The Portable Dante by Dante Alighieri Read Free Book Online

wandering in a dark wood (the worldly life). He tries to escape by climbing a mountain that is lit from behind by the rays of the sun (God). His journey upward is impeded by the sudden appearance of three beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf (the three major divisions of sin, signifying the three major divisions of Hell: fraud, violence, and concupiscence). The poet is about to be driven back when, just as suddenly, Virgil (reason or human understanding) appears. He has been sent by Beatrice (divine revelation) to aid Dante, to guide him on this journey that cannot fail. The only way to escape from the dark wood is to descend into Hell (man must first descend into humility before he can raise himself to salvation or God). The way up the mountain, then, is to go down: before man can hope to climb the mountain of salvation, he must first know what sin is. The purpose of Dante’s journey through Hell is precisely this: to learn all there is to know about sin as a necessary preparation for the ascent to God. In fact, from the opening canto of the
Inferno
to the closing one of the
Paradiso,
Dante the poet presents his pilgrim as continuously learning, his spiritual development being the main theme of the entire poem. His progress is slow, and there are even occasional backslidings.
    In
Inferno
IV the pilgrim and his guide, Virgil, who are now in Limbo, see a hemisphere of light glowing in the distance, and as they move toward it they are met by four great pagan poets. Virgil explains to his ward:
    “Observe the one who comes with sword in hand, leading the three as if he were their master.
    It is the shade of Homer, sovereign poet, and coming second, Horace, the satirist; Ovid is the third, and last comes Lucan.
    (86-90)
    Together with Virgil these four non-Christians form the group of those classical poets whom Dante most admired and from whom he drew much of the material for his poem. It must be said, however, that while Homer was known in the Middle Ages as the first of the great epic poets, the author of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
few people—and Dante was not among them—could read Greek; thus Homer’s great epics were known almost entirely second-hand through the revised versions of Dares and Dictys, who told the tale of the Trojan war in a way that exalted the Trojans and often disparaged the Greeks. Dante admired Homer more for his reputation than for any intimate knowledge that he had of his works. The second of the four is Horace, whom Dante calls the “satirist” but whom he must have thought of mainly as a moralist since Dante was familiar only with the
Ars poetica.
Ovid, who comes next, was the most widely read Roman poet in the Middle Ages, and he was Dante’s main source of mythology in the
Commedia.
Dante, however, seems to have been acquainted with only the
Metamorphoses.
Coming last is Lucan, author of the
Pharsalia,
which deals with the Roman civil war between the legions of Pompey and those of Caesar. The book was one of Dante’s important historical sources.
    When the pilgrim and his guide have seen all there is to see of sin (canto XXXIV) they find they must exit from Hell by climbing down Lucifer’s monstrous, hairy body. Only by grappling with sin itself, by knowing the foundation of all sin, which is pride, personified in the hideous figure of Lucifer frozen in the ice at the very center of the universe, can they hope to make their way out “to see again the stars. ”
    The island-mountain of Purgatory, invented by Dante, is divided into three parts. At the very top is the Earthly Paradise; the upper part of the mountain is sealed off from the lower by a gate that a resplendent angel guards, equipped with St. Peter’s keys. This upper half, with its seven cornices corresponding to the seven deadly sins, is reserved for those who have been permitted to enter the gate from below in order to begin the self-willed torments of their purgation; after its accomplishment they pass to the Earthly