Punishments In Dante's Inferno

Depiction of the afterlife is a common theme among classical writers, but treatment of souls in either heaven or hell varies over time between authors. Beginning with The Iliad, Homer depicts a rather homogenous hell where most souls experience a similar fate, no matter the lives they lived on earth. Using many of Homer’s ideas, Virgil goes further and makes the choices humans made while alive affect how they exist in the afterlife in The Aeneid. Outstripping both his predecessors, Dante’s work reflects his Christian society and expands on Virgil’s assignment of punishment and reward to create both a heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy. While all three are successful in designing their interpretations of hell, Virgil draws heavily

Using Catholic ideals in The Divine Comedy, he further divides souls into three main portions: heaven for the purest souls, purgatory for those in preparation for heaven, and in The Inferno, hell which exists for evil or misguided souls to spend eternal damnation. Like the previous two works, The Inferno contains descriptions of these punishments that support the idea that there is some substance to the souls because they experience physical anguish. Dante explains in The Purgatorio the difference in mortal versus immortal as he tries to hug Casella, but is unsuccessful in his three attempts (16). In nearly identical language as Homer and Virgil, the point of substance-less souls able to experience pain is maintained across the three works. However, Dante goes further using Christian ideology to explain that souls will once again inherit their earthly bodies

He creates a great pit structure composed of concentric circles that narrow at the bottom. Unlike in The Aeneid where Aeneas easily walks from place to place, concrete divisions such as pits, walls and guardians are present to separate the souls at each level. There are three main divisions based on sins committed: incontinence, violence and fraud. Sins of incontinence include more minor actions lacking self-restraint such as lust, gluttony and hoarders (26), violent sins being actions against self, neighbor or God, and fraudulent sins being the worst committed by seducers, hypocrites and treacherous (90). As Dante descends into the pit of hell, the crimes become worse, as does the punishment. Here, Dante is inspired a bit by both Homer and Virgil in the way they punish Tantalus in such a literal manner. While not placing Tantalus in his hell, Dante makes the punishment of souls fit the crime with suicides who sacrificed their bodies exist without a corporal form (102), and violent murders bath in a river of boiling blood (96). In doing so, he commits to Christian themes of having a worse eternal punishment for a terrible