nt of the opportunists (even though the souls are not, technically speaking, "in" hell, being vomited forth even from there; Dante's lack of sympathy for those who lack zeal is one of the hallmarks of his vision). Dante then comes to the River Acheron where the souls crowd together like heaps of dead leaves, has a surly exchange with Charon, is reminded that he would not be in hell at all if he were not himself a sinner, and then, while God thoughtfully provides a background of earthquake, windstorm, and lightning-flash against a red sky, Dante faints.Dante places these unbaptized infants elsewhere and adds in his Limbo to the souls of those righteous Jews who have since gone to heaven the souls of virtuous pagans, of the just who lived moral lives as far as people could without the grace of Christianity. Dante puts Virgil there in the company of other poets, and he adds a catalogue of military heroes from the Aeneid and a catalogue of scholars. These souls spend eternity in their private compound, a citadel at the center surrounded by seven battlemented walls and containing an enameled green meadow, the wall illuminated by a radiance that strikes away a hemisphere of light from the darkness of hell. The accomplishments of these souls is so great that it is recognized even in hell (God does acknowledge human excellence). And yet, there is something pitiful about having such great ones, Plato and Aristotle, Caesar and Aeneas, Homer and Virgil, accept such a tawdry eternity, rather like being in a besieged castle with nothing but bathroom tile to walk on. At this point in hell we are inclined to think this an attractive alternative to the torments of the damned, but from the perspective of heaven or even of purgatory its limitations are all too apparent.Machiavelli:Machiavelli was born in Florence, in 1496. His father was a lawyer, and his family lived modestly, but was not rich. Florence in the 15th century was an independent city, owing...
