Dante's Inferno Summary

I nferno is a fourteenth-century epic poem by Dante Alighieri in

which the poet and pilgrim Dante embarks on a spiritual journey.
 At the poem’s beginning, Dante is lost in a dark wood, both
literally and spiritually. He meets the soul of his poetic idol, the
Roman poet Virgil, who agrees to guide him through hell.

 Dante and Virgil enter hell and explore its nine circles,
observing the punishments suffered by the various categories
of sinners.

 At the bottom of the Ninth Circle, Dante and Virgil encounter

Lucifer. They climb the devil’s back in order to ascend to Mount
Purgatory.

Summary
Last Updated on January 28, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word
Count: 1986

Like so many of the classical epics Dante Alighieri admired,

Dante’s Divine Comedy  begins in medias res. At the start of
the first canto of Inferno, the action has already begun,
unaccompanied by contextual information. The year is 1300. It is
the night before Good Friday. Dante, aged 35, finds himself lost in a
dark wood, having strayed from the  diritta via, the straight way,
true path, or right road. He encounters a leopard, a lion, and a she-
wolf. Evading those fearsome beasts, he then meets the Roman
poet Virgil, now a shade, who agrees to guide Dante down through
the nine circles of hell. Virgil explains that he was summoned by
three holy women: Dante’s beloved Beatrice, the Virgin Mary, and
St. Lucia.
The entrance to hell is marked by a grim message:
“Through me you pass into the grievous city,

through me you pass into eternal pain,

Through me you pass among the lost people[…]

Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

The throng of souls entering the gates of hell extends as far as Dante can
see, and he is stunned by the scale of the desperation he witnesses. He had
not known there were so many dead people. Having passed through the
gates of hell, Dante and Virgil enter Limbo, a region populated by the souls
of those who are noble in character but unbaptized, including pagans and
infants. Dante is honored to stroll with a company of great ancient poets,
including Homer, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace, as well as Virgil. Dante refers to
himself as the sixth among that company, indicating his sense of his own
importance as a poet.

At the entrance of the Second Circle, Dante and Virgil encounter the Cretan
king Minos, who judges the incoming souls and assigns them to their
appropriate place in hell. Once inside, Dante and Virgil encounter the souls
of the lustful, who in life failed to contain their erotic urges.  They are now
eternally buffeted about by surging winds. The two representative souls of
the lustful are Paolo and Francesca, a pair of Florentine lovers who tell Dante
of their ill-fated affair. They went behind the back of Francesca’s husband,
Gian Cotto, who then murdered the lovers in his rage.

In the Third Circle, the souls of the gluttonous splash about in a huge bog,
blinded by the mud and chilled by the icy rain pouring down on them.
Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog, viciously watches them. Virgil fills
Cerberus’s mouths with heaps of mud, allowing him and Dante to slip past.
In the Third Circle, Dante speaks with Ciacco, a fellow Florentine who makes
a political prophecy: the Black Guelphs will drive out the White Guelphs. This
event, the cause of Dante’s exile in 1302, indeed came to pass.

The Fourth Circle is the realm of the greedy. The circle is lorded over by
Plutus, the Roman god of earthly wealth. As Dante and Virgil approach,
Plutus gutturally mutters the cryptic phrase “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn
aleppe!” The phrase fills Dante with both fear and confusion. After Dante and
Virgil descend into the circle, they find the greedy souls, both hoarders and
squanderers. The souls are fated to eternally roll great bags of gold uphill in
Sisyphean fashion or spin in circles, pointlessly rolling great boulders into
one another.
The souls of the wrathful float in the foul, stagnant River Styx. The more
aggressive souls break the surface and bark hatefully, while the more mutely
angry souls languish in the depths. Virgil and Dante hire Phlegyas to ferry
them across. As they make the crossing, they encounter Filippo Argenti, a
Florentine acquaintance of Dante’s. Argenti bitterly accosts Dante because of
their opposing political allegiances: Argenti being a Black Guelph, Dante a
White. Crowds of wrathful souls attack Argenti as Dante and Virgil raft away.
On the other shore, they enter the walled city of Dis, which contains the
subsequent circles of hell.

