What Does The Aeneid Mean In Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Tour through Hell Dante’s Inferno is a narrative, poetic adventure through the nine different layers of Hell. With Virgil as Dante’s guide, Dante encounters all sorts of suffering, “[E]xpect to see to see the suffering race of souls who lost [God]” (Puchner et al. 1607), while interacting with those which are called ‘shades’. Some of these shades Virgil urges Dante to have limited, to no conversations with for various reasons; yet, many are recognizable to Dante and their lot is understood. While reading Dante’s Inferno, the reader experiences that Dante was unaware that he was redirected from a righteous path, “Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path” (Puchner et al. 1600). Dante’s narrative commences during a period when he, akin to Augustus, appreciates their naïve errs and look towards gratifying a doctrine while taking the reader through his conflict. Within Dante’s Inferno, influences

. . You wrote about young Sylvius’s father, who went beyond, with flesh corruptible, with all his senses, to the immortal realm” (Puchner et al. 1604). Not unlike, The Aeneid and Confessions, Inferno provides the reader a retrospective look at how one can travel from a dark place to one of enlightenment. The reader is able to experience a parallel between Augustine’s and Dante’s spiritual path of trying to find their way through and to reform from worldly error. Augustine states, “I had no wish to read further, and no need . . . with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away” (Puchner et al. 1194). It is this author’s stance that, in that moment, Augustine knew what path he needed to then take in