, he got a crueler punishment than he deserved. Dante has a much different response to this interlocutor than he has with the others. Dante breaks his promise to break the ice from Friar Alberigo’s eyes, therefore, betraying the betrayer. He finally stops showing pity for the souls in Hell and sees their punishments as just. Therefore, Friar Alberigo is an example of a deceiving interlocutor whose past does not cause Dante to pity him, meaning that Dante is letting go of his connection to worldly things and