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Inferno compared to iliad
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The Iliad in Dante’s Inferno
Dante makes many references to Homer and the Iliad throughout the Inferno. The fates of favorite characters are described during the course of Dante’s travels. Beginning with his vision of Homer in Limbo, continuing through increasingly gory levels of Hell until Dante reaches the eighth bolgia where he meets Ulysses who is engulfed in fire. Dante’s infatuation with the Iliad is clearly illustrated in his Divine Comedy.
Dante introduces Homer early in the Inferno. After the writer passes the gates of Hell and safely crosses the Acheron he is in the most comfortable section of Hell. Homer, along with other virtuous pagans(those who were not enlightened by Christ’s appearance on earth) and unbaptised children are there. Homer is spending eternity with philosophers, poets, and writers. The first circle has light and a sense of comfort, two things it doesn’t share with any other level of Hell. The only torture Homer has to endure is the lack of hope for salvation.
Dante’s next stop (after his confrontation with Minos) is the second circle where the carnal are relegated. In this circle he meets three main players in Homer’s Iliad, Paris, Achilles, and Helen. All of the inhabitants of this circle are swept up like leaves in a storm, denied the light and reason of God they are eternally dammed to ride the hurricane like winds around the second circle.
Much later in his journey Dante meets the man who conceived the Trojan Horse. Ulysses is in the eighth bolgia among his fellow evil counselors. He is is entrapped in a tongue of flame with his partner in crime, Diomede. The flame comes from one source but is spilt in two, the split symbolizes the falling-out that must come in a partnership based in evil. Ulysses is placed in this circle for many reasons. During the Trojan war he gave birth to the deadly idea that the Achains build infamous Trojan Horse. He also caused the death of Deidamia, Achilles lover when he talked Achilles into leaving her to go to Troy.
In conclusion, we can see that Dante presents the reader with a potentially life-altering chance to participate in his journey through Hell. Not only are we allowed to follow Dante's own soul-searching journey, we ourselves are pressed to examine the state of our own souls in relation to the souls in Inferno. It is not just a story to entertain us; it is a display of human decision and the perpetual impact of those decisions.
The subject of Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, is very clearly stated--it is “the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles.” The reader remains continually aware of the extent of Achilles’ rage, yet is never told the reason why Achilles remains angry and unreconciled. There is no definitive answer to this question. Achilles is not a static character. He is constantly changing; thus the question of why he remains angry solicits different answers at various stages throughout the poem. To find an answer, the reader must carefully examine Achilles’ ever-changing dilemma involving the concepts of mortality and honor. At its simplest, Achilles’ dilemma is that if he goes to war, he will die. But he will die with glory.
Inferno is only a piece of a much larger story written by Dante Alighieri. The entire story is called the Divine Comedy, which is composed of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Together these three pieces tell the story of Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; something that is easily discernible through reading the titles of each part. Dante wrote these poems somewhere around the year 1300. Originally written in what Dante referred to as Latin, there have been many different translations of his Divine Comedy. This has cause some variations in small details of the text, but the main story has stayed the same. Dante was highly involved in some political conflicts at the time which influenced some of his writing. The one thing that influenced Dante more than anything else in his writing was love. His love for the love of his life Beatrice was never ending. It was completely amazing how much he loved her. Now especially in Inferno it would definitely seem like love does not play a major part in the story. It does, love is the main reason the journey is imparted upon in the first place. A major but very overlooked theme in Dante's Inferno is love.
Anger has always been the downfall of humanity. For generations man, had fought in war for many reasons, some claiming to be their rights. What right does any man has sending innocent people to their death? Anger has brought men to make careless decision without caring for the consequences of their action even giving their back to their own people. Men that fought courageously for their country, but no one will ever know their name. So many countless tears mothers have cried for their fallen love ones. Many innocent lives lost because of selfishness and greed. In the Iliad, Homer’s descries the moment when brave warriors enter the battle field and hey yell the cry of war, the same cry that men have cried
In Dante’s Inferno, the relationship between Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil the Guide is an ever-evolving one. By analyzing the transformation of this relationship as the two sojourn through the circles of hell, one is able to learn more about the mindset of Dante the Poet. At the outset, Dante is clearly subservient to Virgil, whom he holds in high esteem for his literary genius. However, as the work progresses, Virgil facilitates Dante’s spiritual enlightenment, so that by the end, Dante has ascended to Virgil’s spiritual level and has in many respects surpassed him. In Dante’s journey with respect to Virgil, one can see man’s spiritual journey towards understanding God. While God loves man regardless of his faults, His greatest desire is to see man attain greater spirituality, in that man, already created in God’s image, may truly become divine, and in doing so, attain eternality.
Dante’s work is very hard to comprehend and understand to many modern readers hence the importance of using films or other poems with similar creativity in order for modern readers to understand the poem. The various journey of Dante to hell helps the readers to have a picture of how hell is and how real it is.Dante uses his poem to expose the rot in the church and also how dirty politics has become.
