Nevertheless, she predicts that her husband will be punished for his fratricide in Caina, within the ninth circle (Canto V). Francesca reports that their act of adultery was triggered by reading the adulterous story of Lancelot and Guinevere (an episode sculpted by Auguste Rodin in The Kiss). Dante is told by Francesca da Rimini how she and her husband’s brother Paolo Malatesta committed adultery, but then died a violent death, in the name of Love, at the hands of her husband, Giovanni (Gianciotto). In this circle, Dante sees Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris, Tristan, and many others who were overcome by sensual love during their life. This symbolises the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly. These souls are blown to and fro by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without hope of rest. They are the first ones to be truly punished in Hell. Dante condemns these “carnal malefactors” for letting their appetites sway their reason.
In the second circle of Hell are those overcome by lust.
Gianciotto Discovers Paolo and Francesca by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The sins of incontinence-weakness in controlling one’s desires and natural urges-are the mildest among them, and, correspondingly, appear first, while the sins of violence and fraud appear lower down. The lower circles are structured according to the classical (Aristotelian) conception of virtue and vice, so that they are grouped into the sins of incontinence, violence, and fraud (which for many commentators are represented by the leopard, lion, and she-wolf). Dante implies that all virtuous non-Christians find themselves here, although he later encounters two (Cato of Utica and Statius) in Purgatory and two (Trajan and Ripheus) in Heaven.īeyond the first circle, all of those condemned for active, deliberately willed sin are judged by the serpentine Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles by wrapping his tail around himself a corresponding number of times (Minos initially hinders the poets’ passage, until rebuked by Virgil). Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo (Canto IV). In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the mathematician Euclid, the scientist Pedanius Dioscorides, the statesman Cicero, the first doctor Hippocrates, the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Averroes and many others, including Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general (“in his armor, falcon-eyed”), Electra, Camilla, Latinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucretia, and Orpheus. Limbo includes green fields and a castle with seven gates to represent the seven virtues, the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Persian polymath Avicenna. Without baptism (“the portal of the faith that you embrace”) they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. Note that circle 8 consists of ten concentric subcircles. Follow Dante’s descent circle by circle through the eternal abode of lost souls, down to the pit of Hell at the center of the earth. To survive this ordeal, he must visit the three realms of the afterlife, beginning with Hell.
Early in the spring of 1300, “midway along the road of our life,” Dante is lost and alone in a dark, foreboding forest.
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