The souls of heretics burn within the earth, piled deep in the flaming graves
of the Sixth Circle. This herd of heretics largely consists of Epicureans,
hedonists, and other materialists, whose damnable heresy lies in their claim
that the soul dies with the body. Virgil describes the geography of the
seventh and eighth circles and, noting the rotations of the constellations,
calculates that it is now just before dawn on Saturday.

Virgil and Dante slip past the Minotaur as they enter the Seventh Circle,
which detains the violent in three subdivided rings. In the First Ring, the
souls of those who were violent against their neighbors wallow in the
Phlegethon, a great river of burning blood. The Phlegethon is populated by
bloodthirsty warlords, such as Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun, who
are kept in place by the sharp arrows of patrolling centaurs.

The Second Ring houses the souls of suicides. They have been transformed

into a grove of gnarled trees, to be perpetually harassed by harpies, who
make the trees bleed. Upon judgment day, they have no hope of returning
to human form; they are rooted in their sordid grove forever. Two profligate
souls sprint through the woods, chased by hounds, crashing through and
breaking the limbs of the suicides, who cannot avoid the agony.

In the Third Ring burn those souls who committed violence against God,

Nature, and Art. They are known as blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers,
respectively. These souls are stranded on a vast desert of scorching sand,
rained upon by a perpetual storm of fire. As Dante and Virgil cross the
desert, they encounter Brunetto Latini, a Florentine scholar, orator, and poet
who was a mentor and close friend of Dante’s. Dante lavishes respect and
praise on Latini, referring to him with the formal pronoun voi. Dante and
Virgil proceed, preparing to plunge into the abyss beyond the Seventh Circle.
To descend through the abyss, Virgil solicits the assistance of the winged
beast Geryon, who ferries them down.
The Eighth Circle, the vastest of all, houses the souls of the fraudulent,
who are divided into ten bolge, or trenches. The bolge are arrayed in a
series of concentric circle that grow smaller as they descend towards the
central well, whose bottom yields the final circle.
 In the First Bolgia suffer the panderers and seducers, who are whipped and
beaten by demons. Dante notices the Greek Hero Jason, who courted and
abandoned Medea, among the seducers’ ranks.

 The Second Bolgia contains the flatterers, who are mired in pools of feces.

 The Third Bolgia imprisons the simoniacs, or the corrupt church officials

who accept money in exchange for favors, pardons, and posts. Notable
simoniacs include Simon Magus, for whom the sin is named, and a trio of
popes: Nicholas III, Boniface VIII, and Clement V. The simoniacs, who are
buried head-first and burned, spark a righteous, enraged tirade by Dante.

 In the Fourth Bolgia bumble the sorcerers, who walk about blindly and

aimlessly, their heads twisted to face backwards. These magicians and
soothsayers sinned for arrogantly attempting to surmise God’s intentions.
Exemplary sorcerers include Amphiaraus, Tiresias, and Michael Scot.

 In the Fifth Bolgia burn the barrators, or the corrupt political officials who

sell government posts for profit. These barrators stew in a lake of hot pitch
and are kept submerged by demons known as the Malebranche. The
Malebranche take a keen interest in Dante and Virgil, and their leader,
Malacoda, orders a troop of his demons to guide the pair to the next bolgia.
Along the way, the Malebranche terrorize an unnamed man, who points out
several of his fellow barrators. When two of the demons begin to wrestle,
falling into the pitch, Dante and Virgil escape the demons’ surveillance and
slip down into the Sixth Bolgia.

