is next example. This is material which Virgil deliberately does not deal with in the Aeneid because this was a battle which the Romans barely come out intact. The historian Livy is used as the narrator of these events. Livy describes the destruction at Carthage: The attention of all was particularly attracted by a living Numidian with his nose and ears mangled, stretched under a dead Roman, who lay over him, and who, when his hands had been rendered unable to hold a weapon, his rage being exasperated to madness, had expired in the act of tearing his antagonist with his teeth. (Livy, Book XXII) Dante is legitimizing his poetry with these references from history. In line twelve Dante writes "...even as Livy writes, who does not err--." He is explicitly giving credit to Livy for the ability to describe the blood and wounds of war. After referring to both Virgial and Livy, who are writers of classical Roman battles, Dante moves on to a time closer to his present. He refers to grotesque images which took place in the thirteenth century. By this point in the passage, Dante has assembled a tremendous cast of hideousness spanding thousands of years. He has shown examples of the most grotesque and gruesome things on earth, which is war. However, he concludes that nothing is worse than the hideousness of the underworld in hell. The images Dante creates with his description of the ninth abyss are truly more hideous than anything that could have been written about the wars Dante compares them to No barrel, even though it's lost a hoop or end-piece, ever gapes as one whom I saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart: his bowels hung between his legs, one saw his vitals and the miserable sack that makes fo what we swallow excrement. (Lines 22-27) The image of a barrel, which has lost its end-piece, gives the reader a concrete analogy for the man who has been split apart. A barrel does not c...
