themselves miserable. Hell is the logical extension of this misery through eternity, with the soul now deprived both of the value of human remorse and of divine mercy. The sin is externalized in all of its ugliness, brutishness, and evil, stripped bare of the veneer with which we all are wont to plate our peccadillos. Any time we feel inclined to feel pity for one of the souls Dante encounters, we would do well to remember that the poem's fiction is that the soul is exactly where (according to the poet) it ought to be and where it has chosen to be (even if the pilgrim--as opposed to the poet--sometimes expresses the pity we are likely to share). The souls often present revisionist autobiographies, but we would do well to be suspicious readers of them since Dante's fictional world is based on a moral geography: where the souls are is our starting point in evaluating whothey are.Finally the lowest area of all in hell is located at the bottom of a deep circular well. Stationed around the perimeter of the well, their torsos sticking up over the edge are a half dozen giants, one of whom, Antaeus, gently deposits the poets down upon the frozen floor of hell. Here, at the center of evil, all the infernal waters, and all the tears and blood of suffering humanity gather and freeze in the total absence of love. Here those souls are trapped in the ice who have been treacherous, that is, fraudulent to those who especially deserved loyalty. At the center of this frozen lake, his torso coming up above the surface, Satan himself, with his three faces, perpetually gnaws on Brutus and Cassius and Judas Iscariot. In canto 3 the descent begins. Dante and Virgil come to the Gate of Hell, with God's words carved over the entry as over an imperial triumphal arch or gateway. Virgil explains that the souls inside have lost "the good of the intellect," takes Dante by the hand, and they enter. Immediately, Dante gets a taste of infernal suffering in the treatme...