 The Sixth Bolgia houses the hypocrites, who trudge about while cloaked in

robes of lead. The robes, with their brilliant exterior gilding and interior
leadenness, reflect the deceptively dual nature of hypocrisy. Notable
hypocrites include members of the Jovial Friars, known for their failed
asceticism, and Caiaphas, the priest who ordered Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.
Caiaphas is staked to the ground in a crucifixion of his own; passing crowds
trample on him, deepening his agony. Dante and Virgil cross a ruined bride
to enter the Seventh Bolgia.

 The Seventh Bolgia bulges with thieves. These thieves are devoured by,

and transformed into, reptiles; just as they stole from others in life, their
identities are stolen by the vile patrolling reptiles. Among the thieves is Vanni
Fucci, a Florentine whom Dante recognizes. Fucci curses God, drawing the ire
 of the centaur Cacus, who pursues Fucci. Dante chastises the city of Florence
for filling the halls of hell with so many sinners; he implores Florentines to do
better.

 In the Eighth Bolgia, false counsellors are ensconced in tongues of flame.

Dante finds the Greek soldiers Diomedes and Ulysses wrapped in a single
flame, punished for having devised the Trojan Horse. Ulysses tells of his final
days, in which he left Ithaca for a final journey beyond the Atlantic. He
coaxed his crew far beyond the horizon, only to sail them into a deadly
whirlpool.

 In the Ninth Bolgia, Dante and Virgil find the sowers of discord, who are
flayed to shreds by a demon. The discordants are largely rebels, politicians,
and soldiers who rent society to satisfy their own aims; notable discordants
include Muhammed, Gaius Curio, and Bertrand de Born.

 The Tenth Bolgia contains the falsifiers, who are ravaged by disease for

having been, figuratively speaking, diseases on society. The varieties of
falsifiers are alchemists, such as Griffolino d’Arezzo, imposters, such as
Gianni Schicchi, counterfeiters, such as Adam of Brescia, and perjurers, such
as Sinon, the man who convinced the Trojans to accept the Greeks’ horse.
Finally, Dante and Virgil arrive at the well, which is crowded with tower-sized
giants, including Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus. Virgil convinces Antaeus to
transport him and Dante down to the well’s bottom, where the Ninth Circle of
hell starts.

Traitors are punished in the Ninth Circle, the frozen lake Cocytus, which is
divided into four rounds.
 The First Round is Caïna, where traitors to their kindred are frozen up to
their necks in ice; this zone is named for the evil Cain. It includes such
traitors as Mordred, of Arthurian lore, and the Ghibelline Camiscion de’ Pazzi.

 The Second Round is Antenora, where traitors to their country are

submerged up to their chins. Examples include the region’s namesake,
Antenor, a Trojan who betrayed his city, and the Guelph traitor Bocca degli
Abati. In this round Dante encounters one of the most pitiable figures in all of
hell, Count Ugolino, who tells his story: After being charged in a conspiracy
to take over his political faction, Ugolino was locked in a tower with his sons
and grandsons, all of whom were slowly starved to death.

 The Third Round is Ptolomea, where traitors to their guests are frozen up to

their eyes. The round is named for Ptolemy, the crooked governor of Jericho.
Here, Dante encounters Fra Alberigo, another of the Jovial Friars, guilty for
 having a pair of rivals murdered at a banquet he hosted. Dante refuses
Alberigo’s pleas to remove the ice from his eyes.

 The Fourth Round is Judecca, where traitors to their lords are entirely

suspended in the ice, their bodies wildly contorted. At the heart of the lake
stands the devil, the former angel Lucifer. The devil, whose chief sin is
treachery to God, has three faces and six leathery wings. The three mouths
perpetually devour three infamous traitors: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas, for
whom the round is named.

Their journey complete, Virgil and Dante depart from hell. They climb the
devil’s back, emerging in a welcome spectacle of starlight in the Southern
Hemisphere, near the base of Mount Purgatory. As Dante’s Inferno ends, the
journey of Purgatorio beckons.