Dante's Inferno And The Heroic Quest
Like Homer's "The Odyssey," and "The Iliad," Dante's "The Inferno" begins with a kind of god's eye view of the world. However, rather than the gods looking down and squabbling about the morality of humans they see, Dante begins with his hero's face-to-face encounter with the divine, or at least a representative of the divine, the pagan poet Virgil. Virgil will be the poet's first guide through the world of the dead. Virgil is a pagan and thus cannot enter the Christian version of heaven, so he will guide Dante through "The Inferno." Virgil cannot enter heaven even though he is a 'good' pagan because he is being punished for being born before Jesus came to teach and suffer upon the earth. The good pagans are punished for being able to envision nothing beyond the existence of Homer's gods, essentially.
The hero of Dante's quest, however, is not an abstract 'he' but the poet himself.
Unlike Virgil's own "Aeneid," and Homer's epics, where the poet appears mainly to invoke the muse, it is...
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