Dante's Inferno and the Heroic Quest: An Epic Comparison

Introduction: A Divine Encounter and the Epic Tradition

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 the humans they observe, 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 serves as the poet's first guide through the world of the dead. Because Virgil is a pagan, he cannot enter the Christian version of heaven, and so he guides Dante through The Inferno instead.

Virgil cannot enter heaven even though he is considered a "good" pagan, because he is effectively being punished for having been born before Jesus came to teach and suffer upon the earth. The good pagans, in Dante's schema, are punished for being able to envision nothing beyond the existence of Homer's gods, essentially.

Dante as Hero: The Spiritual Journey Versus the Physical Quest

The hero of Dante's quest, however, is not an abstract third-person figure but the poet himself. Unlike Virgil's own Aeneid and Homer's epics — where the poet appears mainly to invoke the muse — it is the poet's own soul and view of the world that form the narrative core of the poem, rather than a nationalist epic in which the poet recounts the deeds of gods and heroes of old. There is a geographical wandering, as occurs in Homer's Odyssey, but the protagonist's own spiritual development, after finding himself lost and wandering in a dark wood, is the ultimate focus of interest in The Inferno.

Although both Odysseus and Dante strive homeward and each has a divine intermediary to assist them — Virgil for Dante, and Athena for Odysseus — Dante does not experience a physical reward at the journey's end, such as a wife and a kingdom. Rather, the benefits for Dante are spiritual in nature and come to his heart and mind through understanding.

Inner and Outer Ugliness: Beowulf, Grendel, and Dante

Like the titular nationalist hero of the anonymous Beowulf, Dante as a poet must slay a kind of beast. But the beast that must be slain exists within the poet's own spirit and mind, rather than in anything that belongs to the outside world. The monsters Dante encounters as he descends lower and lower into the meandering gulf of The Inferno may be as horrible as the face of Grendel, but their ultimate horror lies in the fact that the suffering individuals brought such a fate upon themselves, according to the system of Christian ethics that governs the poem.

In John Gardner's later rendering of the Beowulf epic through the point of view of the monster in Grendel, the monster's physical ugliness motivates and creates the impetus for Grendel's ugly actions against the world. In the early Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, physical ugliness and moral ugliness in the heroic quest are synonymous. This is also true in Homer: Thersites, the lame man in the Iliad, is a coward who wishes to go home and renege on the Greek pledge to protect Helen.