re violent, and the plight of the damned in The Inferno is much more intense because their sufferings seem more physical and emotional. At one point, Dante is so moved that he faints:While the one spirit said this the other wept so that for pityI swooned as in death and dropped like a dead body. (Sinclair, p. 79)Yet Dante is only at the beginning of a long and complex series of encounters, each of which represents a more completely and painfully damned group of sinners. In comparison with Virgil’s experience, Dante’s journey is an epic in itself, and the arrangement and order of Dante’s journey is an epic in itself, and the arrangement and order of Dante’s hell is complex enough to justify a study in itself. Significantly, the damned are rigorously classified and placed in circles according to the serious the their sin, as interpreted by the theology of the church in the Middle Ages. Unlike Virgil, Dante makes explicit moral judgement on each of the individuals he meets, and the damned encountered range from historical figures, to contemporary popes and poets, to the greatest sinner of them all: Judas Iscariot. Judas is encountered in the lowest circle of hell, being ground between the teeth of Satan. Satan is a bizarre figure who is more pagan than Christian in his appearance as of Dante had to resort to primitive images to convey the ugliness of the anti-Christ. Satan has three heads and needs all of them to inflict pain on his victims:With six eyes he was weeping and over three chinsDripped tears and bloody foam. In each mouth he crushed A sinner with his teeth as with a heckle and thus kept Three of them in pain…(Sinclair, p. 423)As if to balance his references to the Christian and classical worlds, Dante places Cassius and Brutus alongside Judas in the mouth of Satan, as all are betrayers. Dante’s hell is a closed system, with no escape for the damned, whereas Virgil’s open underworld...
