Dante takes Homer’s torch to the Inferno

Don’t think me unaware, dear readers. I know that literary history is not quite as interesting as a tale of being a foreigner or of dropping the f-bomb on my mother. But I just can’t seem to help myself.

I’ve been working out these ideas for four years or so in my world lit classes, and this is the first time I’ve gotten to string them together in a more or less coherent fashion. If you’ll indulge me, I promise that later I’ll tell you a funnier story. Perhaps one involving a Bad Ass Missionary.

If you haven’t tuned in for a while, you might want to see this post to find out what the Homer’s torch idea is all about. If it’s really been a while, see this one, where I talk about my anti-theory about how books continue each other.

When last we left the discussion, we were talking about how the torch of Homer’s ideas in the Odyssey and the Iliad was taken up by the Roman poet Virgil for his epic, the Aeneid. I suggested that a later writer from Florence, Italy, one Dante Alighieri, then took up the same torch from Virgil.

Ready? Here we go:

Although he had previously written lyric poems and essays, Dante’s most important work is The Divine Comedy. The epithet “divine” was added by later generations of appreciative readers, but Dante himself had titled his long, theology-heavy poem The Comedy, or Comedia in Italian, not because it’s funny, but because it has a happy ending: Dante receives a vision of God. (In literary genre terms, comedy is the opposite of tragedy.)

In the poem, a slightly fictionalized persona of the author, whom scholars call “Dante the Pilgrim” to distinguish him from Dante the Author, wanders from the straight path in life and is menaced by three mysterious beasts in a dark wood. The beasts prevent him from taking the straight road to Paradise, which he can see somewhere ahead of and above him.

In order to escape, Dante must descend into the realm of the dead, much as Odysseus and Aeneas did, making a three-day journey through Hell and Purgatory to reach Paradise. The journey through each area of the underworld is relayed in one large section, or canticle, of the overall poem: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.

Dante meets Virgil. Engravings by Gustav Dore, 1890.

To help his persona Dante the Pilgrim make the journey, Dante the author enlists the help of a guide whom he considers an expert in human nature and one of the world’s greatest poets: Virgil. It is Virgil, in fact, who informs Dante the Pilgrim that, to paraphrase Steve Miller, he’s got to go through Hell before he gets to Heaven. When Dante and Virgil first meet, there is a rather embarrassing scene in which Dante gushes that he is Virgil’s biggest fan and that he learned from Virgil the style that had already begun to make him famous in Italy. (The Comedia is written in a dialect of Italian, but Dante’s earlier work had been done in Latin, the language of the Aeneid.)

Interestingly, Dante the Pilgrim tells Virgil that he is not worthy to make the journey into the realms of the dead because, in his words, “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.” Aeneas, remember, the hero of Virgil’s own epic, had journeyed alive to the land of the dead to receive a prophecy about his future. The Paul that Dante mentions is the Christian apostle Paul who, in a rather cryptic passage in Corinthians, mentions how he knew a man who was “caught up to the third heaven,” “whether in the body or the spirit, I do not know.” Some theologians after Paul settled the ambiguity in his statement and claimed that Paul himself had been the man and that he had, indeed, been taken bodily into heaven and returned alive. This is the tradition Dante seems to be referencing in his comment to Virgil.

This passage is a complex move for Dante the author: in one short sentence, he has linked Virgil’s hero to one of Christianity’s most influential apostles, given the fictionalized version of himself permission to journey alive into the land of the dead, and made sure that he himself seems appropriately humble by appearing to demur.

Harpies torment damned souls in the Forest of Suicides

The conjunction of Christian and Greco-Roman elements continues throughout Dante’s journey with Virgil, especially in the Inferno. Many figures from Greco-Roman mythology perform regulatory tasks in Hell: Cerberus, the three-headed dog, guards the sinners punished for gluttony; Harpies, half-woman and half-bird, torment the sinners transformed into trees in the Forest of Suicides; the Furies refuse Dante and Virgil entrance to Dis, one of Hell’s cities, and threaten them from the top of the walls.

Dante and Virgil with the Virtuous Pagans

Other human figures, both historical and fictional, are also present. Virgil resides in the first circle of the Inferno, the area reserved for “virtuous pagans,” Greco-Roman heroes who lived good lives but were not Christians (since they lived and died before Jesus was born). They do not suffer any of Hell’s torments, but they will never ascend to Paradise. Virgil’s eternal companions include other writers such as Homer, Horace, Ovid, Socrates and Plato, as well as literary characters such as Hector and Aeneas, the Trojan princes, and Lavinia, Aeneas’s Latin wife and the mother of the ancient Roman line.

Odysseus, or “Ulysses” in Latin, also makes an appearance in the Inferno, but he is in a lower level, being punished as a deceiver. Dante, apparently, did not approve of his wily ways.

A celestial messenger scatters devils and opens the gate for Virgil and Dante

However, even though Greco-Roman figures are part of the landscape, so to speak, of the Inferno, Christian theology remains the structuring principle. In the scene where the Furies menace Dante and Virgil from the top of the walls of Dis, Virgil asks for help from an angel who strides lightly through the Inferno and flings back the gate easily, scattering the Furies.

Reminders of the doctrine of the Trinity are everywhere: in the three-fold structure of the realm of the dead, in the nine levels of the Inferno (nine is, of course, the square of three), and even in the terza rima poetic structure, in which rhymes occur in three-line, interlocking units. There are even eleven syllables in each line, giving each tercet, or three-line unit, a total of thirty three syllables.

Classical references are drastically less pronounced in the story after the travelers leave the Inferno with its unredeemed and unredeemable sinners. Virgil himself must eventually be left behind as well, as he is not allowed to ascend higher (closer to God) than the top of Mount Purgatory. The role of guide through Paradise is then taken over by Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, who had sent Virgil to help Dante in the first place.

Other writers at the tail end of the Middle Ages also wrote allegories about the afterlife, though none, I would argue, quite so well as Dante. During the Renaissance, interest in taking up the torch that lit Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and which had been carried further by Virgil and Dante, seems to have waned. Painters and sculptors often took up classical subjects, or Biblical subjects in a classical style, but, to my knowledge, there is no direct literary continuation of the stories of Odysseus, Achilles, Aeneas or Dante.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. A Renaissance-era painting of a character in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, to be sure, but not a direct taking up of Homer's torch.

In the Enlightenment period, spanning roughly the mid-17th to the end of the 18th century, writers and artists seemed more focused on moving forward than looking back. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they concentrated on form and structure, adapting each to their needs and generating afresh each work’s “inner light.” There are certainly classical allusions to be found in the Enlightenment period, and there are even some works in a classical style – but these seem intended as ironic and humorous rather than serious and magnificent.

Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, for instance, uses the conventions of epic poetry to tell the story of a rather silly young woman filled with the rage of Achilles because a lock of her hair has been stolen. Apparently, Pope intended to poke fun at the highly formalized manners of the genteel. Even though Pope used epic conventions, however, he did not quite take up Homer’s torch.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, interest in Homer’s stories revived and his torch really started getting around.