Dante, Virgil, and the Classics

Dante, Virgil, And the Classics

When surveying the work of Dante Alighieri, one discovers immediately that lineage was an important theme for the poet. For Dante, establishing a connection with the past - particularly the glory days of ancient Rome and Greece - with his present day struggles in his native Florence, was a major motivating factor in much of his artistic output. In this sense, his work forms a link with classical writers such as Virgil, who figures prominently in the Divine Comedy. In this brief essay, I will explore the ways in which Dante attempted to make a connection with the ancient world through his usage of such classic authors as Virgil.

The Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, opens with Dante in his thirty-fifth year, in the depths of misery and apparently on the verge of suicide. Virgil, who will be his guide through the underworld, rescues him. As a fellow poet connecting him with the great tradition of the past, Dante relies on Virgil, not merely as a guide, but as a fellow traveler through the vast terrain of sin and accounting. Each time a sin is punished in the Inferno, it is meant to be a symbolic occurrence of poetic justice. Virgil also guides Dante through the second part of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatorio.

In Dante's time, Virgil was considered to be the greatest epic poet of the classical era, so the fact that he is Dante's guide serves to tie Dante and his work directly with the achievements of the past, thus emphasizing the universal values of history. Given the spiritual nature of Dante's work, it is also significant that Virgil was believed to have predicted the arrival of Christianity in the famous lines from his Eclogue IV:

at the boy's birth in whom the iron shall cease, the golden race arise

What is more, Dante's own journey through hell can be said to evoke a similar journey undertaken by Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's great epic poem, the Aeneid. Finally, Virgil's presence throughout the Divine Comedy is there for a philosophical reason, as well; he is meant to represent the clarity of reason in a spiritually chaotic universe.

Homer, author of the great epic the Odyssey, also appears in Dante's Divine Comedy, in the Limbo section of the Inferno. Homer was also the author of the Iliad, which tells the story of the Trojan War. Homer's presence in Dante's work effectively connects the Florentine poet with the politics and poetics of ancient Greece. This is further symbolized by the fact that Homer, in the Inferno, leads as "Lord" three Latin poets - Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. This further underlines the effect that the ancient Greeks had on the Romans - and the double influence that both had on Dante as a poet and politician.