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is said to be the single greatest epic poem of all time. The opening story of the character of Dante the Pilgrim is told in the first of the three divisions: The Inferno. The Inferno is a description of Dante’s journey down through Hell and of the several degrees of suffering and many mythical creatures that he encounters on the way. Throughout his travel Dante displays many different feelings and actions but the emotion that summarizes the entire poem is fear. While some of his character traits change as his mind matures and acknowledges the justice being carried out, from the very beginning until the final Canto, his fear does not subside. This does well to reinforce the symbolism of Dante as Everyman and serves to direct the reader to the moral purpose of Divine Comedy, because of the humility and dependence upon God that fear produces. In the first Canto, which serves as an introduction to the entire comedy, Dante encounters the three beasts which impede his progress out of the dark woods. Coming upon the She-Wolf he writes: "This last beast brought my spirit down so low / with fear that seized me at the sight of her, / lost all hope of going up the hill" (I.52-54). Dante is so shaken by the appearances of the three beasts that he rushes headlong into the dark woods he has just come out of. This is only the first obstacle Dante encounters, but it proves an insurmountable one.
Many arguments have been made that Dante’s Inferno glimmers through here and there in Milton’s Paradise Lost. While at first glance the two poems seem quite drastically different in their portrayal of Hell, but scholars have made arguments that influence from Dante shines through Milton’s work as well as arguments refuting these claims. All of these arguments have their own merit and while there are instances where a Dantean influence can be seen throughout Paradise Lost, Milton’s progression of evil and Satan are quite different from Dante. Dante’s influence on Milton is noted by many scholars and is very apparent in several instances throughout Paradise Lost, however, Milton shows a progression of evil through his own vision of Satan and creates a Hell that is less meticulously constructed than Dante’s and more open to interpretation.
“Early in the spring of 1300, "midway along the road of our life," Dante is lost and alone in a dark, foreboding forest. To survive this ordeal, he must visit the three realms of the afterlife, beginning with Hell.” (Smith) Dante’s Inferno, one of the great classical poems that have come out of literature that’s topic is hell. Dante’s Inferno, gives a descriptive look into hell, from the eyes of Dante. Dante goes into detail about every part of hell. The people, what it looks like, sins to go there, the whole shah-bang. Dante splits up hell into nine different parts. In which he sends different types of sinners to each part. Each hell is made up differently, each has different systems that make up that particular systems. For example, circle three, has Cerberus the three headed dog, and another circle is completely frozen over. There are three circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno that are the best in the book: Circle one, circle six, and circle three.
Dante’s Inferno presents the reader with many questions and thought provoking dialogue to interpret. These crossroads provide points of contemplation and thought. Dante’s graphic depiction of hell and its eternal punishment is filled with imagery and allegorical meanings. Examining one of these cruxes of why there is a rift in the pits of hell, can lead the reader to interpret why Dante used the language he did to relate the Idea of a Just and perfect punishment by God.
Dante's "Inferno" is full of themes. But the most frequent is that of the weakness of human nature. Dante's descent into hell is initially so that Dante can see how he can better live his life, free of weaknesses that may ultimately be his ticket to hell. Through the first ten cantos, Dante portrays how each level of his hell is a manifestation of human weakness and a loss of hope, which ultimately Dante uses to purge and learn from. Dante, himself, is about to fall into the weaknesses of humans, before there is some divine intervention on the part of his love Beatrice, who is in heaven. He is sent on a journey to hell in order for Dante to see, smell, and hear hell. As we see this experience brings out Dante's weakness' of cowardice, wrath and unworthiness. He is lead by Virgil, who is a representation of intellect. Through Dante's experiences he will purge his sins.
In conclusion, a great deal of tension and contrast between “dark” and “light” in The Inferno helps us to explore Dante’s self portrait—he fears dangerous desires and sinful darkness, but shows much courage and hope towards life since he nevertheless follows his guide Virgil to dive into horrible Hell. As shown in Canto I, such emotional reaction to dark and light symbols lays a great foundation for developing Dante’s broad and universal traits as his journey progresses.
Dante experiences a vision, at the age of 35, after experiencing traumatic events in his hometown of Florence. The events that are occurring in Florence at the time are associated with papal corruption and cause Dante to be forced into exile. Following the vision, which confirms to Dante that he has strayed from the right path in life, Dante begins his travel through the three realms, which contain the possible consequences following a person’s death. Dante’s journey begins on Good Friday, when he is escorted to the gates of Hell, moves to Purgatory and ends in Heaven. However, an escort accompanies him for duration of his journey. Virgil, who Dante has long admired, escorts Dante through Hell and...
Homer's Iliad is commonly understood as an epic about the Trojan War, but its meaning goes deeper than that. The Iliad is not only a story of the evolution of Achilleus' persona, but at times it is an anti-war epic as well. The final book proposes many questions to the reader. Why not end with the killing of Hektor? Most stories of war conclude with the triumphant victory of good over evil, but in the Iliad, the final thoughts are inclined to the mourning of the defeated Hektor, which accentuates the fact that good has not triumphed over evil, but simply Achilleus triumphed over Hektor. Ending with the mourning of Hektor also brings to center stage for the first time the human side of war and the harsh aftermath of it. We see that war not only brings great glory, but also much suffering and anguish. Homer puts his anti-war views on display.
Divine Intervention is a “direct and obvious intervention by a god or goddess in the affairs of humans”. In various myths such as the Iliad, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Herakles, divine intervention was called upon in order to restrain a hero’s destructive or too powerful forces. Although the divine intervention was used to impair different heroes, the purpose to constrain was the same in all the narratives.